Category: Uncategorized

An endorsement from the Dean of Mil-SF

Jerry Pournelle approves of Castalia’s new mil-SF anthology:

Riding The Red Horse has a number of stories and essays, and is worth your buying. My non fiction contribution is an essay on simulation I did for Avalon Hill in the 70’s –and it is still pretty good. They found and asked my permission, and I am told I’ve already earned a good dinner out of it… Next I think comes a revival of There Will Be War.

It’s good to see Dr. Pournelle recovering so rapidly from his stroke. As a wargamer and game designer, I very much enjoyed his game design essay in The General; I found it by pure happenstance and we added it at literally the last moment. It was fascinating to learn that he was the inventor of the “matchbox” concealment system, which uses a single unit to stand in for several, a concept that is incorporated in most wargames these days in one way or another.

Strangling the golden goose

The US economy will continue to decline even after the credit bust because it is actively disincentivizing entrepreneurs and driving them out of the country:

The U.S. now ranks not first, not second, not third, but 12th among developed nations in terms of business startup activity. Countries such as Hungary, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel and Italy all have higher startup rates than America does.

We are behind in starting new firms per capita, and this is our single most serious economic problem. Yet it seems like a secret. You never see it mentioned in the media, nor hear from a politician that, for the first time in 35 years, American business deaths now outnumber business births.

Just look at my family. The USA has already have lost over 50 jobs, and based on past taxes paid, more than $100 million in state and federal taxes after jailing my father for 11 years for his failure to pay around $2 million in taxes it claimed he owed. It also lost the benefit of any new businesses he would have started in the last ten years. And it has lost whatever benefit it would have gained from several opportunities in the USA I would have pursued in the past, but instead elected to leave fallow because the regulatory and compliance headaches were too high when piled on top of the usual risks and time commitments involved. I was never as successful as my father, of course, but my business did reach a respectable size and employed a dozen people.

It’s so bad these days that the USA is not only disincentivizing both its resident and expatriate entrepreneurs, but is even causing the latter to give up their citizenships in record numbers. Eduardo Saverin, one of the Facebook co-founders, is far from the only U.S. citizen to renounce his citizenship over tax-related business matters. For years, the American instinct has been to say “good riddance” to such renunciates, but the country is past the point where it can afford to do so, especially when most other countries are very actively courting the small minority of people who are capable of creating new businesses that will provide new job opportunities for their citizens. At this point, foreign entrepreneurs would have to be either stupid or very short-sighted to pursue a green card that will serve as a financial anchor for the rest of their lives.

The tragic thing is that the USA is no longer the land of opportunity for entrepreneurs. It was only 20 years ago that the young guys who started id Software moved from Wisconsin to Texas because the opportunities were better there. But the ids of tomorrow are now leaving the USA for other countries, and are increasingly starting them in places like Eastern Europe, the Nordic countries, and Israel. The last five big game startups have come out of Russia, Finland and Sweden; one of the biggest mobile game successes is in Serbia. This means that even aside from its macroeconomic problems, the USA is very unlikely to possess the long-term potential for growth it once took for granted anymore.

The effects of these negative developments concerning entrepreneurial activity are somewhat obscured by the fact that New York is still the financial capital of the world; four of the six game companies mentioned either went public in the USA or were acquired by US companies. But it doesn’t change the fact that innovation is increasingly taking place outside the USA.

That is, admittedly, remarkably dumb

Matt Taibbi is underwhelmed by American Sniper:

Eastwood, who surely knows better, indulges in countless crass stupidities in the movie. There’s the obligatory somber scene of shirtless buffed-up SEAL Kyle and his heartthrob wife Sienna Miller gasping at the televised horror of the 9/11 attacks. Next thing you know, Kyle is in Iraq actually fighting al-Qaeda – as if there was some logical connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

Which of course there had not been, until we invaded and bombed the wrong country and turned its moonscaped cities into a recruitment breeding ground for… you guessed it, al-Qaeda. They skipped that chicken-egg dilemma in the film, though, because it would detract from the “human story.”

