Category: Uncategorized

The EU prepares for a winter cold war

The EU strategy is obvious: stock up enough natural gas to try to outlast the need Russia’s gas exporters have for European cash. Zerohedge points out three possible problems with that strategy:

1) What if the weather is considerably colder than normal this winter? (i.e. they need more supply)

2) Russia has already committed to supporting the sanctioned firms.

3) German industrials will need energy in the spring.

This also ignores one fundamental flaw in the concept. If the EU is stocking up on its gas supplies, then it is already paying the Russian firms for the gas they would have otherwise expected to buy during the winter. Now they’re buying it early, which means this tactic won’t put any more financial pressure on the Russian firms than it would have if they took delivery later, and accordingly, paid later as well.

Perhaps they’re expecting that the Russians will take all their newly received cash and put it in the NYSE, which will then crash violently, thereby depriving them of it. A stroke of pure genius!

Immigration and unemployment

Think this just might be one reason why there are so many people unemployed and underemployed these days?

The number of foreign-born individuals holding jobs in the United States hit a recorded high of 24,639,000 in August, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS has been tracking the number of foreign-born workers annually since 2005 and monthly since 2007. The BLS does not distinguish between foreign-born individuals who are in the United States legally and those who are here illegally.

Meanwhile, there are 9.6 million unemployed Americans, also according to the BLS. This doesn’t count all the people who have stopped looking for work. Now, while it is true that there is probably not a perfect match between the skills employers are seeking and the skills possessed by the nearly 10 million unemployed Americans, but it should be obvious that with 2.6 employed foreign-born workers for every unemployed American, mass immigration has a) significantly reduced American wages, and b) prevented the U.S. economy from reaching full employment.

The economy is not a zero-sum game. But it is also not a game where mathematics is entirely irrelevant.

Economists and politicians have blithely assured the various publics that immigration is good for national economies for decades. The problem with this assumption is that it is an observable fact that despite experiencing the greatest mass immigration in Western history, the Western economies have been in the doldrums for 15 years.

Books worth reading

A new review of QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED:

James Jesus Angleton famous described the eternal battle between
espionage and counterintelligence as “a wilderness of mirrors.” I
thought of that phrase while reading A Mind Programmed, the latest installation in the Quantum Mortis
series of science fiction stories. Few people or things are what they
seem in this story, and even when you see what they really are, you
still have questions….

I’m new to science fiction, but I enjoyed A Mind Programmed. Though a bit dialogue heavy and slow in the middle, the book spun a good yarn and kept my interest throughout. 

And there are several Amazon reviews of John C. Wright’s ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM worth reading, such as this one by Kyle Robinson:

Given my fondness of fantasy literature, it might surprise some acquaintances to learn that I never read much fantasy when I was a child. I never read Narnia, Redwall, Harry Potter, or any of the other books in the genre. (I only read CS Lewis’s Narnia books earlier this year, in fact.) This places me outside of Wright’s target audience, perhaps, and gives me something of an outsider’s perspective on his story One Bright Star To Guide Them.

Wright has consistently delivered thought-provoking and compelling stories. Awake In The Night Land was a truly spectacular accomplishment and even if The Golden Age trilogy (which is essentially progressive rock in literary form) had a steep learning curve, the sheer imagination behind the series more than earned my continued respect for Wright. City Beyond Time – though book-ended by stories I felt were less compelling than the excellent tales in between – did not disappoint either. But after reading the first Everness book, I wondered if One Bright Star would end up retreading the same kind of story Wright told in that duology. And despite the appealing premise I was concerned that my lack of context would make this story more difficult to enjoy, despite the intriguing premise

The answer is a resounding No. One Bright Star is pure magic, radiating with the virtuosity of a writer whose literary muscle and knack for inscribing heartfelt emotion work in splendid unison. The world and its characters are made so compelling that you, the reader, should not be surprised if your lap is dribbled in drool upon finishing the story, as you salivate for more. One Bright Star is more immediately enjoyable and tightly orchestrated than the comparatively ponderous Everness, and Wright knits his story with a tangible melancholy that proves he is more than capable of making statements in fantasy that rival his science fiction output….

One Bright Star has one of the best endings I’ve enjoyed in recent
memory, and the fact that he draws from the reader such emotion toward
his characters and world in such a brief time is a testament to his
skill. By the end of the story, it’s easy to forget that you have spent
only a few dozen pages in Wright’s world, rather than hundreds. And
despite the fact that I never read Wright’s inspirations as a youth, I
was thoroughly walloped by the poignancy and emotional power of the
ending, which should be all the more stirring for those who have dwelt
within the worlds of Lewis, Tolkein, and Cooper.

