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.”

They’ve learned nothing

One has to seriously wonder what Indiegogo thinks they are doing by determining that not only its campaigns, but its campaign contributors, are too risky for it. Apparently they want to add a few thousand more backers to their growing number of legal disputes.

This is particularly ironic as they never seem to have any problem with campaign owners who rip off their contributors and don’t actually deliver any products.

It’s an interesting business strategy, Cotton. We’ll see how it works out for them.

Color me dubious

This Reddit analysis strikes me more as revolution porn than a revelation of actual government wargaming analysis, but nevertheless, it appears to be generally correct with regards to the essentials:

The United States Government has extensively studied the concept of second American Civil War. Their conclusion is as follows: They don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning. The moment civil war is declared, the government loses. No scenario or outcome ends in their success. Period. It’s just a matter of how long it takes.

A longer analysis will follow, but here are the salient points.

30{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of the American population will actively revolt.

This alone is enormous and damning. Historically, you only need 10{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of the population to actively participate in a rebellion to successfully overthrow the establishment: We only had 15{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of the population actively attempting to throw out the British during the Revolutionary War; roughly 70{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of what remained was neutral and simply stood by. By contrast, 30{f33784e39f95a4a537f95eb029d837fe676a3542b2380ed2d704b841b03a8c5e} of Americans in modern America would support a revolution to stop their own government if it happened tomorrow That’s how discontent the people are and how much the people don’t support the government.

The government would need infrastructure more than rebels would.

Already working with significant handicaps, the establishment would need electricity, access to the Internet, bridges, and airports to coordinate any active campaign against the rebellion. By contrast, the rebellion can work in the dark. Considering how easy it would be to sabotage US infrastructure, one of the first things the rebellion would do is collapse bridges, destroy, or seize power plants, and cover the Interstate in IEDs. This is relatively simple to accomplish, and it would inflict enormous damage on the establishment’s ability to restore order. It would also cost an enormous amount of time and effort to fix any sabotage, because the establishment would need to provide military protection to any workers attempting to rebuild, which is a drain their active fighting personnel resources that they could not afford.

It would certainly make for an interesting wargame design challenge. And it also is in harmony with what we know of the Clinton adminstration’s study of the various militia groups and the government’s inability to suppress them. As a general rule, there is very, very little that governments can do about 4GW insurrections; a government that lacks the ability to suppress illegal organizations such as MS-13 and the Gulf Cartel isn’t going to be able to do much about ideological rebels either.

Stop eating people!

It’s not the heat, it’s the kuru:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel dismissed concerns about her health after visibly trembling at an official ceremony, saying she was just a bit dehydrated in the heat.

Merkel appeared unsteady and was shaking as she stood in the midday sun in Berlin on Tuesday next to visiting Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelensky, whom she was welcoming to her office building with military honours.

Mrs Merkel’s whole body visibly shook and she pursed her lips as she tried to contain the situation as she stood with Zelenskiy in the 28C (82F) heat while a military band played their national anthems outside the chancellery.

It’s rather strange how all these evil globalists exhibit symptoms that are usually only seen among cannibals, is it not?

Reprehensibly stupid

MGTOW are not only cowards and liars, they are reprehensibly stupid, as one Hop Light demonstrates on YouTube in response to my Darkstream entitled Men Going Evil’s Way:

Absurd stream.

“Is the legal system stacked against men? Yes.”
“Are there really bad outcomes? Well, yes.”

But…uh statistics are just statistics.

Vox, you’re smarter than this. It is only a true gamma fool of a man who gets married in this day and age. Completely suicidal in some states. It’s not fear, it survival and adaptation. It’s what men do.

I’m certainly considerably smarter than he is. My point was that the statistics are not applicable. What MGTOW do is attempt to apply GENERAL statistics derived from a population of millions to their own individual situation despite the fact that such statistics are totally meaningless when applied to ONE SPECIFIC individual.

What they’re doing is analogous to deciding one can afford to buy a $2 million house with a 7.84 percent mortgage interest rate because the average US housing price is $279,500 and the average mortgage interest rate is 4.39 percent.

Sounds like a good start

But we’ll see whether there is any follow-through on the words or not, or if it’s just more bluster:

President Donald Trump said on Monday that U.S. authorities would begin next week removing millions of immigrants who are in the United States illegally.

“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” Trump tweeted, referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. “They will be removed as fast as they come in,” he said. He did not offer specifics.

There are an estimated 12 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally, mainly from Mexico and Central America.

The real problem, of course, is with legal immigration. Because the fundamental problem involves quantity, not quality, much less legality.

