Category: Uncategorized

Pad for Performance

And elevate for excellence. Bill Belichick’s system illustrates the effort and the level of detail that are required to set yourself apart, even among the most successful:

As the son of a coach, and a lifelong football devotee, Brian Ferentz figured he could handle every possible expectation that came with his new job as a low-level offensive assistant in New England. He would live the Patriots’ infamous 20/20 coaching existence, working up to 20 hours a day, for about $20,000 a year. He knew he would become an anonymous cog in a high-functioning machine, spending his days—and most nights—swamped in grunt work while receiving little credit for his toiling. But he also knew he had gained entry to a coaching laboratory that could change the trajectory of his life, starting in 2009.

He expected it would be hard. He didn’t expect … an art project? But the team assigned him the NFL equivalent of one, immediately. Bill Belichick summoned Ferentz to his office, where he’d school him on one particular—and particularly tedious—process that New England emphasized more than any other team. Belichick called it “padding,” his method of diagramming plays from opponents. It served to gauge football knowledge, inform game plans and teach the nuances of an infinitely complex sport—part torture chamber, part proving ground, part barrier to entry and part football seminar all wrapped into one exercise.

Every NFL team charts its opposition, on some level, to varying degrees. And other coaches, like Bill Parcells, made their entry-level assistants pad. But while those familiar with the process claim not to know its origin—whether it started with Parcells; Belichick; Belichick’s father, Steve; top-secret Patriots assistant Ernie Adams; or elsewhere—all agree that no one embraced the method, or gleaned more value from it, than Belichick himself.

Ferentz understood the extent immediately. Two words popped into his mind: “holy” and “s—.” A man who once considered himself ready for every nuance of the job was now doubting whether he could do it. He would scour film of upcoming opponents and diagram their offensive plays in staggering detail, then take those diagrams, cut them out, place them into booklets and hand them over for review. Some games took eight hours, depending on the number of plays and the complexity of the scheme, while others could be completed in closer to four. With four or five games to review each week, his mass of other responsibilities and actual coaching, he started to add up the math for a 17-week season, only to stop because he had to pad again.

The “pads” were sheets of paper, 8½ x 11 inches, with a horizontal line dividing the page. They sketched one diagram on top and the other on the bottom. The assistants filled in four plays on each sheet by using both sides. They noted the down and distance; field position, quarter and time remaining; numbers for each of the 22 players and their assignments….

Thirteen years later, Ferentz is Iowa’s offensive coordinator. He’s still a coach, and one who never expected to embrace that “miserable, terrible, awful” process that once forced him to question both his chosen profession and, at times, his existence. Instead, he came to view one specific process, from all of New England’s myriad approaches, as the primary element that built the nebulous, mystical aura known as the Patriot Way.

He’s now a padding proponent. Lifetime membership.

It’s not an accident that both JRR Tolkien and Umberto Eco demonstrated near-psychotic attention to detail in the process of creating their great literary works. Tolkien’s philological depths are rightly famous; it’s less well-known how Eco built a virtual monastery so that he could time how long it took to walk from point A to point B in order to ensure that the conversations in The Name of the Rose fit the amount of time that was required for the traversal.

My level of success is orders of magnitude below the two great writers of the 20th century, but one thing I have noticed is that a) I make a habit of writing design drafts as well as keeping lists and spreadsheets, and b) I always have a much better idea of what is going on, and what needs to be done, than nearly everyone else involved in a given project. I’m regularly astonished by how little most people know about what is required of them to simply do their jobs correctly.

So, to up your game, I highly recommend getting in the habit of writing things down and regularly noting what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, who is doing it, and when you should check on them to see if they are going to deliver it on time. Think of it as padding for life.

DISCUSS ON SG

He Can Shoot Any Booster

If you watched the Darkstream, then you know what this is all about. By request:

You know that any vaxx is capable of boosting
Scotty got it right and he’s capable of proving
He can be what he wants to be
Shoot a one shoot a two then he boosts a three
Whatever kind, he’ll max the vaxx
And if he gets it wrong he walks it back
Amphiboly proves he could never be a loser
That’s why he can shoot any booster

DISCUSS ON SG

Don’t Fall For It Again

The reason Russia is ready to invade Ukraine is extremely straightforward. It will never permit NATO’s expansion into Ukraine. And NATO has already decided to expand into both Ukraine and Georgia.

