Author: VD

Review: Six Expressions of Death

Peter Grant, the author of the Maxwell Saga, reviews Mojo Mori’s Six Expressions of Death. He calls it “an unusual thriller with some intriguing twists.”

I don’t particularly enjoy most thrillers or suspense novels.  I find most of them wanting in one or more aspects, failing to hold my attention.  This one is different.  It’s set in samurai-era Japan, and offers a fascinating insight into that culture in the guise of a murder mystery.  Added to that is an element of the mystical and spiritual, a supernatural twist to the classic whodunnit genre.

An excerpt from Mojo Mori’s debut novel:

A faint sound made the man freeze, his heart racing. Holding his breath, he listened intently. Utter silence prevailed for several moments. Then his ears detected furtive sounds—the soft, irregular noises of a living creature creeping through the grove nearby. The man rose to a crouch, laying his hand on his sword-hilt as he peered into the gloom.

Suddenly, the silhouette of a man glided stealthily between two trees not seven feet from where the traveler crouched! The fog provided a background against which a peasant’s wide straw hat appeared clearly. The fellow also bore a suspiciously long pole in his hands. A second and third, each carrying a similar pole, followed the first. A moment later, the traveler glimpsed the trio moving to his left, creeping methodically through the grove and thrusting the long poles into any place that might conceal a man. Hunters! But of men, not beasts.

The traveler immediately recognized his danger. The long poles were spears, and it was for him the men were almost certainly searching. He did not know if they were agents of his lord’s enemies, attempting to thwart his mission, or merely robbers alerted to potential prey by the innkeeper at the village.

Who they were mattered little at the moment. They would surely kill him if they found him. If he remained in the grove, they were certain to discover him soon. Though he was not unskilled with a sword, the traveler knew he stood little chance against three men at once, particularly men armed with spears.

The man climbed to his feet as quietly as he could, picking up his own straw hat from the forest floor. Easing himself through the trees slowly, and cautiously, the traveler moved away from the three men and in the direction of the road. He could no longer see or hear the hunters. His heart beat violently as he stole among the trunks, keeping one hand outstretched to feel any obstacles hidden in the murk before he stumbled noisily into them. His whole body was tense with the expectation of steel plunging into his flesh from the thrust of an unseen ambusher’s spear.

Soon he reached the far end of the grove. He would have liked to proceed more cautiously, but he knew that lingering even a moment too long might well prove fatal. Once clear of the pines and away from the hunters, speed would prove essential. A clump of small bushes stood between the road and the end of the grove, clinging precariously to a low bank. He clambered down through them carefully, trying not to tangle his legs with the thin branches and snap one loudly. Fortune remained with him, though, as he made his way through them without breaking any, and he was relieved to feel the road’s firm earth under his feet.

The man moved off along the road as swiftly as he dared, his straw sandals making little noise on the damp, hard-packed dirt. Crouching low to make his silhouette less visible, he glanced warily from side to side as he fled. In the pre-dawn light, the road seemed lined with dark, mysterious shapes watching him in brooding silence. He found himself keenly aware of how far away he was from safety, and how close he still was to the men trying to kill him.

A sense of looming menace dogged the man, almost as if he could feel the breath of a pursuer on the back of his neck. The recollection of the innkeeper touching his shoulder as he slept returned to him with blazing clarity.

Is that how they tracked me so easily to the grove? he wondered, as a new fear tingled along his limbs. Did that man put a devil on my back, which rides there even now? If he did, then their witch will know which way I fled!

He had no choice. Better to deal with it now than after daybreak, when he could be seen for miles along the road. The traveler halted and reached deep into his garments. After a moment, his questing fingers found the small bag where he kept sacred salt from the shrine at Shiogama, which he had kept for just such a moment. After whispering a desperate prayer to Shiotsutsuno-oji-no-kami, he withdrew a large pinch of the blessed salt and threw it over his back. Immediately, he felt lighter, and freer, as the sensation of clinging menace left him.

