Gammas redefine gamma

It's amusing how predictable they are. Notice how gammas consider themselves to be a higher form of alpha in this definition provided by Google:

Gamma males love having fun but don't shrug off their responsibilities at the same time. They're definitely adventurous and fun-loving and tend to get very restless if they're left idle for too long. It is possible an alpha male might mature into a gamma male, because gamma males are a more refined version of them.

Il sinistro magico

So, my unexpectedly extended run as a starter has finally come to an end. The veterans were in desperate need of reinforcements this season, and we received them in the form of a new keeper, defender, midfielder, and attacker. This has come in handy, as we've given up ZERO goals in three of our first four games.

However, this week's game was against the three-time league champions and we had an almost-full squad with only our starting sweeper being out, so I found myself on the bench at the start for the first time this year. I couldn't complain, as the new attacker is much better than me, so is the new midfielder, and the other midfielder is for all intents and purposes my equal, only he didn't give up a penalty to cost us two points last week.

(The call was 100 percent incorrect and the penalty was not awardable, but regardless, it was still on me.)

So, I didn't disagree with the captain's call at all. In fact, his starting lineup was precisely what I would have set if I was in charge. Not only that, but when I went in halfway through the first half at left midfield, I found myself entirely outmatched by the Red team's extremely aggressive right mid. I only gave up the ball twice, but one turnover was an exceptionally stupid pass in a situation when I found myself surrounded by four opposing players, and I think I only managed to get up across midfield to help the attack once.

I did do a decent job of helping out the defense, but it wasn't exactly a surprise to find myself back on the bench after halftime. Somehow, we were ahead 1-0 thanks to a goal by the captain that was completely against the run of play, but of the 10 field positions, we might have had the advantage of two of them. Fortunately, they kept trying to attack up the middle, where our best player, the defensive midfielder, was more than equal to their number 10 and repeatedly stifled their attacks.

They started to flag a little in the second half, and we actually managed a decent attack or three, but neither team looked particularly like scoring until the referee gave our defensive midfielder a yellow card. In our veteran's league, that's a 10-minute penalty benching, but a substitution is allowed. I was called in for him and sent over to the left, while the left mid I replaced moved into the now-empty defensive slot.

Somewhat to the surprise of both teams, they weren't able to exploit our best player's absence, and once, after picking up a blocked shot, I managed to beat not one, not two, but three of their players on a long 60-meter run up the left side. I actually got the ball past a fourth and last defender, the sweeper, as well, but he took me down hard to give us a free kick and give me three sprained fingers on my right hand which I can still feel as I type this.

We didn't get anything out of that, but a few minutes later, we got another free kick on the right. Our number 10 tried to put it on the heads of our two tallest players at the top center of the box, but he hit it a little too hard. As I saw it coming, I thought the second of the two defenders to my right would manage to deflect the ball, but it just skimmed the top of his head, so I ran onto it, brought it perfectly to the ground with my left foot, took three steps, then hit it with my left foot without even looking at the goal.

When I looked up, I saw the ball had cleared the keeper, but it looked like it might be going a little wide right. Fortunately, the right post got in the way and the ball banked cleanly in. 2-0! The captain was the first to congratulate me, then pointed towards the bench as the 10 penalty minutes were up and our defensive midfielder was eligible to come back in. "Supersub!" he shouted and we exchanged a high ten as he came onto the field. My work was done.

"If we need any more goals, let me know. I'll be right here," I told the rest of the guys on the bench. They laughed and promptly christened my left foot "the magic left". You see, I have an exceptionally feeble shot by their standards, and that's with my RIGHT foot, so the idea that I could possibly score against anyone, let alone the champions, with my left struck them as intrinsically hysterical. Despite the other team's best efforts, our defense stoned them again and again, and we held on for a 2-0 victory. It was a really good win.

The lesson is this: even when you are playing poorly, even when you're overmatched, even when it's clearly not your night, keep trying. Keep fighting. You never know what will happen. Replay that free kick 100 times and I might touch the ball five times, and maybe I score again once or twice at most. More likely, the defender heads the ball away, my first touch is too hard, or I miss the ball entirely. But you never know, so don't give up. Of the 30 players on both teams who played that night, I was the second-oldest and almost certainly the worst player on the field. But you never know....

They are coming for the geniuses

Jack Baruth addresses the ongoing cultural defenestration of Richard Stallman:

The idea of truly free software given to the world for humanitarian purposes would not exist without Stallman. He was the only person who ever had the thought. Which means it is more radical than calculus, heavier-than-air flight, the theory of relativity, or the atomic bomb. It took someone with Stallman’s particular blend of Promethean IQ and mentally handicapped social skills to push it all the way to reality. You live in Richard Stallman’s world, whether you like it or not. He has had more influence on how we communicate in 2019 than any other single human being currently living. Any sane society would consider him a national treasure of greater importance than Fort Knox, to be cherished and protected accordingly.

Naturally, our society has decided to crucify him. A young woman with an axe to grind has instigated a lynch mob through an astoundingly ill-conceived and illogical bit of emotionally dependent rhetoric:

There are so many things wrong with what Richard Stallman said I hardly know where to begin…

She totally can’t even!

There is nothing I have seen a man in tech do that a woman could not. What’s more, the woman would probably be less egotistical and more team-oriented about it.

This is how you know the author is a mental child. Any of us “could do” many things. I could have written any song, novel, or movie screenplay that has appeared between 1982 and now. Except I didn’t. The Egyptians could have invented the airplane and the laser and the K-cup coffee maker, but they didn’t. Only children deal in potential. Adults deal in reality.

Also, I hate to tell her this, and its embarrassing that I should be the one to lecture an MIT graduate on this, but teams are for normies, for neurotypicals, for trash people who can’t retain multiple levels of variable dereferencing in their heads while coding. Teams do not accomplish, and have never accomplished, anything of genuine intellectual value.

