XFL 2.0

I’ll admit it, I am intrigued:

NO EXTRA POINT KICKS

Teams can go for one point from the 2-yard line, two points from the 5-yard line or three points from the 10-yard line. That means a team could score a nine-points in one possession. These three different scoring options will make a regulation tie a lot less likely. The options will create a fascinating wrinkle in coaching strategy. It’s likely that two-point conversions will be most common, but after a defensive touchdown, why not go for three?

SAFER KICKOFFS AND PUNTS

Two other game play innovations involved the kicking game: Kickoffs have been altered to make them safer so players aren’t hitting each other at full-speed. The kicker will kick off from the 30-yard line, 5 yards farther back than in the NFL, as a way to limit touchbacks. Most players will line up across from each other between the other 30- and 35-yard line and cannot move until the returner catches the ball.

The XFL made some changes to disincentivize punting, in the hopes of encouraging more teams to go for it on fourth down. Balls that are punted into the end zone or out of bounds will be marked at the 35-yard line, as opposed to the 20 in the NFL. The XFL is calling that a “major touchback.” If a team does punt, it will be more difficult to cover. No player on the punt team can run downfield until the ball is kicked, which will give returners more space to work with.

It looks as if the XFL is making a serious attempt to improve the game of football rather than simply imitate the NFL. That doesn’t mean it will be successful, of course, but it does suggest that it may be worth watching. I really like the extra point(s) option. That’s an indication of good game design.

A narrow escape

Fortunately for humanity, its greatest thinker has survived to think more of the thoughts that no one has thought before. Mikhaela Peterson explains the recent silence of Jordan Peterson:

The last year has been extremely difficult for our family. Dad was put on a low dose of a benzodiazepine a few years ago for anxiety following an extremely severe autoimmune reaction to food. He took the medication as prescribed. Last April when my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the dose of the medication was increased. It became apparent that he was suffering from both a physical dependency and a paradoxical reaction to the medication. A paradoxical reaction means the drugs do the opposite of what they’re supposed to. These reactions are rare but are not unheard of.

For the last 8 months he’s been in unbearable discomfort from this drug, made worse when trying to remove it, because of the addition of withdrawal symptoms, stemming from physical dependence. He experienced terrible akathisia, which is a condition where the person feels an incredible, endless, irresistible restlessness, bordering on panic, and an inability to sit still. The reaction made him suicidal.

After several failed treatment attempts in North American hospitals, including attempts at tapering and micro-tapering, we had to seek an emergency medical benzodiazepine detox, which we were only able to find in Russia. It was incredibly gruelling, and was further complicated by severe pneumonia which we’ve been told he developed in one of the previous hospitals. He’s had to spend 4 weeks in the ICU in terrible shape, but, with the help of some extremely competent and courageous doctors, he survived.  The decision to bring him to Russia was made in extreme desperation, when we couldn’t find any better option. The uncertainty around his recovery has been one of the most difficult and scary experiences we’ve ever had.

So: Finally Dad is on the mend, even though there’s a lot of physiological damage that he needs to recover from. He’s improving, and is off the horrible medication. His sense of humour is back. He’s smiling again for the first time in months, but he still has a long way to go to recover fully.

It’s more than a little strange, is it not, that a complete stranger could coincidentally happen to anticipate an emotional crisis of this magnitude prior to its occurrence? But setting aside the various possible causes of the crisis, let us simply observe that perhaps one would be, shall we say, unwise, to live one’s life according to the philosophy and precepts of a man who is clearly unwell on multiple levels, including the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual.

When Churchians church

It’s never all that difficult to distinguish the Churchians from the Christians, even when they are in the pulpit:

I finally got around to ordering Created To Be His Help Meet when my marriage seemed to be falling apart. I had really thought I was honoring God in my relationship toward my husband, yet I felt like I was living in prison, with him as my jailer. I couldn’t put the book down. It was just so liberating. I finally understood what God meant for me as a wife to be like, and I loved it….

Two Sundays later, our pastor stood in the pulpit and said that he was banning Created To Be His Help Meet from the church members, because it was too divisive. He said if we owned one, we were to throw it away. We were shocked. He has never banned church members from watching X- or R-rated movies. He has never banned anything, so why a simple marriage book?

After church, we asked our pastor what was in the book that was not right. He told us it was not because the book was not Scriptural, but because it was divisive, and therefore not good for the church body. My husband told him our marriage had been almost over, but because I had read Created To Be His Help Meet, we are more in love than we ever were.

Our pastor admitted he had not even read the book, but that several women had come to him insisting that he ban the book because it causes conflict. Are a few women going to decide what the rest of us are ALLOWED to read? If they don’t like it, we will not DEMAND that they read it, so why do they DEMAND that the rest of us not be ALLOWED to read it?

Churchians are to religion what cuckservatives are to politics. They will only ever shoot at that which is nominally on their own side, but is too “extreme” or “racist” or “divisive”. They are the original wolves in sheep’s clothing.