You know a novella is really good when the chief complaint of the more critical reviews is that it isn’t longer:

I was sure a homage to Narnia written by John C. Wright would be right up my alley. However, I found myself disappointed by this novella. There’s a great story to be told here, and flashes of it shine through, but I think the novella is just too short to really flesh it out…. I’ve seen enough of Wright’s work to know that he’s capable of brilliantly expanding on the things that I felt were rushed, but for whatever reason he chose not to. 30 more pages would’ve made this book a masterpiece. 

The ironic thing about this criticism is that the novella is already an expanded version of the short story originally published in F&SF magazine. I have no doubt that Mr. Wright could easily expand the novella to a full novel, and indeed, a full trilogy covering both the childhood events and subsequent events. And perhaps he will one day do so, but the fact is that he really said everything that needed to be said in the novella.

And finally, there is this review of QUANTUM MORTIS: A MAN DISRUPTED:

Very good sci-fi noir. There have not been many good detective sci-fi noir novels. Effinger did some good near future books, but that was about it.

The setting here is a military police detective who, due to his world’s laws on embassies, is a member of a section assigned to police crimes involving embassies and governments in exile. Personal AIs, flying cars and power suits, body enhancements, police robots. However, the world has crowded mega towers, and a dark side that is well explored. Very well written, tight scenes. Enjoyable.

“Me very bad raciss too, can haz $2 billion?”

This mea culpa from an admittedly racist NBA team owner sounds more than a little financially motivated to me:

For the second time this year, the owner of a professional basketball team will sell his controlling interest of a franchise after his racially insensitive views were made public.

Bruce Levenson, who has led the ownership group of the Atlanta Hawks since 2004, informed N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver on Saturday that he intended to sell the team, effectively cutting short a league investigation into an email that Mr. Levenson sent two years ago to fellow Hawks executives detailing his thoughts on how the team could attract more white fans.

On Sunday, when the issue came to light, the Hawks released the text of the August 2012 email, in which Mr. Levenson speculated that the team’s black fans had “scared away the whites” and that there were “not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base.”

Some have conjectured that this is the result of Donald Sterling’s vengeful investigations, which certainly could be the case. But when you read the actual email itself, it sounds to me as if Levenson would simply like to extricate himself from an underperforming business in a manner that will not reduce the value of the business.

when digging into why our season ticket base is so small, i was told it is because we can’t get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs and they are the primary demo for season tickets around the league. when i pushed further, folks generally shrugged their shoulders. then i start looking around our arena during games and notice the following:

— it’s 70 pct black

— the cheerleaders are black

— the music is hip hop

— at the bars it’s 90 pct black

— there are few fathers and sons at the games

— we are doing after game concerts to attract more fans and the concerts are either hip hop or gospel.

Then i start looking around at other arenas. It is completely different. Even DC with its affluent black community never has more than 15 pct black audience.

Before we bought the hawks and for those couple years immediately after in an effort to make the arena look full (at the nba’s urging) thousands and thousands of tickets were being giving away, predominantly in the black community, adding to the overwhelming black audience.

My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant season ticket base. 

Levenson’s email demonstrates, yet again, that what the SJWs and SWPLs decry as racism is nothing more than “paying attention to readily observable reality”. I think my favorite part is the way Levenson is attempting to decry racism while simultaneously copping to racial insensitivity. It’s such a bizarre position that I think a financial motivation is the only reasonable explanation.

A rhetorical case for segregation

Obviously, the counter-argument is that anyone who doesn’t want their young son to be attacked and beaten into unconsciousness by a horde of vibrant youth while working is just a terrible, terrible raciss and bad person:

Kroger customers are afraid and outraged by a recent brutal beating that took place. Particularly, because it was unprovoked and could have happened to anyone.

WMC Action News 5 pulled up the video on a cell phone and went to the spot where the assaults happened. As you might imagine, shoppers who watched the video were outraged.

Some couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

“That’s a shame there is no excuse for any of that,” said James Murf.

The grocery store is practically brand new, built just last year. How two store employees and a customer could get beat up there has many baffled.

“I don’t know what the world is coming to when people just attack some random person,” said Barbara Michael.

A witness says he was standing there watching the fight as it happened. He declined to go on camera but told WMC he thought the hitting and kicking started after a Kroger employee exchanged words with a young man in the parking lot, over a shopping basket.

