#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
The second part of the interview with Marc Miller, the designer of Traveller, is now up at Black Gate. If you’re interested in creating your own Traveller-style little black books, there’s a neat little online tool with which you can do so.
If you missed it last week, the first part of the interview is also available.
Peter Hitchens, a longtime Tory, explains why a victory for David Cameron’s Conservative Party would actually mean a terrible defeat for England:
I beg and plead with you not to fall for the shimmering, greasy, cynical fraud which is the Cameron project. You will hate yourself for it in time if you do…. He is truly what he once said he was – the Heir to Blair.
If he wins, he will – as the first Tory leader to win an Election in 18 years – have the power to crush all his critics in the Tory Party.
He will be able to say that political correctness, green zealotry, a pro-EU position and a willingness to spend as much as Labour on the NHS have won the day.
He will claim (falsely) that ‘Right-wing’ policies lost the last three Elections.
Those Tory MPs who agree with you and me will be cowed and silenced for good. The power will lie with the A-list smart set, modish, rich metropolitan liberals hungry for office at all costs who would have been (and who in the case of one of the older ones actually was) in New Labour 13 years ago.
And then where will you have to turn for help as the PC, pro-EU bulldozer trundles across our landscape destroying what is good and familiar and replacing it with a country whose inhabitants increasingly cannot recognise it as their own?
The Liberal Democrats? They agree with David. The Labour Party under exciting, new, Blairite Mr Miliband, heir to a Marxist dynasty?
He agrees with David, too. You will look from bench to bench in the House of Commons and see nothing but the people whose ideas have wrecked a great country in half a century, and who still won’t admit they’re wrong.
Britain is going to end up having to turn to UKIP anyhow, unless the EU collapses under the weight of its economic malfeasance before Cameron imports another 15 million Polistanis and forces Britain into the Euro. So, you might as well vote for them now.
I know we have a reasonable amount of gamers here, so I’m wondering if anyone might be interested in a multi-genre gaming tournament inspired by the Apprentice Adept series. Obviously, it would all be online, but the Sprint competition between Jamie, Markku and I made me think that it might be fun to have different categories such as Arcade, Console, Wargame, and Classic (Chess, Go, etc). Thanks to RK, VASSAL will make it possible to throw down in everything from ASL to Wooden Ships and Iron Men. You could challenge someone and they’d have one month to get the game started, another month to finish it, and this would allow us to determine precisely whom is the Ultimate Gamer here. Forfeits would not only be permitted, but encouraged, so if you blow the game selection game and wind-up facing Spacebunny at Pooyan, Markku at Sprint, or me at Cod:MW2, there is no point in wasting anyone’s time.
Obviously, this could become an ongoing ladder, but I think it would work best initially as a tournament. We can do something like give away a mouse to the winner, a personally inscribed copy of RGD to the second-place finisher, and TIA for third place. (I was going to suggest SE, but I only have two copies of that.) Anyhow, if you’re interested, speak up, and if you have any ideas for what the categories should be, the selection process, or what games should go in what categories, fire away.
I’m just brainstorming at this point, so everything is on the table.
Next week’s reading is cantos XXIV and XXV. And congratulations to the 42 hardcore Hellmarchers who have persisted to this point. We’re two-thirds of the way through the Nether Regions and there are only six weeks until the final!
If the breaking National Enquirer story about Obama’s purported 2004 affair with Vera Baker, a story now being echoed by the Globe, turns out to be true, it may render the whole state candidate qualification issue irrelevant:
In a story that the National Enquirer has been working on since 2008, the tabloid announced on its website that President Barack Obama spent the night with former aide/fundraiser, Vera Baker in a DC hotel. The Enquirer has been trying to obtain confirmation of the details of the story it started looking into since 2008. Those details have apparently been confirmed.
Coming as it does on the heels of the non-coverage of the John Edwards scandal and the multitudinous affairs of Tiger Woods, it will be very difficult for the mainstream media to keep this one under their hat no matter how desperately they want to protect the Magic Negro. Especially since the international press is already paying attention. Obama’s approval ratings have been on a long death march downward, so in combination with the November Congressional elections, this would likely put his administration into a death spiral. After all, it’s a little difficult to play the sex addiction card and go into rehab for six months when you’re supposed to be in the White House.
Regardless, it is interesting to think about how the Republicans would go about attempting to blow what should be a conclusive electoral advantage. I think nominating Michael Steele, defending Goldman Sachs, launching another pointless invasion, and running hard against Arizona-style immigration restrictions might be effective.
