Category: Uncategorized

Excellence in police marksmanship

Mike Williamson observes that the collateral damage produced by the sharpshooters in the NYPD make Graven Tower look downright solicitous by comparison:

As long as you ignore the fact that the shooting victims were innocent bystanders, hitting two people with three shots represents unusual excellence in marksmanship for the NYPD, matching another recent incident in which skilled NYPD officers were able to hit their target and nine bystanders with only 16 bullets. Overall the NYPD usually requires about 331 rounds to hit 54 targets, of which 14 will be innocent bystanders, 24 will be dogs, and 16 will be people the NYPD was actually aiming at. Statistically, if you aren’t a dog, it is slightly more dangerous to be the person the NYPD was shooting at than a bystander (16 people out of 331 shots for intended targets for a 4.8% hit rate vs. 14 people out of 331 shots for bystanders, a 4.2% hit rate.) NYPD has a better success rate for other weapons, and certain factors, like shooting unarmed people in the back, tend to increase hit rates.

When NYPD officers fire 331 shots, and hit 16 targeted people, 24 dogs, but also 14 bystanders, there is a problem.

If the gun control advocates were truly serious about wanting to reduce the amount of unnecessary harm caused by firearms, they’d be campaigning to disarm the police, not the American people.

I suppose we can be grateful that the NYPD doesn’t have rocket-armed aerovars or missile-armed drones at their disposal… uh, oh, wait a minute.

Absolute summary

The New American Aristocracy
Perhaps as a result of the Italian and German experiences, dictatorships
have been the great fear of democracies for the last six decades.
Aristocracy sounds like something out of the 18th century; a legally
privileged class of people sounds positively medieval to the modern ear.
And yet, increasingly, that is exactly what we are seeing develop in
21st century America.

 The Scientists Who Cried Wolf
It’s freezing outside. Hundreds of historic low temperatures have been
set in recent weeks around the country. Every single computer model
that predicted the globe would be warmer over the last decade has been
shown to be wrong. And now this.

“Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record large extent for a second
straight year, baffling scientists seeking to understand why this ice
is expanding rather than shrinking in a warming world. On Saturday, the
ice extent reached 19.51 million square kilometers, according to data
posted on the National Snow and Ice Data Center Web site. That number
bested record high levels set earlier this month and in 2012 (of 19.48
million square kilometers). Records date back to October 1978.”

At this rate, instead of mourning the drowning polar bears, we’re
going to find ourselves fleeing for our lives from rampaging packs of
them.

Lies, Damned Lies, and the Left
 If you happen to notice a no-guns sticker at a place of business, be
sure to ask if it is actually the policy of the business or not before
assuming it is there legitimately. Because it is entirely possible that
the business’s owner didn’t put it there.

Racism in a Post-Racial Society
One of the interesting things about living in Europe is the vast gulf
between the way Europeans actually behave and the way most Americans
believe they do. As a general rule, Americans tend to think of Europe as a little more than a continental socialist camp, which either inspires their admiration or their
pity depending upon whether they are liberal or conservative. Liberals,
in particular, seem to regard Europe as some sort of New York City on
steroids where all the things for which they labor so passionately, like
gun control, abortion, racial equality and gay marriage, are embraced
as a matter of course.

These assumptions tend to be vastly amusing to anyone who has actually spent time living among Europeans.

And now it gets interesting

Nelson Mandela is dead at 95. It should be interesting to see how long his vision of a post-racial South Africa will survive him or if the Kill-the-Boer crowd will consider itself unleashed.

We are not fooled

Larry Correia totally feigns putting on a supportive face while pretending to play down the fact that Steve and I actually managed to OUTGUN the master Monster Hunter. But we are not fooled. We all know this has lit a fire burning deep within the man, the green-hot flames of fury fed by envy, disbelief, and outrage:

I know the author online. I’ve participated in many email chains with
him, Sarah, Mike, and Tom. I’ve got a copy, but I’ve not had a chance to
read it yet. I wanted to read the review copy, but I’ve got a deadline
and I’ve been slammed. I’ve heard good things about it though…. I offend people on the internet for being an unabashed right winger. Vox sends them into hyperbolic rage spirals. He is their devil. They hate him more than Scott Card or George Bush, so that is saying something. Anybody who has caused that many panty twists is deserving of royalties just for the entertainment value of watching the literati have come aparts. 

