Category: Uncategorized

Jack the Ripper was an immigrant Jew

It’s rather like finding out Big Ben was made in Hong Kong. But apparently, immigration has been lethal in Britain for longer than we knew:

The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal the true identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer responsible for  at least five grisly murders in Whitechapel in East London during the autumn of 1888.

DNA evidence has now  shown beyond reasonable doubt which one of six key suspects commonly cited in connection with the Ripper’s reign of terror was the actual killer – and we reveal his identity.

A shawl found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s victims, has been analysed and found to contain DNA from her blood as well as DNA from the killer.

The landmark discovery was made after businessman Russell Edwards, 48, bought the shawl at auction and enlisted the help of Dr Jari Louhelainen, a world-renowned expert in analysing genetic evidence from historical crime scenes.

Using cutting-edge techniques, Dr Louhelainen was able to extract 126-year-old DNA from the material and compare it to DNA from descendants of Eddowes and the suspect, with both proving a perfect match.

The revelation puts an end to the fevered speculation over the Ripper’s identity which has lasted since his murderous rampage in the most impoverished and dangerous streets of London.

It’s quite a fascinating story. And yes, the fact that the killer was an immigrant was integral to his eventual unmasking. I wonder if the English will be disappointed to learn that they cannot take credit for London’s most famous murderer. I have to confess, I always favored the Sir William Withey Gull theory. This is the face of Jack the Ripper, who, interestingly enough, was always one of the prime suspects and had been named by Chief Inspector Donald Swanson in his notes.

A non-starter

A good idea doomed to failure by the rapacious US tax bureaucracy:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is slated to introduce legislation next week
that would revoke the U.S. citizenship of anyone fighting or providing
support to terrorist groups working to attack the United States. Cruz said he is filing the Expatriate Terrorist Act in reaction to
the threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It would
provide another level of protection to prevent foreign fighters from
re-entering the United States, he said.

Prediction: once the IRS realizes that this legislation would provide an cost-efficient means for expatriates to get rid of their US citizenship, it will become a non-starter. In fact, with the recent 400 percent increase in administrative fees, (it now costs about $2,500 to drop your citizenship even though it’s about a two-minute process) it would probably cost less to do it by simply donating to ISIS.

The Unionists are getting scared

I’m starting to think that the Scottish people might actually have the courage to choose independence:

David Cameron today warned that Scotland would be more at risk from terrorism if it votes for independence. The Prime Minister said the United Kingdom had the best security and intelligence services in the world to keep people safe. He said the safety of staying together in a ‘very dangerous and insecure world’ was one of the ‘strongest arguments’ against separation.

Seriously, he’s going to pull out the Terrorism Card now? Obviously the Pound Card, the NHS Card, and the Darling Card failed. Smacks of desperation, doesn’t it. If I were a Scot, I would vote for independence simply out of respect for the great Scots throughout history who died defending it. And I wonder if UKIP’s Farage might be engaging in a bit of strategic black knighting:

Speculation is growing that a poll this weekend will show a significant Yes lead for the first time at a crucial time in the campaign.

Last night, Murdo Fraser, a Tory member of the Scottish Parliament, said: ‘I think it would be best if Nigel Farage stayed as far away from Scotland as possible. The arguments for staying in the UK are strong. The majority of Scots are on our side and we don’t need a distraction at this point.’

But Ukip’s Scottish chairman, Arthur Thackeray, dismissed calls for Mr Farage to stay away as ‘absolute, complete and utter nonsense’. He said: ‘We are a mainstream party Nigel as our leader is coming up in support of a No vote.’

Who will benefit more from the excise of the heavy left-leaning vote from Westminster than UKIP? Going to Scotland and infuriating the Scots with an obnoxious, ostensibly pro-Union display would be a brilliant move by Farage.

Education is not the answer

A study shows that the push to provide more people with college educations is counterproductive and was fundamentally misguided:

Almost half of all recent college graduates are working at jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to a study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

While it might have been rare to see college graduates in these low-quality jobs a few years ago, they’re increasingly the norm these days. That same New York Fed study found that more and more recent college graduates are taking low-wage jobs and working part-time while fewer and fewer of them are working full-time at high-quality jobs.