The history of scientific progress is a history of individuals. Yes, you need a “team” to actually assemble the atomic bomb or the Intel Itanium or a commercial software product. You don’t need a team to conceive it and do the mental heavy lifting. The effective IQ of a team is the same as the lowest IQ in the team; the productivity of the team is a minor percentage of the productivity you could get from its smartest member working alone. Every once in a while you will see one brilliant person be inspired by another brilliant person in the near vicinity. This happens once for every hundred million times a “team” crushes the abilities of its members.

Richard Stallman is, by all normal human standards, a complete lunatic. He also happens to be a genuine genius. And more to the point, by every sane human standard, Richard Stallman has done nothing wrong. While I think his postulations concerning possible defenses of Marvin Minsky's alleged behavior are both a) incorrect and b) irrelevant, there is nothing remotely questionable or surprising about his formulating and expressing them.

Can you even imagine Richard Stallman being courted and corrupted by Jeffrey Epstein? That not only stretches the bounds of credibility, it's got the potential to be a hilarious comedy sketch.

Epstein: Hey, Richard, do you like to party? I know some nice girls who would like to meet you.

Stallman: I would not be happy at a party. Especially not if it's raining. You have a big face. Do you have a parrot?

Epstein: Um, no....

Stallman: Go away! Go away now!

But this isn't a comedy sketch, it is today's ugly reality.

On September 16, 2019, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, resigned as president and from its board of directors.

He took his damn pills

I knew Jordan Peterson was going to find life difficult in the aftermath of Jordanetics, but it now appears that he took his own advice a little too enthusiastically:

Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and anti-political-correctness crusader, has checked himself in to rehab in New York, his daughter has revealed.

The “12 Rules for Life” author has sought help trying to get off the anti-anxiety drug clonazepam, his daughter Mikhaila Peterson said in a video posted to her YouTube account Thursday.

“I’ve never seen my dad like this,” the 27-year-old diet blogger said in the eight-and-a-half-minute video. “He’s having a miserable time of it. It breaks my heart.”

The elder Peterson, 57, began taking the addictive medication to deal with stress from his wife’s battle with cancer and other health problems earlier this year, his daughter said.

Whatever the truth might be, it almost certainly isn't what Peterson has been telling his daughter or anyone else. Remember, he is an inveterate liar and this is within the time frame in which he was still publicly going on about the health miracles of his new diet, upon which he never, ever cheats. My guess is that the stress of knowing tens of thousands of people have learned that he is an unmitigated fraud has been constantly eating away at his fragile psyche ever since the book came out last year.

Yes, his wife is ill, but since he's a narcissist that's not likely to be a significant factor in the state of his mental health. Just look at how he has successfully made his own wife's cancer all about him. And no, I'm not even a little bit surprised by either the addiction or the resort to rehab; things will almost certainly get worse over time because Jordan Peterson can't be cured by pills or rehab or Jungian psychotherapy. He needs to repent and to confess and to stop lying all the time. He needs Jesus Christ.

It is informative, however, to observe that all of those wicked individuals who have attempted to push a completely false narrative about Owen Benjamin's psychological health somehow managed to completely miss Jordan Peterson's breakdown even though I anticipated its inevitability more than a year ago.

• It's not an insult to observe that Jordan Peterson is mentally ill or that his mental illness has significantly influenced his worldview, his philosophy, and his most recent book. To the contrary, it is a highly pertinent fact. One does not need a PhD in psychiatry or anything else to observe that someone is crazy or to observe the effects of that craziness. Jordan Peterson isn't wandering through the night with a knife in his hand muttering "don't be evil" to himself, he's doing an intellectual version of that by weeping on stage with a mic in his hand as he begs people to not be too ashamed to take their prescribed medication.
• May 4, 2018
• More and more people are becoming aware that Jordan Peterson is not only a liar, he is a complete lunatic who should be in a padded cell for his own protection.
• August 31, 2018

Of all the words of screen and pen

The most painful are these:

Vox was right again.

Medieval History 101 Episode X

His supporters satirize his opponents’ anxiety about the extent of his power by calling President Trump “God-Emperor,” but the taunt is only effective because Americans are not supposed to want kings, never mind emperors. And yet, how else would one define the West? Can there be civilization without hierarchy? Can there be peace without an emperor? Throughout the Middle Ages, European Christians looked to Charlemagne as the model for the emperor who would defend Christendom and bring back the glories of Rome. How much did Charlemagne himself contribute to this ideal? Would the Franks of the eighth and ninth centuries have recognized later representations of Charles as emperor and king?

Medieval History 101 Episode X: Getting Medieval on the Emperor by the Grace of God. Episode Guide.

Following our lead

Maybe, just maybe, we knew what we were doing by setting up Unauthorized the way we did:

At the same time the government launched their probe, the top publishers in the country had gathered for an emergency summit in New York. Advertising dollars from 2015-2018 were slowly declining. 2019 trends were showing an alarming trend with programmatic revenues in freefall industry-wide. Ad revenue across publishing was down over 50%??? There’s gotta be an explanation for this?

Here’s the sticky-fingered culprit. Facebook has decided to sweep the leg on the entire industry, it’s actually happening now. But why now? The reason why is shockingly simple.

Google and Facebook are ad-supported businesses. They want to get you on their pages and keep you there at all costs. This puts them at odds with the publishing community, much of which is ad supported. Google. Facebook, and Amazon control 70% of all online ad dollars spent. The rest of the publishing world fights for scraps of the other 30%. But Google and Facebook got together last year and colluded with each other, asking a simple, shocking question, a question that prompted the anti-trust probe:

“What if we took it all?”

And these clowns actually agreed they should fuckin’ do it. Holy smokes.