Needless to say, I’ll be watching my six with extra caution given the likelihood that Larry will be sending magic kanji-enhanced Shadow Guard after us. Now, where did I put that Benelli-Mossberg Area Suppression Expediter-5K? One of those city block-sweepers could come in handy right about now.

In truth, it wouldn’t be entirely unfair to describe Quantum Mortis as Alien Hunters Intergalactic in Space. We had a nice little SF murder mystery going, but after reading MHI and the Grimnoire Chronicles, I realized that it had two major flaws.

  1. Too few bodies.
  2. Too small guns.

That is how Graven Tower received a transfer from the Trans Paradis Police Department to the Military Crimes Investigative Division. My reasoning was that the police can only get away with so much collateral damage before the public refuses to put up with it. But the military, well, all they have to do is cry “planetary security” and they can get away with damn near anything.

The state of independent publishing

One-quarter of the top 100 Amazon sellers are independently published:

As many as a quarter of the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com are from indie publishers, according to data revealed at a trade presentation by the retailer. A chart detailing the 25 top-selling indie titles in 2012 was passed on by an audience member via Twitter. Though the term indie is broad, covering everything from self-published authors to publishing houses that fall outside the big six, the news has been interpreted as a victory for the go-it-alone author. However in the US the term has come to mean self-published. A spokeswoman for Amazon.com said: “This figure is referring to Kindle books on Amazon.com in 2012, with ‘indie’ meaning books self-published via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). So a quarter of the top 100 bestselling Kindle books on Amazon.com in 2012 were self-published via KDP.”

Amazon is playing a little fast and loose with the term “indie” here. KDP does not require self-publishing; Marcher Lord has multiple Kindle Select titles that are not self-published. I suspect Amazon doesn’t want to rub it in the major publisher’s faces that they are already as much a super-publisher as a retail channel. Indie quite clearly means independent publishers AND self- publishers.

My experience with the both world of conventional mainstream publishing as well as indie ebook publishing may be useful here.  I looked up my old reports from various publishers, which happens to include a few books that were not mine, and found the following numbers for conventionally published books distributed through the the traditional bookstores:

SS1: 12,348
SS2: 43,000
SS3: 8,000
IN1: 4,790
IN2: 3,815
IN3: 3,441
IN4: 2,796

Books in bold are mine. The others are not mine, but the numbers are hard. Now, one year ago today, I published A Throne of Bones with Marcher Lord Hinterlands. In terms of sales, it is basically a pure ebook and it isn’t available in any bookstore.

ATOB: 1,989

Here is where it gets interesting.  Let’s assume, for the simplicity’s sake, that the three novellas and SE are a single ebook called SE+.

SE+ PAID: 2,163
SE+ FREE: 21,681

So, even as a relative nobody, who is primarily known for being hated within the genre, and lacking a single book for sale on a bookshelf anywhere, I am still able to sell nearly as many copies of a book in a single year as a well-established minor conventional publisher managed to sell through traditional channels in a book’s lifetime.  Since IN1 is one of my books, that indicates that I’m only able to sell about half as many books without conventional distribution, but the higher royalty rate balances that out. Conventional publishing will do literally nothing for me unless it is one of the six majors.

That being said, it is clear that even from my non-bestselling experience, the major publishers can still push more books than the same writer can reasonably expect to sell on his own. But since they pay lower royalties, which The Author’s Guild describes as 15% of list on hardcovers and 25% of revenue on ebooks, a major publisher still has to sell twice as many copies just to keep pace with the independent revenues.

But that is far from the only consideration. Pocket signed me to write six books. I only wrote four of them and they only published three of them. Even if you sign a book contract with one of the six major publishers, even if you write and deliver the book, even if the book is edited, accepted, and the second half of the advance is paid, there is still no guarantee that the book will ever be published. Now, it’s not a bad gig, being paid to not write books, but it’s hard to really build on your success that way.

To top it all off, the ability to give ebooks away allows me to reach 10x more readers. I previously worked out that one out of every five free SE+ readers will subsequently buy ATOB. And, most importantly, the primary limiting factor, the publisher’s print run, no longer applies. I could have sold considerably more copies of The War in Heaven and The World in Shadow had they not been limited by the print run; both books sold through their respective print runs, which caused the vice-president to call me up, congratulate me, and promptly signed me to two more books… neither of which were either completed or published due to organizational changes that had nothing to do with me. Hence the absence of Stalking the Beast from my literary oeuvre

Here is how I see the pros and cons of independent publishing:

Pros: higher royalties, no print runs, no 6-18 months publishing delays, guaranteed publication, no gatekeeping, total freedom.

