Category: Uncategorized

It’s good to be back

I know that my time on the soccer field is growing shorter. I’m the second-oldest man on the veteran’s team, and the other guy is only a few months older. I think both of us have survived because we have the benefit of relatively fresh knees, I missed 10 years of playing after high school, plus three years more years after an old groin injury flared up, while he didn’t play for nearly 20 years before getting back into the sport.

The fall season started tonight, and it was my best first practice I’ve ever had. Knowing that we’d be getting some new guys who are 14 years younger, I figured I’d better get myself in prime shape if I wanted to hang onto my starting spot. So, I barely missed a workout this summer, added a leg day to the schedule, and made sure to run at least once a week on the treadmill. By last week, I was able to do a 40-minute run with a constant elevation that burned over a thousand calories and still have something left.

When I went to the field, I discovered that the coaches decided we’d have a scrimmage between the vets and the first team. We had more vets, and since my Dutch friend and I were already wearing blue, we were sent to play with the first team. And damn, they were GOOD on the ball. I actually got the first shot, which I put wide, and I managed to keep up with their tiki-taka on the rare occasions they passed it to me instead of pushing it forward, pulling it back, spinning around, and going between two vets. For the most part, I was a spectator, which was fine with me. I was just happy that my occasional passes hit the target.

But my real teammates have been doing this for a LONG time. They dealt with all the flashy ball skills by using their heavier weight to knock the kids around and taking advantage of the young guys typical failure to stay back on defense. They actually scored the first three goals, so I switched back to defense and that helped shut them down. I know how our guys play, I’m faster than most of them, and our rapid counterattacks eventually tired them out. After 90 minutes, they’d only scored twice more and we’d scored seven or eight.

At one point, I brought the ball up from the back and somehow managed to beat four guys in succession before passing off, but the best part was when I saw one young midfielder less than half my age bending over and holding his knees. I laughed at him as I jogged back into position; he looked at me in disbelief and shook his head. Now, don’t get me wrong, I can’t play seriously at their level; their intensity, quickness, and energy is considerably more than I can match. They are in constant motion whereas I have to play a position game and choose my bursts. But it’s rather nice to know that they can’t blow me off the field yet.

Would-be Salon writer visits Alpha Game

It started with a seemingly innocent series of five emails, which I distilled down to part of one:

Can you give me a quick, couple-paragraph summary of the overall AG philosophy? I think that a large part of it is that it’s about not being/appearing weak. What exactly is weakness? Is kindness weakness? Is gentleness weakness? Or is it more that reticence and insecurity in your decisions and beliefs are weaknesses?

I addressed it. Two days later, I addressed another one:

Basically, “how dare you not be interested in me when I was interested in you?” Even though I had made it very clear that I was not interested, he had assumed that I still was. He did the right thing, I guess. He didn’t give up when I turned him down. But it was pretty revolting, rather than attractive.

I reached some conclusions and promptly lost interest:

Anyhow, the point is that outside of sex, women aren’t very interested in men and their interests and men have even less interest in women and theirs. It is a simple and straightforward observation, there is nothing wrong with this perfectly normal state of affairs, and the better you understand it, the more easily you will get along with the opposite sex. 

But then the man about whom she was writing sent me an email. Which is when hilarity ensued.

I’m the guy from the story. For what it’s worth, I read through both the post and the extensive comments section. I was absolutely shocked to find this post, since Eliza never mentioned to me that she intended to make this story public…. seems like some of the people posting had some misconceptions about me and how I acted — and after reading Eliza’s piece, I can hardly blame them!

She reacted angrily by outing the gentleman by linking to his social media accounts and managed to out herself in the process. It turns out that the ever-so-curious Eliza is a writer named Eliza Hecht who was doing research for what one presumes will be another hit piece on the Androsphere.

