Fumigating the Firefox, redux

I’m reposting this since Mozilla’s decision to place ads in Firefox has even more people moving to Pale Moon. Fortunately, it is trivially simple to turn this off and cause the browser to correctly report itself as PaleMoon.

    Create a new tab.
    Type “about:config” into the Address Bar as if it were an internet site (URL).
    Type “compatMode” into the Search box that will appear right below the Address Bar.
    On the line general.useragent.compatMode.firefox there are three settings: user set, boolean, true. Click on “true” and it will change to false.
    Close the tab.

That’s it. Web sites will no longer incorrectly attribute your pageviews to Firefox. This is important, because Firefox’s only real value is in its brand, and as the number of reported Firefox users continues to fall, Google’s rationale for propping up Mozilla is reduced as well.

A note about the new release

We just sent out a second New Release newsletter to our subscribers, and I expect that some of you may be a little surprised at the fact that this particular new release is a somewhat more expensive than our usual pricing model would indicate. Please note that this does NOT indicate a new pricing policy on our part, it is merely the consequence of a contractual obligation on our part that stems from the book’s rather complicated origins.

The book is still considerably less expensive than new ebook releases from the mainstream publishers, at 475 pages it is a good value, and there are two new selections included in the five from which the New Release subscribers can choose their free book: The Four Generations of Modern War by William S. Lind and The Altar of Hate by Vox Day.

In other, not entirely unrelated news, people are beginning to wrap up their long march through William S. Lind’s ON WAR and post reviews on Amazon. Here are three that might inspire you to take a closer look if you haven’t already: 


You can’t say you weren’t warned.
A long but great work. This book should be required reading at West Point. 

Highly recommended
Highly recommended, even for those not directly interested in military strategy. Mr. Lind’s framework has wide ranging applications for politics, economics, and the future of our nation. Consider it in the same league as Nassim Taleb’s “Antifragile” (and indeed, there are many overlaps). 

I urgently and gravely, recommend this book for any officer of the United States Armed Forces 
In March of 2003, I was in a unique position to watch the anatomy of a folly…. I was a career Marine at the time and I knew we were making several mistakes. I knew we didn’t have enough boots on the ground for a successful occupation, in truth we didn’t have enough boots in the entire military. In 1945 we has better than 11% of the population in uniform and under arms and we were trying to get the Germans and The Japanese to self organize. In 2003, less than one half of one percent of our population was in uniform, we had huge global commitments and we were trying to get Arabs to self organize. The occupation plans seemed to be little more than a few platitudes from a Washington DC that was playing at war.

It felt as if we were trapped by a fever dream. That we could bring democracy to an extremely low trust culture on the points of our bayonets. Overthrow thousands of years of tribal tradition with little more than a few speeches. And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why were trying to do it.

William S. Lind had a very good idea as to why were doing it.

This book contains collected columns of William S. Lind through that six year trip to hell known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. Much of this this reads like the works of a modern Nostradamus. Resented by many senior officers at the time as an ardent defeatist, Lind’s predictions were beyond prescient. From the rise of AQI, to the collapse of the Iraqi government’s control over it’s own territory. Linds 20/20 foresight makes him a modern Cassandra.

There is a reason Cassandra wasn’t popular

The new book’s official release date will be on Monday, when it will also be made available on Amazon.

Mozilla slashes its own throat

If you haven’t migrated to Pale Moon yet, you’re going to want to do so soon:

The Firefox browser, lagging its well-heeled rivals, will soon be serving up an array of ads to one and all. Mozilla, the nonprofit group that develops and updates the popular Internet browser, said Thursday that it will begin placing ads where thumbnails of your frequently visited websites would normally be found when you open a new tab. While many of those thumbnails, which Firefox calls “Enhanced Tiles,” will remain as quick links to your favorite sites, some will feature sponsored logos or other promoted images.

The decision comes after a year-long experiment testing the receptivity of the ads among a small group of users.

The ads are a way for Mountain View, Calif.-based Mozilla to stay relevant at a time when more people are making use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome when browsing the Web. Mozilla hopes the sponsored tiles will help influence powerful advertising groups while not compromising its nonprofit values. The ads also represent a potential new revenue stream for Mozilla, which gets most of its funding from Google through a deal in which it is the default search engine.

“We see this as a meaningful contributor to Mozilla’s revenue,” Darren Herman, vice president of content services for Mozilla and the man behind the tile ads, said in an interview. “We’re using ourselves to demonstrate that it’s possible to advertise at a scale nobody else can.”

