Category: Uncategorized

Ninth Circuit: 2nd Amendment secures right to carry

In other words, “bearing arms” doesn’t just mean “owning” them.

The court concludes that California’s broad limits on both open and concealed carry of loaded guns — with no “shall-issue” licensing regime that assures law-abiding adults of a right to get licenses, but only a “good cause” regime under which no license need be given — “impermissibly infringe on the Second Amendment right to bear arms in lawful self-defense.” The Ninth Circuit thus joins the Seventh Circuit, and disagrees with the Second, Third, and Fourth Circuits.

This is good news. Sooner or later, the Supreme Court will be forced to face the issue directly.

That’s no statue, that’s Mark Shea!

In which Mark Shea gets trolled so hard, it’s a wonder he didn’t turn to stone. You absolutely MUST read A Reader Writes of his Experience Among the Dark Enlightenment Types:

The thing about nascent movements like this is that it’s hard to know
when to pay attention and when to ignore them. If you ignore them they
can grow in the dark, like mushrooms on dung.  If you make too much
fuss, you can attract idiots–particularly extremist idiots–who
automatically assume that anything normal people find objectionable must
be awesome, radical, and “not PC” and therefore good.  But of course,
cannibalism is not PC either and embracing something simply and solely
on the basis that it is a “reaction” is one of the stupidest things
humans can do. You can’t build a life on protest and reaction.  You have
to be for something, not merely against something.  And at the end of
the day, the only real core of DE “thought” is to be for racialism.

Much of the stuff written above describes a sect that brings out
belly laughs. Eldar? Men of Numenor?  Seriously? Tolkien would have
these overgrown D and D players’ guts for garters if he heard they were
exploiting his work for their deplorable cultus. Particularly since
(which is my main concern about them) they are using his work as a grab
bag of code words for their deep-rooted racialist heresy.

I first heard about the Dark Enlightenment (aka “Neo-Reaction” or
just “Reaction”) last year, the year after I graduated from college and
was interning at a conservative think tank. I briefly become involved
with the Dark Enlightenment and then left the movement in disgust. Here
is what I learned:

– The Dark Enlightenment is controlled by what the media call “Sith
Lords”. You have more public Lords like Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land,
but there are even some Lords up higher whose names are not revealed.
They say the Master Lord says ‘Et Ego in Arcadia’ which is an anagram
for ‘Tego Arcana Dei’ (“I hide the secrets of God”).

– But only the media call them ‘Sith Lords’. In Inner Speak, they will often use phrases like the Men of Númenor or the Eldars.

– I never met any of the higher Eldars, but I did once meet an Eldar
in Training. I don’t know his real name but people called him Legolas.
He had long blond hair, was dressed like a 19th century count, and wore a
pendant that had both a Christian Cross and Thor’s Hammer on it.

– The movement is a weird mixture of ethno-nationalists, futurists,
monarchists, PUAs (“pick-up artists” like Chateau Heartiste), Trad
Catholics, Trad Protestants, etc. They all believe in HBD (what they
call “human biodiversity” i.e. racism) but disagree on some other minor
points.

– The religious people in the movement (both Christians and pagans)
practice what is called “identitarian religion” (religion that doesn’t
deny ethnic identity).

– Some of the rising stars of the Dark Enlightenment on the internet
seem to be Radish Magazine, Occam’s Razor Mag, and Theden TV.

– The Dark Enlightenment allegedly has millions of dollars of money
to play with. They have a couple big donors. One is rumored to be a
major tech tycoon in Silicon Valley. They actually had a private 3-day
meeting on an island which was furnished with a French chef, etc.
Different forms of formal attire were required for each day (tuxedos,
3-piece suits, etc), and some weird costumes were required too (capes,
hoods, etc) — which sound like a pagan cult. (I wasn’t at this function
but heard about it.)

– I was initiated into the first stages of the Dark Enlightenment,
which involved me stripping down naked so people could “inspect my
phenotype”. I was then given a series of very personal questions, often
relating to sexual matters. I was then told to put on a black cape. (I
really regret doing this but at the time I was younger, more
impressionable and eager to please.)

– For the initial oath taking, everyone must swear on a copy of
Darwin’s Origin of Species, just to show their fidelity to HBD. After
that, for the later oaths, seculars will swear again on Darwin, while
Christians will swear on the Bible, and pagans on the Prose Edda or
Iliad.

– At one of the meetings I heard someone continuously chanting “gens
alba conservanda est” (Latin for “the white race must be preserved”) and
then others were chanting things in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Old
German, but I don’t know those languages so I can’t remember exactly
what they were saying.

