#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
I was amused to see all the Eagles fans taunting the Chiefs fans and welcoming them to Andy Reid Hell, only for Chip Kelly’s team to go out and lay an egg at home against the outdoors-challenged Saints.
I assume the Bengals will have little more trouble with the Chargers than the 49ers do with the Packers, but then, I assumed that a 28-point lead in the third quarter was safe too.
Jim Rogers predicts the failure of the USA’s third central bank:
With Bernanke’s term due to expire in January, Rogers says he will be remembered as “the guy who set the stage for the demise of the Central Bank in America. We’ve had three central banks in America. The first two disappeared. This one’s going to disappear too in the next decade.”
“It’s not a possibility,” he adds, “it’s a probability. People will realise that these guys have led us down a terrible path. The Fed balance sheet has increased by 500 per cent in the last 5 years and a lot of it’s garbage.”
Unlike the wider market, Rogers does not set great store by the Fed’s decision shortly before Christmas to taper its bond buying measures from $85bn per month to $75bn. The announcement put pressure on gold and drove US equities to a new all-time high, in what Rogers views as a relief rally.
“The US went up because people said, ‘Now it’s done, we don’t have to worry anymore.’ But somewhere along the line, markets are going to start suffering. They’ll taper until the markets start hurting and then they’ll panic and loosen up again. They’ve got themselves in a terrible box.”
“It’ll turn into a bubble or a very inflated situation, but eventually the markets will say, we’re not going to take your garbage anymore, whether it’s treasury bonds or currency.”
As you know, I disagree with the inflation call, but I don’t disagree that the Federal Reserve will collapse in bankruptcy sooner or later. As I have repeatedly noted, I expect a political and financial collapse of the US empire by 2033. The pace of problematic events appears to be picking up speed; not even the reported 4 percent economic growth and new Dow highs appears to have dented the average American’s pessimism.
The stage is being set. But when the curtain will fall, I do not know. Every government and every financial regime comes to an end sooner or later, but it usually much easier to see the end date in hindsight than in real time.
Not content with the crashing and burning of his political wise man act, Porky dives into the boiling oil again:
Porky: I’m not surprised that the libertarians here are falling over themselves
to praise the leftist for coming up with a hi-tech version of the Jew
badge. Funny how they hate the NSA for creating dossiers on citizens
minding their own business, but they drool like Pavlov’s dog at the
thought of being able to have a dossier on any complete stranger. As I’ve said previously, libertarians are the pupal stage of authoritarians.VD: As we’ve all observed previously, you’re an idiot.
Porky: Yet here you and the ilk are… giddily peeing your pants at the thought of spying on some stranger’s magazine subscriptions. ie:
Josh, who never lets me forget that libertarians “just want to be left
alone” yet salivates over the idea of an internet dossier on private
citizens.
What Porky is clearly failing to take into account is that the system DH is creating is actually a technological recreation of the virtual one that is already in place in the government, in the universities, and in the big corporations.
All of the blackballing and stigmatizing goes only one way. The Left forcibly keeps those of the Right out of its organizations and institutions while the Right blithely permits leftists to infiltrate and suborn those that remain to it. The Right doesn’t realize this, in part because it keeps creating new ones, then losing control of them within a generation or two. Or sometimes, as in the case of Facebook, within a few weeks.
Opposing the idea that small private companies should have the same ability to defend themselves from infiltration by their political enemies that the giant left-leaning institutions do is little different than advocating gun control for the people while the government and police remain armed.
The Right has very little to fear from the proposed service. Everyone who is even remotely outspoken is already banned from employment with many, perhaps even the majority of existing companies in America. The persecution is real, even though it is passive, reactive, and remarkably gentle in historical terms. Keep in mind that I have not only been expelled from the SFWA for a single tweet, (an infraction of the sort committed by no less than 60 other current members), but I have experienced contractors told by major NGO’s that they would lose their contracts if they continued to work with me. The Left is playing hardball while the Right isn’t even aware that the game has begun.
So, like the Jews of the European ghettos, we of the traditionalist Right have no choice but to work with each other since no one else wants us around. We have no choice but to work harder, to work smarter, and to make ourselves more valuable than those who persecute us. And we can do that, because working harder and smarter has always been our strength; we are the builders. But how can the ants hope to build up new institutions if the moment they begin to succeed, their organizations are infiltrated and co-opted by the grasshoppers who are opposed to everything they believe?
