“A horrifying mess”

The verdict is in: Grrlbusters is even worse than anticipated:

For months, controversy has swirled around the new “Ghostbusters” movie. The trailer was reportedly the most hated in YouTube history, for what that’s worth (or not worth), which led to some pundits saying some of that hate was rooted in sexism.

Others said the fact the Leslie Jones character wasn’t a scientist and seemed to have a role that called for her to play into stereotypes smacked of racism.

Of course, people were voicing these opinions without having seen the entire movie. Well, I have seen it — and while I believe the concerns about racial stereotypes were overblown, “Ghostbusters” is one of the worst movies of the year for multiple other reasons, including:

Bad acting.

Uninspired directing, editing, cinematography and music.

Cheesy special effects.

A forgettable villain.

A terrible script.

SJWs always destroy everything they converge.

Buckle up, Star Citizens

Derek Smart reports that a former backer has defeated the new Star Citizen Terms of Service that tries to deny backers the ability to get refunds from Cloud Imperium Games.

A backer who, like so many that contact me, use my online resources for navigating this farce etc, has been fighting diligently for over a month to get a refund of $3K from CIG/RSI after they changed the ToS and stripped him of rights he already had, has PREVAILED.

It’s only going to get worse from here on out, seeing as I have now been made aware that the LA county consumer protection office is also looking into similar complaints, and complainants (regardless of where you live here in the US or overseas) have been advised to file a complaint on their website.

Notice how Ortwin ( that would be this guy), Chris Roberts’ long-time business partner (and entertainment attorney), basically lied (I have now made them aware of this in detail) to the Attorney General’s office when he stated the following – in writing (!):

i) cited the ToS which the backer never agreed to, hence the whole point of the refund battle

ii) states that the backer has an agreement with RSI; when in fact the backer (like all backers before the ToS change) actually has an agreement with CIG. Note that this is all part of them shifting the liability from the more established CIG entity to one of the several shell corps associated with this train-wreck.

It looks very much as if the pyramid is starting to crumble. Once more, we see that despite the doubters, time has proven Derek Smart to be correct. Don’t be surprised if he turns out to be right about the rest of it too.

Some of the True Believers are already losing their faith:

This game has shown me one major thing: Never back something that strays from its kickstarted objective. Star Citizen was supposed to be some freaking Wing Commander that was amazing and up to date, then it basically fucked its backers by COMPLETELY straying off course and trying to be some end all be all game. CIG basically lied to its original backers and told them “thanks for the money, NOW GO FUCK YOURSELF”. When I heard about this game all I knew was…joy, joy that came from the dream of a supreme space game.

After buying a package, I was officially inducted into the Cult of Star Citizen. Anyone who dared question my holy game would be called a troll, idiot, or not know one thing about game development. After a while I started having doubts in my head after so many delays, but I kept putting them deeper and deeper in my head only to have them resurface with a vengeance.

After I started thinking about the game and what these so called “trolls” were saying, I realized something: This game is already vaporware and a scam. Think about it; its missed constant deadlines, keeps asking for more money for basically concept art, and is completely different than was originally promised…This..is..FRAUD.

The thing is, all of the veterans in the industry realized, around a year ago, that the game wasn’t going to come out. Scope creep, particularly in an already sizable project, is a killer, and Star Citizen suffered from more scope creep than any game I can recall. This is something we cover in DevGame; the combination of a visionary designer and a weak producer is always a dangerous one because the primary purpose of the producer is to rein in the designer and focus on completing the designer’s original vision.

And, of course, the involvement of the principal’s wife is always a red flag in any business. Meanwhile, COD: Infinite Warfare looks absolutely amazing. It’s particularly fun for me to notice the gravity effects, since RMR was the first shooter to utilize turning gravity on and off as a weapon.

The crucial question

Fred Reed asks one of the most important questions of tomorrow’s post-economics society:

The first crucial question of coming decades: Who is going to buy the stuff pouring from robotic factories?

The current notion is that when a yoyo factory automates and lays off most of its workers, they will find other well-paid jobs and continue to buy yoyos. But as well-paid jobs everywhere go automated, where will the money come from to buy yoyos? Today participation in the work force is at all- time lows and we have a large and growing number of young who, unable to find good jobs, live with their parents. They are not buying houses or renting apartments. (They may, given the intellectual level of today’s young, be buying yoyos.)