Eastwood plays for cheap applause and goes super-dumb even by Hollywood standards when one of Kyle’s officers suggests that they could “win the war” by taking out the evil sniper who is upsetting America’s peaceful occupation of Sadr City.

Look, I get it’s a movie. Movies end. They need an ending, and the sort of 4GW morass into which Iraq has ever so predictably descended isn’t suitable. So, it’s understandable that Eastwood turns it into a story with a coherent ending, right down to the dramatic mano-a-mano that is conventional in these sorts of war movies. And it is refreshing to see Hollywood take the side of an American soldier for a change.

But that doesn’t make that line any more intelligent. It just doesn’t.

Today Yemen, tomorrow the West

I have no doubt that the governments of Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen didn’t think it was likely that jihadists would manage to topple them either:

Shiite insurgents tightened their grip on Yemen’s capital Wednesday, seizing control of a missile base and keeping the president as a virtual hostage in a showdown threatening a key American ally in the fight against al-Qaeda.

Days of fast-moving advances by the Houthi rebel faction — believed to be backed by Iran — has left the Western-backed government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi backed into a corner with rapidly diminishing options.

Just hours after storming the presidential palace on Tuesday, the Houthi leader gave what amounted to an ultimatum: Hadi can either move ahead with reforms that include giving rebels more power or risk intensified attacks that could topple his government.

The brinksmanship and uncertainly has pushed Yemen closer to a full-scale political breakdown that could resonate deeply in Washington and among its key regional allies, including neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Fortunately, we’ve been assured that Islam is a religion of peace and jihad is a personal, spiritual struggle, so there is no chance that a second Islamic State will aggressively seek to foment jihad in its neighbors. And even if it did seek to so, what could be more stable than a neighboring monarchy ruled by a 91 year-old man?

It’s an Arab Spring in the making, it’s just not a secular Arab Spring.

Britain wants OUT

80 percent polled want Great Britain out of the European Union:

The biggest vote on this country’s ties to ­Brussels for 40 years saw 80 per cent say they no longer want to be in Europe, the ­Daily Express can reveal. It marks a huge leap forward in this news­paper’s crusade to get Britain out of the EU.

Some 14,581 people voted – 11,706 of them want the UK to quit compared with 2,725 who want to remain part of the EU.

The mini-referendum – the first on the issue since 1975 – was organised by two senior Tory backbenchers and a prospective Tory MP.

They believe the overwhelming result, which will be presented to David Cameron today, will force him to bring forward his planned in-or-out vote on the UK’s future in Europe to next year instead of 2017.

If Cameron still won’t commit to leading the UK out of the European Union, the Conservative Party is going to have to replace him. The EU has failed in literally every possible way. It has absolutely no credibility anymore; the usual threats and promises and electoral shenanigans are not going to keep the British in.

How you can help Sad Puppies 3

“Yes, friends, the time is near — for you to put your money where your
instinct for rambunctious irreverence is. January 31 is your final day
to register as a member of Sasquan,
the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention. Of course, you don’t have
to be a Sasquan member to participate in the Hugo award voting and
nominations. You can also be a member of either Loncon 3 (last year’s
Worldcon) or MidAmeriCon II (next year’s Worldcon.) If you have a
membership for any of these, you’re good to go for the Hugo nomination
period.”

Thus spake Brad Torgersen, Cuddly Token Liberal, Evil Legion of Evil. There are more details on his site.

Mailvox: of rabbits and communism

AD sees the connection:

I read these quotes and can’t help comparing to your Rabbitology posts.

“What I had failed to understand was that the security I felt in the Party was that of a group and that affection in that strange communist world is never a personal emotion. You were loved or hated on the basis of group acceptance, and emotions were stirred or dulled by propaganda. That propaganda was made by the powerful people at the top. That is why ordinary Communists get along well with their groups: they think and feel together and work toward a common goal.”
– School of Darkness, Chapter 16 (1954), Dr. Bella Dodd, head of the New York State Teachers Union , member of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) in the 1930s and 1940s, later a vocal anti-communist

“The process of completely freeing oneself emotionally from being a Communist is a thing no outsider can understand. The group thinking and group planning and the group life of the Party had been a part of me for so long that it was desperately difficult for me to be a person again. … But I had begun the process of “unbecoming” a Communist. It was a long and painful process, much like that of a polio victim who has to learn to walk all over again. I had to learn to think. I had to learn to love. I had to drain the hate and frenzy from my system. I had to dislodge the self and the pride that had made me arrogant, made me feel that I knew all the answers. I had to learn that I knew nothing. There were many stumbling blocks in this process.”

