AUDIOBOOK: The Missionaries

This may very well be the greatest audiobook ever produced. I’m not kidding. It’s right up there with Douglas Adams reading his own The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Owen Stanley’s satirical novel is brilliant, of course, alternating between darkly and ridiculously funny, but Gabrielle Miller’s narration, in her unique Australian accent, takes it to a new level of hilarity. I guarantee the way she does Roger Fletcher’s sneering laugh will crack you up, and her effortless switching between the roughneck and posh accents is spot-on.

And if you think you recognize the voice, let’s just say that you do and leave it at that.

THE MISSIONARIES is six hours and 41 minutes. You will not want to miss it. It’s that good.

That awkward reality

It always catches up to SJWs, sooner or later.

IN 2015, A black software developer embarrassed Google by tweeting that the company’s Photos service had labeled photos of him with a black friend as “gorillas.” Google declared itself “appalled and genuinely sorry.” An engineer who became the public face of the clean-up operation said the label gorilla would no longer be applied to groups of images, and that Google was “working on longer-term fixes.”

More than two years later, one of those fixes is erasing gorillas, and some other primates, from the service’s lexicon. The awkward workaround illustrates the difficulties Google and other tech companies face in advancing image-recognition technology, which the companies hope to use in self-driving cars, personal assistants, and other products.

WIRED tested Google Photos using a collection of 40,000 images well-stocked with animals. It performed impressively at finding many creatures, including pandas and poodles. But the service reported “no results” for the search terms “gorilla,” “chimp,” “chimpanzee,” and “monkey.”

In a third test attempting to assess Google Photos’ view of people, WIRED also uploaded a collection of more than 10,000 images used in facial-recognition research. The search term “African american” turned up only an image of grazing antelope. Typing “black man,” “black woman,” or “black person,” caused Google’s system to return black-and-white images of people, correctly sorted by gender, but not filtered by race. The only search terms with results that appeared to select for people with darker skin tones were “afro” and “African,” although results were mixed.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that “gorilla” was censored from searches and image tags after the 2015 incident, and that “chimp,” “chimpanzee,” and “monkey” are also blocked today. “Image labeling technology is still early and unfortunately it’s nowhere near perfect,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Google also can’t tell the difference between black people and white people. This is the first image result for “white couple”. The second is literally entitled “Black And White Couple Stock Photo.”

And this is the third. Wowjustwow, Google clearly still has a long way to go!

The Spectator covers Comicsgate

James Delingpole chronicles the decline of the comics industry into diversity:

Iron Man is now a 15-year-old black girl who might be a sociopath; the Incredible Hulk is a 19-year-old Asian hipster guy; Thor is a woman who is dying of cancer; and Captain America is a full-on Nazi — to show readers how evil Donald Trump is — while his duties as a good person have been handed over to Falcon, who is much more to be admired, obviously, because he is black.

No, really, this is not a joke designed to satirise the leftist, identity politics lunacy which has afflicted so much of the US entertainment industry. This is what has actually happened to the superheroes of those two iconic imprints Marvel and DC Comics. Their characters have all been updated to make them relevant in a more diverse, gender–fluid age where, as rebel comic-books publisher Vox Day puts it, ‘all the princesses know kung fu and none of them need rescuing’.

Except, of course, the demographic that mainly buys comics — young white males — isn’t much interested in having its consciousness raised. It wants strong storylines with memorable characters, like Spider-Man (now Latino) and Punisher (now trans-gender) used to be before the social justice warriors took over the comics industry. Sure enough, the drop in sales reflects this. In 2016, the total annual sales of the top 300 selling comics in the USA was nearly 90 million; the next year it had fallen below 80 million; this year it may well drop by ten million more.

‘What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there… anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose against,’ Marvel’s VP of sales made the mistake of admitting last year. In the furore that followed he was then sent out to say the precise opposite —that he was ‘proud and excited’ about all the ‘unique characters that reflect new voices’ in the Marvel universe. Well of course. He had a job to keep.

“Deeply un-PC” rebels. Yeah, I’d say that’s a fair description. Get ready, Rebel fans. Alt★Hero #2 is going to be here sooner than you think.

Mailvox: immigration and Boomers

A Man of the West shares how his attempt to introduce immigration heresy into a proud hyphenated-American family went:

I’ve been a reader of your blog and viewer of your videos for some time now, but I’ll cut to the chase rather than linger in my own backstory. An hour ago I was on the phone with my parents that live on the opposite side of the country (dad is a boomer, mom is early gen-x) and the conversation quickly turned to politics and history as it always does.They are Reagan-era right-wing conservatives. I  wouldn’t consider them neocons, but tomato tomAHto at this point. Gradually the topic transformed into immigration being more detrimental to a nation than warfare. As with any historical discussion with a boomer, the subject quickly returned to exclusively America. So I introduced to him the idea that even the Ellis Island immigrants, legal as they may have been, were a net negative to the American nation and culture.

