Category: Uncategorized

A grand strategic failure

Back in 2004, I pointed out that there was no possibility of long-term success for the neocons in Iraq. Now, with the fall of Iraq’s second largest city, it is only a matter of time before Baghdad is taken and the utter failure of the entire neocon grand strategy is apparent to everyone.

Sunni militants spilling over the border from Syria on Tuesday seized control of the northern city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest, in the most stunning success yet in a rapidly widening insurgency that threatens to drag the region into war.

Having consolidated control over Sunni-dominated Nineveh Province, armed gunmen were heading on the main road to Baghdad, Iraqi officials said, and had already taken over parts of Salahuddin Province. Thousands of civilians fled south toward Baghdad and east toward the autonomous region of Kurdistan, where security is maintained by a fiercely loyal army, the pesh merga.

The Iraqi Army apparently crumbled in the face of the militant assault, as soldiers dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms for civilian clothes and blended in with the fleeing masses. The militants freed thousands of prisoners and took over military bases, police stations, banks and provincial headquarters, before raising the black flag of the jihadi group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria over public buildings. The bodies of soldiers, police officers and civilians lay scattered in the streets….

The swift capture of large areas of the city by militants aligned with
the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria represented a climactic moment on a
long trajectory of Iraq’s unraveling since the withdrawal of American
forces at the end of 2011.

As the Romans knew, if you’re not going to colonize a conquered territory, the correct strategy is to go in hard, break things and kill people, then immediately leave. Repeat as needed.

Ten years ago, I was correct about this. Ten years from now, it will be seen that those who demanded Reconquista 2.0 in the West were correct too. Unlike the tango, wars and invasions only require the participation of a single party.

The fall of Mosul also shows the Potemkin nature of the government authorities. As soon as a few committed militants with guns appear on the scene, the facade of omnipotent government power promptly collapses. In recent weeks, we’ve seen this everywhere from the USA to Ukraine and Iraq. The ironic thing is that what is being described as “a foreign invasion of Iraq” is a considerably smaller-scale invasion than the one taking place in the southern USA right now.

Republican sellout bites the dust

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s political career was just ended over his traitorous love of immigration:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated Tuesday by a little-known economics professor in Virginia’s Republican primary, a stunning upset and major victory for the tea party. Cantor is the second-most powerful member of the U.S. House and was seen by some as a possible successor to the House speaker. His loss to Dave Brat, a political novice with little money marks a huge victory for the tea party movement, which supported Cantor just a few years ago.

Perhaps the idiot Republicans will rethink their decision to serve as Obama’s vanguard on the invasion amnesty. Opposing immigration, opposing amnesty, and opposing the ongoing foreign invasion is the winning issue in American politics, just as it is in European politics. As more immigrants migrate, the more blacks and whites of every ideological stripe will turn against immigration and the politicians who support it.

It’s not about legal or illegal, it’s about the numbers.

How is that militarization working out?

US police love to dress up and play soldier, but apparently they have forgotten that an important aspect of being a soldier concerns the other side shooting back:

Sunday’s slaying of two Las Vegas policemen raises to 23 the number of law enforcement officers killed by gunfire this year, a 53 percent increase over the tally at this time last year, which is spurring concern about the influence of radical groups…. The slayings of officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor Soldo, 31, who were gunned down while having lunch at a pizza buffet, add to a trend that has law enforcers worried that they are becoming the targets of crime.

“We are seeing more direct violence as a result of radical groups, and that does concern us,” said Rich Roberts, a spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations. “There seems to be more people out there who are blatantly anti-cop, and heavy exposure through the Internet and other propaganda seems to make people with these violent views feed off each other.”

Perhaps the International Union of Police Associations should stop and think about why there are now more people out there who are blatantly anti-cop. Perhaps it just might have a little something to do with all the people being murdered by police, from military veterans to old women and infants, without any legal repercussions.

