Deeply treasonous parliamentarians

As incredible as it sounds, these are the sorts of machinations that could quite legitimately spark another civil war in Great Britain:

Theresa May is facing an all-out bid by Remainer rebels to stop Brexit going ahead by tearing up the Commons rulebook. The ‘coup’ could see the government stripped of control over business in Parliament – paralysing the PM and potentially allowing MPs to prevent the UK crashing out without a deal.

The move – which No10 believes is being orchestrated by former ministers Oliver Letwin and Dominic Grieve – could happen within hours of Mrs May’s Brexit plan being heavily defeated on Tuesday, as seems inevitable.

The manoeuvring was only uncovered by Chief Whip Julian Smith when he overheard conspirators in the MPs’ cloakroom. Ministers have been warned success for the plotters could make it impossible for the government to cling on. There are claims Speaker John Bercow is ready to help the backbench uprising, after he secretly met Mr Grieve last week.

The high-stakes battle emerged as Mrs May launched another desperate effort to salvage the package she has thrashed out with Brussels.

This is treason by literally every single measure. If either the Queen or the Prime Minister had any spine whatsoever, they would be ordering the arrest of all the conspirators. It also demonstrates the way in which those who are skeptical about “conspiracy theories” are not only ignorant of history, they are wilfully blind concerning current events.

Teresa May’s feeble deal is going to be voted down, as it should be. No-Deal Brexit was always the right way to go, and the desperation of the traitorous continental conspirators is rendered obvious by the extreme tactics they are now contemplating. This is not merely an attack on British democracy and the British government, it is an attack on the very British concept of the rule of law.

A Neocon guard for your mind

Now that Neocon control over the Republican Party and the alternative media has slipped despite their powerful grip on the mainstream media and talk radio, the liberal imperialist world revolutionaries who used to call themselves “neocons” are imitating the SJWs in utilizing a techno-political approach to controlling the narrative by policing what you see and hear:

The product which NewsGuard markets to the general public is a browser plugin which advises online media consumers whether a news media outlet is trustworthy or untrustworthy based on a formula with a very pro-establishment bias which sees outlets like Fox News and the US propaganda outlet Voice of America getting trustworthy ratings while outlets like RT get very low ratings for trustworthiness. This plugin dominates the bulk of what comes up when you start researching NewsGuard, but circulating a plugin which individual internet users can voluntarily download to help their rulers control their minds is not one of the more nefarious agendas being pursued by this company. The full MintPress article gives a thorough breakdown of the yucky things NewsGuard has its fingers in, but here’s a summary of five of its more disturbing revelations:

1. The company has created a service called BrandGuard, billed as a “brand safety tool aimed at helping advertisers keep their brands off of unreliable news and information sites while giving them the assurance they need to support thousands of Green-rated [i.e., Newsguard-approved] news and information sites, big and small.” Popularizing the use of this service will attack the advertising revenue of unapproved alternative media outlets which run ads. NewsGuard is aggressively marketing this service to “ad tech firms, leading agencies, and major advertisers”.

2. NewsGuard’s advisory board reads like the fellowships list of a neocon think tank, and indeed one of its CEOs, Louis Gordon Crovitz, is a Council on Foreign Relations member who has worked with the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. Members of the advisory board include George W Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, deep intelligence community insider Michael Hayden, and the Obama administration’s Richard Stengel, who once publicly supported the need for domestic propaganda in the US. All of these men have appeared in influential think tanks geared toward putting a public smiley face on sociopathic warmongering agendas.

3. Despite one of its criteria for trustworthy sources being whether or not they are transparent about their funding, the specifics of NewsGuard’s financing is kept secret.

4. NewsGuard is also planning to get its news-ranking system integrated into social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, pursuing a partnership which will make pro-establishment media consumption a part of your experience at those sites regardless of whether or not you download a NewsGuard app or plugin.

5. NewsGuard markets itself to state governments in order to get its plugin installed in all of that state’s public schools and libraries to keep internet users from consuming unauthorized narratives. It has already succeeded in accomplishing this in the state of Hawaii, with all of its library branches now running the NewsGuard plugin.

If they were more honest, they would have simply named the company NeoConGuard, because the entire purpose of NewsGuard is to police the internet on behalf of the Israel First lobby in the United States. That’s why it is focused on upholding the Never-Trump Russia, Russia, Russia narrative and will almost certainly be used to push the state and federal anti-BDS laws as well as war in the Middle East and Ukraine, free trade, and unlimited immigration.