Looking east, he saw that the line of pale light along the horizon’s edge was growing. Despite the fog’s uncertain protection, he knew he needed to put more distance between himself and the pine grove where danger had come stealing upon him on padded feet.

Once he had gone two hundred paces from the grove, the traveler stood more upright and picked up speed with longer, faster strides. He was still stiff from his night’s sleep, but he was refreshed too, and he could feel that he had the strength to run until noon, if need be.

As he ran at a relaxed, ground-eating pace, he listened for the sound of heavy feet running up behind him, holding himself ready to turn and fight for his life. But he heard no sounds, and when he occasionally looked back, he saw no human forms moving amid the gradually fading fog. He went on for half an hour before halting for a moment at the top of a slope leading down to a footbridge across a stony mountain stream. It was morning now, and the sun had fully risen, but silence lay over the lank, motionless grasses almost as thickly as the mist hovering over the water.

The man drew in a deep breath, released it slowly, then walked quickly down the slope towards the stream. Despite the meal the night before, the exertion had stirred his appetite and he wished he had bought food for breakfast at the village.

The traveler walked quickly through the fog, his hand poised close to the hilt of his sword. His ears detected no sounds beyond his heart’s swift drumming and a faint whisper of air breathing through the roadside grass, despite his urgent listening. The traveler’s eyes stabbed right and left as he walked, trying to pierce the solemn white vapor hanging sluggishly half a pace above the ground.

The man now felt grateful for the straw sandals he wore. He welcomed their presence even though they had become sodden from the wet road, with water soaking through to chill the soles of his feet. Normally he would have preferred the cleanliness of a pair of geta, that would lift his feet comfortably above the mud. But with peril skulking at his heels this morning, the filthy, water-logged sandals offered him what he now craved more than anything—silence.

The traveler descended a slope towards a stony creek, noting the wooden footbridge crossing the swift mountain stream, whose dark waters gurgled and splashed steadily in the deep pre-dawn hush. He glanced up at the facing hillside, his eyes questing for signs of danger among the pines that dotted it.

Well, perhaps they were only brigands after all, the man thought as he crossed the wooden footbridge and began to climb the facing slope. He looked back and saw there was still no sign of his pursuers.

The fog swirled for a moment as a soft breath of morning breeze rolled down from the green heights above. The white curtain parted, almost as if by human hands. The traveler looked out over the grassy slope falling away to the left, down to the curve of the stream he crossed moments before. Beyond it, a second, thickly-forested slope mounted towards the unseen sky. It seemed to him that the hillside next to him lay empty except for a few paltry shreds of mist that refused to dissipate.

The traveler took a few steps, then, feeling a sudden prickling along his neck, looked to his left again with a sinking feeling in his heart. The slope was no longer empty! Three men now stood on the slope ahead of him, perhaps fifty paces distant. All three were staring in his direction, their eyes dark pits under the wide brims of their straw hats.

Spider legs of horror stalked up and down the traveler’s spine. He knew of shinobi, the assassins who knew the occult secrets of the ghost world. Some said they could track their prey swiftly and surely with the aid of spirits, and bargained with terrible creatures from beyond the grave for even stranger powers. Were these hunters who had made him their quarry such men?

Lies, deceit, and rhetoric

In last night’s Darkstream, I explained why there is no “us” when it comes to the Fake Right and the genuine Right. It’s not a question of rhetoric. Rhetoric is not intrinsically dishonest. It can be, but as we are instructed, rhetoric is most effective when it is enlisted in the service of the truth. Jesus Christ was not lying when he described the Pharisees as “white-washed tombs” and “serpents” and the “offspring of vipers”. He was not speaking dialectic, he was utilizing rhetoric to illustrate their emptiness and dishonesty.

But lies and deceit are always and intrinsically dishonest. Such dishonesties may be necessary at times, when one is forced to make a choice between two evils, but they can never serve as a core strategy for any movement that is genuinely on the side of the good, the right, the white, and the true.

