Category: Uncategorized

Good news for rebels

Considering that the US military is in the process of running exercises to practice fighting against the American people, this announcement is probably good news for the millions of Americans who have been gunning up for the past decade:

The Pentagon announced Monday that it will allow transgender members of the military to serve openly starting next year, marking an end to a long-standing policy that barred them from the armed forces.

In an echo of the Defense Department’s repeal of the ban on gays in uniform four years ago, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said he had directed the armed forces to devise new rules over the next six months that would allow transgender troops to serve, except in situations “where objective, practical impediments are identified.”

“We must ensure that everyone who’s able and willing to serve has the full and equal opportunity to do so, and we must treat all our people with the dignity and respect they deserve,” Carter said in a statement. He called the military’s current regulations “outdated” and said they were “causing uncertainty that distracts commanders from our core missions.”

Carter also issued a directive that would make it more difficult to discharge transgender personnel over the next six months while the new rules are being established, requiring all such cases to be reviewed by a senior Pentagon official. The Pentagon took a similar interim approach to freeze the discharges of gay troops while it was preparing to lift that ban five years ago.

As an added bonus, we should stop hearing about there being too few women in the Navy SEALs and other elite forces. Just put a few of them in dresses, call them ladies, and the problem, such as it is, is solved.

One thing I didn’t realize when reading about the historical collapse of empires is how damned farcical it is. Heinlein’s Crazy Years are upon us, and they are considerably crazier than he’d ever imagined.

Ilk wanted

A known member of the Ilk posts a want ad:

I have need of Ilk, US and Canada. I have a rep group that is currently expanding.  I am looking for reps across the US & Canada. (We have done work in Europe, Asia, South & Central America as well so there could be opportunity there  additionally).  My group sells laboratory casework into a variety of markets that have laboratories: pharmaceutical, biotech, environmental firms, consumer companies, universities, government, military, nuclear, waste water, and more.

It is a straight-commission plan, 10% to 15% commission based on volume.  As an example, one pharmaceutical customer spends about $3M annually on equipment, so if you can close, it is a nice commission.  If anyone sells to these industries, you can do it on the side and it is a great add-on sale.I will also offer a 5% Finders Fee to anyone who works in one of these industries, and sends a referral that leads to a sale.

If you are interested in looking into it, email me with LABS in the subject and I’ll forward it on to the gentleman responsible.

The First Law and the NYT

Instapundit calls it correctly:

THAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LIE AND GET CAUGHT: NY Times Taking a Beating In Its Battle With Ted Cruz.

We wrote here about Ted Cruz’s feud with the New York Times. Cruz’s new book, A Time for Truth, is a hot seller, apparently #3 among hard cover nonfiction books. But the Times refused to list it on its best seller list, claiming that its “sales were limited to strategic bulk purchases.” Both Cruz and his publisher, HarperCollins, have denied the charge, and Cruz has challenged the Times either to provide evidence to back up its claim, or else apologize.

Now Amazon has entered the fray, stating publicly that there is “is no evidence of unusual bulk purchase activity in our sales data.” As of last report, A Time for Truth is #13 at Amazon among all books, not just hard cover nonfiction. Other sources that track book sales evidently agree that there is nothing fishy about Cruz’s book’s sales.

The Times is run by Social Justice Warrior types, and Social Justice Warrior types always lie.

Because SJWs focus on taking the public high ground specifically so they can act as gatekeepers and narrative-controllers, they always have a difficult time when there is an objective measure that is not subject to their control. That’s why they hate Amazon so much; Amazon destroys their ability to sell the story that their authors and books are vastly popular while no one reads the authors and books of which they disapprove.

But because SJWs always lie, you know, you absolutely know, that the lie is in there somewhere. You have only got to look for it, and soon enough, you’ll find it.