The return of the Lizard Queen

Speaking of Mitt Romney, Pat Buchanan doesn’t think he has a chance against Hillary Clinton. Nor, he thinks, does anyone else:

Amid rumblings of another Mitt Romney run for the White House, author
and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan is advising
the GOP to avoid nominating the first two-time loser since Democratic
presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower in
1952 and again in 1956.

Buchanan made clear that despite Hillary’s recent decline in popularity, she remains the front-runner. “It’s very hard to see if Hillary runs who will beat her,” he
stressed. “I don’t see Elizabeth Warren beating her. I tell people that
if I were a 45-year-old Democratic senator, I would run, and I would
challenge Hillary on issues, so if I lost I would have gained the
opportunity to introduce myself to the American people and hope
lightening strikes.”

Mindful of Bill Clinton’s support of Hillary’s candidacy, he added,
“But I doubt any Democrat wants to take the risk of running against
Hillary, since it means going after the king, and failing to get the job
done might just have disastrous consequences.”

I’m out of the presidential prediction game. Since I don’t live there anymore, it has become clear over the years that my ability to read the electorate has declined. That being said, the one thing we do know is that there is usually at least one surprise challenger who pops up, especially in years where there is no incumbent candidate.

We’re still two years out, so there is plenty of time for someone to make a run. Remember, two years ago, Marco Rubio was still being mentioned as a serious candidate.

Sun Tzu did not approve this message

Although he is vastly unpopular with the pinkshirts due to a combination of his huge success as a SF writer combined with his lack of enthusiasm for homosexuals playing house, Orson Scott Card is no conventional conservative. His political positions are more than a little incoherent, especially those where he appeals to what he claims is Christian theology:

The Republican Party deserves to fail, has chosen to fail, and this death wish continues in full force. They could have elected Mitt Romney in 2012 and stopped the
national nightmare by installing in the White House the most competent
man to be a major party nominee since Dwight Eisenhower.

But the evangelical Christians stayed home in droves rather
than vote for an evil Mormon – thus remaining “pure” but refusing to
govern.

The irony is that these very “Christians,” so determined to be
pure, now have as their single most important test of purity the most
unChristian dogma in present-day politics: No Amnesty!

Card’s first mistake is failing to recognize that the Republican Party chose to fail in 2012 by nominating Mitt Romney. But evangelical Christians were not Romney’s problem. Card simply does not have his facts straight. Not only did evangelicals vote for Romney at a higher rate than Mormons did, 79 percent vs 78 percent, but according to Pew
Research they gave him more support than they gave either John McCain (65 percent) or George W. Bush (63
percent and 67 percent in 2000 and 2004).

If anything, Card should be blaming Hispanic Catholics, whose support dropped five points, from 26 percent to 21 percent, from 2008 to 2012.

There were, of course, other Republican groups who were less than keen on the Romney. Libertarians loathed him. Ron Paul’s supporters despised him as well as their treatment by the Republican machine. Competent or not, the man was nearly as foolish a choice as John McCain, and would be even stupider in 2016. What the Republican party leaders always describe as “electable” has reliably turned out to be the opposite.

Mormons may well be fine, upstanding individuals on average. They still belong to a statistically insignificant religious group that is looked on with some suspicion due to their unusual views concerning what is, and what is not, Christian. Among them, apparently, being the idea that amnesty for criminals is a Christian concept, when that actually goes well beyond heresy into the realm of pure fiction.

Card’s version of Christian theology is as incorrect as his grasp of the 2012 voting patterns. I recommend to him the example of Jesus speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well. There may be neither Greek nor Jew in Christ Jesus, but at no point does Jesus, or any of the apostles, ever suggest that Roman citizenship belongs to everyone or that the Samaritans should be supported by Jewish taxes.

And as for a Mormon scare-quoting evangelicals and referring to them as “Christians” on the basis of their failure to support an foreign invasion consisting of tens of millions of aliens, well, let’s just say I don’t think that is the wisest choice of theological ground for Mr. Card to fight that particular battle. The fact that evangelicals generally tolerate Mormons these days does not mean they are going to be terribly inclined to having the legitimacy of their Christianity questioned by one.

