What ARE the odds?

Such a coincidence….

The third man killed in the deadly Amtrak derailment south of Seattle has been identified as an Auburn child pornography collector and an outspoken proponent of child sexual abuse, whose crimes were first detailed in a 2013 SeattlePI story.

The days since the deadly Amtrak derailment between Tacoma and Olympia saw two of the three fatally injured victims, Jim Hamre and Zack Willhoite, celebrated for their love of trains. Hamre, 61, and Willhoite, 35, were close friends and volunteers on the board of All Aboard Washington, a rail advocacy organization.

Benjamin Gran’s story is more complicated.

Gran, a leading member of an online forum dedicated to promoting the sexual abuse of children, served a federal prison term after he was caught with a vast collection of child pornography videos.

The Pierce County coroner’s office said Wednesday that Gran, 40, died of multiple traumatic injuries sustained in Monday’s crash. His death came six years after child pornography investigator came knocking on his apartment door.

The Lost Jedi

5-day revenues
TFA: $325,438,146
TLJ: $261,820,146
-19.6  percent

Day 5 revenue per screen
TFA: $9,038/screen
TLJ: $4,786/screen
-47.1 percent

Unexpectedly, both the average critic’s rating (92{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70}) and the average audience rating (54{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70}) on Rotten Tomatoes are falling as time goes on. At this rate of decline, the audience rating will be below 50{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70} inside a week. To put into perspective what a bomb this movie is, it took The Force Awakens 18 days for its revenue/screen average to fall below the $4,786 figure hit by The Last Jedi on Day 5.

Other than the massive opening weekend, TLJ is performing much more like a Marvel movie than a Star Wars film, which is the first sign that its domestic box office might actually end up reaching less than HALF of TFA’s $936,662,225. In fact, if we simply add how TFA did after Day 18 to TLJ’s five-day total, that suggests it will bring in less than $450 milllion domestically, well short of the $750 million it was expected to make. Given the terrible reviews, it may not even hit $400 million.

TL;DR: SJW convergence is expensive.

UPDATE: the media is belatedly beginning to notice that TLJ is a failure by Star Wars standards, even though they can’t understand the reason for it.

Monday’s box office numbers turned up a new glitch in the numbers for “The Last Jedi.” Even the Disney experts must have been surprised. “Jedi” took home $21.5 million on Monday, an important night for adult filmgoers.

But two years ago, “The Force Awakens” reaped just over $40 million on its first Monday. It’s almost twice as much.

There’s a feeling that “Jedi” is soft at the box office. I don’t know why. It’s just as good if not better. And it has major plot developments for “Star Wars” fans.

So this afternoon’s report on Tuesday numbers will be scrutinized closely. “Force Awakens” did $37.3 million on its first Tuesday. Will “Jedi” compare favorably? Stay tuned…

No, no, it did not. Instead of comparing favorably on its first Tuesday (Day 5), TLJ compared very disfavorably, coming in 42 percent south of its predecessor at $20.3 million.

UPDATE: TLJ is rapidly approaching freefall territory.

Day 6: $16,900,000 (-65.6{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70} from Day 6 TFA)
$3,993 per screen (-67{8b465fcc1261600c3844715b0002d5b2f22fe6ddf2fd7bce983edf903d17ed70} from Day 6 TFA)

A strong step forward

This 14-point corporate tax cut really is a big deal and a massive win for the God-Emperor:

Telecom giant AT&T was quick to respond to news of U.S. tax reform, announcing it would give some employees bonuses once the legislation is signed into law.

AT&T said in a press release Wednesday that it would give more than 200,000 of its U.S. workers who are union members a special bonus of $1,000. The company also increased its capital expenditures budget by $1 billion in the U.S.

“Congress, working closely with the President, took a monumental step to bring taxes paid by U.S. businesses in line with the rest of the industrialized world,” CEO Randall Stephenson said in a statement. “This tax reform will drive economic growth and create good-paying jobs. In fact, we will increase our U.S. investment and pay a special bonus to our U.S. employees.”

AT&T had previously said that it would invest $1 billion in the U.S. if “competitive” tax reform legislation was passed, and has said that the tax reform framework could increase demand for AT&T’s services.

The House of Representatives on Wednesday sent tax reform legislation to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it soon. Trump lauded the bill, calling it “an extraordinary victory for American families, workers, and businesses.”