Enthusiasts of the free market say that I do not understand economics, that there will always be work for people who want to work. But there isn’t. There won’t be. There is less all the time. Again, look at the falling participation in the work force, the growing numbers in part-time badly paid jobs. Short of governmentally imposed minimums, wages are determined by the market, meaning that if a robot works for a dollar an hour, a human will have to work for ninety-five cents an hour to compete , or find a job a robot can’t do–and these get scarcer.

From a businessman’s point of view, robots are superb employees. They don’t strike, demand raises, call in sick, get disgruntled and do a sloppy job, or require benefits. Building factories that are robotic from the gitgo means not having to lay workers off, which is politically easier than firing existing workers. Using robots obviates the Chinese advantage in wages, especially if America can make better robots–good for companies, but not for workers in either country. That is, production may return to the US, but jobs will not. In countries with declining populations, having robots do the work may reduce the attractiveness of importing uncivilizable bomb-chucking morons from the bush world.

A second crucial question: What will we do with people who have nothing to do? This has been a hidden problem for a long time, solved to date by child-labor laws, compulsory attendance in high school, the growth of universities as holding tanks, welfare populations, and vast bureaucracies of people who pretend to be employed. Few of these do anything productive, but are supported and kept off the job market by the rest of us. But there are limits to the capacity of Starbuck’s to soak up college graduates. (The economic fate of America may depend on our consumption of overpriced coffee.)

As time goes on and fewer and fewer people can find work, and particularly the less intelligent, something will have to give. We won’t see it coming. We never see anything coming. Businessmen will observe productivity going up and labor costs going down. What could be wrong with that? Businessmen do not concern themselves with social questions. Methinks, however, that social questions are about to concern themselves with businessmen.

As standards of living decrease, unrest will come.

My father and I first began discussing this back in 1985. I remember it well, as we were driving to his office together after I’d helped him take one of the family cars into the car dealership for servicing.

“I employ over 100 people,” he said. “And how many of them actually do anything? How many of them sit in an office looking at paper? That’s what they do. That’s what I do. But except for a few people like the guy at the dealership who will fix the car, no one is really doing anything.”

And that was at a company that had been named to the Inc 500 for the second straight year.

The Information Society was supposed to replace the Industrial Society, and we all know how well that has worked. Very, very well for some, not so well for most. People didn’t find alternative employment so much as they were provided make-work jobs and kept in school for four to eight more years.

Now the Robotic Society is replacing the Information Society and the ability to disguise both the lack of employment and the lack of need of employment is rapidly vanishing. The fundamental falsity of increasingly outdated economics models are also becoming apparent; no conventional model can survive the near-complete replacement of labor with capital.

Wounded Gamma loses again

One significant characteristic of the Gamma male is that he cannot deal with being publicly shown to be wrong. Such an event punctures the delusion bubble in which he, the Secret King, always triumphs, so it creates a wound that never heals, and festers much longer than any higher-rank man can imagine. Even if he manages to control himself and not let it show immediately, it eats away at him and preys on his mind.

The way the Gamma usually deals with a festering wound is to attempt to negate it by subsequently demonstrating his superiority to the party who dealt it to him. This means that he will lie in wait, for years if need be, for what he sees as an opportunity to prove the offending party wrong. This, he believes, will disqualify and discredit the party, which somehow means that the Gamma was not wrong the first time, even though he was. But no matter, the Secret King triumphs in the end!

This behavior is so predictable that I not infrequently find myself able to correctly anticipate when a previously wounded Gamma is going to think he sees an opening and launch what I am coming to think of as a restorative rebuttal. However, I did not see this one coming; I did not think that Camestros Felapton was dumb enough to launch what is either his third or his fourth attempt to repair his delusion bubble since being so publicly humiliated about his lack of knowledge concerning rhetoric in Of Enthymemes and False Erudition. Apparently the sting of his repeated defeats at my hands has become more than he can bear, because he is really grasping at straws now.