The endgame is underway. Last Thursday, Rooster Teeth, a company I admire and have tremendous respect for laid off 50 people. To avoid the same fate publishers have absolutely littered their website with ads; Pop-ups, Auto-sound ads, the kitchen sink, to stay afloat. We haven’t followed suit. Frankly I’d rather die.

Fewer publishers, and the ones left must worship a new god. Sound familiar?

By taking it all, the Duopoly actually wins twice. Not only do they kill publishers and take their money, what’s left of the publishers who hang on will have no choice but to attach their skeleton crew to Facebook and Google for life support. Facebook will actually have the balls to play savior by creating, say, a ‘preferred publisher program’, anointing a handful of publishers as partners who will get traffic from FB and just enough ad revenue to survive. Then Facebook’s algorithm will only show you articles from those publishers that their algorithm thinks you want to see. Your entire internet consumption, as well as how you think and feel, will be dictated to you.

theCHIVE doesn’t have that option nor would we want it. Logically, if the ad-supported model is dying, we must diversify our business model. We must control our own destiny and diversify away from ad-supported to subscription model.

If you've noticed, we don't advertise any of our projects anywhere. Arkhaven, Castalia, Infogalactic, VFM and Unauthorized all refuse to pay-to-play on Amazon, Facebook, Google, or anywhere else. We would rather rely upon our core supporters, focus upon serving them, and gradually grow that strong foundation than try to catch a big wave on Amazon or wherever.

Why? Because the wave belongs to the wave maker and is entirely under its control! We've seen, repeatedly, that even million-selling Amazon authors have ZERO support outside of Amazon. Their success is entirely in the hands of potentially hostile parties, which is why we'd rather have a small, but very reliable set of supporters than a large, but entirely unreliable one.

Build your own platform. Build your own market. TheCHIVE has belatedly realized what we knew all along: if people aren't willing to pay for it directly, it isn't worth doing in the first place. And if you haven't subscribed to Unauthorized yet, you can do so here. And speaking of UATV, there is a new Chuck Dixon video on the upcoming Birds of Prey movie up now.  Yes, believe it or not, he wrote that comic too....

A publisher, not a platform

Facebook is trying to spin federal law and be protected by it too:

Facebook has invoked its free speech right as a publisher, insisting its ability to smear users as extremists is protected – but its legal immunity thus far has rested on a law that protects platforms, not publishers. Which is it?

Facebook has declared it has the right, as a publisher, to exercise its own free speech and bar conservative political performance artist Laura Loomer from its platform. Even calling her a dangerous extremist is allowed under the First Amendment, because it’s merely an opinion, Facebook claims in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Loomer.

But Facebook has always defined itself as a tech company providing a platform for users’ speech in the past, a definition that has come to appear increasingly ridiculous in the era of widespread politically-motivated censorship. Now, the not-so-neutral content platform has redefined itself as a publisher, equipped with a whole new set of rights – but bereft of the protections that have kept it safe from legal repercussions in the past.

“Under well-established law, neither Facebook nor any other publisher can be liable for failing to publish someone else’s message,” Facebook’s motion to dismiss Loomer’s defamation suit reads, justifying its decision to ban her from the platform. It also points out that terms like “dangerous” or “promoting hate” cannot be factually verified and are thus constitutionally protected opinions for a publisher – while claiming it never applied either term to Loomer, despite banning her from its platform under its “dangerous individuals” policy.

Defining itself as a publisher opens Facebook up to lawsuits for defamation and other liability for the content users publish, something they were previously immunized against. All the lies, personal attacks, and smears launched by users going forward can now be laid at Facebook’s feet. That’s a Pandora’s box they might not want to open, legal analyst and radio host Lionel told RT.

Whatever they say – platform or publisher – their words will haunt them legally from now on.

Platforms like Twitter, Google, and – until now, apparently – Facebook are protected from the legal consequences of their users’ speech by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Facebook even makes reference to section 230 later in its motion, suggesting that it is trying to have its cake and eat it too.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the legal departments of the SJW-converged tech companies are paper tigers. They are not at all accustomed to anyone standing up to them, they are riddled with diversity, and they are prone to flailing about dramatically and incoherently rather than articulating an internally consistent legal narrative.

Facebook cannot be both a platform and a publisher. Either it is a content-neutral platform or a publisher responsible for its content. In the Loomer case, it has clearly chosen to be a publisher and can now be held responsible for all the content it publishes.

On a not-completely-unrelated note, Indiegogo has announced new Terms of Use today.

Alt-Hero Volume 1

A backer requests a discussion thread:

Can we start a thread on the Alt-Hero Volume 1 Omnibus? Got mine in the mail.

They have gone out to US backers and we anticipate they will go out to UK/Europe/ROW next week. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Please to not Epstein

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe really, really, really doesn't want to be Epsteined in prison:

“Will you take a deal in order to go on with the rest of your life if there is no big criminal attachment — you don’t have to do any time or anything like that?” CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked McCabe in an interview.

“Absolutely not, under any circumstances,” said McCabe, who joined CNN as an analyst Aug. 23.

“No deal?” Cuomo asked.

“Absolutely not, under any circumstances,” McCabe repeated.

Epstein assumed he was either too important or beyond their reach. McCabe obviously knows better.

Conservatives never learn

The British Conservatives are about to learn the lesson that US conservatives learned in the 2016 election.

Voters who back the Brexit Party at the next election would be helping put Jeremy Corbyn in No 10, Jacob Rees-Mogg warned last night.

The Leader of the House of Commons emphatically ruled out an alliance between the Tories and Nigel Farage in a snap poll.

He also issued a clear warning of the consequences for the Tories of Brexit not happening on October 31, saying the Brexit Party would be ‘full steam ahead’.

‘I don’t think a deal works,’ Mr Rees-Mogg told a Daily Telegraph event last night. ‘If we haven’t left by October 31, the Brexit Party won’t want to do a deal with us. If we have failed, the Brexit Party is full steam ahead.’