The new tax law will drop the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from the current 35 percent and includes other measures that Republicans say will spur businesses to invest domestically. AT&T’s effective tax rate was 32.7 percent in 2016, according to its annual report.

High corporate taxes are brutal because they cost so many people beyond the intended targets; it’s like eating the seed corn. It would be nice to see the God-Emperor follow this up by offering a carrot-and-stick solution to corporations holding Eurodollars overseas, then getting rid of the ludicrous and unconstitutional FATCA.

Civil war in the USA

More and more people are beginning to find this not merely possible, but plausible:

The thought of Civil War has been in the minds of many people lately, on both sides of the political and cultural divide. This is not a thing to be wished for, though no one should kid themselves into believing it’s impossible either. Let us take a sober look at what such a conflict might entail.

To begin with, it would not look like the first American Civil War, which was essentially a war between two regions of the country with different economic interests. The divide created two separate countries, both initially contiguous, intact, and relatively homogeneous. The lines of demarcation now are only somewhat regional, and tend to correspond to differences between urban and rural populations, as well as differences of race and class. A second American Civil War would be much more similar to the Spanish Civil War, with the leftists dominating the cities and conservatives controlling the countryside. Conflicts of this nature, with enemies mixed geographically, are a formula for spontaneous mass bloodletting. India-Pakistan during the 1947 partition comes to mind as another modern example. Given an absence of legitimate government and the friction of proximity, ordinary people can be moved to settle grievances by killing one another without the need for governments to egg them on.

Some dimensions of a future civil war would be, I think, largely unprecedented. When lesser countries have imploded in violence in recent times, they have done so with most of the world around them still intact. There were other nations to offer aid, assistance and intervention, welcome or unwelcome. There were places for refugees to go. The collapse of the world’s remaining superpower would take much of the world down with it. A global economic crisis would be inevitable. The withdrawal of American forces from bases across the world to fight at home would also create a power vacuum that others, even under economic strain, would be tempted to exploit. Whichever side gained control of our nuclear arsenal, our status as a nuclear power would probably persuade other nations not to interfere in our conflict militarily, but the collapse of trade alone would produce crippling effects that would be hard to overestimate. Many components for products our manufacturing sector makes are globally sourced.

Add to this the breakdown of our transportation system, dependent on oil and transecting one new front line after another. The internet would fail. It is a frail enough now. Financial systems would fail. What happens if the banks find half their assets suddenly in hostile territory? All Federal government functions, including Social Security, would fail, many of them losing their very legitimacy to one side or the other. Food production, heavily dependent on diesel fuel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, not to mention a steady supply of genetically engineered seeds, would slump alarmingly. In short, most things we depend on are now held together by a network of delicate and complex connections.

Without those connections, would you have a job? If so, in what medium of exchange could your employers manage to pay you? What would there be for you to buy? Does your town, your county, or even your state have the ability to marshal its resources into a viable economy? How many people in those entities could deal with anything worse than a weather disaster, in which they count on the fact that help is coming soon?

As I have said many times, great movements of peoples is nearly always accompanied by war, sooner or later. It would defy both logic and history to assume or insist that the USA will be an exception.

Mailvox: t-shirt review

In light of all the previous discussion of one of the new Crypto.Fashion t-shirts, I thought an actual review of the shirt in question was pertinent:

The Cryptofashion t-shirt “That red dot on your chest means Daddy is watching” arrived and I brought it to my friend’s house. It was a gift for her daughter. Dad is a God-fearing, classic alpha male, hunter, gun owner, with a long-term happy marriage and beautiful children. This was for his eldest daughter as a graduation gift along with a copy of SJWAL.

His wife took one look at the shirt and laughed with pleasure “That is PERFECT!”

Daughter loves it. The fabric is soft and the cut is feminine.

The normal, happily-married “my husband is awesome” response to this t-shirt is “too funny” and “I love it” from females. God knows what wheels go a-spinning in high strung males-ville, not being one myself.

Thanks for a great product.

The lesson, as always, is this: never, ever, listen to advice about women from Gamma males, no matter how “red-pilled” they claim to be. And pay no mind to the opinions of the childless about how you raise your children. They have literally no idea what they’re talking about, nor does it even occur to them that this is more of a warning to pedos and other sexual predators than potential boyfriends.