The initiative comes as Firefox continues to lose ground to its
rivals. According to Net Applications, which measures individual users’
daily Internet activity, IE is the top PC browser, with a 58 percent
share, followed by Chrome at 21 percent and Firefox at 14 percent. Mozilla
plans to ramp up the ads over time, but even once that’s in full swing,
Herman said Mozilla will tread carefully with how it places those ads…. Among the first ads shown will be anti-tobacco messages and promotions for the new Edward Snowden biopic, “Citizenfour.”

Once you go full SJW, there is no going back. It’s not going to be long before Firefox is below 10 percent. And once that happens, they may as well shut it down.

Of SJWs and echo chambers

I have to admit, I’m a little surprised. Only #423 on the Level 2 SJW blocklist? How can this be? DON’T THEY KNOW WHO I AM?

Who will be added to the block list? The short answer is anyone that a blocker defines as block list worthy. The general rule is if you are the type that would find yourself banned on a blog on Freethoughtblogs.com, Skepchick.org or from the A+ forum then you will likely end up in the list…

And as I’ve noted, they operate solely at the rhetorical level. Their assertions and posturing are almost entirely devoid of any meaning beyond “me good, them bad”.

John Scalzi‏@scalzi
Oh, the transcendent irony of being accused by a GamerGater of living in an echo chamber.

John Scalzi‏@scalzi
Happy to say my Twitter feeds are full of brilliant, clever people, and that’s only partially because I mute the stupid, annoying jerks.

Apparently John “I am a rapist” Scalzi not only doesn’t know what satire is, he doesn’t know what irony is either. Keep this typical SJW behavior in mind when they begin with their entryist tactics and start babbling about the importance of inclusivity, diversity, discourse and dialogue. Words don’t have any objective meaning to them, they merely mean whatever the SJW needs it to mean in order to achieve whatever goal he is pursuing.

It will do you no good to point out to the likes of Scalzi that he observably lives in an echo chamber of his active making. “Echo chamber” is merely a bad word, and being a bad word, therefore cannot be applied to the SJW and must be applied to his bad opponent, regardless of what it actually means. If you agree with them, you are by definition “brilliant and clever”, and if you disagree with them, or even worse, criticize them, you are intrinsically “stupid, annoying jerks”.

This is why they don’t dare to compete in any venue that is not “heads I win, tails you lose.”  And this is how they can attack a libertarian as being a “fascist’ or a black man for being a “white supremacist” without even a hint of intellectual embarrassment. Because, for them, neither words nor truth have any genuine meaning.

3GW at sea?

The US military may be beginning to learn the hard way that high-tech warfare is powerful, but fragile:

On 10 April 2014, the USS Donald Cook entered the waters of the Black Sea and on 12 April a Russian Su-24 tactical bomber flew over the vessel triggering an incident that,
according to several media reports, completely demoralized its crew, so
much so that the Pentagon issued a protest.

The USS Donald Cook (DDG-75) is a 4th generation guided missile destroyer whose key weapons are Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of up to 2,500 kilometers, and capable of carrying nuclear explosives. This ship carries 56 Tomahawk missiles in standard mode, and 96 missiles in attack mode.

The US destroyer is equipped with the most recent Aegis Combat System.
It is an integrated naval weapons systems which can link together the
missile defense systems of all vessels embedded within the same network,
so as to ensure the detection, tracking and destruction of hundreds of
targets at the same time. In addition, the USS Donald Cook is
equipped with 4 large radars, whose power is comparable to that of
several stations. For protection, it carries more than fifty
anti-aircraft missiles of various types.

Meanwhile, the Russian Su-24 that buzzed the USS Donald Cook carried neither bombs nor missiles but only a basket mounted under the fuselage, which, according to the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, contained a Russian electronic warfare device called Khibiny.

As the Russian jet approached the US vessel, the electronic device
disabled all radars, control circuits, systems, information
transmission, etc. on board the US destroyer. In other words, the
all-powerful Aegis system, now hooked up – or about to be – with
the defense systems installed on NATO’s most modern ships was shut down,
as turning off the TV set with the remote control.

The Russian Su-24 then simulated a missile attack against the USS Donald Cook,
which was left literally deaf and blind. As if carrying out a training
exercise, the Russian aircraft – unarmed – repeated the same maneuver 12
times before flying away.

After that, the 4th generation destroyer immediately set sail towards a port in Romania. Since that incident, which the Atlanticist media have carefully
covered up despite the widespread reactions sparked among defense
industry experts, no US ship has ever approached Russian territorial
waters again.  According to some specialized media, 27 sailors from the USS Donald Cook requested to be relieved from active service.