RGD readers will know that I’m very skeptical of the reliability of government economic statistics, mostly because they are a constantly moving target that mutate over time. However, a closer look at everything from TOTLL to today’s GDP Advance (3.2% annual) makes it appear as if the statistical shenanigans are growing exponentially:
I’m concerned with these numbers – quite concerned in fact. The Federal Government borrowed (and presumably spent) $462 billion in excess of tax receipts over the first three months of 2010. But PCE – personal consumption expenditures – was up $83 billion and federal spending was up only 3.5 billion.
Where did the other $375 billion go?
Into a black hole of covering existing obligations, it appears, and the final private demand GDP deficit covered by this is almost exactly 10% (GDP for the quarter is ~3.650 trillion, so $375 billion is roughly 10% of that.)
Karl Denninger isn’t the only one to notice anomalies with regards to today’s BEA release. Calculated Risk notices that Residential Investment isn’t behaving in its usual post-recessionary manner: “RI as a percent of GDP is at a new record low. And there is no reason to expect a sustained increase in RI until the excess housing inventory is absorbed. Notice that RI usually recovers very quickly coming out of a recession. This time RI is moving sideways – not a good sign for a robust recovery in 2010.”
The ability of the progressive white woman to stare objective reality in the face and insist it doesn’t exist never ceases to amuse:
Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I started to write what I thought was a very clever editorial about violence against women in Haiti. The case, I believed, was being overstated by women’s organizations in need of additional resources. Ever committed to preserving the dignity of Black men in a world which constantly stereotypes them as violent savages, I viewed this writing as yet one more opportunity to fight “the man” on behalf of my brothers. That night, before I could finish the piece, I was held on a rooftop in Haiti and raped repeatedly by one of the very men who I had spent the bulk of my life advocating for.
It hurt. The experience was almost more than I could bear. I begged him to stop. Afraid he would kill me, I pleaded with him to honor my commitment to Haiti, to him as a brother in the mutual struggle for an end to our common oppression, but to no avail. He didn’t care that I was a Malcolm X scholar. He told me to shut up, and then slapped me in the face….
I went to Haiti after the earthquake to empower Haitians to self-sufficiency. I went to remind them of the many great contributions that Afro-descendants have made to this world, and of their amazing resilience and strength as a people. Not once did I envision myself becoming a receptacle for a Black man’s rage at the white world, but that is what I became. While I take issue with my brother’s behavior, I’m grateful for the experience.
Yes, it’s always a tragedy when a sex tour goes awry…. Compounding the humor here is the way in which the grateful rapee believes it is the fault of “the [white] man” that violent, savage black men rape silly white women who believe in the myth of equality. We can only conclude from this that she believes black men and white women alike are non-sapient animals incapable of making their own decisions or controlling their own behavior. It’s probably just as well that this dimwitted woman happened to choose race relations over the environment as her cretinous crusade. She is clearly that special sort of environmental activist that ends up eaten by bears.
But, even though she avoided a career in ursine digestion, I should nevertheless like to congratulate Ms Kijera on her award-winning entry into the Peace Bride Club, for excellence in female naivete.
You can always count on the fact that some idiot in authority, somewhere, is going to try to destroy the fabric of civilization:
Lord Justice Laws condemned any attempt to protect believers who take a stand on matters of conscience under the law as “irrational” and “capricious”. In comments likely to set the church on a collision course with the courts, he claimed that doing so could set Britain on the road to a “theocracy”, or religious rule. His comments came as he dismissed a legal challenge by a Christian relationship counsellor who was sacked after refusing to offer sex therapy sessions to homosexual couples because it was against his beliefs.
The views expressed by the amusingly mistitled Lord Justice Laws are largely the same views previously expressed by every totalitarian leader or bureaucrat throughout history. For it is empirically and demonstrably obvious that what is capricious and irrational are the many vagaries of present UK/EU “law”, not belief systems that have been much more clearly codified and accepted by far more people for centuries.
Every intelligent individual, religious or irreligious, should be able to see the very clear danger involved in declaring the right of the state to override conscience and that “no religious belief itself could be protected under the law ‘however long its tradition, however rich its culture'”. This is overt totalitarian madness and is a direct conceptual strike at every cherished freedom of Western civilization. If there is no room for the law to respect religious beliefs, there is no room for it to respect beliefs of any kind and it rests upon a foundation of nothing more than the law of tooth and claw. It is not only absurd, but downright backwards to claim that respecting religious beliefs would put the UK “on the road to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.” Most historical theocracies have been less autocratic than the current EU, and far less autocratic than dozens of the bloodthirsty anti-religious regimes of the 20th century.
