Category: Uncategorized

Too little, too late

Now that Ebola has arrived and killed people in the USA and Spain, the Obama administration belatedly attempts to look like it is doing something:

Federal health officials will require temperature checks for the first time at five major American airports for people arriving from the three West African countries hardest hit by the deadly Ebola virus. However, health experts said the measures were more likely to calm a worried public than to prevent many people with Ebola from entering the country. Still, they constitute the first large-scale attempt to improve security at American ports of entry since the virus arrived on American soil last month.

The thing is, if you don’t want people to panic, you should not lie to them and tell them they are safe when they are not.

On invasion

One of America’s foremost military thinkers explains that immigration can be MORE dangerous than a conventional military invasion:

Regrettably, the colossal mess created by “multi-culturalism” affects all Europeans and Americans, Right as well as Left. I will say again what I have said before: in a Fourth Generation world, invasion by immigrants who do not acculturate is more dangerous than invasion by the army of a foreign state. In America, a similar invading army took to our streets last week, demonstrating against any attempt to stem the invasion. Few of the flags they carried were American.

That was written by Bill Lind back in 2006. We were warned.

Dutch slaughter

So much for the concept of “never again”. Between abortion and the end of life and euthanasia at the end of it, modern secularists are beginning to make the National Socialist approach to mass killing look downright moderate:

The number of mentally-ill patients killed by euthanasia in Holland has trebled in the space of a year, new figures have revealed. In 2013, a total of 42 people with ‘severe psychiatric problems’ were killed by lethal injection compared to 14 in 2012 and 13 in 2011. The latest official figures also revealed a 15 per cent surge in the number of euthanasia deaths from 4,188 cases in 2012 to 4,829 cases last year. The incremental rise is consistent with a 13 per cent increase in 2012, an 18 per cent rise in 2011, 19 per cent in 2010 and 13 per cent in 2009.

The rise is also likely to confirm the fears of Dutch regulator Theo Boer who told the Daily Mail that he expected to see euthanasia cases smash the 6,000 barrier in 2014. Overall, deaths by euthanasia, which officially account for three per cent of all deaths in the Netherlands, have increased by 151 per cent in just seven years.

Most cases – some 3,600 people – involved cancer sufferers but there were also 97 people who died at the hands of their doctors because they were suffering from dementia, the figures show. The figures, however, do not include cases of so-called terminal sedation, where patients are given a cocktail of sedatives and narcotics before food and fluids are withdrawn. Studies suggest that if such deaths were added to the figure then euthanasia would account for one in eight – about 12.3 per cent – of all deaths in the Netherlands.

So, Dutch doctors are murdering people with “severe psychiatric problems” as well as dementia. At this point, it won’t be long into it is decided that everyone with an IQ under 99 is removed from the gene pool.

The idea that modern post-Christian society is any less barbaric than the Middle Ages is becoming increasingly risible. 

They don’t get it

White Americans around the country are startled to discover that no amount of liberal happy talk and income redistribution is sufficient to make African-Americans want to be like them or even consider them to be part of the same tribe.

Alice Singen had always seen her home town as an integrated, harmonious place. Like many other white residents, she prided herself on staying here even when others began to leave.
But since the death of an unarmed black teenager at the hands of a white police officer, some African Americans are calling it segregated and racist. Now Singen has found herself talking in terms of “us” and “them,” “we” and “they.”
“I didn’t have any problems with anybody or any color, and all of a sudden it feels like we are being held responsible for something that’s not our fault,” Singen, 70, said as she left Faraci Pizza, a 46-year-old Ferguson business that has become a focal point of racial tension. “I don’t get it.”

Just because you don’t have any problem with them doesn’t mean that they don’t have any problem with you…. How fortunate it is that no one but white people living in Republican states who fail to parrot the latest SJW dogma can be racist!

