Ebola spreads in the USA

First, they said it would never get to the USA. Then they said it wouldn’t spread to the health care workers:

A hospital worker here who helped treat the Liberian man who died last week of the Ebola virus has tested positive for the disease, even though the worker was wearing a gown, gloves, mask and other protective gear when coming into contact with the victim, officials said Sunday.

The hospital employee, a woman whom officials did not identify, worked at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, Thomas Eric Duncan, 42, died last Wednesday. The health care worker reported a low-grade fever Friday night, went to the hospital at some point after that and was immediately admitted and put in isolation, officials said.

One wonders what will be the next statement from a government official on the subject to be exposed as false. Note that a nurse in Spain also caught the virus from a Spanish man who was brought back to Spain by his government for treatment.

VPFL Week 5

70 Mounds View Meerkats (4-1)
60 Texas Chili Eaters (4-1)

86 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-1)
80 Boot Hill Bogs (0-5)

55 RR Redbeards (4-1)
47 Clerical Errs (0-5)

68 Gilbert Gamma Rays (3-2)
66 Bane Cornshuckers (2-3)

66 King (2-3)
54 Favre Dollar Footlongs (2-3)

About six years

That’s how much time the American can-kicking in Iraq bought. Of course, it is readily apparent that this was rather like going buying time in order to go from the frying pan into the blast furnace.  Another prescient selection from William S. Lind’s forthcoming ON WAR:

A piece in the December 27, 2007 Cleveland Plain Dealer, “Vote on fate of Kirkuk postponed,” by Tina Susman and Asso Ahmed of the L.A. Times, reported that: “Kurdish lawmakers agreed Wednesday to a six-month delay in a referendum on whether the oil-rich city of Kirkuk should join the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan or remain under Iraqi central government control….Also Wednesday, the head of the Iraqi parliament’s constitutional review committee, Humam Hamoudi, said he would request a three-month delay in rewriting the national constitution. That would mark the fourth time the target date…has been put off.”

As the Iraqis kick the can down the road, so do the Americans. The American-funded Sunni militia, aka the Concerned Local Citizens or the Awakening, has grown to 72,000 volunteers in nearly 300 communities in Iraq. They have been credited with reducing violence in some of Iraq’s most violent areas. But many people, including some Sunnis, worry that the groups could destabilize Iraq.

The concern is a valid one. With our usual charming naiveté, we seem to think the Sunnis have become our friends. But they are merely using us to help them get ready for the next round with the Shiites and, in the case of Kirkuk, the Kurds.

They were indeed, as “destabilize” is a mild way of putting it. That American-funded Sunni militia, aka the Concerned Local Citizens aka the Awakening aka the Islamic State, is now engaged in successfully fighting that anticipated next round with both the Shiites and the Kurds. They’ve not only taken Kirkuk and are pressing the Kurds hard in the north, but are also threatening to besiege a Baghdad ruled by a crumbling Shiite US-puppet government.

As in the case of al Qaeda, the Islamic State was directly subsidized by the American government. If this sort of repetitive blowback does not suffice to convince you that expansionist imperialism abroad is a fool’s game, then one can only conclude that you are one of those Aristotle characterized as impervious to information. We don’t always have to do something, especially when that something has the predictable probability of making matters worse.

TSA battles Ebola

Or not, as it happens:

The World Health Organization is sending doctors to countries where the virus is most prevalent — Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Fusion’s Jorge Ramos spoke to one of the doctors, Dr. Aileen Marty, who recently returned home to Miami after spending 31 days in Nigeria. She says she was surprised what happened when she arrived at Miami International Airport.

“I get to the kiosk…mark the fact that I’ve been in Nigeria and nobody cares, nobody stopped me,” Marty said.

“Not a single test?” Ramos asked her, surprised.

“Nothing,” Marty answered.

Some say evil, some say incompetent. I fail to see why the Obola administration can’t be both. Let’s face it, our best hope is that the whole thing simply burns itself out without a great deal of help from the obviously overmatched medical community.

So much for that whole “science just works, bitches” meme. It’s unwise to arrogantly challenge Mother Nature.

A lethal attack

Frankly, I’m astonished @Spacekatgal hasn’t cried rape yet. But give her time, she’ll probably be babbling about her fear of alien abduction or the Yakuza by the end of next week.

Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal
I want to be crystal clear – I am scared of the death threats I’ve gotten. I am terrified of the #gamergate blame-the-victim witch hunt.

Brianna Wu @Spacekatgal
Getting attacked by @voxday is like having Jesus Christ come to your door and tell you you’re a great person.

Attacked? This should suffice to demonstrate why no one with any sense finds “the death threats” to be credible, here is my supposed attack on her.

“@Spacekatgal That’s cool. We’ll keep not playing them. And not listening to you.”

Feel the terror! Quiver before the rage! Call the police, clearly a madman is about! IT’S JUST LIKE HALLOWEEN AND THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE COMBINED!!!!!

Anyhow, just to make it clear that my position concerning @Spacekatgal is one of utter Olympian indifference, I was sure to clarify it.