Wharton School professor Peter Capelli tried to figure out whether the problem in the labor market is because the jobs don’t require the skills that candidates are offering or because workers don’t have the proper skills that employers are seeking.

Here’s what he found. The main problem with the U.S. job market isn’t a gap in basic skills or a shortage of employees with particular skills, but a mismatch between the supply and the demand for certain skills. There’s a greater supply of college graduates than a demand for college graduates in the labor market.

This mismatch, according to Capelli, exists because most jobs in today’s economy don’t require a college degree.

“Indeed, a reasonable conclusion is that over-education remains the persistent and even growing situation of the U.S. labor force with respect to skills,” Capelli said in his study.

The worst thing is that the expense of these unnecessary educations make it harder for women to do the one thing American society actually needs them to do, which is to get married and have children. Which, of course, may have been the real objective all along.

You don’t need to know the difference between first-wave feminism and third-wave feminism, or what Sun Tzu meant by “Heaven” to work at Starbucks. Education doesn’t create jobs, in fact, many new jobs are created by men who dropped out of the educational process in order to start new companies.

I’ll bet proportionately fewer jobs have been created by people with PhDs than by non-graduates who started college but never finished.

Vibrancy on video

Don’t think you’ll be left out of the fun, ladies. This is why you must carry. If both those victims had had compact .357s, there would be five fewer predators out there looking for kicks through beating up white people. Remember, vibrants never fight fair, so you always have to be prepared to deal with at least three of them at a time, and four is the safer assumption. Or, as in this case, five.

If you’re armed, it’s actually better if there is more than one attacker because it’s that much less likely that the pro-diversity crowd will try to concoct a case against you. Just don’t pull a Bernie Goetz and shoot anyone in the back or when they’re already down.

Even if you can’t carry a gun for some reason, a serrated three-inch blade on your keychain will be enough to address the first attacker. Get the blade out, keep your hand out of sight as the first attacker comes in, stay low, drive in with your left shoulder, rear hand in and up, and the attacker should be out of commission before he even knows you’re armed. Don’t try to warn them off, because when outnumbered you want surprise on your side. Vibrants tend to be cowardly, as you can see by the way they dart in and out when they attack, so they’re probably not going to stick around after the first guy goes down. But don’t pause and wait for them to run off, move in and take out the second one as soon as the first one is incapacitated.

The guy actually acquitted himself fairly well, but the key mistake he initially made was to try to pretend the predators weren’t there and hope they would just pass by. Never ignore groups of vibrants, especially not at night, and not when they are approaching from behind you. If you whirl around, aggressively meet their eyes and stand there in silence watching them, they will usually slink off in search of less dangerous prey. Remember, most blacks are even more frightened of whites than whites are scared of blacks because they have been raised on scary stories about white racism and oppression since they were small. Use the fear.

The very last thing they want to see is a cold smile that says: “Why, hello there, Mr. Vibrant. I have been waiting my entire life for someone to give me this excuse.”

Los revisores querían

If you speak Spanish and are interested in reviewing Una Estrella Brillante para Guiarlos by John C. Wright for Amazon, please shoot me an email with ESTRELLA in the subject. The translator, Emilio, explains why it made sense to use Mexican Spanish rather than theoretically more proper Spanish.

According to the royal academy of the Spanish language, the country
that speaks the most proper Spanish is Colombia. But large companies,
like Disney, use the Mexican translation for their movies or shows for
all Latin America, since it’s considered the most neutral by most Latin American countries. It’s easier to understand a translation to Mexican Spanish in Peru, Argentina, or the Dominican Republic than any of those
dialects elsewhere. So there’s an argument to be made, that if you want
it to be successful economically, it should have a Mexican translation.

Good enough for me. Emilio is also one of the guys who has expressed interest in setting up a new gaming review site, as is Caedryn, who posted the following comment yesterday:

If anyone is interested, I would really like to start a push for making and contributing to a blue gaming site. I have been putting around on making my own using blogger, but I run into a scope of just how much there is to cover in the industry for one person, and a realization of how relatively mediocre my writing ability is to carry a place on its own.