Ben Shapiro is an intellectual drag queen

I’ll be going on with Alex Jones very soon, presumably to discuss Iran. But we’ll see… we always seem to end up off on a tangent that I didn’t see coming.

UPDATE: Yeah, we really didn’t discuss Iran. And I did NOT see those particular tangents coming.

Gammas destroy everything

Even a Navy SEAL team:

Andrea said it all began when her husband was tapped to lead the worst-performing SEAL Team platoon into the final battle to finish off the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in Mosul, Iraq, in 2017. It would be his eighth combat deployment and his second time to Mosul. During the workup to the deployment, Eddie turned it into the No. 1 platoon, she said. However, on the deployment beginning February 2017, things quickly soured between Eddie, who was the platoon chief, and his much-younger subordinate SEALs in their mid-20s.

Some of the platoon members started to complain constantly about the battle rhythm, she said. Eddie scolded them, saying, ‘You guys are not performing…on the SEAL teams, this is how we do it.” He told them to their faces, “You guys are performing like cowards and pussies,” she said.

Her husband pulled those who were not performing “off target,” she said. He started to send a group back to rest, and leave a group on target, alternating a week on and a week off. Meanwhile, Eddie, and the officer-in-charge Navy SEAL Lt. Jacob “Jake” Portier, and the assistant officer-in-charge Navy SEAL Lt. Tom MacNeil were the only people who stayed on target, she said.

Andrea said since her husband stayed on target the entire deployment, back at the rest house a “revolt” started. “They would all just b-tch and moan and piss…like high school girls,” she said. She said the initial campaign was started by four people, including some who had never been in combat before and were not handling the battle rhythm. She said Eddie told them, “What we’re doing is not anything over and above what the call of duty is. This is standard operating procedure.”

She said at that time, both Portier and MacNeil took Eddie’s side and were reprimanding the platoon members for lack of performance.

“It’s just very weird juxtaposition of this warrior community that’s been infiltrated by these weaker minded individuals that can’t be told what to do, they don’t respect authority, in fact they usurp authority and they don’t think that they’re accountable to anyone or anything,” she said.

If you ever wonder why I am absolutely ruthless about purging gammas from my projects and dev teams, to the point that I don’t even mind if a few innocent deltas or omegas get swept out with the cancer, this story of a gamma infestation gone septic should help explain why. It doesn’t matter how talented the gamma is, it doesn’t matter what level of fractalization he is on, sooner or later he is going to meltdown over something and devote himself to destroying the organization and its alpha.

This is so perfectly typical of gamma behavior it is to the point of being exemplary: the accusers decided they wanted three things. “They decided that what they wanted — the end goal was three things, they wanted my husband off of TRADET, they wanted my husband stripped of his silver star that they had put him in for. They also wanted him not to pick up E-8,” she said.

For the gamma, the point is always about harm caused to the hated alpha whether it does them any good or not. They are intrinsically focused on the negative, which is why you can never count on their own positive interests restraining them in the slightest.

The old rules don’t apply

Yet another reason to ignore Boomer advice, particularly as it regards the housing market:

Recently, however, we’ve lost the plot on the classic life arc of yesteryear. Places where real estate is cheap don’t have many good jobs. Places with lots of jobs, primarily coastal cities, have seen their real-estate markets go absolutely haywire. The most recent evidence of this remarkable change comes in a new report by the real-estate firm Unison. The company, which provides financing to homebuyers by “co-investing” with them, calculated how long it would take to save up a 20 percent down payment on the median home in a given city by squirreling away 5 percent of the city’s gross median income per year.

Nationally, the gap between income and home value has been rising. Using Unison’s methodology, it took nine years to save up a down payment in 1975. Now it takes 14.

But the aggregate numbers make the decrease in access to the real-estate market seem gradual, albeit troubling, and underplay the spikiness of the country. In Los Angeles, it would take 43 years to save up for a down payment. In San Francisco, 40. In San Jose and San Diego, 31. In Seattle and Portland, 27 and 23, respectively. In the east, New York and Miami topped the list, requiring 36 years to save up that down payment. Only Detroit, at seven years, was under the national average from 1975.

For young people in high-opportunity metro areas, the route to home ownership is basically blocked without the help of a wealthy family member or some stock options. Meanwhile, older people who bought under much more favorable circumstances have seen their equity stakes grow and grow and grow.

It’s really astonishing to review how many markets are fundamentally broken. I finally understand why some consider my 2033 timeframe to be optimistic. From my Gen-X perspective, the housing market was fairly reasonable until about 1997. That’s when everything took off like a rocket and essentially locked first-time buyers out.