#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
An open thread for those who would like to live-comment my appearance on the Alex Jones show at 1 PM Central.
The stream is here.
NOW LIVE: Bestselling comic author, editor & video game designer #VoxDay joins todays broadcast to explain his pro-West work including an SJW-free alternative to Wikipedia and more.
I understand that the elite in Washington thinks Americans are stupid. But how dumb do you have to be to preen and posture about “self-determination” and “spreading democracy” for nearly 100 years, only to turn around and reject the overwhelming results of a free and fair referendum:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement Wednesday saying the US “rejects Russia’s attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.”
“The United States calls on Russia to respect the principles to which it has long claimed to adhere and to end its occupation of Crimea,” the statement reads. Pompeo is also expected to state in congressional testimony Wednesday that the United States will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, a European diplomat briefed by the State Department told CNN.
Pompeo’s declaration comes after President Donald Trump had appeared to cast doubt on his administration’s commitment to Ukraine’s claims over the peninsula. Asked by reporters on Air Force One at the end of June whether the United States would recognize Russia’s claim on Crimea, Trump ambiguously responded: “We’re going to have to see.”
Perhaps it’s just a negotiating point. Perhaps it’s just for show. Regardless, it’s stupid and totally unconvincing. Self-contradictory rhetoric is the worst and least effective kind of rhetoric.
A backer wants to know how he can support Voxiversity:
Is it possible to support Voxiversity other than Freestartr? It appears to be down.
Freestartr is down, apparently thanks to Stripe’s shenigans, and they have not been able to get anything up and running in the time period I discussed with them. Nor have any of the backers been able to contribute anything since May. So, after consulting with several backers, I’ve arranged to get the campaign up on a new site which I will announce as soon as it is ready later this week. I hope most of the backers will be able to make the transition to the new site.
We will have two Voxiversity videos out in August. I’ve been focusing on building up the Darkstream subscriber base in the meantime. While they are two different channels, from my perspective, it’s a single video front, so supporting one is supporting the other. There is a lot of room for improvement, of course, but we are making steady progress, these occasional setbacks and delays notwithstanding. I’ve also been working on something that will have a major impact on everything from Castalia to Voxiversity, and I hope to be able to announce something about that before the end of October.
In not-entirely-unrelated news, I will be appearing on the Alex Jones show today at 1 PM Central today to discuss comics and culture war, among other things.
And for those of you who have been repeatedly asking me for essential book recommendations, I’ve put together short book lists for what I consider to be the best in literature, history, science fiction, and fantasy at the Castalia Direct Store. I’ll be adding to these in the future, this is just a bare-bones beginning.
A reader points out how Agile development provides an entry point for converging technology companies:
It took a while to notice but there is something happening in even non-converged companies. They call it “Agile” in the instances I know of, but that has been around and revised for the last two decades.
It is being sold as what Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. use to get great gains in productivity and measure their teams’ performance. Instead, it is where the cancer can hide. That doesn’t mean you don’t yet have cancer, only that you won’t be able to tell as the nerves are dead.
Having been involved with it being “imposed from above” and discovering it in other companies I finally know why some of the stupid or meaningless kabuki is being used.
If something in your software development process seems either meaningless, stupid, or even counterproductive, it is because the purpose is not coding quality, probably is being celebrated elsewhere as a product of SJW convergence, but is being adopted and imposed on your team. I doubt it is even intended to weaken or destroy competition, but that is the result.
First, there is no measure of individual productivity. All that matters is the “team velocity” which is basically socialism coding (to paraphrase GitHub). This is bad enough when you have a fixed size of similarly capable coders working on the same thing. But what if the team consists of some HTML people, some CSS people, and some JavaScript people who do nonot know much about the other domains, or worse just 3 people, one of each? Yet the measurement is overall. Worse is you typically have a few stars, and supporting actors. So what happens when your two best Java Jockeys are replaced with Danny Diversity and Betty Bugwright that are actually a negative? The powers go into a tizzy and complain about the TEAM slowing down. Everyone on the team knows why but can’t say. And what is your evaluation and/or bonus or whatever based on? Being a team player, not a team winner.
