Category: Uncategorized

Paging Mr. Lind

The Pentagon has no idea what to do about 4GW:

The Pentagon is increasingly concerned about how to combat “hybrid warfare,” the combination of stealth invasion, local proxy forces and international propaganda that Russia used to annex Crimea and destabilize eastern Ukraine, U.S. officials said.

Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday released the 2015 National Military Strategy, in which he cited Russia’s actions in Ukraine and said “hybrid conflicts” will persist well into the future.

This kind of warfare transcends traditional notions of one military confronting another by incorporating conventional and unconventional forces, information warfare such as propaganda, as well as economic measures to undermine an enemy, according to Frank Hoffman, a professor at the National Defense University.

“The critique was, and still is, that America’s view of war is overly simplified,” he said. “We think of things in black-and-white terms.”

I suppose I’ll have to send Gen. Dempsey a copy of The 4GW Handbook when we publish it in September.

Fire local, hire global

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. But it does raise some serious questions when Microsoft is simultaneously a) laying off 7 percent of its workforce while b) lobbying hard for more H1B visas to permit it to import more foreign workers.

Up to 7,800 people will be laid off globally, the company announced Wednesday morning. Most of the jobs are within its smartphone hardware business. Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) had 118,600 employees as of March 30, with about 60,000 of those workers in the United States. The cuts represents about 7% of its staff.

This is Nadella’s second major restructuring. He announced 18,000 layoffs in Nokia’s devices and services business last year, following Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30)’s acquisition of the handset maker.

Of course, I don’t think anyone is even remotely surprised that the Nokia acquisition didn’t work out well.

The built-in bias of Wikipedia

I’ve commented before on how the editors at Wikipedia doggedly turn every article about a left-leaning public figure into a defense case, while every one about a right-wing figure is prosecutorial in nature:

Neil Tyson, a prominent popularizer of science (he even has his own television show) was recently found to have repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years. The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science. Tyson targeted journalists, members of Congress, even former President George W. Bush. And what was their crime? They were guilty of rejecting science, according to Tyson.

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real….

After I published my piece about Neil Tyson’s fabrication of the George W. Bush quote, several users edited Neil Tyson’s wiki page
to include details of the quote fabrication controversy. The
fact-loving, evidence-weighing, ever-objective editors of the online
encyclopedia did not appreciate the inclusion of the evidence of Tyson’s
fabrication. Not at all.

According to a review of the edit history of Tyson’s page,
one long-time Wikipedia editor deleted an entire pending section
summarizing the issue of Tyson’s fabricated quotes. Another editor
attempted to insert a brief mention of Tyson’s fabrication of the George
W. Bush quote. That mention was also deleted. When it was reinserted,
it was deleted yet again by an editor who describes himself as a childless progressive and an apostle of Daily Kos (h/t @kerpen).

Literally every single mention of Tyson’s history of fabricating quotes has been removed from Tyson’s Wikipedia page.

Meanwhile, the Wikipedia page about me contains more about NK Jemisin and John Scalzi than it does about a professional career that has been covered everywhere from the New York Times to Computer Gaming World, casts doubt on my heritage, and reduces my entire personal life to two of the four languages I speak. I mean, at the very least, you’d think they’d mention that I speak English, that my blog is the most highly trafficked one in science fiction and fantasy, or my son is the youngest male author ever published.

But, of course, anything that might reflect well on me, or poorly on Tyson, is something that the Wikipedia editors are determined to excise. And that’s why you should never take anything you read on Wikipedia as anything but a starting point.

Guess what? You’re fired

In which a reader reacts to bad news:

Today, tomorrow, next year. No matter when it happens, if it ever happens, hearing these words will inspire many things in men across the socio-sexual spectrum.

I know, because I got to hear them recently. And it sucks.

Suddenly your world is upside down, and for many of us, all that confidence you worked so hard to build feels as if it will evaporate before your eyes. Now what?

At the very least, it can happen to any of us, and even Vox has had the rug pulled out from under him during projects. I suspect even the highest-ranked men take a blow when this happens. So instead of bitching and crying about my situation, I’m sharing my general observations and what I’m doing. Take it for what you will, and I hope it helps if you ever find yourself in the same place.

Walking Away

From the moment I heard the words, the first thing I knew I had to realize was that the decision has been made. No amount of excusing or emotional-pleading would change anything (I’m looking at you gammas). It was beyond my control; their house, their rules. I decided to skip wasting any more time with people who weren’t furthering my goals.

Now, you may feel angry or sad or embarrassed or humiliated as you clean out your desk, and it’s fine to privately acknowledge those initial feelings (you’d be surprised how even a fairly confident man will feel them, I know I did). But it’s important to accept where you’re at now, so you can get back up on your feet.

You’ll be glad you walked away with your head up.