Storm is the New Pizza

Q is hereby confirmed to be legitimate; the mainstream media is going into full attack mode:

A new conspiracy theory called “The Storm” has taken the grimiest parts of the internet by, well, storm. Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.

As most terrible things do, this story begins with a post on /pol/, a sub-board of the more-or-less-anonymous, anything-goes website 4chan. Over the last few years, /pol/ — which technically stands for “politically incorrect” — has slowly but surely become a top contender for the ever-coveted title of the most upsetting community online. It’s the sort of place where neo-Nazis and people who believe women shouldn’t have basic human rights used to meet before we started verifying them on Twitter and electing them to public office. And as of late, it’s expanded its ranks to include fringe members of all shapes and sizes.

On October 28, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages in a /pol/ thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” (assumedly in reference to that creepy Trump quote from early October). Q claimed to be a high-level government insider with Q clearance (hence the name) tasked with posting intel drops — which he, for some reason, called “crumbs” — straight to 4chan in order to covertly inform the public about POTUS’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state. It was, in short, absolutely insane.

Also, Jimmy Saville was selflessly devoted to children, Dennis Hastert just loved wrestling with high school boys, John Podesta merely has the same highly refined tastes in office decor that his brother does for the home, and Harvey Weinstein happens to be highly attractive to young actresses due to his influence in Hollywood.

As for those absurd rumors about Kevin Spacey and Marion Zimmer Bradley, they are absolutely insane.

I’m always mystified by the claims that Pizzagate has been “debunked” because an actor showed up at the restaurant in DC and fired a single shot at the floor. It’s a bizarre pseudo-argument that doesn’t even rise to the level of logical fallacy; they might as legitimately claim that Pizzagate has been debunked because Adrian Peterson had a 100-yard rushing game for the Arizona Cardinals.

One thing I learned from editing The Last Closet is that where there is such sulfuric smoke, there is almost certainly considerably more fire than anyone ever imagines.

Spammees double down

Some of you have been complaining that Blogger has tightened its spam filters and you’ve been getting caught up in it. First of all, this is true and it is why we have been seeing less spam and fewer trolls of late. Second, I am completely unsympathetic because this is exactly what I told you would happen if you touched the poop. You were warned, you couldn’t control yourself, you did it, and now you’re suffering the consequences.

Third, if you’re dumb enough to try to defeat the spam filters by – and I cannot believe I actually have to point this out to anyone – reposting exactly the same comment that was previously spammed, all you’re doing is confirming to the spam filters that you are a spammer. You’re actually making the situation worse for yourself, because while the moderators can remove a single spammed comment from the filters, reposted comments get deleted, which strengthens the filters’ confidence that your comments are, indeed, spam that merits removal.

In the event that your comment fails to appear or mysteriously vanishes, the correct thing to do is nothing. Do not alert me or the moderators. Do not attempt to immediately comment again and absolutely do not repost your cut-and-pasted comment. If a single comment from a known commenter is seen in the spam, it will eventually be seen and restored by the moderators and the spam filters will gradually learn over time that your comments are not spam. In the meantime, rest assured that the other readers will do their best to survive despite being temporarily bereft of your valuable insights.

SJWs are never satisfied

Even if you are not an inveterate SJW-hater, even if you are the cuckiest of moderates, it is absolutely vital to never give an inch to SJWs. The reason is that they will never be satisfied, and every inch they gain only convinces them that they can get more if they press harder.

An excerpt from SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN explains this phenomenon:

The Anonymous Conservative observes the SJW psychological cycle appears to operate in the following manner:

  • Tell yourself you are innately superior due to intrinsic qualities related to your identity.
  • Feel bad about being superior.
  • Feel super-superior for not only being superior, but for also have the moral sense to feel bad about your own superiority.

He asks what amygdala-mediated process could be driving this continual process and concludes that the SJW brain is using the process to attenuate some tendency of his mind to gravitate towards negative thoughts about himself. This gravitation towards negativity can be the result of physical or mental inferiority, childhood trauma, abuse, failure, depression, or any number of reasons, but regardless of the specific reason, SJWs find these negative thoughts to be cognitively painful. When forced to face this pain, their brain runs through the usual routine in order to reduce the angst they feel and replace it with a newly charged feeling of superiority. This is why both the Narrative and the social justice identity are so vitally important to them; it is literally their shield against the emotional pain that constantly threatens to overwhelm them.