Urging Brexit Party supporters back to the Tory fold, he warned the audience to ‘think very hard’ before voting for it.

He added: ‘If you vote for the Brexit Party at the next election it is a vote effectively for Jeremy Corbyn.’

People stuck on binary analyses never see the third option coming. They also never seem to grasp that most people prefer open and avowed enemies to unreliable and traitorous allies.

If the leaders of the Conservative Party had any brains and actually valued political power, they would do two things. First, encourage Scottish independence. The only reason Labour ever had any power in Great Britain was due to the strong inclination of the Scots toward the Left. Once the Scottish electorate is excised from the British Parliament, Labour becomes as irrelevant as the Liberal Democrats have been historically.

Second, do a deal with the Brexit Party and build up a powerful Leave majority whether Brexit has taken place or not.

The fact that the Conservative leadership refuses to do either of these perfectly obvious things demonstrates very clearly that they are not serious about any of their professed principles. Like US conservatives, they have failed to conserve anything. They fully merit their future failure.

The end of air supremacy

The Yemeni attack on Saudi Arabia may mark a turning point in the 100-year history of air war:

Saudi Arabia spent billions to protect a kingdom built on oil but could not stop the suspected Iranian drone and missile attack, exposing gaps that even America’s most advanced weaponry failed to fill.

In addition to deciding whether that firepower should be turned on Iran in retaliation, the Saudis and their American allies must now figure out how to prevent a repeat of last weekend’s attack -- or worse, such as an assault on the Saudis’ export facilities in the Persian Gulf or any of the desalination plants that supply drinking water.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked Wednesday on his way to Saudi Arabia how it was possible that the kingdom could have dropped its guard, failing to stop any of the low-flying cruise missiles or armed drones that struck the Abqaiq oil processing center -- the largest of its kind in the world -- and the Khurais oil field. Even the best air defenses sometimes fail, he replied....

Between 2014 and 2018, the Saudis ranked as the world’s No. 1 arms importer. In that period, they accounted for 22 percent of the United States’ global arms sales, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In recent years they have acquired some of America’s top-shelf weapons, including F-15 fighter aircraft, Apache attack helicopters and the Patriot air defense systems.

None of that made a difference last weekend in the face of an attack that exposed Saudi weaknesses that might seem obvious in retrospect.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that the US is well behind Russia and China with regards to unmanned air war due to its historical supremacy in conventional manned air warfare. Because the US has focused on defending against threats of the sort that it poses to others, neither it nor its allies are prepared for "unconventional" attacks that avoid those defenses.

This is the usual pattern of military history, wherein a long-standing advantage is circumvented by technological and tactical innovations that eliminate the utility of the advantage. Think about the way in which the German U-boat circumvented the British Navy's control of the oceans or how Wellington's refusal to give battle at any time and place that was not of his choosing negated the massive numerical advantage of the French forces occupying Spain.

Canada's racist Prime Minister

It's going to be interesting to see how the Left will bend over backwards to explain why they're not screaming for Justin Trudeau's resignation now that he's been caught appearing in blackface. So racist indeed!

UPDATE: But wait, there's more!

Decades of failed predictions

At this point, "scientific" predictions might as well be coin flips given the way they so readily exchange one form of catastrophe for its opposite.

The conservative-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute has put together a lengthy compilation of apocalyptic predictions dating back decades that did not come to pass, timed as Democratic presidential candidates and climate activists refocus attention on the issue.

The dire predictions, often repeated in the media, warned of a variety of impending disasters – famine, drought, an ice age, and even disappearing nations – if the world failed to act on climate change.

An Associated Press headline from 1989 read "Rising seas could obliterate nations: U.N. officials." The article detailed a U.N. environmental official warning that entire nations would be eliminated if the world failed to reverse warming by 2000.

Then there were the fears that the world would experience a never-ending "cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere." That claim came from an "international team of specialists" cited by The New York Times in 1978.

Just years prior, Time magazine echoed other media outlets in suggesting that "another ice age" was imminent. "Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest," the magazine warned in 1974. The Guardian similarly warned in 1974 that "Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast."

In 1970, The Boston Globe ran the headline, "Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century." The Washington Post, for its part, published a Columbia University scientist's claim that the world could be "as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age."

One of the great advantages of age is that you can readily spot the liars, having been lied to by them before.

Philosophizing in the best possible way

Pope Leo XIII explains why it is important for Christians of an intellectual bent to read The Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas.

Whoso turns his attention to the bitter strifes of these days and seeks a reason for the troubles that vex public and private life must come to the conclusion that a fruitful cause of the evils which now afflict, as well as those which threaten, us lies in this: that false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses. For, since it is in the very nature of man to follow the guide of reason in his actions, if his intellect sins at all his will soon follows; and thus it happens that false opinions, whose seat is in the understanding, influence human actions and pervert them.

Whereas, on the other hand, if men be of sound mind and take their stand on true and solid principles, there will result a vast amount of benefits for the public and private good. We do not, indeed, attribute such force and authority to philosophy as to esteem it equal to the task of combating and rooting out all errors; for, when the Christian religion was first constituted, it came upon earth to restore it to its primeval dignity by the admirable light of faith, diffused “not by persuasive words of human wisdom, but in the manifestation of spirit and of power,” so also at the present time we look above all things to the powerful help of Almighty God to bring back to a right understanding the minds of man and dispel the darkness of error.

But the natural helps with which the grace of the divine wisdom, strongly and sweetly disposing all things, has supplied the human race are neither to be despised nor neglected, chief among which is evidently the right use of philosophy. For, not in vain did God set the light of reason in the human mind; and so far is the super-added light of faith from extinguishing or lessening the power of the intelligence that it completes it rather, and by adding to its strength renders it capable of greater things.