Don’t Panic

Let’s stop here for a moment. I cannot stress this one enough. Over the years I’ve seen several other friends get fired, and watching them panic is not only pathetic to see, it will definitely make the situation worse. If you have a woman and you’re panicking, she’ll panic x 100. Your house will be in disarray, energy will be spent dealing with that situation on top of everything else, and you will not be able to make the necessary decisions you’re about to need to make with a clear head. (Yes, there are decisions coming).

Instead of freaking out, I relaxed. Yeah, you heard that right. Relaxed. I recommend going for a long drive, going fishing or hiking, going to the track or to the gym. Not an all day affair, but wherever it is that you can be completely relaxed , enjoying what you’re doing for a bit (I recommend skipping your favorite bar though). For me, it was a long, long run at my favorite spot.

Now, I assessed the situation. Not who may have sold me out or how stupid I thought my boss was, but real assessment where you identify where you went wrong and what you may have done differently. By identifying what I could fix, if anything, I was gaining control over what was actually in my control.

Now I could move forward and move on with confidence. Time to rise up from this low point.

Initiate All Backup Plans Now

You do have backup plans, right? I cannot recommend enough that every many have a solid set of backups plans. If you don’t have any currently, you can start small by building up a little savings or by having a normal side-gig that brings in cash flow. Literally anything is better than nothing.

For me, it means shifting my energy toward other revenue-generating projects, falling back on my meager 1st-level emergency fund, and casually increasing the level of networking I do. Also, and here’s where the decision-making starts to come in, jettisoning unneeded luxuries. This isn’t to say that I’m some guy that’s always blowing through his money, but it’s time to figure out if there’s any additional fat you can trim from your budget. Downgrading cell services, assessing if you can learn to fix the wife’s car yourself, holding off a little longer on whatever you think you need to buy. Whatever it is, there’s always fat to trim, and you very well may need that extra $50 or $100 a month down the road. If you get fired, you’re going to be faced with a lot of these types of decisions in short order; best to get used to them fast.

Main point: don’t wait to deploy your multi-pronged set of back up plans. More initiatives today means more chance of success tomorrow.

Now that You’re Back Up, Hit it With Everything You Have

It might seem counter-intuitive to some men, but you’re not “fired” for all time or until you find another job. In fact, I’m already back on my feet. My situation is less than ideal, but I’m the man sitting at the table playing the hand I was dealt, and I damn well intend to play.

So what they tell you about making sure to keep your routine if you’re fired– it’s bullshit. For many men, routine means waking up at 8am, doing some stuff until 5pm, relaxing until 10pm, and then falling asleep. I’m going to tell you something far different: even if you feel like you don’t want to do anything, it’s actually the time to be doing as much as you can. If you wake up at 8am normally, start waking up at 6am. Fall asleep at your desk, every day. Yes, hit back at all hours until you’re literally falling asleep from exhaustion.

And it shouldn’t just be applying for jobs, though I can’t say enough that in this situation, you should be applying to 100s not merely a few due to fear of rejection. Hit the weights, run, read books, start new projects… write blog posts. Maximize your opportunities, and push forward with everything you have.

A Few Final Considerations

If you’re a regular guy, feelings like depression will pop up, at least the hints of them. I know I’ve had them. Like before, I recommend acknowledging them, and then refocusing. Do not dwell on them. They will do nothing to improve your situation.

On that note, I recommend drinking no more than one day a week, no matter your past habits. One day lets you blow of steam, but the last thing you want is to fall into a non-stop drink-a-thon. And for the gammas, no matter what you feel compelled to say: you are not on some fun vacation; this is not your wife’s gift to you this year, and you are not a stay-at-home dad with a wife that loves her career.

Lastly, understand that you must learn to STFU. I was lucky to know that no one cares why you were fired. Not your wife, not your buddies, not even your mom. Even close friends will likely give you funny looks if you tell them. I recommend not shying away from telling the truth if it comes up, but there’s no reason to broadcast it, and most importantly, really and truly, no one gives a damn about the details. Trying to socially peg down your old boss, as if anyone cared, reeks of desperation, and you… you’re a man with options.

Now, let’s get to it.

A perspective on Seveneves

I’ll write my own review of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves soon, and it will have very little in common with this one:

As my co-reviewer discusses elsewhere: on page one the moon blows up for no reason, and Earth is doomed. All life on the surface will be dead within a year. There’s barely any hope – the only conceivable path forward is, basically, to start launching rockets as fast as we can, and that won’t be fast enough to put more than a few hundred people with minimal survival infrastructure into orbit. It’s a rough situation, but I’m sure we can trust that Humanity will all come together as one in the face of this disaster and put aside our petty ahahahaha.

This story more than any other features a direct, explicit conflict between characters espousing pro-freedom/democracy/egalitarian principles and others defending order/security/hierarchy/meritocracy. Two teams shall enter a nightmarish swarm of tiny orbital habitats, one shall leave. So where does the literary simulation lead us?

