Category: Uncategorized

That makes foursix

This sounds rather like an Arkansas suicide:

The founder and CEO of American Title Services in Centennial was found dead in his home this week, the result of self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun, according to the Arapahoe County coroner.

Richard Talley, 57, and the company he founded in 2001 were under investigation by state insurance regulators at the time of his death late Tuesday, an agency spokesman confirmed Thursday. It was unclear how long the investigation had been ongoing or its primary focus.

A coroner’s spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head.

As Zerohedge points out, this “suicide” follows “the jumping deaths of 2 London bankers and a former-Fed economist in the US”. This seems a little strange considering how the financial companies are presently sitting very fat and happy. There have also been two suicides in Switzerland; the CFO of Zurich Insurance and the CEO of Swisscom.

“A nightmare for science”

It is remarkable how evolution enthusiasts can’t seem to reach the logical conclusion concerning their repeated inability to successfully debate creationists. Then again, if they had as solid a grasp on logic and statistics as they do on the various epicycles of their ever-evolving “theory”, they would not be evangelical evolutionists in the first place:

In a much-hyped showdown, “the Science Guy” tried to defend evolution against creationist Ken Ham, and proved how slick science-deniers can be. How did the guy who’s right go so wrong?

On many mornings, I wake up and think, “You know what this country needs? More culture war.” As I scramble up a couple eggs, I find myself wishing—fervently wishing—that we could spend more time reducing substantive issues to mere spectacle. Later, as I scrub the pan, I’ll fantasize about how those very spectacles might even funnel money toward some of the country’s most politicized religious groups.

Fortunately, Bill “the Science Guy” Nye has heard my wish—which, really, is the wish of a nation. Why else would he have traveled to Kentucky this week in order to debate Ken Ham, the young-earth creationist founder of Answers in Genesis, about the origins of the world?

Actually, there are two other reasons that Nye might have done so, and I’ve given both possibilities a great deal of thought in the past few days. The first is that Nye, for all his bow-tied charm, is at heart a publicity-hungry cynic, eager to reestablish the national reputation he once had as the host of a PBS show. When his stint on Dancing With the Stars ended quickly, Nye turned to the only other channel that could launch him back to national attention: a sensationalized debate, replete with the media buzz that he craves.

Possibility number two is that Nye is clueless—that, for all his skill as a science communicator, Nye has less political acumen than your average wombat.

After watching the debate, I’m leaning toward that second possibility. Last night, it was easy to pick out the smarter man on the stage. Oddly, it was the same man who was arguing that the earth is 6,000 years old. It was like watching the Broncos play the Seahawks. Nye never had a chance.

I didn’t watch the “debate”. I had no interest in it, surmising correctly, (as it turns out), that neither side would actually be debating, but were instead engaged in mutual preaching to their own choirs. And it is amusing to observe the wrestling with the temptation intellectual dishonesty poses to the evolutionists as a result of their frustration with their own inability to successful defend their faith

For example, the writer claims it is bullshit to distinguish between scientific evidence and historical extrapolation. He asserts: “We can use evidence from the present to extrapolate about the past.” Well, yes, but that doesn’t disprove Ham’s point, which isn’t so much a point as a basic fact. An extrapolation is not, by definition, an observation. Nor can a historical extrapolation be tested.

For some reason, science fetishists who understand very well that it is impossible to use science to prove that Abraham Lincoln succeeded George Washington as president do not understand that it is equally impossible to use science to prove that species X transformed into species Y. Extrapolation only takes us to the hypothesis part of the scientific equation, it does not get us past the necessary testing and observation aspects. Barring a time machine, it is history, not science.

And in the end, the author throws in the towel, admits defeat, and advocates a full-blown retreat:

You don’t need to be Sun Tzu to realize that, when it comes to guys like Ken Ham, you can’t really win. If you refuse to debate them, they claim to be censored. If you agree to debate them, you give them a public platform on which to argue that, yep, they’re being censored. Better not to engage at all, at least directly.

