Category: Uncategorized

Boycotting the gun grabbers

Karl Denninger follows the lead of PTR Industries, which is moving out of Connecticut, and goes them one better by announcing he will no longer do business with anyone from Connecticut:

 “The rights of the citizens of CT have been trampled
upon. The safety of its children is at best questionably improved from
the day of the tragedy that triggered the events that lead us here.
Finally, due to an improperly drafted bill, manufacturing of modern
sporting rifles in the State of CT has been effectively outlawed. With a
heavy heart but a clear mind, we have been forced to decide that our
business can no longer survive in Connecticut – the former Constitution
state.

Furthermore, we feel that our
industry as a whole will continue to be threatened so long as it remains
in a state where its elected leaders have no regard for the rights of
those who produce and manufacture its wealth. We are making a call to
all involved in our industry to leave this state, close your doors and
show our politicians the true consequences of their hasty and uninformed
actions. We encourage those in our industry to abandon this state as
its leaders have abandoned the proud heritage that forged our freedom.”

I will make a wider call. We should all boycott everyone and everything in Connecticut.

You
got CT plates on your car?  Tough crap — no hotel room for you, no
gas, no food, no nothing.  Go back where you came from.  Return to your
socialist utopia.
You claim you “didn’t do it”?  Yes you did —
you sat still for it.  You haven’t removed the clowns who did it.  You
have not done your duty as a citizen, and until you do so I will not do business with you.

Will I act on this? You bet.  In fact, I already did.

I’m all for this sort of thing. There are no shortages of egregious political offenses about which one might merely complain, but gun control laws are the line in the sand that cannot be crossed.  Everyone who understands the primary importance of gun rights and the People’s ability to defend itself against the government should follow the lead of the gun manufacturers and Mr. Denninger in refusing to do business with Connecticut and any the residents of any other state that cross that all-important line.  The Newton shootings are no justification.

Let me be perfectly clear.  It is preferable, vastly preferable, to permit drugged-up, mentally disturbed individuals to shoot up public schools every single day than to disarm the People.  Disarming the People, particularly given a regime that proclaims its right to assassinate citizens at will, would have consequences that are several orders of magnitude worse than the cumulative result of a daily Newton-style shooting.

No compromise is possible. Connecticut has gone too far. And if Connecticut is not forced to backdown, other states will follow suit and the situation will eventually spiral out of control.

I don’t have subscribers. I don’t do business with anyone from Connecticut. So, my support for the boycott is without substance. But if you do happen to live in Connecticut, I would encourage you to vote with your feet at the earliest opportunity.  Free men cannot live in the same polity as slaves and parasites who wish to enslave them.

One of The Market Ticker’s commenters said: “I like it here. I have a nice house, a good job, and I appreciate the
mild climate. I don’t want to have to pack up and move if things get
worse, which they probably will. Why should those who love liberty have
to keep fleeing?”

Because, unlike their forefathers, they are not willing to fight for it.

Abortion is slaughter

In case the advances in technology haven’t made it perfectly clear yet to the morally challenged, the case of Kermit Goswell should suffice to demonstrate to even the most avowed feminist that abortion is pure and simple murder.  Note that this link is safe, but you may wish to be careful about reading through the court documents or looking at any of the pictures, as they are downright stomach-turning.

Abortion provider Kermit Gosnell, 72, is charged with killing a woman patient and seven babies allegedly born alive, and with performing illegal, late-term abortions at his thriving inner-city clinic. Co-defendant Eileen O’Neill, 56, of Phoenixville, is charged with billing as a doctor and participating in a corrupt organization.

Eight former employees have pleaded guilty, some to third-degree murder, and have testified this month about bizarre, often-chaotic practices at the clinic.

Ashley Baldwin spoke Thursday of starting there at age 15 through a high school training program, and soon assisting with abortions and administering intravenous drugs. Baldwin, now 22, said she worked nearly 50-hour weeks, often well past midnight, when abortions were routinely performed.