Second is “the two week sprint”. Why two weeks? Imagine a complex subproject that will take someone good three months to go from start to finish, but you know that he can do it as he has been reliable. What this new process does is require it to be broken down into a dozen individual 2 week tickets with what needs to be completed – yes, a real deliverable – a each point. You might recognize this as the hardest part of any nontrivial change or addition. But Danny Diversity can’t even begin to understand how to do anything for the complex subproject, but can copy a bubblesort routine when it is needed for sprint #9. It is worse than that because 2 weeks is the MAXIMUM granularity, but the idea is to have half-day sized projects.
Note there will be “customers” that request a feature, and “the team” is supposed to estimate it, but in the new paradigm design is either omitted, relegated outside the team, or is done in parallel (usually as resented tickets trying to do a mini-waterfall inside the “agile” – usually it is the reverse). If you are making small patches, easily reversed to something like a website (e.g. add popup for shopping cart), this can work because the granularity is small, testability is high, it is a small mod, not a major design, and can be backed out instantly. Imagine if an OTA update bricks or introduces a huge vulnerability to a smartphone.
Third, one of the foundations of Agile is constant refactoring, often built in to the process, to avoid accumulating technical debt. If refactoring is one of those things that is avoided or treated like something that we haaaave to do, you are doing the converged version of “Agile”. Why? Because Betty Bugwright and Danny Diversity will get their tasks done in the sprint, but either any review will reject them or a clean-up tech debt ticket will have to be added. Can’t let there be a visible pattern of where the accumulation of technical debt is coming from. Like San Francisco wondering why the spontaneous appearance of the feces and needles on the side walks.
Fourth, Participation (a)Trophy Test driven code. Actual regression tests are very useful, but hard to do and take time and effort to code. Expecially cross module unit and system tests. Instead, we get kabuki where Danny writes a routine to verify Add(2,2) returns 4, which is still better than letting him modify any used part of the code. But you can add thousands of lines of meaningless clutter, imply that the quality is improving because it is now “tested” while the system is collapsing, and give the deadweight something nondestructive to do for the kabuki.
True Agile is a toolbox, with screwdrivers to remove screws, hammers for nails, and wrenches or at least pliers for bolts. But when all you have is a hammer…
This is an astute observation. I may have to include it almost verbatim as an example in Corporate Cancer.
The core problem with macroeconomics is that it is an abstraction piled upon fiction which is then used to set policies with material consequences. As I addressed in no little detail in The Return of the Great Depression, the margin of error observably involved in the reporting of economic statistics is greater than that required to know something as basic as if the economy is growing or contracting. That is why it matters very much indeed that over half of the government’s spending data is wrong:
A new bipartisan Senate report revealed more than half of the government’s public data on federal spending is wrong, as the website USAspending.gov is riddled with errors.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by chairman Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and ranking member Tom Carper (D., Del.), released a report Tuesday finding nearly every agency is failing to accurately report its spending as required by federal law.
The subcommittee reviewed over two dozen inspector general reports and determined 55 percent of the spending data submitted to USAspending.gov was inaccurate. The errors accounted for $240 billion in spending during the second quarter of 2017, according to the report.
The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014, or DATA Act, required federal spending to be easily accessible to the public through a searchable website, which became USAspending.gov. The website was revamped earlier this year, but agencies are not meeting their requirements to submit accurate, consistent, and reliable data on its spending.
The agency in charge of USAspending.gov—the Treasury Department—is among the worst culprits, as 96 percent of its own data is inaccurate.
To put this in perspective, $240 billion amounts to 1.3 percent of the $18.6 trillion US GDP. Since it was reported that GDP grew 3.1 percent in the first quarter of 2018 compared to the previous quarter, that means that actual GDP growth was either 4.4 or 1.8 percent that quarter, depending upon which way the error lies.