The authoritarians consist of scientists, engineers and ex-military. They’re the guys who you would want in charge of a risky space mission. Note that Red Team don’t identify as authoritarians, they just want to accomplish the mission – a dangerous rendezvous with the fragmented core of the moon – and they think doing it right is more important than achieving consensus. Humanity is at stake, after all.

The collectivists consist of everybody else who was shot into orbit for various other reasons. Their plight is understandable. They mostly lack the technical skills to contribute to the mission, but that doesn’t stop them from having opinions on what needs to be done. Many of them don’t agree with the lunar rendezvous plan, for example, yet that mission requires that all available resources be devoted to it. Would you like to be dragged along on a dangerous Moon mission when you would prefer to try burning for Mars instead? Don’t you want a vote?

So naturally the two ideologies can’t cooperate. The collectivists retreat into a scattered swarm of tiny habitats, the authoritarians take the retrofitted International Space Station up to the lunar redoubt.

Both teams do pretty badly at the task of survival. The odds are stacked against them. The collectivists fly off in one direction and the authoritarians fly off in another and when they meet again, neither group is really too far behind the other in terms of body count.

It’s interesting that in light of the reviewer’s statement that Stephenson’s “most interesting and subversive contributions lie in his sociological and political thinking” that he completely leaves the book’s very strong socio-sexual elements out of this review.

I have to admit, I have seldom been more interested in interviewing an author, simply because I cannot tell if Stephenson is writing with a straight face, or, as I strongly suspect, taking the piss out of Pink SF. I mean, if I wrote exactly the same novel, word for word, there would be no question of the latter.

Why Rand Paul lost my vote

Scott Morefield explains:

As a libertarian-leaning Constitutionalist, I enthusiastically supported Ron Paul in the last two elections. So nobody who knows me was surprised when I declared my early excitement and support of his son, Rand, as a possible presidential prospect even before he won his Senate seat. Both father and son extol so many of the liberty-centered virtues that once made this country great and which are so rarely articulated today.

However, unlike his more ideologically-pure father, whose “take-me-or-leave-me” approach wasn’t one to sacrifice even a sliver of his beliefs for electoral victory, Rand is a bit more pragmatic. As someone who was at times frustrated by Ron Paul’s intransigence on even seemingly unimportant issues to the detriment of his public perception (come on, does anybody in the country actually think killing Bin Laden was a bad thing?), I can appreciate Rand’s desire to at least keep his finger on the pulse of what collective America is feeling….

No matter how you slice it, the fact remains that this Stalinesque push
to remove any vestiges of those “evil” Confederates is bound to alienate
a significant percentage of the very voters Rand Paul should be able to
count on as his base. So, when Rand adds his voice to the commissars,
those of us in Southern flyover country to whom that flag represents the
honor of thousands of Americans who fought and died for their homeland,
not slavery, bristle just a little. We care about a lot of things,
including getting along with folks of all races, but we don’t give two
hoots about what the “beltway” says is politically-correct.

I think Rand Paul sank his campaign when he endorsed the Confederate flag purge. He’s not as bad as Jeb Bush, of course, even Hillary Clinton may not be. But I think most of his father’s supporters, who have always viewed him with a certain degree of skepticism and concern, will look elsewhere as a result of his opposition to the symbol of the South.

German nationalism rises

Seriously, who thought flooding Germany with foreign invaders was a good idea?

President Joachim Gauck on Thursday condemned a recent rise in “vile” attacks on refugee shelters in Germany and warned that xenophobic attitudes were taking root in the country.

The comments by the head of state underline growing concern about hostility towards immigrants in Germany, which last year saw the emergence of the grassroots anti-Islam group PEGIDA.

Since the beginning of the year, there have been 150 attacks on refugee shelters — nearly as many as in the whole of 2014.

“We are seeing xenophobic attitudes taking root and that some people aren’t even shying away from carrying out attacks,” Gauck said in a speech in Berlin.

“I’m referring to what we have recently experienced again with these vile attacks on refugee homes. It’s unbearable.”

When your citizens are actively attacking “refugee shelters”, that’s probably a very good sign that you should stop letting refugees enter the country and start sending those that are already there back to their home countries.

It’s the invasion that is are unbearable, that’s what is causing the vile attacks. If the German head of state was truly concerned about xenophobia and hostility towards immigrants, he should shut down immigration into Germany.

The Rainbow Nazis attack conscience

And, incidentally, civilization. That certainly didn’t take long:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky has filed a lawsuit on behalf of four Rowan County couples, two same-gender couples and two opposite-gender couples, denied marriage licenses by County Clerk Kim Davis, a press release from the ACLU confirms.

Davis is standing firm on her decision to stop issuing marriage licenses, despite dozens of protesters who gathered outside the courthouse.