It’s amusing to see Mark Pitcavage popping up again and babbling about militias and white supremacists. He’s an ASL player and statist whore who has been going on and on about the terrible danger from militia groups since the Clinton years. In addition to being an ADL researcher, he’s been a longtime campaigner against the pure evil of printing black cardboard counters to represent German forces in World War II games.

Anyhow, while it is true that “over the last 25 years or so there’s been a gradual erosion toward authority figures and of respect for police officers”, but it is no longer true that the “vast majority of people respect police officers”. And it is completely the fault of the police forces, who have set themselves up as a paramilitary law enforcement soldiers rather than officers of the peace. But as the recent Las Vegas shootings prove, they simply are not prepared for any war in which the shooting isn’t all one-sided.

The Las Vegas lunatics weren’t militants. They were suicidal lunatics. Think about how many more police they could have killed if they had simply performed a few citizen’s no-knock raids during the night.

Desperately avoiding default

One thing you have to understand about every federal debt-related action: it’s not for the benefit of the borrowers, but for the benefit of the banks. We saw this in 2009 with “mortgage reform” and it will be the same with “student loan reform”:

President Barack Obama is prepping new executive steps to help Americans struggling to pay off their student debt, and throwing his support behind Senate Democratic legislation with a similar goal but potentially a much more profound impact.

Obama on Monday will announce he’s expanding his “Pay As You Earn” program that lets borrowers pay no more than 10 percent of their monthly income in loan payments, the White House said. Currently, the program is only available to those who started borrowing after October 2007 and kept borrowing after October 2011. Obama plans to start allowing those who borrowed earlier to participate, potentially extending the benefit to millions more borrowers.

 The problem Obama is addressing is that although it is impossible for graduates (and non-graduates) to formally default on their student loans, they will effectively default on them when they simply don’t have the money to make their payments.

This is simply reducing the payments in order to keep them on the hook longer and thereby prevent the loans from being correctly recognized as bad loans that have to be written off. As Karl Denninger correctly ascertains, the ultimate goal is to keep the
young borrowers on the hook, but force taxpayers to pay off their
loans. It about the banks not the borrowers. It’s ALWAYS about the banks.

Anti-American Republicans

Why on Earth would anyone vote for a Republican anymore? They’re just Democrats of Last Resort, meant to be turned in the case of an emergency.

There’s only a few weeks left until the summer recess swallows Congress’ legislative agenda for 2014, but a group of key Republicans haven’t given up immigration quite yet. Helping guide a secretive effort to informally gauge support for legislative action on the issue before August are two expected names: Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Paul Ryan (R-WI). But joining them is a young conservative lawmaker whose efforts on the issue have shocked conservative power brokers and prompted a behind-the-scenes backlash.

“Absolutely,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) told Breitbart News, “I have been talking about immigration with my colleagues for months. Talking about important issues is part of my job.”

Mulvaney was quick to add he isn’t “whipping” support for a bill per se – “I haven’t even seen a bill on immigration reform that I could whip even if I wanted to,” he said – and that he remains firmly opposed to the Senate “Gang of Eight” bill.

“I have absolutely no interest in taking up the Senate bill or going to conference on the Senate bill. Securing our borders is my first priority on any immigration reform, and the Senate bill falls woefully short on that point. Furthermore, I will not support a special pathway to citizenship for those who are here illegally. The Senate bill has always been and remains a non-starter,” Mulvaney said.

Still, his support for House action on the issue this year, and his backing for a separate issue, reauthorization of the Export-Import bank, has prompted new scrutiny on Mulvaney from the right.

“He needs to be called out for this,” one prominent conservative says.

Mulvaney not only has one of the most conservative voting records in the House Republican conference, he has been a leader of a group of conservative dissidents looking to push Speaker John Boehner to the right. In 2013, Mulvaney pointedly took a seat near the front of the House chamber and sat silently as his name was called repeatedly during the Boehner’s reelection as speaker.

His new movement on immigration isn’t his first foray into the issue. In February, he was profiled by a New York Times reporter who traveled to his South Carolina district to witness his first town hall conducted in Spanish.