NATO decided to admit Ukraine and Georgia, but did not set a deadline, Secretary General of the organization Jens Stoltenberg said in an interview in the Repubblika newspaper.

“Ukraine has already requested to join, and we have decided to work towards this by supporting its reforms, helping to modernize the armed forces to our standards. In 2008, we decided that Ukraine and Georgia would become [NATO] members, but we did not establish, when exactly,” Stoltenberg said.

That’s why the neocons are already attempting to lay the global media narrative for the customary US false flag, which, from the Spanish-American War to the Afghan War, has been used to whip up public support for US invasions of foreign countries around the world. These justifications for military action were all fake to varying degrees. Sometimes they were complete false flags, like the Maine and 9/11. At other times they were genuine attacks that were misrepresented to the public, such as the Lusitania and Pearl Harbor. But regardless of which form the next one takes, don’t let your friends and family fall for the next one.

The position that Russia has no right to a sphere of influence is as risible as it is hypocritical when it comes from the United States. It is the USA, not Russia, that is presently the Evil Empire. It is the USA, not China, that presently plays host to what Philip K. Dick described as “the empire that never ended.”

The United States has exercised a sphere of influence in its own hemisphere for almost 200 years, since President James Monroe, in his seventh annual message to Congress, declared that the United States “should consider any attempt” by foreign powers “to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

Listening to Mr. Blinken, you might think the United States long ago deposited this prerogative over the foreign policies of its southern neighbors in history’s dustbin. It has done no such thing. In 2018, Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, called the Monroe Doctrine “as relevant today as it was the day it was written.” The following year, his national security adviser, John Bolton, boasted that “the Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”

To be sure, the United States doesn’t enforce the Monroe Doctrine in the same way it did in the first half of the 20th century, when it regularly deployed the Marines to Central America and the Caribbean, or during the Cold War, when the C.I.A. helped topple leftist governments. Washington’s methods have changed. It now prefers using economic coercion to punish governments that ally with adversaries and challenge its regional dominion.

Consider Washington’s decades-long embargo of Cuba. U.S. officials may claim the embargo’s goal is to promote democracy, but virtually every other government on earth — democracies included — views it as an act of political bullying. Last year, the United Nations General Assembly condemned the embargo by a vote of 184 to 2. Human Rights Watch has denounced it for imposing “indiscriminate hardship on the Cuban population.”

Biden officials do not celebrate the Monroe Doctrine as their Trump administration predecessors did. But they still muscle America’s neighbors. Mr. Biden hasn’t eased the embargo of Cuba. Nor has he ended Mr. Trump’s effort to cut off Venezuela, another autocratic government that flirts with America’s foes, from global trade. The United States, in the words of one European Union official, is still prepared to “starve Venezuelans until their leadership surrender or their people oust them.” These policies serve notice to other Latin American governments that defying Washington can bring grave costs.

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The Inevitable False Flag

The Fake Biden Administration has been kind enough to warn us about the war with Russia the neocons who run it are attempting to launch:

The US has intelligence that Russia is planning a ‘false-flag’ operation on its own forces in eastern Ukraine to create a pretext for invasion.

Officials on Friday also said they believed Russia was mounting a social media disinformation campaign to portray Ukraine as the aggressor.

The update, making the prospect of military conflict more immediate, came as Ukrainian government websites were taken offline in a ‘massive’ cyberattack, talks between Washington and Moscow collapsed and Russia held a combat readiness inspection of their troops.

Meanwhile, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia had ‘run out of patience’ with the West as Moscow demanded assurances that NATO would not expand closer to its territory.

The United States has evidence that operatives trained in urban warfare and sabotage will carry out these attacks on Russian proxy forces, officials told journalists on Friday, possibly weeks before an invasion.

‘We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine,’ said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.

‘The operatives are trained in urban warfare and using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces.’

She said it mimicked the playbook used when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula, and included social media disinformation to show Kyiv as the instigator of violence.

Translation: The USA will be staging an obvious false flag prior to starting a war again.

Remember the Maine!

Thank goodness that Scott Adams invented and explained the new concept of projection to us earlier today, so we understand that when Jen Psaki says that Russia is going to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine, she’s actually describing what the US government is in the process of doing.

We owe him a real debt of gratitude for teaching us to see through the persuasion.

DISCUSS ON SG

Covid and Corporate Cancer

Covid and the vaccine regime is killing SJW-converged Big Tech. An account from the inside:

I work in Big Tech. A name you would know and have probably used before. Wanted to give a rundown of what it’s like from the inside right now.

