Author: VD

The Sad Puppy Hugo Slate

Larry Correia recommends the following slate to the registered Hugo voters:

Best Novel

Warbound, the Grimnoir Chronicles – Larry Correia – Baen

A Few Good Men – Sarah Hoyt – Baen

Novella

“The Butcher of Khardov” – Dan Wells – Skull Island Expeditions

“The Chaplain’s Legacy” – Brad Torgersen – Analog

Novellete

“The Exchange Officers” – Brad Torgersen – Analog

“Opera Vita Aeterna” – Vox Day – The Last Witchking

Best Fanzine

Elitist Book Reviews – Steve Diamond

Best Editor Long Form

Toni Weisskopf

Best Editor Short Form

Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Campbell Award

Marko Kloos

Frank Chadwick

It should be interesting to see how this all turns out. But after John Scalzi – how entirely unsurprising – laid the groundwork for the open politicization of the Hugo Award, it was inevitable that what had always been done quietly behind closed doors would come out in the open.

In addition to the Sad Puppy slate I am adding the following works:

Best Short Story
Port Call – Michael Z. Williamson – Baen
The Krumhorn and Misericorde – Dave Freer – Baen
Dog’s Body – Sarah A. Hoyt – Baen
Failsafe – Karen Bovenmyer – Iron Dragon Books

Best Related Work
Writing Down the Dragon – Tom Simon – Bondwine Books
On Training for War – Tom Kratman – Baen
A Terrible Thing to Lose:Zombie Science and Science Fiction in John Ringo’s
Under a Graveyard Sky – Tedd Roberts – Baen

Best Professional Artist
Kirk DouPonce

That’s not the only option

Developing political policy for a white minority populace:

For the first time in American history, non-whites will make up half or more of the next generation, likely pushing Washington toward a bigger government — and the GOP better tone down their anti-government rhetoric if they want to win them, according to a top polling outfit.

At a briefing for congressional aides hosted by the moderate Republican Ripon Society, Pew Research Vice President Michael Dimock said that the trend among younger Americans is support for government programs and acceptance of Democratic Party policies.

“Their tendency is more liberal, their tendency is bigger government,” he said of so-called “millennials” born between 1979 and 1995. They will likely set the trend for the still-unnamed next generation.

“This is a generation that is 41 percent non-white; the generation behind it is likely to be close to 50 if not more than 50 percent non-white, and the anti-government kind of tone is one that really doesn’t resonate with that non-white sector in particular,” said Dimock at the Ripon retreat.
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His advice to the GOP: “Try to take as much of the anti-government rhetoric out.”

There is, of course, another obvious option. Try to remove the non-white population from the electorate. Given that it has already been observed how whites are beginning to abandon the Democratic Party, and given what we know about the way in which historical multi-ethnic societies have usually ended, Occam’s Razor tends to point towards wide-scale disenfranschisement, if not ethnic cleansing, throughout the West.

After all, the EU has already disenfranchised entire nations. A few population sub-groups would be a moderate policy by comparison.

If you find these prospects to be impossible, ask yourself this question: Is the prospect of ethnic cleansing in the USA more or less unthinkable than state-imposed homosexual “marriage” was a mere two decades ago?

Pro-vaccine dishonesty

If you are an advocate of mass vaccination who wonders why more and more people simply don’t trust those who are pushing vaccines on everyone, these two quotes from a vaccine debate on Reason should suffice to illustrate why:

PRO: A 2007 article in the Journal of the American Medical
Association compared the annual average number of cases and
resulting deaths of various diseases before the advent of vaccines
to those occurring in 2006. Before an effective diphtheria vaccine
was developed in the 1930s, for example, the disease infected about
21,000 people in the United States each year, killing 1,800. By
2006 both numbers were zero. Polio, too, went from deadly (16,000
cases, 1,900 deaths) to non-existent after vaccines were rolled out
in the 1950s and 1960s. Chickenpox used to infect 4 million kids a
year, hospitalize 11,000, and kill 105; within a decade of a
vaccine being rolled out in the mid-1990s, infections had dropped
to 600,000, resulting in 1,276 hospitalizations and 19 deaths.
Similar dramatic results can be found with whooping cough, measles,
rubella, and more.

CON: Judging from what one reads and hears in the popular media, it is easy to conclude that the science is settled, that the benefits of each vaccine clearly outweigh the risks, and that vaccinations have played the critical role in the decline of deaths due to infectious diseases such as measles, whooping cough, and diphtheria, all of which claimed many lives in the past.

However even a cursory look at the available data quickly reveals that the mortality from almost all infectious disease was in steep decline well before the introduction of vaccination or antibiotics. Diphtheria mortality had fallen 60 percent by the time vaccination was introduced in the 1920s, deaths from pertussis/whooping cough had declined by 98 percent before vaccination was introduced in the late 1940s, measles mortality had dropped 98 percent from its peak in the U.S. by the time measles inoculation was introduced in 1963-and by an impressive 99.96 percent in England when measles vaccination was introduced in 1968. In 1960 there were 380 deaths from measles among a U.S. population of 180,671,000, a rate of 0.24 deaths per 100,000.