The State is losing

William Lind presciently anticipated which side would have the advantage back in 2006:

Among the critics and reinterpreters of Fourth Generation war, the bad is most powerfully represented by Thomas Barnett’s two books The Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action. Barnett divides the world into two parts, the Functioning Core and the Non-Integrating Gap. This is parallel to what I call centers of order and centers or sources of disorder, and I agree that this will be the fundamental fault line of the 21st Century. Barnett’s error is that he assumes the Functioning Core will be the stronger party, able to restore order in places where it has broken down. In fact, the forces of disorder will be stronger, because they are driven by a factor Barnett dismisses, the spreading crisis of legitimacy of the state. By ignoring Martin van Creveld’s work on the rise and decline of the state, Barnett’s books end up anchoring their foundations on sand.

The implications go far beyond the obvious regions of the Middle East and Ukraine. What we’re seeing in Spain, in Belgium, and in Scotland are the early phases of crises of the State which will likely result, eventually, in either a) a different, more decentralized order or b) disorder.
And the increasingly rapid growth of diversity in the USA is a distinct sign of incipient crisis of State legitimacy and eventual disorder.

Inequality and Piketty

Yesterday I was asked about Piketty’s argument that free trade reduces income equality. This requires an answer on several levels.

First, income inequality matters. The Keynesians claim that it doesn’t matter if Peter owes Paul or Paul owes Peter. This is observably false, just as it matters if there is a middle class that is economically active versus an economically dominant aristocracy that is primarily interested in conspicuous consumption. This isn’t some sort of new Levellism, merely a logical observation of fact.

Second, this is a literally Marxist perspective. It may surprise some to know that free trade is a Marxist position. Look it up. Free trade is not anticommunist, it is one aspect of communism.

Third, like most Marxist principles, this is wrong. Opening up an economy to additional outside players, most of whom have proved to be the apex predators in their native economies, means that the average individual’s income is going to go down because the outside player is not going to enter the market if it cannot extract sufficient resources to justify their capital expenses in penetrating it.

Now, I haven’t read Piketty and I see no reason to do so in the future. This is because he is attempting to sell a concept that is neither new nor true.

The truth about free trade

Free trade advocates are very often dishonest and attempt to claim that while they support the free movement of capital and goods, they do not support the free movement of people. But this is nonsense, because the free movement of people is intrinsically necessary for free trade in both labor and services. Furthermore, observe that the European Union’s “Four Freedoms” are explicit on this point:

One of the “Four Freedoms” of the Single Market is free movement of persons – along with free movement of capital, goods and services. Having a Single Market means having free movement of products (goods and services) and factors of production (capital and labour). Saying the UK wants to restrict free movement of persons but stay in the Single Market makes precisely as much/little sense (and for precisely the same reasons) as would saying “The UK wants to impose tariffs on imports from Germany and France but remain in the Single Market” or “The UK wants to impose capital controls on investment into Italy but remain in the Single Market”. Restricting free movement would, in substance, be withdrawing from the Single Market and hence in substance withdrawing from the EU. The substantive question is unambiguous. The only thing left to consider is the semantic question – whether withdrawing from free movement would be called “withdrawing from the EU” or not. Since the EU is the zone of EU citizenship and EU citizenship means free movement, the answer must be “Yes – the UK would not be in the EU”, though we might perhaps still be in some other form of “Europe”.

The second reason it is not mere word games is that many schemes for “withdrawing from the European Union” involve continuing to participate in some other form of “Europe” – e.g. the “Norway option” of continuing to be in the European Economic Area. “Out” hasn’t normally meant “no Europe”, merely “exiting the European Union”. But exiting the European Union is precisely what any form of restriction on the free movement of persons entails, by definition.

Past generations can be forgiven for not grasping that free trade meant the end of national sovereignty and the end of the very concept of “the nation”. They did not understand how inexpensive and easy travel would eventually become. But now we know better. And this is the real reason that “nationalism” has been attacked as  an intrinsic and dangerous evil; it is the strong point around which resistance to the universal pillaging of the global elite’s attempt to construct its vision of Eine Welt, Eine Art, Eine Ordnung.

Castalia audiobooks

I was very disappointed with my experience selling audiobooks through Audible. Not only did they control the prices and set them too high for a one hour forty-five minute audiobook, but whatever compression algorithm they used on the files caused the audio quality to seriously deteriorate. That was particularly annoying because I could hear what it was supposed to sound like on the original.