We know that there are some who, in their overestimate of the human faculties, maintain that as soon as man’s intellect becomes subject to divine authority it falls from its native dignity, and hampered by the yoke of this species of slavery, is much retarded and hindered in its progress toward the supreme truth and excellence. Such an idea is most false and deceptive, and its sole tendency is to induce foolish and ungrateful men wilfully to repudiate the most sublime truths, and reject the divine gift of faith, from which the fountains of all good things flow out upon civil society.

For the human mind, being confined within certain limits, and those narrow enough, is exposed to many errors and is ignorant of many things; whereas the Christian faith, reposing on the authority of God, is the unfailing mistress of truth, whom whoso followeth he will be neither enmeshed in the snares of error nor tossed hither and thither on the waves of fluctuating opinion. Those, therefore, who to the study of philosophy unite obedience to the Christian faith, are philosophizing in the best possible way.

The best way back from the Jesuit Church of Reason that has replaced the traditional Roman Catholic Church is a rejection of its surrender to the world and its prince. And the intellectual foundation for this rejection and subsequent reformation will be found in the Church Fathers.

In La Nuova Chiesa di Karl Rahner, Stefano Fontana soberingly traces the genealogy of Pope Francis’s “open Church” back to Rahner, the towering radical suspected of heterodoxy under Pope Pius XII. As Fontana shows, Rahner negotiated a “surrender to the world” which is being registered in this pontificate’s signature agendas—from Communion for adulterers and the ordination of married men to the enthronement of “conscience” and the rapid abandonment of evangelization.

Historian Roberto de Mattei likewise calls Rahner the Pope’s “grandfather,” arguing that the two Jesuits are linked through a third—Carlo Cardinal Martini, leader of the St. Gallen mafia and Pope Francis’s “father.” “The agenda of Cardinal Martini, which is the same as Rahner’s, offers us the key to understanding the papacy of Pope Francis,” says de Mattei, pointing to the Cardinal’s fiery last interview calling for the autonomy of conscience and Communion for adulterers.

The Great Replacement: comics edition

The conservative media is finally beginning to notice that something is wrong in the state of comics:

Iron Man is dead. Captain America is all but dead, having traveled back in time to live his life out in the America he remembered. Those unhappy events occurred in Avengers Endgame, the film in which Woke Hollywood killed off and retired the two white men—top heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). And more wokeness is coming, as the producers and directors of these obscenely profitable blockbusters fashion a new non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual MCU. The normal white man will be exiled. Who better than a black bisexual woman or “married” homosexual man, after all, to save the universe!

For Marvel fans to understand what’s coming, they must also understand that Disney will soon have complete control of the MCU, sans Spiderman. Disney and Sony have ended their sui generis partnership to make five films about the webslinger, with Sony retaining total control and Spidey swinging out of the MCU, apparently for good.

That will leave the movie franchise safely in the hands of people of color and those who partake of the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The heterosexual white man no longer saves the world. He’s an anachronism, a throwback to white-bread world of George Reeves and Noel Neill. The MCU cannot be left out of the The Great Replacement. Whites men will still show up, of course. But the new emphasis will be women, homosexuals, and, of course, people of color.

Of course, in keeping with conservative tradition, there is no mention whatsoever of legitimate alternative comics, such as Arkhaven and Dark Legion Comics, just complaints about the state of the mainstream. In the event you're interested in actually doing something about this, you might want to consider supporting Jon Del Arroz's new Flying Sparks 3 campaign or picking up a copy of Alt-Hero Volume 1.

Speaking of AHv1, the omnibuses have gone out to backers in the USA. They will be going out next week to backers in Europe and elsewhere.

UPDATE: In fairness, Mr. Kersey has written about the alternatives to Marvel before.

That's not funny!

Jimmy O. Yang@FunnyAsianDude
As a comedian I usually side with the comedians on sensitive subjects. But this is just plain racist. Its truly disgusting. Standing up against this is just as important as supporting our Asian brothers and sisters. This man has to go.

I could not agree more. Nothing is more important than supporting our Asian brothers and sisters! We should all stand with the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The pirate China Mike

Larry Correia chronicles the sad decline of China Mike Glyver from science fiction historian to open piracy:

A while back Richard Fox got nominated for a prestigious award for a story he wrote. Problem was, Richard is a financially successful indy author, and the snoots have a hate boner for indy authors, (snoots are all about writers having to go through proper thinking “gate keepers” first). Since Glyer is addicted to stirring up controversy, the world’s fattest vulture swooped in and started posting about Richard Fox’s nomination.

Wait… You know what? Glyer is right about one thing. Accuracy is important. Vultures are actually noble, social creatures who play an important role in the ecosystem, which is basically the opposite of Mike Glyer, so I should not have compared him to a vulture. I apologize. To vultures… Not Mike Glyer. He can fuck right off.

Problem was, Richard was already wise to Glyer’s game, and told him to keep his name out of his whore mouth, up to and including sending an official take down notice.

Good. Because fuck Mike Glyer. Every author should tell him to keep their stuff off his awful website.

At the time I didn’t really know or care who posted the story on the internet. That’s obfuscation. If Richard did post it himself, that’s up to him. When I throw out the trash, that doesn’t mean I want racoons rummaging through my garbage can. Nobody wants racoons in their trash. Now imagine Mike Glyer rooting around in your dumpster. No. Shoo, bad Glyer! BAD!

Except after seeing the email exchange, it’s worse than that. Richard posted the link to a private closed forum only readable by SFWA members (the people who would be voting for the award). Somebody (Richard says he doesn’t know who) took that private link and stuck it on Google Drive and Glyer linked to that to get clicks for his shitty public website. When Richard contacted him, rather than be a decent human being and go “Oh, my bad. Sorry.”  Glyer acted like an entitled shit and started lecturing the author he was trying to screw over about his tone and lack of civility.