We need to know that the prospective employee is a self-appointed activist who boasts of having no morals and a predilection for attacking those with whom he disagrees. Pajamaboy is hardly going to bring that up when he’s applying for a job now, is he? We need to know that the girl trying to sell us computers is a fire-breathing Jezebelle who believes all sex is rape. We need to know that the professed libertarian is heavily partial to left-wing entertainment. We need to know that the student applying for seminary is a radical homosexual whose primary interest in the priesthood is access to altar boys.
Above all, we have to bypass the corporate gatekeepers and take our case directly to the people. We have to become the very populists they fear. They will call us names, they will call us Nazis, they will call us fascists, they will call us a hundred other names that don’t reasonably apply to us. That doesn’t matter, because we have two things on our side that will always triumph over their vast edifice of temporal power: our faith in God and our acknowledgement for objective Reality.
As always, Porky is arguing in favor of despair, surrender, and unilateral disarming on the part of the Right. Perhaps this is because he is short-sighted, perhaps this is because he is an agent provocateur, or perhaps he is simply an idiot. It doesn’t really matter, all that matters is that he is wrong.
DH explains:
I see this as exactly what VD is talking about. I can work really well with libertarians. I can work really well with populists. But I can’t work well with GOP true believers. If you spend your working day listening to Shawn Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and thinking they are the greatest thing ever, it’s over. We are not going to work well unless it is quite literally a work-for-hire remote employee contracted position. Same thing with Glenn Beck. If you are real Glenn Beck believer, it’s probably not going to work out. I certainly can’t have you interacting with my clients and risking going into hysterics about whatever he was talking about the radio today. Oddly, almost the same thing is true of Rachael Maddow fans. If you are an activist liberal firebrand it’s probably not going to work out. In the real world Obama is a failure and everyone knows it. I can’t have you representing to the world otherwise. And what’s a good way to find this out? If I know you’ve posted 8,000 messages to TheBlaze.com, or Glenn Beck’s forums, if you’ve re-tweeted Rachael Maddow 500 times, those are great indicators you won’t fit in.
How, precisely, can anyone reasonably argue with that? Conversely, if you are a true blue Real American in the Hannity sense, do you really want to be dependent upon the Maddow retweeter? Those of us whose views are already public have nothing to fear from this sort of thing because we already deal with it on a daily basis. Seeing the playing field leveled and applied to everyone on both sides hardly seems unfair.
Chris Kluwe continues to insert his hypocritical foot into his mouth while garnering absolutely no support from anyone in the National Football League:
“I don’t know if the team would have kept me if the message was different. I think it is really unfortunate that in the NFL it seems like you can do a wide variety of awful things but if you speak out on a social issue then that’s what appears to be the bright line. The ‘hey you can’t cross that’. What does that say about our priorities? We’d rather have felons and racists and abusers then someone speaking out on issues.”
Those thoughts make Kluwe question if he even wants to come back to the National Football League.
“I don’t know if I want to deal with the unreality of the NFL anymore. It really is this bubble of people who think actions have no consequences and they can act however they want.”
If he did want to come back Kluwe isn’t sure if anyone would want him, now.
“I don’t know if there are any owners or head coaches out there that are willing to deal with everything that comes along with (signing me).”
Kluwe isn’t surprised no other players have come to his defense.
I draw your attention to that last part. The homosexual advocates are constantly trying to claim that those who are opposed to normalizing and institutionalizing sexual abnormalities are outnumbered, but the fact is that we remain the majority and we always will. The Left will cite its cherry-picked polls and point to the youth, making the same static mistake it makes about everything, ignoring the fact that a) the youth are stupid, and, b) most of them grow up eventually.
The ironic thing is that while the idiot punter likely fancies himself an “anti-racist”, but there is nothing, short of a complete ban on African players, that would have more racist consequences than banning criminals and abusers from the league. This guy is even dumber than he first appeared.
Kluwe has no support from the players and I daresay he has even less from the coaches around the league in light of his statements about the Vikings coaches and general manager. Leslie Frazier, for all that he failed as a head coach, is a very well-respected defensive coordinator, and has already been hired by Tampa Bay. And after openly declaring his intention to see that one of his coaches is never employed again, Kluwe is the very last person who can complain about being blackballed.
And let’s not forget that Chris Culliver of the 49ers was publicly criticized by the team for expressing his views on homogamy.