Cons: lower sales numbers, no books in bookstores, no marketing, no advances, no professional validation, no free editing and cover art.

Since print runs and publisher reorgs have been the bane of my publishing history, and since I insist on being heavily involved with my covers, there simply isn’t any doubt that indie publishing is my preference. If, on the other hand, all you’re really looking for is professional validation, then you probably won’t be happy with publishing independently.

I tend to suspect that Hugh Howey has demonstrated the future of the industry for the successful writer, which is to publish the ebooks independently and publish print books through a mainstream publisher.  However, it will be very difficult for established writers to swing this and an independent probably has to sell at least 100k ebooks per year before the major publishers will be seriously interested in that sort of arrangement.

More and more diversity

If 50 million Mexican immigrants are good for the economy, imagine how much better 100 million Chinese immigrants would be. We’ll all live like kings!

U.S. immigration officials are considering a proposal from Chinese
investors to create a multibillion-dollar development in New York’s
Catskills called “China City” — raising concerns among critics about
the potential cost to U.S. taxpayers and, according to one analyst, the
possibility it could be a “stalking horse” for the Beijing government.

A spokesman from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told
FoxNews.com that the proposal for Thompson, N.Y., has not been approved
but is under consideration.

The mysterious proposed development appears to be a step beyond the
types of ethnic enclaves scattered throughout U.S. cities, like the
Chinatown sections of New York City or San Francisco. The 600-acre
“China City of America” is located far outside New York City in upstate
New York’s wetlands and is a meticulously planned project, calling for
family housing, a college and student residences, among other
structures.

I have a better idea. Let’s just give them New York City along with all of its residents, most of whom are avid supporters of mass immigration. Then move all the post-1965 immigrants into New York state.  All of the promised economic benefits with none of the social costs.

How can those who have repeatedly claimed that the magic of geographical relocation transforms serfs and savages into true blue Constitution-loving Americans possibly object to establishing large Chinese cities in their midst? And how could anyone suspect that the new Chinese-Americans would harbor any loyalties to Beijing? They’re here for the opportunity, after all!  They love America!

The outdated Neo-Darwinists

As usual, I appear to be well in advance of the scientists. Isn’t it simply astonishing that a non-scientist can so readily and reliably predict the inaccuracy and unreliability of the current scientific consensus? How is that even theoretically possible? How can ignorance trump credentials and actual science education? And yet….

In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.

The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found.

The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years. It is possible, for example, that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA. Scientists hope that further studies of extremely ancient human DNA will clarify the mystery.

There isn’t a mystery here. The TENS true believers keep thinking that genetics will color in the lines of their rudimentary evolution-based models, but instead, the science keeps breaking their lines. All of the conceptual models are wrong. Pretty much all of the carefully calculated timelines are wrong. Evolution by natural selection is a red herring of a theory that was developed at a time when the scientific tools were crude and largely unscientific. So, it should be absolutely no surprise that the improved data being provided by advancements in genetic science is repeatedly overturning the conclusions that were previously reached.

““This would not have been possible even a year ago,” said Juan Luis
Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a
co-author of the paper. Finding such ancient human DNA was a major advance, said David Reich, a
geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the
research. “That’s an amazing, game-changing thing,” he said.”

The game will change, but it will take time. I am aware that most scientists are still holding firmly to the natural selection model. This, too, is as expected, as per Kuhn. We’ll have to wait until all the Dawkinses and Myerses die off before geneticists with a sufficiently open mind can throw out the theory altogether. As it happens, they’re already beginning to throw out Mr. Dawkins’s signature concept:

Mendel didn’t expose the physical gene, of course (that would come a
century later), but the conceptual gene. And this conceptual gene,
revealed in the tables and calculations of this math-friendly monk,
seemed an agent of mathematical neatness. Mendel’s thousands of
crossings showed that the traits he studied — smooth skin versus
wrinkled, for instance, or purple flower versus white — appeared or
disappeared in consistent ratios dictated by clear mathematical
formulas. Inheritance appeared to work like algebra. Anything so
math-friendly had to be driven by discrete integers.
It was beautiful work. Yet when Mendel first published his findings in 1866, just seven years after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,
no one noticed. Starting in 1900, however, biologists rediscovering his
work began to see that these units of heredity he’d discovered — dubbed
genes in 1909 — filled a crucial gap in Darwin’s theory of evolution. This recognition was the Holy Shit! moment that launched genetics’ Holy Shit! century. It seemed to explain everything. And it saved Darwin.

