Category: Uncategorized

#uninstalled

Firefox on Vox Popoli: 20 percent, down from 34 percent.
Firefox on Alpha Game: 22 percent, down from 30 percent.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Eich debacle turns out to be the biggest negative for Mozilla since Google introduced Chrome. Chrome is actually down one percentage point, from 27 to 26 percent, as Pale Moon now accounts for 7 percent of the traffic here and 3 percent at AG.

There are even some suspicions that Mozilla is attempting to mitigate the size of the negative reports by manipulating its feedback reports: “C’mon Mozilla, I KNOW the UNHAPPY count exceeded 23,000 yesterday (8th),
others saw 50K for 7 day total. You can manipulate your own feedback
forum if you choose to do so, but you cannot manipulate your market
share. You COULD publish a full and unreserved apology, and reinstate
your fine ex-CEO. That might POSSIBLY stop the rot, and save your
organisation from going under.”

And that is why it is important to #uninstallfirefox. It is the best way to prevent Mozilla from controlling the narrative in a friendly mainstream media, which has been much quieter about the backlash than about the initial criticism of Eich.

Wobbling on Global Warming

The New York Times finally begins to recognize that scare tactics on global warming don’t work on anyone but children and the gullible:

[E]vidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.

Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts. But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters.

Another big factor in the mass refusal to buy into the AGW/CC propaganda is the observation that no one who claims to be worried about global warming is living in a sustainable manner in wind-powered tents far away from the sea.

Fumigating the Firefox

Since Pale Moon is built upon a Firefox base, it still reports itself to be Firefox to web sites by default. Fortunately, it is trivially simple to turn this off and cause the browser to correctly report itself as PaleMoon.

  1. Create a new tab.
  2. Type “about:config” into the Address Bar as if it were an internet site (URL).
  3. Type “compatMode” into the Search box that will appear right below the Address Bar.
  4. On the line general.useragent.compatMode.firefox there are three settings: user set, boolean, true. Click on “true” and it will change to false.
  5. Close the tab.

That’s it. Web sites will no longer incorrectly attribute your pageviews to Firefox. If as many people have switched to Pale Moon as have switched to Chrome, the decline in Firefox usage may actually be twice what I originally estimated.

“A tollbooth on the bankster turnpike”

A retiring SEC attorney criticizes the Securities and Exchange Commission:

James Kidney, who joined the SEC in 1986 and retired this month, offered the critique in a speech at his goodbye party. His remarks hit home with many in the crowd of SEC lawyers and alumni thanks to a part of his resume not publicly known: He had campaigned internally to bring charges against more executives in the agency’s 2010 case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)

The SEC has become “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,” Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. “On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening.”

Kidney said his superiors were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing difficult cases. The agency’s penalties, Kidney said, have become “at most a tollbooth on the bankster turnpike.”

This doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, but it confirms everything we suspected. Government regulation simply Does Not Work. It is easily coopted and corrupted, most particularly in industries where large quantities of money are involved.

Fines simply do not work when penalizing corporations. They just pass on the costs to their customers, or in the case of banks, create more money out of thin air. And it’s too easy to place the blame on employees who no longer work there.

A tale of two responses

Obviously the Firefox Input tool is not the only way in which people communicate their dissatisfaction with Mozilla. But by any measure, it should be readily obvious that the firestorm of criticism directed at Mozilla for forcing Brandon Eich’s resignation and the #uninstallfirefox movement, which is growing by the day, is considerably greater than the criticism aimed at the organization in response to Eich’s promotion to CEO.

It is both remarkable and telling that while Mozilla’s board and its employees were quite willing to speak out when their new CEO was supposedly a tremendous PR disaster, they have remained silent in the face of considerably greater public outrage. This is despite the Happy/Sad metric registering all-time highs and the number of messages running nearly 10x higher than normal and nearly all of them being negative.

Mozilla has made it clear that its values directly contradict those of Christians as well as everyone who believes in the separation of work and politics. As John C. Wright said: “No lover of liberty will continue to use Firefox after this day.”

If you haven’t switched yet, I encourage you to do so. Pale Moon works very well, and if that doesn’t work for you or if you are looking for greater privacy, I would recommend giving Epic Browser a look.

On this blog, Firefox use is already down by more than one-fifth, from 34 to 27 percent of readers. On Alpha Game, it is down by exactly one-fifth, from 30 to 24 percent.

Wenn Sie wollen

In case you’re interested in brushing up on your German, QUANTUM MORTIS Der programmierte Verstand is a free download on Amazon today. Dr. G did a great job translating it, and it’s considerably more accessible than the Goethe and Hesse I was assigned to read in my high school German class.

In other Castalia House news, we are days away from releasing John C. Wright’s AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND and weeks away from releasing Stickwick’s ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS curriculum, which is receiving rave reviews from the early reviewers. The latter will be available in PDF through Smashwords since EPUB/Kindle simply isn’t a viable format in this particular case.

UPDATE: Like David Hasselhoff, we are ein Bombenerfolg in Germany:

    #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Foreign Language Fiction > German
    #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Foreign Languages > German > Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction

 Amazon Bestseller-Rang: #16 Kostenfrei in Kindle-Shop
   Nr. 1 in Kindle-Shop > eBooks > Fantasy & Science Fiction > Science Fiction

Short-sighted GOP rules lawyers

In their efforts to force the unelectable Mitt Romney on the Republican grass roots in 2012, the rules lawyers of the Republica Party elite have created a serious procedural problem for the party’s nomination process in 2016:

Led by Romney loyalist and pitbull GOP lawyer Ben Ginsberg, the RNC made changes in the rules that would not only insure an orderly convention for the front-runner in 2012 but would make it extremely difficult—if not completely impossible—for an intra-party challenge to be mounted against a President Romney in 2016. Apparently, it never occurred to the majority of the Rules Committee that there might not be a President Romney in 2016  to protect….

