Author: VD

Erica and the Evo-Avengers 008

VD: This is not my response to the two Eco-Avenger videos, this is the portion of the transcript of Will Duffy’s appearance last night on Ms Matthew’s channel when they discussed Probability Zero.

On Reading the Book and Watching the Response

Will: Here are my receipts. I purchased Probability Zero on July 26th and I didn’t read it right away. Then I purchased Hardcoded on August 9th. Then I purchased The Frozen Gene on August 10th. And then I emailed Vox for the first time on August 22nd. So these are the receipts. This is the exact timeline. This was nothing I had in my back pocket. This wasn’t the long game.

As to how I knew so many details about Vox Day, including details about his son—it’s quite simple. I read his books. Everything in my presentation was from his books. Everything.

It will come as a shock to most of you that Erica, Dr. Zack Hancock, Dr. Dan, Dr. Maddie Frank, and Grayson Hawk did not read the Probability Zero book that my presentation was based on. Details forthcoming. I had a lot of homework this go-round. I had to rewatch the last presentation, watch Erica’s rebuttal video to Vox Day, and then watch “Six Scientists Roast Vox Day” for over four hours. These videos were 12 hours, 42 minutes, and 25 seconds long total. My game plan: Step one, rewatch Human Evolution 2 live stream. Step two, meet with Mike Griffiths. Step three, watch Erica’s response video to Vox Day. Step four, meet with Mike Griffiths. Step five, watch “Six Scientists Roast Vox Day.”

For those who don’t know or don’t remember, Mike Griffiths is a mathematician—he’s the head of maths at a private institution in England. He’s a huge fan of Erica, and he’s an atheist.

I want to highlight one comment from Dr. Dan over at Creation Myths: “Can we also just marvel at the fact that Will went to a GD billiards player to learn popgen instead of, I don’t know, a population geneticist?” I’ll let the comment speak for itself.

On the Fossil Record

Will: Erica covered a lot in the last session. She covered fossils, more fossils, and finally more fossils. The more Erica teaches me about the fossil record and the more I learn about it, the more I struggle to make sense of young earth creationism.

I’m not going to elaborate on this now, but I will in January during our final discussion.

Predictions and Tiktaalik

Will: Erica, you said predictions are the gold standard of science. I’ve been thinking about that. Since our series started, I’ve tried to watch every evolution debate on the Modern Day Debate YouTube channel, and the number one evolution prediction that comes up almost every time is Tiktaalik. I’ve heard it so much that I never actually looked into the prediction and just accepted the claim that it was predicted. In the past couple weeks, I decided to look into it and I can’t find any evidence that it was predicted. I’m not making a positive claim that it wasn’t predicted—I’m just saying I can’t find any evidence that it was. So I want to know: in what way was Tiktaalik predicted?

Molecular Clock Discrepancies

Will: Erica, you said that the molecular clock matches with the fossil emergence time. Unfortunately, I have not had time to look into this, but I have been contacted by multiple people who said there are significant discrepancies with reconciling the fossil record with the molecular clock.

I have been sent multiple scientific papers that I haven’t read, and I’ll show them:

  • “The Origin of Animals: Can Molecular Clocks and the Fossil Record Be Reconciled?”
  • “Uncertainty in the Timing of Origin of Animals and the Limits of Precision in Molecular Timescales”
  • “Survival and Selection Biases in Early Animal Evolution and a Source of Systematic Overestimation in Molecular Clocks”
  • “Re-evaluating Molecular Clock Maximum Age Calibrations Revives Pre-Ediacaran Divergence Estimates for Animals”

Teleology

Will: When this part of the presentation came up, I mentioned to Erica that I thought what she was saying went against what she said about teleology originally—that we can’t tell if something’s designed.

Here’s what was said in the last presentation: “There is actually a way to use fracture patterns to tell whether or not a tool was made by a hominin or not. You can actually roll a bunch of rocks down a hill and see how they break. So there’s a way to differentiate between something that was designed by hands and something that nature did in the case of stone tools.”

But in our first session, she said: “The problem with teleology is exactly what you see on the screen. We can’t differentiate between the designed and the natural.” And a couple minutes later: “It’s not that teleology is impossible. It’s that teleology is non-scientific because it can’t actually be tested.”

I do struggle to understand that when combined with saying there is a test we can do. I think it’s possible teleology is kind of sneaking back in the door here.

The Selection Coefficient / Selective Turnover Coefficient Error

Will: When Erica and Zach were going over my slide, Erica said that “d” in the formula is “Day’s selection coefficient.” And then she said, “What’s crazy is that Day’s selection coefficient isn’t actually a selection coefficient.”

This is unfortunate. If you go back and look at my slide, it’s a selective turnover coefficient. It is not a selection coefficient. So when you said Day’s selective turnover coefficient cannot do what a selection coefficient does, that was not valid because it’s not a selection coefficient.