Darwin had legitimised evolution by proposing for it a viable
mechanism — natural selection, in which organisms with the most
favourable traits survive and multiply at higher rates than do others.
But he could not explain what created or altered traits. Mendel could. Genes created traits, and both would spread through a
population if a gene created a trait that survived selection….

These days, Dawkins makes the news so often for buffoonery that some might wonder how he ever became so celebrated. The Selfish Gene
is how. To read this book is to be amazed, entertained, transported.
For instance, when Dawkins describes how life might have begun — how a
randomly generated strand of chemicals pulled from the ether could
happen to become a ‘replicator’, a little machine that starts to build
other strands like itself, and then generates organisms to carry it — he
creates one of the most thrilling stretches of explanatory writing ever
penned. It’s breathtaking.

Dawkins assembles genetics’ dry materials and abstract maths into a
rich but orderly landscape through which he guides you with grace,
charm, urbanity, and humour. He replicates in prose the process he
describes. He gives agency to chemical chains, logic to confounding
behaviour. He takes an impossibly complex idea and makes it almost
impossible to misunderstand. He reveals the gene as not just the centre
of the cell but the centre of all life, agency, and behaviour. By the
time you’ve finished his book, or well before that, Dawkins has made of
the tiny gene — this replicator, this strip of chemicals little more
than an abstraction — a huge, relentlessly turning gearwheel of steel,
its teeth driving smaller cogs to make all of life happen. It’s a
gorgeous argument. Along with its beauty and other advantageous traits,
it is amenable to maths and, at its core, wonderfully simple.

Unfortunately, say Wray, West-Eberhard and others, it’s wrong.

The best part of all this is that Dawkins clearly knows it’s wrong too. Not that he’s going to admit it, though, not yet.

I phoned Richard Dawkins to see what he thought of all this. Did
genes follow rather than lead? I asked him specifically about whether
processes such as gene accommodation might lead instead. Then he did
something so slick and wonderful I didn’t quite realise what he’d done
till after we hung up: he dismissed genetic accommodation… by
accommodating it. Specifically, he said that genetic accommodation
doesn’t really change anything, because since the gene ends up locking
in the change and carrying it forward, it all comes back to the gene
anyway.

‘This doesn’t modify the gene-centric model at all,’ he said. ‘The
gene-centric model is all about the gene being the unit in the hierarchy
of life that is selected. That remains the gene.’

‘He’s backfilling,’ said West-Eberhard. ‘He and others have long been
arguing for the primacy of an individual gene that creates a trait that
either survives or doesn’t.’

They backtest and they backfill. That’s due to the crumbling state of TENS. They’re still clinging to natural selection, of course. But the TENS model is in crisis and it will collapse soon enough. It is even beginning to look as if we may get to see it happen in our lifetimes. Gene expression is more compatible with Intelligent Design than with TENS. We are not evolved, we are created. DNA is our C++ equivalent, and the womb is our compiler. Compile it differently, get different results. This is not New Age mumbo jumbo, but a scientific hypothesis that will be testable once we understand it well enough to become proficient in programming it ourselves.

New Fighter Verse CD

Jamsco and company have a new Fighter Verse CD out. The video below is not exactly what I would call my style of music, but then, I am given to understand that not everyone listens primarily to techno-industrial these days. The CD includes music from six song writers and thirty-seven musicians in various styles including capella, bluegrass, folk, reggae, jazz, Brazilian and one cowboy song.

Strangely enough, neither Psykosonik nor My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult were invited to contribute. A little hurt, I am.

“The rare trick”

Jonathan Moeller, Pulp Writer, reviews both Quantum Mortis books:

Short review: Murder mystery with rayguns IN SPACE!

Longer review: Both works are set in the distant future, and center around one Graven Tower…. It has been interesting watching SF wrestle with the question of the ongoing IT revolution of the last few decades, especially since society as a whole has not yet figured out how to deal with the Internet. If you read older science fiction, the computers of the future were supposed to be the computer from STAR TREK, Wintermute, and Tron-style virtual reality. No one anticipated the banal reality of YouTube, Hulu, Internet pornography, and people Instagramming pictures of their breakfast toast. All of a sudden, science fiction novels have to wrestle with a future containing smartphones and the Internet, and this book does a good job of grafting the IT revolution onto a space-opera framework.