Now, in an Italian/Irish immigrant family, to say something like this is sacrilege. But that’s when I could tell I was getting somewhere, because my dad started spewing post-modernist, globalist, pro-Babel propaganda like the Littlest Chickenhawk on a week-long soy bender. He even tried to drag out some JBP quotes until I dropped the “he authored a 2015 UN Development Panel report” on him. Then came the stuff I had heard him slip into past conversations, like “culture is always changing” and “no culture remains the same. History shows a constant fluctuation of cultures”. These always seemed like wishy-washy public-education level slogans parroted to give the illusion of sounding like you are well-versed in a wide scope of history. But this time I wasn’t tolerating it.

I’m not going to waste your time with a play-by-play review of the whole argument, but in the end I calmly told him “You are so focused on the microcosm that you cannot see the macrocosmic implications of the Tower-of-Babel agenda that you are supporting, and you are attempting to excuse your fear of the duty and suffering required to fight for Christianity, Western Civilization, Aristotelian rationality, and Truth by capitulating to this idiotic idea that ‘cultures will always change’. It is a lie to cover up a fear, and it is rationalizing surrender.”

Any advice on teaching an old dog new tricks?

Just keep standing calmly, confidently, and respectfully by the truth. Don’t meet anger with anger, just keep calling out the falsehoods and deceptions as they are presented to you. As the reader has already observed, he’s over the target and his father is already in a state of cognitive dissonance. The trick is to avoid making the correct path out of that dissonance more unpleasant than a) it has to be and b) than the alternative of full delusion.

A Reagan conservative is halfway there. But it’s not unknown for them to retreat into liberalism, even SJWism, simply because the pain of the truth is too great for their soft Boomer sensibilities. So, it’s not wise to punch them in the mouth no matter how much nonsense they spew in their intellectual flailing about.

You will know they have been convicted of the truth, even if they haven’t accepted it yet, when they desperately try to change the subject to you, your motivations, and your shortcomings. Don’t take the bait, just calmly ask, “What does that have to do with 20th century immigration and its consequences?” and steer them back to the subject they are now trying to avoid addressing.

Losing the next war

Don’t be surprised if the first naval battle of the 21st century goes unexpectedly poorly for the US Navy:

A three-month internal review conducted by senior U.S. surface fleet leaders found some or significant concerns with the ship handling skills of nearly 85 percent of its junior officers, and that many struggled to react decisively to extricate their ship from danger when there was an immediate risk of collision, according to an internal message obtained by Defense News.

Led by the Surface Warfare Officer School, officer of the deck competency checks were conducted on a random selection of OOD-qualified first-tour division officers (the newest officers in the fleet) in underway bridge navigation simulators fleet-wide between January and March. Of the 164 officers who were evaluated, only 27 passed with “no concerns.” Another 108 completed with “some concerns,” and 29 had “significant concerns,” according to the message, which was released by the Navy’s top surface warfare officer Vice Adm. Richard Brown.

Brown, who leads Naval Surface Force Pacific, termed the results “sobering.”

The evaluations raise distressing questions about the level of ship handling training junior officers get both prior to their arrival at their first command and when they arrive. In a Tuesday interview with Defense News at the Pentagon, Brown said the checks would be used to inform new training in development for young officers and that changes were already underway that show the Navy is serious about self-assessment and improvement in the wake of the twin disasters that claimed the lives of 17 sailors last summer.

Among the shortfalls identified in the checks:

  • Officers struggled with operating radars and the associated tools at hand, an issue that emerged in the wake of the Fitzgerald accident.
  • Officers had a firm grasp of the international rules of the road for navigating ships at sea, but struggled to apply them practically during watch standing, especially in low-visibility situations.
  • Most officers were able to keep clear of close encounters with other ships in the simulator but those that found themselves in extremis “were often ill-equipped to take immediate action to avoid collisions”

The big advantage of the US Navy in the past – the fact that it was comprised of relatively intelligent American men – no longer exists. The Chinese Navy hasn’t caught up technologically yet, but it already possesses a considerably more intelligent officer corps that will likely prove to be more competent as well.

