Category: Uncategorized

Don’t go out without carrying

And if you are confronted, don’t hesitate to use lethal force. Because the vibrants, particularly the younger ones, won’t hesitate to kill even when it’s absolutely unnecessary and they’ve already got what they demanded:

According to NBC Philadelphia, the three black teens were playing basketball when one of them got the bright idea to go rob someone at random. After seeing a different man out walking his dog and deciding not to rob him, they saw 51-year-old James Patrick Stuhlman.

Stuhlman apparently would usually walk with his 13-year-old daughter, but on the night of his murder he had told her to stay home because it was getting late, likely saving her life. As he walked down the dark street on March 12, the father and owner of a local landscaping company saw three teens approach him, and upon running into him they announced a robbery.

“At one point, he did plead for his life,” Captain James Clark said Thursday at a news conference, according to the New York Daily News. “He said, ‘Please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me,’ and they still shot him one more time.”

On Thursday, 15-year-old Brandon Smith and a 14-year-old whose name has been withheld were arrested by police and said they had decided to rob Stuhlman rather than the other man they saw because he looked more vulnerable.

At this point, every robbery by young Africans is sufficient reason to believe one’s life is in imminent danger and is sufficient justification for lethal self-defense. Of course, in the mainstream media’s version, the three murderers were merely “teens” and “high school freshmen”.

Civil disobedience

The Germans aren’t exactly known for it, but when they do it, they do it well:

“A few years ago the German Minister of Justice—kind of like the
Attorney General here in the United States—he was pushing very hard for
Germans to have biometric data on their national ID cards, and he wanted
all Germans to be fingerprinted. And the Germans pushed back,
particularly privacy advocates and those in the Chaos Computer Club.
And so what they did is when the German Minister of Justice was out at a
restaurant, they went ahead and after he left they got the glass that
he had left behind, and they were able to lift his fingerprint off of
the glass. They then took a photograph, brought it into Photoshop,
cleaned it up, and then were able to replicate it on 3D printers, in
latex. … [They] included it as a handout in their Chaos Computer Club
magazine that went out to 5,000 people, and they encouraged their
readers to leave the Justice Minister’s fingerprints at crime scenes all
over Germany, which they did.”

This points out the only way one can reasonably expect to gain any privacy, which is by flooding the system. It is a known fact that figuring out what information is valuable is much harder than obtaining raw data in the first place, so rather than futile attempts to lock things down, one’s focus should be in flooding the data collectors with vast quantities of meaningless information.

4GW coming to America

The USA is about to discover the distinct military disadvantages of permitting a massive Fifth Column of immigrants in its midst:

A division of ISIS published a ‘kill list’ containing the names, photos and addresses of 100 US military members online and called upon its ‘brothers residing in America’ to kill them. The list was posted online by the ‘Islamic State Hacking Division’. The group claimed it hacked several military servers, databases and emails to obtain the information.

The ISHD said it wants ‘lone wolf’ attackers to go after the military members and ‘kill them wherever you find them’.

The list did appear to match up with information which was available online, TheBlaze reported.

The posting read: ‘With the huge amount of data we have from various different servers and databases, we have decided to leak 100 addresses so that our brothers in America can deal with you. And now we have made it easy for you by giving you addresses, all you need to do is take the final step, so what are you waiting for? Kill them in their own lands, behead them in their own homes, stab them to death as they walk their streets thinking that they are safe.’

Notice how even ISIS recognizes that which neither the Democratic nor Republican parties are willing to admit. America is land that belongs to white Christian people of European descent, (only after being conquered and taken from my people, of course), it is not part of the Dar al-Islam, and it does not belong to the ISIS “brothers in America” who have invaded it or to the millions of other alien immigrants who presently reside in it. Not yet, anyhow. And perhaps not ever.

Perhaps after members of the US military begin dying in their own lands, Americans will begin to take the concept of defending their own lands, and their own people, seriously.

More Hugo predictions

One Aled Morgan responds to the Chaos Horizon Hugo predictions, which were as follows:

  1. Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
  2. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
  3. Monster Hunter Nemesis, Larry Correia
  4. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
  5. Skin Game, Jim Butcher  

First, the two I’d be astonished not to see on the ballot:

Lock In
Ancilliary Sword

Then very likely:

The Three Body Problem
Annihilation

Then at about the same level of probability fighting for the fifth slot:

Monster Hunter Nemesis
My Real Children
The Goblin Emperor
Symbiont

Possible but unlikely:

The Peripheral
The Darkling Sea

What you’re overlooking about Scalzi is that he has a massively popular blog, he has orders of magnitude more readers than the “Sad Puppies”, and while he never opersteps the line he encourages his fans to nominate him… and they do. The same goes for Grant, who has made the ballot so often already but doedn’t win — she has the same kind of nominating fans.