Secularists should beware of celebrating this form of superficially secular form of jurisprudence, as it isn not indicative of a movement towards a rational and progressive secular humanist society, but rather the unlimited state power formerly seen in ancient pagan societies.
Ex-NY makes me wonder when this place turned into Dear Vox:
Hi Vox,
Are you ready to dish-out some dating – rather than econ – advice? If yes, here’s the story: about three years ago I dated a very nice, Christian beta male. He was cute and fit and honorable and I really, really liked him. He really liked me too, but there was one big problem: I lived in NYC and didn’t have a car. He lived far away in my old hometown (a moderately-sized city) and it was really hard for us to see each other. After three months, I was frustrated about the distance, and I ended it with him. I know now that was stupid. My only excuse is that I was young and I wanted a boyfriend with whom I could do fun stuff whenever I wanted, like other girls. Also, I thought nice, stable, Christian, honorable beta-males were everywhere in NYC. More fool me! I soon regretted it, but was too embarrassed to call him.
Now it’s three years later, and a new job has brought me back to my old hometown. I was talking to a friend the other day and I heard my old beau is still in my old hometown and still single. I’d like to call him and tell him I have moved back and see if he’d like to get together. He may or may not be interested. But is making the call stupid and self-defeating on its face? Guys? How would you react?
Oh, sweet Darwin… all right, my opinion is that it can’t hurt to take a shot. Contacting him is neither stupid nor self-defeating. You have nothing to lose but your pride, and that’s simply not worth a lifetime of cat-collecting. To be young is to be stupid; we all make absurd decisions and do ridiculous things that we subsequently come to regret. Most men understand that. I think that if he is still as honorable as you say he was, he will be naturally inclined to at least hear you out. And besides, you say that he’s a beta so he’s probably not going to be overly put out by the assumption that you’ve been off chasing alphas in New York City for the past three years. (Whether you truly have or haven’t been is irrelevant. Most men correctly interpret “fun”, in female terms, to mean sex with alphas. Or at least marriage-inappropriate non-beta providers.)
So, once you’ve made the decision to contact him, what to say? I would simply recommend calling him up, apologizing for being too young and foolish to recognize his true value, and asking him if he’d be amenable to letting you take him out to dinner or meeting him for drinks by way of apology. If he seems open to the idea but reluctant, remind him that at worst, he’ll get free food and drinks for an evening. No harm no foul. Now, you don’t need to grovel – in fact you shouldn’t – but you will need to be open and apologetic about what you now regard as your regrettable stupidity and superficiality. And, of course, if he agrees, you will have to bring your A-game with regards to your dress and appearance. Stylish, sexy, and contrite is what you’re going for, not sackcloth, ashes, and “New York kicked my ass so I guess you losers in the sticks are my best option now”.
It may work. Or it may not. If he’s not embittered by the experience and your looks haven’t declined too drastically over the three years, I suspect your odds are pretty good. But whether it works or not, in the long run you will almost certainly feel much, much better for having made the effort. At least you will know; it is not our failures that we regret so much as our failures to even try.
Anyhow, that’s my take. Other opinions may vary. And on a tangential note: ladies, stop going to the Big City to pursue your big adventure before beginning your “real life”! I’ve seen it again and again. You are very unlikely to meet anyone interested in building a future with you there, you’re primarily going to encounter men who are in the Big City to have as many adventures as possible. So, if you’re interested in pursuing marriage and children some day, keep in mind that the Big City Adventure is nothing more than a total waste of your market peak.
Regular reader LP sends this one out to the Ilk:
My mom was hit by 2 cars Tuesday evening. She is not ok, we are not sure about the extent of her injuries. She broke around 6 to 9 ribs, to top it all off, today is her 60th b-day. Her car was totaled as were the other cars. The two cars sandwiched my mother’s car. She may have cardio thoracic surgery, not sure on that, but her hip and pelvis are fractured. She was sent to Allegheny ICU in Pittsburgh. Dad and I have been there and so far she is looking so-so. Keep her in your prayers. Do pray for the other 2 to 3 people in the wreck as well as they were sent to UPMC ICU that night.
Here is hoping she will make a full recovery.