Rather than only requiring a candidate to have a plurality of the delegates from five states in order to have one’s name placed into nomination, the rule was changed to require a candidate to have a majority of delegate votes in at least eight states as a prerequisite to nomination.

Under the new rule, only Mitt Romney would meet the test for nomination assuring that there would be no Ron Paul problem.

While this might worked out nicely for those controlling the GOP convention in 2012, the amended rule now poses a serious change in how the game is to be played in 2016. What’s more, given that the rule cannot be changed until the next round of delegates arrive at  the convention in 2016 and the Rules Committee convenes to establish the new rules of the convention, the Republicans are stuck with what they have wrought in 2012.

And that represents a very significant problem for anyone who believes the voters should have something to say about their party’s nominee or those who don’t favor a convention where the bosses and delegates get to decide who is the nominee, irrespective of what home state Republicans might have to say.

Based on the RNC issued memo in 2011 ruling that ‘winner-take-all’ elections will only be permitted when a candidate receives a majority of the votes cast in the primary battle, and given the deep bench of candidates likely to seek the 2016 GOP nomination, it seems unlikely that there are going to be a whole lot of states producing majority wins for candidates.

Thus, a Republican candidate who receives 49 percent of the vote in a “winner-take-all” state will not be permitted to get 100 percent of the state’s delegates. And that means it is an almost certainty that there will not be a candidate walking into the GOP convention with the requisite eight states producing a majority of delegates supporting a candidate now required to have one’s name placed into nomination.

And you think that these breathtakingly dishonest idiots are going fix everything that Obama has wrought? Or anything, anything at all? The odds are very good that they’ll make things considerably worse, as was the case with the Bush administration. Don’t vote Republican if you value freedom, small government, or the Constitution. Don’t be under the illusion that Republican rule will make things any better at all. Republicans are every bit as guilty of the destruction of the United States of America as their Democratic partners in crime.

La dolce vita

So I was traveling through France on the train today and saw that the forty-something woman pushing the food-and-drinks trolley was tall, slender, and looked vaguely Italian. I didn’t think anything of it, but her appearance prompted the man sitting across the aisle to start asking her where she was from in French.

She must have noticed something in his accent that I didn’t, because she answered in Italian. I didn’t recognize the name of the town, but he obviously did. It turned out that he and the two women sitting near me were originally from the next town over in Piemonte. They discussed a few landmarks and families and so on while I sat there quietly minding my own business and editing John Wright’s latest masterpiece on my tablet. They got a little exuberant at one point, prompting the woman nearest me to lean over and apologize in French, explaining that they were all essentially neighbors. From Italia.

“Si, lo so, anch’io parlo italiano,” I said, which sparked considerable hilarity. The next thing I knew, I was getting quizzed about my last trip to Piemonte, the man bought a bottle of wine from the trolley lady, and was distributing plastic cups to everyone, including me. It’s rather amusing. Even when you take the Italians out of Italy, the party travels with them.

Two more bankers down

1.A mere two weeks since former JPMorgan banker, Kenneth Bellando jumped to his death, Bloomberg reports that
the former CEO of Dutch Bank ABN Amro (and his wife and daughter) were found dead at their home after a possible “family tragedy.”
This expands the dismal list of senior financial services executive
deaths to 12 in the last few months. The 57-year-old Jan Peter
Schmittmann, was reportedly discovered by his other daughter when she
arrived home that morning. Police declined to comment on the cirumstances of his (and his wife and daughter’s) death.

2.  Over the weekend the world was gripped by the drama surrounding the mysterious murder-homicide of
the former CEO of Dutch bank ABN Amro and members of his family, and
whether there is more foul play than meets the eye. However, that is
nothing compared to what just happened in the tiny, and all too quiet
Principality of Lichtenstein, where moments ago the CEO of local
financial institution Bank Frick & Co. AG, Juergen Frick, was shot dead in the underground garage of the bank located in the city of
Balzers. 

I don’t even have any theories at this point. It’s a moment of High Weirdness as the various deaths are more random and outlandish than one would expect to find in a thriller. But regardless of what is actually taking place, it does seem readily apparent that we are not dealing with a normal situation in the financial world here.

Even the most inventive fiction writer would struggle to fit the demise of European bankers, a CIA agent, and Peaches Geldof all into the same novel.

The seeds of bad science

Rupert Darwell traces them in a book entitled The Age of Global Warming:

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. One of the greatest problems, however, was that the ecologists’ attacks on economic growth were unwelcome to the nations they most idolised – the poor ones. The eternal Green paradox is that the concept of the simple, natural life appeals only to countries with tons of money. By a brilliant stroke, the founding fathers developed the concept of “sustainable development”. This meant that poor countries would not have to restrain their own growth, but could force restraint upon the rich ones. This formula was propagated at the first global environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972….

Scientists, Rupert Darwall complains, have been too ready to embrace the
“subjectivity” of the future, and too often have a “cultural aversion to
learning from the past”. If they read this tremendous book they will see
those lessons set out with painful clarity.

If one wanted to understand the root of my contempt for scientists and scientistry, as opposed to my mere opposition to their pseudo-scientific policies, it can be summarized by Darwall’s statement about their “cultural aversion to
learning from the past”.

Scientody is a powerful tool. But history is an even more useful and reliable one with regards to humanity. Because, a few genetic alterations over time notwithstanding, Man remains Man and human nature remains human nature.