Tag: trainwreck

93 percent corrupt

Apparently it’s very, very profitable running political “non-profits” these days:

Right Wing News hired a researcher who spent more than a month researching 17 conservative PACs so we could do a special report. What we found was shocking.

* The bottom 10 performing PACs we researched spent $54,318,498 overall and yet only paid out $3,621,896 to candidates.

* Did you know that despite the fact that it raised a staggering 13 million dollars, The National Draft Ben Carson for President isn’t affiliated with Ben Carson and the small percentage of money they spent on independent expenditures didn’t go to him? Now you know why Ben Carson’s business manager, Armstrong Williams wouldn’t allow the group’s campaign director to take a picture with Carson and said, “People giving money think it’s going to Dr. Carson and it’s not. …Our hands are tied. We don’t want people exploited.”

* The Republican Mainstreet Partnership is getting an enormous amount of union money.

“Labor unions provided significant funding for the (Republican Main Street Partnership) with Working for Working Americans, the International Union of Operating Engineers, and the Laborers International Union of North America all contributing around $250,000. The United Transportation Union ($30,000), Seafarers International Union ($20,000), were joined by the Teamsters, Air Line Pilots Association, International Association of Firefighters, and various other unions who contributed $10,000.  SEIU contributed $5,000, as did the Laborers Union, the Transport Workers Union and various others.”

In conclusion, “One of the things I realized while I was putting this report together is that perhaps the biggest reason grassroots candidates have been having trouble breaking through in recent years is because such a large percentage of the money that was intended for them is being siphoned off to vendors, wasted, and just plain old pocketed by people in these PACs.”

I’d like to be able to say that I was shocked, but I’m not even a little bit surprised. The only thing that is remarkable is the percentage of the skimming. That’s taking 93.3 percent off the top! They’re even worse than their sob-sister cousin charities; apparently fear-mongering is more profitable than tear-jerking.

The tedious Thor

It would have been vastly more entertaining had Thor come out of the closet. The Fabulous Thor! His outfit was always a little camp anyhow. Turning him into a grim transgendered feminist fighting to impose equalitarian thought control is as boring as it is offensive:

Thor a woman? It’s hard to believe the most macho, overtly masculine character in the comic canon could possibly be reimagined as a broad. But that’s almost certainly precisely the reason Thor was chosen: as a fuck-you to so-called nerdbros from the achingly progressive staff of today’s comic book establishment.

This has led to some questions from comic book fans. Questions such as: will Wonder Woman turn out to be a tranny? Is the Incredible Hulk only incredible because he endured cruel fat-shaming as a teen but didn’t let his size define him? And shouldn’t Spider-Man be a gay latino?

That last one’s not a joke, by the way: in 2011, Marvel unveiled a bisexual Spider-Man that was half-black and half-latino, called Miles Morales, to the consternation and confusion of ordinary comic book fans, as part of its Ultimate series of character reboots. We’re told “erasure,” whereby people’s pasts are scrubbed out by those in authority, is a social justice issue. Well, right now there’s erasure going in the basic, canonical biographies of some of Marvel’s most cherished superheroes.

Captain America, too, is changing: he’s becoming black. Changes like this are designed to provoke readers, and they do–not because readers are racist or sexist, but because they understand that certain characteristics are intrinsic to certain characters. James Bond and Captain America are obviously white. It is a part of their personalities. Thor is obviously a man; to suggest otherwise is daft.

What sticks in the craw of the fans I’ve spoken to about female Thor is how utterly transparent the political posturing is behind the change. There is no good literary justification for making Thor a woman, they say–and the results have been execrable. You can write intelligent satire about masculinity without making a classic masculine icon into a girl, an observation that seems to have escaped Marvel’s writers.

Of course, what all of these transformations most strongly indicate is the fact that Marvel believes women and minorities to be totally uninteresting. Not only does it highlight the fact that women and minorities can’t create their own characters, but even pro-intersectional white men can’t manage to create them in a manner that interests anyone, least of all women and minorities.

It’s exactly the same thing as a communist government taking over a capitalist society. They don’t understand how it works or why it works, they can’t create it or maintain it, but they can certainly manage to run it into the ground.

This comment from the SJWs at IGN is hilariously inapt:

“Not only do these scenes subtly acknowledge and render inert the
concerns voiced by real life detractors, but they also paint the
character in a stronger, more resilient light.”
— IGN

Subtle? The only way Marvel could have handled it any less subtly was if Thor spent the entire issue reading The Vagina Monologues with Gloria Steinhem at Wellesley.

It’s a joke, right?

The Republican elite is desperate to figure out a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory despite the electorate being weary after eight years of Obama’s misrule:

Jeb Bush is the clear Republican presidential frontrunner, surging to the front of the potential GOP pack following his announcement that he’s “actively exploring” a bid, a new CNN/ORC poll found.

He takes nearly one-quarter — 23% — of Republicans surveyed in the new nationwide poll, putting him 10 points ahead of his closest competitor, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who tallied 13%.