SJWs are creatures of pain. They are in a near-constant state of mild psychological distress, which is why so many of them are in therapy or on various psychotropic medications. This is why they are so sensitive, so fragile, and so prone to angry, incoherent rants for reasons that often seem inexplicable to others. They might well be pitied, were it not for the behavior that their suffering inspires in them.

Now, it may seem bizarre that individuals whose primary objective is to mitigate their emotional pain would make a habit of seeking out conflict, much less generating conflict where none previously existed. But that is because you are a normal, psychologically healthy individual whose normal state is not one of internal distress. It is only through conflict that the SJW can generate the feelings of moral superiority he requires in order to drown out his steady state of emotional pain. This is why the Narrative can never stop mutating and why no solution will ever suffice regardless of how perfectly it complies with SJW demands.

It also explains why SJWs are so relentlessly critical of others. In a paper entitled “Holding People Responsible for Ethical Violations: The Surprising Benefits of Accusing Others”, funded by the Wharton Behavioral Lab, researchers found that people who accuse others of unethical behavior can derive significant benefits from doing so. Compared to normal people who do not make a habit of accusing others of crimethink and other moral failures, accusers are perceived by others to have higher ethical standards. In one study, it was found that the act of making accusations increased trust in the accuser and lowered trust in the target. This is precisely the purpose of the disqualify and discredit routine that SJWs so often utilize. In a second study, it was found that making accusations tends to elevate trust in the accuser by boosting other people’s perceptions of the accuser’s ethical standards. And in a third study, it was found that accusations boosted trust in the accuser, decreased trust in the target, and even more significantly, promoted dissension within the group.

In other words, SJWs transfer their own emotional pain into making themselves feel more positive about themselves while simultaneously elevating their social status at the expense of others and at the cost of group harmony. This is why group after group, organization after organization, find that acceding to the demands of the SJWs in their midst inevitably generates more conflict, not less.

Why can how be so?

The media finds it hard to grasp the obvious fact that people simply don’t believe them anymore:

The critics loved “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” — The Times’s Manohla Dargis raved about it, and she wasn’t alone. Rotten Tomatoes, aggregating critics’ reviews, rated the latest chapter in the saga 93 percent fresh. But fans? Not so much. At least if you go by Rotten Tomatoes, which says moviegoers posting on its site rated the film 56 percent fresh.

But wait! CinemaScore, which conducts exit polls at theaters (that is, it talks to actual, live human beings), says moviegoers gave “The Last Jedi” a solid A. And the box office was stratospheric: $450 million worldwide in one weekend, making it the second biggest opening ever.

What’s going on? There are several theories:

1) It’s straight-up trolling. Deadline.com pointed out that nothing prevents the same person from repeatedly logging onto Rotten Tomatoes and dragging down the audience score. (And one Facebook user claims to have done just that.)

2) The adventures of Rey and company (including the villainous Snoke) were genuinely disappointing. As the Hollywood Reporter noted, fans hoped that the writer-director Rian Johnson’s follow-up to “The Force Awakens” would explain, among other mysteries, who Rey’s parents are, and the answer (nobody special) wasn’t very satisfying.

3) It’s a function of how the internet has affected fandom. Vanity Fair argues that the web fosters the kind of scrutiny that few films can withstand.

On Facebook, we asked what you thought of the movie and what explains the divide between fans and critics. More than 800 responses suggested that perhaps the Rotten Tomatoes fan rating wasn’t so far off. A lot of you really did not like “The Last Jedi.”

The truth is that post-GamerGate, only idiots and SJWs pay any attention to what the critics, who are at best converged and at worst corrupted and in the direct pay of the content-producing corporations, say anymore. And in this particular case, the movie not only sucked, but betrayed multiple generations of fans.

UPDATE: After 4 days, TLJ is already underperforming TFA by $46.5 million and 19.2 percent. By comparison, Attack of the Clones outperformed The Phantom Menace by $25 million and 26.4 percent. That means that despite the massive numbers, in terms of expectations it is a box office bomb. If the fall-off picks up pace, and based on the media’s defensiveness I suspect it will, TLJ will take in less than two-thirds of what TFA did.