No doubt this case will spark protests that Not All Abortion Clinics Are Like That as it gradually leaks into the public consciousness despite the best efforts of the media to keep it contained.  But that is akin to claiming that there was nothing wrong with Bergen-Belsen because, after all, things were worse at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Let’s make it perfectly clear.  If you are a doctor or a nurse who performs abortions, you are every bit as bad, every bit as purely evil, as the SS-Totenkopfverbänder who slaughtered people in the National Socialists’ extermination camps.  And if you are a woman who aborts her child, you are every bit as bad, every bit as disgusting, as the SS guards at those camps, who may not have bloodied their hands themselves, but were complicitcollaborated by making the killing possible.

And if you simply support the so-called “right” to legal abortion, you are no better than a card-carrying member of the National Socialist German Workers Party.  In fact, you are even worse.  For all their many flaws, the National Socialists at least had a substantive cause: the preservation of a defeated and economically devastated German nation.  Your cause is mere female convenience, rendering you even more repellant and abominable in the eyes of anyone who values human life.  Their symbol was the reversed Swastika, but yours should be a pyramid of infant skulls.

I understand you have your rationalizations and your justifications.  I am aware that you firmly believe that an unborn, or partially born, or newly born, child is either not human or is for some reason or another unworthy of the same right to life possessed by adult human beings who hate racism, support sexual equality, and voted for Barack Obama. I appreciate that you are absolutely convinced that acting to terminate the life of a genetically unique individual who is dependent upon his mother for his continued survival is no different than cutting one’s hair or trimming one’s nails.  I know you assert that because it is a woman’s body, she can do whatever she wants with it, all the various trespassing and drug and flasher laws notwithstanding. Or perhaps you have a different reason, in which case feel free to make your case for it here.

But remember this: the Nazis had their justifications too. And those justifications were considerably more soundly rooted in science, history, and logic than yours are.

I assure you, I guarantee you, that future history is going to remember feminists and everyone else who supported the 20th-21st century Holocaust of the Unborn with every bit as much disgust and horror as today’s progressives regard 18th-19th century slavers and 20th century Nazis.  The tide is already beginning to turn, as many feminists have finally realized a few of the unforeseen, but retrospectively obvious consequences of their so-called right and begun lobbying for laws against sex-screening and the free exercise of their unholy “right” for officially unapproved reasons.

So, I call on you to rethink your stance, truly rethink it, and repent. Redeem yourself by turning against this evil practice you have supported and speaking out against it. Ask for forgiveness from God and from the millions of innocents whose deaths you rationalized and even encouraged.  What is done cannot be undone, but it is never too late to turn away from evil and refuse to continue walking along its dark path.

Stop all the endless rationalizations and justifications. Just stop. They are pointless. You know, in your heart of hearts, they aren’t convincing anyone.  They aren’t even convincing you.

The perpetual motion money machine

As she is one-half of the Reinhart-Roghoff team that has done some excellent work concerning why what Alan Greenspan once called the New Economy was not, in fact, anything new or different, I’m always interested in what Carmen Reinhart has to say.  I don’t necessarily agree with her on policy prescriptions, but her diagnostic take is usually insightful. She was interviewed by Der Spiegel last week:

SPIEGEL: Ms. Reinhart, central banks around the world are
flooding the markets with cheap money in order to spur economies and
support governments. Are these institutions losing their independence?
Reinhart: No central bank will admit it is keeping rates low to
help governments out of their debt crises. But in fact they are bending
over backwards to help governments to finance their deficits. This is
nothing new in history. After World War II, there was a long phase in
which central banks were subservient to governments. It has only been
since the 1970s that they have become politically more independent. The
pendulum seems to be swinging back as a result of the financial crisis.
SPIEGEL: Is that true of the European Central Bank as well?
Reinhart: Less than for other central banks, but yes. And the crisis isn’t over yet — not in the United States and not in Europe.
SPIEGEL: But the danger of such a central bank policy is already well known: It can lead to high inflation.
Reinhart: True. But it is certainly more difficult for a central
banker to raise interest rates with a debt to gross domestic product
ratio of over 100 percent than it is when this ratio stands at 39
percent. Therefore, I believe the shift towards less independence of
monetary policy is not just a temporary change.
SPIEGEL: As a historian who knows the potential long-term
consequences very well, doesn’t such short-sighted decision-making
frighten you?
Reinhart: I am not opposing this change, I am just stating it.
You have to deal with the debt overhang one way or the other because the
high debt levels are an impediment to growth, they paralyze the
financial system and the credit process. One way to cope with this is to
write off part of the debt.
SPIEGEL: You mean some kind of haircut?
Reinhart: Yes. But we are in an environment where politicians are very reluctant to do write-offs. So what happens is that money is transferred from savers to borrowers via negative interest rates.
SPIEGEL: In other words: When the inflation rate is higher than
the interest rates paid on the markets, the debts shrink as if by magic.
The downside, though, is that this applies to the savings of normal
people.
Reinhart: The technical term for this is financial repression.
After World War II, all countries that had a big debt overhang relied on
financial repression to avoid an explicit default. After the war,
governments imposed interest rate ceilings for government bonds.
Nowadays they have more sophisticated means.

The dangerous phase of the crisis that we have now entered is that even mainstream economists who understand the debt-related nature of the problem – and recall that back in 2008-2009, the only people who recognized that it was based on debt were outsiders like Steve Keen and me – are still supporting, however unenthusiastically, the attempt of the central banks to inflate their way out of the problem, even though some of them know it isn’t going to work.

Why? Because they are desperate.  They know that the alternative is either default and a short but savage depression that will absolutely ruin most of the world’s wealthy and powerful or the collapse of the global financial system and quite likely a fair amount of the various political structures as well. So, they are hoping against hope that the central banks will be successful in inflating their way out, but if one looks at the debt statistics, it is perfectly clear that the strategy is failing because debt/GDP is still growing.

“In the EU-27 the government debt-to-GDP ratio increased from 80.0 % at
the end of 2010 to 82.5 % at the end of 2011, and in the euro area from
85.4 % to 87.3 %…. In the EU-27, total government revenue in 2011 amounted to 44.7 % of GDP
(up from 44.1 % of GDP in 2010), and expenditure to 49.1 % of GDP (down
from 50.6 % in 2010).”

That’s the savage austerity of which the European Keynesians are complaining. Tax revenues are up 0.6 percent and government spending is down 1.5 percent, but the debt/GDP went up 2.5 percent anyhow.  This is why default, and the concomitant deflation, is inevitable, no matter how much the financial powers-that-be are desperately fighting it off.

The situation is even worse in the USA and Japan, where the government debt/GDP ratios have risen to 103 percent and 230 percent.  And while we don’t know when the financial engine, increasingly clogged with debt, is going to seize up, we can be certain that sooner or later it will.  It is very unlikely that either Europe or the USA are going to be given more than 20 years to muddle along and continue piling on the debt in the manner that Japan has.

Koanic Soul reviews The Wardog’s Coin

Since we’re on the subject of SF/F and book reviews, I suppose turnabout is fair play. Koanic Soul provides the Neanderthal perspective on The Wardog’s Coin.  An excerpt:

This book contains two short stories, “Wardog’s Coin” and “Qalabi Dawn”. It’s well worth buying as an ebook. Spoilers ahead, so just buy it if you trust me.

Overall, the story was great and stayed with me. The wargaming bones of
the battle make it stick in memory with lucid clarity. The elven combat
was awesome, the relative combat strengths of the various troops was
clear, the warrior morale of the humans was realistic and rousing….

There is only one word for Qalabi Dawn – epic. This is Vox at his
greatest. Writing alien demon-cat characters. What does this say about
him? Figure it out for yourself.