“My conscience will not allow me to issue a license for a same sex couple,” says Kim Davis, “because I know that God ordained marriage from the very foundation of this world to be between a man and a woman.”

In explaining the ACLU’s decision to file suit on the couples’ behalf, ACLU of Kentucky Cooperating Attorney Laura Landenwich stated, “Ms. Davis has the absolute right to believe whatever she wants about God, faith, and religion, but as a government official who swore an oath to uphold the law, she cannot pick and choose who she is going to serve, or which duties her office will perform based on her religious beliefs.”

The Rainbow Nazis really appear to be hell-bent on seeing the establishment of a post-democratic American theocracy. Because that’s what is most likely going to come out of this Sodom and Gomorrahstan totalitarianism in the end. They’re like children who can’t resist pushing until they discover where the limits are.

Within a year, they’ll be attacking priests and pastors too.

It appears that it won’t be all that much longer before everyone discovers what happens when enough people stop consenting to the consensual fiction known as “the law”.

Garden porn

Frankly, I don’t think there is really any other way to describe it. Extreme composting guru David the Good is now making videos:

Earlier this year, Marjory Wildcraft invited me to be a part of her Home Grown Food Summit. 

I agreed and hired my cousin (he almost volunteered, in fact, since it
was a lot of work) to help me put together a good gardening presentation
for the event.

The result was 13 Tips, Tricks and Lessons from Homesteading an Acre.

The video played live during the summit and was ranked among the top
five presentations by viewers. It generated a lot of really good press
but was only available as part of a multi-video package deal.

Until now!

I’ve set it free and am now offering the almost hour-long presentation for $4.99 as a video download for your enjoyment and gardening edification.

And I’m sure his fans will be delighted to note that David the Good is planning to follow up the very successful Compost Everything with two more books with Castalia House, one of which may even be released this year.

One will be focused on survival preparedness, the other on homeschooling.

The war at Tor

Like a swan swimming across a pond, what looks like serenity from the outside often masks a tremendous amount of activity going on beneath the surface. Over the last few weeks I’ve had several conversations with executives at Tor Books, Macmillan, and Macmillan UK, and I can assure you that there is a very good reason for Mr. George Martin’s sudden and repeated calls for supporters of Irene Gallo and others at Tor Books to “denounce and oppose” the ongoing Tor boycott.

For those who want to stand up to the bullies and rabids and their Tor boycott, please note that SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH was published by Tor. (They were also Jack Vance’s publisher for most of the last few decades).  

That was a pretty good anthology actually. Despite the best efforts of the various authors it seldom rose to full-blown Vancean heights, but I quite liked the Tanith Lee and John C. Wright stories it contained. What Martin appears to be trying to do with his multiple posts on the subject is make it harder for the executives at Macmillan to hold anyone at Tor Books responsible for their repeated violations of the Macmillan Code of Conduct or for their attacks on Tor’s authors and customers. And although Martin is unwilling to come right out and say it, he is offering an implicit threat that if Macmillan does the right thing and jettisons the unprofessional parties concerned, he and other SJWs will launch their own boycott of Tor and take their future books to other publishers.

The reason George is doing this now is because he knows what’s going on inside Tor thanks to his various contacts there. Things are getting very heated, as it has been reported that Patrick Nielsen Hayden has threatened to take his Scalzi (and other writers) and go elsewhere if either Irene Gallo or Moshe Feder are fired or forced to resign. Whether John Scalzi backs PNH to this extent or not (and if he is even aware of this threat on his behalf or not), I do not know, but I personally find it very difficult to believe that Scalzi would ever consent to put his ten-year contract with Tor Books in jeopardy for anyone’s sake. He may be grateful to PNH for launching and repeatedly propping up his career, but he’s not THAT grateful.

If it’s true that PNH is threatening to take his ball and go to DAW or some other publishing home, it’s an amateurish move that demonstrates the very sort of entitled unprofessionalism and poor decision-making that has put Tor Books into the current situation in the first place. But it shouldn’t be a surprise that PNH might be taking this line, as he would not be the only Tor-affiliated individual who to take such a stance. For example, Tor author Mary Robinette Kowal has already publicly threatened to return the advances for her next two books and take them elsewhere if Ms Gallo is fired.

‏ @RizziWorld How about this. If they fire Irene, I will return the advances on my next two books and pull them.
7:23 AM – 14 Jun 2015

What a noble gesture in support of an employee’s right to publicly attack the company’s customers! Anyhow, if Mr. Nielsen Hayden was in fact foolish enough to threaten his superiors in any way, I expect he will soon receive an object lesson in the realities of corporate power.

And for the witch hunters at Tor who are desperate to learn with whom I have been speaking, I am kind enough to give you one little hint. Go to my Twitter account, search through it, and see who has commented on my tweets. I think you will find the results to be illuminating.