Brainstorm: John C. Wright

The next Open Brainstorm session will be with author John C. Wright. We will be discussing his new novel SOMEWHITHER, the new fantasy series he is in the process of writing for Castalia House, his record-setting Hugo nominations, and the Phil Sandifier debate concerning ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM. The session will run from 7 PM to 8:30 PM EDT on Thursday, July 16, and there will be a Q&A session following the interview. To register to attend, click here.

The Brainstorm July session will be Tuesday, July 21st, from 7:30 to 9:00 PM EDT. The topics will be the idea of designing a superior alternative to Wikipedia, the possible implications of the resolution of the Greek debt crisis, and updates on applied Life Design, the Tor boycott, and the Hugo Awards. If you’d like to take part, you can acquire either a monthly or an annual membership.

If you’re an Annual member who has a question you’d like addressed, please email me at least a day before the event. Let me know if you’ve got a mike and would prefer me to call on you so you can ask it or if you’d rather that I just directly address the question.

Daneistocracy in Europe

The abject surrender of the Greek government demonstrates the growing irrelevance of democracy, not only in Europe, but across the West:

Less than a week after they triumphantly gave international creditors a bloody nose by rejecting a harsh austerity plan, angry and bewildered Greeks are left wondering how they now find themselves swallowing an even worse deal.

In a nationwide referendum just last Sunday, nearly 62 per cent of voters rejected an austerity deal that had been offered by the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank.

There were scenes of wild jubilation across the country.

In Athens’ Syntagma Square, the Greek answer to Trafalgar Square, thousands of joyous ‘No’ voters hugged and kissed each other, waved Greece’s national flag and swigged cans of beer.

“It was an expression of the will of the people,” Manos Agelidis, 27, a biomedical engineering PhD student, told The Telegraph as he celebrated with friends.

Fast forward just a few days, however, and Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, did the unthinkable.

On Thursday, with a deadline imposed by the creditors looming, he buckled.

His radical Left-wing Syriza government, which came to power in January on the unrealistic promise of putting an end to austerity and the country’s six-year long economic nightmare, put forward a plan that promises spending cuts of €12 billion in return for a third international bail-out, this time worth €53.5 billion (£38.4bn).

The European Union is not only post-democratic, it is openly and avowedly anti-democratic. It has continued to override the expressed will of the Irish, French, British, Italian, and Greek people by putting pressure on the elected representatives to subvert the will of the people.

This is why direct democracy is the only form of democracy that may still be considered viable. The idea of representative democracy is that the limits it places on democracy will be in the long term interests of the nation, but the way it has easily been subverted in the interests of the financial powers demonstrates that representative democracy is actually more susceptible to corruption and subversion than direct democracy.

Mob rule has its own flaws, but it is certainly to be preferred to creditor rule, or daneistocracy. And that is what representative democracy now amounts to, as the elected representatives of countries such as Greece agree to give up their national sovereignty just to keep the credit money spigot flowing.

Zerohedge add that the Eurozone is no longer a voluntary union:

Despite the euphoria in global equity markets, The FT’s Wolfgang Munchau – once one of the keenest euro enthusiasts – warns regime change is coming in Europe. The actions of the creditors has “destroyed the eurozone as we know it and demolished the idea of a monetary union as a step towards a democratic political union,” Munchau exclaims, fearing they have “demoted the eurozone into a toxic fixed exchange-rate system, with a shared single currency, run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order.” He concludes rather ominously, “we will soon be asking ourselves whether this new eurozone, in which the strong push around the weak, can be sustainable.”

Of math and the SJW

In which McRapey totally pwns the math:

Vox Day (@voxday)
The @torbooks boycott has reduced @scalzi’s Bookscan sales by 68%! http://t.co/kYXVBeBBo7 #SadPuppies

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
1. A detractor trying to show his “boycott” of Tor was working claimed a 68% drop in my Lock In sales since the boycott, citing Bookscan…

2. His only problem is that he read the data backwards. Literally backwards. My booksales went UP in that time, not down.

3. And people wonder why I occasionally say I wish I had a better class
of detractor. Even being able to math would be an improvement!