These selections from the Anglin Style Guide demonstrates that not only are these people not on our side, they are not to be trusted by anyone, ever. There is so little truth in them, and so much intentional deceit, that I don’t think even their claimed purpose of “saving the white race” can necessarily be taken at face value.

PRIME DIRECTIVE: ALWAYS BLAME THE JEWS FOR EVERYTHING

As Hitler says in Mein Kampf, people will become confused and disheartened if they feel there are multiple enemies. As such, all enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance.

So no blaming Enlightenment though, pathological altruism, technology/urbanization, etc. – just blame Jews for everything.

This basically includes blaming Jews for the behavior of other non-Whites. Of course it should not be that they are innocent, but the message should always be that if we didn’t have the Jews we could figure out how to deal with non-Whites very easily.

The same deal with women. Women should be attacked, but there should always be mention that if it wasn’t for the Jews, they would be acting normally.

What should be completely avoided is the sometimes mentioned idea that “even if we got rid of the Jews we would still have all these other problems.” The Jews should always be the beginning and the end of every problem, from poverty to poor family dynamics to war to the destruction of the rainforest.

LULZ

The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not…. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.

POSITIVITY

We should always claim we are winning, and should celebrate any wins with extreme exaggeration. This does not mean we downplay the enemy, just that we play up ourselves. We overestimate our influence.

We should always be on the lookout for any opportunity to grab media attention. It’s all good. No matter what. The most obvious way to do this is to troll public figures and get them to whine about it. I keep thinking this will stop working eventually, but it just never does.

100{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} BLACK AND WHITE

Just as we mustn’t present multiple enemies, we mustn’t leave any room for nuance in any other area. To the entent that it is physically possible, everything should be painted in completely black and white terms. The basic idea is that everyone on our side is 100{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} good and everyone who isn’t on or side is 100{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} evil.

DEHUMANIZATION

There should be a conscious agenda to dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths. So it isn’t clear that we are doing this – as that would be a turnoff to most normal people – we rely on lulz.

ATTACKING MAINSTREAM SHILLS

Pro-Jew shills should be attacked. These include Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and Milo. At the same time, they should also be accused/celebrated as secret Nazis whenever they post anything that lines up with our agenda.

As you see, not unlike SJWs, Swastika-Wearing Jackasses are also prone to lying. Of course, as is the case with SJW projection, their very strategies inform us how we can effectively respond to them. Every time they claim a victory, praise them for being good little Stormpoopers and “celebrating the win with extreme exaggeration”. Every time they claim to be important or the most-trafficked site in the history of the Internet, praise them for remembering to “overestimate their influence.”

If they whine about being attacked and ask you why, keep the answer short and succinct: “because you are evil and your Alinsky-inspired strategy is literally satanic.” At the end of the day, that is sufficient cause to reject them, no matter what their professed objectives may be.

And when they try to run Jon Stewart’s “clown nose on, clown nose off” game and start posturing about how you’re just too old to grasp “the lulz”, you would do well to remind them that you are aware the lulz are only there to hide the fact that they are actively seeking to dehumanize people and inure others to their deaths.

Flat UI is retarding.

It is literally retarding. It slows the user down by nearly one-quarter on average. I’ve always hated it, passionately, since I noticed Apple pushing it. Now I understand why, beyond the ugly, outdated aesthetics.

The mania for “flat” user interfaces is costing publishers and ecommerce sites billions in lost revenue. A “flat” design removes the distinction between navigation controls and content. Historically, navigation controls such as buttons were shaded, or given 3D relief, to distinguish them from the application or web page’s content.

The mania is credited to Microsoft with its minimalistic Zune player, an iPod clone, which was developed into the Windows Phone Series UX, which in turn became the design for Windows from Windows 8 in 2012 onwards. But Steve Jobs is also to blame. The typography-besotted Apple founder was fascinated by WP’s “magazine-style” Metro design, and it was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013. Once blessed by Apple, flat designs spread to electronic programme guides on telly, games consoles and even car interfaces. And of course web sites.

Flat designs looked “cleaner” and more “modern” (Microsoft’s subsequent portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.

The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content.

