Author: VD

A hero of human liberty

Edward Snowden made the brave, self-sacrificing choice that hundreds of thousands of servants of the machine could make, but do not, every single day.  He informed the American people, and the people of the world, what the US government is doing to them.  I think it is entirely possible that he will one day come to be considered an American Solzhenitsyn:

 The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said….

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that
doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his
disclosures. “I know the media likes to personalise political debates,
and I know the government will demonise me.”

Despite these fears,
he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the
substance of his disclosures. “I really want the focus to be on these
documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens
around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added:
“My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in
their name and that which is done against them.”

He has had “a
very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a
girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a
family he loves. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t
in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with
this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

I know it is very difficult for most Americans to grasp this, but the US government are not the good guys here.  They are even worse than the bad guys from whom they claim to be protecting you.  Before you condemn Snowden as a traitor, remember, George Washington, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were, from the perspective of the British crown, traitors too.

Homeschooling hits critical mass

Even as a strong advocate of homeschooling, I’m a little surprised to see how rapidly it is growing:

As dissatisfaction with the U.S. public school system grows, apparently so has the appeal of homeschooling. Educational researchers, in fact, are expecting a surge in the number of students educated at home by their parents over the next ten years, as more parents reject public schools.

A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.

It can be almost amusing how easy it is to derail an outspoken critic homeschooling.  Asking them how old they were when they took calculus usually does the trick… it’s a rhetorical tactic that is particularly effective on adults who never made it that far in mathematics.

Z1 and the next credit crash

Karl Denninger doesn’t see much more good news in the current Z1 release than I do.  It’s not overtly bad, at first glance, but even if the pattern of corporate debt expansion combined with household contraction isn’t immediately problematic, it is clear that the continued expansion of government sector debt is only keeping the economy in a state of disinflation.

Consumer debt has gone exactly nowhere.  The so-called “recovery” has been carried by business debt that has grown at a rate roughly double that of economic expansion, and the government is growing debt at a rate more than triple that rate…. Note that the absolute level of debt to GDP, however, refuses to go under 350%; it has now started rising again but is entirely coming from two sectors — business credit and the Federal Government. The problem with this paradigm is that we’re doing the same thing that led to the 2008 blowup — we’ve learned exactly nothing.  In real terms our GDP is in fact contracting by about $500 billion a quarter, after adjusting for debt expansion — that’s $2 trillion a year, more or less.

I prefer to look at what I call Zn, which is Z1 estimated as if it had continued to grow at the sixty-year historical rate of 2.36 percent that was required to fuel the post-WWII economic growth.  Regardless of when one begins, Zn tracked Z1 very, very closely until 2008, and the gap is still widening.  Although Z1 grew 1.28 percent, (47 percent of which was federal government debt), that didn’t prevent the disinflationary gap from growing another $1.1 trillion in Q1.

The credit demand gap is now approaching $25 trillion, which is not only more than the entire annual GDP, but amounts to 43 percent of total outstanding credit market debt.  And federal sector debt, which in 2005 was less than half the household sector debt, now virtually equals it in size.

NSA and the absence of law

I’ve been saying this for a while now, so it’s interesting to see others openly observing it in the mainstream media.  The US government does not respect the Constitution or any law, it is not the Constitutional entity everyone assumes it to be, and the US justice system is one giant game of make-believe:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the US justice
system was suffering from a “calamitous collapse in the rule of law”, as
Washington reeled from the sensational exposure of vast spy agency
surveillance programmes. Speaking in an interview with AFP at Ecuador’s London embassy, where
he has been holed up for almost a year, the founder of the
whistleblowing website accused the US government of trying to “launder”
its activities with regard to the far-reaching electronic spying effort
revealed on Thursday.

Assange doesn’t know the half of it, but he knew enough to try to stay out of the clutches of a Big Brother machine that kidnaps people around the world, kills others with drones, and spies on everyone with Internet access.  It is somewhat astonishing, to the average person who grew up amidst the Manichean struggle of the forces of freedom and light versus the evil empire of the Soviet Union, to gradually realize that the evil empire of the USA is more insidious and pernicious, with a greater global reach, than the Soviet version.

Tyler Durden observes that the administration has been caught lying in all of its responses to news of the NSA scandal:

There’s one reason why the administration, James Clapper and the NSA should just keep their mouths shut as the PRISM-gate fallout escalates: with every incremental attempt to refute some previously unknown facet of the US Big Brother state, a new piece of previously unleaked information from the same intelligence organization now scrambling for damage control, emerges and exposes the brand new narrative as yet another lie, forcing even more lies, more retribution against sources, more journalist persecution and so on.

