Sounds like someone is lying to the President

President Trump calls off a planned strike on Iran:

Donald Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing a $180m US spy drone but pulled back last minute as planes were in the air and ships in position against the advice of some of his top aides, according to reports.

Military and diplomatic officials were said to be expecting a strike as late as 7pm Thursday, with planned attacks on Iranian targets including radar and missile batteries approved, The New York Times reports.

The paper says multiple senior administration sources confirmed the plans.

One insider is said to have told them planes were in the air and ships were in position when the mission was called off – against the advice Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, national security adviser John R. Bolton and CIA director Gina Haspel.

Iran had earlier released GPS coordinates suggesting the drone was eight miles off its coast. That put the missile within the 12 nautical miles from the shore Iran claims as its territorial waters.

Officials there later said they had ‘indisputable’ evidence the drone violated its airspace.

But the US said it was shot down 21 miles off the Iranian coast, in the Strait of Hormuz.

My guess is that he approved the strike but changed his mind when he found out that there was, at the very least, reason to question where his officials said the drone was shot down.

Mailvox: we have an answer

No, Neal Stephenson was not taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to writing Seveneves. Yes, Neal Stephenson has gone SJW, or so we are informed by a reader of his latest:

Neal Stephenson’s last novel Seveneves was just bad.  His newest effort Fall is full of social justice AND bad.  Thank God I got it from the library.

In this story, he has adhered to your theory that the USA will break up sometime in the 2030s, but the “Red State” area is called Ameristan, from which all smart/educated people have fled.  Ameristan has no dentists, so everyone has brown or missing teeth.  If anyone needs medical care, they have to sneak across the border to the “Blue Lands.” Nothing of value is produced in Ameristan, nothing is exported, everyone is dirt-poor.

Furthermore, Ameristan lives under the Levitican Law, which is a literal interpretation of the Old Testament.  Even the most obscure passages from the Bible are enforced, such as executing anyone who wears mixed linen and wool.  They also crucify people and burn crosses a lot.  The countryside is infested with roaming bandits, so everyone has to drive around with AK-47s or even vehicle-mounted machine machine guns, a bit like ISIS territory.  It’s such a heavy-handed parody it’s like something out of Saturday Night Live, but he isn’t joking.

Finally, Stephenson really lays on the feminism here.  The female characters are hyper-alert for “microaggressions” (yes, he really uses that word), for instance in one scene a character “decided to let the microaggression pass without comment.”  Also the women call out a male character for “mansplaining.”

At one point he talks about the bad old days, where women were harassed on the internet all the time, and men didn’t believe women could write good code.  Now (in the 2040s) everyone has an anonymous public ID – no one knows your sex, even when applying for jobs – so OF COURSE it turns out that when code is written anonymously, female-written code turns out to be better than men’s code!

Seveneves pretty much took Stephenson from “buy immediately in hardback” to “borrow from library only” in my eyes.  Now I think I’m just done with the guy.  I guess he was probably always like this, but now has so much money he thinks he can go wild.

I don’t know. It sounds so over the top that in light of his famous account of his duels with William Gibson, I can’t help but suspect him of selling books while taking the piss out of his SJW readers.

What happens when it’s a carrier?

Iran shoots down a US drone:

The US have confirmed that Iran has shot down one of its $180million spy drones, but refutes the Revolutionary Guard’s claims it was in Iranian airspace.

Iranian commander Hossein Salami declared his men were ‘ready for war,’ as the downing of the aircraft over its ‘red lines’ sent ‘a clear message’ to the Americans.

Tehran alleged an RQ-4 Global Hawk was shot down over their southern coastal city of Hormozgan, but a U.S. official said it had been a Navy MQ-4C Triton in international airspace.

A highly sophisticated missile will have been deployed, of deep concern to Washington not only for Tehran’s patently advanced arsenal, but the secrets they could steal in examining the stricken drone.

The MQ-4C soars to over 50,000ft, can be operated from 9,400 miles away and is loaded with optical/infrared sensors – it is believed to be the first time one has been taken out.

It comes amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington over U.S. economic sanctions and alleged Iranian attacks on shipping in the Straits of Hormuz.

It’s not quite so fun playing gunboat diplomacy when the enemy has the ability to sink your gunboats. The fact that a Triton has not been shot down before tends to indicate that Iran’s military capabilities are better than expected, which should give the Trump administration serious pause about listening to the neoclowns and their incessant demands for what very well could turn out to be the US empire’s Sicilian Expedition.

One should be hesitant to take either side at their word, however, since there were no Tritons officially deployed to the region and there is some belief that it was actually a RQ-4N BAMS-D drone, which are Global Hawks converted to experimental Tritons. This may explain the apparent contradiction in reports.

Now, remember, the neoclowns want us to believe that Iran can shoot down a new-model drone, which reportedly has never been done before, but nevertheless wasn’t able to sink a civilian ship in six separate attempts.