Needless to say, the side that dares not directly engage is the side that knows it cannot successfully make its case. And the more the evangelical Darwinians appeal to an increasingly threadbare scientific authority, the weaker their case is observed to be by all impartial parties. When they’re saying: “you don’t understand the biology” and their critics are saying: “you don’t understand the math”, well, as it turns out, we have an excellent means of determining whose claims are founded in fact and whose are not.

And what we can readily test and observe with these two competing hypotheses is that the scientific evidence here does not favor those appealing to scientific authority.

The end of multiculturalism in Canada

George Jonas castigates the new type of Canadian immigrant: the cultural invader:

Canada, along with some other great immigrant societies, such as America or Australia, evolved into a coherent whole by welcoming new arrivals from the four corners of the Earth, offering them a chance to become a Canadian, American or Australian as they desired or managed to be, and then rewarding them according to how close they’ve come. In the process immigrants suffered casualties, but generally enriched the societies that enriched them, often within a single generation.

The assumption, unspoken but taken for granted until the 1960s, was that immigration was beneficial as long as it was designed to serve the interests of the host society first. The immigrant’s own interests would be served by the opportunity to eventually join the host society. For this to have any meaning, of course, the existence and desirability of a host nationality had to be taken for granted. If there had been no “Americans” or “Canadians,” there would have been nothing to join. Inherent in the American model of a “melting pot” as well as the fussier Canadian model of a “cultural mosaic” was the pre-existence of a nation to which the immigrant was applying to belong.

Until recent times, the West has been spoiled by the loyalty of immigrants, even from hostile regions or cultures…. It was in the past 40 years that the immigrant of dubious loyalty
emerged, followed by the disloyal native-born, sometimes of immigrant
ancestry, sometimes of Islamic conversion. The new immigrant seemed
ready to share the West’s wealth but not its values.

In many ways he
resembled an invader more than a settler or an asylum-seeker. Instead of
making efforts to assimilate, the invader demanded changes in the host
country’s culture. He called on society to accommodate his linguistic or
religious requirements. In 1985, a Sikh CNR railway worker refused to
exchange his turban for a regulation hard hat. This was innocuous
enough, but in 1991, less innocuously, a newly appointed Toronto police
board commissioner of Asian extraction declined to take the traditional
oath to the Queen.

Those who uphold the values of the traditional West should not despair. The Ummayids who immigrated to Spain and imported their cultural values there were eventually expelled after 781 years of Reconquista. The West will win here too, but not until a sufficient number of Westerners realize that there will be no peace and their way of life cannot survive until the immigrants are returned home to their native lands.

Consider how small, in comparison to the present number of invaders, the earlier immigration was. And notice that the people invaded at the time also did not realize it was an invasion that was taking place around them:


In 711 a raiding force from North Africa approximately 1,700-strong led by Tariq Ibn Ziyad landed south of present-day Spain. Ibn Abd-el-Hakem reports, one and a half centuries later, that “the people of Andalus did not observe them, thinking that the vessels crossing and recrossing were similar to the trading vessels which for their benefit plied backwards and forwards.”  Tariq’s forces were thence reinforced by those of his superior, the wali Musa ibn Nusair, and both went on to take control of most of Iberia with an army estimated at approximately 10,000–15,000 combatants.

The translation challenge

Mint Wilson, the lady responsible for the Indonesian translation of Mantra yang Rusak, which was published today in epub format since Amazon does not sell books published in Bahasa Indonesia, has been maintaining a blog about the translation process. It makes for interesting reading for anyone with an interest in languages:

As I translated A Magic Broken, I tried to translate VD’s word choices as close to Indonesian root words as possible. It’s not hard but it is sure often to find that I translated words into its Indonesian form only to realized Indonesian has borrowed it from English word. For example:

 With the precision born of many hours of practice, the sleeve knife slid into his hand as he stepped behind the man rushing past him.

precision – presisi
practice – praktik

It will be all right using these loan words to translate the English ones, but Bahasa Indonesia also has some of the same meaning words that are not any where close enough in form to their English counterparts. Though I suspect they are also loan words.

precision- presisi- ketepatan
practice – praktik- latihan

Bahasa Indonesia has many loan words from other languages. The origin of Bahasa Indonesia is Malay Polynesian that has been used as lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries.  Bahasa Indonesia underwent several developmental process before becoming a modern language; the most influential of these was it’s contact with other languages. Such language contact influence language system lexically, phonologically, and grammatically.