The other day Vox was disparaging about the value of scientific evidence. I’m not entirely sure if he is clear himself about what he means but when it comes to IQ he is happy to post anything that he feels supports his case. This time, it is a pair of studies that point to a 4 point decline in IQ in France in a 9-10 year period. Vox quotes a second study that was an analysis of the first. This second study was an attempt to discern the cause of the decline by looking at the magnitude of the changes at a subtest level. This second paper concluded that the decline ‘likely has a primarily biological cause’. Vox declares it was due to immigration.

Did I now? What did I actually write? Let’s review:

My estimate of a post-1965 four-point IQ loss in the USA was a minimum estimate based solely on replacement migration, but considering that dysgenic fertility is also a factor in the USA, the actual decline is almost certainly worse.


If replacement migration is also the lesser factor in the US case, then the post-1965 IQ decline in the USA could be as much as 10 points. However, US immigration has been higher and US native birth rates have remained higher than in France, so something on the order of 7-8 points is more likely. This is not insignificant; it is the difference between the current USA and Sierra Leone.


So, Camestros is obviously wrong. I did not say the decline was due solely to immigration, I merely repeated what the study said, which is that the reported IQ decline in France was primarily due to dysgenic fertility and secondarily due to immigration.

Moreover, this shows that Camestros was not merely wrong, he was lying, because I even pointed out that while dysgenic fertility appears to have been the primary factor responsible in France, in the US it is more likely that immigration is nearly as important a factor for two reasons: US immigration rates are higher and US native birth rates are higher. There is a third reason as well; higher abortion rates among the lowest-IQ population tend to partially counterbalance the lower fertility rate of the highest-IQ population.

We had damn well better hope I am right, because we know the immigration-related decline of IQ in the USA is at least 4 points based on population averages. If the dysgenic fertility decline in the USA is, like France, even worse than the immigration-related decline, then we will have already seen a catastrophic decline in average US IQ of 9 points or more! In his desperation to declare me wrong about immigration and IQ, (and therefore retroactively wrong about Aristotle and rhetoric) Camestros fails to even notice the horrific implications of his argument. Who cares about that, what is important is to patch up that punctured delusion bubble stat!

Finally, after again trying to cast doubt on IQ as a reasonable metric for intelligence as well as upon the possibility of comparing average national intelligence levels, Camestros ends by saying, “neither paper ends up agreeing with Vox’s conclusion.”

Considering that neither paper addresses the USA at all, it would be absolutely remarkable if either of them had.

Once more, Camestros provides us with sufficient evidence to safely conclude that if IQ is a reasonable measure of innate intelligence, his is considerably lower than mine. It’s funny that despite being such a questionable metric, a similar percentile just seems to keep showing up no matter how it’s measured.

Of course, my actual vocabulary is probably more than twice that, but then, we’re not counting Italian, German, French, or Japanese vocabularies.

UPDATE: Gammas never learn. And they never stop lying.

Camestros Felapton ‏@CamestrosF
@voxday declares me beneath his consideration, again

Supreme Dark Lord @voxday
You’re lying, again. I take on all comers. Even hapless, midwitted gamma males like you. 

Scientific skepticism

And scientists wonder why we’re every bit as skeptical as everything they report as “the current scientific consensus”. This is a fairly typical “scientific” rebuttal to a science news report that happens to be outside of the current mainstream of accepted thought:

Let’s start with a quick talk about aliens. In an infinite universe, it seems foolhardy— even arrogant— to completely dismiss the idea of extraterrestrial life. There are so many galaxies, so many planets, so many suns; across the neverending expanse of space, one suspects that there must be another group of intelligent beings somewhere.

But suspect is the key word there. We have no credible evidence for the existence of alien civilizations. As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And claiming that the Paracas skulls are possibly alien is certainly extraordinary. So let’s look at the evidence— does it measure up?

Well, the short answer is no. First, consider the source: the preliminary results of genetic testing were announced by Brien Foerster, who is the assistant director of the Paracas History Museum.

That’s a pretty impressive title, and I’ll admit that it threw me. That title implies formal archaeological, curatorial, or history credentials, maybe a body of peer-reviewed research projects. That title implies that he has serious academic credibility, and that we should listen to his announcements about his areas of expertise.

None of this is true. Some pretty basic Google research turns up some facts about Foerster that cast his announcement in an entirely different light.

