Carolla: Those people have done their best to fuck up everything they can. School system is fucking unusable. Barbed wire around every freeway side. Gangs tagging fucking Nature, rocks and trees. It’s a traffic nightmare. Basically, the stuff that God did, several million years ago? That’s the good part of LA. Everyone else is getting their head kicked in at Dodger Stadium. But as far as the city planners, and the mayor and all that, you guys have fucked up everything you’ve touched. Plate tectonics gets an A+ from two-whatever Zooic era, when everything shifted, and turned, and we thawed. I’ve lived here my whole life and it’s now shit. Rogan: I’ve only lived here since 1994, but it’s been a big difference. Carolla: It’s essentially turning into Mexico, which is a shit place. No one wants to talk about this, but Mexico is a shitty place to live. Rogan: It’s the worst. It’s one of the worst places in the world. Carolla: So the deal is, we can absorb, as a society, X amount of folks from Mexico a year before we turn into Mexico too. If we turn into Mexico, then we’re a shit joint too.
Magic Dirt does not work. The real Alt Right, the nationalist True Right, is inevitable.
The CEO of Restoration Hardware reaches the same conclusion as the CEO of Proctor & Gamble: online advertising accomplishes nothing. More at Zerohedge.
I’ll share a little anecdote with you on this point.
We had our marketing meeting in the company several years ago and the online marketing team was pitching to double their budget, right, and at the time, say, look, nobody in the company is doubling their budget. But tell me why you believe that’s the right thing to do. And they said, well, look, our customer acquisition cost and our ad cost is the lowest in the company. And I said, well, tell me about the data, show me how. And they said, well, people who click through the words that we buy on Google, the ad cost was lowest. And I said, how do you know that they’re clicking on the word and going to the website because of the word you bought versus they saw a store or they received a source book? They said, oh, we know.
I said, well, how many words do you buy? They said 3,200. 3,200 words. I said, well, what are the top words? How are they ranked, the ranking of the words? Oh, we don’t have that, right. And I was getting the look at like, oh, Gary is kind of one these old brick-and-mortar guys. He just doesn’t get it.
And I said, well, what are the top 10 words? And they didn’t have the information. I said, why don’t we cancel the meeting and come back next week when you have the data? I’m sure that Google sales representatives who are taking you to the expensive lunches and selling you the 3,200 words have that data. So why don’t we get the data and then let, review the data?
And they came back the next week and we sat in a meeting and all of a sudden, I can tell you there’s a little change in the faces. They had to wear it kind of down. Everybody kind of came in. I said, so what did we find out?
And they said, well, we’ve found out that 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?
Immediately the next day, we cancelled all the words, including our own name. By the way, we are paying for the little shaded box above our words and said, oh no, we have to hang on to that because Pottery Barn might squat on top of us. I said, excuse me? I said, if someone goes to a mall or a shopping center and they’re going to Restoration Hardware and there’s a Pottery Bam there, they’re already squatting, okay? It doesn’t mean they’re going to go into their store. If somebody wanted to buy a diamond from Tiffany and just because Zale’s is sitting on top of them in a shaded box doesn’t mean they’re going to go to Zale’s and buy a diamond.
I mean, I can’t believe how many companies buy their own name and they’re paying Google millions of dollars a year for their own name, like maybe if this is webcast, right, a lot of people are going to go, holy crap. They’re going to look at their investments. They’d go, maybe we don’t need to buy our own name.
I’ve seen absolutely ZERO benefit to buying Google ads or Facebook ads myself. I’ve never bothered with Twitter ads or any other social media advertising. I’ve seen very, very moderate success buying Amazon ads. What has been far more successful is a) the Castalia House email lists, b) blogging about and excerpting books, c) the book carousels on the sidebar, and d) Tweeting about new books.
Of course, I’ve always been skeptical about digital advertising. Except for the way it can amplify word of mouth, it’s always struck me as a dubious proposition. You’ll notice that I’ve never been very prone to permitting anyone else to advertise here either, for just that reason.
Jerry Pournelle died on Friday, peacefully in his sleep. With his death, America lost an important figure… But Pournelle didn’t just write fiction. His 1970 book with Stefan Possony, The Strategy of Technology, outlined a strategy for winning the Cold War (with among other things, an emphasis on strategic missile defense) that was largely followed, and successfully, by the Reagan administration. He was a driving force behind the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy in the 1980s that helped lay the groundwork for today’s booming civilian space launch industry. And, for me, his wide-ranging columns in Galaxy Magazine, back when it was edited by star editor James Baen, were particularly influential.