The takeaway here is that vaccination played a very minor role in the steep decline in mortality due to infectious disease during the late 19th century and early to mid- 20th century. Improved living standards, better nutrition, sanitary sewage disposal, clean water, and less crowded living conditions all played crucial roles.

Again and again and again, we see the pro-vaccine side playing very fast and loose with the truth. They intentionally try to claim statistical benefits for mass vaccination that cannot possibly be attributed to it, even as the pharmaceutical companies disavow any responsibility for the products that they are lobbying to have legally imposed upon children who cannot possibly consent to having foreign substances injected into their bodies.

The vaccine lobby is a corrupt big government abomination that would vaccinate for oxygen if it could get away with it and no one who describes himself as a libertarian or even a conservative should support it in any way, shape, or form, regardless of his belief in the efficacy of vaccination. There is absolutely no libertarian case for mandatory vaccination and anyone who claims there is identifies himself as an ideological fraud.

May I suggest crying Holocaust?

Failing that, I’m sure this weakening support is nothing that a few judicious accusations of anti-semitism wouldn’t cure:

Support for Israel is weakening among evangelical Christians, prompting a new struggle for the hearts and minds of younger members of America’s largest pro-Israel demographic group. While hard numbers are not available, evangelical leaders on both sides of the divide on Israel agree that members of the millennial generation do not share their parents’ passion for the Jewish state; many are seeking some form of evenhandedness when approaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“What is happening is that the hard line of Christian Zionists was not successfully passed forward to the next generation, because it was based on theological themes that are now being questioned by younger evangelicals,” said David Gushee, professor of Christian ethics and director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University in Atlanta.

I find it rather amusing that after decades of relentless Jewish attacks on evangelical Christianity, Jews are suddenly alarmed to discover that evangelical Christians are no longer reliably in their corner. How is this a surprise to anyone? They should be relieved that they haven’t managed to convert evangelicals into open enemies despite their best efforts.

If Ha’aretz is worried now, perhaps they should have a look at Europe, where the post-Christians are openly anti-Israel. After coming to America, many Jewish immigrants foolishly elected to attack the primary factor that prompted America to give them refuge. Ah well, no worries, there is always China. Are we not reliably informed of the tremendous respect and affection the Han have for the Jewish people?

Upon reading the end of the article, it appears it is impossible to parody at least one of these organizations:

The group is also launching speaking tours on campuses, and intends to invest in videos and social media activity that will monitor Christian influencers and “confront them when they cross the line.”

Now that’s going to work a treat. Nothing inspires love and affection like monitoring and confronting people.

The rogue agency

The NSA and CIA don’t answer to Congress:

In 2007, reporter Charles Davis asked then-Chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee – Jay Rockefeller – about clandestine U.S. operations against a foreign government.

DAVIS: Reports quote administration officials as saying this is going on and it’s being done in a way to avoid oversight of the Intelligence Committee. Is there any way—

ROCKEFELLER: They’ll go to any lengths to do that, as we’ve seen in the last two days [during hearings on FISA].

DAVIS: Is there anything you could do in your position as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee to find answers about this, if it is in fact going on?

ROCKEFELLER: Don’t you understand the way Intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. ALL of it. ALL THE TIME. I only get –  and my committee only gets –  what they WANT to give me.

This is shocking … but not new. The NSA was created in secret … and Congress wasn’t even notified.

 This description of Congress’s feeble attempts at oversight is almost amusing:

Amash
said that intelligence officials are often evasive during classified
briefings and reveal little new information unless directly pressed.

“You don’t have any idea what kind of things are going on,” Amash said. “So
you have to start just spitting off random questions. Does the
government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear?
Does the government have a cyborg army? If you don’t know what kind of
things the government might have, you just have to guess and it becomes a
totally ridiculous game of twenty questions.“

I have to admit, I am genuinely curious about this talking bear? Does anyone know if the government’s ownership of it was officially denied?

Too religious, too difficult

This article on Gene Wolfe summarizes the current problem of traditional SF/F publishing. If the man who is widely considered to be among the greatest living SF writers could not get published today, then it should be entirely apparent that there is a serious problem in the industry:

Lots of novel readers—from the highest brow to the lowest—nod politely when the science-fiction writer Gene Wolfe is mentioned. But even among science-fiction fans, one gets the sense that they’re saying, “Yes, yes, we know how good he is, but we’d rather talk about such bestselling authors as Neil Gaiman or Robert Jordan, Laurel Hamilton or Neal Stephenson.” As Glenn Reynolds, the inveterate science-fiction enthusiast and popular blogger of Instapundit.com, recently wrote, “Gene Wolfe is a superb writer, but I’m not crazy about his storytelling.” I recently asked a veteran New York editor whether Wolfe could find a publisher today if he were just coming along as a young writer. “Probably not,” she admitted. His writing is too religious, too difficult, and too strange.