Translation: the employee was trying to do his job and the vibrant youth violently objected. In a free society, Kroger would simply announce that it will no longer permit any vibrants under the age of forty to enter its premises for insurance reasons. But we do not live in a free society, which is why the American people are eventually going to find themselves in a race war of epic proportions that will last until the historical state of ethnic homogenuity prevails. A five percent minority population appears to be the maximum limit of mutually beneficial inter-ethnic relations; it can be less, of course, depending upon the behavior of the minority.

Nobody in his right mind wants a race war. Or any sort of civil war. Wars are always unpredictable. But no one who is cognizant of history will deny that partition wars are how multiethnic empires usually come to an end. Reading WWI histories very much drives home certain similarities between the collapsing, decadent Austro-Hungarian empire and the still-powerful, but creaky Pax Americana; the USA has not yet lost its military dominance but the various cracks in its power are readily visible. And the problem is that the only reliable way to avoid race wars is not idiotic sloganeering and inter-racial propaganda, but segregated borders.

Jared Diamond and his theories of geographic determinism notwithstanding, those historical states did not come about by accident, any more than Zimbabwe now just happens to be almost entirely black or Iraq now just happens to be almost entirely free of Jews and Christians. It would be hard to identify a time in human history when some form of ethnic or religious cleansing was not taking place.

The evil myth of racial equality in America could only survive so long as vibrants were a mostly segregated minority, whose predilections and general dyscivicism were hidden from the white college students who only ever came across the vibrant best and brightest. The Civil Rights movement, which some conservatives still foolishly lionize, was a disaster for the USA; not as historically cataclysmic as the Immigration Act of 1965 or the combination of no-fault divorce and legal abortion, but a disaster nonetheless.

England is beginning to come to terms with the fact that Enoch Powell was right. I expect that America will eventually come to terms with the fact that Bull Connor and George Wallace were right as well. But the segregationists made one serious mistake. “Segregation now, segregation
tomorrow, segregation forever” is just a rhetoric. The more convincing argument, and the historical reality, is this: “Segregation now or elimination tomorrow.”

And before all the white boy liberals are tempted to play the Raciss Card, just remember, kemosabe, the Red Card trumps it. And my tribe knows all about the vital necessity of segregation for survival, or as we call it, the reservation.

Holding the line

One of the Honey Badgers, Hannah Wallen, explains why the SJW hate is so ferocious for the gamers in Gamergate:

The only people who are equipped to fight off that rushing tide of manipulation and control are those for whom potential social rejection doesn’t constitute a threat.

That, gamers, is why gamergate is not about any one of the damseling drama queens receiving the coverage in gaming media that is now spilling over into other news sources. It not about the media themselves, either, or the companies supporting the industry.

It’s about us.

We’re not under attack because we owe anyone anything we have refused to give, or because we’ve done anything we shouldn’t have done. We’re under attack because we’re one of the last shields that human individuality in western society has.

It’s absolutely vital that gamers continue to reject the shaming and demands being launched at us by elitist social engineers in journalism. We’re the line they can’t be allowed to cross, the last bastion of intellectual freedom. Out of everyone, we have the one factor that can stop them from owning the social landscape of the western world. Out of everyone, we have the power of immunity to their weapon of choice. We have the ability to turn that very same weapon around and use it against them by not only refusing to adopt their narrative, but making our rejection of it hurt them financially.

This is how we’re going to hold the line and begin pushing back. It’s going to be ridiculously ugly. The beast that is social justice elitism is not going to go peacefully, nor is it going to change its tactics. We’re going to see that  monstrous, flailing attempt to shame us into compliance continue. We’re going to see the accusations and whining, damseling and demonization all accelerate as the elites try to smash the resistance without understanding why it exists. And then hopefully we’ll see like-minded individuals joining the ranks of resistance as they realize they don’t have to be adopt the victim narrative to be part of a community. If we can achieve just that one thing by standing our ground and defending our territory, we can push that bullying force out, take our community back, and get back to gaming in peace.

It’s not a bad piece. Only the geeks of Gamerdom are not as alone as they think they are. Those who have followed the SFWA saga of the last two years will recognize the pattern that is at work there, that is at work in places as diverse as NBA team ownership and the executive offices of the tech industry. The SJW jihadists are attempting to drive out every heretic who dares to violate their equalitarian dogma anywhere one can be found.