I was a kid in the 1970s, which was not a great era to be a kid. We had Vietnam and Watergate, the Apollo space program quit abruptly, oil prices skyrocketed and so did inflation. Even a hamburger was expensive.
And while that was going on, the voices in the media were all preaching gloom and doom. Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich, in his book The Population Bomb, was predicting food riots in America due to overpopulation. A group called The Club of Rome published a report titled The Limits to Growth that suggested it was all over for Western technological civilization. Bookstore displays were filled with books like The Late Great Planet Earth that announced the end times. And if that weren’t enough, most people figured we were heading for a global thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. It looked like we were headed for some sort of apocalyptic future in which Charlton Heston would be the only survivor besides a few apes or mutants.
But Jerry Pournelle never bought it. In his Galaxy columns — eventually collected and published in book form, and still in print — he actually did the math. The fact was, he reported, we could not only survive but, in his words, survive with style.
Castalia House is republishing The Strategy of Technology later this year. Also, today and tomorrow, we are giving away my favorite volume in the entire There Will Be War series, namely, Volume II. It is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 19 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Superiority” by Arthur C. Clarke, “In the Name of the Father” by Edward P. Hughes, “‘Caster” by Eric Vinicoff, “Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg, “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen” by William Wu, and “Proud Legions”, an essay on the Korean War by T.R. Fehrenbach.
These stories are great and many of them remain relevant today. Just last month, Castalia House was contacted by a U.S. military war college and asked for permission to give out copies of There Will Be War Vol. II to the officers in the class, which permission we obviously granted.
That is what real influence looks like. Most of the authors and the editor are gone now, but the beauty of the written word is that it provides the author with a voice even after death.
It’s incredibly informative that one of the most devastating accusations that the Fake Right Swastika Wearing Jackasses can imagine is that I stand by my friends and allies. Pop quiz: what can we safely conclude about the socio-sexual rank of people who consider doing so to be, not only a negative, but one so damaging as to be meme-worthy?
Milo stood by me when I made a media misstep that angered people at Breitbart. I stood by Milo when the media attempted to crucify him for his Joe Rogan interview and he lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster. That’s what friends and allies do, even when the other individual is flawed, imperfect, or behaves in a suboptimal manner. And only a fool or a social reject abandons people over mere differences of opinion or the occasional moral failure.
The responses were amusing.
Steve Autism@TruthNSausages They DO know Vox was in the music business right?
Rusticus @rusticusjunius Wax Trax! Records for crying out loud.
To say nothing of TVT. Anyhow, it has become abundantly clear that we right-wing omni-nationalists are the Real Alternative Right, the True Right. Because the Fake Right Clowns are not of the Right, do not believe in the Right-Left spectrum, and even openly claim that the historical ideological Right is entirely irrelevant today. Which, of course, is precisely what makes them frauds and charlatans when they attempt to market themselves as “right-wing” in order to appeal to young conservatives and libertarians, as well as disenchanted young liberals and leftists.
The Fake Right is every bit as deceitful and false as CNN. And they utilize the same “guilt-by-association” tactics as the mainstream media.
As for me, you can always expect me to stand by my friends, allies, authors, and readers. Even when they make mistakes. Especially when they make mistakes.
I don’t particularly enjoy most thrillers or suspense novels. I find most of them wanting in one or more aspects, failing to hold my attention. This one is different. It’s set in samurai-era Japan, and offers a fascinating insight into that culture in the guise of a murder mystery. Added to that is an element of the mystical and spiritual, a supernatural twist to the classic whodunnit genre.
A faint sound made the man freeze, his heart racing. Holding his breath, he listened intently. Utter silence prevailed for several moments. Then his ears detected furtive sounds—the soft, irregular noises of a living creature creeping through the grove nearby. The man rose to a crouch, laying his hand on his sword-hilt as he peered into the gloom.
Suddenly, the silhouette of a man glided stealthily between two trees not seven feet from where the traveler crouched! The fog provided a background against which a peasant’s wide straw hat appeared clearly. The fellow also bore a suspiciously long pole in his hands. A second and third, each carrying a similar pole, followed the first. A moment later, the traveler glimpsed the trio moving to his left, creeping methodically through the grove and thrusting the long poles into any place that might conceal a man. Hunters! But of men, not beasts.