4. (To be clear, the week-to-week number movement have nothing to do
with boycotts or anything else. They’re the usual sales up and downs.)

5. Those curious can see discussion of it here:
http://file770.com/?p=23709 . Note the first comment, which catches the
math error.

You know, I haven’t been caught out this badly since I observed that Kim Stanley Robinson was, on the basis of the picture on his web site, a remarkably ugly bearded woman. If nothing else, you’d think the exclamation point on a single tweet would have given it away, but apparently anything short of a “LOL”, a smiley face emoji, and a (jk) will be lost on these masters of the social arts.

Johnny Con’s attempted derision of his nameless detractor’s inability to do math is amusing because there is no mathematical error involved. There is absolutely no indication of not “being able to math”. And he would appear to have failed to realize that I was mocking Jason Sanford for a) pretending that an obviously irrelevant snapshot of data was relevant, b) listing the dates in the reverse of the usual order, and c) proceeding to reach a backwards conclusion. See, unlike Scalzi, I don’t assume the other side is completely retarded; I find it impossible to imagine that Sanford is genuinely dumb enough to believe that the data he cited is meaningful in any way, shape, or form.

SJWs like Scalzi are so easy. All you need to to do make them jump is offer them a “mistake” they can attack in order to disqualify you and show how totally smart and superior they are. As Scalzi demonstrates, they will ignore literally everything that is relevant to the argument at hand in their desperate eagerness to strike their pseudo-superior poses.

Sanford wrote: “Lock In by John Scalzi (hardcover) 65 copies on 7/05, 39 on 6/28, 74 on 6/21, 63 on 6/14, 46 on 6/7, 54 on 5/31, 21 on 5/24.” The chart, on the other hand, begins with May 24th and ends with July 5th, with the data running in the more conventional left to right manner, which made his reversal obvious even for those who don’t know how to read dates in the American manner. There is no math error; 21/65 = 0.32, which would indicate a 68 percent decline; more importantly, as Mike Glyer correctly notes, the dates Sanford cites to “prove” the ineffectiveness of the boycott are invalid because he cites data from three successive weeks before the boycott began.

When I aggregated the sales for these 10 books from the week of June 21, the latest unaffected by the boycott (announced on June 19), and the sales from the week of July 5 (the latest reported by Sanford), that gave me 1,740 vs. 1,667 books. Therefore, the July 5 sales of these 10 books were 95.8% of what they were before immediately before the boycott.

In fact, Scalzi’s Bookscan sales have observably declined since the boycott began: from 74 the week of June 21 to 65 the week of July 5. That is a 12.2 percent decline. Clearly, if we are to take Mr. Sanford’s numbers seriously, the Tor boycott has been effective.

Of course, what will likely be of considerably more concern to Tor Books than the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of the boycott is the fact that the writer for whom they blew off 523 new writers is selling as few as 21 copies of his “best-selling” hardcover per week.

Remember the First Law of SJW: SJWs always lie.

RIP Iwata-san

“On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am
a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”
– Satoru Iwata, 1959-2015

GGinParis’s salute to #GamerGate

It was inspiring to meet GamerGaters from several different countries and to discover how determined all of them were. It was both a privilege and a pleasure to be able to meet everyone there. I think these meetups are important because they help reinvigorate those who are getting discouraged and inspire those who are thinking about getting involved but haven’t made the leap yet.

SJWs rewrite the Reddit narrative

It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit

Ellen Pao became a hero to many when she took on the entrenched male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley. But sentiment is a fickle thing. Late Friday she fell victim to a crowd demanding her ouster as chief executive of the popular social media site Reddit.

Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist comments, many of them on Reddit itself, is quite likely to renew charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web — and that Silicon Valley’s well-publicized problem with gender and ethnic diversity in its work force persists….

More than 213,000 people signed a petition demanding Ms. Pao’s resignation. After her departure was announced, Reddit users celebrated in an over-the-top fashion. “Rejoice internet brethren,” wrote one. “The great evil has been slain.”