“On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers,” the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate. “The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers.”

The firm dispenses with the counter-argument that users were “more engaged” with the page.

“Since this experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and effort spent looking around the page are not good. These findings don’t mean that users were more ‘engaged’ with the pages. Instead, they suggest that participants struggled to locate the element they wanted, or weren’t confident when they first saw it.”

However, the failure of the WarMouse to be embraced with any widespread enthusiasm taught me that for all they like the idea of fast computers, most people are not very concerned with interface speed. If people are not particularly interested in doubling their interface speed, which we demonstrated was the norm for WarMouse Meta users, it should not be surprising that they are not overly concerned about losing 22 percent of it either.

Build the Wall already

Steve Bannon addresses Trump’s low approval ratings. The president’s former chief strategist says once Trump builds the wall, his approval ratings will go up, and he’ll go on to a 2020 landslide.

Bannon is correct, but he is only stating the obvious. I have been saying this since before the Inauguration. To ensure reelection, Donald Trump needs to do one thing, and one thing only: BUILD THE WALL.

Everything else is irrelevant in comparison. Build the Wall and win handsomely, fail to build it and risk losing.

Jerry Pournelle Week

To celebrate the life and work of Jerry Pournelle, we will be giving away volumes of his classic military science fiction series, THERE WILL BE WAR, all week. Today and tomorrow, you can download THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. I for free. If you have never read Dr. Pournelle before, this is an excellent opportunity to acquaint yourself with his fiction and his philosophy. The man has gone to his reward, but his ideas remain with us.

Created by the bestselling SF novelist Jerry Pournelle, THERE WILL BE WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It features some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I and Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II. Many science fiction greats were featured in the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova. 

33 years later, Castalia House has teamed up with Dr. Pournelle to make this classic science fiction series available to the public again. THERE WILL BE WAR is a treasure trove of science fiction and history that will educate and amaze new readers while reminding old ones how much the world has changed over the last three decades. Most of the stories, like war itself, remain entirely relevant today. 

Volume I is edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, and features 23 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Reflex” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the original “Ender’s Game” novella by Orson Scott Card, “The Defenders” by Philip K. Dick, and a highly influential pair of essays devoted to the then-revolutionary concept of “High Frontier” by Robert A. Heinlein and Lt. General Daniel Graham. 

If you would prefer to buy Dr. Pournelle’s books instead, I would recommend adding the big, beautiful hardcover omnibus of THERE WILL BE WAR Vols. I and II to your library.

NFL Week One

This is the weekly NFL open thread. A reminder: those who attempt to take this opportunity to posture about their television-watching habits and answer a question that no one has asked will be spammed.

When success becomes self-sabotage

A liberal professor writes about the structural damage to the Left that the left-wing success in academia has wrought:

Liberal political education, such as it is, now takes place on campuses that are far removed, socially and geographically, from the rest of the country—and particularly from the sorts of people who once were the foundation of the Democratic Party. And the political catechism that is taught is a historical artifact, reflecting more the idiosyncratic experience of the ’60s generation than the realities of power politics today.

The experience of that era taught the New Left two lessons. The first was that movement politics was the only mode of engagement that actually changes things; the second was that political activity must have some authentic meaning for the self, making compromise seem like a self-betrayal.

These lessons, though, have little bearing on liberalism’s present crisis, which is that of being defeated time and again by a well-organized Republican Party that keeps tightening its grip on our institutions. Where those lessons do resonate is with young people in our highly individualistic bourgeois society—a society that keeps them focused on themselves and teaches them that personal choice, individual rights and self-definition are all that is sacred.

It is little wonder that students of the Facebook age are drawn to courses focused on their identities and movements related to them. Nor is it surprising that many join campus groups that engage in identity movement work. But the costs need to be tallied.

For those students who will soon become liberal and progressive elites, the line between self-discovery and political action has become blurred. Their political commitments are genuine but are circumscribed by the confines of their self-definitions. Issues that penetrate those confines take on looming importance, and since politics for them is personal, their positions tend to be absolutist and nonnegotiable. Those issues that don’t touch on their identities or affect people like themselves are hardly perceived. And classic liberal ideas like citizenship, solidarity and the common good have little meaning for them.