The US was defeated in the Syrian war-by-proxy by a much smaller, much less well-equipped Russian force, in much the same way the IDF was defeated by Hezbollah in 2006. It is very unlikely that this defeat passed unnoticed by military strategists around the world, or that it will be the last one suffered by the US military.

Quit Crossfit

It will be informative to see how many Christians value their faith more than their body and leave their CrossFit programs as a result of CrossFit’s anti-Christian bigotry.

A high-ranking CrossFit employee was fired after tweeting his support for a CrossFit gym’s cancellation of a Pride event, citing his belief that celebrating LGBT pride is a “sin.”

Russell Berger was the mega-successful fitness company’s chief knowledge officer, often de facto spokesperson, and a co-author of the Russells, a blog about scientific misconduct that he maintained with colleague Russell Greene.

But Berger got into hot water Wednesday afternoon when he tweeted about a CrossFit gym in Indianapolis, Indiana, where owners canceled a workout in honor of Pride Month. Many of the coaches and employees quit in protest, according to WTTV TV in Indianapolis. On Wednesday, the gym posted notices that it was shutting down.

“As someone who personally believes celebrating ‘pride’ is a sin, I’d like to personally encourage #CrossFitInfiltrate for standing by their convictions and refusing to host an @indypride workout,” Berger wrote. “The intolerance of the LGBTQ ideology toward any alternative views is mind-blowing.”

At first, Berger was placed on an unpaid leave of absence. But later on Wednesday, CrossFit announced on Twitter that he had been fired.

“The statements made today by Russell Berger do not reflect the views of CrossFit Inc.,” the company said. “For this reason, his employment with CrossFit has been terminated.” Shortly before Berger was placed on leave, CrossFit founder and CEO Greg Glassman told BuzzFeed News that he did not stand by Berger’s views, which he called “appalling.” CrossFit’s official Twitter account also quoted him as saying, “I am crazy proud of the gay community in CrossFit.”

“He needs to take a big dose of ‘shut the fuck up’ and hide out for awhile. It’s sad,” Glassman said in an interview. “We do so much good work with such pure hearts — to have some zealot in his off-time do something this stupid, we’re all upset. The whole company is upset. This changes his standing with us. What that looks like, I don’t know. It’s so unfortunate.”

In addition to not supporting anti-Christian organizations that celebrate sin, Christians also must stop offering toleration in the workplace that they are no longer shown. Remember, the new standards is whether the statements made by an employee reflect the views of the employer or not. That means it is perfectly acceptable to fire anyone who states that sin is okay, that Jesus Christ never existed, or that Donald Trump should be impeached.

I’ve only visited a CrossFit gym once, and to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. Spacebunny was more interested in the program than I was. But neither of us will ever be trying it now.

This is why it was a massive mistake to stop enforcing the blasphemy laws. Freedom of speech was a Trojan Horse. Its chief proponents never believed in it for a second, they only wanted to use it to undermine Christian culture. And if you don’t defend your culture, you will lose your culture.

The GitHub purchase

It’s not as if GitHub isn’t already moderately converged, but the Microsoft acquisition of it is unlikely to make things any less subject to converged policing:

AFTER A WEEKEND of rumors, Microsoft officially announced Monday that it will acquire the code repository site GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. The platform is an important resource for some 28 million developers and home to billions of lines of open source code. It’s in many ways a natural fit for Microsoft, which has in recent years warmed up to open source.

But the beloved developer platform may also introduce moderation headaches. Microsoft will soon need to formally decide what will happen to the many GitHub repositories that conflict with its own interests. The tech giant will face similar content moderations challenges that peers like Facebook and Google have, but with code instead of speech.

Created over a decade ago, GitHub is where developers at nearly every major software organization, from Google to NASA, collaborate. It hosts projects as diverse as Bitcoin’s code and all of the German government’s laws and regulations. The platform functions as a kind of social network for coders; their contributions to the site can serve as a stand-in for a traditional resume. Anyone can publish open source code to GitHub for free; the platform makes money by charging individuals and corporations to keep their code private.

GitHub’s 85 million repositories help to make it one of the world’s most popular websites. They include, however, projects that GitHub’s new owner might take issue with…. “GitHub isn’t a perfect defender of censorship, but they still host Tiananmen Square stuff. That’s likely to disappear under Microsoft,” says Rob Graham, CEO of Errata Security, who helped trace the 2015 DDOS attack to China. GitHub has also been censored in a number of other countries where Microsoft has business interests, including Russia and India.

This is one of the challenges facing Alt-Tech. The conventional startup objective of selling out to a tech company for billions conflicts with the objective of creating something that is not subject to corpocracy and convergence. On the plus side, it should mean that there will tend to be fewer Silicon Valley snake oil salesmen pushing their sites on the Right.