UPDATE: Iran has released what it claims are the precise coordinates of the shoot-down:

At 00:14 US drone took off from UAE in stealth mode & violated Iranian airspace. It was targeted at 04:05 at the coordinates (25°59’43″N 57°02’25″E) near Kouh-e Mobarak. We’ve retrieved sections of the US military drone in OUR territorial waters where it was shot down.

The decline of development

The growing number of development issues with the F-35 will not surprise anyone who understands that the US empire is in its decline-and-contraction stage:

According to a June 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office, the program had 111 category 1 deficiencies on the books in January 2018. By May 24, 2018, that number had decreased to 64 open category 1 problems out of a total 913 deficiencies, according to one document obtained by Defense News.

Another document obtained by Defense News noted that at least 13 issues would need to be held as category 1 deficiencies going into operational tests in fall 2018.

The 13 deficiencies include:

  • The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.
  • The spare parts inventory shown by the F-35’s logistics system does not always reflect reality, causing occasional mission cancellations.
  • Cabin pressure spikes in the cockpit of the F-35 have been known to cause barotrauma, the word given to extreme ear and sinus pain.
  • In very cold conditions — defined as at or near minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit — the F-35 will erroneously report that one of its batteries have failed, sometimes prompting missions to be aborted.
  • Supersonic flight in excess of Mach 1.2 can cause structural damage and blistering to the stealth coating of the F-35B and F-35C.
  • After doing certain maneuvers, F-35B and F-35C pilots are not always able to completely control the aircraft’s pitch, roll and yaw.
  • If the F-35A and F-35B blows a tire upon landing, the impact could also take out both hydraulic lines and pose a loss-of-aircraft risk.
  • A “green glow” sometimes appears on the helmet-mounted display, washing out the imagery in the helmet and making it difficult to land the F-35C on an aircraft carrier.
  • On nights with little starlight, the night vision camera sometimes displays green striations that make it difficult for all variants to see the horizon or to land on ships.
  • The sea search mode of the F-35’s radar only illuminates a small slice of the sea’s surface.
  • When the F-35B vertically lands on very hot days, older engines may be unable to produce the required thrust to keep the jet airborne, resulting in a hard landing.

The Pentagon has identified four additional category 1 deficiencies since beginning operational tests in December 2018, mostly centered around weapons interfaces, Winter said.

For the price of the F-35, the USA could have built 79,787 F-16s, or 17.3x more than were ever built. If you don’t understand why the USA is going to lose its next major war, look up the kill rate between German Panthers and US Shermans or between Tigers and T-34s. One F-35 might be better than one F-16, but it’s not capable of taking on 200 at a time.

The clash of low-trust cultures

The more the East invades the West, the more it becomes apparent that my explanation for the historical success of some minorities is dependent upon their possession of a low-trust, high-performance monopoly in a high-trust environment is the correct one:

As a commenter pointed out about my review of This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Suketu Mehta, the scion of an Indian diamond merchant clan, diamond merchants are about the last who ought to lecture white Americans on their failures of inclusion and diversity.

The diamond business is globalist yet intensely nepotistic. I knew an American woman who got a job in the Los Angeles diamond district but then went to work for an insurance company due to discrimination against women and non-Indians.

Indians have recently pushed Orthodox Jewish diamond businessmen largely out of their stronghold in Antwerp, Belgium, in part by being more clannish than the Orthodox Jews.

Jews are being pushed out of their merchanting and intellectual strongholds by the Chinese, the Indians, and other Asian groups because after centuries of competing successfully with high-trust Europeans, they are in no shape to compete with similarly low-trust cultures with larger extended families.

Note that the Mehta book is perfectly straightforward about immigration being not merely invasion, but conquest.

When the Middle Ages were Dark

Unauthorized professor Rachel Fulton Brown laments the colorization of what used to be known as the Dark Ages:

You remember, right? What it was like when the Middle Ages were Dark? The Roman Catholic Church made slaves of everyone, stripped them of their sense of dignity and independence and made social status a matter not of achievement, but birth. The Church hated science and industry and did everything in its power to keep people in chains. It guarded its authority with the sword and the stake, stifled all innovation, and fed the common people lies.

And why were these Ages so Dark? There were no universities, no towns, only castles with dungeons. Monks huddled in their cells thinking dark thoughts about sin, while Vikings stormed across the countryside, raping and pillaging and capturing Christians to sell as slaves. The Church refused to let anybody learn to read in case they got hold of the Bible and threatened its power.

Meanwhile, in the convents, women went mad, hysterically imagining themselves beloved by God, some even going so far as to have visions of being married to Christ. They were encouraged in these “absurd and puerile” delusions by their priests, themselves driven mad by their unnatural celibacy, who, when they were not seducing nuns, were inventing lies about witches having sex with the Devil, all the while blaming the women for inflaming their lust.