For the Hugos, what’s important is not wide readership but readership within Worldcon going fandom. Lots of the measures you’re assessing would be great if this were a wide-constituency vote, but it isn’t. It’ll be around two thousand people. SFWA’s even smaller, and everyone in SFWA knows each other. Butcher’s really really popular in the wider constituency, but his books don’t feel like the kind of thing people nominate for Hugos to the people who nominate, so I’d say it has zero chance except with Sad Puppies. And I expect a backlash against Sad Puppies this year.

I have to admit, The Three-Body Problem looks pretty good. I find the concept interesting, seeing as I used a variant of it to explain some of the problems with Keynesian economic theory in RGD. As a fan of Japanese literature both ancient and modern, I’m curious to see what Chinese SF is like. I tried Vandermeer’s Balzac’s War and ended up putting it down before long, but perhaps his Southern Reach Trilogy is better. In any event, Holmwood, who both reads the occasional Scalzi book and is a Sad Puppy supporter, offers a mild correction:

John Scalzi is a good author. I enjoyed both Old Man’s War and Agent to the Stars. His books are pushed heavily by his publisher (deservedly so) and Lock-In was a better work than Redshirts which won previously. That said, I believe his blog’s readership is a good deal smaller than (say) that of Vox Day, and certainly smaller than Day, Correia, Wright, Torgersen, Hoyt, etc combined.

Back to the general topic of Puppies, sad and otherwise.

I would be both surprised and disappointed if Puppies locked up overwhelmingly to vote a slate en masse without regard to quality. So far that’s not been the case, though I’m well aware there are those who’d love to poke a stick in the putative SF establishment fans’ collective eyes and do just that.

But this, while very well and good, VIOLATES THE NARRATIVE. Tudor leaps in to explain that Whatever is not merely big. It is ENORMOUS:

Scalzi’s blog is not big, is enormous. There are many good SF writers, but there are only a handful NY Times Bestsellers. Scalzi became one because of his blog. I only like some of his books but even I read his blog regularly. And if an author will write on his blog about her/his new book, than it’s certain that its sales will receive a great boost.

And so it fell to me to actually provide the relevant facts of the matter:

John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, is not reasonably described as “enormous” and his blog readership is considerably smaller than mine, let alone the combined readership of the various Sad and Rabid Puppy authors. The most traffic Mr. Scalzi ever had is just over 1 million Google pageviews per month back in May 2012. Since then, his blog traffic has declined to around 450,000 pageviews per month. By comparison, my blogs alone now enjoy traffic of 1.5 million pageviews per month, about three times that of Mr. Scalzi’s Whatever.

In 2014, Mr. Scalzi’s blog had 5.6 million annual pageviews whereas mine had 15.7 million. Where Mr. Scalzi is very popular, however, is on Twitter, where his 70k+ followers are more than all of the aforementioned authors combined. Whether Twitter followers or blog readerships are more predictive of Hugo success, I leave to Chaos Horizon to predict.

The reason many people have a false impression of Mr. Scalzi’s blog is that Mr. Scalzi has historically been prone to a considerable amount of exaggeration. For example, in an August 2010 interview with Lightspeed magazine, he claimed Whatever had 2 million monthly pageviews. The actual number of pageviews that month was 305 thousand, or about 15 percent of the amount claimed.

I do find it intriguing that more than a year after the greater part of Mr. Scalzi’s claimed blog traffic was exposed as nonexistent, there are still those pinkshirts who fail to recognize that the numbers in the science fiction market simply do not add up in the way they apparently believe they do. I wonder what would suffice to convince them otherwise?

As for Holmewood’s concern about quality, I would simply urge the prospective Worldcon voter to compare the Rabid Puppy slate to last year’s Hugo winners. I contend that the Rabid Puppies are, across the board, considerably superior in terms of both science fiction essence and and science fiction quality to the 2014 winners.

The danger of global warming

Dr. Patrick Moore explains why AGW/CC is not merely nonsense, but dangerous, anti-human nonsense:

I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that
it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof
of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the
science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict
the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the
doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric
carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to
unlivable temperatures.

In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years,
since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels.
Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings
colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than
today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels
revolutionized civilization. The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase
and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is
preposterous.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
announced for the umpteenth time we are doomed unless we reduce
carbon-dioxide emissions to zero. Effectively this means either reducing
the population to zero, or going back 10,000 years before humans began
clearing forests for agriculture. This proposed cure is far worse than
adapting to a warmer world, if it actually comes about.