This has been going around, but while the SU-24 is confirmed to have successfully buzzed the destroyer, some of the details are being disputed.

In truth the Russian fighter did fly 12 times provocatively close to the US destroyer, and Col. Warren did report the incident to Reuters. However, this is where the truth ends.

In reality Warren told the following to the agency: “This provocative and unprofessional Russian action is inconsistent with international protocols and previous agreements on the professional interaction between our militaries.”

The plane appeared to be unarmed, according to Warren. The pilot did not respond to multiple queries from the Cook. Warren also added that another Russian fighter was also flying in the area, but not as close to the ship as the other one.

Warren said the vessel was not in any serious danger. The Pentagon website cited the Colonel’s words: “The Donald Cook is more than capable of defending herself against two SU-24s.

I think that the only way we can know the truth is by observing if US Navy ships continue to enter the Black Sea or not. One thing American readers may not know is that Russian warplanes have tested NATO air defenses more than 40 times in the last nine months. So it’s far from implausible that they are sending a similar “back off” message to the US naval forces as well in light of the Obama administration’s foolish, if not downright insane, decision to interfere in Ukraine.

However, the specific details appear to be closer to a Tom Clancy novel than anything that happened in 2014. It’s much more likely that 27 pregnant sailors were quietly relieved from active duty than 27 sailors quit from sheer terror of Russian ECW capabilities.

Two failed wars

A lieutenant general regrets the wasted lives of his soldiers, thrown away for nothing in Iraq and Afghanistan:

As a senior commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, I lost 80 soldiers.
Despite their sacrifices, and those of thousands more, all we have to
show for it are two failed wars. This fact eats at me every day, and Veterans Day is tougher than most…. We can convince ourselves that we did our part, and a few more diplomats or civilian leaders should have done theirs. Similar myths no doubt comforted Americans who fought under the command of Robert E. Lee in the Civil War or William C. Westmoreland in Vietnam. But as a three-star general who spent four years trying to win this thing — and failing — I now know better.

We did not understand the enemy, a guerrilla network embedded in a quarrelsome, suspicious civilian population. We didn’t understand our own forces, which are built for rapid, decisive conventional operations, not lingering, ill-defined counterinsurgencies. We’re made for Desert Storm, not Vietnam. As a general, I got it wrong. Like my peers, I argued to stay the course, to persist and persist, to “clear/hold/build” even as the “hold” stage stretched for months, and then years, with decades beckoning. We backed ourselves season by season into a long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq, then compounded it by doing likewise in Afghanistan.

What went wrong in Iraq and in Afghanistan isn’t the stuff of legend. It won’t bring people into the recruiting office, or make for good speeches on Veterans Day. Reserve those honors for the brave men and women who bear the burdens of combat.

That said, those who served deserve an accounting from the generals. What happened? How? And, especially, why? It has to be a public assessment, nonpartisan and not left to the military. (We tend to grade ourselves on the curve.) Something along the lines of the 9/11 Commission is in order. We owe that to our veterans and our fellow citizens.

Such an accounting couldn’t be more timely. Today we are hearing some, including those in uniform, argue for a robust ground offensive against the Islamic State in Iraq. Air attacks aren’t enough, we’re told. Our Kurdish and Iraqi Army allies are weak and incompetent. Only another surge can win the fight against this dire threat. Really? If insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I think we’re there.

As a veteran, and a general who learned hard lessons in two lost campaigns, I’d like to suggest an alternative. Maybe an incomplete and imperfect effort to contain the Islamic State is as good as it gets. Perhaps the best we can or should do is to keep it busy, “degrade” its forces, harry them or kill them, and seek the long game at the lowest possible cost. It’s not a solution that is likely to spawn a legend. But in the real world, it just may well give us something better than another defeat.

Clearly the general should have read ON WAR. William S. Lind could have told him – in fact, did tell him – that the US military could not defeat the Pashtun in Afghanistan or rebuild the state it shattered in Iraq.

SJWs are Gramscian culture warriors

In which esr points out that SJW tactics are the same as those utilized by the Nazis and the Communists before them:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithet. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists….

I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover
from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and
waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize
Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern
leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our
politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.

The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t
hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with
attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later
get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t
want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do,
either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our
children, we’d better get to work.

Esr is addressing the danger posed by Islam here, not SJWs, and he’s talking about the entire West rather than the assault on the game industry but he’s describing the same tactics derived from the same playbook as part of the same anti-Western cultural war.