Zach was presenting and said, “So Vox has this other term d, but we don’t know what it means.” He admitted that he doesn’t know what it means, which makes sense. Unfortunately, that entire section of the video was a category error, and I didn’t find one person in the thousands of comments who caught this—I could be wrong, but I think it’s because people did not read Probability Zero.

After reading the book, you walk away with a really good understanding of what a selection coefficient is in population genetics, and you would never confuse it with Day’s selective turnover coefficient d. In population genetics, a selection coefficient uses the symbol S, which I actually used in the formula. Selection coefficients are S. The selective turnover coefficient is d.

Who Actually Read the Book

Will: People ask, “How do you know so much about Vox?” I read his books. In the beginning of the second video, Erica said, “So we read his book. Now when I say ‘we,’ I mean me, Zach, and four of our other credentialed friends.” That was a collective “we,” and I think people might have missed what it actually meant. It didn’t mean all of them read the book.

  • Zach said: “It’s like trying to explain to a 5-year-old why the sky is blue. It’s just a waste of time and I’m not going to read your book. I’m not going to waste my time with it. I got science to do.” So Zach didn’t read the book.
  • Maddie said: “I read 40% of a book about this.” So she read less than half.
  • Erica said: “I read about 60 to 70% of the book in its entirety, whereas I skimmed the rest.”

Then something else happened. When Erica’s first video rebuttal to Vox Day came out, the numbers were not the same numbers that I originally presented. They were way off. The quotes and page numbers she was giving were not correct in my book. Come to find out, none of them purchased Probability Zero. They obtained an EPUB version somewhere and shared it with everyone else. It was the wrong version. The only version you can buy—which is what I bought, for $4.99 on Amazon—is the second edition, which had corrections, updates, and the latest science. The EPUB version they all used was the original edition.

Vox Day’s Prediction

Will: Vox Day made a prediction on his blog on September 26th, the day after our last live session: “My response is fairly simple and straightforward. I’ll be happy to talk to her or to whomever and explain these things. I do not expect anyone to actually (a) talk to me or (b) read the book. I don’t know what it is about biologists, population geneticists, and other science enthusiasts, but they always seem to imagine they can effectively critique anything without bothering to actually learn anything about it.”

I was really hoping this prediction would not come true.

Wright-Fisher, Moran, and Day’s Selective Turnover Coefficient

Will: Zach said: “There are two classic models—the Wright-Fisher model and the Moran model. In its classic sense, the Wright-Fisher model does not have overlapping generations. But you can equate the two by setting the population size (the N value) in the Wright-Fisher model to an effective population size and you just scale that effective population size by the slowdown of drift due to overlapping generations. So even the Wright-Fisher model can account for overlapping generations.”

Zach is correct here. But since he didn’t read Probability Zero and doesn’t understand Day’s selective turnover coefficient d, he doesn’t know why it’s still necessary and why it captures something that N-sub-e misses.

Both models—Wright-Fisher and Moran—are answering this question: How fast does genetic drift move neutral alleles through the population?

Day’s selective turnover coefficient d is designed to answer an entirely different question: How fast does the entire gene pool turn over?

The d formula involves variables that simply have not been accounted for in standard population genetic models.

Now, if anyone out there wants to grab my attention and immediately build rapport with me, simply acknowledge and tip your hat to Vox Day for his selective turnover coefficient. It has essentially nothing to do with his Mittens argument that evolution by natural selection is mathematically impossible. So conceding this one should be relatively harmless.

Zach’s Calculation Errors

Will: Zach said, “This is going to be 76.8 multiplied by 252,000, and that’s how many mutations you’re actually going to have in that time period.” This was a mistake. And remember what Erica said—trusted creators are people who can own their mistakes. Zach is a trusted creator. He owned his mistake, and it’s in the video. He corrected himself: “Importantly, we can’t use 6.4—this is the diploid genome size—for the fixation rate, because you fix on a haploid genome. So it should be 3.2.”

This made me happy. But then a few seconds later he said, “I want to quickly clarify that value, but I also want to say that we can still use this value in the following derivations.” He referenced Perubski et al. 2025, saying they estimate an average of 152 de novo mutations every single generation, and dividing that in half for the haploid genome size gives 76—meaning the original number can still be used.

But this is a pretty significant error. The Perubski et al. number includes large structural variants, insertions, deletions, and duplications—not just single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Zach’s entire calculation on the whiteboard is explicitly about single nucleotide differences using a single nucleotide mutation rate. You can’t validate a SNP-only calculation with a number that includes large structural variation.

Once again, I could not find anyone in the thousands of comments who caught this. But you know who did catch it? Mike Griffiths. The billiards player.

The 38 Million Number

Will: Zach says we can fix 38 million differences between humans and chimps. That’s incorrect for three reasons.

First, the calculation is being run on the diploid genome size (76.8) instead of the haploid genome (38.4).

Second, minor: he’s using 252,000 generations instead of the d-coded size of 201,600.