Now that was some epic artistic cruelty, so much so that one almost suspects the dark hand of Roissy. Thank the Divine Rainbow for Mark Shea, saving the world from nonexistent movements since 2014! Then again, as a media-identified Sith Lord, perhaps that’s merely what I want him to think….

Ready for Round Two

It’s always good to know who regards you as the enemy:

Documents from an Ohio National Guard (ONG) training drill conducted last January reveal the details of a mock disaster where Second Amendment supporters with “anti-government” opinions were portrayed as domestic terrorists. The ONG 52nd Civil Support Team training scenario involved a plot from local school district employees to use biological weapons in order to advance their beliefs about “protecting Gun Rights and Second Amendment rights.”

Portsmouth Fire Chief Bill Raison told NBC 3 WSAZ-TV in Huntington, West Virginia that the drill accurately represented “the reality of the world we live in,” adding that such training “helps us all be prepared.” Internal ONG documents provided to Media Trackers after repeated delays provide further context to what WSAZ-TV reported last winter.

In the disaster-preparedness scenario, two Portsmouth Junior High School employees poisoned school lunches with mustard gas, acting on orders from white-nationalist leader William Pierce. The ONG team discovered biological weapons being produced in the school,
requiring activation of containment and decontamination procedures.

That’s a nice little Baphomet the 52nd Civil Support Team features on its unit logo. Things do appear to be getting uglier and uglier. It was recently reported that less than 15 percent of Connecticut citizens who own semi-automatic rifles registered them with the state authorities. No one in his right mind thinks it is wise to be disarmed at this late stage of American history, not when the barbarians have been permitted inside the gates and the next big war appears more likely to take place at home than abroad.

New books, new policies

Castalia House has already announced that Tom Kratman’s Big Boys Don’t Cry will be published at the end of this month. In addition to that, we will have another book coming out as well. We aren’t ready to announce it yet, but I will say that it is longer than a novella and the first two words in the title begin with the letters Q and M. So, I’m looking for 20 volunteers, ten for each book, to commit to reading the books and then reviewing them when they go live on Amazon. Please send me an email with either BBDC or QM in the title. And if you aren’t already familiar with the science fiction world of Quantum Mortis, you’ve got a few weeks to read QM: Gravity Kills and QM: A Man Disrupted before the third volume appears.

And in other news, we certainly have not forgotten about Selenoth. If you haven’t already read Summa Elvetica, this is your chance to get caught up since Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy is free for the first time on Amazon today.

Castalia House has also reviewed its translations policy after speaking to our vast stable of authors as well as consulting with a number of professional translators. We have decided that our standard offering will be a 25 percent royalty to translators and 25 percent royalty to the authors on revenues from the translated editions. This approach appears to be satisfactory for all three parties concerned, as Castalia House now has 20 foreign language translations in progress.

Also, if you’re one of the reviewers of QM:AMD or QM:GK, please note that the missing reviews may have been preserved in your Amazon account even though they’re not appearing on the book’s current page. So, if you don’t mind, please check to see if you still have it and post it to the current book page.

Dum-dum-dum

And another one’s down:

Ordinarily we would ignore the news of another banker’s death – after all these sad events happen all the time – if it wasn’t for several contextual aspects of this most recent passage. First, the death in question, as reported by the Stamford Daily Voice is that of Ryan Henry Crane, a Harvard graduate, who is survived by his wife, son and parents at the very young age of 37. Second, Ryan Henry Crane was formerly employed by JPMorgan – a bank which was featured prominently in the news as recently as two weeks ago when another of its London-based employees committed suicide by jumping from the top floor of its Canary Wharf building….The circumstances surrounding his death are scarce, but what is most
notable is that not only is Crane the second very young JPMorgan banker
to pass in recent days, but is also the fourth banker death in under a month.

Curiouser and curiouser….

Increased demonization cycles

Sarah Hoyt has a theory concerning the increasingly rapid appearance of Pink SF’s Two-Minute Hates:

The funny thing, though, is that they are not only completely ignorant about us, and so unaware of it that the dime never drops, but that these demonization cycles seem to be coming closer and closer and get more hysterical. The next person who disagrees with them or pokes the tiniest bit of fun at them will be declared “worse than Hitler” and they’ll call for his hanging.

I think I know why.  Part of the reason the episodes are coming closer together and getting crazier is that they’re losing power and they know it.  They convinced an entire generation of women that Heinlein should not be read.  This was because “all the right thinking people know that.”  This is breaking.  There are enough blogs, and enough of us female Heinlein fans ready to tell them they’re idiots and then describe exactly in what part of their anatomy their head is lodged.

With Resnick and Malzberg the backlash was faster and louder and even a lot of their number thought (privately) that they were off their rocker.  With Card, I think only the choir thinks he’s “a fascist.”