The latest piece of news once again comes from the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald who this time exposes the NSA’s datamining tool “Boundless Informant” which according to leaked documents collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide in March 2013 alone, and “3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period.”

This is summarized in the chart below which shows that only the middle east has more active NSA-espionage than the US. Also, Obama may not want to show Xi the activity heatmap for China, or else the whole “China is hacking us” script may promptly fall apart.

As usual, the government is hiding behind the fact that it is hiring contractors to do what it is prohibited by that ever-so-effectual “law” from doing itself.  The government is entirely lawless; to the last two presidential administrations, “law” is simply another weapon in its war on the American people.

Playing in the sandbox

As Digital Book World mentioned, we will be publishing both original fiction and previously published work through our in-game retail store.  Unfortunately, the piece didn’t happen to mention that the system is not theoretical, but is already fully operational; the author bought a copy of The Wardog’s Coin with game coins we’d given him and received an epub on his system in less than two seconds.

We’re open to anything that is likely to appeal to our player base.  But we’re particularly interested in extending the world of Selenoth with the help of talented and creative writers.  Think Thieves World, only with 500 years of history on an entire continent in which to play.  The stories should range between 1,500 words at a minimum and 12,500 maximum; stories that somehow involve a gladiatorial angle will be given particular consideration.  And, of course, they will have to avoid conflicting with canon in any serious manner; I would encourage those interested to focus on small, localized conflicts and to keep in mind that First Sword is set more than 100 years before the events that take place in A Throne of Bones.

We haven’t worked out the contractual arrangements yet, but most likely we will give the author the choice between a conventional short fiction arrangement at SFWA-defined professional rate of 5¢/word and a 25 percent royalty share of the revenues derived from sales of the piece.

We’ll put out information on selling already published novels and short fiction unrelated to Selenoth in the near future.  We’ve already heard from several publishers and authors; so please keep in mind that we want to go out with a catalog of about 50 ebooks, and 10 of the spots are already filled.  In general, we’re interested in action-oriented fantasy, military science fiction, and the sort of SF/F in which the major genre publishers are presently uninterested.

Anyhow, if this is of interest to you, let me know.  We’ve already got two original stories we’ll be publishing through the game, one dealing with the trolls, and another with the mer.

The truth will out

Those lamenting the increased sound and fury of the gatekeepers of academia, media, and publishing as they attempt to kick out anyone and everyone who rejects the received dogma are failing to keep one very important thing in mind: No amount of credentials, social pressure, and financial carrots will suffice to prevent an honest man from understanding what he is seeing and experiencing:

If you take certain positions, you will be cast into outer darkness. Whether your statements are empirically accurate is irrelevant. Translation: truth doesn’t matter when ideology triumphs. White is black, day is night, there are no IQ differences among ethnic groups.

We are used to this sort of politically motivated mendacity in the university, where “diversity” has come to mean “conformity.” Murray merely states the obvious when he observes that “In academia, only the tenured can safely write on these topics. Assistant professors know that their chances of getting tenure will be close to zero if they publish politically incorrect findings on climate change, homosexuality, race differences, gender differences, or renewable energy. Their chances will not be much higher if they have published anything with a distinctly conservative perspective of any sort.”

That is bad enough. Here we have institutions, whose very raison d’être is the pursuit of truth, constrained to parrot politically-sanctioned untruth on a wide range of sensitive topics. Even worse is the metastasis of this freedom-and truth-blighting habit of mendacity. Increasingly, this sort of craven doublethink has oozed out of the academy and into the corridors of business, the media, and culture at large. Where will it end?

It will end when it always does; when reality squashes the lies with all the restraint and mercy of a semi running over a rabbit.  The most sincere diversity advocates suddenly lose their religion when vibrant thugs and rapists move in next door to them. The most heartfelt Keynesian feels seeds of doubt sprouting in his mind when the economy enters into a fourth year of declining employment despite trillions in stimulus.  And even the Vote Red/Vote Blue crowd is beginning to wonder how their votes can possibly make any difference at all as the first glimpses of the extent of the IRS and NSA scandals begin to take form.

The world is actively opposed to the Truth, so it should not be any surprise that its institutions are opposed to the truth as well as anyone bold enough to stand up for it.

