Under the guidance of Santo Matteo, Italy is cleansing itself, street by street, quarter by quarter:
Police in Rome on Thursday cleared nearly 400 people, including dozens of children, from a shanty camp inhabited for years by members of the minority Roma community, despite a European Union court ruling halting demolition. Residents stood outside the camp with mattresses and other belongings piled alongside vehicles, some protesting against the move with chants of "Racists!"
Some residents complained that police used force during the eviction. Police commander Antonio Di Maggio denied the claims.
Mayor Virginia Raggi wrote on Facebook that the shantytown, established in a former campground called Camping River on Rome's northern periphery, was closed for hygiene reasons. Parts of the camp had been without electricity and running water. She said that the move was meant to provide greater protection to the Roma, especially minors, some of whom do not attend school.
"It is unacceptable to continue to finance places like this that create ghettos, and above all, where the living conditions don't protect the rights of children, women and men," Raggi wrote in a Facebook post.
The European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday asked Italian authorities to suspend action until Friday and outline plans to rehouse the community, following an appeal by three camp residents. But city officials said that they had long been working to relocate residents, and had delayed the planned closing by more than a year.
Raggi noted that some who were not Italian citizens had returned to their native Romania in recent months. While many members of Italy's sizeable Roma community, also known as Gypsies, are of Italian nationality, many living in the camp were from Romania, Kosovo, Bosnia and Serbia.
Condannato per violenza sessuale su una minorenne, che in seguito a quegli abusi si ammazzò, un uomo di 45 anni è stato ucciso ieri sera a Frasso Telesino, un centro del Beneventano, dove era tornato da un paio di giorni grazie a un breve permesso ottenuto dopo nove anni di detenzione. L’assassino ha raggiunto Giuseppe Matarazzo fin dentro casa, per poi allontanarsi senza essere notato da nessuno, almeno stando alle prime indagini avviate dai carabinieri. Che per ora non si sbilanciano sul movente, ma certo Matarazzo difficilmente può avere avuto il tempo di farsi qualche nemico nelle poche ore di libertà di cui ha goduto in questi giorni, quindi è più che probabile che l’omicida avesse con lui un conto aperto da molti anni, e vista la colpa di cui si macchiò, non si può escludere che chi ha deciso di ucciderlo abbia ritenuto che l’uomo meritava una condanna superiore a quella inflittagli in corte d’assise e poi in appello.
Translation: a priest in Napoli who was jailed for molesting a 15-year-old girl, who later killed herself, was let out of prison for two days after serving 9 years of his 11-year sentence. At the end of the two days, he was found shot to death in his home. His death was not believed to be a suicide.
Look at what is happening in Hollywood. It's very typical. You've got a small tight group, they're corrupted by their own power, they're enslaved to their own desires, and they have turned their back on God, they've turned their back on Christian morality, and it's not an accident that you've got a lot of the people there who are not merely not Christian, but they are openly and avowedly anti-Christian. They're afraid of Christians, they hate Christians, but more importantly, they hate God and they hate Jesus Christ. And that will be their downfall.
It's going to be beautiful seeing how the SF-SJWs react to the coming collapse of Tor Books. They are just horrible little creatures. The Toad of Tor is still so bitter about her husband's muting by Macmillan that she is after anyone who dares to so much as speak well of me.
This week I launched Flying Sparks, my beautiful superhero comic of a hero and villain in love, and the mantra of Jon Del Arroz “isn’t really a bestseller” continued. The publisher’s wife and employee of the company Teresa Neilsen Hayden launched an attack on me because I spoke positively of fellow author Vox Day, who has recently taken a generous amount of time actually criticizing some of my work in a constructive way and guiding me to help me become a better author, something no one from Tor has ever come close to doing in their childish namecalling and gaslighting attacks.
But the Nielsen Haydens still have just enough influence within the creepy little SF fandom community to put on a show for the Twitter Trust & Safety Council at the expense of the leading Hispanic voice in science fiction. Based on my experience, this is the prelude to Jon Del Arroz's eventual banning from Twitter.
I don't know about you, but I'm truly going to enjoy Arkhaven and Castalia House crushing these evil grotesqueries. They have already failed, they simply aren't fully aware of it yet. Once the full extent of what we're now in the process of doing becomes clear to them, they're going to need to seriously up their medications. And speaking of Jon Del Arroz, I can confirm that Dark Legion Comics will be publishing the retail editions of his successfully-funded Flying Sparks comic.
The problem mortals face in striking deals with the devil is that eventually, time will run out. This blind item from seven months ago on CDAN is almost certainly relevant to Ronan Farrow's expose of CBS and Les Moonves.
Make that definitely relevant, as this prophetic comment on the blog post demonstrates: Ronan Farrow is on this. He's doing a major profile for the NY Times and has been calling people all over the industry--causing a panic at Viacom and CBS. Remember, both the post and the comment are from January, 2018.
Tick tock, tick tock. That clock is ticking loudly as a chain of events and a metaphorical deal with the devil can bring down this entire media corporation and their now-struggling studio within the coming year. This one has been a long time coming, and is thankfully about to come to an end for the perpetrators of some of the modern entertainment industry's worst long-time institutional abuses of underage actresses. For many of the long-time CDAN regulars this one won't be a shock, although the details might. Many people in Hollywood and out have been waiting to see when this Producer at this cable network is going to be called out, publicly accused, or charged for his many years of abuse behind the scenes. Many have wondered why - with so many others being brought down - he's managed to escape almost unscathed? It's because of his Protector. His Protector is the mega-wealthy big boss of the studio and corporate parent, and he wields a lot of power over many types of media, in both Hollywood and New York. Many years ago the Producer got himself in serious trouble over his perverted abuses of several of his actresses. Not just those he abused himself, but those he encouraged his writers, directors, and co-producers to sexually abuse. This was not a one-time thing, but an ongoing constant pattern which led those actresses to drugs, self-destruction, self-abuse, mutilation, destroyed dreams, wasted careers, damaged families, and even insanity. Made more disgusting by the complicity and apathy of the parents, "momagers", and guardians who just wanted fame and money. All so that some jolly perverts could get their rocks off living out their sick unfulfilled tweenage dreams. At that time, the Protector still had most of his marbles and was going to live forever. Many believe he still may, although he's now alive in name only and the flames are lapping at his legs daily. Back then he still had his iron grip on his business and he's never been afraid to sue, threaten, harass, or destroy others as his favorite sport.
Back when the abuses emerged as whispers at the corporation, the executives and The Protector sat down with his corporate bean counters and realized the massive cash cow this Producer was for them. Huge. Very huge and big in every way. In fact, probably one of the three biggest revenue generators in the corporate parent's entire history (especially in the coveted target demographic for ads, merch, and licensing). When that much is at stake, they don't want to rock the boat or kill the golden goose (Or cow. Or even a giant pig.). Anyway, on the other hand? It is a public corporation, and that means things can get leaked and revealed just through statements and financial reports. What then evolved was a corporate game of chess that nobody could imagine.
The Producer was no dummy, so he personally hired investigators to provide ammo for his case. He then hired top financial experts to lay out the revenue he and his cronies represented to the corporation both in the past and in future revenues. So when the Protector summoned him? The Producer showed the Protector a huge financial report to validate his power and worth to the bottom line. Then he showed a massive dossier of files going back 50 years of the powerful Protector's own misdeeds. From New York, to Hollywood, to Boston, to London - a trail of abuses, perversions, thefts from his company, abuse, stealing from his own family, and even outright felonies. By the time he got down the list to mention offshore banking, the Protector knew he'd met someone on his level. Thus the two twisted men forged a strategy and agreement to protect each other and the corporation.