I personally have very limited experience on the blogging side of things, but I was a QA tester in college for a couple of companies and am working on a table top game independently as a hobby. So… very limited experience on that side as well past an obsessive desire to learn and dissect mechanics and writing.

I’d like a place for people who actually like games to be able to write about them without the need to feed into the industry and clickbait for revenue.

I’d personally want it to be a place for tabletop and video gaming or any other genres I may have missed that tie into such a framework. We could include gameplay/podcasts/whatever medium you’re into for providing commentary and reporting on news and events. I’d like to get a solid group of people together from the ilk to start talking about site design and structure and anyone initially interested in writing regardless of time dedication then branch out from there with requests for regular writers and so on.

If anyone is interested in writing at all or helping build the site, please send me an email at the account I’ve made for the project gammaphiedATgmail.com so I can get an email chain together to start discussion over this weekend.

This is a project that both I and Castalia House will definitely want to support. Castalia, of course, is inspired by the most famous game-related novel of all, Das Glasperlenspiel by Hermann Hesse. I don’t have time to head up the project, but would be more than pleased to help out, as I am willing contribute my old game review columns to serve as an archive of historical reviews. I’ve also been teaching a game development course at a technical institute, and I suspect some of the students might be very interested in getting involved.

In other news, one really has to respect the power of Instapundit. Last week, we put up a free novella. There were 848 downloads and it climbed to a respectable Amazon rank although I don’t recall what it was. Yesterday, Instapundit mentioned  that QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED was a free download. It’s presently #1 in military fiction, #4 in science fiction, and #52 on Amazon.

They made their bed

Leave them lie in it. Britain would be mad if they permit their “nationals” to return to Britain after joining ISIS:

British jihadis fighting in Syria want to come home after becoming disillusioned with the conflict, it emerged today. In the last three years, more than 500 radicalised Britons are believed to have headed out to the war-torn country, where Islamist groups are fighting President Bashar Assad’s forces. But some of those who signed up to fight have now contacted authorities in Britain saying they have had enough of the war-zone and want to return home, it was reported today.

A man representing a group of 30 militants reportedly contacted King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), telling them his group want to come back.

The men, who went to the region in the hope of toppling President Assad, are reportedly unhappy at having to fight against other rebel factions. According to The Times, the man told researchers: ‘We came to fight the regime and instead we are involved in gang warfare. It’s not what we came for but if we go back [to Britain] we will go to jail.’

The ICSR’s Professor Peter Neumann told newspaper: ‘The people we have been talking to… want to quit but feel trapped because all the Government is talking about is locking them up for 30 years.’

Forget locking them up. They ought to simply have their citizenships revoked, their passports cancelled, and left to fight their gang wars. Which is exactly what the USA and every other Western state should do to every member of ISIS, wherever they are.

Based on the comments that follow the article, there is barely a Briton who wants them back.

The end of Kotaku et al

Observers are unimpressed with the gaming journalists’ hatred for their nominal audience:

Slate readers are over, declining—a dead demographic.

Why on Earth would I start a column with this thesis? There is no faster way to alienate my audience—that is, the people who pay my bills. And yet, this is exactly what writers at not one but half a dozen online gaming publications did to their audiences last week, and it points to a significant shift in the business of gaming. Gamers are not over, but gaming journalism is.

Some background: Recently, there were some egregious incidents of harassment in the gaming community, as I covered in a previous piece. The harassment story quickly spiraled into a much larger fight, clumsily dubbed #GamerGate, between an angry, mostly anonymous mass of gamers and the gaming press. The fight blew up on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, gaming sites, 4chan, and elsewhere last week. With rhetorical shrapnel flying everywhere, one ironic low was achieved when popular and resolutely positive gamer Steven Williams, aka Boogie2988, found himself simultaneously maligned as a brainwashed feminist by self-declared men’s rights activists and fat-shamed by self-declared social justice advocates. Another low was when thoughtful freelance gaming writer Jenn Frank decided to leave the field altogether after being unfairly singled out for relentless criticism.

Trying to sort through GamerGate is like sinking into quicksand, but the general tenor of the discussion has been: A fair number of gamers hate the journalists who cover them, and the journalists hate them back.