Most importantly: neutral theory applies to the entire genome. Zach is using circular reasoning in assuming the neutral prediction of 35 million differences all fall perfectly into the divergent sites. In reality, the divergent sites are only 1.09% of the genome. So statistically, only 1.09% of the neutral substitutions would end up in the divergent zone. The proper formula would be: 15-some-odd-million × 35 million ÷ 3.2 billion (the size of the genome). So Zach’s original 38 million number is in actuality just 169,344.

Rate vs. Latency: The Highway Analogy

Will: Zach said: “Hopefully you can see a very glaring problem with this math. One is that it assumes that each mutation has to both arise and go to fixation before the next mutation can occur.”

Zach is incorrect here. Part of me has sympathy for him as he’s trying to critique a book he hasn’t read. But the other part of me struggles to have sympathy for the same reason—he’s trying to critique a book he hasn’t read.

When you calculate a rate such as an observed fixation rate, you are dividing the total number of generations observed by the total number of fixations over that period. This tells you how many generations elapsed per fixation on average, regardless of whether those fixations occurred sequentially or overlapped.

Vox Day’s calculation is a rate calculation. Zach thinks it is a latency calculation.

I can help everyone understand with a simple highway analogy. Imagine you were counting how many cars pass a red line in one hour, and you count 360 cars. How would you calculate the average rate? The numerator is the time (3,600 seconds), the denominator is the number of cars (360). So 3,600 ÷ 360 = 10 seconds per car. This is the exact same method Vox Day uses to calculate the average observed fixation rate. If you see this formula and say, “Well, that formula means the cars can only travel one at a time, like through a tunnel,” that is absolutely incorrect.

Vox Day’s calculation is not a latency calculation and is not assuming one fixation happens before another one starts. This was explicitly covered and anticipated in Probability Zero.

I’m not hammering on Zach here. I believe he is a trusted creator and he’s going to own these mistakes. We’re all just trying to get to the truth.

Mittens Is Not the Waiting Time Problem

Will: Dr. Dan says, “Like the waiting time problem, which—even though Vox Day has never heard of it—that’s the argument he’s making.” No. Mittens is not the waiting time problem. The waiting time problem refers to the significant amount of time required for beneficial genetic mutations to occur in a population. The Mittens argument isn’t concerned with mutation rates at all. It is an empirical audit of observable fixations. Mittens would be better referred to as the fixation problem.

The Bacteria Issue

Will: Dr. Maddie said the idea of applying the fixation rate from bacteria to human populations doesn’t work when you just take the average of the fixations out of the Lenski experiment and apply that as a fixation rate to the human population assuming all the mutations are happening in series.

No, it doesn’t assume mutations are happening in series. But let’s talk about the bacteria issue. I don’t know anyone who argues that humans fixate mutations faster than bacteria in terms of generations per fixation. I think it’s possible the audience walked away from that video thinking that is what was being argued. So I’m hoping Erica and the others can clarify whether or not they actually believe humans fixate mutations faster than bacteria.

Zach said something good: “The issue with using even conceptually the Lenski long-term evolution experiment for a fixation rate is that the Lenski long-term experiment begins with a bacterial population that is clonal and has no diversity.” Zach makes a really valid point here. This was also caught by Mike Griffiths, who brought it to my attention before this video was released.

Here’s Vox Day’s response, which I’m not claiming to understand:

“The polymorphism objection sounds legitimate until you think about what standing variation is. It’s not a warehouse of pre-adapted beneficial alleles waiting for their moment. It’s mostly neutral variation, which is why it’s still segregating. If those variants were beneficial, they’d have already swept to fixation. If they were deleterious, purifying selection would have removed them. What mutation-drift equilibrium gives you is a population full of genetic noise at low frequencies, not a head start on adaptation.”

I don’t understand this enough yet to know who’s right. But the main argument with the bacteria thing seems to be that Vox shouldn’t apply bacterial fixation rates to humans because bacteria are clonal and slow.

Dr. Michael Lynch—who I’m told is one of the most respected population geneticists in the field—has stated that bacteria are actually faster and more efficient at molecular adaptation than eukaryotes because of their population size advantage. He says: “Prokaryotes appear to be much more efficient than eukaryotes at promoting simple to moderately complex molecular adaptations.”

Mike Griffiths as Intermediary

Will: Mike Griffiths watched Erica and Zach’s presentation. He also bought Probability Zero. He watched Erica and Zach’s presentation twice and has a list of about a half-dozen questions and issues. I introduced Mike to Zach via email and Mike shared his list with Zach. Zach has yet to respond.

On the Probability Zero side, Mike has started reading Probability Zero and Vox Day’s scientific papers. He has a list of questions and issues for Vox as well. I asked Vox if he would respond to Mike, and he agreed. The three of us did a Zoom together last week, and after the Zoom, Mike sent his list to Vox.