The Producer surrendered his very expensive background report - and the Protector agreed to make all those "pesky" abuse whispers go away. They also agreed to blame another big corporate executive within the corporation if anything ever did leak out and set him up as a fall guy. The Protector even targeted one of his corporate underlings to shoulder the blame too, so he could claim ignorance. None of this was simple, instant, and was NOT cheap or easy. But the perverted Producer was smart enough to have limited potential witnesses by keeping his rapes/abuses down to he said/she said. And for more than a decade in the pre-Cosby & pre-Harvey days a reporter, lawyer, or cop wouldn't accuse in such instances without hard proof.
Whether Moonves is an attempted distraction or a prelude is irrelevant. The evil old Protector can't protect the depraved Producer any longer, so it's just a matter of time before the first big crack in the dam of information about the Hollywood pedos appears.
Both CBS and Viacom are going down hard. Nor will they be the only organizations to do so. Neon Revolt has more.
Ronan Farrow releases his expose on CBS CEO and alleged sex predator (((Les Moonves)))
For more than twenty years, Leslie Moonves has been one of the most powerful media executives in America. As the chairman and C.E.O. of CBS Corporation, he oversees shows ranging from “60 Minutes” to “The Big Bang Theory.” His portfolio includes the premium cable channel Showtime, the publishing house Simon & Schuster, and a streaming service, CBS All Access. Moonves, who is sixty-eight, has a reputation for canny hiring and project selection....
Six women who had professional dealings with him told me that, between the nineteen-eighties and the late aughts, Moonves sexually harassed them. Four described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, in what they said appeared to be a practiced routine. Two told me that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers. All said that he became cold or hostile after they rejected his advances, and that they believed their careers suffered as a result. “What happened to me was a sexual assault, and then I was fired for not participating,” the actress and writer Illeana Douglas told me. All the women said they still feared that speaking out would lead to retaliation from Moonves, who is known in the industry for his ability to make or break careers. “He has gotten away with it for decades,” the writer Janet Jones, who alleges that she had to shove Moonves off her after he forcibly kissed her at a work meeting, told me. “And it’s just not O.K.”
Thirty current and former employees of CBS told me that such behavior extended from Moonves to important parts of the corporation, including CBS News and “60 Minutes,” one of the network’s most esteemed programs. During Moonves’s tenure, men at CBS News who were accused of sexual misconduct were promoted, even as the company paid settlements to women with complaints. It isn’t clear whether Moonves himself knew of the allegations, but he has a reputation for being closely involved in management decisions across the network. Some of the allegations, such as those against the former anchor Charlie Rose, as reported by the Washington Post, have already become public. Other claims are being reported here for the first time. Nineteen current and former employees told me that Jeff Fager, the former chairman of CBS News and the current executive producer of “60 Minutes,” allowed harassment in the division. “It’s top down, this culture of older men who have all this power and you are nothing,” one veteran producer told me. “The company is shielding lots of bad behavior.”
It's time for CBS to clean house, starting with the chairman and CEO.
A guy who works in the industry sheds a little light on the corruption of the Hollywood cabal in the chans:
The A list community is broken down like this:
Somewhere around 30% are abusers (and that ranges from pedophile/trafficker /sacrificer down to having a casting couch).
Somewhere around 30% are genuine victims (there are literal slaves who believe they are living the high life, down to people who are raped and pressured into silence).
Somewhere around 30% willingly trade sexual favors for opportunities (ranges from begrudgingly, but they know how the system works to being a little cabal darling who loves or even gets off to whoring around).
The remaining 10% who are not applicable to the above is made up of:
People who are self-made and chose never to associate with the cabal. We know them from their own efforts, and they happened to get lucky or strike gold.
People who are insanely popular and make enough money for THEM that they have the clout to refuse to participate. They are usually blackmailed by credible threats of violence or ruining their careers into being quiet. Perhaps you could consider these people complicit.
People who are extremely diligent in not allowing themselves to be courted by THEM. This means either not going to or leaving early from Hollywood events and parties, and treating every time another person tests their waters like a joke or over reacting to the small stuff.
People THEY simply don’t want. Their standards may seem low, but there are hosts of people that the public likes and that came them money, but for one reason or another THEY don't want them in the group. They'll allow these people to remain on the outskirts of the group but will never even attempt to invite them to the inner circles.
This board has become known, and some people keep eyes on it. Some people get briefings on it. They are nervous that people are dedicated enough to dig, draw connections, lay them out plainly, then organize/coordinate to put them in front of a wide audience. These kinds of these used to be relegated to conspiracy boards and easily dispelled by mocking.
Current climate knows to fear drawing the attention of the masses. They also know once the hoard has their eye on you, everything they do is closely monitored, which is incredibly claustrophobic for people who thrive on symbolism and covert communication out in the open.
Immense push back on James Gunn's firing as witch hunt in specific is an effort to shame the masses out of shaming people out of jobs and not let this set precedent.
Many still think and expect they'll be able to sacrifice a few of the guilty publicly to preserve the rest. Many believe there will be a few more Weinsteins and Kevin Spaceys, but they'll be okay. Some are freezing everything until this blows over. Some see the writing on the wall and oppose publicly to try and stop.
I'm not even remotely surprised to hear that the pushback on the Gunn firing is coming straight out of the Hellmouth. It had the stink of coordination to it. This is confirmation that we should be highly suspicious of the mockers, condemn the defenders and enablers, and press on with even more investigations into uncovering the truth, whatever it may be. The more pressure that they feel, the more some will feel the need to come clean while others desperately try to cover things up. And if history is a reliable guide, it is through the attempted coverups that the whole thing will come crashing down.
Weaponized autists may not be the heroes that we wanted, but they are the heroes that we need.
The CBS CEO, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, is accused of unwanted kissing and touching in a New Yorker article set to be published Friday. The New Yorker is poised to publish an article by Ronan Farrow that includes allegations of sexual misconduct on the part of embattled CBS chairman and CEO Leslie Moonves, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
A spokesperson for The New Yorker says, “We don't comment on pieces we haven't published." Sources with knowledge of the article say it delves into the broader culture at CBS and will publish later today on the magazine’s website.
CBS said in a statement that it is investigating the claims made against Moonves. “All allegations of personal misconduct are to be taken seriously," the network stated. "The Independent Directors of CBS have committed to investigating claims that violate the Company’s clear policies in that regard. Upon the conclusion of that investigation, which involves recently reported allegations that go back several decades, the Board will promptly review the findings and take appropriate action.”
The allegations are said in part to involve instances of unwanted kissing and touching that occurred more than 20 years ago, as well as numerous claims that occurred more recently.
He's not the first. He won't be the last. These losers literally cannot control themselves around attractive women. It's long past time to flush them all out of the entertainment system and the corpocracy.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organization, and the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services (DWS) are celebrating the launch of a new Unemployment Insurance system this week - WYUI - for the State of Wyoming. The WYUI solution is a fully modernized Unemployment Insurance system that will improve the way claimants interact with the state with a more user-friendly interface and expanded self-service capabilities.