It's always amusing to see how SJWs are shocked to discover that the laws apply to them too. Ever since John "McRapey" Scalzi helpfully came up with the bright idea to make award-nominated fiction available to the voters, the SJW gatekeepers of science fiction have been distributing the award-nominated works to the public, mostly with the permission of the rights holders.

However, Richard Fox did not give his permission to have his work publicly released outside of the private SFWA forum to which I totally do not have access any longer. And while China Mike was not the only individual to provide a public link to Fox's work, he was the only one who refused to take the link down and leave it down when requested to do so by the rights holder.

Needless to say, the usual suspects have been whining and crying about Fox's "timing" and "motivations" despite the fact that none of that matters. The law is clear. If a rights holder tells you to take something down, it doesn't matter why or when he tells you to do so, you either comply or you are in violation of U.S. copyright law. End of story.

On a side note, doesn't "China Mike, space pirate" have a great ring to it?

The Land of the Mind-Controlled

The early history of mind control in the USA:

In 1951, Dulles hired a chemist to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control. The man he chose, Sidney Gottlieb, was not part of the silver-spoon aristocracy from which most officers of the early CIA were recruited, but a 33-year-old Jew from an immigrant family who limped and stuttered. He also meditated, lived in a remote cabin without running water and rose before dawn to milk his goats.

Gottlieb wanted to use Detrick’s assets to propel his mind control project to new heights. He asked Dulles to negotiate an accord that would formalize the connection between the military and the CIA in this pursuit. Under the arrangement’s provisions, according to a later report, “CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.”

Taking advantage of this arrangement, Gottlieb created a hidden CIA enclave inside Camp Detrick. His handful of CIA chemists worked so closely with their comrades in the Special Operations Division that they became a single unit.

Some scientists outside the tight-knit group suspected what was happening. “Do you know what a ‘self-contained, off-the-shelf operation’ means?” one of them asked years later. “The CIA was running one in my lab. They were testing psychochemicals and running experiments in my labs and weren’t telling me.”

Gottlieb searched relentlessly for a way to blast away human minds so new ones could be implanted in their place. He tested an astonishing variety of drug combinations, often in conjunction with other torments like electroshock or sensory deprivation. In the United States, his victims were unwitting subjects at jails and hospitals, including a federal prison in Atlanta and an addiction research center in Lexington, Kentucky.

In Europe and East Asia, Gottlieb’s victims were prisoners in secret detention centers. One of those centers, built in the basement of a former villa in the German town of Kronberg, might have been the first secret CIA prison. While CIA scientists and their former Nazi comrades sat before a stone fireplace discussing the techniques of mind control, prisoners in basement cells were being prepared as subjects in brutal and sometimes fatal experiments.

These were the most gruesome experiments the U.S. government ever conducted on human beings. In one of the them, seven prisoners in Lexington, Kentucky, were given multiple doses of LSD for 77 days straight. In another, captured North Koreans were given depressant drugs, then dosed with potent stimulants and exposed to intense heat and electroshock while they were in the weakened state of transition. These experiments destroyed many minds and caused an unknown number of deaths. Many of the potions, pills and aerosols administered to victims were created at Detrick.

One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. The CIA called it suicide. Olson’s family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick.

A decade of intense experiments taught Gottlieb that there are indeed ways to destroy a human mind. He never, however, found a way to implant a new mind in the resulting void. The grail he sought eluded him. MK-ULTRA ended in failure in the early 1960s. “The conclusion from all these activities,” he admitted afterward, “was that it was very difficult to manipulate human behavior in this way.”

Turns out all they needed was a Like button and they could rely upon fake social pressure to do the rest.

As if they don't

It was really rather stupid of the US government to imagine that public claims China was spying on consumers through their devices weren't going to rebound hard on the US tech giants:

China has accused Apple of monitoring its users through spyware on its phones and computers.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said today that the world should be wary about the US tech company because it had assisted Washington to spy on ordinary users as well as country leaders 'for as long as 10 years'.

Beijing's spokesperson made the allegation after the United States claimed Chinese company Huawei could be collecting intelligence for Beijing and urged its allies to block the firm from their 5G networks. Hua Chunying, a spokesperson from the Ministry, also accused American IT provider Cisco of secretly collecting information from its users through the firm's devices. Hua said: 'As early as 2014, Apple acknowledged in a statement to have extracted personal data including short messages, contact lists, pictures from its users' mobile phones through a "back door" in its system.'

She added: 'According to leaked information by project PRISM, American people barely have any personal privacy in data including their phone calls, communications, documents and voice recordings in front of US intelligence. In additional, leaders from 35 countries - including some of America's most intimate allies - have had their phone calls monitored. Some of them have been monitored for as long as 10 years.'

Just wait until they start going after Facebook and Google. I really fail to see how "you don't want to let them spy on you, you should let US keep spying on you" is likely to be a successful sales pitch.

Help, Fellow Americans!

Great news! Hollywood is full of genuine, true blue heritage Americans defending traditional American ideals again! The Atlantic helpfully alerts us to Hollywood's Great Leap Backward:

The fate of the Hong Kong booksellers has caused an outcry around the world, with independent news outlets and free-speech advocates warning of a return to totalitarianism. “It’s an attack on the publishing industry from all aspects,” declared Yaqiu Wang of Human Rights Watch in a recent New York Times article.

This outcry is wholly justified. But as a longtime observer of a different medium that has also been losing ground to China’s censors, I have to wonder: Why isn’t there a similar outcry about China’s mounting attack on the film industry, not just in Hong Kong but also in the United States?