NeoConGuard is just a techno-political expansion of what Bill Kristol and Jon Podhoretz were trying to do with the now-failed Weekly Standard, which by Podhoretz’s own admission was “to create a publication that would help guide and keep honest the hard-charging Republican party that had scored its stunning lopsided victory over Bill Clinton’s Democrats.”

Divisional playoffs: Saturday

The Chiefs are ROLLING over the Colts. The funny thing is that it wasn’t until this weekend that I finally realized why the name Mahomes always sounded vaguely familiar to me. It’s because the Chiefs’ QB’s father played for the Twins for a few years when I was still living in Minnesota. I’m not a baseball fan, but back in the day, when you read the daily newspapers, you picked up the general gist of what was going on with the local sports teams even if you didn’t follow them.

Anyhow, this is the open thread for tonight’s games. And if they’re boring, feel free to join us at the Darkstream.

You opined, we listened

While we’re not always able to be responsive to various peoples’ ideas and requests, we do at least try to be amenable to suggestions for improvement. So, here is a partial list of some of the things the various teams have added lately.

  • You can now use Paypal at the Arkhaven store. Please note that we’d still prefer to have you use your credit card because Paypal’s transaction cost is 2x higher, but if you’re having problems with your card being accepted, Paypal is now a viable option.
  • Castalia House audiobooks sold from the Arkhaven store now come in a high-quality DRM-free single-file MP4 format. The audio quality is approximately 4x that of an Audible audiobook and you can use the file with a broad range of mobile and desktop readers and other media players. We’ve also added an AUDIOBOOKS link on the black bar on the main page to make them easier to find. We intend to eventually put our new audiobooks on Audible as well, but we are waiting to hear back from them about being able to make our 40+ existing audiobooks available on the Arkhaven store.
  • The Darkstream now accepts superchats. So, if you’d like to support it that way, it is now a viable option. We did an initial test last night and it was considerably more successful than I’d imagined.
  • The Darkstream will soon be available in podcast format on iTunes. You can find a few recent podcasts here.
  • The digital editions of Arkhaven and Dark Legion comics are now available in high-resolution CBZ format. Not all of the previously published comics have been converted yet, but all of the new releases will be.
There is a lot more to come in the near future, but this is what we have already implemented and can announce to date. On the Indiegogo front, things are proceeding according to the process, and there is nothing more to say at the present time except that we are aware of the way in which SJWs are putting pressure on Indiegogo to deplatform other creators of whom they do not approve.

Fighting the last war

I don’t disagree with what this guy is saying. But it’s a little ironic that he talks about fighting the last war, because the author himself is focused on an outdated and increasingly irrelevant ideological struggle:

History and theory don’t matter to socialists because they imagine society can be engineered. The old arguments and historical examples simply don’t apply: even human nature is malleable, and whenever our stubborn tendencies don’t comport with socialism’s grand plans a “social construct” is to blame.

These most recent spasms of support for the deadly ideology of socialism remind us that progressives aren’t kidding. They may not fully understand what socialism means, but they fully intend to bring it about. Single-payer health care, “free” education, wealth redistribution schemes, highly progressive income taxes, wealth taxes, gun bans, and radical curbs on fossil fuels are all on the immediate agenda. They will do this quickly if possible, incrementally if they have to (see, again, the 20th century). They will do it with or without popular support, using legislatures, courts and judges, supranational agencies,university indoctrination, friendly media, or whatever political, economic, or social tools it takes (including de-platforming and hate speech laws). This is not paranoia; all of this is openly discussed. And say what you will about progressivism, it does have a central if false ethos: egalitarianism.

Conservatives, by contrast, are not serious. They have no animating spirit. They don’t much talk about liberty or property or markets or opportunity. They don’t mean what they say about the Constitution, they won’t do a thing to limit government, they won’t touch entitlements or defense spending, they won’t abolish the Department of Education or a single federal agency, they won’t touch abortion laws, and they sure won’t give up their own socialist impulses. Trumpism, though not conservative and thoroughly non-intellectual, drove a final stake through the barely beating heart of Right intellectualism, from the Weekly Standard to National Review. Conservatism today is incoherent, both ideologically and tactically incapable of countering the rising tide of socialism.

The real battle is not conservatism vs socialism. First, conservatism is dead because there is nothing left in the West to conserve. Second, the real battle is nationalism vs global imperialism. The most recent offensive of the neo-liberal world order has failed, but its armies have not left the field and its leaders are actively developing new strategies, new tactics, and new false oppositions in order to attempt to pick up where the last attempt left off.

Who needs a federal government

The USA has enjoyed the longest government shutdown in its history without incident:

The partial government shutdown became the longest closure in U.S. history at when the clock ticked past midnight Friday as President Donald Trump and nervous Republicans scrambled to find a way out of the mess.