TCS' WYUI solution is a robust, scalable and repeatable platform with the ability to integrate and control multiple functional requirements, including online claims processing, payments, adjudication, and appeals. The WYUI implementation is also one of the first in the United States to be developed, tested and implemented in Microsoft Azure in such a short time frame, and within budget. Hosting the new system on Azure makes it more scalable than the previous system, and as the data housed in the system continues to grow, the system itself can be expanded.
TCS has already enabled several U.S. states to modernize their systems to support Unemployment Insurance programs, including Mississippi and Maine, as part of the ReEmployUSA Consortium. By partnering with Wyoming's DWS, TCS has replaced a 34-year-old benefits and appeal legacy system with a modernized system, within a span of less than 20 months.
About Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS)
Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world's largest businesses in their transformation journeys for the last fifty years. TCS offers a consulting-led, cognitive powered, integrated portfolio of IT, Business & Technology Services, and engineering. This is delivered through its unique Location Independent Agile delivery model, recognized as a benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata group, India's largest multinational business group, TCS has more than 400,000 of the world's best-trained consultants in 46 countries.
What a truly virtuous cycle! Put American workers out of work, then get paid to process the transfer payments between the state government and the unemployed workers. Imagine how much money can be transferred to Indiasaved by replacing the entire Social Security Administration with Tata Consultancy Services!
So, the van pulled into an Autohof in Germany and we parked a little distance from the cafe/coffee shop/restaurant/news-stand/playground. We needed to stretch our legs, since we’d been on the road for several hours and would be driving for a few more. As we strolled to the Hof, the driver pointed to the parking slots right in front of the doors and shook his head. There were the usual handicapped places, and then two, pink, “Women Only” slots.
Not pregnant women, not elderly women, not women with small children, just women.
Oh come on! You have to be kidding me. What became of Grrrrrrrrl Power!? What became of “I am woman, hear me roar”? Women are so delicate that we need parking slots even closer than the designated handicapped places?
What became of them? They were nonsense from the start. The sooner everyone finally gets around to admitting that there is no such thing as sexual equality, there never was, and there never will be, the sooner society can be restructured on rational and sustainable grounds.
A tweet Sarah Silverman sent nine years ago, which she says was a joke, has some labeling her a pedophile.
In July 2009, the comedic actress tweeted, "Hey, is it considered molestation if the child makes the first move? I'm gonna need a quick answer on this."
On Wednesday, the conservative publication Townhall posted a story about that tweet with the headline, "Disney Voice Actress and Comedian Sarah Silverman Also Joked About Molesting Children." The article noted that a Twitter user asked Silverman about the 2009 tweet last year, "Was that supposed to be funny? Cause it wasn't."
Silverman responded to the controversy on Thursday.
Sarah Silverman@SarahKSilverman Some very odd people R saying I’m a pedo, re: a joke from a time not that long ago when hard absurd jokes by comedians were acknowledged for what they were — jokes — not a disengenuous national threat to people fake-clutching their pearls (whilst ranting the country’s too PC)
If it's not okay to joke about Jews or Nazis or Africans, then it's absolutely not okay to joke about molesting children. If jokes about Jews mean you're an anti-Semite, and jokes about Africans mean you're a racist, then jokes about molesting children obviously mean you're a pedophile and you should be hunted down, disemployed, banned from social media and payment processing, and rejected by all right-thinking citizens.
Those are the rules. The logic is straightforward and impeccable. So deal with it.
A number of people have been asking me to do the occasional Darkstream dedicated to games and game development, so I gave it a shot last night and it appears to have been reasonably well received. Because I anticipate considerably more discussion on this front in the coming months, and because a lot of the people interested in it will have no interest in the other subjects regularly addressed here, I'm not going to post Devstreams here, but on the DevGame blog instead.
The interesting thing to me about Fortnite, and the reason why I consider Fortnite to be essentially the game designers more or less giving up, is because what we have been doing as FPS designers from the very beginning is attempting to provide meaning and structure and story and experience to the action, and unfortunately we've been fighting the tendency of a certain group of players - who I am not at all convinced are the majority of players, but there are a lot of them - and they have a tendency to simply run around like chickens with their heads cut off. If you've played any online game starting back in the days of Doom and Heretic - yeah when we were playing with 4-player and 8-player networks - what you would see is some people would play strategically, some people would camp, other people would would team up and move cooperatively, but you always had the people who just run around like crazy, blasting away like crazy, and basically behaving in a way that you can't even possibly consider anything that is remotely approaching anything credible or realistic.
And so, with Fortnite, and I have played it, and it's a very good example of what it is the Battle Royale genre and so forth, but ultimately there is no purpose, there is no story, the action is the experience. Now that's ok, that's fine if that's if that's what you want, but you see, for years designers have been trying to hide that, they've been trying to keep that under control, and what Fortnite represents - and it's obviously not the first Battle Royale game, it's not the only one, but it is the most successful, the most symbolic of the concept - it's basically the designers throwing up their hands and saying, "you know what, you guys just want to run around like chickens with your heads cut off slaughtering each other, here you go!" And to their credit, they give you the means to do that, so that's what's different between that and Call of Duty and Battlefield and all these other FPS games. Almost all the other games were trying to limit that, they're trying to limit it through the level designs they're trying to limit it through the ammo drops, and all that sort of thing.
I can't say more about this at the moment, but there is a very real possibility that we will soon be moving Alt-Hero into the game space as well as the movie space in the not-too-distant future. So, it's best to be prepared for that.
Never much liked Stereopony, and I'd put Scandal above Doll$boxx, but they definitely got the #1 band right. They're just spectacularly good. Even the soft poppy new song is well-written and has got the big chorus as well as a nice bass line.
NOW LIVE: Bestselling comic author, editor & video game designer #VoxDay joins todays broadcast to explain his pro-West work including an SJW-free alternative to Wikipedia and more.
I understand that the elite in Washington thinks Americans are stupid. But how dumb do you have to be to preen and posture about "self-determination" and "spreading democracy" for nearly 100 years, only to turn around and reject the overwhelming results of a free and fair referendum:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement Wednesday saying the US "rejects Russia's attempted annexation of Crimea and pledges to maintain this policy until Ukraine's territorial integrity is restored."
"The United States calls on Russia to respect the principles to which it has long claimed to adhere and to end its occupation of Crimea," the statement reads. Pompeo is also expected to state in congressional testimony Wednesday that the United States will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, a European diplomat briefed by the State Department told CNN.
Pompeo's declaration comes after President Donald Trump had appeared to cast doubt on his administration's commitment to Ukraine's claims over the peninsula. Asked by reporters on Air Force One at the end of June whether the United States would recognize Russia's claim on Crimea, Trump ambiguously responded: "We're going to have to see."
Perhaps it's just a negotiating point. Perhaps it's just for show. Regardless, it's stupid and totally unconvincing. Self-contradictory rhetoric is the worst and least effective kind of rhetoric.
A backer wants to know how he can support Voxiversity:
Is it possible to support Voxiversity other than Freestartr? It appears to be down.
Freestartr is down, apparently thanks to Stripe's shenigans, and they have not been able to get anything up and running in the time period I discussed with them. Nor have any of the backers been able to contribute anything since May. So, after consulting with several backers, I've arranged to get the campaign up on a new site which I will announce as soon as it is ready later this week. I hope most of the backers will be able to make the transition to the new site.
We will have two Voxiversity videos out in August. I've been focusing on building up the Darkstream subscriber base in the meantime. While they are two different channels, from my perspective, it's a single video front, so supporting one is supporting the other. There is a lot of room for improvement, of course, but we are making steady progress, these occasional setbacks and delays notwithstanding. I've also been working on something that will have a major impact on everything from Castalia to Voxiversity, and I hope to be able to announce something about that before the end of October.