I think one could quite reasonably question if JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, or HP Lovecraft could get published today. Tolkien might well be accounted too difficult, Lovecraft too strange, and Lewis is more openly religious than Wolfe. It’s fascinating, too, to note that Wolfe appears to have anticipated my own argument that the philosophical problem of evil and suffering is not a problem for Christianity.

It is a familiar charge of modern atheism that the existence of pain argues against the existence of God. “For some time it has seemed to me,” Wolfe insists, “that it would be even easier to maintain the position that pain proves or tends to prove God’s reality.”

Pain necessarily implies pleasure just as shadow implies light and evil implies good. The opposite of pain is not pleasure, but rather insensate nothingness, the gray, unfeeling goo of the no-believers.

Setting the record straight… again

I have to admit that I do not understand how lying about my easily confirmed CV is supposed to serve as a substantive form of criticism.  Do these critics imagine that denying history is a valid and convincing form of rhetoric? I recently mentioned that when critics attempt to dig through my words in search of a disqualifying quote, they tend to forget that I started as a nationally syndicated columnist. In other words, unlike the average person blithely expressing himself on the Internet, I have always been aware that my statements are public and will be carefully examined for critical purposes.

This prompted the following response:

You
mean “World Net Daily? LOL….. You know, they’ll give a column to
anyone with a heartbeat and a willingness to say nasty things about
black people. Not really something to brag about . Especially since your daddy got you the job, he having been on the board of directors.

No, I did not mean WND. This should be obvious, given that WND is not a national syndicate. I began writing a column for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1994. This column was picked up for national syndication by Chronicle Features, the syndicate arm of the San Franscisco Chronicle, in 1995. I was the sixth columnist in the Pioneer Press’s 145-year history to be syndicated. The syndicated column was picked up by the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, among others. My favorite was the North Bay Nugget. During this time I also wrote several major reviews for Computer Gaming World and Electronic Entertainment, such as those on Heretic, Dark Forces, and TIE Fighter.

I did not begin writing for WND until 2001. It soon became the third most-popular weekly column there after Ann Coulter’s and Pat Buchanan’s and was nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate two years later. My father did not get me the job there. Nor can that column even be reasonably be described as a job, as I never took money from WND for any of those columns.

Another critic asserted a non-existent double standard.

The point is that Vox’s double standards is funny. He gets a little
uppity about people taking him out of context, but has no problem doing
the same. It’s funny. Even funnier though is his touting of his “column”
at WND that his daddy insisted he be given. And it was so meaningful.
People still talk about the amazing insights he offered. We know the
import of his views based on the many offers he’s had to recreate this
column elsewhere.

First, I don’t take people out of context. Second, my daddy didn’t insist that I be given a “column” at WND; Joseph Farah asked my father if I would be willing to write a column there. Third, I am contacted by various news sites inquiring if I might be interested in contributing to them on a fairly regular basis. And then there was this pair of individuals who questioned my veracity concerning a pair of game advances that were each worth more than 60+ times an advance that Mr. Scalzi bragged about:

“Ha, there is no way this is true. What was the advance for and when?”

“$2.4 Million in advances in one year. Not bad….RIGHT…….And yet, still no game from Vox Day. You
just have to wonder how far the guy will go to soothe his envy of
another writer who outpaces him so consistently. It’s a little vulgar.”

As it happens, the two advances that year were rather more than $2.4 million combined; there is an article in the Star Tribune which specifically discusses a $1.8 million advance that Fenris Wolf received for one of the two contracts mentioned. I’m not envious of a writer who brags about $20,000 advances. I’m not even envious of one of my European friends who received an advance more than ten times bigger than that on his most recently published novel. I don’t want to receive advances from anyone.

Those are the facts. The publicly available and undeniable facts. It is true that many are not familiar with them as I don’t often discuss these things, and in fact, I would not be inclined to mention them at all if they were not already public information. But they are what they are, as anyone can readily determine for himself. The problem, I suspect, is that when facts get in the way of the favored narrative, these critics prefer to reject those facts instead of modifying their narrative accordingly.

How Coleco scored Donkey Kong

I ran across this interview with the driving force behind the Colecovision and found it to be fascinating. It seems incredible to think you could once get the rights to great arcade games like Zaxxon and Turbo for $5,000.