The languages that influence Bahasa Indonesia are :

  • Sanskrit, Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms that reigned in Indonesian archipelago brought by Indian results in many Sanskrit words in Bahasa Indonesia.
  • Arabic, Persian and Arabic traders introduced the religion and as Indonesia became the country with largest muslim population in the world, over the centuries results in an extensive Arabic loan words.
  • Dutch, Dutch colonization and administration, lasting from the 17th century to the 20th, had an extensive impact on the vocabulary.
  • Portuguese, The Portuguese were among the first westerners to sail eastwards to the “Spice Islands” in the 16th century as they traded and then colonized later.
  • Chinese, Chinese traders and significant number of immigrants made their contributions on Bahasa Indonesia vocabulary.

Some interesting fact: for ‘god’ Bahasa Indonesia Bible translate it with 4 loan words: ‘Tuhan’, ‘dewa’, ‘ilah ‘and ‘Allah’. I think ‘Tuhan’ and ‘dewa’ are from Sanskrit, ‘ilah’ and ‘Allah’ are from Arabic. For God Creator Bahasa Indonesia bible translate ‘God’ into TUHAN (when the origin mention Jehova or Yahwe) and Allah (when the original word might be ‘ADONAI’). ‘Dewa’ and ‘ilah’ are for lesser gods.

There is a scene in A Magic Broken, where the word ‘gods’ appear when Nicolas the main character trying to get pass the gate guard:

 The friendly smile suddenly disappeared from the man’s face, and the guide was staring at him as if he’d suddenly turned into an orc. “You some sort’o wizard?” the guard demanded, even as he stepped back a pace and put a hand on his sword handle.

 “Gods, no, I’m a soldier,”Nicolas lied easily. The guard wasn’t the problem. It was the red robe he had to worry about.

Here, I translated the word into ‘dewa’ as I don’t think ‘Allah’ will fit nor the original meaning permit ‘Allah’ in a plural form.

In addition to publishing Mint’s first translation, I’m pleased to be able to say that Castalia House has another 11 translations currently in progress. The Blue SF revolution continues.

Progess towards regress

James Taranto correctly points out that the solutions to past problems may turn out to be even more severe problems in their own right.

The decline of marriage among poor and working-class Americans is a result of a variety of social and economic changes. Among them, as Lowrey notes, are “tidal economic forces,” namely “globalization, the decline of labor unions [and] technological change.”

She ignores the tidal social changes that have also contributed, namely the sexual revolution and the expectation that women will spend most of their adult lives in the workforce, which, as we’ve argued, reduced the incentives for both men and women to marry. It is no more feasible to turn the clock back on globalization or automation than on contraception or female labor-force participation. All of these developments represent progress, in that they were solutions to the problems of the past. All of them contribute to the problems of the present.

This is an interesting point, especially in light of the fact that female labor-force participation has been dropping steadily ever since it peaked at 60.3 percent in 2000. It has dropped 6.4 percent to 56.9 percent, a level not seen since 1988.

Those who argue that the clock cannot be turned back are simply in denial. Not only can the clock be turned back, we can be certain that the clock will be turned back whenever the progressive developments lead to an unsustainable situation. Globalization will end as soon as people in the wealthier countries understand that free trade necessarily means impoverishment and a decline to global norms.