I have little doubt that he is right. Many, if not most, #GamerGaters would rather drink the blood of every single SJW than submit to them. In the same vein, many Americans would rather see a ruthless pro-white, pro-Western government led by the hard-eyed likes of Vladimir Putin than watch their nation continue to vanish in a swarm of third world immigration. The Left, for all their drama queen antics, doesn’t realize how many Men of the West are never, ever going to submit to them.

And if the sweet reason of the esr’s prove impotent, the Breiviks will rise. Esr thought, back in 2006, that there was an excellent chance the West can recover from the intellectual disease without violence. Eight years later, in 2014, I am considerably less sanguine about those odds.

What you can do, part 2

This is the second part of my response to someone who asked what they could do to help fight the SJWs. A few days ago, a #GamerGater named @Ignideus with less than 500 followers came up with the idea for #OpSkyNet as a prospective solution for the tendency of e-celebs to dominate the public discourse on Twitter. Today, it is the #3-trending hashtag on Twitter and #GamerGate has been re-energized as the leaderless, decentralized force that it is.

Larry Correia did little more than mention a few SF/F writers he felt had produced work that merited award consideration, and in the process, exposed the corruption and hyperpoliticization of the SF Awards process.

Yesterday, a non-gamer named RooshV announced the creation of Reaxxion, a pro-#GamerGate game review site for men. He writes:

My younger brother, who considers himself a gamer, gave me the
definitive push into starting Reaxxion. He plays Xbox, PC games on
Steam, and also some mobile games. He particularly likes games with long
and intricate story lines, telling me that gaming is just not about
pushing buttons to advance a level but to be affected on some level by a
compelling story, but now those stories are being perverted by people
who truly believe that men are evil and holding women down just because
they may want to enjoy a traditional story line with attractive women.

The infiltration of SJW’s into gaming may mean that my brother will
have to put up with their narrative in his games. It may mean that his
entertainment options become more limited because a developer was subtly
threatened unless he inserted another “empowered female” in a game
where such a character simply doesn’t fit. I’ve learned that unless you
fight back against these people, unless you spread awareness and develop
a megaphone as big as them, they will surely get what they want and
impact the culture in a way that hurts normal men who don’t subscribe to
their strange worldview.

Roosh isn’t a gamer, but he understands the importance of #GamerGate as the current Schwerpunkt, or focal point, of the SJWs. That’s why he’s stepped in with the sort of material assistance that only someone of his stature on the Internet can; the very name of the new game site is a gesture of contempt for those who consider themselves progressives.

Ingnideus was an unknown. Larry is a New York Times bestselling author. Roosh is Internet-famous, or if you prefer, infamous. But all three of them are taking what action they can take and all three of them are having a real impact.  What you can do entirely depends upon your capabilities, resources, and inclinations, but all of it is, at the very least, capable of mattering.

Most people who want to get involved are more akin to Ingnideus than Roosh. What that means is finding someone who is already leading the way by doing something and lending support to their efforts. Find a Schwerpunkt of interest to you and throw your weigh behind it. Many of you are already doing this with Castalia House, by buying our books, subscribing to our New Release newsletter, or in some cases, proofreading, formatting, narrating, and slush-reading. A few are assisting Alpenwolf, Joe and Kirk have been helping with the First Sword art. But we can always use more and we are far from the only independent writer, developer, publisher, site or blog that can use the help.

General

  • Support the good. Don’t support the SJWs in any of their flavors.
  • Get on Twitter. Tweet once with #OpSkyNet. Retweet and favorite one #GamerGate tweet per day.
  • Email one Gawker (or other #GamerGate target) advertiser per week.
  • Join Recommend. Write one Game- or Book-related reco, good or bad, per week and I’ll add it to the appropriate list. Be sure to follow me first so I will see it.
  • Try an indy game from a #GamerGate developer.
  • Submit an article to Reaxxion. 
  • Speak out. Do a blog post. Tell a friend.
  • Stand by those under attack, especially if you don’t agree with them. The primary SJW tactic is 3rd Generation. They cut off, isolate, then swarm. They can’t do that if you refuse to permit them to separate you from their target.

Castalia House

  • I’m ridiculously behind on submissions. We need new slushreaders and probably someone to manage the process.
  • PR. We haven’t sent out a single press release to anyone yet even though we have a pretty good story to tell. We’re too busy producing to talk about it.
  • Bloggers for Castalia House. Mascaro is too busy now and Jeffro has needed to take a few weeks off due to burnout. It’s difficult doing one quality blog post per week; many people can manage one or two, but consistency is the key.
  • PDF Layout. LL is getting up to speed on this, but we have a pretty big backlog already and we are contractually obligated to get some of our newly signed books out in print.