I told Erica already that I do not rush things like this. I spent a very significant amount of time not only learning Vox Day’s arguments in Probability Zero, but also learning as much as I could about the math behind population genetics. I have since spent a good deal of time reviewing the responses from Erica, Zach, Dan, Maddie, and Grayson. There are significant errors that I trust will be owned and corrected. As such, the verdict is still out.

I will tell everyone I’m relying heavily on Mike Griffiths as well. I’m honestly giddy to get to be a bystander on his conversations with both Zach Hancock and Vox Day. Mike has legitimate concerns for both of them, and I’m extremely curious how they will both respond.

Will’s Conclusion

Will: I want to point out to everyone what stood out to me most the last few weeks after I mentioned Vox Day and Probability Zero.

The response I received was the exact opposite of what everyone has been telling me to do from the very beginning:

  • I’ve been told to focus on the data and science and not the person. Yet the vast majority of responses and comments I get are focused on Vox Day as a person and not the data and the science.
  • I’ve been told that Darwin’s racism has no relevance to evolution and that Fisher—of the Wright-Fisher model—being a eugenicist doesn’t make his math wrong. But that’s all I’m hearing about Vox Day.
  • I’ve been told to focus on understanding new things instead of just trying to refute them. But I see very few people trying to actually understand his arguments—just trying to refute them.
  • I’ve been told not to run to creationists hoping they can refute what Erica teaches me and to study what I’m taught. But all I’ve seen is everyone say, “I’m just gonna have Erica and Zach and whoever else refute this instead of looking into it.”

I think it’s important for what it’s worth to know what I’m experiencing and what I’m seeing from my perspective.

Erica’s Response

Erica: I have a lot of thoughts—like three pages of thoughts. I’m going to work through some of them, but I’m not going to get to everything because you have a hard stop at 7:00 and I want to get to the actual presentation and super chats.

I can understand your perspective on being frustrated with people’s response to Vox. I said this to you via email and I’ve voiced this to other people as well. I think you have to put yourself in other people’s shoes a little bit too, though. The reason Zach and I covered what we covered in that initial video is because that’s what you shared—that was in your PowerPoint. Our first video was obviously just in response to the PowerPoint we got from you. We didn’t have access to the book at that point. I hadn’t read the book at that time either, even the scant portion I did read, although I did read Mittens 3.0, which is available online for free and is supposed to be—according to Vox—the most up-to-date version of the argument. That’s also why in the second video we went over Mittens 3.0 in addition to the first version of Probability Zero, because that was according to him the strongest version of the argument.

I can understand your frustration, but I find it difficult to set aside a lot of his other beliefs in the same way one would for someone like Darwin or Fisher. In Darwin and Fisher’s case—and I said this to you via email—Fischer was a eugenicist and Darwin was racist. That’s factually true. Darwin was an abolitionist as well—he was progressive for his time—but that doesn’t change the fact that he lived within the context he lived in. But the work they did in science did stand on its own. Their work has stood the test of time, and Fisher and Darwin’s ideas are still being used today to make accurate predictions. I’ve not seen the same with Vox’s math.

This is something that people sympathetic to Vox have not appreciated, and I’ve yet to see him comment on it. The math that underpins standard population genetics has been used to accurately model real populations now. And there are like a billion of them, which is why I showed a slideshow of two dozen or however many it was. Point blank, full stop: if Vox is correct and traditional population genetics is incorrect, those papers shouldn’t exist. They shouldn’t be able to accurately model or even predict changes in real world populations.

I do still maintain that this is a waiting time problem. The waiting time problem in traditional creationist circles is a fixation problem. Mutation rate and fixation rate are used interchangeably a lot, inappropriately, as you would now know because you’ve read up on a lot of population genetics. But because they’re used interchangeably, it makes it seem like the waiting time problem is something distinct from this fixation problem. It’s not. You can go back to Doug Axe’s original paper in the early 2000s and see exactly this, which is why we’ve said this is a waiting time problem.

I’ll say too: the idea that he’s using the Lenski long-term evolution bacteria—which, as you accurately pointed out, are clonal and thus inappropriate for that reason—I don’t think anybody’s saying that bacteria quite literally fixate faster than humans do. That’s not my understanding. The problem is that in the Lenski experiment in particular, by their nature of beginning clonally and by their nature of not recombining, these two things are not analogous. It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison.

The numbers exist out there for eukaryotes—fruit flies, rats, humans. We have pedigree studies on real-world human populations: a grandparent, a parent, and their kid. And you can use that to model these populations into the past. They don’t match Vox’s math. And they don’t behave like bacteria.

To me, what rings out most severely is that he must rectify this math with the entire scientific community, and he won’t. I find that incredibly frustrating because he puts out the books and says, “This stands on its own,” but it’s never applied to any real-world populations.