Especially when Mr. Card simply embarrasses himself with his observable lack of knowledge of the Bible.

These “Christians” would do well to read chapter 18 of the Gospel of
Matthew, where Jesus tells his exact opinion of those who demand “no
amnesty, ever!” for other people’s sins – while they expect to be
forgiven for their own much greater ones.

Card is, theologically speaking, a complete illiterate. Jesus says absolutely nothing about “those who demand no amnesty ever.” Quite to the contrary, he says: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.’ If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”

In other words, Christians are to treat their unrepentant sinful brothers like pagans. Presumably, they need not treat unrepentant criminal aliens any better. As for the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant, the three requirements are for the debtor to admit that the debt is owed, be willing to pay it, and beg for patience, none of which apply to invading foreigners.

My suspicion is that Card is sufficiently Biblically illiterate to have confused the reference to gouging out an eye in Matthew 18:9 with Matthew 7:5’s reference to planks and specks.

It never really was

A Jewish woman explains why she is leaving Sweden:

I just can’t live like this any longer. I can’t accept that life consists of long periods of fear and despair, interrupted by the short bursts of happiness I get when I come back to Israel. I can’t raise my kids to hide who they are, I can’t usher them into a society that teaches them they are the other and that being less of who they are is the key to survival.

I just can’t, not anymore.

I got back to Sweden yesterday and something has changed, the shift is so tangible. Within me, yes, but also in the world around me. I take down my Israeli flag that I so proudly hung from my balcony. I’m told it is no longer safe, and I have to make a choice between being open and keeping my children safe. The Palestinian flag hanging from my neighbor’s window is still visible across the courtyard. I notice the injustice, but the outrage is replaced with sadness and fatigue.

I called this my home for 33 years. Yet, I realize now that it isn’t, and it never really was.

She’s absolutely correct. Sweden wasn’t her home. It isn’t her home. If it was, she would have been flying a Swedish flag from her balcony, not an Israeli one. Just as Israel belongs to the Jews, Sweden belongs to the Swedes. And Sweden’s younger generation is not at all shy about proclaiming it.

I expect her Palestinian neighbor is also going to discover that Sweden isn’t his home in the near future.

An erroneous conclusion re crime

Ron Unz is a smart guy and he does a lot of good work. But I strongly suspect he made a fundamental error in his examination of race and crime rates:

This contentious history of racially-charged social analysis was certainly in the back of my mind when I began my quantitative research into Hispanic crime rates in late 2009. One traditional difficulty in producing such estimates had been the problematical nature of the data. Although the FBI Uniform Crime Reports readily show the annual totals of black and Asian criminal perpetrators, Hispanics are generally grouped together with whites and no separate figures are provided, thereby allowing all sorts of extreme speculation by those so inclined.

In order to distinguish reality from vivid imagination, a major section of my analysis focused on the data from America’s larger cities, exploring the correlations between their FBI-reported crime rates and their Census-reported ethnic proportions. If urban crime rates had little relation to the relative size of the local Hispanic population, this would indicate that Hispanics did not have unusually high rates of criminality. Furthermore, densely populated urban centers have almost always had far more crime than rural areas or suburbs, so restricting the analysis to cities would reduce the impact of that extraneous variable, which might otherwise artificially inflate the national crime statistics for a heavily urbanized population group such as Hispanics.

My expectations proved entirely correct, and the correlations between Hispanic percentages and local crime rates were usually quite close to the same figures for whites, strongly supporting my hypothesis that the two groups had fairly similar rates of urban criminality despite their huge differences in socio-economic status. But that same simple calculation yielded a remarkably strong correlation between black numbers and crime, fully confirming the implications of the FBI racial data on perpetrators.