Physician Ben Carson comes in third, with 7% support, and Sen. Rand Paul and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee are both tied for fourth with 6%.

So, the Republicans have Bush III, Fatboy, and another token Negro on offer. 2016 looks like yet another election that I won’t be voting Republican even if the Democrats run a ticket featuring Asmoedeus and Belial.

I find the nominal Carson support to be particularly amusing. “Look, we got one too” has never been a winning strategy. And that’s especially true when everyone hates the previous one. It also makes it clear that no one got the “White Party” memo from the 2012 election.

It’s nothing of the sort, of course. Expressing support for an absurd black “candidate” is merely the Republican way of begging “see, I’m not a racist… please don’t hit me!”

The best books of 2014

For some reason, I’m on the GoodReads mailing list even though I don’t use it at all, so when I saw that the 2014 Readers’ Choice winners had been announced, I clicked on it to see if Larry Correia had won. And I literally laughed out loud when I saw the covers of the winners… now, do you notice anything that seven of these eight books have in common? Which one of these books is not like the others, which one of these books just doesn’t belong? Of course, as we know from the Hugo and Nebula Awards, it’s only a matter of a year or three before that last anomaly is viciously stamped out too. No wonder book sales are continuing to decline. Seriously, even the gamma males of science fiction aren’t going to read any of that equine ejectus.

And we are supposed to believe they’re honestly and truly going to make good, nay, even better, computer games. Really? To quote the Sports Guy: “The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.”

Here is the primary difference between men and women. In the past, women would look at a male-dominated list of book awards and be struck by feelbad because she felt excluded. A man looks at that list, laughs, and thinks, do they really read that shit? THIS STAR WON’T GO OUT? Are you freaking kidding me?

Robert Heinlein was wrong. These are not the Crazy Years. They are the #GIRLBOSS Years.

Fashion is the new science

The AAS releases a formal statement concerning men’s fashion:

The following statement was issued on 19 November 2014 by the Executive Committee of the American Astronomical Society on behalf of the AAS Council:

The past few days have seen extensive international discussion of an incident (known online as #shirtstorm or #shirtgate) in which a participant in a European Space Agency media conference wore a shirt with sexualized images of gun-toting women and made an unfortunate remark comparing the featured spacecraft to a woman. Viewers responded critically to these inappropriate statements, especially jarring in such a highly visible setting (one in which very few women appeared), and the scientist apologized sincerely. But in the meantime, unacceptable abuse has been directed toward the critics, from criticism of “over-active feminism” to personal insults and more dire threats.

We wish to express our support for members of the community who rightly brought this issue to the fore, and we condemn the unreasonable attacks they experienced as a result, which caused deep distress in our community. We do appreciate the scientist’s sincere and unqualified apology.

The AAS has a clear anti-harassment policy, which prohibits “verbal comments or physical actions of a sexual nature” and “a display of sexually suggestive objects or pictures.” Had the offending images appeared and comments been made under the auspices of the AAS, they would be in clear violation of our policy.

If I were a scientist, I would immediately resign from any organization that was releasing statements on fashion, much less had a formal policy on what I could and could not wear.

I’m sure it will surprise no one to know that the president of the AAS is a female SJW. The sad thing about this isn’t that most women care more about clothes and politics than science; we already knew that. What is both tragic and observable is that even women who are professional scientists care more about clothes and politics than science. They aren’t merely an embarrassment to their sex, they are the epitome of a humiliating shame to it.

It can’t possibly be true that “unacceptable abuse has been directed toward the critics”. Whatever abuse they received not only was well-merited, but didn’t go nearly far enough because they deserve shameless mocking for the rest of their pathetic lives.

And this is why you don’t let SJWs into any organization to which you belong. Because this is what they do.

The paradox of international aid

A longtime NGO enthusiast belatedly discovers that international development programs are an invasive species that change the targeted societies in unexpected, and often negative ways, and reliably fail to achieve the results intended.

This is the paradox: When you improve something, you change it in ways you couldn’t have expected. You can find examples of this in every corner of development practice. A project in Kenya that gave kids free uniforms, textbooks, and classroom materials increased enrollment by 50 percent, swamping the teachers and reducing the quality of education for everyone. Communities in India cut off their own water supply so they could be classified as “slums” and be eligible for slum-upgrading funding. I’ve worked in places where as soon as a company sets up a health clinic or an education program, the local government disappears—why should they spend money on primary schools when a rich company is ready to take on the responsibility?

My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant.

“That behavior was serving a need for them,” she says in her speech. “It made them feel powerful, it made them feel important, it gave them a sense of identity. … When that ended, [they] needed another kind of meaning in their lives.”

The fancy academic term for this is “complex adaptive systems.” We all understand that every ecosystem, each forest floor or coral reef, is the result of millions of interactions between its constituent parts, a balance of all the aggregated adaptations of plants and animals to their climate and each other. Adding a non-native species, or removing one that has always been there, changes these relationships in ways that are too intertwined and complicated to predict.