I have to ask you this. I don’t understand how you could give him the benefit of the doubt for the other stuff. I can sit here and say I disavow Darwin for the shitty stuff he said. I disavow Fisher for the shitty stuff he said. I like their math, but I can recognize that in these areas, they’re bad people for holding these perspectives. And you’ve already said—just to be clear for everyone—Will said he disavows white supremacy and doesn’t think women should lose the right to vote and doesn’t think marital rape laws should be revoked. He said that up top. But I still think you’re being a little bit defensive of Vox, and I don’t understand how you could do that after watching the video that had a lot of this stuff in his own words. That’s confusing to me. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt here because I think this series is a good thing.

DISCUSS ON SG

Cry, Conservative, Cry

If only someone had come up with an alternative to Wikipedia that permitted conservatives to contribute. If only…

Anyone can add information to the pages of Wikipedia, even without an account. However, senior volunteer editors have a tight grip on what remains. Oftentimes, information is removed minutes later if they don’t like it.

If that information comes from The Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, Breitbart, Media Research Center, O’Keefe, and others on the right, it will likely be removed.

Wikipedia editors have determined that almost every conservative news outlet is unreliable and disallowed their content in some fashion.

In fact, The Gateway Pundit finished a study on this, and it is worse than we thought.

LEFT SOURCES ALLOWED: 37 of 75 reviewed (49%).
RIGHT SOURCES ALLOWED: 2 of 75 reviewed (3%).

Since 2018, Wikipedia has created an ecosystem where left-leaning sources are favored. Of the 75 conservative outlets we listed, only 2 are approved as sources.

I no longer care at all what happens to conservatives. When it comes to doing anything beyond whatever is necessary to pick up a paycheck or coach a children’s team, they are the most useless creatures on the planet.

It’s not as if every single conservative commentator who ever cried about inaccuracies on their Wikipedia page didn’t know about Infogalactic. It’s not as if we didn’t actually offer them their own bio page that no one else could touch.

But because it wasn’t the primary, established, and mainstream option, they weren’t interested.

The most surprising thing about conservatives that I’ve learned over the years is that they have no actual principles. They just don’t like change from whatever it is they are accustomed to. The most hallowed “conservative” principles such as “free speech” and “freedom of religion” are actually satanic Enlightenment inversions of the policies that protected Christendom for centuries.

Which is why I am not, and am pleased to say that I have never been, a conservative. Because change is good when it is for the better. Change is good when it is in the service of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Never forget that Jesus Christ was himself an agent of change.

Infogalactic will be back one day. But it’s not going to be powered by conservatives. Or, for that matter, people.

DISCUSS ON SG

File 770 Discriminates Against Hispanics

It’s so terrible to see the way that the science fiction community is full of hatred and discriminates against Hispanics. Mike Glyer of File 770 actually apologized for running a basic convention report about the recent World Fantasy Convention that just happened to be written by a gentleman of Hispanic descent.

How can I run a review by Paul Weimer and a week later post something by Jon Del Arroz, a writer who’s persecuted him? (Or ever?) That was a terrible choice. I apologize. And how can I do that to Cat Eldridge, who is closely associated with this blog but was completely blindsided by the post. He works with Paul all the time and absolutely would not want us to be hosting JDA. I apologize to Cat, too.

A good apology would stop there, I think. Which I say because some people want to know why I did this in the first place. And an explanation at this point in an apology is usually a backdoor justification which makes the apology worthless. All I can say is the explanation is part of my contrition.

File 770 doesn’t have that many commenters, so it often feels like I do a lot of work and all that matters is if I mention someone’s hot button topic they will jump in to reprimand me for failing their purity test. Most of the time my skin is not so thin that I react. Sometimes it is. Resentment is the issue that drives most of the problems I have in life, and when I yield to it bad things happen.

I was going through just such a season of feeling picked on when Jon Del Arroz sent me his convention report. I combed through it expecting to find takes I would refuse to publish but it was rather vanilla. Nothing to object to but the byline.

This is obviously nothing more than pure anti-Hispanic racism on the part of Mr. Glyer. There was literally nothing to object to but a Hispanic name in the byline; it was a simple and straightforward news report devoid of any political content whatsoever, as you can see for for yourself.

World Fantasy Con 2026 Friday Review
Posted on October 24, 2026 by Mike Glyer

By Jon Del Arroz: World Fantasy Convention opened Thursday at the Oakland MarriottCity Center, and Friday, the first full day, delivered the small, personal kind of gathering the convention is known for. I wasn’t able to attend Thursday because of having to get work done. Robert Silverberg was the main draw for me, and he did not disappoint.

The convention is a fraction of Worldcon’s size. Programming runs two or three panels at a time, the dealer room is modest, and the convention space is compact. Organizers have been citing 775 members on Facebook. At peak times on Friday the halls held roughly 200. The staff has the operation running smoothly and were all super nice and helpful, from the info desk to programming to the dealer room, and attendees I passed all seemed to be having a good time.

The morning opened with a panel on the changing publishing world. The lineup was Silverberg, Josh Wilson from The Fabulous magazine, Teresa DeLucchi, director of marketing at Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press, Betsy Wollheim, and Stephen Jones.