But then, he said legislative action was out of the question because President Obama is an untrustworthy partner. “We are afraid that if we reach an agreement, he will take the parts he likes and he won’t take the parts that he doesn’t like,” Mulvaney told the audience in Spanish, according to the Times.

Mulvaney’s active involvement on the issue now suggests that calculation may have changed for him, although the sentiment is felt even more deeply by top immigration hawks who note President Obama has continued to aggressively wield his executive action pen in the months since.

At a town hall last week, Mulvaney used rhetoric on the issue similar to that of top amnesty proponents.

“Immigration is not a simple issue. There are at least three major parts of it: there’s border security, legal immigration, and the status of the 11 million, 15 million, 30 million … pick a number – it’s the status of the folks who are here illegally. People say, ‘oh, comprehensive reform is a bad idea.’ Ok? But, unless you deal with all three of those you haven’t dealt with immigration,” Mulvaney said.

“There are jobs that American citizens will not do. There are jobs that American citizens will not do. We can talk about why that is. We can talk about how our welfare state is broken, how we encourage people not to work, but that doesn’t help the farmer pick his peaches this summer. We have businesses that rely on migrant – legal – migrant workers, and a lot of them are in this state,” he added.

The old “fruit rotting in the field” canard. The only reason Americans won’t do jobs is because the jobs don’t pay a reasonable wage. And the reason they don’t pay a reasonable wage, the reason that inflation-corrected wages are still below  1973, is a) immigration legal and illegal, and b) the doubling of the number of women in the labor force.

Instead of fighting an unpopular, scandal-ridden, lame-duck Obama, the Republicans are trying to hand him a political victory that will destroy both the Republican Party and the increasingly tattered remnants of the country… even as more than a quarter of a million half-civilized children invade the southern border.

Robert Heinlein saw the Crazy Years coming, but he had no idea how insane they would turn out to be.

É dia de Português

O planeta independente Rhysalan oferece Asilo para 1.462 governos
exilados. É responsabilidade do departamento de Xenocriminologia e
Relações Alienígenas da Divisão Militar de Investigação de Crimes manter
a rédea curta com as centenas de milhares de xenos residindo no
planeta. Assassinatos, revoluções, guerras civis e tentativas de
genocídios planetários fazem parte da rotina de trabalho do Subtenente
Comandante Graven Tower, da DMIC-XRA.

Em acréscimo a um aerovar armado com mísseis, à sua confiável Sphinx
CPB-18 e às políticas extremamente liberais da DMIC com relação a danos
colaterais e vítimas civis, o Comandante Tower é estimulado por sua
extrema xenofobia, assim como por uma inteligência de máquina com
aumento de realidade de categoria militar que acredita que encontrou
Deus. No meio deste cenário, quando os restos desintegrados do herdeiro
legítimo de uma casa real alienígena são descobertos nas ruas de Trans
Paradis, a questão não é tanto se no final os assassinos serão
encontrados, mas se são os criminosos ou os investigadores criminais que
vão contribuir mais para a soma total de mortos.

QUANTUM MORTIS é a série de mistério de Ficção Científica Militar
repleta de ação de Vox Day – indicado para o prêmio Hugo e autor da
série de fantasias épicas As Artes da Escuridão e da Luz – e Steve
Rzasa.

Thanks to Israel and Daniel, Castalia House has released its second and third books in Portuguese today. Two QUANTUM MORTIS books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal, have joined Uma Magia Perdida in our Portuguese language catalog. This should be useful for those, like The Perfect Aryan Male, who are brushing up on their Brazilian Portuguese. Please note that both Gravidade Mortal and Uma Magia Perdida will be free downloads tomorrow and Thursday.