This church now knows everything it needs to know about their “pastor”. He is not fit for church leadership and should be removed from the pulpit and expelled from the congregation at the earliest opportunity.

Remember, Jesus came to cause conflict. Jesus explicitly said that he came to divide people. Anyone who opposes the very concept of conflict or divisiveness is obviously and observably on the other side.

Now they’re trying the gay one

As Anonymous Conservative has noted, the sudden bursts of overperformance on the part of Biden, Warren, Klobuchar, and now Buthesgay or whatever the name of the gay guy on the student council is, are just test runs by the DNC.

Support for former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg among Democratic and Independent voters in New Hampshire is gaining as the 2020 field gears up for the state’s primary next week, the latest polling data shows.

The figures—gathered daily by 7 News and Emerson College Polling—showed that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders maintains a healthy lead in the state where he won more than 60 percent of votes in the 2016 contest.

On Wednesday, 38-year-old Buttegieg closed the gap by four points from Tuesday, a overall nine-point boost for the candidate since Monday. Sanders’ support dropped one point from Tuesday to Wednesday.

Wednesday’s figures put Sanders at 31 percent, Buttigieg at 21 percent, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren tied at 12 percent, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar at 11 percent.

Critics of the media often claim that they are just covering the horse race. This isn’t actually true. What they’re doing is floating various options and seeing which candidate the voters are willing to buy into. Biden and Warren have already blown their shots. Klobuchar was given a little extra bump due to her proximity to Iowa, but unsurprisingly, her appeal remained nonexistent. Sanders is nearly as unpopular with the bank-media complex as Trump. Now it’s obviously the little gay guy’s turn to be floated as a trial balloon, which is going to prove supremely unsuccessful.

Once you understand the polls are entirely fake, it’s easy to see how they are utilized.

Okay, that would be bad

There is a possibility that the actual numbers for Corona-chan are considerably larger than the reported numbers:

As many experts question the veracity of China’s statistics for the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Tencent over the weekend seems to have inadvertently released what is potentially the actual number of infections and deaths, which were astronomically higher than official figures, but are eerily in line with predictions from a respected scientific journal.

As early as Jan. 26, netizens were reporting that Tencent, on its webpage titled “Epidemic Situation Tracker” was briefly showing data on the novel coronavirus (2019nCoV) in China that was much higher than official estimates, before suddenly switching to lower numbers. Taiwanese netizen Hiroki Lo that day reported that Tencent and NetEase were both posting “unmodified statistics,” before switching to official numbers in short order.

On late Saturday evening (Feb. 1), the Tencent webpage showed confirmed cases of the Wuhan virus in China as standing at 154,023, 10 times the official figure at the time. It listed the number of suspected cases as 79,808, four times the official figure.

The number of cured cases was only 269, well below the official number that day of 300. Most ominously, the death toll listed was 24,589, vastly higher than the 300 officially listed that day.

I do find it unlikely that the death rate is 16 percent instead of 2 percent, though. If that were the case, more people outside of China would have died already.

Soros is not buying the best and brightest

The Soros-funded app that ruined the Iowa caucuses was written by amateurs:

Motherboard asked six cybersecurity and app development experts we trust to analyze the app. The app was built on top of React Native, an open-source app development package released by Facebook that can be used for both Android and iOS apps, according to Kasra Rahjerdi, who has been an Android developer since the original Android project was launched, and Robert Baptiste, a white-hat hacker who has exposed security flaws in many popular apps and reviewed the code. Rahjerdi said that the app contains default React Native metadata and that it comes off as a “very very off the shelf skeleton project plus add your own code kind of thing.”

“Honestly, the biggest thing is—I don’t want to throw it under the bus—but the app was clearly done by someone following a tutorial. It’s similar to projects I do with my mentees who are learning how to code,” Rahjerdi said. “They started with a starter package and they just added things on top of it. I get deja vu from my classes because the code looks like someone Googled things like ‘how to add authentication to React Native App’ and followed the instructions,” Rahjerdi said.

“The mobile app looks hastily thrown together,” Dan Guido, CEO of cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits, told Motherboard.

Hey, look at the bright side of the debacle. At least journalists are finally learning to code!

Fake impeachment fail

The attempted dethroning of the god-emperor failed in the Senate, as we all knew it would:

The Senate on Wednesday voted to acquit President Donald Trump on both counts in his impeachment trial.

Forty-eight senators, including one Republican, found Trump guilty of abuse of power, while 52, all Republicans, voted to acquit him.

The president was also impeached on the charge of obstruction of Congress, in which all 53 Republicans found him not guilty and the remaining 47 senators voted to convict.

Now it is time for President Trump to demonstrate what happens to those who strike at the god-emperor and fail. Starting, of course, with Judas Romney.

The Black Musketeers

There may be seven of them. There may be three. Who knows anymore?

In an effort to celebrate Black History Month, and in a push for ethnic inclusiveness, book publisher Penguin Random House and retailer Barnes and Noble are turning white literary characters black.