I understand what he is saying about the order of the two stories, and perhaps he’s right, but my thought was that as the title piece, The Wardog’s Coin was akin to the A-side of a single and therefore had to be first.  Also, I guessed that Qalabi Dawn would tend to come off as a little out there, so I figured it would be wise to put the more accessible story first.

I personally tend to like Qalabi better, but I’m not surprised that many, if not most of the readers see it otherwise. And I’m pleased that the perspective of the demonspawn comes across as a distinctly alien one, as that was my goal from the start.

With regards to what Koanic describes as a cliche, I should probably mention that it is a tribute to another author I happen to hold in some regard.  If you haven’t noticed, all of my books end that way.

Book review: Terms of Enlistment

TERMS OF ENLISTMENT
Marko Kloos
Rating: 7 of 10 

Terms of Enlistment is a military sci-fi novel that will, like John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, be compared by many to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.  It is the self-published debut novel from Marko Kloos, and it has justifiably been a surprise hit on Amazon, where it has been a top bestseller in science fiction as well as a top 100 seller overall.

Why? Well, there are no shortage of writers, (myself included), editors, and publishers, who would very much like to know the answer to that.

One possibility is that unlike the Heinlein novel, Terms of Enlistment is set in a dystopic future America where the cities are crowded, dirty ghettos, the space colonies are sparsely populated, far away, and nearly impossible to reach, and a permanent state of semi-war exists with the future Soviet Union. Kloos is very in touch with the zeitgeist in this regard; his protagonist doesn’t join the military out of a desire for glory or a sense of patriotism, but merely due to the prospect of some solid meals even if he fails the enlistment process.

Another is that Kloos hits the ideological sweet spot, writing about war and guns in the sort of loving, knowledgeable detail that appeals to readers on the right, while never wavering from the equalitarian ideals that are sacrosanct to readers on the left. Beyond the necessary structural assumptions, however, he doesn’t appear to be interested in taking sides or going off on tangents to deliver mini-sermons on patriotic virtue like Heinlein or the supreme importance of tolerance like Scalzi. Instead, he stays focused on his story and his characters, much to the benefit of them and the reader.  If none of the characters are particularly deep, neither are they cardboard characters set up to be either the good guy or the bad guy for purposes of Teaching An Important Lesson.

For all the dystopian grime of the setting and the attention to detail devoted to the weaponry, Kloos abides by what has become the SF-MIL trope of a sex-neutral military in which men and women enlist, shower, fight, and bunk together.  That this is entirely absurd is beside the point and in no way detracts from the story, which in fact depends quite heavily upon it.  (Let’s face it, if you’re going to feature giant missile-resistant aliens, also having female Medal of Honor winners who can best any man in hand-to-hand combat is hardly going to destroy the reader’s suspension of disbelief.)  I am arguably one of the foremost critics of the Warrior Woman trope in SF/F, and I barely even noticed it.  With one important and necessary exception, the nominal sex of the soldiers in the book is almost entirely irrelevant.

And that brings us to the third, and perhaps the most powerful element of Terms of Enlistment, the element which is actually hinted at in the title. Underneath the science fiction and the military trappings, the novel is actually a romance novel about a first love that lasts. I don’t say this to denigrate the book, but to praise it, as Kloos weaves the elements together so seamlessly that the sheer impossibilities of the romance no more trouble the reader than the ludicrous machinations of Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. Having been rejected by the fading gatekeepers of SF/F and finding success through making his own way, it may be that Kloos has shown a way out of science fiction’s present ideological morass, in offering readers a solid futuristic love story with no shortage of action, in producing a book with strong appeal to both men and women, to both SF’s left and right.

Terms of Enlistment is a very readable debut novel that is better than the sum of its parts because those parts fit so well together. It is also a resounding rebuke to the world of professional publishing and its procurement system. One wishes Kloos continued success and hopes that as he is embraced by that world, as he inevitably will be, he does not devolve into yet another preachy progressive SF writer.