And in other Castalia House news, we’re pleased to announce the first of our new bloggers. Jeff Johnson of the Space Gaming Blog will be posting on Mondays. Yesterday he got off on exactly the right foot with a review of the first of the new Traveller novels from Marc Miller, Fate of the Kinunir. The Castalia House blog is rapidly becoming a destination in its own right, with four new bloggers joining Daniel, Mascaro, and Anson in posting essays, book reviews and interviews of independent and established authors alike. So, if you’re interested in following the Blue SF revolution as it proceeds, you’ll want to check it out on a regular basis.

Not a bad summary, actually

Our new friend Damien nicely summarizes the heart of the SF/F Left-Right divide on Twitter. A more succinct paraphrase:

Right-wing sci-fi is about shooting the Other. Left-wing sci-fi is about fucking the Other.

This does explain the incessant Pink SF/F obsession with necrobestiality. As well as, for that matter, Larry Correia.

Speaking of Twitter, John Scalzi is, as usual, spinning, ever spinning. There are spiders who look at him in awe, and wonder where on Earth he finds the energy.

Once in a while I check to see if the racist sexist homophobic dipshits
are still railing that I exist in the world. They are. I smile.

Sure you’re smiling, Johnny. That’s why you stopped reporting your annual numbers in 2013. That’s why you shut down your Quantcast reports. That’s why you don’t post a traffic meter anywhere on your site. That’s why you threatened to quit SFWA. No one is “railing that [you] exist in the world”. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find your constant snake oil salesmanship genuinely amusing. You’re the Bernie Madoff of science fiction and you’ve got the Participation Hugo to prove it.

Now, did you forget that you tried the “I’m so loving this” routine before you finally cracked and let your real feelings show? Look, there is nothing wrong with being upset and embarrassed about being caught out inflating your bio. But piling on lie after lie after lie just isn’t convincing very many people anymore.

June will mark the fifteenth straight month that my average site traffic exceeds your best month ever… by more than 120,000 pageviews. And the main reason your blog is in relative decline is because you lack the self-confidence to be honest with your readers.

But hey, keep smiling!

They are not members of US society

The federal government is aiding and abetting a large-scale invasion of the USA:

“We’re taking a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement announcing the plan.

“How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings — many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking — goes to the core of who we are as a nation,” he said.

Known as unaccompanied alien children, they are generally from Central America, are escaping poverty, abuse or dangerous gangs back home, and make the harrowing trek through Mexico and across the U.S. border.

The government expects more than 90,000 of the children to be apprehended on the U.S. side of the border this year and more than 140,000 to be caught next year. That doesn’t include the tens of thousands more who avoid capture.

This Children’s Crusade is more than three times larger than Napoleon’s army at Waterloo.  The USA should be defending the borders against them, not hiring them lawyers. And Cantor and company should be impeaching Obama for this, not trying to help him push through the amnesty program for illegals that sparked this latest invasion.

If it was not already obvious that the post-1965 immigration program will destroy the USA, this latest twist should make it abundantly clear. Perhaps we should simply send one unaccompanied immigrant child to every voter who has supported immigration in the past. And this puts the lie to the myth that immigrants are just hard-working people seeking opportunity.

An informative police lesson

It should be educational to discover if it is now deemed more acceptable for the police to murder unarmed civilians than to refuse to work at a gay pride parade:

A Salt Lake City police officer has been placed on leave after refusing an assignment to work at a gay pride parade. The officer was among about 30 officers assigned to provide traffic control and security for the annual Utah Pride Parade on Sunday in Salt Lake City, said department spokeswoman Lara Jones.

“We don’t tolerate bias and bigotry in the department, and assignments are assignments … To allow personal opinion to enter into whether an officer will take a post is not something that can be tolerated in a police department,” Jones told KSL.

Now, in fairness, most police officers who shoot and kill grandmothers, puppies, and people living at the wrong address are placed on leave too. But they are subsequently found not guilty of any wrongdoing and eventually return to their jobs without any fanfare. It will therefore be interesting to learn if this Salt Lake City officer is eventually fired or not.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the police would have been arresting all of the exhibitionists flaunting their sexual abnormality. Some call this progress. But not, I think, for very much longer.