Over the years, the U.S. government has often praised and defended Hollywood films as a key component of American soft power—that is, as a storytelling medium that can, without engaging in blatant propaganda, convey American ideals, including free expression itself, to foreign populations around the world. But Hollywood has long since abandoned that role. Indeed, not since the end of World War II have the studios cooperated with Washington in furthering the nation’s ideals. Instead, the relationship today is purely commercial—on both sides. For example, Hollywood frequently enlists Washington’s help in fighting piracy and gaining access to foreign markets. But even while providing that help, Washington refrains from asking Hollywood to temper its more negative portrayals of American life, politics, and global intentions. (The exception is the Department of Defense, which insists on approving the script of every film produced with its assistance.)

Things are different in China. In that country, which is fast becoming the world’s largest and most important movie market, the ruling Communist Party exercises no such restraint. On the contrary, Beijing has a very clear idea of how a film industry should operate—namely, as an essential part of the effort to bring public opinion in alignment with the party’s ideological worldview.

And here we were worried about those (((Hollywood values))) relentlessly attacking America, Christianity and Western civilization. It's reassuring to be informed that, contrary to our spurious concerns, Hollywood is actually, and has always been, full of real White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans standing up for traditional American ideals.

So, naturally, we must rise to defend these great champions of America and the West against the Chinese incursion, because these terrible Chinese interlopers just don't respect those ideals, right? Or, you know, Americans could always just sit by and watch Hollywood burn as the People's Liberation Army marches right over it and holocausts the global propaganda machine. Whatever shall we do?

 Looks like it's time to toast some marshmallows. And the jump to China is definitely off, as it looks like we're about to be informed that Xi is the New Hitler.

Washington Free Beacon senior editor Bill Gertz said on Friday that under Chinese president Xi Jinping, the communist state has become a "communist nightmare."

Gertz appeared on The Mark Levin Show to promote his new book, Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy, in which he describes how the "China threat" has transformed radically since the 1980s.

"It really took a turn for the worse under the regime of Xi Jinping, the current Chinese leader, who has advanced what he calls the China Dream, which is really a communist nightmare," Gertz said. "He has his eyes set on global hegemony, he wants China to be the dominant superpower in the world, and in order to do that, he has to diminish the power of the United States. Xi Jinping has become the new Mao, the new emperor."

I wonder what went on behind the scenes over the last few years? Regardless, it's evident that China has made it abundantly clear to the relevant parties that they are not at all interested in having their olam tikkened.

Transport wiki >>> IG

If you use Chrome or Brave, there is absolutely no need to utilize Wikipedia ever again. All you need to do is add the Transporter extension and you'll automatically be transported to Infogalactic every time you click on a Wikipedia link.

This extension allows the user to move between Wiki and IG.

Auto-redirects from Wikipedia to Infogalactic's version of that page (whether entering via a link or the address bar).

Clicking the extension button shuttles you back to the Wiki version and disables auto-redirect for that tab, and clicking again takes you back to Infogalactic. If you navigate away, on that tab, to some website outside either Wiki or IG, it'll reset the behaviour back to auto-redirecting. 

Behaviour is also bound to the tab in which the clicking took place. If you click the button, thus disabling auto-redirect, and open a new tab, that new tab will obey the default redirect behaviour, i.e. taking you to Infogalactic if you visit Wikipedia.

There is also a Firefox version.

This is what it sounds like

Do NOT ever attempt fiction if you are not a professional writer of it. Believe it or not, there is actually an amount of skill involved in creating a sense of verisimilitude in storytelling. And the first lesson is this: write what you know. Which means, if you are an individual from one identity group, do not attempt to invent details about other identity groups. You WILL get it wrong. In fact, you will not only get it wrong, you will get it LAUGHABLY wrong.

Michael Harriot dissects Joe Biden's tale of an encounter with a gang leader named Corn Pop that was the highlight of his 1962 Negro Summer Safari Adventure.

I'm always astounded by the imaginings of white people as it relates to race. Many of them have this fictionalized jigaboo version that is almost alien-like. And one of the greatest examples of this ever is Joe Biden's story about Corn Pop the gangsta.

Now it has already been demonstrably proven that Biden will make stuff up. But any black person who hears this story will automatically give you the side-eye and  says: "nigga please."

It begins when Biden was working as a lifeguard at a pool.

Now Biden is like, 176 years old, but he's still in pretty good shape. This supposedly happened in the summer of 1962. Biden says that, instead of hanging out all summer, he decided to take a job working as a lifeguard at a black pool.

So, that summer, Biden was the only white lifeguard at Prices Run swimming pool in Brown-Burton Winchester Park. He says he did it—y'all, I SWEAR this is true—"in hopes of learning more about the black community." Yes, that's an actual quote.

Biden says that he became popular at the pool because many of the black people in Wilmington, DE had never talked to a white person before. This raised by bullshit-o-meter, so I decided to look it up. In 1960, Wilmington was 73% white, according to census records

Anyway, during Biden's Negro Summer Safari Adventure, one day, all of the town gangsters came to the pool. Now I know what you're thinking, but don't stereotype. Gangbangers are NOT a monolith.

Why can't a real street nigga enjoy a nice refreshing dip? Sometimes a thug wants to play Marco Polo, too. Well, the gang that invaded Biden's pool was called the Romans, which sounds gangsta AF. And the leader of the Romans was a dude named Corn Pop.

Now if you're black, I know this shit sounds like some white kid tried to make a gang fairy tale for a sixth-grade play because you and I know there ain't no squad led by a nigga named Corn Pop going around terrorizing Delaware pools.

But, I guess, in white people minds, thugs get two weeks vacation and go on retreats at city pools. Anyway, Biden says he had no idea that Corn Pop was the duly elected leader of the hood niggas. So when Corn Pop began bouncing on the diving board, which was against the rules,

Biden told him:

"Esther Williams! Get off the board, man..."