In not-entirely-unrelated news, I will be appearing on the Alex Jones show today at 1 PM Central today to discuss comics and culture war, among other things.
And for those of you who have been repeatedly asking me for essential book recommendations, I've put together short book lists for what I consider to be the best in literature, history, science fiction, and fantasy at the Castalia Direct Store. I'll be adding to these in the future, this is just a bare-bones beginning.
A reader points out how Agile development provides an entry point for converging technology companies:
It took a while to notice but there is something happening in even non-converged companies. They call it "Agile" in the instances I know of, but that has been around and revised for the last two decades.
It is being sold as what Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. use to get great gains in productivity and measure their teams' performance. Instead, it is where the cancer can hide. That doesn't mean you don't yet have cancer, only that you won't be able to tell as the nerves are dead.
Having been involved with it being "imposed from above" and discovering it in other companies I finally know why some of the stupid or meaningless kabuki is being used.
If something in your software development process seems either meaningless, stupid, or even counterproductive, it is because the purpose is not coding quality, probably is being celebrated elsewhere as a product of SJW convergence, but is being adopted and imposed on your team. I doubt it is even intended to weaken or destroy competition, but that is the result.
First, there is no measure of individual productivity. All that matters is the "team velocity" which is basically socialism coding (to paraphrase GitHub). This is bad enough when you have a fixed size of similarly capable coders working on the same thing. But what if the team consists of some HTML people, some CSS people, and some JavaScript people who do nonot know much about the other domains, or worse just 3 people, one of each? Yet the measurement is overall. Worse is you typically have a few stars, and supporting actors. So what happens when your two best Java Jockeys are replaced with Danny Diversity and Betty Bugwright that are actually a negative? The powers go into a tizzy and complain about the TEAM slowing down. Everyone on the team knows why but can't say. And what is your evaluation and/or bonus or whatever based on? Being a team player, not a team winner.
Second is "the two week sprint". Why two weeks? Imagine a complex subproject that will take someone good three months to go from start to finish, but you know that he can do it as he has been reliable. What this new process does is require it to be broken down into a dozen individual 2 week tickets with what needs to be completed - yes, a real deliverable - a each point. You might recognize this as the hardest part of any nontrivial change or addition. But Danny Diversity can't even begin to understand how to do anything for the complex subproject, but can copy a bubblesort routine when it is needed for sprint #9. It is worse than that because 2 weeks is the MAXIMUM granularity, but the idea is to have half-day sized projects.
Note there will be "customers" that request a feature, and "the team" is supposed to estimate it, but in the new paradigm design is either omitted, relegated outside the team, or is done in parallel (usually as resented tickets trying to do a mini-waterfall inside the "agile" - usually it is the reverse). If you are making small patches, easily reversed to something like a website (e.g. add popup for shopping cart), this can work because the granularity is small, testability is high, it is a small mod, not a major design, and can be backed out instantly. Imagine if an OTA update bricks or introduces a huge vulnerability to a smartphone.
Third, one of the foundations of Agile is constant refactoring, often built in to the process, to avoid accumulating technical debt. If refactoring is one of those things that is avoided or treated like something that we haaaave to do, you are doing the converged version of "Agile". Why? Because Betty Bugwright and Danny Diversity will get their tasks done in the sprint, but either any review will reject them or a clean-up tech debt ticket will have to be added. Can't let there be a visible pattern of where the accumulation of technical debt is coming from. Like San Francisco wondering why the spontaneous appearance of the feces and needles on the side walks.
Fourth, Participation (a)Trophy Test driven code. Actual regression tests are very useful, but hard to do and take time and effort to code. Expecially cross module unit and system tests. Instead, we get kabuki where Danny writes a routine to verify Add(2,2) returns 4, which is still better than letting him modify any used part of the code. But you can add thousands of lines of meaningless clutter, imply that the quality is improving because it is now "tested" while the system is collapsing, and give the deadweight something nondestructive to do for the kabuki.
True Agile is a toolbox, with screwdrivers to remove screws, hammers for nails, and wrenches or at least pliers for bolts. But when all you have is a hammer...
This is an astute observation. I may have to include it almost verbatim as an example in Corporate Cancer.
The core problem with macroeconomics is that it is an abstraction piled upon fiction which is then used to set policies with material consequences. As I addressed in no little detail in The Return of the Great Depression, the margin of error observably involved in the reporting of economic statistics is greater than that required to know something as basic as if the economy is growing or contracting. That is why it matters very much indeed that over half of the government's spending data is wrong:
A new bipartisan Senate report revealed more than half of the government's public data on federal spending is wrong, as the website USAspending.gov is riddled with errors.
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by chairman Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and ranking member Tom Carper (D., Del.), released a report Tuesday finding nearly every agency is failing to accurately report its spending as required by federal law.
The subcommittee reviewed over two dozen inspector general reports and determined 55 percent of the spending data submitted to USAspending.gov was inaccurate. The errors accounted for $240 billion in spending during the second quarter of 2017, according to the report.
The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014, or DATA Act, required federal spending to be easily accessible to the public through a searchable website, which became USAspending.gov. The website was revamped earlier this year, but agencies are not meeting their requirements to submit accurate, consistent, and reliable data on its spending.
The agency in charge of USAspending.gov—the Treasury Department—is among the worst culprits, as 96 percent of its own data is inaccurate.
To put this in perspective, $240 billion amounts to 1.3 percent of the $18.6 trillion US GDP. Since it was reported that GDP grew 3.1 percent in the first quarter of 2018 compared to the previous quarter, that means that actual GDP growth was either 4.4 or 1.8 percent that quarter, depending upon which way the error lies.
And since the last two quarters growth are reported at 0.7 and 0.5 percent, these government spending errors may mean that the US economy is already in a statistically hidden recession.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq was set for a big down day Thursday after disappointing quarterly results from Facebook sent the social media giant hurtling toward its biggest share price decline ever and on track to lose more than $125 billion in market value. The Invesco QQQ Trust, which tracks the Nasdaq 100 index and can give traders a good idea of how the Nasdaq stocks will trade, was down more than 2 percent at one point in after-hours trading Wednesday. At last count, the ETF was off by about 1.5 percent. Nasdaq futures opened lower Wednesday evening, off by about 0.8 percent. Facebook lost more than a fifth of its value after hours.
I don't think these guys understand how many people now sincerely believe that everyone on the Left is an evil deviant who hates Jesus Christ, Christendom, children, comics, and video games.
At this point, though, good faith isn’t required for a conservative social media takedown. After seeing figures like Google engineer James Damore fired for what their supporters see as mere political differences, many on the right have subscribed to what conservative writer Kurt Schlichter has termed “the new rules.”
As long as conservatives get fired for their political opinions, in their view, they can use campaigns to get liberals fired for the same.
Of course we can. And of course we will. If you don't like it, then you shouldn't have permitted us to be deplatformed in the first place.
The other shoe has finally dropped for Clare Bronfman, the heiress behind the alleged cult leader. Bronfman, who’s an heiress to the Seagram’s liquor fortune, was long ago outed as a major bankroller of Keith Raniere, the empowerment guru turned master manipulator who’s been charged with sex trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking, and conspiracy to commit forced labor.