Jerry Jones wants to turn the NFL into the NBA. Why not, when Roger Goodell appears to be intent on turning it into the WNBA?
If Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had his way, more than 12 teams would be in the postseason right now. Jones was asked on 105.3 The Fan (via ESPN.com)
whether he would support expanding the playoffs from six teams per
conference to eight teams per conference, and he said he likes that idea
because it would allow more teams to enter the playoffs and give more
fan bases a reason to get excited about the NFL in January.
This is so mind-bogglingly stupid. I don’t know if Jerry is a liberal or not, but his reasoning certainly is. Liberals are binary thinkers who believe everything is static, and that the situation will remain the same except for whatever changes they introduce to it. They don’t deal well with complexity and they don’t understand that the act of introducing those changes intrinsically changes the previous situation.
Jones assumes that because twelve fan bases are (supposedly) excited about their team making the playoffs, increasing the number of fan bases to sixteen will increase the overall excitement. But that isn’t true, because increasing the percentage of teams that make the playoffs from 37.5% to 50 percent will reduce the perceived value of making the playoffs.
In fact, it’s been obvious to me that the value of the playoffs has already been watered down, as no one really starts to think their team has a chance to make the Super Bowl until the divisional round of the playoffs anyhow. The difficulty teams are having in selling out their tickets to the wild card round can’t be entirely blamed on this, as I suspect the economy and the New NFL rules are at least partly responsible. Regardless, the fact that three of four home teams are already having a tough time selling tickets with four games this weekend only underlines the idiocy of the idea of further expanding the playoffs.
The fans obviously realize how bad the idea is. In the PFT poll with 16,398 voters, 75 percent are against it.
It seems some other bloggers are beginning to get into the habit of being open with their traffic numbers; it’s nice to see people gradually getting over the idea that hiding this information from people will somehow inflate their perceived importance. Here are the Google pageviews for a few other bloggers, with the Global Alexa rank given in parentheses.
Whatever: 7,519,279
Steve Sailer: 6,635,426
Rational Male: 2,543,859
Being open with our traffic is a healthy exercise, I think, because it prevents us from getting too carried away with any exaggerated sense of our own importance. The numbers are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to mainstream media sites like Fox News and the New York Times, but remember, there was a time when those media outlets were once very small too. If anyone else has a site for which they’d like to share their Google pageviews, leave the data in the comments and I’ll add it here.
It strikes me as almost criminal that such an original thinker as Steve should have only 6.6 million pageviews per year when clueless wonders such as Malcolm Gladwell are bestselling authors, but as Steve himself notes, “The reality is that web searches bring a lot of people to individual
postings I’ve written and then … it doesn’t make much impression on
them. They presumably stare blankly for awhile and then they’re on their
way. I suspect that my combination of highbrow content without highbrow
affectation is a turnoff for the vast majority of random visitors.”
They are the sort of people who gravitate to liberal blogs that invariably describe themselves as “thoughtful” while mindlessly repeating pablum straight out of the New York Times without ever evincing evidence of having had a single original thought of their own.
I don’t appear to have Steve’s problem, as the admitted reluctance of many bloggers to link here means that most of my traffic consists of regular readers rather than web searches and fly-by-nighters. Of course, it also means that the level of engagement, the average visit duration, and the quality of the discourse tends to be higher, so I see it as a net positive. This is also why, as the traffic continues to grow and the blog increasingly comes to the attention of various self-appointed activists, I’ll be cracking down harder and harder on the disruptive elements who will seek to interfere with the discourse here.
Disagreement is expected. Dissent is fine. Substantive criticism is both encouraged and appreciated. Mindless, reflexive ankle-biting is discouraged. Derailing is not permitted and trolls will be actively and aggressively pursued. Alles klar?
I’m also interested in opening up Alpha Game again to other regular contributors in 2014 as it was never intended as a single author blog. The initial batch of contributors all ran out of steam within the first month or two back in 2011, which is not terribly surprising, so this time I intend to take a different approach and begin by adding a single additional contributor who will focus on a particular aspect of Game. I want to add depth rather than breadth. This focus could be anything from Game in literature to Game and improving marital relations. However, if you’re not able to commit to four 500-word posts per week, please don’t even think of volunteering. Remember, I’ve been doing this for a while now and the fact is that the vast majority of people with the inchoate urge to write don’t really have all that much to say.