Froonium Driven ‏@Froonium_Drive
All the crap happening to @Spacekatgal says he isn’t wrong this time. 

@Froonium_Drive @Spacekatgal
Hey, I don’t support this anti-transgender hate being directed at @Spacekatgal. I just ignore her.

@Spacekatgal If not playing your 1 game and not caring about your opinion is “getting attacked”, the entire game industry is attacking you.

I have no problem whatsoever with women making games for women. Hell, I designed a game for women; it’s called HOT DISH and THQ did pretty well with it a while back. But I have no interest in playing those games, just as all the “gamer grrrls” have zero interest in Advanced Squad Leader and games that I like to play.

As I used to tell the venture capitalists who hired me to look at various investment possibilities in the game sector, games for women already exist and the biggest one is called “Facebook”. Games are just interfaces, and women collect “likes” the same way men rack up “kills”.

This amused me. These SJW morons can’t even manage to avoid tripping over their own hypersensitivities.

Richard Stelling added you to list rjstelling/massive-cunts 

Yeah, Richard, that’s not exactly the way to go about white-knighting for your feministas.

They’re so gamer

This is amusing. McRapey and the SF pinkshirts belatedly discover #GamerGate:

    Jesus. Brianna Wu is someone I consider a friend. Fuck everyone who thinks GamerGate is anything other than haters shitting on women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    If you think threatening women is a legitimate tactic for anything, feel free to stop reading my work. I don’t need you or your money.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Astounding the number of dudes who think a woman game developer being harassed has nothing to do with a movement founded to harass women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And yes, GamerGate was founded to harass women. We’ve all seen the IRC logs. Part of the plan: recruit others to be their useful idiots.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And there sure have been a lot of useful idiots letting offering up their services to those who want to harass women! Well done, you.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Face it, dudes: “GamerGate” is a toxic thing. You can’t say you support WITHOUT explicitly standing with those who hate and harass women.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    Excellent post about GamerGate. “If you don’t step away… then you *are* part of a hate movement.” http://t.co/IOB0nSiFJE
    — N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) October 11, 2014

    So stop standing with people who WANT you to be their useful idiots while they threaten women. You can’t pretend you don’t know anymore.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    You know. We know you know. EVERYONE knows you know. No one else buys into your denial. Just stop. AND repudiate. Stop being used. Simple.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

    And if you refuse to stop being a useful idiot for those who harass and hate women, we’ll know that too. And remember.
    — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 11, 2014

What should be remembered is this string of tweets the next time John Scalzi tries to pretend he’s a hardcore game nerd. After all, it only took him nearly two months to discover what the entire gaming community had been discussing. As for Ms Wu, she’s not even original enough to come up with a new form of crying wolf. Anita Sarkeesian already played the “ooh, I’m so scared I had to flee my home” card back in August.

At this rate, we can probably pencil in McRapey waxing indignant about Jennifer Lawrence sometime around Thanksgiving. And as often the case, he clearly has absolutely no idea that popular opinion is absolutely not on his side here.

It should also be amusing to see him start trying to walk back this claim – “GamerGate was founded to harass women” – when he discovers that the term was coined by one of the very Hollywood figures he is now trying to suck up to.

After bravely “fleeing from her home”, Spacekatgal pulls a post-flight Brave Sir Robin:

Announcement: I AM NOT GOING ANYWHERE. I am going to keep making games. And I will keep speaking up for women in gamedev.

That’s cool. The rest of us will continue not playing them and not listening to her. Exactly like we’ve been doing for the last 25 years.

UPDATE: McRapey saying that he is “currently ACTUALLY making a video game” is like a Best Boy saying that he is starring in a movie.

A 4GW fiasco in realtime

You don’t have to be an expert in 4th Generation Warfare to know that the US decision to resort to air strikes against the Islamic State was going to backfire:

The U.S.-led air war in Syria has gotten off to a rocky start, with even the Syrian rebel groups closest to the United States turning against it, U.S. ally Turkey refusing to contribute and the plight of a beleaguered Kurdish town exposing the limitations of the strategy.

U.S. officials caution that the strikes are just the beginning of a broader strategy that could take years to carry out. But the anger that the attacks have stirred risks undermining the effort, analysts and rebels say.

The main beneficiary of the strikes so far appears to be President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces have taken advantage of the shift in the military balance to step up attacks against the moderate rebels designated by President Obama as partners of the United States in the war against extremists.

The U.S. targets have included oil facilities, a granary and an electricity plant under Islamic State control. The damage to those facilities has caused shortages and price hikes across the rebel-held north that are harming ordinary Syrians more than the well-funded militants, residents and activists say.

At the start of the air campaign, dozens of U.S. cruise missiles were fired into areas controlled by the moderate rebels, who are supposed to be fighting the Islamic State. Syrians who had in the past appealed for American intervention against Assad have been staging demonstrations denouncing the United States and burning the American flag.