On Tuesday, Clare Bronfman was taken into custody in New York City. A superseding indictment charged Bronfman alongside several other top NXIVM members: Kathy Russell, Lauren Salzman and Nancy Salzman. The six defendants stand accused of running an organized criminal enterprise. Crimes alleged within the indictment include identity theft, harboring of aliens for financial gain, extortion, forced labor, sex trafficking, money laundering, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. It describes Bronfman as “a member of the Enterprise and a high-ranking member of Nxivm” who served as an executive board member from approximately 2009 to 2018.
You may recall when David Chappelle inexplicably went off to Africa. I mean here is a guy who was top of his game, making incredible sums of money, who was offered everything in the world, and he turns it all down and just disappears into Africa for no reason that anyone can understand. And he never really addressed it directly, it was portrayed as him having some sort of breakdown or something, but he wasn’t having a breakdown, and he explained it in an interview on Inside the Acting show – I can’t remember what it’s called – but he’s talking to a bunch of acting students and he talked about how important it was to have your price, to know what your price was before you went out to pursue a career in Hollywood. And so it was interesting because he said it’s very important to know what your price is, to know what lines you’re not going to cross, and then he said “hence Africa.” What he was very clearly saying was that he was asked to pay a price that he was not willing to pay for his career.
This is something that is relevant to me personally at the moment because now we have a successful line of comics, now that people are becoming aware of the quality of our books and the potential that they have in various mediums and various media, whether it’s film, whether it’s cable, whether it’s streaming, or whether it’s games, so there are people that are interested and that are talking to us, and one of the things I make very clear is that if they’re interested in trying to offer us success in exchange for compromising our principles, our faith, or our souls, they can just stop the conversation right now. We will do it ourselves, then maybe we won’t be successful – so the fuck what?
Jesus Christ turned down the entire world, what price a TV show? Why would you sell your soul for a TV show, for a movie, for a career as a second-rate movie star? I mean seriously, who has a better career in Hollywood than Tom Cruise, is there anyone you can think of? He’s in all the blockbusters, everybody knows his name, he’s about as famous as you can be, he’s been in a number of hit franchises, he’s been in movies that are part of our cultural language, several of his characters are iconic figures, and how many of you would trade places to live in that guy’s freakish life? Why would you ever why would you ever want to live like that? And that’s the best that they can offer! That is the Heaven on Earth that they can offer you. What an utter nightmare!
Are there any other celebrities you believe will be exposed?
Yes I think that lots of people will be exposed. If you go to Neon Revolt, if you go to 8Chan, if you go to Crazy Days and Nights they are all naming names. Now, I’m not going to name any of those names because I have no direct information about any of them. It’s not my world. I’m glad it’s not my world. You know if you want to talk about game designers, I was talking to Derek Smart today. I talk to people in the games industry on a regular basis, and I can guarantee you that we don’t do any casting couch bullshit, we don’t make anybody engage in bizarre rituals so that they can work on games with us. I mean, that sort of stuff would be totally insane.
Do you believe Hollywood’s destructive influence on dismantling Christian culture was intentional or a side-effect of encouraging their own depravity?
It was absolutely intentional: these people hate Christianity, they hate Christians, they hate Western civilization, and they even hate Christmas. It’s really astonishing when you learn to see it, and once you see it, you can’t un-see it.
On a not-unrelated note, Ben Shapiro being a Hollywood Jew with Hollywood values is not news to me. I knew the background of the Littlest Chickenhawk - now there is an unexpectedly dual-barreled nickname - from the start. But Ben Shapiro's background never seemed relevant to my criticism of him until the "conservative" talking head inexplicably leaped to the defense of James Gunn:
Late Thursday night, Mike Cernovich, a centrist social writer-activist and childrens advocate who has aligned himself with right-wing political movements over the past two years, began sharing Gunn’s insidious tweets. Less than 12 hours after Cernovich, who was amplified by One America News’ Jack Posobiec and the film, An Open Secret, which documents the systemic sexual child abuse found throughout Hollywood, began sharing this evidence with the public Disney fired Gunn from the upcoming sequel.
Gunn tweeted these comments in his forties. He is reportedly worth $100 million and the writer-director of a teen film series. These aren’t tweets from a college kid trying to get attention, or a rising standup comedian trying to bombast their way into the public spotlight. This wasn’t a careless retweet, or a foolishly shared comic. These comments should be damning to anyone, like Shapiro, who strategically positions themselves on the most archaic of social conservatism.
Strange, isn’t it? Maybe not. Shapiro grew up, and still lives, in Hollywood. His mother is a power-player within the industry and his cousins are actors Mara Wilson and Daniel Ben Wilson....
Was Ben Shapiro defending of James Gunn on his Twitter, the Daily Wire blog, and podcast because Gunn had defended him?
Is this tribal Hollywood protecting Hollywood?
Was Mike Cernovich’s takedown of James Gunn the reason why Shapiro opposed it?
Are there any disclosures Shapiro would like to make about himself or his family’s relationship with Gunn, his associates, or Disney or its subsidiaries?
These are questions Shapiro won’t host a debate on. Why not?
Because Shapiro is an evil little fraud. He's terrified of debate with anyone who isn't a left-wing halfwit. He's a midwit, a gatekeeper, and a media construct who has been relentlessly pushed on American conservatives since he was in junior high. Any Christian or conservative who considers himself a Shapiro fan is a naive fool who has been taken in by the propaganda program. The same thing goes for Jordan Peterson.
These heavily promoted wormtongues do not speak the truth, they do not believe what their fans think they believe, and their objectives are to protect evil by distracting and confusing those who would otherwise stand against it. William F. Buckley. Glenn Beck. Ben Shapiro. Jordan Peterson.... when are conservatives going to stop falling for these obvious frauds?
Last week, everyone’s favorite alt-right troll, Mike Cernovich, decided he’d had enough of Gunn’s two-bit leftist moralizing. So a-diggin’ he went, and he unearthed all those nasty old tweets. And Disney promptly fired Gunn from the next Guardians of the Galaxy installment. Gunn canceled his appearance at the San Diego Comic-Con (the Cannes of nerd-dom), and his future in the business is very much in doubt.
Moved by the peine forte et dure, Gunn apologized and begged for forgiveness. But seriously, does that ever work anymore? Of course not. The man’s toast. And his fate has divided the right into four camps:
(1) The Pizzagaters. These nuts believe that Gunn’s public tweets prove there’s a top-secret, organized cabal of pedophiles in Hollywood.
(2) The Moralists. Their deal is, “Rape jokes are never funny! Pedo jokes are never funny! Firing Gunn was the right call.”
(3) The Schadenfreuders. “The bastard got what he deserved for cheering when the same thing happened to Roseanne. Maybe if enough lefties suffer because of these witch hunts, they’ll finally stop doing it to us.”
(4) Me. I’ll get to that in a minute.
(1) It's not a secret. There is a disturbingly large population of pedophiles in Hollywood. Everyone there knows who they are, including David Cole. While Gunn's jokes don't prove the existence of an organized cabal, based on his "jokes", his recent movie that featured a pit containing the remains of tens of thousands of children murdered by their father, and his various pictures posted on social media featuring pizza, crying children, and other symbols known to be utilized by pedos, it appears that Gunn was, at the very least, conversant with that particular collection of evil freaks.