(Remember, we haven’t seen any changes in perceived wealth as yet because people have been spending through their savings and maximizing their debt in order to maintain their current levels of consumer spending. Once the consumer spending begins to contract, the credit disinflation will give way to full-fledged credit deflation.)

Contraception was outlawed before and it will be outlawed again in some countries once it becomes clear that not only is the societal price for replacing children with semi-civilized immigrants too high, but such replacement policies are correlated with net economic losses rather than the long-assumed gains. All actions and policies have unintended consequences, which is why the simplistic notion of progress as an inexorable clock is simply misguided.

Imaginary women in the military

It’s not the article at Tor that is of interest here, but rather the discussion between Tom Kratman and a small collection of Pink SF enthusiasts who do not permit their complete ignorance of all things military affect their ability to express some strong opinions on future war: 

“Sexual attraction may be innate, but it’s not universal. See asexual, people who identify as.”

Do you really think the occasional fluke has a whole lot to say about mass armies? If so, why?

How people act on sexual attraction is learned behaviour.

Only in minor details. The love, lust, favoritism, demoralization, and de facto prostitution are fairly universal within any armed force that sees integrated sexes or integrated sexually compatible people unless extraordinary structural provisions are made. Those structural provision include segregation. Here’s an interesting quote from very liberal, very politically correct Canada’s PPCLI battle school: “Male/female attraction will not go away because we tell it to; and soldiers will court considerable risk to pursue the obvious.”

What you really seem to be saying is we can control it. Forget it; we can’t.

What you should not forget is the ability of an army, any army, to make a terrible idea look good through sheer weight of effort and duplicity practiced on an heroic scale. Think Vietnam…or Project 100,000.

“can’t be controlled.” Tom, man. What’re you saying, dude? That people use sex to game the system? (Some people use anything to game systems.) And somehow that’s what, especially unfair? Or you’re saying, what, the act of sex is so inherently super-special it has in itself some peculiarly distorting effect on hierarchies? (Or maybe you’re saying something about sexual coercion, but I’m not going there.) I say to this: grow some imagination. I’m tired of hearing “the future can’t be different because [argument which boils down to “I don’t want to think about what would have to change”].” Like I said, these may not be stories you want to read or tell? But don’t pretend they can’t be told, or that other people may not find your futures as implausible – and even unpleasant – as you might theirs, on good grounds. From where I stand, your futures do live in Opposite World. And unless you bring a more SFnal imagination to our present interaction, my opinion of your wrongheadedness isn’t likely to change.

No, you are presupposing that things which cannot be changed can. Worse, you have no obvious basis for believing it except that you want to. Do you have any expertise in the matter of combat? I do. What you’re demanding isn’t SF; it’s fantasy. The mere fact that you can so lightly dismiss the effect of using sex to game the system, and as if that were all of it, indicates that anything that interferes with your particular fantasy has to be rejected.

Yes, the effect of sex has distorting effects in hierarchies. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at any given corporation, but combat units are not corporations. The next time Bill Gates has to worry about a near ambush or artillery strike on his way to the office will be the first.

In this particular, no, the future cannot be different unless you write away what men and women are, how they think and act, what they care about, and what they’ll take risks for.

Tom’s response is brilliant because it highlights the essential inhumanity of Pink SF. If great fiction speaks to the human condition, the great flaw of Pink SF is that it specifically and overtly rejects the human elements of the human condition. While I defer to Tom Kratman on what he insists is the legitimate possibility, given a considerable quantity of extreme and particular training, of women serving in an effective military unit, I remain extremely dubious that even the conventional notions of superstrength and mandatory reversible birth control could begin to permit women to become even mediocre soldiers. (4-3-6), in ASL terms, would be a best case scenario.

While I am not a military veteran, I am both a student of military history and a former martial arts fighter. As the former, I am aware that what settles battles is not who can kill the other side more effectively, but rather, who can cause the other side to run away or otherwise quit fighting first. As the latter, I have observed that women quit fighting as soon as they take a single damaging strike and not infrequently before then.

