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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Charlie Nash @MrNashington Not all “conservatives” are affected by Twitter’s new search result censorship, with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, the National Review’s David French, the Resurgent’s Erick Erickson, and Glenn Beck remaining unaffected…
It’s almost as if the Left wants to keep the cucks around and viable. After all, if they don’t have any Fake Opposition around, they might look like… fascists?
YEAH, NO MORE REFUNDS. EVER. I am just going to jump right into this one, no preamble, no foreplay, nothing. If you put money into Star Citizen, and you didn’t apply for or get a refund before end of 2017 – congrats you’re now a statistic in a long con scam. The End.
I saw this coming a mile away, over three years ago in 2015. And, like my other warnings, I issued a Red Alert about the implications. Some people listened, got a refund, and got out. Others were riding the wave of the project’s popularity due to repeated lies from Chris Roberts’ camp, and so just kept on giving them money. Hey, it’s their money – and we don’t care.
It’s now 2018, and all what I warned about has all come to pass. CIG has now gone on the record that, as I had accurately predicted, their TOS changes over the years were designed to rip backers off. Here are two official statements recently issued to Motherboard/Vice , Kotaku , Ars Technica , PC Gamer and others.
“Our Terms of Service provides refunds for 14 days after each pledge is made, but company policy is to refund anyone who has second thoughts for up to 30 days after their pledge, no questions asked,” – CIG
“The Terms of Service are not retroactive, but a huge majority of Mr. Lord’s pledges came after the TOS was changed to specify arbitration, and those pledges are under that TOS,” the rep wrote. “His pledges with new money on top of his earlier pledges required him to accept the new Terms of Service.” – CIG
Let me preface everything that comes next with these irrefutable FACTS:
Star Citizen was NEVER billed as an Early Access game. Not even once.
In Oct 2012 Chris Roberts asked for, and raised $2M via initial Kickstarter crowd-funding. He promised to release both multiplayer (Star Citizen) and single-player (Squadron 42) by Nov 2014.
By Aug 2013, when the first hangar module was released, they had raised $16.7M.
By Nov 2014, the month he promised it would release, after increasing the game’s scope significantly, they had raised $65M.
Contrary to what some backers try to promote, there was NEVER a vote of consensus to increase the scope of the game. That scope creep came when Chris Roberts himself created additional stretch goals after the initial Kickstarter goal was met. And then he kept on doing it by making various feature promises, new ship JPEG sales etc.
Right. So now lets discuss why this backer lawsuit and his subsequent court loss is so significant now more than ever. I have covered the fiasco in three Twitter threads since news of this backer’s lawsuit broke. But first, a bit of history for context.
Now, I’m not happy about this. Chris Roberts is one of my design heroes. Wing Commander, the Secret Missions, and Wing Commander II are some of the games I played most heavily throughout the entire course of my life. But I had my doubts early on too, so much so that I did not pursue a potential opportunity to work on the AI design for what were then the wingmen in a proposed Wing Commander reboot.
And, you will note, I did not back Star Citizen even though I very nearly did so on three separate occasions. The problem that I always had with the project was what set off Derek’s radar in the first place: I don’t see how he can actually build this thing. Because I’m pretty sure I couldn’t. That’s the thing about game designers. We’re genuinely not jealous of those who have done better than we have. We admire the great ones. We try to learn from them, to understand them, to fully comprehend their designs. I get Akalabeth. I get Wing Commander. I get Doom. I get Fantasy General. I get Puzzle Quest. I get Fortnite, even though I despise everything for which it stands. But I still don’t get how Star Citizen was ever supposed to function.
Arkhaven is happy to announce that Alt-Hero #2: Rebel’s Cell is now available in print at the Arkhaven Direct bookstore for $2.99. This is the limited-run gold logo edition.
We are also pleased to announce that the gold logo edition of Alt-Hero #1: Crackdown has sold out and is no longer available. However, if you are a gold logo edition owner who would like to pick up a regular logo edition, they are now available at Arkhaven Direct.
It is possible that Amazon still has a few gold logo editions in stock, but the print run for the first issue gold logos has been shut down with just over 2,400 copies printed and sold.
In other Alt-Hero news, MAGNATE has provided an update on DevGame regarding the current state of the RPG development and the results of its most recent playtest. And here’s a random thought: how about an Alt-Hero replacement for the now-defunct City of Heroes? For reasons I can’t share now, that’s a LOT more potentially viable than you would probably imagine.
Jordan Peterson is definitely peculiar, but he is only opaque to those who can’t follow him. Which includes, necessarily, the entirety of his fan base:
Peterson’s definition of God is a sprawling, book-length collection of abstractions, some of which are grounded in narratives about the human condition, while others are mere descriptions of psychological and temporal realities (“…the future to which we make sacrifices”). In other words, it’s a definition that’s so elastic and subjective as to be almost meaningless. As Harris put it, “That’s not how most people most of the time are using the word, and there’s something misleading about that.”
To which Peterson responded, “I never made the claim that what I’m talking about is like what other people are talking about.” That’s true, and he often says he doesn’t define ‘belief’ or ‘God’ in the same way as anyone else. Even when he’s asked a more specific question—about, say, his belief (or lack thereof) in the divinity of Christ—he says the answer depends on the interviewer’s definitions of ‘Christ’ and ‘divine.’ But Peterson still uses words like ‘divine’ all the time. He’s happy to describe consciousness as divine, which he considers to be an “axiomatic statement.” He’s more than willing to tell you “magical things happen as the logos manifests itself” before announcing his firm belief that the logos is divine, too. But only if, by ‘divine,’ you mean “Of ultimate transcendent value.”
But then, what does Peterson mean by ‘transcendent’? Or ‘value’? And what will he mean by all the words he uses to answer those questions? Communication becomes extremely difficult if we allow ourselves repeatedly to be drawn into a labyrinth of semantic distinctions. That is precisely why there has to be some fundamental agreement about what words actually mean at the beginning of any conversation. This is something Peterson can be particularly bad at doing, when the mood takes him—just listen to his excruciating two-hour conversation with Harris that never managed to get past the disputed meaning of the word ‘truth.’
As I call it, bafflegarble. It’s nonsense that baffles the insufficiently comprehending.
When it comes to telling us where our morality comes from, Peterson’s equivocal, opaque language suddenly falls away and he leaves us in no doubt about what he’s trying to say. He’s making yet another simplistic, monocausal argument that ignores all the elements of our philosophical and cultural tradition that contradict it.
So what about the rationalist critiques of religion written by Enlightenment atheists like Hume and Spinoza? Or the withering attacks on Christianity by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine? What about all the aspects of our Christian heritage that Peterson doesn’t emphasize, like the virulent anti-Semitism that infected the Third Reich, the scriptural warrants for slavery and genocide, and the savage religious wars that preceded the Enlightenment? Why has moral progress so often required our civilization to renounce the dogmas and dictates of the Judeo-Christian tradition Peterson reveres?
Peterson knows he doesn’t have to answer these questions because, despite all his declarations to the contrary, he isn’t bound by this tradition. In one breath, he tells the audience they live in a society that would collapse without the immovable foundation of Judeo-Christian values. In the next, he reminds them that his God is a modern God, unsullied by the barbarism of ancient texts and unencumbered by the immense weight of history. There’s just one problem: Jordan Peterson’s God is nobody else’s God.
Of course not. Because the Judeo-Christian tradition he reveres does not exist and Jordan Peterson couldn’t believe he is the messiah who will save humanity from destruction by war if he believed in either a) the Christian god or b) any other god that humanity has ever worshiped throughout history. Forget him not being a Christian, he’s not even a noble pagan.