The traveler immediately recognized his danger. The long poles were spears, and it was for him the men were almost certainly searching. He did not know if they were agents of his lord’s enemies, attempting to thwart his mission, or merely robbers alerted to potential prey by the innkeeper at the village.
Who they were mattered little at the moment. They would surely kill him if they found him. If he remained in the grove, they were certain to discover him soon. Though he was not unskilled with a sword, the traveler knew he stood little chance against three men at once, particularly men armed with spears.
The man climbed to his feet as quietly as he could, picking up his own straw hat from the forest floor. Easing himself through the trees slowly, and cautiously, the traveler moved away from the three men and in the direction of the road. He could no longer see or hear the hunters. His heart beat violently as he stole among the trunks, keeping one hand outstretched to feel any obstacles hidden in the murk before he stumbled noisily into them. His whole body was tense with the expectation of steel plunging into his flesh from the thrust of an unseen ambusher’s spear.
Soon he reached the far end of the grove. He would have liked to proceed more cautiously, but he knew that lingering even a moment too long might well prove fatal. Once clear of the pines and away from the hunters, speed would prove essential. A clump of small bushes stood between the road and the end of the grove, clinging precariously to a low bank. He clambered down through them carefully, trying not to tangle his legs with the thin branches and snap one loudly. Fortune remained with him, though, as he made his way through them without breaking any, and he was relieved to feel the road’s firm earth under his feet.
The man moved off along the road as swiftly as he dared, his straw sandals making little noise on the damp, hard-packed dirt. Crouching low to make his silhouette less visible, he glanced warily from side to side as he fled. In the pre-dawn light, the road seemed lined with dark, mysterious shapes watching him in brooding silence. He found himself keenly aware of how far away he was from safety, and how close he still was to the men trying to kill him.
A sense of looming menace dogged the man, almost as if he could feel the breath of a pursuer on the back of his neck. The recollection of the innkeeper touching his shoulder as he slept returned to him with blazing clarity.
Is that how they tracked me so easily to the grove? he wondered, as a new fear tingled along his limbs. Did that man put a devil on my back, which rides there even now? If he did, then their witch will know which way I fled!
He had no choice. Better to deal with it now than after daybreak, when he could be seen for miles along the road. The traveler halted and reached deep into his garments. After a moment, his questing fingers found the small bag where he kept sacred salt from the shrine at Shiogama, which he had kept for just such a moment. After whispering a desperate prayer to Shiotsutsuno-oji-no-kami, he withdrew a large pinch of the blessed salt and threw it over his back. Immediately, he felt lighter, and freer, as the sensation of clinging menace left him.
Looking east, he saw that the line of pale light along the horizon’s edge was growing. Despite the fog’s uncertain protection, he knew he needed to put more distance between himself and the pine grove where danger had come stealing upon him on padded feet.
Once he had gone two hundred paces from the grove, the traveler stood more upright and picked up speed with longer, faster strides. He was still stiff from his night’s sleep, but he was refreshed too, and he could feel that he had the strength to run until noon, if need be.
As he ran at a relaxed, ground-eating pace, he listened for the sound of heavy feet running up behind him, holding himself ready to turn and fight for his life. But he heard no sounds, and when he occasionally looked back, he saw no human forms moving amid the gradually fading fog. He went on for half an hour before halting for a moment at the top of a slope leading down to a footbridge across a stony mountain stream. It was morning now, and the sun had fully risen, but silence lay over the lank, motionless grasses almost as thickly as the mist hovering over the water.
The man drew in a deep breath, released it slowly, then walked quickly down the slope towards the stream. Despite the meal the night before, the exertion had stirred his appetite and he wished he had bought food for breakfast at the village.
The traveler walked quickly through the fog, his hand poised close to the hilt of his sword. His ears detected no sounds beyond his heart’s swift drumming and a faint whisper of air breathing through the roadside grass, despite his urgent listening. The traveler’s eyes stabbed right and left as he walked, trying to pierce the solemn white vapor hanging sluggishly half a pace above the ground.
The man now felt grateful for the straw sandals he wore. He welcomed their presence even though they had become sodden from the wet road, with water soaking through to chill the soles of his feet. Normally he would have preferred the cleanliness of a pair of geta, that would lift his feet comfortably above the mud. But with peril skulking at his heels this morning, the filthy, water-logged sandals offered him what he now craved more than anything—silence.