Then Biden kicked Corn Pop out of the pool. (I know you're thinking "Who TF is Esther Williams?" She was a famous swimmer in the 50s. But I admit, I thought he was talking about the lady who played Florida Evans, too)

Anyway, after he kicked the probably fictitious Corn Pop out of the pool, everybody was like: They told Biden that Corn Pop carried a straight razor and was gonna be waiting for him when he got off work. Now you and I both know that, if this was true, Biden would've just called the cops to walk him to the car.

But this was in 1962, and before 911, you had to dial a whole seven numbers. Plus, Biden said that he knew that if he called the cops, he wouldn't be allowed back into the African American community

Nigga, what?

Anyway, Biden says, instead he wrapped a six-foot metal chain around his arm and wrapped that in a towel. Because everyone knows there are ample black chains just laying around the "African America community" but no police officers.

When he went out to the car, Corn Pop was indeed waiting for him. But Biden went Clint Eastwood on Corn and told OG Pop from the Romans:

"You might cut me, Corn Pop, but I’m going to wrap this chain around your head before you do."

Again, that is a direct quote.

And guess what happened?

Just like that, my nigga CP put down the straight razor and he and Biden became friends. From that day own, Biden was untouchable in the black community because Corn Pop vouched for him

Again, STOP LAUGHING!

Now I don't know how it works where you live, but in my hood, you don't actually get a laminated street credential card from the neighborhood thug council but, then again, I've never been on the mean streets of Wilmington. But this story is actually recounted in Joe Biden's 2007 autobiography AND is retold in the Washington Post, here.

But this is not about Biden.

This is a celebration of the life of a straight razor-carrying certified street thug who I'd bet my pinky toe never existed. But if you ask Biden, I bet he'd say Corn Pop has passed on.

RIP my nigga Corn Pop. This is how it sounds when thugs die.

Of course, back in the 1970s, when Joe Biden was still semi-coherent, white Boomers knew so little about blacks that a water-loving gang leader named Corn Pop who carried a knife might have actually sounded credible to them. I very much doubt there is a single member of the Gen-X generational cohort, be he red or yellow, black or white, who could have heard that story with laughing out loud and immediately calling BS on it.

And "the Romans"? He might as well have said Corn Pop was the leader of the Sharks and threatened him with a scary doo-wop number sung acapella.

Boomers are such cheeseballs. They believe everything they are told by anyone they recognize as an authority figure.

Ceterum, non enim ad lunam.

RIP Rick Ocasek

Another leading musician of the '80s is gone:

The lead singer of The Cars has died at the age of 75 after being found 'unconscious and unresponsive' in his Manhattan townhouse.

Ric Ocasek was discovered by estranged wife Paulina Porizkova at around 4.14pm inside his Gramercy Park home in New York, Page Six reported.

The frontman was pronounced dead at the scene and appeared to have died from natural causes.

The Cars were my first favorite band as a teenager. Their sound was definitely new and different, as they bridged the gap between guitar rock and synth pop in a way that pretty much defined the New Wave.

Paper vs blood

Paper Americans discover that not everyone is inclined to pretend that paper is thicker than blood:

Two young Americans, Victor and Cynthia Liu, are “trapped” in China, increasingly desperate and despondent because Chinese authorities have blocked them from leaving for more than a year.

“They are trapped. They are alone. They are desperate to come home,” David Pressman, the siblings’ New York-based attorney, told USA TODAY. “They are literally breaking down.”

The Lius are subject to a so-called “exit ban,” and they’re not they only ones.

Another American citizen, Huang Wan, says Chinese officials are using a “fake” legal case to prevent her from returning to the United States. An Australian resident, Yuan Xiaoliang, has been barred from leaving China for more than eight months, and her husband, an Australian citizen, has been arrested on suspicion of spying, according to Australia’s foreign minister.

The State Department has warned Americans about China’s growing use of exit bans – stating in a Jan. 3 travel advisory that Chinese authorities have sometimes used exit bans to keep Americans in China for years.... Thomas Kellogg, executive director of the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University Law Center, said China has long used exit bans to stop its own citizens from leaving the country, particularly human-rights activists or other dissidents. But authorities are increasingly using the tactic to harass Americans and other foreign nationals, particularly those of Chinese descent, he said.

What defines a man? Is it is his paperwork? Or is it his DNA? It's extremely informative to see who is on the side of science and the truth and who is not. The obvious and relevant logic dictates that one cannot simply declare a Chinese man to be an "American" due to his beliefs any more than one can declare a man to be a "woman" or a "fish" on that basis.

NFL open thread

Skol Vikings!

UPDATE: Kirk Cousins is the Charlie Brown of quarterbacks. It's FIRST DOWN. The RBs are running right over the Green Bay defense, which appears to be almost gassed. Your first two reads are covered. THROW THE BALL AWAY!  Whatever you do, DO NOT TRY TO BE THE HERO.

Naturally, he decides this is the perfect moment to throw an off-balance, under-pressure pass to the corner of the end zone, where Diggs is double-covered. Interception.

This is why the NFL doesn't have guaranteed contracts.

Coin flips are more reliable than science

The reproducibility crisis in scientistry is even worse than we science skeptics had thought.

Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests. This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research to build upon.

From his lab at the University of Virginia's Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies.

"The idea here is to take a bunch of experiments and to try and do the exact same thing to see if we can get the same results."

You could be forgiven for thinking that should be easy. Experiments are supposed to be replicable.

The authors should have done it themselves before publication, and all you have to do is read the methods section in the paper and follow the instructions.

Sadly nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth.

After meticulous research involving painstaking attention to detail over several years (the project was launched in 2011), the team was able to confirm only two of the original studies' findings.

Two more proved inconclusive and in the fifth, the team completely failed to replicate the result.... According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments.

Science is not a metric for truth or reality. One should NEVER rely upon scientists' opinions about anything, because when science is actually reliable, we call it ENGINEERING.

When the gold standard is forty percent, you might as well rely upon flipping a coin.