Alpenwolf

  •  Art. We’re doing all right for code, I think. (Markku, correct me if I’m wrong) but we could use additional art help. 
  • PR. We don’t need it yet, but we will.
  • There is probably something else I’m missing.

Why bother? Who cares about random guys living in their mother’s basements fighting for large pixellated breasts sporting chainmail bikinis in their games? Nero explains why he, a non-gamer, is following the battle:

GamerGate is remarkable—and attracts the interest of people like me—because it represents perhaps the first time in the last decade or more that a significant incursion has been made in the culture wars against guilt-mongerers, nannies, authoritarians and far-Left agitators.

Games are merely the current battleground. TV is already lost to the SJWs. Movies are lost. Literature is largely lost. Genre literature is all but lost. Remember, this is the mentality we’re up against:

Humphrey, the former Subway worker, had been living with her uncle before she lost her job. She now bounces from couch to couch in her circle of protester friends — a sacrifice she said is worthwhile, because what is the point of working when she says she could be killed any day because of the color of her skin? Now, she said, standing at the Rowan Community Center on a run-down block in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of St. Louis, “I sleep, eat and breathe this.”

Sure, that sort of commitment easy for someone with no talent, job, or responsibilities, who has literally nothing else to do to throw themselves into something 24-7. But we’re not talking about that level of commitment, but rather a small and spare-time, but persistent one. My perception, and I could be wrong, is that far too many people on the Right are overly concerned that someone, somewhere, might profit from their assistance whereas there are no shortage of volunteers on the Left who don’t care at all about that. (This may, admittedly, be due to their general failure to grasp the concept in the first place.) Did Joe Farah benefit from my contribution of more than 500 columns to WND? I should bloody well hope so! What would be the point if he didn’t? I didn’t give him money, I gave him 30 minutes per week, and I remain pleased to see what effective use he made of it.

The Catch-22 is that there is never any money involved in getting something started from nothing, which is why it is hard to start anything without the approval of the SJW gatekeepers who have successfully infiltrated the foundations and the large corporations. There is only one way around this, which is for the talent of the right to be willing to follow the example provided by the Free and Open Source crowd.

This sort of thing should never be seen as a job, but a contribution to the cause given out of a positive spirit. It might turn into a job one day, but it probably won’t. And if you’re worried that Castalia, or Roosh, or the guys at Recommend, or might one day end up making a buck due in part to some of the time you’ve put in, consider this: Would you be here in the first place, reading this, if I has been unwilling to write columns or blog posts without being paid for my time?

Anyhow, those are my thoughts. Some of you will have additional ideas, and feel free to throw them out here. This is an open discussion, so brainstorm, don’t critique. And above all, one thing is clear. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t expect direction and management. Adopt a Fourth Generation mentality. Ignideus is the Leader of #GamerGate, Roosh is the Leader of #GamerGate, I am the Leader of #GamerGate, and so can you.

Two-Hand Monte

The central bank giveth, the government taketh away:

Five of the world’s biggest banks have today been handed fines totalling more than £2billion for rigging the £3.5trillion-a-day foreign exchange market. British, US and Swiss authorities all launched an onslaught after an 18-month investigation as regulators today revealed the latest scandal to rock the industry. 

State-owned Royal Bank of Scotland has been fined £217million ($344million) by the London-based Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as well as £182million ($290million) by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The others involved in the settlement are Citibank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and UBS, who will also pay up to £500million each. Barclays said it continues to hold discussions with regulators.

More than 30 traders have been fired, suspended, put on leave, or resigned since the probes started, and the Serious Fraud Office has launched a criminal investigation – but there have been no arrests.

The lesson is: if you’re going to make a career of theft, better do it as a bankster. It’s remarkable to observe how no matter what law is broken as an employee of an international bank, the only penalty will is a relatively small financial one directed at the artificial person of the banking corporation.

The RBS CEO said: “‘We had people working at this bank who did not know the difference between right and wrong, or worse, didn’t care about the distinction.'”

You don’t say. It’s cute that he uses the past tense there.

Snow day!

I don’t often miss Minnesota. But I have to admit, I did enjoy the excitement of looking outside, seeing a field of white where there used to be a street, and turning on the radio, listening to hear that school had been canceled that day. As a kid, there isn’t much better than an unexpected snow day.