Why are the SJWs at the New York Times lining up behind Ellen Pao and trying to rewrite the narrative? For the same reason the media lies about GamerGate and lies about the Puppies. They are terrified at the resistance being shown by the broad spectrum anti-SJW movement. As I told GGinParis last night, without #GamerGate there is no Rabid Puppies. Without #GamerGate, Ellen Pao is still running Reddit into the ground.

And the SJWs are right to be terrified. They are not only meeting resistance now, but they are being actively pushed back from territory they’d previously claimed. This is only the beginning; eventually we will drive them entirely out of the various industries and being identified as an SJW will be as totally unacceptable to most people as being a Nazi, a Communist, or a KKK member.

Paris in 48 hours

But first, TT reports on RPinDC:

About 30 Sad and Rabid Puppies met up in Ballston Virginia last night.  John Wright and his wife Jagi were in attendance and in the center of some interesting conversations.  Several ilk were there, including Salt, Mick-On-Everything, Cargo Squid, Rantor, and the banned Dr Torch.  From the Sad side, discussions about Larry’s, Brad’s and Kratman’s works could be heard.  All in all a good meet up. 

I’m not sure anyone who attended IlkMoot is conscious yet, so any reports on that will be forthcoming.

As for GGinParis, Spacebunny and I arrived on Friday afternoon, visited the Eiffel Tower, then found a small, but very good Chinese restaurant, Shan Gout, in the 12th Arrondissment, just around the corner from two game stores. The next day, we visited the Arc de Triomphe, decided the French were protesting a bit much with regards to WWII, and roamed about before meeting up with Mike Cernovich and the charming @ShaunaGee for a high-protein dinner at Gourmet Gourmand, a wine shop with a single table which is not only excellent and highly recommended, but turned out to be absolutely hilarious.

Remy, who owns the place and is a true Philosophe of Food, actually slapped Mike’s hand away from the Spanish version of bruschetta at one point because the flavors had not yet had time to set, and then proceeded to declaim, “Now, we have the food. What does it mean?” Remy is awesome and so was the meat, the cheese, and the wine. He also insisted that we try the Serrano jambon before digging into the Pata Negra in order that those new to the ultimate in cured pig could properly appreciate the latter. Shauna must have duly appreciated it, because no sooner was the plate placed in front of her than I blinked and it disappeared.

We were just down the block from Le Killy Jen, so we strolled over and met the security detail we’d arranged for in light of what happened in DC. Milo was fashionably late and showed up with Allum, who clearly isn’t paid enough and will one day write a series of books about the Rabelaisian horrors he has witnessed. About 40 people showed up for GGinParis, including #0053 and Giuseppe Filotto, who presented me with an Item of Cultural Heritage that would probably have gotten me arrested had the gendarmarie been paying closer attention. #53 graciously presented us with GG and Rabid Puppies buttons; I took the former and Milo promptly claimed the other. You can see both of them in the picture of SB and Milo below. The French newspaper Le Monde also sent a reporter, who interviewed a number of GGers and finally concluded that it was very hard to explain #GamerGate in French political terms, although he admitted that “true revolutionaries dedicated to Liberté in the spirit of Voltaire” was something that the French could understand. He didn’t seem to quite be able to connect this with his observation that some of us “had said things that are illegal to say in France”.

Afterwards, Mike and Shauna and Milo and Allum and #53 and Spacebunny and I closed down a bar in the Place du Tertre over a rather good bottle of Malveaux, then wound up at La Chat Noir until 4 AM. Among other things, this small-hours spree inspired the following comments:

“Where ARE we?”

“Why does that woman keep taking off her clothes?”

“Whatever happened to Allum?”

“Does anyone have a phone that actually works in France?”

Mike Cernovich, to the kid who threw up in the cab: “It happens.”

Nefarious plots were plotted, dark alliances were solidified, unspeakable concoctions were consumed, plush raccoons were posed with, new friends were made, and a fabtastic time was had by all.