Mailvox: there is no error

Peter Gent refuses to back down:

You are totally and absolutely wrong. I am neither a liar or a deceiver, but I am someone who challenged you accurately on your biblical error, which is important as you stand publicly for Jesus Christ.

You are intelligent, educated, experienced, and knowledgeable in many things, but theologically and biblically you are sometimes problematic and your lack in this area sometimes shows. Everything I said was sound orthodox theology and relevant to the situation. I am sorry if it didn’t fit in with your argument or seemed to invalidate your position, but it appeared that you could not deal with the actual argument, which is too bad, since it is true both biblically and has been accepted within the Church since the beginning.

It is your blog and you do what you want. But know this. In this you are wrong. I am calling you on it. Scream at me all you want but that doesn’t change the facts. You are wrong.

To which I replied:

You are persistent in your stupidity. You simply refuse to accept that there is a difference between a FACT: Jesus broke the law, and a JUSTIFICATION: Jesus was right to do so.

All of your blathering is irrelevant, because all of your blathering is focused on the justification rather than the fact. The claim was that Jesus never broke any law. That claim is conclusively false. Whether he was justified in breaking those laws or not is totally irrelevant.

Nevertheless, he persisted:

Then there are few who are, since I am 142 and have been a Christian for 45 years, am theologically trained, and have been in the wars standing for the faith for a long time. I have never been a churchian as you put it. I am about as far the opposite from that as a professing, believing Christian can be.

Re: Theology has NOTHING to do with straightforward factual claims.

It does when informs the underlying meaning of those factual claims and there is a category error being expressed.

For example: factual claim – Jesus broke some of the prevailing Jewish religious laws of his time. True. But his argument for doing so was that the laws he broke were invalid due to the fact they where not God’s law but accretions (traditions) that had been added to God’s law that destroyed the original intent. In addition, as pertaining breaking the Sabbath, he was the Son of God and as such was Lord of the Sabbath. Those are theological argumenst. So was Peter’s argument before the Sanhedrin about who they should listen to. As a result, Jesus’ actions can only be used to justify breaking laws today if they are in opposition to or violate God’s law. Romans 12 makes this very clear. To use Jesus’ example as a pretext for the breaking of any human law without that qualification is a serious error.  A theological error.

This is amusing. He just admitted what I have been pointing out all along: “Jesus broke some of the prevailing Jewish religious laws of his time.”

There is no theological error. There has never been any “biblical error”. Gent is arguing, irrelevantly, against a strawman of his own concoction. I am not saying that we are justified in breaking any laws we feel like breaking because Jesus Christ was a lawbreaker. I have never said that. I merely pointed out that the gentleman who claimed that “Jesus broke no law in his day” was absolutely, observably, and factually wrong.

I did not offer any argument on the basis of that observation.

Mailvox: the day she figured it out

Kudos and all, but the frightening thing about this email is the fact that this women genuinely and legitimately believed, for decades, that she was physically capable of going toe-to-toe with men. Thanks, Hollywood!

The day I figured it out

Not a natural athlete, but I did devote 7 years to martial arts back in my 30s.  3 to 4 times a week, excellent conditioning, but to be frank, I was horrible at sparring.  Think Barney Fife, vibrating and completely ineffective.  I hung in there, spurred on by too many martial arts movies and the media myth that a 120 lb. trained woman could take on a man in a fight.  And it was light touch sparring because of Insurance Risk.

So, there was one last special class to make that dark-colored belt; Punching/Kicking Class.  An all-day seminar where you were paired off with someone your size, they would hold a 6-inch-thick pad and you full contact punched and kicked them …then you would hold the pad and they would punch and kick.  Heady stuff, my Gi was snapping, there was a satisfying “thwack” sound, I was quite proud and kinda hoping for some bloody knuckles and a need to “tape up”.  Then it came time for me to hold the bag.  Now mind you, I was paired off with a small man, a short skinny ex-navy grunt, just my size.  He pulled off one full force punch and I was on my butt and there were tears on my face.  I got back up, took a deeper stance, and once again was back on the floor.  I kept trying but it was obvious to me I wasn’t helping this guy practice his punching and kicking at all.  So, I asked the instructor if I could just do the punching kicking practice but not hold the bag.  He took me for a walk outside the studio.  I have since learned that is a Bad Sign.  He explained to me the point of the class was being able to take the punching and kicking, the point was to be able to hold the bag, to be able to take the punch.  And I suddenly understood, it was basic physics really.  In my head, it was a scene out of a Beautiful Mind, with Vectors, Force Lines, and Angles appearing in red.  But it was just me with my mouth open going, “Huh”