Of course, the book isn’t all deep thoughts – there are a lot of battles with particle weapons, lasers, missiles, more particle weapons, and flying cars. Graven uses a lot of guns – the book achieves the rare trick of writing gun porn about guns that do not actually exist. It is an interesting look at the IT-augmented warfare of the future (or the present, really), when attacking the enemy’s computer systems is just as effective, if not more so, as attacking his troops and food supplies.

Read the whole review there. Jonathan always has an intelligent take on things and usually somehow manages to observe an aspect of the novel that even the writer doesn’t realize is there until it is pointed out to him.

Also, for those who are interested, I’ve started a Quantum Mortis wiki to help Steve and I keep track of who is who and what is what. If you feel like pitching in and contributing to it, please feel free to do so. I’m also throwing together a Traveller-style sector map that I expect to post there sometime next week.

On the translation front, there are now Finnish (2), French (2), Bahasa Indonesia, and Latin works in progress. So, if you’re a native speaker of some other non-English language and you’re interested in receiving a bigger revenue share than Simon & Schuster used to provide to Dan Brown and me at the turn of the century, shoot me an email. I’m particularly interested finding translators for Deutsch, Schwyzerdütsch, and Italiano.

He who shows up, wins

A Catholic priest mourns the corruption and decline of the Catholic family in reflecting how his parishioners have contracepted their parochial school out of existence:

A stranger came into the sacristy after Sunday Mass. In an incriminating huff he said, “I have been away from the area for fifteen years; where are the people? And now you are tearing down the school? I went there as a kid.”

I put my hands up to quiet him from further talking and I calmly said, “Let me ask you a question: How many kids did you have?” He said, “Two.” Then I said, “So did everyone else. When you only have two kids per family there is no growth.” His demeanor changed, and then he dropped his head and said, “And they aren’t even going to Mass anymore.”

I never thought I would be asking that question, but since I had to close our parish school, I’ve grown bolder and I started to ask that question more often. When I came to my parish five years ago, the school was on its proverbial “last legs.” In its last two years we did everything we could to recruit more students, but eventually I had to face the fact that after 103 years of education the school was no longer viable.

In one of the pre-closure brain-storming sessions with teachers, I was asked what to do to get more students. I replied, “Well, I know what to do, but it takes seven years.” The older teachers laughed, but the others needed me to state the obvious to the oblivious, viz. we need more babies….

I have modestly preached against contraception and sterilization, but
for many of my parishioners it is too late. Most of them are done with
raising more children. They have had their two kids twenty, thirty,
forty years ago and some women don’t want to hear about the Culture of
Death. They decide to go to other parishes where the pastor doesn’t
prick their consciences.

I am reminded of a diocesan official in his talk to us young pro-life,
pro-family priests twenty years ago. He said, “Yes, you can preach
against abortion and contraception, but remember, you have to put a roof
over your churches.” Now, our diocese is closing and merging these same
parishes, but you know what—they all have good roofs.

Pastors, if the demographic winter or bomb seems someone else’s
problem, try this at your parish as I recently did at mine. I took the
last ten burials and printed out their obituaries. At Sts. Peter and
Paul Cemetery we had six men and four women with an average age of 80
years. With the ten, I counted the number of siblings for a total of 45
and divided by 10 which came to 4.5 children per family. Then I counted
the ten’s children and divided by ten. The next generation had 28 kids
which I divided by ten and came to 2.8 per family. I then moved on to
the third generation, the grandchildren. These ten deceased had 48
grandchildren from their 28 children. When dividing these numbers, I
came to a figure of 1.714 per family. The national average number of children per household is 1.91; while the replacement level is 2.1 children per family.

I don’t claim to have answers on how to turn around a dying parish or
diocese. In fact, I am more at a loss as to what to say than ever
before. To defend the Church’s teaching against contraception and
sterilization is like going back to ancient Rome and warning them about
the dangers of indoor lead plumbing. No matter what you would say their
only response back would come in various levels of volume, “But it’s
indoor plumbing!” In other words, no matter the real threat to one’s
physical health from contraception and sterilization, the immediate
perceived benefits outweigh the moral and physical downside.

I’m not anti-contraception myself, but I am against the short-sightedness of small families.The Jews have it right and three is the bare minimum that any Christian couple should have, assuming they can have children. I understand that it is sometimes hard to see past the cost and the challenges that come with raising children, but I don’t know a single family with children who regrets the youngest. And most of the families I know, regardless of size, speak a little wistfully about how it would have been nice to have just one more.

If we’re going to win the future, our children have to show up for it.