(2) David Cole doesn't understand what morality is. The deal of the moralists are that pedo jokes are always wrong, whether they are funny or not. But whether that is true or not, being funny does not absolve one of the immorality of ones words and deeds. To be forgiven for sin, one must repent, not produce a sufficiently amusing wisecrack. From the moral perspective, firing Gunn was the right call, whether one happened to find him to be funny or not.
(3) Gunn did get what he deserved. Having been banned from Twitter for absolutely nothing at all and having my livelihood directly affected by the speech and thought police, I have absolutely no pity whatsoever for someone like Gunn losing his job. Reprisals are always justified whether they are successful in convincing the enemy to abandon the tactic in question or not.
(4) He never got to it.
When a major leftist A-lister like Gunn is punished for speech, the right goes “Serves you right! Sweet revenge!” But the general public, and other figures in the entertainment industry, go “Oh shit, if that can happen to him, I’d better shut the hell up and never say anything even slightly controversial.” So go ahead, cheer James Gunn’s destruction. You want Europe? That’s how you’ll get Europe. People scared to speak freely, people frightened to crack a joke. If that’s what you want, I don’t care if you’re on “my side.” Fuck off.
Everyone in the center and the Right was already doing that. Submission is not better than resistance and reprisal. And as one who has lived in Europe for decades, I can attest that Europeans feel considerably more free to make controversial statements than anyone in America does.
We're not on your side, David. And we know perfectly well that you're not on ours. You're not fooling us at all. Free speech is an anti-Christian fraud, it always has been, and the West will do very well to revive and restore the historical blasphemy laws. Since the idea of no standards is clearly not tenable, it will be much better to abide by the historical standards of civilized Christianity than the ever-mutating standard of social justice.
Charlie Nash @MrNashington Not all "conservatives" are affected by Twitter's new search result censorship, with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro, the National Review’s David French, the Resurgent’s Erick Erickson, and Glenn Beck remaining unaffected...
It's almost as if the Left wants to keep the cucks around and viable. After all, if they don't have any Fake Opposition around, they might look like... fascists?
YEAH, NO MORE REFUNDS. EVER.
I am just going to jump right into this one, no preamble, no foreplay, nothing. If you put money into Star Citizen, and you didn’t apply for or get a refund before end of 2017 – congrats you’re now a statistic in a long con scam. The End.
I saw this coming a mile away, over three years ago in 2015. And, like my other warnings, I issued a Red Alert about the implications. Some people listened, got a refund, and got out. Others were riding the wave of the project’s popularity due to repeated lies from Chris Roberts’ camp, and so just kept on giving them money. Hey, it’s their money – and we don’t care.
It’s now 2018, and all what I warned about has all come to pass. CIG has now gone on the record that, as I had accurately predicted, their TOS changes over the years were designed to rip backers off. Here are two official statements recently issued to Motherboard/Vice , Kotaku , Ars Technica , PC Gamer and others.
“Our Terms of Service provides refunds for 14 days after each pledge is made, but company policy is to refund anyone who has second thoughts for up to 30 days after their pledge, no questions asked,”
– CIG
“The Terms of Service are not retroactive, but a huge majority of Mr. Lord’s pledges came after the TOS was changed to specify arbitration, and those pledges are under that TOS,” the rep wrote. “His pledges with new money on top of his earlier pledges required him to accept the new Terms of Service.”
– CIG
Let me preface everything that comes next with these irrefutable FACTS:
Star Citizen was NEVER billed as an Early Access game. Not even once.
In Oct 2012 Chris Roberts asked for, and raised $2M via initial Kickstarter crowd-funding. He promised to release both multiplayer (Star Citizen) and single-player (Squadron 42) by Nov 2014.
By Aug 2013, when the first hangar module was released, they had raised $16.7M.
By Nov 2014, the month he promised it would release, after increasing the game’s scope significantly, they had raised $65M.
Contrary to what some backers try to promote, there was NEVER a vote of consensus to increase the scope of the game. That scope creep came when Chris Roberts himself created additional stretch goals after the initial Kickstarter goal was met. And then he kept on doing it by making various feature promises, new ship JPEG sales etc.
Right. So now lets discuss why this backer lawsuit and his subsequent court loss is so significant now more than ever. I have covered the fiasco in three Twitter threads since news of this backer’s lawsuit broke. But first, a bit of history for context.
Now, I'm not happy about this. Chris Roberts is one of my design heroes. Wing Commander, the Secret Missions, and Wing Commander II are some of the games I played most heavily throughout the entire course of my life. But I had my doubts early on too, so much so that I did not pursue a potential opportunity to work on the AI design for what were then the wingmen in a proposed Wing Commander reboot.
And, you will note, I did not back Star Citizen even though I very nearly did so on three separate occasions. The problem that I always had with the project was what set off Derek's radar in the first place: I don't see how he can actually build this thing. Because I'm pretty sure I couldn't.
That's the thing about game designers. We're genuinely not jealous of those who have done better than we have. We admire the great ones. We try to learn from them, to understand them, to fully comprehend their designs. I get Akalabeth. I get Wing Commander. I get Doom. I get Fantasy General. I get Puzzle Quest. I get Fortnite, even though I despise everything for which it stands. But I still don't get how Star Citizen was ever supposed to function.
Arkhaven is happy to announce that Alt-Hero #2: Rebel's Cell is now available in print at the Arkhaven Direct bookstore for $2.99. This is the limited-run gold logo edition.
We are also pleased to announce that the gold logo edition of Alt-Hero #1: Crackdown has sold out and is no longer available. However, if you are a gold logo edition owner who would like to pick up a regular logo edition, they are now available at Arkhaven Direct.
It is possible that Amazon still has a few gold logo editions in stock, but the print run for the first issue gold logos has been shut down with just over 2,400 copies printed and sold.
In other Alt-Hero news, MAGNATE has provided an update on DevGame regarding the current state of the RPG development and the results of its most recent playtest. And here's a random thought: how about an Alt-Hero replacement for the now-defunct City of Heroes? For reasons I can't share now, that's a LOT more potentially viable than you would probably imagine.
Jordan Peterson is definitely peculiar, but he is only opaque to those who can't follow him. Which includes, necessarily, the entirety of his fan base:
Peterson’s definition of God is a sprawling, book-length collection of abstractions, some of which are grounded in narratives about the human condition, while others are mere descriptions of psychological and temporal realities (“…the future to which we make sacrifices”). In other words, it’s a definition that’s so elastic and subjective as to be almost meaningless. As Harris put it, “That’s not how most people most of the time are using the word, and there’s something misleading about that.”
To which Peterson responded, “I never made the claim that what I’m talking about is like what other people are talking about.” That’s true, and he often says he doesn’t define ‘belief’ or ‘God’ in the same way as anyone else. Even when he’s asked a more specific question—about, say, his belief (or lack thereof) in the divinity of Christ—he says the answer depends on the interviewer’s definitions of ‘Christ’ and ‘divine.’ But Peterson still uses words like ‘divine’ all the time. He’s happy to describe consciousness as divine, which he considers to be an “axiomatic statement.” He’s more than willing to tell you “magical things happen as the logos manifests itself” before announcing his firm belief that the logos is divine, too. But only if, by ‘divine,’ you mean “Of ultimate transcendent value.”
But then, what does Peterson mean by ‘transcendent’? Or ‘value’? And what will he mean by all the words he uses to answer those questions? Communication becomes extremely difficult if we allow ourselves repeatedly to be drawn into a labyrinth of semantic distinctions. That is precisely why there has to be some fundamental agreement about what words actually mean at the beginning of any conversation. This is something Peterson can be particularly bad at doing, when the mood takes him—just listen to his excruciating two-hour conversation with Harris that never managed to get past the disputed meaning of the word ‘truth.’