But it is not only low-status rejects and outcasts who are impervious to their social pressure. And those of us who are neither rejects nor outcasts, but lone wolves by preference and temperament have the ability to build rival structures, rival institutions, and rival organizations that have the distinct advantage of operating in accordance with science, history, and objective reality rather than dogmatic fantasy.

Every time we refuse to back down, every time we refuse to accept their dogma as truth, we win. We reduce the amount of social pressure they are able to bring to bear. They know that. And it makes them furious. One need only read the foam-flecked rantings of their more outspoken members about me or about other members of the open resistance to see that. What makes them so angry about our very public resistance to their dogma is that their social pressure becomes less effective when it is seen to be resistible. That is why it is so important to  resist openly rather than to do so in a private and covert manner.

Because regardless of what you think in the privacy of your own mind, the public acquiescence of your silence causes others to believe that you are in accordance with the dogma and thereby adds to the social pressure placed upon others.

Sarah Hoyt talks about despair and how it is not only debilitating, but a sin. And perhaps some feel an amount of despair when they finally see how the cards are stacked against them simply for committing the crime of believing what their own eyes can see. But I see despair as being primarily a combination of ignorance with a failure of imagination. Things will not always be this way because the world is not, and has never been, a static place.

Maybe they will get worse. Maybe they will get better. But they won’t get any better while one sits and laments one’s losses and disappointments. One can ALWAYS accomplish SOMETHING positive, even if it is no more than refusing to be moved by lies, blandishments, and social pressure. Learn to take pride and pleasure in the small victories and you will find yourself considerably less inclined to worry overmuch about the disappointments and defeats.

Things I’ve noticed while reading military history

  1. Civilian leadership usually appoints the wrong commanders.
  2. The main thing lacking in military leaders, from the highest level to the lowest, is a willingness to accept the risk of defeat. Nothing assures failure like indecisiveness.
  3. Advances in communications technology increases the amount of civilian interference into war operations.
  4. Civilian leadership seldom has a clear objective in mind.
  5. Military commanders regard “the book” as an intrinsic excuse and therefore have a tendency to cling to it.
  6. A historian’s take on a given war is strongly influenced by his nationalist sympathies.
  7. The temptation to interfere with a strategic plan once it is put into action appears to be almost overwhelming.

My favorite quote from Max Hastings history of World War I thus far: Falkenhayn noted laconically on taking over command:  “Schlieffen’s notes are at an end and therewith also Moltke’s wits.”

It’s really remarkable to observe how overwhelmed, inept, and generally detached from reality the generals on both sides were. Between the commander of the British Expeditionary Force constantly attempting to retreat and the high commander of the German forces not bothering to even give orders to his generals for literally days at a time, it’s just astonishing.  And they were the relatively competent ones in comparison with the Austrian and Russian commanders.

It’s somewhat sobering to read the historical blunders in light of the lunatic decisions presently being made by the US and European military leaders.

Your album covers totally lied

And so did your porn. It turns out lesbians aren’t hot. Not even a little bit. They’re just fat.

The US government has spent nearly $3 million on a study to explore lesbian obesity. According to the Department of Health and Human Services 69 per cent of American adults over the age of 20 are classified as overweight or obese and yet 75 per cent of America’s lesbian population falls into this category compared to half of the female population.

It’s hilarious to see the shambling lesbian land whales react to the obvious conclusion:

“Lets be absolutely clear. Lesbians are not gay because they can’t get a man.
All of the lesbians I know, and I know quite a few, have had to fight off
the attentions of men frequently. Studies like this only serve to give
ammunition to this type of prejudice.”

Sure, Pete Rose, whatever you say.

A get-out-the-vote tactic

Having repeatedly tried to support the YES vote for Scottish independence by claiming it was 22 points down in the polls, the UK media tries to boost the NO turnout by suddenly reporting that the YES side is ahead by two points:

Scotland WILL become independent, shock new poll claims as it shows 51% now back Yes campaign with just 11 days until vote

  • Fifty-one per cent of voters to choose independence on September 18 
  • Shock poll puts Yes campaign in the lead for the first time
  • Better Together safely holds 49 per cent of the vote
  • Gap between sides narrows to just two points with less than a fortnight before historic referendum 

It’s always interesting to see the way in which the polls move before a big vote of this sort. They always seem to move in the same pattern whenever the media clearly favors one side over another. First a huge lead for the side it is supporting, gradually declining over time, and when the media gets worried it is actually going to lose, a shock poll suddenly appears showing the side it opposes ahead, but only by a little.

It seems to me that the more the English politicians and celebrities huff and puff, the more the Scots appear to favor independence.