First, his academic credentials: by cobbling information together from the webpage of his company Hidden Inca Tours and his official Facebook page, it appears that he has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada. Foerster doesn’t offer any further information about his educational background, including his exact field of undergraduate study. I was unable to find any evidence of an advanced degree.

Foerster’s company, Hidden Inca Tours, is a travel agency that specializes in taking travelers on paranormal tours around the world, but focuses on Peru and the surrounding region. Foerster has also written a number of books on archaeology, including one called “The Enigma of Cranial Deformation: Elongated Skulls of the Ancients,” which he wrote with David Hatcher Childress. Vanderbilt University archaeologist Charles E. Orser once called Childress “one of the most flagrant violators of basic archaeological reasoning.”

So what about his role as assistant director at the Paracas History Museum? How did a paranormal tour operator get that job?

Well, first, the Paracas History Museum is a private museum. It’s owned by one Juan Navarro, who is also its director. Navarro is also listed on the Hidden Inca Tours webpage as a member of “Our Team of Experts.” I was unable to find any mention of academic credentials earned by Navarro, either.

My preoccupation with academic credentials is not meant to downplay the immense wisdom and experience possessed by many people who do not have undergraduate or post-grad degrees. Being smart does not require a college degree. Heck, it doesn’t require any kind of education at all; it’s an innate quality.

However, scientific expertise is not an innate quality. It is something that is gained through years of study and research, both of which are usually completed in an institution that awards successful students degrees upon graduation.

To be fair, I don’t have any special academic credentials that make me an expert in archaeology or genetics. But I’m not arguing that the data is flawed— we haven’t seen the full data, and I’m not qualified to speak on that— but I am arguing that a number of features of the announcement should warn us not to take Foerster’s announcement at face value.

That brings us to the strange nature of the announcement. Foerster announced the results personally, via internet, rather than through a scientifically reputable source.

There are a number of problems with the way he announced the preliminary results. Speaking to Discovery.com, science promoter and skeptic Sharon Hill said “This is an unconventional way of making ‘groundbreaking’ claims.”

Hill added “It’s not supported by a university, but by private funding. The initial findings were released in this unprofessional way (via Facebook, websites and an Internet radio interview) obviously because Foerster and the other researchers think this is very exciting news.”

Exciting news is one thing, but scientific credibility is another. “[S]cience doesn’t work by social media,” said Hill. “Peer review is a critical part of science and the Paracas skulls proponents have taken a shortcut that completely undermines their credibility. Appealing to the public’s interest in this cultural practice we see as bizarre — skull deformation —instead of publishing the data for peer-review examination is not going to be acceptable to the scientific community.”

There’s also the matter of the testing itself. According to Foerster, the geneticist who discovered the allegedly never-before-seen DNA, wants to remain anonymous. If that’s not a red flag for the credibility of your research, I don’t know what is.

The final nail in this story’s coffin, for me, was the revelation that Foerster had appeared on the popular History Channel program “Ancient Aliens” multiple times. In yesterday’s article, I said that the scientific and archaeological communities generally regard “Ancient Aliens” as inaccurate.

Now let’s consider the various bases for why we are supposed to dismiss the announced findings of genetic anomalies in the highly unusual Paracas skulls, which reportedly do not fit within the parameters of human skull variations.

  1. We have no credible evidence for the existence of alien civilizations? That’s a stupid statement, considering these skulls may be such evidence. There is no credible evidence for anything the first time it is discovered.
  2. The Carl Sagan quote is stupid and incorrect, for reasons that a) should be obvious and b) have been covered previously. It’s cheap sciencistic rhetoric.
  3. The title doesn’t imply anything. As for the lack of credentials, well, given the amount of known fraud and statistical error being committed by impeccably credentialed scientists, that is hardly a disqualifier.
  4. Guilt-by-association. I wrote a book with Bruce Bethke, but that doesn’t make me one of the world’s experts on supercomputers.
  5. (laughs) The writer has no credentials either. By her own logic, should we not dismiss everything she is saying? In any event, her preoccupation with academic credentials is not exactly hard to explain; she is a woman. That’s why women now so outnumber men in the university enrollments.
  6. The fact that Foerster elected to bypass the gatekeepers says literally nothing about whether the reported news is accurate or not.
  7. The geneticist’s preference to remain anonymous is not a red flag but rather an indication of the corrupt nature of science and science journalism. He knew his credibility would be attacked and adroitly avoided it by permitting the evidence to stand on its own.
  8. An appearance on a television show that is generally regarded as inaccurate by the very communities whose consensus and competence is being challenged by these reports says absolutely nothing about whether they are true or not.