In any event, since we recovered the rights from Marcher Lord and we didn’t use ACX to produce the audio recordings, we are now able to make the audiobook for A MAGIC BROKEN available from the Castalia House store. We are also introducing a new policy, as the ebook is included with a purchase of the audiobook. We’ve also reduced the price and have improved the audio quality of the retail MP3 by using a variable bit rate to compress the file.

We are very interested in producing more ebooks, especially now that we’ve got more books from more authors to consider. And while we are quite happy with Nick Afka Thomas as the Official Voice of Selenoth, we are on the lookout for narrators to read stand-alone books such as AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, CITY BEYOND TIME, as well as the QUANTUM MORTIS and THE STARS CAME BACK science fiction series. If you’re interested, please send us a three-minute sample MP3 of you reading a passage from the relevant book with NARRATOR in the subject.

Advantage: good guys

One of the big advantages of concealed carry is that the bad guys have absolutely no reason who is ready and able to gun them down from behind:

Two men were fatally shot by a customer after they attempted to rob a north Harris County bar early Saturday — the latest in a fury of shootings in Houston this week. Jenny O’Donnell, owner of EJ’s Place, said four armed men came to her bar in the 16400 block of Kuykendall at Colwell, around 2:30 a.m.

O’Donnell, who was not there at the time of the incident, said a head bartender and waitress were closing up for the night when two men walked into the bar and demanded everyone get down on the floor. Two other men “lingered at the bar door,” she said.

That’s when a customer at the bar pulled his own gun and started shooting at the men, she said. The attempted robbers fired at least three rounds inside the bar, said O’Donnell.

“That man was a hero,” said O’Donnell. “We could have had some bodies.”

The men then turned around and ran out the door, O’Donnell said. One of the men died right outside the front door, while the other man died at the end of the bar’s parking lot, she said.

It’s interesting to observe that four robbers were involved and that still wasn’t enough to guarantee a safe and successful robbery.  The more that people are armed, the more dangerous and difficult it becomes for criminals to accomplish anything from basic street muggings to full-fledged home invasions.

Of course, it will also tend to highlight the relative inability of the police to do the same. Which isn’t actually a criticism of the police, it’s merely reflective of the obvious fact that the police simply cannot be everywhere at once, whereas privately armed individuals can be.

As Instapundit says, “a pack, not a herd”.

The college experience isn’t worth it

Not if you’re going to be paying for it for the rest of your life:

Stats from the Department of Education show outstanding student loans total more than $1 trillion. A report from The Institute for College Access in late 2013 revealed the average new graduate starts his or her life with $29,400 in student loan debt. College as we know it is clearly unaffordable.

So my question is: Why do people keep embarking on the “traditional college experience” when they know it’s going to put them tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars in debt?

And while some people say these 18-year-old kids don’t know what they’re getting themselves into, let’s not pretend we don’t know better. I distinctly remember asking my friend how he would pay off the roughly $70,000 debt he would incur to obtain a major in Ancient Greek and Latin at a liberal arts college in the Midwest. His answer? A simple shrug and flippant “It’s not something I have to worry about right now — hopefully they’ll be forgiven by the government.” Now that he’s still waiting tables four years after graduation, I’d say it’s well past time to start worrying.

I can’t pretend I completely understand how these people feel after the fun is over and the repayments begin, but I can say that I really don’t feel bad for them.

Why not? Because I worked hard to avoid taking out loans. My wonderful parents and grandmother helped me pay for my education, but in the end, it was a few decisions I made that saved me the burden of borrowing money I would never have been able to pay back. Unlike the majority of my friends who went to schools less than an hour from their parents’ homes and chose to live on campus rather than commute, my college roommates were named Mom and Dad. I chose state schools that were half, sometimes one-quarter, of the cost of the schools my friends were attending and worked a part-time on-campus scholarship job in addition to full-time hours at my retail job.

In fairness, it should be pointed out that there is an entire predatory industry, aided and abetted by the federal government, the public school system, and far too many parents, encouraging graduating seniors to make stupid and short-sighted decisions.  This doesn’t excuse the terrible decisions they are making, but it does help explain them.

I’m a little curious about what I can only presume is a new editor at TIME. They’ve been running some surprisingly good columns of late.