The traveler descended a slope towards a stony creek, noting the wooden footbridge crossing the swift mountain stream, whose dark waters gurgled and splashed steadily in the deep pre-dawn hush. He glanced up at the facing hillside, his eyes questing for signs of danger among the pines that dotted it.
Well, perhaps they were only brigands after all, the man thought as he crossed the wooden footbridge and began to climb the facing slope. He looked back and saw there was still no sign of his pursuers.
The fog swirled for a moment as a soft breath of morning breeze rolled down from the green heights above. The white curtain parted, almost as if by human hands. The traveler looked out over the grassy slope falling away to the left, down to the curve of the stream he crossed moments before. Beyond it, a second, thickly-forested slope mounted towards the unseen sky. It seemed to him that the hillside next to him lay empty except for a few paltry shreds of mist that refused to dissipate.
The traveler took a few steps, then, feeling a sudden prickling along his neck, looked to his left again with a sinking feeling in his heart. The slope was no longer empty! Three men now stood on the slope ahead of him, perhaps fifty paces distant. All three were staring in his direction, their eyes dark pits under the wide brims of their straw hats.
Spider legs of horror stalked up and down the traveler’s spine. He knew of shinobi, the assassins who knew the occult secrets of the ghost world. Some said they could track their prey swiftly and surely with the aid of spirits, and bargained with terrible creatures from beyond the grave for even stranger powers. Were these hunters who had made him their quarry such men?
In last night’s Darkstream, I explained why there is no “us” when it comes to the Fake Right and the genuine Right. It’s not a question of rhetoric. Rhetoric is not intrinsically dishonest. It can be, but as we are instructed, rhetoric is most effective when it is enlisted in the service of the truth. Jesus Christ was not lying when he described the Pharisees as “white-washed tombs” and “serpents” and the “offspring of vipers”. He was not speaking dialectic, he was utilizing rhetoric to illustrate their emptiness and dishonesty.
But lies and deceit are always and intrinsically dishonest. Such dishonesties may be necessary at times, when one is forced to make a choice between two evils, but they can never serve as a core strategy for any movement that is genuinely on the side of the good, the right, the white, and the true.
These selections from the Anglin Style Guide demonstrates that not only are these people not on our side, they are not to be trusted by anyone, ever. There is so little truth in them, and so much intentional deceit, that I don’t think even their claimed purpose of “saving the white race” can necessarily be taken at face value.
PRIME DIRECTIVE: ALWAYS BLAME THE JEWS FOR EVERYTHING
As Hitler says in Mein Kampf, people will become confused and disheartened if they feel there are multiple enemies. As such, all enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance.
So no blaming Enlightenment though, pathological altruism, technology/urbanization, etc. – just blame Jews for everything.
This basically includes blaming Jews for the behavior of other non-Whites. Of course it should not be that they are innocent, but the message should always be that if we didn’t have the Jews we could figure out how to deal with non-Whites very easily.
The same deal with women. Women should be attacked, but there should always be mention that if it wasn’t for the Jews, they would be acting normally.
What should be completely avoided is the sometimes mentioned idea that “even if we got rid of the Jews we would still have all these other problems.” The Jews should always be the beginning and the end of every problem, from poverty to poor family dynamics to war to the destruction of the rainforest.
LULZ
The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not…. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.
POSITIVITY
We should always claim we are winning, and should celebrate any wins with extreme exaggeration. This does not mean we downplay the enemy, just that we play up ourselves. We overestimate our influence.
We should always be on the lookout for any opportunity to grab media attention. It’s all good. No matter what. The most obvious way to do this is to troll public figures and get them to whine about it. I keep thinking this will stop working eventually, but it just never does.
100{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} BLACK AND WHITE
Just as we mustn’t present multiple enemies, we mustn’t leave any room for nuance in any other area. To the entent that it is physically possible, everything should be painted in completely black and white terms. The basic idea is that everyone on our side is 100{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} good and everyone who isn’t on or side is 100{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} evil.
DEHUMANIZATION
There should be a conscious agenda to dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths. So it isn’t clear that we are doing this – as that would be a turnoff to most normal people – we rely on lulz.
ATTACKING MAINSTREAM SHILLS
Pro-Jew shills should be attacked. These include Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and Milo. At the same time, they should also be accused/celebrated as secret Nazis whenever they post anything that lines up with our agenda.