If there is one person who desperately needs to read William S. Lind’s forthcoming ON WAR, it is Barack Obama. And it wouldn’t hurt if whoever is presently in charge of the US military response to the Islamic State would do so as well.

A new project

A few weeks ago, I had an idea for a general review site with certain specific features that all the various review sites are lacking. Then, at a recent technology conference, I saw a French guy presenting a cross-platform review system that rather cleverly combined a scraping technology with a Twitter-like interface. I realized that he’d already done 75 percent of the work my idea would require, found him later, and told him that I thought we should work together, to which he quite naturally responded: “who are you?”

After I explained my ideas, we had lunch, discovered that our visions were entirely compatible. So, instead of another game design, I’m dabbling in technology design again, and I have to say that this is considerably easier than trying to figure out how to manufacture 18-button mice in China. Of course, it’s all just interface in the end, and there are more similarities between game design and this sort of app design than you might think.

The system is called Recommend. The site and iPhone app is live already, you can see it at re.co or via the App Store. There you can also see my first 12+ recommendations, which range from an AWESOME for Advanced Squad Leader to DISAPPOINTING for Disturbed’s Asylum. I will also soon be one of their Experts in the Game and Book categories. It’s a very clever system that automatically adds a picture scooped from the Internet, and it only takes two or three minutes to create and write-up a complete recommendation.

The reason the system is of great interest to experts and influencers is that it permits the linking back to whatever link the reco-writer wishes. So, for example, my reco (as they call it) of John Wright’s THE GOLDEN AGE links to Scooter’s review of the book on the Castalia House blog. There will eventually be considerably more to the system than this, as I am presently designing a gamefication system that will allow Recommend users to build up their influence as the first of at least three new systems that will help turn Recommend into something considerably more advanced and useful than Yelp. Note that it is very much in development at the moment, but even in its early state, it is already informative and useful.

I would love to see a hundred or more Dread Ilk become influential via this system, so if you’d like to help out, there are two ways you can do so right now. The first is very simple. Just go to Recommend, sign up, follow me, and start creating your own recos. I’ll follow you in return and soon we’ll have a dynamic intra-Ilk recommendation system in operation. Right now they only have four ratings, from Horrible to Awesome, but that will be increased to six in the near future. And if you happen to like one of the things I’m recommending, click on the Recommend box to co-recommend it.

The second way to help is a little more complex. One of the things I’ve been asked to do is to find and vet bona fide experts in various fields. So, if you happen to be a legitimate expert in something and are willing to commit to doing 20 recos per month, sign up, write a reco or three as an example and to see how much work in involved, then shoot me an email with EXPERT in the subject. I’ll check them out and then get in touch with you. The field can be literally anything, from astrophysics to video production, and you can recommend anything, from audio software to zoos.

And simply because someone will ask the question, no, this does not change anything at all with regards to Alpenwolf and Castalia House. I usually have between 4 and 5 projects going at once, and since I recently finished two other projects, this is only number three at present. I seldom talk about those other projects, but in this case, since it is a social media project which the Ilk can most certainly assist, it makes sense to do so.

Islamophobia at the UN

I take personal offense at this reprehensibly Islamophobic comment by a UN official, who implies that devoted members of the religion of peace would allow anyone to come to harm after taking control of a Syrian city:

Thousands of people “will most likely be massacred” if Kobani falls to Islamic State fighters, a U.N. envoy said on Friday, as militants fought deeper into the besieged Syrian Kurdish town in full view of Turkish tanks that have done nothing to intervene.

I’m sure the Turks are amused by the passive-aggressive criticism of their failure to defend the very Kurds who have been violently rebelling against their rule for decades, if not centuries. It’s one thing to wipe out your enemies. But one can hardly criticize a people who, upon seeing someone else doing it for them, shrug, look on, and say, “you know, defending those people is really neither our problem nor our interest.”

Anti-gun liberals would do well to keep this in mind come the day of the zombies. When they’re screaming “somebody, please do something!” I suspect there will be more than a few well-armed conservatives and libertarians who will look on with a faint smile and say, “now, weren’t you the very sort of idiot who a) brought the zombies to town, and b) tried to take my guns away?”

After all, did not the Bible say that the hearts of men would grow cold?

A failure in tech support

Spacebunny has an amusing encounter with Adobe’s fascinating approach to technical support.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
I have a new focus for my battle. @Adobe they are the reason I can’t print…..

Adobe Customer Care ‏@AdobeCare
@Spacebunnyday Hi there, can you provide more detail on your printing issue? Which Adobe app are you using? ^M

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
@AdobeCare Reader – document could not be printed, no pages selected message. Uninstalled XI reinstalled version 8 and it works.

Adobe Customer Care ‏@AdobeCare
@Spacebunnyday Glad it has been sorted- thanks for letting us know! ^M

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
I like the fact that you don’t CARE that your newest version doesn’t work….

Full points to Adobe Customer Care for being proactive and trawling Twitter in search of customer problems to attack. That’s great. But we really do have to subtract a few points for reading comprehension. And their subsequent response is not exactly confidence inspiring.