If you’ll notice, I don’t pay any attention whatsoever to all the new gaming sites and I have absolutely no idea why anyone else ever did. It is entirely obvious that none of them know anything about the history of games, and many of them are observably not very interested in games at all.

Barometer and Bernie Madoff

The SF Weekly has an appropriate article entitled “Science Friction”:

If you’re looking for a barometer of the state of science fiction in the U.S., consider the career of John Scalzi….. Scalzi’s June
2011 to July 2013 tenure as SFWA president ran fairly smoothly — until
its final month. The decision to feature a buxom, scantily clad,
redheaded warrior on the cover of the SFWA Bulletin ignited a firestorm
of controversy.

“There was a strong generational divide on that issue,” Scalzi says.
“There were a lot of older authors who were like, ‘I don’t see the
problem with that. It’s a strong feminist symbol.’ And there were a lot
of younger authors who were like, ‘You’re kidding me. You don’t see the
problem here?'”

Scalzi was traveling on the last day of his 2013 book tour when the
controversy came to a head. “I was literally on the plane, watching it
all go up on Twitter,” he says. “I was coming into my last month as
president but I was like, ‘Fuck, I’ve got to deal with this.'”

Having approved the cover without thinking through all of its
implications, Scalzi apologized to the membership for his “screw-up.”
SFWA put procedures in place that allowed the organization to weather
that storm and others, including the expulsion of Theodore Beale, aka
Vox Day, who used a promotional SFWA Twitter feed to link to
inflammatory remarks on his blog (where he called another author
“half-savage” and an editor a “fat frog”). Day was subsequently removed
from SFWA a month after Scalzi’s tenure.

In his personal online feud with Day, Scalzi and his supporters also
ended up raising funds for charities benefiting women, gays, and
minorities. By pledging $5 every time Day used Scalzi’s name or used a
derogatory nickname for anyone else in a post, the group raised $50,000
in pledges. (Scalzi capped his contribution at $1,000, and his readers
did the rest.)

As usual, the media finds me to be one of the most interesting things about Scalzi, although only Salon has ever troubled to get my side to the story. I do find some modest amusement in the fact that even when McRapey is out pushing his new novel, the media is more interested in his passive-aggressive crusade against me than in his book. They’d probably be even more interested if they knew that he and Patrick Nielsen Hayden threatened to quit SFWA if I was not “removed”, or read his bizarre victory rant on Twitter after “Opera Vita Aeterna” failed to win Best Novelette. Or if they had any idea what a complete fraud he has always been; one observes that he no longer talks up his “online blog” in interviews these days.

Meanwhile, regarding the state of science fiction: “The biggest declines were in biography/autobiography (down 26%, partially because of the huge success of Steve Jobs in 2011), science fiction (down 21%), and business (down 18%).”
– Publisher’s Weekly, 11 January 2013

As for him being a barometer, one observes Scalzi is still trying to escape the science fiction and fantasy market: “With writing and selling Lock In, we are looking to a larger
market,” Scalzi said. “Not disrespecting the science fiction and fantasy
market, obviously, but to open it up and bring in new readers.”

It is downright perverse for one of the biggest cheerleaders of the two-decade Pink SF diversity movement that has turned off more people to SF/F than anything else in its history to talk about bringing in new readers. Scalzi isn’t merely the Bernie Madoff of science fiction, he is also one of its leading californicators. Having first conned his way into it, he shat all over it in the company of his fellow Social Justice Warriors and is now attempting to move on to greener pastures as yet unsullied by his particular one-trick pony approach to literature.

But that’s precisely why we will win the genre back in the end. We’re here because we want to be here, because we actually love genuine science fiction and classic fantasy, not because we think it’s the best place to pursue social justice or con a few people out of a few dollars. We’ll win because the gatekeepers who took over the publishers and tried to force Pink SF on everyone are losing their grip. We’ll win because women like Tiger are translating QUANTUM MORTIS into Chinese, and because men like Emilio are translating ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM into Spanish. (Both of them sent me their finished translations yesterday; while the Spanish one is already good to go, figuring out how to make a Chinese ebook will take me a little while.)