But it should be kept in mind that this dynamic works both ways. Mass migrants are also an invasive species, and they change the “ecosystem” they are invading every bit as much, and as “unexpectedly”, as the development programs do.

I need to see if I am still a member

Before I resign from IGDA:

In a sign of how frenzied, panicky and intolerant the games industry establishment has become over the legitimate concerns of ordinary gamers, the International Game Developers’ Association branded some 10,425 Twitter accounts, including those of journalists, as harassment “offenders” in a humiliatingly ill-conceived attempt to provide a “blocking tool” to its members.

The blocking tool, which has been widely mocked online for its lack of sophistication and “blanket ban” approach, was assembled by Randi Harper, a persistent online agitator. The tool prevents users from seeing not only the tweets of users Harper has decided are implicated in harassment, but also many accounts who simply follow those users, by blocking a list of thousands of users with the use of an automated “bot.”

So indiscriminately has the block list been compiled that the IGDA’s own staff appear on it. Roberto Rosario, chair of the IGDA in Puerto Rico, is named on the list. In an acutely embarrassing moment for the Association, Rosario, who is not a GamerGate supporter, publicly threatened to resign unless his name was removed or the bot was disavowed.

It turns out that I, too, am on the block list. I was asked to join IGDA by its then-president at a big European games conference some years ago, which I subsequently did. I’m pretty sure that he’s not the president now, because he didn’t strike me as a complete idiot. I know I’m a member of  a European GDA, but it’s a different organization than IGDA, so I don’t know what my current membership status is with them. Expired, I assume, but I’ll have to check on Monday.

Banning “feminist”

Men loathe them. Women are embarrassed by them. Civilized people despise them so much that TIME Magazine had to withdraw “feminist” from its “words to ban in 2015 poll” because so many people were voting for it and that made the feminists at the magazine experience the dread feelbad.

TIME apologizes for the execution of this poll; the word ‘feminist’ should not have been included in a list of words to ban. While we meant to invite debate about some ways the word was used this year, that nuance was lost, and we regret that its inclusion has become a distraction from the important debate over equality and justice.

In other words, “the important debate over equality and justice” should not involve any actual criticism of the beliefs of one side. Forget banning the word “feminist”, what would be better is to ban all feminists from the Western Civilization they are trying to destroy.

Feminism is the one ideology that makes National Socialism look merciful and Communism look viable by comparison. Regard its adherents accordingly.

How to make a monster

A Very Important Lesson from John Scalzi and the SJWs:

John Scalzi@scalzi
Kid called me out on Twitter last night for something she considered sexist. Proud of her; happy to have raised her so she knew she could.

Josh Neff ‏@joshuamneff
You’re doing parenting right.

The Inner Babysitter ‏@PSMHopkins
I literally cheered when I saw that last night.

Ben Emery ‏@JamesBenEmery
As a parent, that’s when you sit back and go, “I know I’ve made mistakes, but overall I haven’t completely failed.”

ChaosNexus ‏@ChaosNexus
I can’t imagine there would be any wilting flowers in the Scalzi household.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
@ChaosNexus There really aren’t.

Well, there is observably one wilting flower there, at any rate. Notice how the male SJW openly revels in his failure; he asserts pride in his own degradation. Now, where have I heard this sort of thing before? Ah, yes, now I recollect, in Isaiah, when the prophet speaks of the judgment of the wicked of Judah.

“O My people! Their oppressors are children, And
women rule over them. O My people! Those who guide you lead you astray and confuse the direction of your paths.”
– Isaiah 3:12.

And then, of course, there is this:

“The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it
to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of
parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed,
people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the
old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically
turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their
deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought
Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded
night and day by informers who knew him intimately.”
– George Orwell, 1984

There is nothing new about the SJW. He is the harbinger of evil and the symptom of a decadent society in the process of collapse. But to return to this specific SJW, there is, as you might expect on Twitter, a punchline.


@scalzi “Kid called me out on Twitter last night for something she considered sexist”
So you muted her?

High-larious.

That’s what you call a predictive model

The Anonymous Conservative wrote on November 5th:

While it is not clear why Lena Dunham canceled her book tour dates, it would not surprise me to find out that she is presently in bad shape health-wise – nauseous, headachy, weak, and probably fighting off some head-bug. One of the biggest things which will strike you about amygdala deficiency is how it will create physical illness from amygdala activation in those afflicted.

They really do live awful lives of horror.

That was followed the next day by this announcement concerning The Dunham Horror:

Lena Dunham postpones European book tour with ill health following claims she ‘sexually abused’ sister. Girls creator Lena Dunham has postponed two scheduled appearances on her European book tour until December citing ill health.

Considering the degree to which this lumpenrabbit is being subjected to widespread rejection, even by some inhabitants of the global warren, we should probably start a pool concerning the date of her upcoming “suicide attempt”.