As I call it, bafflegarble. It's nonsense that baffles the insufficiently comprehending.
When it comes to telling us where our morality comes from, Peterson’s equivocal, opaque language suddenly falls away and he leaves us in no doubt about what he’s trying to say. He’s making yet another simplistic, monocausal argument that ignores all the elements of our philosophical and cultural tradition that contradict it.
So what about the rationalist critiques of religion written by Enlightenment atheists like Hume and Spinoza? Or the withering attacks on Christianity by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine? What about all the aspects of our Christian heritage that Peterson doesn’t emphasize, like the virulent anti-Semitism that infected the Third Reich, the scriptural warrants for slavery and genocide, and the savage religious wars that preceded the Enlightenment? Why has moral progress so often required our civilization to renounce the dogmas and dictates of the Judeo-Christian tradition Peterson reveres?
Peterson knows he doesn’t have to answer these questions because, despite all his declarations to the contrary, he isn’t bound by this tradition. In one breath, he tells the audience they live in a society that would collapse without the immovable foundation of Judeo-Christian values. In the next, he reminds them that his God is a modern God, unsullied by the barbarism of ancient texts and unencumbered by the immense weight of history. There’s just one problem: Jordan Peterson’s God is nobody else’s God.
Of course not. Because the Judeo-Christian tradition he reveres does not exist and Jordan Peterson couldn't believe he is the messiah who will save humanity from destruction by war if he believed in either a) the Christian god or b) any other god that humanity has ever worshiped throughout history. Forget him not being a Christian, he's not even a noble pagan.
John Scalzi finally realizes that the science fiction community has passed him by.
John Scalzi@scalzi
Just saw my WorldCon schedule.
Single panel and a kaffeeklatsch.
Huh.
They don't respect Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein anymore. They're certainly not going to take long to forget about a mediocre, middle-aged white male.
UPDATE: If you can't win, pretend not to have been playing the game.
John Scalzi@scalzi It's a trend. Also, after noting last night I'd be happy to give up my panel slot, this morning I went ahead and withdrew from programming entirely, to open up slots for folks previously excluded from programming, including other Hugo finalists.
Such magnanimity! It almost brings a single tear to my eye.
No matter how converged the institutions become, God can always renew the human heart and rebuild new ones. A reader writes of attending Mass this weekend.
I have recently made small efforts to attending the Mass again after a long layoff. I found a parish here in my Florida diocese that happens to administer the pre-Vatican Latin Mass after attending one for the first time on Easter in Germany. Talk about a night and day difference between services.
Anyways, to the point... I was floored when the celebrating priest stepped up to give his Homily and focused on this particular Mass' Introit prayer, an excerpt from Psalm 53: "the Lord is the protector of my soul; turn back the evils of mine enemies, and cut them off in Thy truth." He spoke frankly about the... unsuitability of this exhortation for Godly vengeance for the modern sensibilities of the Church and related it to the recent revelations of an American cardinal who has been in the news for abusing seminarians for years, and yet continuing to rise in the Church hierarchy.
To hammer it home even more, the priest spoke of how - at least in the States - the Conference of Catholic Bishops has put zero tolerance rules in place that effectively deflect blame away from themselves down to the priests and parishioners in cases where abuses are brought to light, saving their own asses while offering up those of the flocks they ought be tending to. He even uttered those three magic words - Social Justice Warrior - and excoriated them from the pulpit for separating Christian charity from their works while putting all of their efforts into grandstanding and focusing on the worldly aspects of said works (i.e. politics) This is a far cry from a mass I attended some months ago where the Celebrant was urging us all to call our representatives and cry a river over the Dreamer babies amongst us because - well, because.
This Sunday's priest said, specifically, "If you open your eyes, and begin to pay attention, and learn what to look for, you will not like what you see.
"And many Christians must be prepared - and yet will not be - to learn just how deep the darkness runs."
I was brought immediately back to a Darkstream you recently posted, speaking on the depths of depravity of the power brokers in our world and in our institutions, and how few people are truly prepared for the revelations to come about said institutions. God Bless this guy for having some balls to speak truth to power when it seems like all of Christendom has been castrated.
The darkness runs deep. But it does not run deep enough to escape the light of Truth or the sword of Justice. Even the noble pagans knew this.
When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?
- Epictetus
Be free. Be fearless. And when the Day of Deus Vult arrives, be ferocious.
THE PRICE OF A DRINK is the fourth issue in the RIGHT HO, JEEVES series, which tells of the travails of the inimitable Bertie Wooster, summoned from the comforts of #3A Berkley Mansions, London to Brinkley Manor by his imperious Aunt Dahlia. In this issue, Gussie Fink-Nottle has summoned up the courage required to address the collected youth of Market Snodsbury, but it is a liquid courage. Not only that, but he has summoned up entirely too much of it, with hilarious and humiliating consequences for everyone involved.
Adapted from the classic Wodehouse novel by comics legend Chuck Dixon and drawn by SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN illustrator Gary Kwapisz, THE PRICE OF A DRINK is issue #4 of 6 in the RIGHT HO, JEEVES series.
And on a not-entirely-unconnected note, it appears that our competitors are experiencing difficulties and declining sales, which, of course, cannot possibly be connected to their convergence.
Comic book publishers are facing a growing crisis: Flagging interest from readers and competition from digital entertainment are dragging down sales. Hoping to reverse the trend, publishers are creating their own digital platforms to directly connect with readers and encourage more engagement from fans.
The goal is to reach readers who may not live near a comic book shop but want to keep up with the Avengers and the Justice League. Experts say the direct-to-consumer model also helps compete with streaming services like Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Video.
“They all look at Netflix and say, ‘Why do I need an intermediary?’” said Milton Griepp, the chief executive of ICv2, an online magazine that covers the industry. “That’s where this battle is being fought.”
Smaller comic book publishers are testing their own direct-to-consumer platforms. Image Comics, the publisher of popular titles like The Walking Dead and Saga, started a direct-to-consumer platform in 2015 to sell comic book subscriptions and apparel.
Sarah Silverman Retweeted
Selma Blair@SelmaBlair
Jul 21
Marvel: RE-HIRE JAMES GUNN - Sign the Petition! Because if people are punished despite changing, then what does that teach people about owning mistakes and evolving? This man is one of the good ones.
Ms. Blair's petition is useful. First, it's a nice public list of pedo-defenders. Second, as the petition itself points out, all the other Hollywood directors need to be fired.
The other thing is if you do this to Gunn you have to do it for all the other directors who have said some crappy joke sometime in their life, which is all of them, cause I doubt there's one human on this planet who hasn't made a shitty joke once or twice in there life.
Bounding Into Comics is covering the exposure of more Hollywood pedo-jokers active on Twitter:
After James Gunn was fired by Disney for a number of sickening tweets involving pedophilia and child rape, more celebrities’ old Tweets are being exposed which cover the same subject. Those celebrities include Sarah Silverman, who stars in Disney’s upcoming Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It-Ralph 2, Ian Michael Black, who previously starred in Reno 911, Sean Gunn, James Gunn’s brother, who stars in Guardians of the Galaxy as well as Gilmore Girls, comedian Anthony Jeselnik, and Patton Oswalt, who lends his voice to a number of animated cartoons like Justice League Action, Spider-Man, and Disney’s Big Hero 6.