One thing most of you are going to have to understand is that the days of go along to get along are over. The Left is coming for you no matter what you do, no matter how careful you are to keep your head down and your mouth shut. One phrase I’m now seeing over and over again of late is an idea that was brought up often during the SFWA kerfluffle:
“Regardless of the reasons Kluwe was cut, if his description of Priefer’s
homophobic comments is accurate, then Priefer could (and should) face
NFL discipline. Open expressions of bigotry should have no place in the
NFL.”
“Hate speech, whether is it about race, gender or sexual preference has no place in any workplace.”
“I am a supporter of gay rights and equality. I also think that Kluwe is
telling the truth about Priefer. There is no place for a man like that
in any professional org.”
“Hate speech has no place in a work environment.”
And who defines bigotry and hate speech? Not you, that’s for sure. So, the Left can advocate the end of religion, the elimination of all Christians and anything else that they find desirable, and it will neither be considered hate nor bigotry, but if you even fail to show what is presently deemed sufficient enthusiasm for their latest insanity, there will be no place for you.
So, it is time to start making sure that there are places for you and for others like you who do not subscribe to the Left’s madness. DH’s new project is only one brick in a vast structure that will have to be built, because our predecessors failed us. To paraphrase the immortal words of Otter, they fucked up, they trusted the left. And now the left is running rampant through the institutions, just as Antonio Gramsci dreamed.
I received this email the other day from a self-described “Libertarian SQL Geek”
Vox, my current position will be eliminated in two weeks. Yes, I’m being caught up in the Obamacare “we need to downsize to cover the costs of medical” rush. I view it as an opportunity. If you have need of a database geek for projects, or know of anyone else in the who might have need of my services, please let me know, and feel free to pass my name along.
If you’re looking for a SQL guy, email me and I’ll pass it along. And actually, if you’re looking for anyone, let me know and I’ll post it here.
Many people are rightly responding contemptuously to the hypocritical, self-serving, and poisonous article that Chris Kluwe wrote on Deadspin, in which he called one of the top special teams coaches in the NFL a “bigot” and called Leslie Frazier and Rick Spielman “cowards”. What a lot of people don’t know is that Kluwe also called Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Logan Mankins and Vincent Jackson “douchebags” back in 2011. He is a nasty little piece of work.
Now he’s spewing venom in public about the fact that he lost his job not because he was an overpriced, mediocre punter who finished 22nd in the league, cost more than 4 times more than his replacement, and then lost his job again when he was beaten out by a rookie in Oakland, but because Mike Priefer is a bigot. Seriously. And yet, who would you rather pay $1.63 million for the season, Kluwe’s salary or the cumulative salaries of Jeff Locke, (whose 2013 punting stats were nearly identical to Kluwe’s 2012 stats), Blair Walsh, (one of the best kickers in the league), Cordarrelle Patterson, (All-Pro WR with a legitimate claim to offensive rookie of the year), and Xavier Rhodes, (a mediocre, but improving cornerback).
It’s my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of
2012, that I was fired by Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn’t agree with
the cause I was working for, and two cowards, Leslie Frazier and Rick
Spielman, both of whom knew I was a good punter and would remain a good
punter for the foreseeable future, as my numbers over my eight-year
career had shown, but who lacked the fortitude to disagree with Mike
Priefer on a touchy subject matter.
That’s quite the sentence there. He doesn’t write any better than he punted. If you cut through all the cheap shots and name-calling, Kluwe is saying that he believes he was fired. This is news? We all know he was cut and justifiably so. He wasn’t terrible, but he wasn’t a particularly good punter either. He also had a serious downside; going back to 2002, no punter in the league gave up more return touchdowns than Kluwe. In fact, in the last 384 team seasons, not a single team gave up as many punt return touchdowns as the four (4!) that Kluwe did in 2008. Among Vikings fans, Kluwe was much less notorious for his mouth than for frequently outkicking the punt coverage and kicking untimely touchbacks when the team had the chance to pin the opponent deep in its own end.
I saw every game in which he punted and at no point did I think it was surprising that Kluwe lost his job. There were fans who wanted to get rid of him after 2008 and 2010. Was it surprising that the Vikings drafted Jeff Locke in the 5th round? Sure, but not as surprising as drafting Christian Ponder in the 1st round or the Jaguars drafting Bryan Anger in the 3rd round. Don’t forget that a few months later Kluwe lost the Oakland job to an undrafted free agent, Marquette King. We’re not talking about Ray Guy here, or even Andy Lee.