The panelists agreed that everything in the business is up in the air and very different than ever. They discussed the trend toward sprayed edges on books that began in the pandemic, and cited that they thought the trend had peaked, which I find entertaining and think look great and add a lot to the presentation of books. They also said physical books are staging a bigger comeback because ebooks have become so prevalent and normalized, so people want something physical and cool to hold. That matches what I see in the market: readers want premium deluxe editions, and more publishers are making them.

AI produced the panel’s one real disagreement. Jones called it inevitable and asked why anyone bothers fighting it. DeLucchi argued people should not be using it. Jones has the better of that argument. AI is not going away, and people will not stop using it. It cleans up typos fast, and it has plenty of uses that never touch the creative work. He believes eventually AI will replace editors entirely for the most part.

The AI exchange led Silverberg to talk of copy editors, and he did not hold back. He once had a copy editor “fix” a sentence he had deliberately left unfinished, and he had to get it changed back. His verdict: “I hate copy editors because I know what I’m doing.” He added that Harlan Ellison once had a copy editor change a pile of his text wholesale, and that it did not go well for the copy editor.

He also talked about meeting John W. Campbell. The business used to be personal, he said, and now it is detached and run by email. The panel noted that unlike the days of building relationships with editors to buy stories, Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld buys stories only through open submissions, not by soliciting authors, so a relationship with the editor doesn’t get you a sale. Everyone goes through the same slush process. Silverberg described walking into Campbell’s office as being like going to church and meeting God. When he got to call Campbell by his first name, he thought the roof would fall in.

The dealer’s hall was modest but with a lot of cool stuff. Tachyon Publishing had a big presence there with a lot of works that were tempting, especially form Peter Beagle’s catalog. Cross Genre Books, a Portland dealer, had a deep rare-book stock: signed Jack Vance, signed Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, Anne McCaffrey, and plenty of Heinlein. I spoke with Anthony Eichenlaub, vice president of SFWA, who had a table in the room. Artist John Picacio also set up there, and he kept a line most of the time I passed, with fans buying prints.

In the afternoon I went to a reading with Bruce McAllister, Charlie Jane Anders, and Caroline Yoachim. McAllister is a long time writer who has done wonderful work and does not get enough credit in the field these days despite plenty of award nominations for his work. Anders really worked the room before reading from a forthcoming publication in 2027 that involves vampires and time travel, thanking the moderator and the audience and getting everyone applauding, and the crowd responded in kind.

What’s great is how many of the attendees are there just as fans and not a full slate of scheduled speaking. I ran into Robin Hobb and Tad Williams, among other big names. Peter Beagle held a small meetup that filled before I could sign up, and I hope to catch him another way before Sunday. A bookbinding workshop, where attendees bound their own books, also looked good, and I missed it for scheduling reasons.

Friday night also holds a mass autographing session. Silverberg and Jones are expected to unveil an anthology there, with advance review copies on hand. Saturday brings Silverberg’s interview panel, which I expect to be a highlight of the con as well. The World Fantasy Awards banquet is Sunday to cap everything off. 

All in all, it was an excellent Friday, and World Fantasy Convention delivered. 

Now, I have zero interest in any future accommodation with the SF-SJWs, not because they quite rightly hate and fear me, but because they are such a collection of irrelevant mediocrities that there isn’t a single one of them that I would ever deem worthy of publishing in ebook, let alone in fine deluxe leather. When Castalia House is publishing excellent authors like Eiji Yoshikawa, Benito Perez Galdos, Zenaide Fleuriot, Unno Juza, and Nomura Kido in English for the first time ever, how could we possibly care about these sub-trivial SF/F wannabes who don’t even understand what science fiction is and what it is not.

Unfortunately, Mike Glyer has forgotten that his proper role is that of a science fiction historian, not a racial gatekeeper, and while it’s understandable that he would eventually fold under the hateful pressure of the yapping SJWs, it is a mistake on his part. Because, as a very kind and gentle dark lord once said, an apology is nothing more than a guilty plea in their beady little eyes.

And they are irrelevant anyhow. Despite their best efforts, Castalia House already publishes more and better titles than Tor or Baen. I will not be surprised if within three years, Castalia House is the biggest science fiction-related publisher in the world not named “Amazon”.

Sign up for Castalia Unlimited to find out why.

DISCUS ON SG

Top US Military Strategist Fired

Considering that the US military managed to lose 18 military bases in an offensive action, one would hope that it is looking for better strategists than those upon whom it has been relying.

The Pentagon has fired its top military strategist as Washington draws up contingency plans for a possible escalation of hostilities with Iran.

Army Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia has been removed from his position as director for strategy, plans, and policy (J5) on the Joint Staff, a spokesman confirmed late Wednesday, following media reports of his dismissal. His predecessor, Lt. Gen. Joseph McGee, was forced into retirement a year ago amid reported friction with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine. Sylvia previously served as vice director of the J5.

The Pentagon did not explain Sylvia’s departure. His responsibilities included developing military strategies and plans to advise the chairman and the US president. He joins nearly two dozen senior military and civilian officials removed during Hegseth’s tenure.