As you see, not unlike SJWs, Swastika-Wearing Jackasses are also prone to lying. Of course, as is the case with SJW projection, their very strategies inform us how we can effectively respond to them. Every time they claim a victory, praise them for being good little Stormpoopers and “celebrating the win with extreme exaggeration”. Every time they claim to be important or the most-trafficked site in the history of the Internet, praise them for remembering to “overestimate their influence.”
If they whine about being attacked and ask you why, keep the answer short and succinct: “because you are evil and your Alinsky-inspired strategy is literally satanic.” At the end of the day, that is sufficient cause to reject them, no matter what their professed objectives may be.
And when they try to run Jon Stewart’s “clown nose on, clown nose off” game and start posturing about how you’re just too old to grasp “the lulz”, you would do well to remind them that you are aware the lulz are only there to hide the fact that they are actively seeking to dehumanize people and inure others to their deaths.
It is literally retarding. It slows the user down by nearly one-quarter on average. I’ve always hated it, passionately, since I noticed Apple pushing it. Now I understand why, beyond the ugly, outdated aesthetics.
The mania for “flat” user interfaces is costing publishers and ecommerce sites billions in lost revenue. A “flat” design removes the distinction between navigation controls and content. Historically, navigation controls such as buttons were shaded, or given 3D relief, to distinguish them from the application or web page’s content.
The mania is credited to Microsoft with its minimalistic Zune player, an iPod clone, which was developed into the Windows Phone Series UX, which in turn became the design for Windows from Windows 8 in 2012 onwards. But Steve Jobs is also to blame. The typography-besotted Apple founder was fascinated by WP’s “magazine-style” Metro design, and it was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013. Once blessed by Apple, flat designs spread to electronic programme guides on telly, games consoles and even car interfaces. And of course web sites.
Flat designs looked “cleaner” and more “modern” (Microsoft’s subsequent portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.
The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content.
“On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers,” the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate. “The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers.”
The firm dispenses with the counter-argument that users were “more engaged” with the page.
“Since this experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and effort spent looking around the page are not good. These findings don’t mean that users were more ‘engaged’ with the pages. Instead, they suggest that participants struggled to locate the element they wanted, or weren’t confident when they first saw it.”
However, the failure of the WarMouse to be embraced with any widespread enthusiasm taught me that for all they like the idea of fast computers, most people are not very concerned with interface speed. If people are not particularly interested in doubling their interface speed, which we demonstrated was the norm for WarMouse Meta users, it should not be surprising that they are not overly concerned about losing 22 percent of it either.
Steve Bannon addresses Trump’s low approval ratings. The president’s former chief strategist says once Trump builds the wall, his approval ratings will go up, and he’ll go on to a 2020 landslide.
Bannon is correct, but he is only stating the obvious. I have been saying this since before the Inauguration. To ensure reelection, Donald Trump needs to do one thing, and one thing only: BUILD THE WALL.
Everything else is irrelevant in comparison. Build the Wall and win handsomely, fail to build it and risk losing.
To celebrate the life and work of Jerry Pournelle, we will be giving away volumes of his classic military science fiction series, THERE WILL BE WAR, all week. Today and tomorrow, you can download THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. Ifor free. If you have never read Dr. Pournelle before, this is an excellent opportunity to acquaint yourself with his fiction and his philosophy. The man has gone to his reward, but his ideas remain with us.
Created by the bestselling SF novelist Jerry Pournelle, THERE WILL BE WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It features some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I and Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II. Many science fiction greats were featured in the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova. 33 years later, Castalia House has teamed up with Dr. Pournelle to make this classic science fiction series available to the public again. THERE WILL BE WAR is a treasure trove of science fiction and history that will educate and amaze new readers while reminding old ones how much the world has changed over the last three decades. Most of the stories, like war itself, remain entirely relevant today. Volume I is edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, and features 23 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Reflex” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the original “Ender’s Game” novella by Orson Scott Card, “The Defenders” by Philip K. Dick, and a highly influential pair of essays devoted to the then-revolutionary concept of “High Frontier” by Robert A. Heinlein and Lt. General Daniel Graham.
If you would prefer to buy Dr. Pournelle’s books instead, I would recommend adding the big, beautiful hardcover omnibus of THERE WILL BE WAR Vols. I and II to your library.
This is the weekly NFL open thread. A reminder: those who attempt to take this opportunity to posture about their television-watching habits and answer a question that no one has asked will be spammed.