So, I hope McRapey is entirely successful in making his leap into the soulless void of Hollywood. He’s been a blight on science fiction ever since he first serialized his Robert Heinlein imitation on his “online column” with its “more than two million page views monthly”. The sooner he finds his true place writing snarky politically correct dialogue for television sitcoms, the better.

As for commissioning songs, one would be remiss if one failed to mention Everything is Falling Into Place (Groove Kittens mix) by Rapey McRaperson and the Pink Rabbit Posse. And since we’re talking about science fiction, I should probably mention that QUANTUM MORTIS: A Mind Programmed is free today and tomorrow on Amazon.

UPDATE: McRapey is getting annoyed that people keep pointing out that Larry Correia sells more than he does, even though his publisher keeps buying him a one-week spot on the NYT bestseller list each time he writes a book:

    Over on the right-wing SF/F frothosphere, it’s apparently become the fashion to assert a particular conservative writer sell me than me…—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    .. and apparently this is important for REASONS, and proof of liberal bias in the universe blah blah blah oh jesus why this again.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    Leaving aside whether this particular writer sells more than me or not: Honestly, who really gives a shit if he does?—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    If he does: Good for him! I hope he’s happy. It has ABSOLUTELY NO BEARING on how and whether I can sell my books, or he his.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    It seems some people need publishing to be some zero-sum game in which you can only succeed if someone else is failing, etc.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    In fact, that’s a profoundly way of looking at the publishing world. It’s not zero sum: My success doesn’t stop any other success.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    And other people’s success do not impede mine. There are enough readers for many authors to do well. Which is great!—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    I find the NEED to say one writer is more successful than another FOR REASONS to be an example of how some people never stop being 12.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    So, if you’re one of those people, stop being 12. If your favorite writer sells more than me, great! I sell enough. And that’s enough.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

    End of rant.—
    John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 04, 2014

Who gives a shit THAT he does, Johnny? Not “if he does”. Why, YOU most certainly do! That’s why you’re constantly trying to suck up to Larry Correia and John Ringo while repeatedly insulting other Baen authors who don’t sell quite as well.

Also, the publishing world is zero-sum. There are a limited number of readers, a finite amount of time in which a book hits its peak sales, and a reader who is reading a free copy of QUANTUM MORTIS A Mind Programmed or the excellent ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM is a reader who is not reading something else.

That is precisely why the mainstream publishers are so angry that Amazon permits authors to give away their books 20 days out of the year and why Amazon limits the giveaways to 20 days.

How not to destroy Christianity

China is going about it the wrong way:

In China the government is now taking on Christianity, treating some practitioners as potentially dangerous to the state. Christianity has been in China for centuries and currently is about five of the population and growing fast. In some provinces where Christians are prominent (lots of churches) and numerous the government is shutting down churches and arresting clergy and prominent Christians for the least infraction of the law. This effort is most visible on the North Korean border, where foreign Christians (some of them ethnic Koreans or Chinese) have been assisting North Koreans who have escaped from North Korea. Another hotspot is the southeastern city of Wenzhou, long known as a “Christian city” (because about 15 percent of the population is Christian) where local authorities are shutting down dozens of Christian churches.

Even before the communists took over in the late 1940s Chinese governments had long seen religion as a constant threat. What is especially alarming is any religion that attracts too many members and become more visible, especially as critics of the government. Some Christian sects are doing this and now comes the usual government response.

While Chinese are free to worship any way they want, the government picks religious leaders and imposes discipline. Thus the ongoing war against Falungong and Tibetan Buddhism. Both of these religions refuse to accept government control and are persecuted for that. This included sending thousands of practitioners to slave labor camps and often using some of those prisoners for organ donors. These victims never survived this process. But the persecution has not wiped out these two movements, and this, government officials know, sets a dangerous example for other Chinese. Throughout Chinese history governments have been overthrown by religious movements that harnessed and directed mass discontent.

It should be obvious that if the Communist Party was serious about destroying the Christian faith in China, instead of outlawing Christianity, it would provide Christians with easy sex and money and require them to watch at least eight hours of American television every day. It’s incessant temptation that weakens the Christian, not hatred, violence, and persecution.