And with Larry…  There is no word for this.  It’s like a Chihuahua trying to hold onto a car by the back bumper.  They have not only bit off more than they can chew, they’ve bit off more than they can… bite.  In tactical terms it’s getting involved in a landwar in Asia or going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

But wait, there’s more.  The other reason they’re getting crazier and crazier and trying to enforce group conformity more and more is that they are no longer in possession of the bully pulpit.

That’s definitely part of it. As Hugh Howey showed in the report to which I linked earlier today, independent publishers now sell more daily units in the three primary genres, Mystery/Thriller, SF/F, and Romance than the major publishers do. But the loss of the bully pulpit and the declining power of the gatekeepers has done more than drive them crazy, it has all but eliminated their targets.

Consider how much static I took for a few months from the moment I ran for president. But I’m gone now. They can’t purge me twice. They can’t purge Sarah or Larry, they’re already out of the little club. They can, in fact, they regularly dig up the corpse of Robert Heinlein in order to ritually attack him, but nobody cares, least of all REH.

So, like rats, the rabbits are on the verge of devouring themselves. They have no one else left to attack. We’ve already seen Dave Truesdale and a cohort of elderly members publicly launch a salvo at Stephen Gould and the lowlives of the Board; it won’t be long until those Very Serious and Concerned Individuals strike back with a series of point-and-shrieks directed at various petition signers.

If you’re a young writer on the right half of the political spectrum, you would have to be insane to decide to join the SFWA at this point. I mean, is it going to help you get published by Baen? Is it going to impress anyone at Castalia House? Or, for that matter, Random House, after the way they were attacked by the SFWA worthies? And do you really think the lunatics at places like Tor are going to harbor any interest in your story about spaceships and space battles if it lacks the requisite tri-gendered queer transcultural warrior princess who defends abortions in space from the evil Bible-misquoting raciss white Christian bigot?

We have achieved ideological segregation. Now the wolves can compete among themselves and laugh as we watch the rabbits frantically shrieking “not-rabbit” at their fellow rabbits as they devour each other.

Lake-freeze denialism

It’s interesting to observe the difference between the science fetishists’ demands for evidence where the supernatural is concerned, and their ability to completely ignore it wherever their pet hypotheses are jeopardized by observation:

Lake Superior hasn’t completely frozen over in two decades. But an expert on Great Lakes ice says there’s a “very high likelihood” that the three-quadrillion-gallon lake will soon be totally covered with ice thanks to this winter’s record-breaking cold. The ice cover on the largest freshwater lake in the world hit a 20-year record of 91 percent on Feb. 5, 1994. Jay Austin, associate professor at the Large Lakes Observatory in Duluth, Minn., told CNSNews.com that he expects that record will be broken this winter when the most northern of the Great Lakes becomes totally shrouded in ice….

Austin attributes the large amount of ice on the lake to the “extraordinary cold winter we’ve had,” pointing out that Duluth recently experienced an all-time record of 23 straight days of below-zero temperatures. The previous record of 22 days was set in 1936 and tied in 1963, according to the National Weather Service.

Of course, if we observational rationalists were to operate like the global warmists, we would immediately take a poll of everyone to decide if they believed Lake Superior would freeze over or not, then trumpet our consensus as irrefutable scientific fact.

I suggest we wait a month to see if the lake actually freezes over or not. Even if doing so makes me a lake-freeze denialist.

Of Amazon and author earnings

You may recall that last year, I pointed out that John Scalzi was not only doing authors a serious disservice by denigrating self-publishing, attacking publishers who mitigate their risk by not paying advances, and throwing a public hissy fit over Random House moving into the 21st Century with its Hydra imprint, he was actually doing himself a disservice by throwing away more than half his revenues for the privilege of being able to say he is approved by the gatekeepers at Tor. Scalzi, of course, pretended that I had no idea what I was talking about, because he is a special snowflake who has a totally unique publishing contract that bears no similarity to any other publishing deal in the industry or something like that.

After all, who are you going to trust on such matters, the economics writer who correctly predicted both the bull market in gold and the 2008 financial crisis or the Bernie Madoff of science fiction with his “50,000 DAILY READERS”?

I mention this because Hugh Howey, the massively successful SF self-publisher, just released a fascinating report on the current economics of publishing and what he learned pretty much confirmed everything that I’ve been saying on the subject for the last two years. It also very clearly demonstrates that the current and past leadership of the SFWA consist of individuals who did not, and who do not, understand the electronic train coming down the tracks that is already in the process of crushing the traditional publishers.