There was no commerce, no learning, no art. All was drab and colorless because the Church hated beauty. The kings were barbarians who knew nothing of law. The Church encouraged the worst superstitions so as to keep the laity bewitched and in fear of God. The barons thought nothing of torturing their own laborers, while the Church was ever on the lookout for heretics to burn at the stake.

Even the high culture was infected with superstition, as the Church coerced the laity into building great cathedrals simply in order to assert its power. Whereas the ancient Romans had build a great civilization (never mind the conquest and slaves), the Middle Ages knew only decadence and decline, thanks to the Church. There was no great literature or philosophy, only the demented ravings of the scholastics, who wasted their lives arguing such stupidities as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and insisting that the world was flat.

And then along came Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937) and ruined everything.

Prof. Brown’s first Unauthorized video will be available on Unauthorized.TV later this month.

Prediction: spectacularly bad

The Wheel of Time wasn’t any good in book form. One shudders to think how bad it will be by the time Amazon gets through with it:

Amazon’s highly anticipated TV series adaptation of the beloved book series The Wheel of Time has found its star. It was announced today that Oscar-nominated actress Rosamund Pike will play the lead role of Moiraine in the TV adaptation of Robert Jordan’s fantasy novels.

The Wheel of Time is set in a sprawling, epic world where magic exists, but only women can use it. Meaning that in this series — women hold the keys to power. The story follows Moiraine, a member of the shadowy and influential all-female organization called the ‘Aes Sedai’ as she embarks on a dangerous, world-spanning journey with five young men and women. Moiraine’s interested in these five because she believes one of them might be the reincarnation of an incredibly powerful individual, whom prophecies say will either save humanity or destroy it. The series draws on numerous elements of European and Asian culture and philosophy, most notably the cyclical nature of time found in Buddhism and Hinduism.

The Wheel of Time had a very good introduction. Then it promptly started going downhill in the first chapter and didn’t stop until it reached its nadir at Book Seven. But it was essentially unreadable beginning with Book Four. It’s never a good sign when a series is said to improve by its fans after the author’s death. I very much doubt the TV series will survive to the finish either.

I am, however, genuinely curious to learn who will play the most annoying character in fantasy literature, Rand al’Thor. Whoever he is, one hopes that he will possess a sufficiently punchable face in order to properly play the part. I suggest David Hogg.

No, no, HELL no!

What sort of drooling moron is going to give Mark freaking Zuckerberg control over his money, however virtual?

The much-hyped launch of Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra has met a brick wall of institutional skepticism as politicians and regulators take one look at CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy record and raise a collective eyebrow.

Calibra, the new Facebook subsidiary which will operate Libra, has made no secret of its ambitions to branch out from funds transfer into credit, bill payments and other more sophisticated products. Such consolidation of power in the hands of a company that already has a monopoly on online social interaction for its 2-billion-plus users – and a terrible record of protecting users’ privacy – has understandably worried the skeptics.

I already deactivated my Facebook account – and I’ll activate it only to delete it entirely. There is literally ZERO chance I will ever make any use of Libra. I’d rather trade in seashells.

Now on Unauthorized

Now that we have our logo sorted, we can finally begin the process of rolling out the platform-specific apps for which many viewers have been requesting. We also anticipate launching the Medieval History series very soon. This has been a big month for Unauthorized, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, it’s an excellent time to do so and ride with the outlaws of the Internet.

We’re also going to have a special badge for Unauthorized subscribers on SocialGalactic 2.0, which is rapidly approaching Alpha testing.

Convergence in credit cards

As it is written, every organization that becomes converged loses its ability to perform its primary function. Mastercard is in the process of doing so:

Every time someone in the trans or nonbinary community has to whip out their credit card to rent a car or buy dinner, they may be required to prove a credit card that misidentifies them is actually theirs. That can mean a string of uncomfortable, personal questions that may feel like harassment masquerading as security concerns, and it can make going about daily life not only emotionally draining, but downright dangerous.

According to one survey, nearly one-third (32{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e}) of individuals who have shown IDs with a name or gender that did not match their presentation found themselves being harassed, denied services, and/or attacked. That is a lot to deal with when you’re just trying to buy groceries, see a movie, get your hair done, or just exist in the world.

Now Mastercard is taking one step toward making life a little easier for people in this situation. The company just announced the True Name card, which will allow people to use their true names, not deadnames, on cards without the requirement of a legal name change. The True Name card will make lives easier and safer.

One of the primary functions of a credit card is to correctly identify the person to whom credit is being provided. Now imagine the myriad of ways this new security hole is going to be exploited by thieves and credit card scammers.

Clerk to tall bearded man: “Why does your credit card say Penelope Chao?”

Penelope: “That’s my True Name.”

Clerk: “You didn’t steal this card from that little Asian woman whose purse was snatched in front of the store yesterday?”

Penelope: “Of course not! Can’t you tell I identify as a woman?”

Clerk: “My apologies, Ms Chao. No offense intended.”

Penelope: “None taken. Hey, gimme three packs of Marlboro Reds too.”