And since the last two quarters growth are reported at 0.7 and 0.5 percent, these government spending errors may mean that the US economy is already in a statistically hidden recession.
Something BIG is about to drop.
Q
Facebook plunges more than 24 percent on revenue miss and projected slowdown
The tech-heavy Nasdaq was set for a big down day Thursday after disappointing quarterly results from Facebook sent the social media giant hurtling toward its biggest share price decline ever and on track to lose more than $125 billion in market value.
The Invesco QQQ Trust, which tracks the Nasdaq 100 index and can give traders a good idea of how the Nasdaq stocks will trade, was down more than 2 percent at one point in after-hours trading Wednesday. At last count, the ETF was off by about 1.5 percent. Nasdaq futures opened lower Wednesday evening, off by about 0.8 percent. Facebook lost more than a fifth of its value after hours.
I don’t think these guys understand how many people now sincerely believe that everyone on the Left is an evil deviant who hates Jesus Christ, Christendom, children, comics, and video games.
At this point, though, good faith isn’t required for a conservative social media takedown. After seeing figures like Google engineer James Damore fired for what their supporters see as mere political differences, many on the right have subscribed to what conservative writer Kurt Schlichter has termed “the new rules.”
As long as conservatives get fired for their political opinions, in their view, they can use campaigns to get liberals fired for the same.
Of course we can. And of course we will. If you don’t like it, then you shouldn’t have permitted us to be deplatformed in the first place.
It’s not as if we’re just imagining that Hollywood is a criminal cesspool of godless degeneracy:
The other shoe has finally dropped for Clare Bronfman, the heiress behind the alleged cult leader. Bronfman, who’s an heiress to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, was long ago outed as a major bankroller of Keith Raniere, the empowerment guru turned master manipulator who’s been charged with sex trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking, and conspiracy to commit forced labor.
On Tuesday, Clare Bronfman was taken into custody in New York City. A superseding indictment charged Bronfman alongside several other top NXIVM members: Kathy Russell, Lauren Salzman and Nancy Salzman. The six defendants stand accused of running an organized criminal enterprise. Crimes alleged within the indictment include identity theft, harboring of aliens for financial gain, extortion, forced labor, sex trafficking, money laundering, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. It describes Bronfman as “a member of the Enterprise and a high-ranking member of Nxivm” who served as an executive board member from approximately 2009 to 2018.
From the transcript of the Darkstream.
You may recall when David Chappelle inexplicably went off to Africa. I mean here is a guy who was top of his game, making incredible sums of money, who was offered everything in the world, and he turns it all down and just disappears into Africa for no reason that anyone can understand. And he never really addressed it directly, it was portrayed as him having some sort of breakdown or something, but he wasn’t having a breakdown, and he explained it in an interview on Inside the Acting show – I can’t remember what it’s called – but he’s talking to a bunch of acting students and he talked about how important it was to have your price, to know what your price was before you went out to pursue a career in Hollywood. And so it was interesting because he said it’s very important to know what your price is, to know what lines you’re not going to cross, and then he said “hence Africa.” What he was very clearly saying was that he was asked to pay a price that he was not willing to pay for his career.
This is something that is relevant to me personally at the moment because now we have a successful line of comics, now that people are becoming aware of the quality of our books and the potential that they have in various mediums and various media, whether it’s film, whether it’s cable, whether it’s streaming, or whether it’s games, so there are people that are interested and that are talking to us, and one of the things I make very clear is that if they’re interested in trying to offer us success in exchange for compromising our principles, our faith, or our souls, they can just stop the conversation right now. We will do it ourselves, then maybe we won’t be successful – so the fuck what?