For a promotional event in one of America’s largest cities, twelve classic novels are being given a facelift as covers swap characters’ races as a means of giving representation to individuals of varying ethnic backgrounds. Nothing in the novels themselves is being changed, so white characters within the so-called ‘diverse editions’ are still Caucasian in the text, making the move the literary world’s version of blackface.

Among the titles sacrificed on the altar of hollow pandering are Romeo and Juliet, Frankenstein, The Three Musketeers, and Moby Dick. Grabbing the most social media attention, however, is the updated cover to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as many believe it is dripping in racial stereotypes. The image depicts a black Dorothy, but instead of elegant ruby red slippers, the iconic shoes are replaced with a pair of sneakers.

And this is why Castalia Library is not only important, it is downright necessary. Because it is only a matter of time before Amazon starts deleting the non-updated versions from your digital libraries.

The amusing thing is that black authors are rightly irritated that Penguin and Barnes are attempting to use Black History Month to sell books by dead white authors instead of live black ones.

Mailvox: the spirit of Reepicheep

The talking mouse always was my favorite character in The Chronicles of Narnia:

I am reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for the first time and I am reading chapter 12, the Dark Island. It has made me love Reepicheep and he reminds me of you, the dread Ilk, VFM et al.

The scene is set when Caspian is deciding on whether to sail into the darkness and all advice is to the contrary:

But all at once the clear voice of Reepicheep. “And why not?” he said. “Will someone explain to me why not?”

No one was anxious to explain, so Reepicheep continued: “If I were addressing peasants or slaves,” he said, “I might suppose that this suggestion proceeded from cowardice. But I hope it will never be told in Narnia that a company of noble and royal persons in the flower of their age turned tail because they were afraid of the dark.”

“But what manner of use would it be ploughing through that blackness?” asked Drinian.

“Use?” replied Reepicheep. “Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honour and adventure. And here is as great an adventure as ever I heard of, and here, if we turn back, no little impeachment of all our honours.”

But this was the best reminding of your stout defense of friends such as Owen:

There came a cry, either of some inhuman voice or else a voice of one in such extremity of terror that he had almost lost his humanity. Caspian was still trying to speak his mouth was too dry-when the shrill voice of Reepicheep, which sounded louder than usual in that silence, was heard.

“Who calls?” it piped. “If you are a foe we do not fear you, and if you are a friend your enemies shall be taught the fear of us.”

Long live the spirit of Reepicheep! May we all aspire to it.

Reepicheep represents the indomitable spirit, the unconquerable spirit, of Man. He kneels only to the king and to Aslan, he fears no evil, and to say that he embraces conflict would be a serious understatement. In my opinion, it is he, not Caspian, Edmund, Lucy, or Eustace, who is the true hero of the tale.

My owns plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise and Peepiceek will be head of the talking mice in Narnia.

We need more women in technology

If the Iowa caucuses don’t demonstrate the importance of women in technology, I don’t know what will:

Hours after a debacle that marred Monday’s Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses, investors in a company hired to tabulate votes through a new mobile app worked to distance themselves from the company at the center of the chaos, scrubbing digital trails publicly connecting them to the firm.

The chaos in Iowa on Monday evening put a microscope on one of Democratic Party’s youngest and fastest-rising digital stars, Tara McGowan, prompting serious questions—and some conspiracy theories—about the constellation of advocacy, technology, and quasi-news organizations she’s built.

“It is a pattern of fake it till you make it,” one top Democrative operative said of McGowan and her firm, ACRONYM. “You talk a big game and then sort of hope it becomes true.”

On Monday, all eyes turned to one company in McGowan’s portfolio, Shadow Inc., as Iowa precinct chairs reported serious flaws with the app it had developed tabulate the vote. As complaints about the app trickled in on Monday, McGowan, who is the chief executive of Shadow investor ACRONYM, took to Twitter to describe her group as just that, an investor.

Miss McGowan probably should have stuck to talking about the need for more women in technology on the conference circuit. I sincerely commend the Democratic Party’s commitment to women and diversities in technology, and recommend they boost that commitment to the 100 percent level. Remember, diversity is your strength and straight white male technology is witchcraft!

Anyhow, it’s not a big mystery as to why ACRONYM bombed so badly despite being founded by “the Democrats most dangerous digital strategist.”

Acronym has taken hardly any time in breaking the strategy-firm ecosystem in the nation’s capital. By the end of 2018, it had raised and managed more than $18 million, registered 60,000 voters, run 105 targeted ad campaigns in 15 states, helped elect 63 progressive candidates and won 61 percent of the races it invested in. Its staff has grown from five to 38 and it has quickly become one of the go-to digital organizing forces for everyone from Planned Parenthood and Emily’s List to Everytown for Gun Safety and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

McGowan is just another Elizabeth Holmes. And never trust a “strategist” who couldn’t beat a 9-year-old boy in checkers.