As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate.

Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.

Conservatives complain loudest about today’s campus follies, but it is really liberals who should be angry. The big story is not that leftist professors successfully turn millions of young people into dangerous political radicals every year. It is that they have gotten students so obsessed with their personal identities that, by the time they graduate, they have much less interest in, and even less engagement with, the wider political world outside their heads.

Unfortunately, if we look at the complete failure of the Bush-era Right, and the current fecklessness of the Republican House and Senate, we can’t really say this tendency is limited to the Left.

Landfall

Hurricane Irma hits Florida:

Hurricane Irma has now made landfall on Florida, slamming into Key West, bringing sustained winds of 130mph, as well as rain and threats of tornadoes in what is expected to be one of the worst storms to hit the area in living memory.

The state thought it had escaped the worst case scenario as the storm moved into land and was downgraded to Category 3 – but late Saturday night it re-energized and was upgraded back to Category 4, the second-worst level, with gusts of up to 144mph.

And this is only the beginning for the mainland US, as Irma is set to move inland northwest, threatening Naples and other cities up the west coast of Florida as the wears on. A man was killed after tropical-storm-strength winds caused him to lose control of the truck he was driving through Monroe County, which contains Key West. He had been carrying a generator, local officials told ABC News. Two others died in a car accident in Hardee County, Florida, the Florida Highway Patrol said. The area is around 60 miles inland from Sarasota.

Those deaths come after Irma claimed at least 25 lives in the Caribbean as it swept over several countries, destroying entire islands. Meanwhile, more than a million people have been left without power across the state, while storm surges of 10-15 feet have been predicted around the Everglades, where lower land exacerbates the floods. Highs of 5-10 feet have been predicted in Miami.

The ideas, they percolate

An article on PJ media about a distressed young liberal woman who keeps finding out that the men to whom she is attracted turn out to be Trump voters.

No woman wants a man she can push around, walk all over, or beat in an arm-wrestling match. Politics be damned. That’s not how biology works. (Now, I realize I may be talking to biology deniers, but you asked “why can’t I stop?” and this is why. Biology.) Women are naturally attracted to alpha males and not that gamma guy in a onesie with fragile wrists. The left has emasculated their men to the point of putting them in dresses and sending them into the ladies’ room. It’s no wonder you need to shop outside your herd. Why the heck wouldn’t you?

The reality you’re facing is that your guys are the ones getting a wedgie and ours are the ones you want to go home with. I don’t blame you.

People often think that influence is somehow related to everyone knowing your name. That’s not influence. That’s fame.

On a related note, I’ve been hearing for the last week or two that the various kerfluffles with the two Andrews, Anglin and Torba, are “bad PR” and bad for my brand.

The objective measures:

  • Twitter followers declined from 33,000 to 32,800
  • Five Infogalactic Burn Unit members canceled their subscriptions. All five have already been replaced.
  • Daily average site traffic increased 5 percent
  • Daily average book sales increased 225 percent
  • 7 8 new Legal Legion of Evil volunteers.
It would appear there is a sound basis for the Fake Right theory that Mike Cernovich became a successful shekel-grubbing book salesman on the basis of metaphorically punching Clown Nazis. That wasn’t my intention, but if this is what “destroying my brand” looks like, I think I can live with it. Although perhaps the more apt term would be “thrive” on it.

By the way, there is going to be a BIG surprise awaiting the self-appointed experts on defamation presently expressing their legal theories on Gab. I have to admit, I was genuinely shocked myself to discover what is actually considered defamation per se in the relevant jurisdiction. I mean, there is not a single non-lawyer, on either side of the issue, who had a clear grasp of the actual legal situation at hand.

Hurricane Irma

This is an open thread to discuss the incoming hurricane and the preparations for it. And nothing else, please. Spare a thought or two for the people who are being forced to evacuate their homes.