It appears the rapid takedown of James Gunn's career has spooked Hollywood enough that they have declared war on the chans. If Sarah Silverman is to be believed, REPERCUSSIONS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME.
I was wondering why Disney would act with such uncharacteristic alacrity in getting rid of Gunn, who has not even been accused of any actual crime, when they have shamelessly hired convicted child molesters as directors in the past. A post by Neon Revolt offers a possible explanation, as it claims the entire Hollywood mafia is in a panic, due to the way in which the sacrificial Weinstein crossburn has failed to end the multiple lines of inquiry that increasingly point towards some of its highest-ranking members in film, media, finance, and politics being guilty of unspeakable crimes.
I suspect this is why Shapiro and other fake conservatives are exposing themselves now as Gunn's defenders, because this would be one secret that they cannot afford to permit to reach either their fans or the general public. Even the most rabid evangelical Christian Zionists who fly the flag of Israel in the church sanctuary and hold sacred the broadest interpretation of Genesis 12:3 is not going to defend a network of Satanists who corrupt, rape, and murder children just because they happen to be of Jewish descent; to the contrary, his fury is only going to be stoked by the way in which he has been methodically deceived for so long.
Of course, it's entirely possible that Shapiro, Peterson, and other inexplicable media stars are what the chans describe as "made men" themselves.
If we know anything about the weaponized autists that make up the chans, they are not going to "stand the fuck down". To the contrary, these threats will only energize and motivate them. And if even half of what Renegade is saying is true, then it explains the cautious way that the God-Emperor has gone about breaking the power of the shadow state, because things would almost certainly get violent and out of control very fast. But sooner or later, the flood of truth is going to break through the dam of lies.
Can confirm. All of this is true and there was a thread that was investigating twitter handles. Thousands of names came up and anons were digging deeper and deeper before the (((mods))) at cuckchan shut it down. This is full on damage control and they're really scared after that James GUNN scandal. Obviously they didn't want another scenario like that to happen, but in trying to censor those of us exposing the sick fucks running Pedowood they didn't realize we had archived almost everything.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; A time of war, and a time of peace.
- Ecclesiastes 31:8
Now why would Sarah Silverman be up in arms about this? Oh, that's why.
Sarah Silverman@SarahKSilverman Hey, is it considered molestation if the child makes the first move? I'm gonna need a quick answer on this. 10:34 PM - 6 Jul 2009
I found it amusing that when I went to archive it, I got this message: This page was last archived 1 day ago. Remember, never link, always archive. The ride never ends.
So this is the competition. At least, the competition that is likely to survive the ruthless winnowing of #MeToo, #JustAJoke, #ComicsGate, #DontHitMeImAGirlNow and #PizzaGate2.
A U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter jet on Saturday intercepted a small plane near Donald Trump's private golf resort in New Jersey, where the president is currently staying.
Continental U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command said a "general aviation aircraft" entered a temporary restricted area "without proper clearances or communications" over Bedminster, N.J.
The plane landed without incident and the pilot was met by law enforcement officials.
I'm a bit dubious about that fatal "stroke" suffered by one of the President's secret service agents in Scotland as well.
Theresa May faces a deepening political crisis as a poll showed voters oppose her Brexit plans - and are ready shift to the hard right.
Just 12 per cent said the compromise solution being championed by the PM would be good for Britain.
In a particularly stinging finding, the research found that twice as many people thought Boris Johnson would do a better job in Downing Street.
Mrs May is battling to hold the Tories together as she desperately scrambles to put together a deal with the EU. Mr Johnson and David Davis both quit Cabinet after the premier forced through a compromise plan through at a Chequers summit for ministers a fortnight ago.
Meanwhile, Mr Davis has waded back into the row by urging Mrs May to rip up her plans altogether and start again. The proposals also do not appeared to have delivered the breakthrough with the EU that Mrs May had hoped - as fears rise of a no-deal Brexit. Michel Barnier gave the plans short shrift a a brutal press conference on Friday, suggesting they would be unacceptable.
According to a YouGov poll for the Sunday Times, just 12 per cent of the public think the Chequers plan would be good for Britain, while 43 per cent disagree. Around 38 per cent would vote for a new party on the right that was committed to Brexit. Some 24 per cent would be prepared to support an explicitly far-right anti-immigrant, anti-Islam party.
The Alt-Right is the only Right and it is inevitable. Everywhere.
DC is racing Marvel in a contest of who can completely converge their film and TV properties first. I'd say DC has taken the lead at the moment. The bad news is that they actually added a white character to Supergirl. The good news is that she is a he.
The panel named transgender activist Nicole Maines (Royal Pains, The Trans List, Becoming Nicole book) joining the show in the series regular role of Nia Nal, aka Dreamer. The newest addition to the CatCo reporting team, she is described as a soulful young transgender woman with a fierce drive to protect others, Nia’s journey this season means fulfilling her destiny as the superhero Dreamer (much like Kara came into her own as Supergirl).
In addition, the series will be joined by series regular April Parker Jones (Jericho, The Last Ship) as Colonel Haley, a hardline career military woman who lives and dies by the orders of her commanding officers. Dedicated to her country, she always acts in its best interest — even if it’s not her own.
And David Ajala (Doctor Who, Nightflyers, The Dark Knight), who will recur as Manchester Black, based on the DC character created by Joe Kelly, described as the type of guy who brings a knife to a gunfight and still walks away the winner. With a dark past, he easily deflects the brutality of his mission with his charm and sense of humor.
More negroes! More wimmins! More trannies! Hurrah! But where are the gay Jewish pedos in wheelchairs? It's not true diversity without gay Jewish pedos in wheelchairs! Progress is love is love on wheels!
The Walt Disney Company has fired filmmaker James Gunn, director of the Marvel franchise Guardians of the Galaxy films, due to revelations that he—gasp—said some very offensive things on Twitter many years ago.
It's no accident these tweets were suddenly discovered; right-wing bloggers including Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec (with an assist from Breitbart and The Daily Caller) went digging after Gunn made negative remarks about conservative writer Ben Shapiro on Twitter. Ironically, Gunn was actually offering a very qualified defense of liberal actor and director Mark Duplass for saying Ben Shapiro was someone the left should engage.
Gunn's tweets reference violence and sexual assault against children. They are gross. But he says they were intended as jokes, and there's really no reason to suspect otherwise. While many have implied that the tweets include a link to child pornography, this is false—the link in question is harmless.
Gunn said he was a very different person when he wrote those tweets, and had previously apologized.
"I viewed myself as a provocateur, making movies and telling jokes that were outrageous and taboo," he said in a statement. "In the past, I have apologized for humor of mine that hurt people. I truly felt sorry and meant every word of my apologies."
This really ought to have been enough. But we live in an era where both the left and the right are eager to collect the scalps of people who offend them. Conservatives who participated in the lynch mob against Gunn are hypocrites, since they have often scolded the left for doing this exact same thing.
Cuckservatives are very unhappy when anyone does anything more effective than protest in a feeble and futile manner. To the Left, an apology is nothing more than an admission of guilt and justification for prosecution, and their apologies should be treated accordingly. Cerno and Jack are doing exactly what everyone on the Right should be doing to the Left, and that is holding them accountable to their own rules.
If you want to win the cultural war, you have to fight. Feckless posturing about how "we should be better than that" is not fighting, it is surrendering.
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THE PRICE OF A DRINK 