No one who buys into the AGW/CC scam should be taken any more seriously than an economist who “invests” in a Ponzi scheme. AGW/CC is scientific fraud, it is historical ignorance, and it is political ideology. I’ve been saying this for years now, and every single piece of information that has come out since has strongly supported that contention.

#Comicgate

Dare we dream of a response to the SJWs in the comics world?

CB: And how will you react if and when they tell you some of your art is “problematic?”

EL: I don’t need to do a thing. I’m in charge here. Readers can buy what I’m selling or not. Ideally that’s what it should be. A candy bar company makes a candy bar and you can buy it or not. Those are your two choices. The internet assumes there are two other options: that candy bars can be pulled off the shelves and returned to their manufacturers unsold or that those buying candy bars can stipulate the ingredients. You want to make a different comic book? Make one of your own. You can buy the one I produce or you can not buy it, but you can’t dictate what goes on inside those pages. One guy makes that call.

CB: Lastly Erik, what do you think the long term effects will be if the comic industry continues to acquiesce to these sort of demands?

EL: The slippery slope is a return to the Comics Code. That, or some other kind of censoring body who knows better than the rest of us. Movies have gone in a direction where everything is pre-screened to an audience who weighs in on them and decides what’s good or bad and changes are made accordingly. The danger of taking cues from the audience is pablum like Star Wars Episode I where fans weighed in on what they wanted, George Lucas gave them what he thought they wanted and then they hated what he gave them. The audience is not wiser than the creative people. If they were better writers and artists than those in the field, they would be employed in the field. They’re mouthy amateurs and their suggestions should largely be treated like the witless ramblings of an insane person.

Years ago, Stan Lee instituted a new policy because of a number of letters from readers. Some vocal fans had complained that continued stories were problematic. Since distribution was spotty at best, many readers often missed chapters of continued stories and so they asked that Marvel stop producing continued stories. And so they did. The policy went into effect and a few months later all of their books were self-contained. And then another batch of mail came in complaining about the simple, dull one-part stories throughout the line. And so that policy was tossed out the window.

The danger is in thinking that the vocal few represent the entirety of your audience. They don’t. And so what we’re getting is situations like Jim Lee giving Wonder Woman pants in the Justice League because readers demanded it, then getting rid of them because other readers demanded it, all before the pants version saw print! These publishers are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to please everybody and not knowing who to listen to, and I can’t help but feel that a lot of the people yelling and screaming aren’t buying the comics, pants or no pants.

 #GamerGate has changed the rules. Blue SF is on the rise and the pinkshirts are reeling in dismay. All it takes is for one creator in an industry – just one – to stand up and say “I will create what I want to create” in order to inspire others to do the same.

The slaughter of the development houses

EA kills another legendary name in game development:

In an a move to consolidate its studios Electronic Arts has announced that it will be closing down Maxis. One of the sad truths of the video game industry is that game studios close down and disappear all the time. That being the case, there are still moments when you see certain names coupled with the words “shut down” and can’t help but feel a bit saddened.

Case in point, Electronic Arts has announced at GDC today that it will be closing down Maxis Emeryville in an effort to fold its staff and projects into other development houses under the Maxis brand. Recognizing that this consolidation will lead to many of the studio’s staffers losing their jobs, EA stated that former Emeryville employees “will be given opportunities to explore other positions within the Maxis studios and throughout EA.” The publisher also intends to work with employees leaving wholesale “to ensure the best possible transition with separation packages and career assistance.”

What is that now, six or seven classic development houses that have been devoured by the EA monster? I was seriously concerned when they acquired Origin, and downright bummed out when it became obvious that they were going to kill both the Ultima and Wing Commander franchises. Chris Roberts even worked out a deal to try to revive the latter a few years ago, but wasn’t able to find the funding, hence Star Citizen. One hopes that one day, he’ll be able to buy back the IP that EA is never going to utilize.

I have fond memories of Maxis. Roger, one of their tech support guys, was my initial contact there in my Transdimensional Evangelist days, and we used to go into the city from time to time when I was in town. We had some unforgettable evenings, most notably the time another Maxis employee who had a jeep with the license plate “JAHARMY”  was driving and took us to DV8.

Well, at least they’re keeping the brand name for now. I seriously wonder sometimes how EA even stays in business. They shut down a friend’s studio last year that was highly profitable, just because the overall revenue was under the level dictated by their new corporate policy. They didn’t sell it or anything, just shut it down and threw away literally millions of dollars in profit. So PopCap is next, after which it will presumably be Bioware’s turn.