He’s correct about blacks committing crime at much higher rates than whites. But I think I can show that his conclusion that Hispanics commit rates at about the same rate as whites is wrong. The reason is that the metric he chose to try to pull out the information that the FBI is hiding is suboptimal.

I reached a very different conclusion when looking at race and homicide by firearm in 2012.

We will assume, for the sake of argument, that Hispanic victims are synonymous with Hispanic killers. The BJS supports this assumption, reporting that from 1976 to 2005, 86% of white victims were killed by whites and 94% of black victims were killed by black.  A CDC report states: “Homicide rates in 2010 among non-Hispanic, African-American males 10-24 years of age (51.5 per 100,000) exceeded those of Hispanic males (13.5 per 100,000) and non-Hispanic, White males in the same age group (2.9 per 100,000).”

We’re not concerned with the black homicide rate since we already know that.  What interests us is how the remaining 4,116 gun homicides are divided between whites and Hispanics.  The distribution indicated by the CDC report shows that 3,388 were Hispanic and only 728 were white.  This may be a little skewed by the focus on young males, but nevertheless provides a very credible estimate of 6.8 per 100k population, which would put the US-Latin firearms homicide rate in between Nicaragua at 5.9 and Paraguay at 7.4.  It would also indicate that the US-White homicide rate is 0.32 per 100k population, a per capita rate very close to The Netherlands at 0.33 although still higher than France, Germany, or the UK.

Now, it is theoretically possible that while young Hispanics commit a disproportionate amount of firearms homicide, Hispanics of all ages commit other crimes at the same rate as whites. This strikes me as a very unlikely conclusion, especially in light of what we know anecdotally from police and media reports.  Obviously more work needs to be done before the matter can be considered settled, but I think that this is sufficient to call Mr. Unz’s conclusion into question.

A letter to Hachette’s CEO

Our friends at Amazon requested that those readers and writers who support them write an email to Hachette CEO Michael Pietsch. Amazon has been very good to me over the past few years, both an author and a customer, so I was happy to oblige.

Dear Mr. Pietsch,

As a Hugo-nominated author, a Pocket Books author, and an editor
for an independent publishing house in Finland, I would like to
encourage you to rethink your position regarding Amazon. I understand
that the rapid changes in the industry are affecting your company, often
in a negative manner. I also realize that your overhead and your
contracts tend to reflect standard industry practices that are no longer
in line with the new world of digital publishing.

The fact is, Mr. Pietsch, that the world is changing and Hachette has to
change with it. Ebook prices are coming down as per the technology curve.
When have you ever known a new technology to come out and gradually
become more expensive over time? I don’t wish to criticize you or your
organization for various attempts to keep the new world at bay, as the
important point is not that colluding with other mainstream publishers,
trying to protect higher book prices, or using authors as leverage is
wrong, or even bad PR, but that such actions are ultimately futile.

The ebook genie will never go back into the bottle. Therefore, the sooner you
restructure Hachette to reflect the new realities, which include coming
to a reasonable accomodation with Amazon, the more likely it is
that your organization will survive these changes.

With regards,

Vox Day

Hachette’s position isn’t merely economically illiterate, observably hypocritical, and morally wrong, it is untenable. At the moment, Hachette obviously needs Amazon more than Amazon needs Hachette. As for its supporters among the scribbling classes, I think Amazon would do well to teach the authors who are publicly opposed to them a Very Important Lesson by refusing to sell any of their books for six months.

After the initial screeches of outrage died down, I suspect they would all fall in line very quickly. One of the things I like about Amazon is that it is the sort of thing they might actually do; I don’t think they’d be afraid to demonstrate to those various loud-mouthed authors just how unimportant they truly are. It’s amazing how many writers not only excuse their mainstream publishers for actions that Amazon has not even committed, but fail to realize that selling books is only a small part of Amazon’s business these days.

Amazon isn’t perfect. What corporation is? But they have been the best thing for authors and the reading public since Mr. Gutenberg first assembled his printing press. And the fact that the dinosaur gatekeepers and their pet authors hate and fear it is a feature, not a bug.