I have seen many men fight with broken bones; I myself once won a ringfight after having my nose broken in the initial exchange. I have never seen a woman get up off the ground after being flattened or bloodied and continue fighting except when she is in training with someone she trusts not to intentionally hurt her. In fact, when a woman isn’t hurt but simply gets frightened while sparring, she tends to turn her back on the opponent and literally cringe.

So, my conclusion is that women in combat will either surrender or run like rabbits as soon as they get sufficiently frightened or their unit takes a few casualties.

This comment, in particular, amused me:

Then again, on the other hand, we have John Scalzi, against whom I can
levy no such complaint. Scalzi, unlike Ringo, Kratman, or Williamson,
doesn’t have a military background of his own. Yet I find his future
military more convincingly science-fictional than those of the aforementioned authors. Why is that?

I would think the answer is entirely obvious. Because you know nothing about war or the military and you prefer your weird non-science fantasies about old people’s orgies and men exchanging sexual favors to anything that can be reasonably extrapolated from the last 8,000 years of recorded military history.

The militaries in the science fiction world of QUANTUM MORTIS do not utilize female soldiers for the obvious reason that they are actually expected to engage in combat. The science fiction elements there involve physical augmentation, targeting-assisted weaponry, artificial intelligence, and interstellar mercenary corporations. They do not involve silly fantasies about strong, independent warrior women, which by rights should be classified as women’s erotic fiction rather than science fiction because it is quite literally anti-science.

Pro-vibrancy will eat itself

It is very, very amusing to see how those who have championed vibrancy for decades finally getting pushed out of the way by the very vibrants they championed now that the vibrants have the numbers:

Party caucuses are going on tonight in precincts across Minnesota. Caucuses are an old-fashioned civic tradition, more noted for boredom and long nights than anything else, but tonight there was some excitement at a DFL caucus in Minneapolis. A fight broke out:

A very tense night at a caucus site in Minneapolis where DFLer Mohamud Noor is challenging longtime DFL state Rep. Phyllis Kahn. The heat in one Minneapolis location resulted in police being called out. With 300 people at the Byan [sic] Coyle Center, a fight broke out and people rushed the stage. After the melee, the Minneapolis police shut down the caucus. See the video below and the live blog for more.

A lot of cultural history is packed into that paragraph. Phyllis Kahn, 76 years old, has been in the Minnesota legislature for an astonishing 42 years. A political insider for her entire adult life, she lives in one of the notorious $1 homes on Nicollet Island that were given to prominent Democrats. Mohamud Noor is a Somali, one of many thousands who have thronged to Minnesota in recent years. Until recently a state employee, he was elected to the Minneapolis school board less than two months ago.

It’s always hilarious to see whites who are of their “color-blindness” finding themselves getting booted out on their asses by the various tribal peoples they have championed with such moral superiority. In the same way that only women living in historically safe environments can afford to claim they don’t need men, only a dominant ethnic majority can claim to be “color-blind”.

Once those “color-blind” individuals are outnumbered and getting beaten up for being out-group, they tend to belatedly discover their tribal identity that they’ve denied for so long. That’s why the post-racialists are so absurd; one has to wonder if they’ve ever had a frank conversation with someone who isn’t an English-speaking American of Western European descent.

The Left always devours itself. We’re seeing it in the New York Times. We’re seeing it in Minnesota politics. We’re seeing it on Wikipedia. We’ll see it in the SFWA now that the Right has been effectively purged. Because, as John C. Wright has observed, the heart of darkness is relentless.

A statue for Scalzi?

This is getting absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I realize that John Scalzi is the doyenne of Pink SF with ~50 kazillion readers and he has won a Participation Hugo and all, but a statue? Seriously?

The sculptor did get the whole shambling thing right, though. And he did a nice job of capturing the whole sexyrapey gamma male vibe. All it needs is that notorious quote.