A solution couldn’t come soon enough for federal workers who got pay statements Friday but no pay.

The House and Senate voted to give federal workers back pay whenever the federal government reopens and then left town for the weekend, leaving the shutdown on track to become one for the record books once the clock struck midnight and the closure entered its 22nd day.

And while Trump privately considered one dramatic escape route – declaring a national emergency to build the wall without a new stream of cash from Congress – members of his own party were fiercely debating that idea, and the president urged Congress to come up with another solution.

‘What we’re not looking to do right now is national emergency,’ Trump said. He insisted that he had the authority to do that, adding that he’s ‘not going to do it so fast’ because he’d still prefer to work a deal with Congress.

Even the black-pillers are beginning to understand that the God-Emperor is serious about building his Big Beautiful Wall. And he is serious about it because he understands that without it, there is no point in even running for re-election.

The Republican Establishment is serious about trying to primary him with Mitt Romney – last week 54 Republican Senators voted to directly attack unalienable American rights at the behest of AIPAC and other Neo-Palestinian interest groups – and President Trump will not be able to defeat that treacherous challenge if he does not deliver on his most important promise to his supporters.

Stand firm and inflexible, Mr. President. Build the Wall. Drain the Swamp. That is the road to victory in 2020.

He shot the sheriff

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has suspended the man who may arguably be the worst law enforcement officer in the country, Scott Israel:

Effective immediately, I am officially suspending Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel for his repeated failures, incompetence and neglect of duty.

Reasons for the suspension span several pages but include this: “WHEREAS Sheriff Israel is responsible for inserting into the Broward County Sheriff’s Office Active Shooter Policy that a deputy ‘may’ enter the area or structure to engage an active shooter and preserve life.”

The reason he didn’t actually fire Israel is because he can’t. Only the State Senate can do that. No word on the fate of any deputies, though.

Heuristics are not proof

And yet they remain useful when conclusive evidence is not available:

Faced with the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, John Snow had no idea what mechanism caused cholera, and his instruments could not reliably identify the contaminants in water supplies, but he noted what we would now call correlations: some water companies had more of their clients die than others, even though all of them supplied to rich and poor households alike. South of the river companies were more deadly, and they drew more contaminated water from the river rather than other sources, and filtered it less than other companies. Some neighbourhood pumps had more deaths nearby than did others. This was a geographic form of correlation (now called a Voronoi diagram) and it was on that correlational basis, without knowledge of the real mechanism, that he took the handle off the Broad Street pump, and stopped the epidemic.

That is the way we tell the story now, but Snow was a careful and clever man, and pointed out another explanation: the cholera outbreak was coming to an end anyway, as people ran away from areas where there were many deaths. The common folk who believed that correlation implied causation ran for their lives and lived to see another day.

Snow also had to cope with a major anomaly in his geographic correlational investigations. None of the brewery workers right next to the Broad Street water pump fell ill with cholera. It turned out that they received free beer, and the water for the beer was boiled so as to release the flavour of hops, thus inadvertently killing off the water-borne organisms.

Snow jumped to a conclusion because his mind was prepared to interpret associations in a particular way, intially by his doubts about the air transmission miasma theory and later by his own hypothesis of water-borne transmission. He jumped to the right conclusion, without proofs of the causal mechanism which were only available years later.

This is why you should NEVER try to dismiss any correlation with the idiot’s refrain that “correlation is not causation”. That is an astonishingly stupid thing to say, as it is tantamount to saying that “a clue is not a mathematical proof.” Who claims that it is?

As Michael Woodley points out, there is never causation WITHOUT correlation. Which means that correlation is a necessary, but insufficient indicator of causation, it is not a synonym for it.

Those nefarious Russians

First they got Drumpf elected and now they’re messing with the magnetic North Pole:

Earth’s magnetic fields are shifting – and scientists are unsure why.

Researchers say the magnetic North Pole is  ‘skittering’ away from Canada, towards Siberia.

The problem has got so bad, researchers around the world are scrambling to update a global model of the fields.

Called the World Magnetic Model, it underlies all modern navigation, from the systems that steer ships at sea to Google Maps on smartphones. The most recent version of the model came out in 2015, and it was supposed to last until 2020.

However, researchers say the  magnetic field is changing so rapidly that they have to fix the model urgently.

It was due to be updated on the 15th January, but due to the US Government shutdown, that has already been delayed until the 30th.

The magnetic field is in a permanent state of flux.

Magnetic north wanders, and every few hundred thousand years the polarity flips so that a compass would point south instead of north.

Is it just me or is everything getting weirder faster these days?