Jesus Christ turned down the entire world, what price a TV show? Why would you sell your soul for a TV show, for a movie, for a career as a second-rate movie star? I mean seriously, who has a better career in Hollywood than Tom Cruise, is there anyone you can think of? He’s in all the blockbusters, everybody knows his name, he’s about as famous as you can be, he’s been in a number of hit franchises, he’s been in movies that are part of our cultural language, several of his characters are iconic figures, and how many of you would trade places to live in that guy’s freakish life? Why would you ever why would you ever want to live like that? And that’s the best that they can offer! That is the Heaven on Earth that they can offer you. What an utter nightmare!
Are there any other celebrities you believe will be exposed?
Yes I think that lots of people will be exposed. If you go to Neon Revolt, if you go to 8Chan, if you go to Crazy Days and Nights they are all naming names. Now, I’m not going to name any of those names because I have no direct information about any of them. It’s not my world. I’m glad it’s not my world. You know if you want to talk about game designers, I was talking to Derek Smart today. I talk to people in the games industry on a regular basis, and I can guarantee you that we don’t do any casting couch bullshit, we don’t make anybody engage in bizarre rituals so that they can work on games with us. I mean, that sort of stuff would be totally insane.
Do you believe Hollywood’s destructive influence on dismantling Christian culture was intentional or a side-effect of encouraging their own depravity?
It was absolutely intentional: these people hate Christianity, they hate Christians, they hate Western civilization, and they even hate Christmas. It’s really astonishing when you learn to see it, and once you see it, you can’t un-see it.
On a not-unrelated note, Ben Shapiro being a Hollywood Jew with Hollywood values is not news to me. I knew the background of the Littlest Chickenhawk – now there is an unexpectedly dual-barreled nickname – from the start. But Ben Shapiro’s background never seemed relevant to my criticism of him until the “conservative” talking head inexplicably leaped to the defense of James Gunn:
Late Thursday night, Mike Cernovich, a centrist social writer-activist and childrens advocate who has aligned himself with right-wing political movements over the past two years, began sharing Gunn’s insidious tweets. Less than 12 hours after Cernovich, who was amplified by One America News’ Jack Posobiec and the film, An Open Secret, which documents the systemic sexual child abuse found throughout Hollywood, began sharing this evidence with the public Disney fired Gunn from the upcoming sequel.
Gunn tweeted these comments in his forties. He is reportedly worth $100 million and the writer-director of a teen film series. These aren’t tweets from a college kid trying to get attention, or a rising standup comedian trying to bombast their way into the public spotlight. This wasn’t a careless retweet, or a foolishly shared comic. These comments should be damning to anyone, like Shapiro, who strategically positions themselves on the most archaic of social conservatism.
Strange, isn’t it? Maybe not. Shapiro grew up, and still lives, in Hollywood. His mother is a power-player within the industry and his cousins are actors Mara Wilson and Daniel Ben Wilson….
- Was Ben Shapiro defending of James Gunn on his Twitter, the Daily Wire blog, and podcast because Gunn had defended him?
- Is this tribal Hollywood protecting Hollywood?
- Was Mike Cernovich’s takedown of James Gunn the reason why Shapiro opposed it?
- Are there any disclosures Shapiro would like to make about himself or his family’s relationship with Gunn, his associates, or Disney or its subsidiaries?
These are questions Shapiro won’t host a debate on. Why not?
Because Shapiro is an evil little fraud. He’s terrified of debate with anyone who isn’t a left-wing halfwit. He’s a midwit, a gatekeeper, and a media construct who has been relentlessly pushed on American conservatives since he was in junior high. Any Christian or conservative who considers himself a Shapiro fan is a naive fool who has been taken in by the propaganda program. The same thing goes for Jordan Peterson.
These heavily promoted wormtongues do not speak the truth, they do not believe what their fans think they believe, and their objectives are to protect evil by distracting and confusing those who would otherwise stand against it. William F. Buckley. Glenn Beck. Ben Shapiro. Jordan Peterson…. when are conservatives going to stop falling for these obvious frauds?
Worldcon 76 San Jose@worldcon2018
(From the Chair)
“The WorldCon Program – We will do better.”
I directed the Program Division to take down the preliminary program information that was released yesterday evening. There were too many errors and problems in it to leave it up.