“I’m a rapist. I’m one of those men who likes to force myself on
women without their consent or desire and then batter them sexually.”
– John Scalzi

The decline of the Grey Lady

This New York Observer article doesn’t tell us anything new. We all know the New York Times editorial page is terrible. But it does help explain why:

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times.

The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in the words of one current Times reporter….

“I think the editorials are viewed by most reporters as largely
irrelevant, and there’s not a lot of respect for the editorial page. The
editorials are dull, and that’s a cardinal sin. They aren’t getting any
less dull. As for the columnists, Friedman is the worst. He hasn’t had
an original thought in 20 years; he’s an embarrassment. He’s perceived
as an idiot who has been wrong about every major issue for 20 years,
from favoring the invasion of Iraq to the notion that green energy is
the most important topic in the world even as the financial markets were
imploding. Then there’s Maureen Dowd, who has been writing the same
column since George H. W. Bush was president.”

Yet another former Times writer concurred. “Andy [Rosenthal] is a wrecking
ball, a lot like his father but without the gravitas. What strikes me
about the editorial and op-ed pages is that they have become
relentlessly grim. With very few exceptions, there’s almost nothing
light-hearted or whimsical or sprightly about them, nothing to gladden
the soul.

Of course, it probably doesn’t help that the paper has largely converted itself into one massive editorial page. A recent study showed that only one in six front page articles could be considered proper news, the rest were all editorials cloaked in a newsy disguise.

The thing is, newspapers are absolutely allergic to permitting anyone who isn’t a doctrinaire left-liberal get any exposure, so they sentence themselves to grim and tedious left-wing dogma. It is little surprise that even liberals tend to find it less than scintillating.

Civilization is not guaranteed

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of the thin and fraying thread that is the survival of Western civilization:

Had the Greeks lost at Salamis, Western civilization might easily have been strangled in its adolescence. Had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union, the European democracies would have probably remained overwhelmed. And had the Japanese just sidestepped the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, as they gobbled up the orphaned Pacific colonies of a defunct Western Europe, the Pacific World as we know it now might be a far different, far darker place.

I am not engaging in pop counterfactual history, as much as reminding us of how thin the thread of civilization sometimes hangs, both in its beginning and full maturity. Something analogous is happening currently in the 21st-century West. But the old alarmist scenarios — a nuclear exchange, global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps, a new lethal AIDS-like virus — should not be our worry.

Rather our way of life is changing not with a bang, but with a whimper, insidiously and self-inflicted, rather than abruptly and from foreign stimuli. Most of the problem is cultural. Unfortunately it was predicted by a host of pessimistic anti-democratic philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Spengler. I’ve always hoped that these gloom-and-doomers were wrong about the Western paradigm, but some days it becomes harder.

The problem is cultural, but not in the sense that most people mean it. Western civilization is Christian and European. There are other civilizations, to be sure, some of which predate Western civilization, but no one who has studied the history of Chinese and Japanese civilization is under any illusions that life under global Han domination is likely to resemble the world when the sun never set on the British Empire. The fact that Western civilization was less than perfect does not mean that its replacement, whether it be by pagan savages, sterile seculars, or one of its old rivals, will not be considerably worse by every objective measure.

Societies are seldom wiped out by conquest, at least, not until they have been sufficiently enervated by their own failure of confidence in their foundational principles. Western civilization cannot survive either the abandonment of Christianity or the importation of non-European peoples. The geography will remain, but neither the culture nor the values will survive. Just as we wonder at how the Romans declined, future generations will read about us and marvel at how the most powerful civilization in human history murdered its children and welcomed their replacements with open arms.

Representative democracy is already effectively dead. Christianity will survive, but probably not in its culturally dominant form. The European subspecies will survive, but in a smaller, more concentrated, and more tribal form that will likely transform into a larger and more lethal variant of the Jewish diaspora. Warlords have always arisen amidst the ashes of empires and I see no reason to doubt the same phenomenon will occur when the collapse of the American empire brings an end to the 60-year Pax Americana.