Why Amazon are the good guys

Hugh Howey makes many of the same points I have concerning the Amazon-Hatchette battle, only in more detail, and he reminds everyone that the behavior of the Big 5 publishing cartel from which Amazon has liberated authors is worse than most people know:

The real monopoly, once you start examining business practices and attitudes, is Big Publishing itself, a group so entrenched with one another and indistinguishable from one another that they simply go by the collective moniker: The Big 5.

Their contracts are functionally identical. Their e-book royalties (and most others terms and clauses) are lockstep and are not negotiable. They have a history of working together in a noncompetitive fashion in order to raise prices for their customers (prices that they would love to set at twice what mass market paperbacks formerly cost). Conferring by phone or email in this culture is considered polite, not illegal. It wasn’t long ago that top editors at the major houses would meet on Wednesdays to discuss the bestseller list, to congratulate one another on acquisitions, and to discuss business plans and practices. All completely normal. Celebrated, even.

When members of the Big 5 do compete (truly compete, not just offer varying marketing promises and sizes of advances), the offender needs to be reigned in quickly. When Simon & Schuster innovated with print-only deals—thereby landing bestselling authors who were otherwise never going to sign with any major publisher—the resulting press on these deals (and likely pressure from other publishers) caused an immediate retreat. The poor publisher who stepped out of line dutifully pulled back into rank. Print-only deals were no longer on the table. Contracts snapped back to their immutable and noncompetitive form.

Or what about the “most favored nation clauses?” These pernicious contractual entities stipulate that any authors who get higher royalties in the future will trigger a retroactive match in royalties for select existing authors. This is like a sports contract that simply stipulates “I’ll always be the highest paid player.” It hamstrings all the publishers in a knot of anti-competitiveness. Where is the outrage or the reporting? Once again, we have a hardening of the monoculture where dissent is impossible and innovation stifled. Instead, the major publishers play Monopoly like my boss used to.

Unable to tolerate a move toward democratic literature, where any voice is free to publish, where authors are paid 70% of list price instead of a mere 17.5%, they rely instead on appeals to litigation, on a public relations campaign within the press, and on collusion.

Another point that I have not seen anyone touch upon is that unlike the Big 5, Amazon gives authors direct access to international book-buying markets. Tomorrow, Castalia House will be releasing its second and third Brazilian Portuguese books, Um Homem Desintegrado and Gravidade Mortal. That simply would not have been possible if Steve and I were publishing through a traditional publisher.

However, this is the core point: “Why show support for a corporation that may lower royalties to 30% in the future when you can celebrate a corporation that pays 17.5% today? Why show support for a corporation that may raise prices in the future when you can champion a corporation that colludes to raise them today? The groupthink and absence of reason is baffling.”

There are two reasons. The first is that authors are conditioned to kowtow to the traditional gatekeepers. The second is that authors who are doing well under the current system are terrified that they may not be able to compete as effectively without being the structurally favored sons – and daughters – of the gatekeepers. And given what the gatekeepers have been favoring for the last two decades, I suspect their fears are well-justified.

One final note: it is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that the conventional publishers aren’t leveraging their one area of historical expertise by doing print-only deals. It’s the one thing they can do very well that the independents and self-publishers can’t as easily do, and in many cases, that the two groups won’t even bother doing. Instead, by insisting on being granted both print and ebook rights, they’ll usually end up with nothing.

Speaking of Amazon, the Hugo-nominated novelette “Opera Vita Aeterna” is a free download from Amazon today and tomorrow. Not only do the Big 5 publishers give away only a small fraction of the free books that Amazon does, but they junk their unsold stock rather than let anyone read them.

UPDATE: The Amazonians are voting with their downloads.

Lady Astronaut of Mars: #1,942 Free in Kindle Store
Opera Vita Aeterna:
#628 Free in Kindle Store

(Relax, I know the rankings are dynamic. This is more of that strange and unfamiliar concept called ‘humor’.)