Here is what our data guru found when he used sales per ranking data and applied it to the top 7,000 bestselling genre works on Amazon today: Looks good for the Big Five, doesn’t it? When it comes to gross dollar sales, they take half the pie. Remember, they only account for a little over a quarter of the unit sales. Also keep in mind that they only have to pay 25% of net revenue to the author. By contrast, self-published authors on Amazon’s platform keep 70% of the total purchase price.

 Let’s now look at revenue from the author’s perspective: It’s a complete inversion. Indie authors are earning nearly half the total author revenue from genre fiction sales on Amazon. Nearly half. This next chart reveals why: Blue represents the author. You can clearly see that for Big-Five published works, the publisher makes more than twice what the author makes for the sale of an e-book. Keep in mind that the profit margins for publishers are better on e-books than they are on hardbacks. That means the author gets a smaller cut while the publisher takes a larger share. This, despite the fact that e-books do not require printing, warehousing, or shipping. As a result, self-published authors as a group are making 50% more profit than their traditionally published counterparts, even though their books have only half the gross sales revenue.

But here is the money bit:

You may have heard from other reports that e-books account for roughly 25% of overall book sales. But this figure is based only on sales reported by major publishers. E-book distributors like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the iBookstore, and Google Play don’t reveal their sales data. That means that self-published e-books are not counted in that 25%. Neither are small presses, e-only presses, or Amazon’s publishing imprints. This would be like the Cookie Council seeking a report on global cookie sales and polling a handful of Girl Scout troops for the answer—then announcing that 25% of worldwide cookie sales are Thin Mints. But this is wrong. They’re just looking at Girl Scout cookies, and even then only a handful of troops.

In other words, any statistics you read concerning the publishing industry are even less credible than the fiction produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That being said, I believe Howey is right. I believe “the world of literature has its brightest days still ahead” and part of that is going to be the result of the destruction of the gatekeepers who have been methodically destroying science fiction and fantasy for the last 30 years. The gatekeepers cannot sustain their inflated prices, they cannot foist their favored authors on unsuspecting readers, and they can no longer pretend their books sell any better or are of any higher quality than those being produced by the myriad of other active publishers for much longer.

“It turns out that 86% of the top 2,500 genre fiction bestsellers in the
overall Amazon store are e-books. At the top of the charts, the
dominance of e-books is even more extreme. 92% of the Top-100
best-selling books in these genres are e-books!”

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. In 13 months, ebooks have comprised 94 percent of the sales of A Throne of Bones. And keep in mind that Howey’s statistics probably don’t include the distribution of free ebooks. My free/sold ratio is 5/1. This is why Castalia House is only producing print books in hardcover for the hard-core fans who enjoy collecting as well as reading; if it’s not electronic, it’s no longer really relevant.

I should mention that another serious problem for the traditional publishers I predicted during my campaign for SFWA president has already surfaced, and it has done so even sooner than I said it would. Dreamworks Interactive recently announced that it will no longer be licensing the publishing rights to its works, but will publish its own ebooks. This means that the very lucrative media tie-in model that is keeping many of the larger genre publishers afloat is about to disappear. That means no more paying sizable advances to award-winning authors of terrible romances in space on the basis of Halo tie-in sales. It will be interesting to see which of the major genre publishers goes down first.

The Darth Vader dilemma

The more they squeeze, the more regulatory resistance slips through their fingers like sand:

Consider what administration officials announcing the new exemption for medium-sized employers had to say about firms that might fire workers to get under the threshold and avoid hugely expensive new requirements of the law. Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS – under penalty of perjury – that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs.

Welcome to the USSA. You can’t understand leftist reasoning until you grasp that everything they do is based on a static universe. From evolution to health care regulation, their policies inevitably involve the Ricardian Vice of reducing the situation down to the simplest possible binary choice, then being mystified when their actions inspire a reaction.

Followed, of course, by their futile attempts to use force to demand compliance.

The biggest problem won’t be firms laying off workers to get into the preferred class, but rather, all the firms that will no longer grow out of it.

Famous last words

“We have been watching closely the recent volatility in global
financial markets. Our sense is that at this stage these developments do
not pose a substantial risk to the U.S. economic outlook.”
– Jane Yellen, Fed Head

She even sounds like Bernanke back in 2008. And, just in case it wasn’t completely obvious, we have the reassurance that the desperate money pumping will not end until the entire system collapses too.

“The Committee has emphasized that a highly accommodative
policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after asset
purchases end.”

I’ll bet it has. After all, we’re only looking at a $29 trillion credit demand gap. The thing is, even from a Keynesian perspective, one should be able to discern that we are in a giant economic contraction. Here is the old Econ 101 question: highly accommodative monetary policy is prescribed when the economy is a) growing, or b) contracting?