One of the Mad Geniuses, Amanda, adds her two cents on the subject:

[A]ll Amazon did was take a page out of Hatchette’s book and ask its authors to take a stand. Oh the cries of foul that suddenly rose from the interwebs. Within
half a hour of reading the email, I was seeing accusations of Amazon
acting like a stalker in sending the email to the usual AHDers (Amazon
Hater Disorder sufferers) about how evil Amazon was to ask its authors
to contact poor, innocent Hatchette. There was even one author claiming
that Amazon is not and never will be a friend to authors. All of those
had me shaking my head and wondering if these folks had ever really read
their contracts with their traditional publisher — several of whom are
signed with Hatchette — as well as if they actually knew the meaning of
the terms “contract”, “negotiation” and “irony”.

What pushed me over the edge was a post by another author who
admitted to not having received or read the email but, based on what
they were seeing form their author friends, Amazon was once again
resorting to dirty pool and must be stopped because, duh, Amazon is
evil.

They really are proper little Manicheans, aren’t they.

93 percent more

Obviously Larry Correia is GREAT FOR SCIENCE FICTION:

Loncon 3 announces record participation in the 2014 Hugo Awards!

London, 7 August 2014 – Loncon 3, the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention being held at London ExCeL from 14-18 August, is proud to announce that it received 3,587 valid ballots for the 2014 Hugo Awards. 3,571 ballots were submitted online through the Loncon 3 website and 16 paper ballots were received. This total eclipses the previous record participation of 2,100 ballots (set by Renovation in 2011) by over 50%.

That’s 1,723 votes more than last year’s 1,848. There is a very good chance that whether he wins or loses, Larry Correia’s WARBOUND will get more votes than the 407/827 that last year’s winner did. It also indicates that he raised nearly $70,000 for the World Fantasy Convention. If nothing else, they should be giving him a Service to WorldCon award.

Personally, I think it would be hilarious to see NO AWARD win a category or two, especially after the way the pinkshirts talked it up after the nominations were announced. It’s always amusing how they never seem to grasp that a sword cuts both ways.

That being said, I very much doubt that increase is entirely, or even largely, down to the involvement of those loyal to the Evil League of Evil. I suspect we have succeeded in energizing the pinkshirts, who are bound and determined to protect what they consider to be their turf. The first sign we’ll see concerning how this will play out is when the 1939 Awards are announced on Thursday. If CS Lewis and Ayn Rand make a strong showing, we can tentatively conclude that there are decent prospects for good humor on Sunday.

What West?

With Easterners murdering Easterners again, the cry rises once more: the West must act!

  • The West must face the evil that has revealed itself in the Iraq genocide – Michael Nazir-Ali
  • The West must intervene in Iraq – Lord Dannatt
  • The decision to intervene is almost certainly the right call – Ross Douthat

Why? What possible interest does the West have in keeping Easterners from killing each other? France imported tens of thousands of pro-French Algerians to keep them from being murdered by other Algerians, now their police don’t dare to enter the slums inhabited by the grandchildren of those Algerians. The USA has been importing people from every single one of its post-WWI foreign engagements of the previous century, what benefit has that been to Americans beyond nearly exposing the people of Coon Rapids, Minnesota, to Ebola?

Did Rome concern itself when one Chinese king was slaughtering other Chinese? Did Imperial Japan intervene in the Dutch-Spanish war?

The West is in no position to help anyone now that it has been invaded by more than 30 million Muslims and Africans and 50 million Hispanics. With the center of gravity under assault, nothing at all will be accomplished elsewhere. Considering that the present debacle is the direct result of the last two failed Western interventions, why does anyone believe that a third one will improve anything, rather than make it worse?

Besides, the “West” is already involved. There are presently more than 500 “Britons” fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Which means the West shouldn’t concern itself with the wars over there, it should be preparing to fight the inevitable one over here.