The problem, of course, is threefold. First, this is a war that is manifestly not in the US national interest. Second, the shift to 5GW missile-and-drone-based warfare renders all previous strategies at least potentially irrelevant. Third, it is never helpful to have an allied nation calling the shots and dictating a military’s primary objectives.

This is why the war on Iran was obviously foolish and why success in that war was very low-probability from the start. The US military needs a complete reset, and replacing its top strategist is only the first in a very long chain of necessary decisions if the USA wants to remain a major regional military power.

And the sooner that it realizes it is no longer a global superpower, the better.

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The Descent of America

It’s been fascinating to watch as everyone has gradually discovered that immigration and the service economy and the Boomer love of deals has inexorably led to nothing lasting and nothing working anymore:

DEI, AI, outsourcing- all have contributed to a reality where once mighty America is running on fumes. Innovation today would mean diversifying the AI voices. You know we’re bound to get an Ebonics-spewing AI bot named Jamal. It already means eliminating the entry level jobs at McDonald’s and other fast food places, and replacing them with self-service kiosks. You find these self-service kiosks everywhere, including hospitals and doctor’s offices. Ironic- fast food and the medical system- two of the more dangerous elements in our collapsing America 2.0. We’re not making America Healthy Again any more than we’re bringing back American factories. RFK, Jr. just really polished his sellout skills by coming out in favor of the COVID vaccines for children and praising Anthony Fauci. You know, the guy he skewered so effectively in the best selling book on Amazon. Someone tell him to read his own work. There are no White hats. No heroes. Just AI bots and surly Black women.

Some of us warned, decades ago, that America was going to become nothing more than a service economy, once we destroyed our industrial base with NAFTA and other disastrous trade deals. But we certainly didn’t envision a service economy that featured such really, really bad service. If you’ve essentially retired from making things, then you should at least concentrate on treating the customers who buy all the products you import from other countries decently. You should at least hire friendly and competent American citizens to interact with the customers, who are dealing with the substandard nature of those imported products. Companies that wildly overcharge you for television stations that provide no diversity of perspective, and internet services that are slower and less reliable than those found in countries like the Dominican Republic, should at least hire friendly and competent American citizens to fix that incredibly slow internet and mindless television for you.

Now, certainly our mad immigration policies have contributed to this mess. As they say, when you import the Third World, you become the Third World. Let the record show that, in the year of our Lord 2026, America has undeniably become a Third World country. My parents, not to mention my grandparents, wouldn’t recognize America 2.0 as the country they grew up in, struggled to survive in, and died in. We have become conquered without a shot being fired. An invading force, an army without weapons, ushered in and paid for by the non-Irish and non-non-Irish elite who profit from division and chaos.

The constant stream of new H-1B Visa workers from India hasn’t been stopped. They have made Americans feel inadequate with their nonsense about needing immigrants to “do the jobs Americans won’t do,” and because “we just can’t find enough skilled workers.” No, they want to pay their workers less. They want to slash benefits. They want to use AI and automated menus, not real human beings. And the human beings they do hire, as my most recent experience demonstrated, are not “skilled,” and are not friendly, reliable, and efficient. There has to be a lot of friendlier, more reliable, and more efficient U.S. citizens out there. Laid off or outsourced. Given up after being unable to find work. Blackballed for refusing the jab or other types of political incorrectness. There are an especially large number of White males in this category. Once the toast of the White-run patriarchy, they now bear the burden of being the wrong “fit” for every position, and reap the fallout from the Great Replacement.

We are a society where nothing and increasingly no one seems to work. You can see it in every store, every restaurant. Employees going through the motions. None of them paid enough to live on their own. All of them denied a chance at the American Dream. The Third Worlders who have been installed here have increased their standard of living. Americans whose families have been in this country for countless generations are seeing their standard of living deteriorate. It’s a disgrace that our children’s generation will be the first to have a lower standard of living than ours.

It’s not true that no one cares. And the answer really isn’t that hard. Stick together. Only hire friends, family, and young men who look like you. Stop proudly patronizing businesses run by those who hate you and have already replaced you.

Spacebunny and I don’t go out to dinner very often. And when we do, we always go to the same place: the restaurant run by our Italian friend. Sure, it doesn’t hurt that it is very possibly the best proper Italian pizza to be found anywhere outside of Italy – we both had an amazing Zuchetto from the seasonal menu that was made with pumpkin sauce instead of tomato sauce – but we make a point of not only going there, but telling everyone about it. Which is one of the many reasons he’s actually expanding his business when the restaurants all around him are going under.

The contracting economy is an opportunity to leverage your consumer power. Most businesses are on a razor’s edge, heavily in debt and teetering between survival and extinction. You can help tilt the balance every day by choosing quality over minimizing cost, working with friends and acquaintances rather than strangers, and serving as a cheerleader slash ad hoc advertising department for the companies that are good to you.