Announcing First Sword

This seems as good a time as any to announce the forthcoming release of First Sword, the first combat management game.  Digital Book World was particularly interested in one of the innovations the game is introducing:

For publishers looking to diversify their ebook sales channels, here’s an idea: selling ebooks through in-game stores. Alpenwolf, a small, international game-development firm is going to test this idea with a game it releases in November this year, First Sword. The game is a “commentary-based management game,” according to one of its developers, Theo Beale, who is also an author, musician, former game reviewer and game journalist.

I find it rather amusing that despite all of the frequent efforts to “out” me, no one ever figured out one of my alternate pseudonyms despite my use of it in one of the game industry’s leading publications for my monthly column there.  I mean, surely you never imagined that Vox Day would be the only one I use….  Anyhow, for those who are interested, here is another screen shot of First Sword in action.

This is a pre-Alpha screenshot of a combat between two equally matched fighters.  There are about 5,000 messages in the commentary system, more than 10x more than the leading game of this type, which allows for a wide variety of complicated narratives in describing the various arena battles.  In this particular screenshot, the stipex, Honorius, has just managed to score a reasonably damaging hit on Trebonius, the hoplomachus.

First Sword is a free-to-play game available for Android, iOS, Blackberry, Facebook, and web-based browser in November, 2013.  In directly related news, I will soon be posting a call for authors interested in selling ebooks of all lengths through the in-game retail medium described in the linked article.

Lying with numbers

The government always lies.  Even when it looks like they’re telling the truth, they are lying:

Here’s a seemingly comforting statistic: In all of 2012, the Obama administration went to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court only 200 times to ask for Americans’ “business records” under the USA Patriot Act.

Every year, the Justice Department gives Congress a tally of the classified wiretap orders sought and issued in terrorist and spy cases – it was 1,789 last year. At the same time, it reports the number of demands for “business records” in such cases, issued under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. And while the number of such orders has generally grown over the years, it has always managed to stay relatively low. In 2011, it was 205. There were 96 orders in 2010, and only 21 in 2009.

Thanks to the Guardian’s scoop, we now know definitively just how misleading these numbers are. You see, while the feds are required to disclose the number of orders they apply for and receive (almost always the same number, by the way), they aren’t required to say how many people are targeted in each order. So a single order issued to Verizon Business Solutions in April covered metadata for every phone call made by every customer. That’s from one order out of what will probably be about 200 reported in next year’s numbers.

I understand the impulse to believe the government is telling the truth about something.  No one wants to think through the implications that they are lying about the NSA’s domestic spying, or Sandy Hook, or 9/11, or Pearl Harbor, or nuclear weapons in Iraq.

But the fact is that they are.  They repeatedly and reliably are.  Believing that the U.S. government always lies doesn’t make one a conspiracy theorist, it merely means that one is paying attention.  As I’ve said before, the main reason I am dubious about the Moon landings is that the government claims they took place.

Mailvox: A Boomer defends his generation

Mr. Pea sounds pretty pleased that the cookie jar is empty:

After reading some of the garbage here, it finally dawned on me… you
are mad because you can not and will not have what mommy and daddy had!
Never mind that it all had nothing to do with liberty and freedom! Never
mind it had nothing to do with virtue and righteousness! You’re pissed
off because that same cookie jar that you put your hand in… is empty!

You
would be perfectly happy to transplant what mommy and daddy had into
your generation… just as long as the cookie jar was just as full for
you as it was for them.

But that will never happen. Because all
this time you are lamenting the empty cookie jar… you thump your
chests in self-righteousness and claim virtue above and beyond mommy and
daddy.

Well, yes, to a certain extent.  We would very much like for Mommy and Daddy to not burn down the house with us and everyone else in it.  We’d very much like to have some seed corn to plant, but we don’t, because Greedy Mommy and Drunk Old Daddy ate it.

And we most certainly do claim virtue beyond the Boomers.  Not only are we aware that we’re starting with nothing and can’t count on any help from them, but we’re working hard to make sure that unlike them, we leave something for our children behind.  Of course, saying that a generation is more virtuous than the Boomers is the faintest of faint praise; every single generation in recorded history has been more virtuous.

But it isn’t true to say we’d be perfectly happy to be like mommy and daddy.  In fact, that is Generation X’s one true satisfaction.  Say what you will about we cynical, narrow-eyed Xers, but you can’t say we’re anything like you.  We don’t want to change the world, we’re just hoping to survive and perhaps build some sort of rude shelter from the rubble.