Furthermore, Kluwe is actually dumb enough to argue that the Vikings would have been fully justified to cut him for his immoral beliefs:
If there’s one thing I hope to achieve from sharing this story, it’s to make sure that Mike Priefer never holds a coaching position again in the NFL, and ideally never coaches at any level. (According to the Pioneer Press, he is “the only in-house candidate with a chance” at the head-coaching job.) It’s inexcusable that someone would use his status as a teacher and a role model to proselytize on behalf of his own doctrine of intolerance, and I hope he never gets another opportunity to pass his example along to anyone else.
In other words, Kluwe thinks it is absolutely fine to deprive someone of a livelihood on the basis of their beliefs. So, what is he complaining about then? If employers have the right to fire people for their beliefs, then the Vikings’ coaches were right to cut Kluwe. If they do not and the coaches were wrong to cut Kluwe, then how can he possibly call for Mike Priefer, who coached the Vikings special teams to fifth and sixth-place DVOA rankings in 2012 and 2013, to never again hold a coaching position at any level. If the NFL is going to take such a radical pro-homosexual position, it had better realize it is going to lose most of its fans.
As the Vikings themselves stated: “Any notion that Chris was released from our football team due to his
stance on marriage equality is entirely inaccurate and inconsistent with
team policy. Chris was released strictly based on his football
performance.”
Kluwe is the scrawny, shrewish public face of left-wing totalitarianism. He demonstrates how if you permit a leftist into your organization, he will attempt to destroy you if you do not allow him to dictate your actions, your words, and even your thoughts. Obviously, by Kluwe’s own standards, he should never have been permitted to play in the NFL in the first place.
Just shut up and go away, Kluwe. We Vikings fans never thought much of you anyhow.
Dave Eggers has the solution: pay them more!
McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a minimum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money.
For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.
Well, I can trump Mr. Eggers’s brilliant plan. I’ll bet 100 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $1 million and rose to a minimum of $1.5 million.As for how we’ll pay for it, the answer is obvious: we’ll find a way! Translation: borrow the money and pay it back with all the new wealth generated by the taxes paid by a much better-educated generation of public school students.
Note that this brilliant plan, which ignores a few small things such as supply and demand, as well as the ramifications of debt, is the product of the founders of 826 tutoring centers. One can only presume that the tutoring centers are sponsored by Brawndo, because it’s got electrolytes that students need.
It’s fascinating that Eggers and company look at the global test results and fail to observe one more thing that Finland, Singapore, and Korea all have in common: very few Africans and Hispanics. That may not have much impact on teacher retention, but I’m guessing it has more than a little to do with the USA’s lower global ranking with regards to student performance.
David Gelernter has a very good article in Commentary on the descent of science into, if not quite religion, something that is at the very least a distinct and readily identifiable philosophy:
The modern “mind fields” encompass artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Researchers in these fields are profoundly split, and the chaos was on display in the ugliness occasioned by the publication of Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos in 2012. Nagel is an eminent philosopher and professor at NYU. In Mind & Cosmos, he shows with terse, meticulous thoroughness why mainstream thought on the workings of the mind is intellectually bankrupt. He explains why Darwinian evolution is insufficient to explain the emergence of consciousness—the capacity to feel or experience the world. He then offers his own ideas on consciousness, which are speculative, incomplete, tentative, and provocative—in the tradition of science and philosophy.
Nagel was immediately set on and (symbolically) beaten to death by all the leading punks, bullies, and hangers-on of the philosophical underworld. Attacking Darwin is the sin against the Holy Ghost that pious scientists are taught never to forgive. Even worse, Nagel is an atheist unwilling to express sufficient hatred of religion to satisfy other atheists. There is nothing religious about Nagel’s speculations; he believes that science has not come far enough to explain consciousness and that it must press on. He believes that Darwin is not sufficient.
The intelligentsia was so furious that it formed a lynch mob. In May 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece called “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong.” One paragraph was notable:
“Whatever the validity of [Nagel’s] stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad….” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error.”
It’s the cowardice of the Chronicle’s statement that is alarming—as if the only conceivable response to a mass attack by killer hyenas were to run away. Nagel was assailed; almost everyone else ran.
Science is in desperate need of an intellectual cleansing, a return to the scientific fundamentals of its methodology. Indeed, both Science and Christianity are in much the same boat these days, as both Method and Faith have become corrupted by those who claim to speak in its name.