Now, none of this means that Foerster is not a con artist and the reports of the genetic anomalies in the skulls are not fiction. But the correct response is for other geneticists to test the samples and either confirm or contradict the report; that is scientody. This sort of blanket assertion isn’t founded in science, it’s not even based on good logic.

Convergence at Penguin Random House

This announcement is, I think, very promising for Castalia House, its readers, and its supporters. The stars are coming into alignment for Castalia to become bigger than any of us had ever imagined:

Penguin and Random House merged three years ago, in 2013, and today Penguin Random House’s CEO, Markus Dohle, sent an anniversary letter to employees in which he congratulated them on their hard work, but more importantly, detailed how that work is affecting people throughout the world.

“Along this road, we have continued to write our story, telling the world who we are, what we do, and why we do it,” Dohle wrote. “Equally important is how—especially in today’s dynamic and complex world, with unprecedented societal events impacting all of us.”

“Publishing is undeniably a force for good,” Dohle continued. “But working in an industry that is inherently a service to society, we risk subscribing to the notion that this is enough. It’s not. We ought to do more—and we can—by taking advantage of our capacity as Penguin Random House to drive positive social, environmental, and cultural change, locally and globally.”

Allow me to remind you of a certain quote that you may find to be relevant in this circumstance.

“Society should treat all equally well who have deserved equally well of it, that is, who have deserved equally well absolutely. This is the highest abstract standard of social and distributive justice; towards which all institutions, and the efforts of all virtuous citizens should be made in the utmost degree to converge.”
 —John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 1861

The only substantive changes Penguin Random House is going to be making will be negative, to their bottom line and their share price. The entire mainstream publishing industry has “dinosaur buggy whip” written all over it. It’s astonishing that they can’t seem to see it yet.

This is how bad it is

Contrast and compare. Star Citizen. 2016. 5 years and $117 million in development. Licensed engine technology. Supposed to be well into Beta, if not fully playable.

Rebel Moon Revolution. 1997. 14 months and $600k in development. Homebrew 3D engine. Not even half-complete; this was pre-Alpha development material resurrected and made operable by some Russian fans who requested it.

Mailvox: you’re going to need a bigger state

IreneAthena suggests permitting whites to self-segregate to a reservation:

What’s all this about designating one state, or five, and forcing all the blacks to move there? That idea smacks of the slave trade, with Africans being dragged away from their familiar homes and forced to live in places not of their choosing.

What we need is a separate state–just one ought to do it — reserved for Whites who can’t manage to live in the same state with any of the other races. If whites want to live in such an exclusive setting, they may, but they’ll have no other options besides that one state. State of the Snow White Princesses Far Away from any Black-Eyed Peas.

Everyone else can live where they’d like, also. Even the most vocal “we need our safe space” minorities wouldn’t mind living in a mixed-race STATE, or a mixed-race CITY, if not a mixed-race neighborhood. Woik it out, people.

I don’t think she understands how fast tens of millions of white people would move to a state guaranteed to be all-white. Nor does she likely understand how that state would rapidly begin to significantly outperform the rest of the country, or how many non-whites would be clamoring to be permitted entry.

After all, diversity means nothing more than chasing down white people in an attempt to escape the negative consequences of being surrounded by your own kind. It’s Magic Dirt theory in action.

The sad thing is that we used to have such a reservation. It was called “America”. Only whites, specifically those of English descent, were truly and properly considered American; that is why all other types of “Americans” are hyphenated or otherwise modified, including “Native Americans”.

(We American Indians are better understood as pre-Americans in this regard; the concept is concerned with the nation, not the continent.)

But, rightly or wrongly, the system was designed to permit other whites to become quasi-Americans, which more or less worked until the voluntary nation was transformed into a conventional empire by the force of arms. Which took place, it should not surprise you to know, with considerable assistance from recent immigrants forced into military service.