Obviously insanely radically leftwing. BLM/LGBTQ. Trans flags hanging in office. Pronouns stated before meetings. Special affiliation groups for everyone but white men. All what you’d expect.

But COVID/WFH has totally broken people. They are fundamentally weak, often with no social support outside of work. They’re the people with no children, no spouse. Only a dog or cat for emotional support.

There’s constant talk, even now, about how hard things are for everyone. Often meetings start with going around the room to ask “How is everyone feeling?”

Literally everyone else went on sad rants about their lives. “I’m so MAD a white supremacist shot 3 black men in Kenosha!”

It’s toxic. When it got to me, I said “Good.” and then a (((lady engineer))) literally proposed that we should not be allowed to answer the question positively. I shit you not. I think it hurt her that I wasn’t as miserable as her.

She made some argument about “vulnerability”. These people not only want you weak, they want you to expose your vulnerabilities to them so they can exploit them. They may not intend this explicitly, but whatever twisted ideology they worship ends with this result.

So back to morale. Everyone is demoralized. This may surprise you, since Big Tech is extremely well paid and has been able to WFH throughout the past 2 years. They’ve been given extra days off, extra stipends, bonuses, etc. They never had to fear being laid off.

I have some sympathy, and can feel some of this myself. It’s normal and natural to work with people in-person. WFH can make it easy to overwork. You take fewer breaks, often work past normal working hours. You don’t feel connected to customers or celebrate success in person.

And as I mentioned, Big Tech is often the only social life for people. I fortunately never made it mine, but my company had all sorts of after-work activities. Sports leagues, game nights, different classes taught by employees. There was a rhythm and connectedness that’s gone.

The Great Resignation is real. Many employees are leaving for better jobs. Remote work has (so far) resulted in more job opportunities for those working in Big Tech, especially outside of Silicon Valley. And so we backfill those positions, or hire new people, all remote. We now have employees who have nearly 2 years of tenure who have never met another employee in person, and lives alone in some city away from where the office was.

This would be fine for a normal person, but again, we’re attracting the family-less urbanites scared of even meeting up with their friends at a restaurant.

The churn in jobs also has the major effect of constantly dealing with the overhead of re-assinging projects from people leaving, and onboarding new people. The new employees don’t get enough attention to succeed. And the employees that stay end up with a load of work dumped by the former coworkers, plus the responsibility of onboarding the new ones. There are many software engineers who’ve not written a single line of code in the past year.

While the Woke agitation has slowed due to the productive employees’ ability to simply log off, in addition to the tiredness of the agitators, there is more and more open rebellion regarding pay and profits.

“Bring your whole self to work” was the Big Tech mantra. Tell people about your cool hobbies, share your politics (if you’re far left only), share your sex life. This plus the feeling of distance an online-only presence creates has made people braver in speaking their thoughts.

You used to have to have the balls to knock on the CEOs office door, or schedule a meeting. Now you can fire off a nasty Slack message straight to her. People will openly write threads and comments throughout Slack bad-mouthing the higher ups at the company. And they do nothing.

It’s unreal what people will write, with no recourse.

If it were anything remotely RW, I’m certain they’d be immediately fired, but so long as they’re sufficiently LW or minority (anything but straight white man), they can agitate, complain, do no work, and continue employment.

We are going to win this cultural war. Whereas conflict is the air we breathe, the delicate snowflakes of converged Corporate America can’t even handle reading the news headlines. Whereas our morale is antifragile, and we become more determined with every deplatforming, discrediting, and demonetization, their morale is breaking under the weight of their loneliness.

The history of 4GW is the history of the side that is weaker in terms of resources, but stronger in terms of morale, reliably proving victorious. We are steadily building strong foundations on every front. They are losing their ability to even release functional products.

We will win.

DISCUSS ON SG

Killshots in Canada

The devil, as always, can be detected in the details:

The Covid vaccines look worse and worse.

A reader has pointed out an amazing dataset from the province of Alberta, Canada which reports Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths by day after the first and second vaccine doses.

Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from Covid all soar in the days and weeks after people receive their first vaccine dose.

The charts make it completely obvious why the definition of “unvaccinated” was stretched to include “those who have been vaccinated in the last 14 days”. Most of the “unvaccinated” who are now infected with Covid were actually vaccinated, they’ve just been redefined as not having received the vaxxes with which they have, in fact, been injected.