Bromley knew this title – which was hitherto unknown in the West – could be the game to propel his console into the public consciousness. He also knew he had to act fast. “A meeting was arranged for the next day,” he reveals. “I said I wanted the rights to Donkey Kong. I didn’t want Atari to find out about this game. After a lengthy conversation Makihara-san told me Yamauchi-san wanted $200,000 advance and $2.00 per unit royalty. It was around 10:00AM and Yamauchi-san knew that I needed to catch my train, so then he added the kicker: the US$ 200,000 must be wired to his account by 12:00 midnight, or there was no deal.”

The odds were most certainly against Bromley. “The most Coleco had ever paid for an advance for any license up to then was $5,000,” he says. ”Also, they never, ever paid more than 5% of their selling price; the worst case would be about 90 cents. Now because of the need to wire the money before 12:00AM Tokyo time, I needed to take the next available train. I would have to call as soon as I got back to my hotel in Tokyo which would be in the afternoon and therefore wake up Arnold Greenberg in the US, the only one who could authorise an immediate wire transfer. I was to call him at home, wake him up, and then ask him to wire $200,000 for a game he has never seen or heard of. If that wasn’t bad enough, he then has to agree to more than twice the usual royalty amount!”

Bromley stayed firm, spurred on by the fact that he knew that Donkey Kong would be a smash-hit once western gamers laid eyes on it. “Upon my return to Tokyo, I called Arnold Greenberg from my room – I was shaking a little,” he admits. “It was about 4:00 AM in the morning and I got: ‘Whaaaaa? Do you know what time it is?’ I referred him to a conversation we had days before with marketing and sales; we all agreed we needed a really spectacular game to bundle with the ColecoVision console to create an impact. I then told him of the conditions: $200,000 advance and the $2.00 per unit royalty. I said: ‘I have found that game.’ To my surprise all he said: ‘is it really that good?’ I told him that it was as good as Pac-Man. He asked what it was called and I uttered ‘Donkey Kong.’ Silence. For the first time I realized how silly the name sounded. What seemed like an hour later he said: ‘OK. Let’s do it,’ and said he would wire over the money as soon as the banks opened that day.”

It’s also an important lesson in what passes for Japanese business ethics. I had to laugh upon reading it, having run into similar issues with both Konami and Sega in the past. Fortunately, having studied in Tokyo, I was more prepared for them than Mr. Bromley was, although it’s hard to argue with how well it worked out for him. What a pity Coleco didn’t tough it out the way Nintendo did; the industry would have been the better for it.

THE ALTAR OF HATE

Today Castalia House published my collection of short stories entitled THE ALTAR OF HATE. It consists of one novella, one poem, and eight short stories. Some of the stories will be familiar to longtime Dread Ilk, having been originally available on my old Eternal Warriors web site back in the day or published in Stupefying Stories. As the collection is dedicated to Bane, who would have enjoyed its dark and occasionally sinister bent, it contains the poem that is here on this site, “Bane Walks On”. And there is a new story, one with which I am particularly pleased, that involves the application of a particular Maupassant mechanism to the futuristic world of Quantum Mortis.

The cover illustration was created by our newest artist, Jeremiah, who did an excellent job working under the direction of JartStar. The title story was inspired by a visit to Venice some years ago; I very much doubt any writer can visit that eerie, decaying city without feeling the proddings of a brooding, water-logged muse. I very much like the cover art, as in addition to the Venetian theme it reminds me a little of the paperback edition of Mona Lisa Overdrive, an image that Psykosonik once used as the cover of our demo tape.

From the initial reviews:

“Each story has its appeal across multiple genres, although to me the
story from which the title is derived was particularly moving.”

“From an eldritch tale blended with computer insider humor, an ode to a
fallen friend, to science fiction with a twist, this is a good
collection of Vox’s shorter writings to date.”

“The stories move along, but one feels the uneasy eyes of the abyss
staring back as you progress, as it were, through a darkened ancient
forest. Only an author of the first rank could achieve this.”

In other Castalia news, fans of Tom’s Rathaverse will be pleased to note this comment to a reviewer hoping for a sequel: “Look for The Court-Martial of Ratha Flower Wood, maybe before Christmas.”

The new evil empire

The European public has finally begun to figure out that the Eurofascists of the EU are cut from the same cloth as Napoleon and Hitler:

Britons see Russia in a more positive light than the European Union,
despite recent tensions with Moscow over Ukraine, according to a poll
published on Saturday. The league table of 27 “liked”
countries and institutions put the European Parliament — for which
elections are being held in May — sixth from bottom, and the EU fourth
from bottom. Only Saudi Arabia,
Iran and North Korea ranked below the European parliament when those
polled were asked how positive or negative they felt towards them.
Israel was fifth from bottom and Russia was seventh from bottom. Canada was top.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the British fear the EU more than the Russians. The EU is an invading and occupying force. The Russians are doing little more than securing their national interests in responds to EU and US provocations, and in doing so, proving that national interests supersede artificially-drawn political boundaries.