Men are stronger than women.  Go figure.  It is basic physics; the bones are denser and the muscles are heavier.  And I realized this whole time, I had been a minnow swimming with sharks.  That most men could take out most women with a punch or two.  Heck, most men can take out another man with a sucker punch, but I am talking a face front fight; guy wins most every time.  And especially bigger men.  The fact I was so shocked told me a bunch about how naive I was and how much the media lied about this.  I suddenly had this whole new respect for most men; most of them were walking around with the ability to take down smaller folks; and they don’t.  They just plain don’t.  They hold doors open and walk on the dangerous side of the sidewalk and go out to check night time noises.  Basically IMHO most of guys in America are heroes.

I firmly believe that everyone, male and female, would benefit greatly from being physically beaten down at least once in their lives before their 18th birthday. It is a salutary experience.

Back in my fighting days, a girl I was dating joined our dojo for a while. After doing a drill that involved getting kicked repeatedly in the stomach, she was a bit wide-eyed and excited, and exclaimed, “I’ve never been hit in the stomach before!”

“Have you ever been hit in the face?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. So, I hit her in the chin with a backfist hard enough to snap her head back, but not hard enough to knock her down.

“What did you do that for!” she demanded about 15 seconds later, once she stopped staggering around and got over the usual shock.

“Did you feel that disorientation, the way you couldn’t quite believe that someone actually hit you in the face?”

“Well, yeah!” A mere two syllables, but spoken with deep passion and accompanied by an intense and narrow-eyed glare.

“See, that’s normal. Everyone feels like that the first time they take a good shot to the head. Now you know what it feels like. Next time you get hit, you’ll be ready for it, and you can fight your way through it.”

She wasn’t quite as appreciative of the lesson as I expected. It was strange, but the way she used to tell the story made me sound kind of like a psycho.

St. George shrugged

I was amused to hear about these two English gentlemen, who simply walked away and left a strong independent woman to fend for herself on the London Underground.

Tamara Cincik, founder and CEO of Fashion Roundtable, attacked on busy Tube. Mother-of-one kicked and threatened by an ‘unwell’ 6ft man as passengers fled. She has slammed two ‘white middle class men’ who left her to defend herself.

The fashion CEO is keen to stress she does not blame this man, who she believes needs medical help but said the incident was ‘terrifying’. Instead she is upset that two men she describes as ‘white and middle class’ chose not to help and moved to another carriage. 

Ms Cincik said: ‘Children were crying and women were crying, it was awful. I wasn’t crying I was in shock. I remain more angry with those white middle class men who left me to it. As fathers, husbands and sons they should be ashamed of themselves.’

Why should they be ashamed? They did nothing of which to be ashamed. She isn’t their daughter, wife, or mother. They had no obligation to risk being injured or having the polish on their shoes scuffed for her. She’s lucky that they didn’t simply sit there and laugh at her, as the younger generation of white men are increasingly inclined to do. Women have spent the last fifty years telling white men that everything is their fault and that they are both unneeded and unwanted. Women broke the socio-sexual contract, which is why many white men quite reasonably feel absolutely no duty to look out for women, children, or anyone else for whom they are not directly responsible.

Of course, African and Asian men never have. Isn’t it wonderful that white women have successfully convinced white men to adopt non-European cultural values! Diversity truly is a wonder.

Given her subsequent reaction, those two men were absolutely right to leave this woman to take her beating. She’s a typical left-wing idiot, blaming the men who had no obligation to her but letting the man who actually attacked her off the hook. Had they done anything, she probably would have screamed at them for hurting the poor, harmless crazy man.

Melinda Gates is another white woman for whom no self-respecting white man will ever lift a finger.

I am specifically looking at funds who over-index on women-led and minority-led businesses. I’m asking a lot of business questions about how they will go about their funding, how they will over-index on women’s businesses, and how they will hold themselves accountable for a great return.

Some of these big firms often believe in the white guy in a hoodie disrupting a whole industry. So we’re going to disrupt it by making sure we’re indexing for women and minorities because they’ve got great ideas.

Many of them think if they have one female at the table, they’ve done their job. Another big one is when they say that they have trouble finding women. Those are just excuses. They don’t know what investing in these areas looks like until they get several women who are partners in their firm.

Meanwhile, her husband’s former company is now an Indian concern, thanks in part to “over-indexing”, which is the approved new pseudonym for “affirmative action”.