Excellence is a choice. Choose it.

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2026 Based Books Nonfiction

There’s a whole world of ideas out there that you’re not supposed to explore. Forgotten history. Unconventional science. Unfashionable philosophy. Suppressed perspectives. Questions that respectable people aren’t supposed to ask.

And authors who aren’t afraid to ask them.

Welcome to the 2026 Non-Fiction Based Book Sale™, where independent thinkers, researchers, historians, and authors have come together to offer their books for just $0.99 or FREE!

For one week only, from Wednesday, October 28, through Tuesday, November 3, discover books that challenge conventional wisdom, recover forgotten knowledge, and encourage you to think for yourself.

Castalia House and I are participating in the 2026 Nonfiction Based Book sale with two books:

I would also very highly recommend John C. Wright’s excellent collection of essays, Transhuman and Subhuman, which is among the best and most thought-provoking nonfiction works I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

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The End of the US Middle East

It appears the Gulf States have chosen a side, and it’s not the US-Israeli alliance:

Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, Prince Khalid bin Salman, the brother of the Crown Prince, flew to Tehran. With him came Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir and Turkey’s intelligence chief, Ibrahim Kalin. They sat down with Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and senior security official Rezaei, who hosted the talks, for about two hours. The agenda: the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, the Strait of Hormuz, the American blockade of Iran’s ports and a regional non-aggression framework.

Read that list again. Those are the four biggest security problems in the Persian Gulf. The countries that actually live there just met to discuss them. The United States, which has two carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group and a blockade in the neighborhood, was not in the room. Nobody seems to have missed it.

The three visitors are the signatories of the Makkah Agreement, the mutual-defense treaty that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed on August 7. Article 2 says an attack on one is an attack on all. It was sold, at least in Washington’s imagination, as a Sunni shield for the Kingdom against Iran and its friends in Yemen.

Eleven weeks later, the entire shield showed up in Tehran to talk about cooperation. Iran’s ambassador to Pakistan says Tehran will “study” the agreement, “and if it is good, we will support it.” The treaty conveniently includes an accession clause allowing new members to join by consensus. My sources tell me the three formally invited Iran to join once the U.S.-Israeli war ends, and that Tehran accepted on that basis. No official readout confirms that yet. But the official readouts did agree to keep talking “among the four,” and Iran has a phrase for what it wants: “endogenous security.” Translation: security for the Gulf, by the Gulf, without the 5th Fleet.

Imagine NATO’s founding members inviting the Soviet Union to join in 1952, and you have some idea how badly this has gone for American strategy.

In fairness to American strategists, none of the people involved in the US strategy for the Middle East for the past 40 years have actually been Americans. What we’re witnessing is the failure of the Greater Israeli strategy of the neocons, which I have to admit, did succeed rather better than I would have ever imagined given how effectively it exploited the non-nation states of the region.

The problem, as always, is that the seeds of ultimate failure are planted with initial success. Fortunately for the USA, it appears to have been more of a Suez moment than a Sicilian one.

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Rumors of a War’s End

Days before the Israeli electorate appears to have refused to give the ruling Likud Party a majority, the Jerusalem Post reports that the IDF refused the Israeli Prime Minister’s order to restart Israel’s war against Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir clashed over a military action that could renew the conflict with Iran days before Israel’s elections, N12 News reported Sunday evening. Recently, Zamir received a directive from the political echelon to carry out an action, which security officials told N12 would “trigger a rapid escalation into a confrontation with Iran.”

Due to the sensitive nature of the action, N12 reported that Zamir requested an in-depth discussion and formal authorization before moving forward with the action.

Sources familiar with the details told N12 that Zamir and additional IDF leadership are concerned that the political echelon may be trying to exploit the front with Iran ahead of elections for political gain.

It’s also being rumored that Saudi Arabia has effectively surrendered to Iran and is seeking an accommodation to extricate itself from the US security system. And it’s confirmed that the leaders of Norway and Finland are talking to Putin.

So perhaps things are happening behind the scenes.

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The Bellwether State

Spencer Pratt reflects upon his experience running for mayor of Los Angeles:

I hate to be this cynical, but I’ll be honest…running for Mayor exposes you to things that make you believe the city is actually being overtaken by demonic energy. Drive south Fig at night. Go to 6th and San Pedro. You see children openly prostituting, drug zombies setting dogs and cats on fire, babies born to crackheads and tossed in a dumpster, dead people just lying in the streets…that’s not even to mention the dozen neighbors of ours who burned alive in what is now a crumbled hellscape.

Many times I wondered if the city’s problems weren’t beyond the reach of any politician’s capacity to actually fix. There is a cultural and spiritual rot that can’t be fixed at the ballot box. Until we fix the culture, we are kinda just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and the shit we shovel around every 4 years doesn’t really mean a thing.

The Dark has been gathering for decades. Now we are seeing the early results of its rising. And we are also seeing how men like Bukele will be required in order to chase it back into the shadows again.

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