It is hard for rabbits to break out of the warren, and even harder for them to become a not-rabbit. Don’t expect much in the way of reason from the pinkshirts, for as it is said, it is difficult to reason a man out of a position he has not reasoned himself into. This is why they switch fluidly between contradictory positions as easily as a school of fish changes direction; they’re not paying any attention to the direction of the school, they’re completely focused on the actions of the rabbits around them.

The importance of rejection

esr explains why it is vital to categorically reject the premises and principles of the SJW shriekers:

Whenever I see screaming, hate-filled behavior… the important part never turns out to be whatever principles the screamer claims to be advocating. Those are just window-dressing for the bullying, the dominance games, and the rage.

You cannot ameliorate the behavior of people like that by accepting their premises and arguing within them; they’ll just pocket your concessions and attack again, seeking increasingly abject submission. In one-on-one relationships this is called “emotional abuse”, and like abusers they are all about control of you while claiming to be about anything but.

Third-wave feminism, “social justice” and “anti-racism” are rotten with this. Some of the principles, considered in isolation, would be noble; but they don’t stay noble in the minds of a rage mob.

The good news is that, like emotional abusers, they only have the power over you that you allow them. Liberation begins with recognizing the abuse for what it is. It continues by entirely rejecting their attempts at manipulation. This means rejecting their terminology, their core concepts, their framing, and their attempts to jam you into a “victim” or “oppressor” identity that denies your lived experience.

The identity-jamming part maradydd clearly gets; the most eloquent sections of her writing are those in which she (rightly) rejects feminist attempts to jam her into a victim identity. But I don’t think she quite gets how thoroughly you have to reject the rest of the SJW pitch in order not to enable their abuse.

This is the challenge of #GamerGate and Blue SF and Hacker culture and the Androsphere, to say nothing of a myriad of other singular interest groups. We are opposed to precisely the same thing, precisely the same phenomenon, sometimes even the very same individuals, and yet, because we don’t share interests, we tend not to recognize that we share the same enemy. We have the numbers, and yet we fail to ally and support each other cross-interest because most gamers couldn’t care less about fiction and most fiction readers are not hard core gamers.

War is coming

Whether the West is ready or not. As with the National Socialists, the frightened appeasers of the West are unwilling to listen to what their self-proclaimed enemies are saying:

Jurgen Todenhofer, the first Western reporter to embed with Islamic State fighters and not be killed in the process, spoke to Al Jazeera about his time with the terror group. Todenhofer lived side by side with the jihadist fighters for ten days in the Islamic State-stronghold city of Mosul, Iraq. He was accompanied only by his son, who served as his cameraman.

“I always asked them about the value of mercy in Islam,” but “I didn’t see any mercy in their behavior,” explained Todenhofer. He added, “Something that I don’t understand at all is the enthusiasm in their plan of religious cleansing, planning to kill the non-believers… They also will kill Muslim democrats because they believe that non-ISIL-Muslims put the laws of human beings above the commandments of God.”

The German reporter then elaborated on how shocked he was about how “willing to kill” the ISIS fighters are. He said that they were ready to commit genocide. “They were talking about [killing] hundreds of millions. They were enthusiastic about it, and I just cannot understand that,” said Todenhofer.

At this point, the Western governments are more interested in suppressing the only forces that will save them, the Christians and the nationalists. But they will go, one way or another. Either they’ll be thrown out democratically by the pro-survival Western elements, or they’ll eventually find themselves in the position of the Yemeni Prime Minister.


Armed Houthi militia have encircled the Prime Minister’s residence in
Yemen just hours after gunmen opened fire on his convoy, according to a
government spokesman.