I find it both mystifying and amusing that even as many white Americans today lament the disappearance of their rights, the destruction of their communities, and the decline of their society, they continue to cling to the cretinous myth of equality and the equally nonsensical concept of a propositional nation that is, more than anything else, responsible for the very transformations they rightly decry.

That is why they fully deserve what they are experiencing, and what they are going to experience in the future. It makes absolutely no sense to mourn the decline of America while celebrating equality, diversity, and immigration because it is equality, diversity, and immigration that are the primary causal factors in that decline.

To quote the great angelic philosopher, Tila Tequila, “People are all angry about what’s happening but guess what? It’s called karma! You cannot stop what is coming for YOU created it!”


UPDATE: A reader points out that there are plenty of American blacks who would like to prefer to have their own homogeneous nation-state too.

Babu Omowale, the so-called national minister of defense for the People’s New Black Panther Party, says his group and allied organizations have their sights set on establishing “our own government in a nation within a nation.” Omowale used the interview to claim five states as belonging to the “Black Nation”: Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia.

The revolutionary stated: “We just need to start migrating back to those states and taking control of the economics in those states. If black people move in, most definitely white people will move out. So it’s not a hard process for us to have our own country within a country.”

I suspect a lot of white Americans would take that deal. After all, only a true racist would oppose African-Americans getting their own sovereign and independent homeland. It’s time for whites to stop oppressing blacks by ruling over them, which is nothing less than a legacy of slavery. It’s time for a national referendum on #Blaxit.

The enstupidation of France

The USA, the UK, and Denmark are not the only countries to see an observable decline in average IQ:

  • Dutton and Lynn have identified a 4 point decline in French IQ.
  • Dysgenics and replacement migration are proposed as causes.
  • French IQ losses are found to be associated with the Jensen effect (ρ = .833).
  • A common factor of g loadings and 3 biological variables loads on the loss-vector.
  • This supports biological causation.

Dutton and Lynn report secular declines in Fullscale IQ evaluated using WAIS of four points a decade in France between the years 1999 and 2008–9. It is posited that the trend may have a partially biological cause, stemming from dysgenic fertility and, to a lesser extent, replacement migration. Given that these, and other biological phenomena are associated with the Jensen effect, it is expected that if they are the principal causes of the IQ decline then the secular change should also be associated with the Jensen effect.

Furthermore if it can be demonstrated that the vectors of secular IQ decline, g loadings and the vectors of other biological indicators share variance, then the case for biological causation will be strengthened. Using the method of correlated vectors and error disattenuation, the secular IQ declines are shown to be associated with a high-magnitude Jensen effect (ρ = .833). A multi-vector common factor comprised of the vector of g loadings along with the vectors of three biological variables (subtest heritabilities, dysgenic fertilities and simple visual reaction times) was found to load substantially on the secular IQ decline vector (λ = .723).

These findings indicate that the French secular IQ loss likely has a primarily biological cause.

What is frightening about this decline in French IQ is how rapidly it has taken place. My estimate of a post-1965 four-point IQ loss in the USA was a minimum estimate based solely on replacement migration, but considering that dysgenic fertility is also a factor in the USA, the actual decline is almost certainly worse.

If replacement migration is also the lesser factor in the US case, then the post-1965 IQ decline in the USA could be as much as 10 points. However, US immigration has been higher and US native birth rates have remained higher than in France, so something on the order of 7-8 points is more likely. This is not insignificant; it is the difference between the current USA and Sierra Leone.

Immigration isn’t just bad for a nation’s economy, it is horrifically damaging to a nation’s prospects for the future.

Portugal 1 France 0

Talk about the Ewing Theory in effect! Who would have thought that Ronaldo going out due to injury after 15 minutes would lead to a Portuguese victory?

I was DEEPLY unimpressed by the French. They played very much like the Germans did in the semifinal, standing back and passing the ball around the perimeter, showing absolutely no urgency or seriously attempting to score. It was another strike against EU-style multiculturalism as the much-ballyhooed Noir-Blanc-Marron failed at home.

One lesson of this tournament is that solid team play and determination beats superior talent. The lesser teams aren’t quite as lesser as they used to be. Between Iceland, Wales, and Portugal, it was an unusually entertaining Euro.

And it’s always fun to see one of the minor powers steal a championship from the usual suspects. What a fantastic goal by Eder in extra time to win it.