I am sorry we slighted and angered so many of the people we are gathering to meet, honor and celebrate. This was a mistake, our mistake. We were trying to build a program reflecting the diversity of fandom and respectful of intersectionality. I am heartbroken that we failed so completely.
We are tearing the program apart and starting over. It was intended to be a reflection of the cultures, passions and experiences of Worldcon membership, with room for both new voices and old. What we released yesterday failed to do that; we must do better.
It’s just ever so shocking to discover another (((conservative))) defending the right of depraved Hollywood freaks to repeatedly “joke” about pedophilia and molesting children:
Last week, everyone’s favorite alt-right troll, Mike Cernovich, decided he’d had enough of Gunn’s two-bit leftist moralizing. So a-diggin’ he went, and he unearthed all those nasty old tweets. And Disney promptly fired Gunn from the next Guardians of the Galaxy installment. Gunn canceled his appearance at the San Diego Comic-Con (the Cannes of nerd-dom), and his future in the business is very much in doubt.
Moved by the peine forte et dure, Gunn apologized and begged for forgiveness. But seriously, does that ever work anymore? Of course not. The man’s toast. And his fate has divided the right into four camps:
(1) The Pizzagaters. These nuts believe that Gunn’s public tweets prove there’s a top-secret, organized cabal of pedophiles in Hollywood.
(2) The Moralists. Their deal is, “Rape jokes are never funny! Pedo jokes are never funny! Firing Gunn was the right call.”
(3) The Schadenfreuders. “The bastard got what he deserved for cheering when the same thing happened to Roseanne. Maybe if enough lefties suffer because of these witch hunts, they’ll finally stop doing it to us.”
(4) Me. I’ll get to that in a minute.
(1) It’s not a secret. There is a disturbingly large population of pedophiles in Hollywood. Everyone there knows who they are, including David Cole. While Gunn’s jokes don’t prove the existence of an organized cabal, based on his “jokes”, his recent movie that featured a pit containing the remains of tens of thousands of children murdered by their father, and his various pictures posted on social media featuring pizza, crying children, and other symbols known to be utilized by pedos, it appears that Gunn was, at the very least, conversant with that particular collection of evil freaks.
(2) David Cole doesn’t understand what morality is. The deal of the moralists are that pedo jokes are always wrong, whether they are funny or not. But whether that is true or not, being funny does not absolve one of the immorality of ones words and deeds. To be forgiven for sin, one must repent, not produce a sufficiently amusing wisecrack. From the moral perspective, firing Gunn was the right call, whether one happened to find him to be funny or not.
(3) Gunn did get what he deserved. Having been banned from Twitter for absolutely nothing at all and having my livelihood directly affected by the speech and thought police, I have absolutely no pity whatsoever for someone like Gunn losing his job. Reprisals are always justified whether they are successful in convincing the enemy to abandon the tactic in question or not.
(4) He never got to it.
When a major leftist A-lister like Gunn is punished for speech, the right goes “Serves you right! Sweet revenge!” But the general public, and other figures in the entertainment industry, go “Oh shit, if that can happen to him, I’d better shut the hell up and never say anything even slightly controversial.” So go ahead, cheer James Gunn’s destruction. You want Europe? That’s how you’ll get Europe. People scared to speak freely, people frightened to crack a joke. If that’s what you want, I don’t care if you’re on “my side.” Fuck off.
Everyone in the center and the Right was already doing that. Submission is not better than resistance and reprisal. And as one who has lived in Europe for decades, I can attest that Europeans feel considerably more free to make controversial statements than anyone in America does.
We’re not on your side, David. And we know perfectly well that you’re not on ours. You’re not fooling us at all. Free speech is an anti-Christian fraud, it always has been, and the West will do very well to revive and restore the historical blasphemy laws. Since the idea of no standards is clearly not tenable, it will be much better to abide by the historical standards of civilized Christianity than the ever-mutating standard of social justice.