Choose this day whom you will serve

Jon Podhoretz doesn’t appear to like the idea of having to choose between America and Israel:

Today, the president of the United States told the prime minister of Israel he was reassessing America’s “options” with regard to Israel in light of remarks Benjamin Netanyahu made about potential Palestinian statehood and an election-day Facebook post urging Israeli right-wingers to go to the polls on Monday to counter a surge in Israeli Arab voters.

The crisis in the relationship we discuss in our new editorial statement has entered a new and potentially unprecedented phase.

It may well be that the president is going to present American Jews with a choice over the coming months no American president should ask us to make—to become parties to and participants in his effort to create what, in 2009, he called “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel.

The question, of course, is to what Podhoretz is truly objecting. Does he, a U.S. citizen, genuinely find it difficult to choose between the U.S.A. and Israel? Or is he more truly concerned that, as the Spanish Inquisition did with the false conversos, the president intends to expose where the true loyalties of the Jews in America lie?

There should be an amount of “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel. They are two separate and very different countries, and while they share some interests, they also have other interests that are distinct, and in some cases, even divergent. An alliance between the two countries makes sense. Attempting to force the two countries to march in lockstep does not.

The mere fact that Podhoretz would appear to oppose recognition of this basic reality is sufficient to raise some questions where his true and singular allegiance lies. It is telling that the name of his piece is “The Crisis Has Exploded” when the vast majority of Americans have no idea that there is any such crisis at all.

It’s not anti-Semitic to observe that no man can serve two masters. But it is literally anti-American for a U.S. citizen to call for the sacrifice of U.S. interests on Israel’s behalf. There is nothing wrong with being pro-Israel. I am pro-Israel. But there is definitely something wrong with selling out what is supposed to be your own country, regardless of what reason you give to justify it.

The inequality of austerity

For all the talk about the “idle poor” and lazy Greeks, let’s not forget that corporate welfare to the “idle rich” and politically connected Greeks is often rather substantial. That’s not just a left-wing talking point, in this age of banking bailouts, the subsidies to the very rich may actually exceed those to the overtly government dependent. It’s clear that the burden imposed by the IMF is not falling, like the rain, on the rich and poor alike.

Greece’s unbalanced austerity and drastic increase of poverty. The poorest households in the debt-ridden country lost nearly 86% of their income, while the richest lost only 17-20%.  The tax burden on the poor increased by 337% while the burden on upper-income classes increased by only 9% !!! This is the result of a study that has analyzed 260.000 tax and income data from the years 2008 – 2012.

According to the study commissioned by the German Institute for Macroeconomic Research (IMK) affiliated with the Hans Böckler Foundation:

– The nominal gross income of Greek households decreased by almost a quarter in only four years.

– The wages cuts caused nearly half of the decline.

– The net income fell further by almost 9 percent, because the tax burden was significantly increased

When you see statistics like that, you sort of assume that there will be some sort of revolution taking place, and frankly, it would be hard to blame them. Crony “capitalism” of the sort we’ve seen dominate the Western economies since 2008 is not something that any genuine capitalist should support.

Forget free thought

US universities are now places where even simple facts are unwelcome:

A student at Reed College has been banned from class for denying the existence of “rape culture” in the United States and arguing that the oft-repeated statistic that one in five women are raped at college is bogus.

Jeremiah True, 19, received an email from professor Pancho Savery on March 14 telling him he was making his classmates so uncomfortable that he was no longer welcome to participate in the “conference” sections of his Humanities 110 class, a course which focuses on the art and literature of classical Greece, according to BuzzFeed News.

True says he sparred with his classmates on a variety of issues, but says it was his criticism of the 1-in-5 rape statistic that ended up being the tipping point.

“There are several survivors of sexual assault in our conference, and you have made them extremely uncomfortable with what they see as not only your undermining incidents of rape, but of also placing too much emphasis on men being unfairly charged with rape,” said Savery in an email True posted online. “[Other students] have said that things you have said in our conference have made them so upset that they have difficulty concentrating in other classes. I, as conference leader, have to do what is best for the well-being of the entire class, and I am therefore banning you from conference for the remainder of the semester.”

At least one student thinks giving True the boot was the right move, saying that True’s statements somehow represented a safety hazard.

“This is an excellent example of a professor taking initiative to take care of his students,” senior Rosie Dempsey told BuzzFeed. “Of course, we are an institution that encourages dissent and active discussion, but there is a difference between stimulating discussion through opposition and making other students feel unsafe.”

If they are banning people for making other students feel unsafe, shouldn’t they ban those who run around telling students that one of five of them is doomed to be raped?