Story: 3.5 of 5. It’s simple. It’s straightforward. It’s sufficiently interesting and compelling to hold the reader’s attention throughout.  It is essentially divided into two parts; I tended to find the first part more interesting than the second, but at no point did I lose interest in finding out what happened next. There are certainly aspects to the plot that would tend to strain credulity should one wish to dwell on them, but this isn’t a novel to make one think, it is one to simply kick back and read through in a sitting or three.

Style: 3 of 5. It’s simple. It’s straightforward. If there are no fireworks, there are no real clunkers either. The best thing about Kloos’s writing style is that it does its job and doesn’t get in the way of the story.

Characters: 3 of 5. They are likable and one stays interested in their fates, but they are not what one would call either deep or developed.  We never understand why Grayson, the protagonist, is so hung up on his Navy girl that he is willing to swap services and follow her into space. We never learn why she stays, as far as we know, faithful to him and isn’t involved with two or three of the other officers on her ship. We know they care about each other, what we really never find out is why.

Creativity: 3 of 5. There actually isn’t much in the way of creativity here, but the dystopic world is presented so competently, so vividly, that I simply couldn’t reasonably claim that it is below average in any way. Have we seen it before? Of course, hence the comparisons to Starship Troopers and Old Man’s War. But the familiarity with books we enjoyed when we were younger is part of the book’s appeal; it is not always necessary to reinvent the wheel.  And if one cannot praise an author who doesn’t do something he has no need to do, neither can one criticize him.

Text sample: All of my roommates have chevrons on their collars. Two of them are E-2s, with single chevrons, and the third is an E-3, a Private First Class, a chevron with a rocker underneath. People don’t usually make E-2 right out of Basic unless they were top flight in their training battalion like Halley, and E-3 promotions don’t ever happen before a year of active service.
“Am I the only new guy in this squad?” I ask.
“Yep,” one of them confirms. “Our platoon got four this cycle, I think, including you. They trickle the new guys in like that, so you can learn on the job. Grayson, is it?”
“Yeah.”
The soldier across the table from me extends his hand, and I shake it.
“I’m Baker. The cheating fuck over there trying to look at my cards is Priest, and the one with the ponytail is Hansen.”
I nod at each of them in turn.
“You’re in luck, Grayson. You’re in the squad with the best squad leader in the entire battalion.”
“In the entire brigade,” Hansen corrects. She has almond-shaped eyes and very white and even teeth, evidence of better dental care than you can get anywhere within ten miles of a Public Residence Cluster.
“Oh, yeah? What’s his name?”
“Her name.” Priest gives up his attempt to sneak a peek at Baker’s cards, and leans back in his chair. “Staff Sergeant Fallon. She used to be a First Sergeant, but they busted her down for striking an officer.”
“I thought they kicked you out of the service for hitting a superior,” I say, smelling a military fish tale.
“Oh, they do,” Hansen says. “That’s unless you’re a Medal of Honor winner. They don’t get rid of certified heroes. It would be bad PR.”
“Medal of Honor?” I ask, and the disbelief in my face makes my three roommates grin with delight. “As in, that blue ribbon with the white stars that goes on top of all the other ribbons?”
“That’s the one. She got it when the NAC did that excursion into mainland China a few years back, at the Battle of Dalian. You get the Medal, you can ask for any assignment anywhere in the Service, and she went right back to her old unit once she was out of the hospital.”
“That’s pretty wild. Is she a complete hard-ass?”
“Not at all. She’s got no patience for slackers, but as long as you pull your weight and don’t look like you’re clueless, she’s hands-off.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I say. “I was expecting…hell, I have no idea what I was expecting, actually.”
“You were expecting some sort of penal colony,” Baker says amicably. “You thought you pulled the shittiest card in the deck when they told you that you’re going TA, right?”
There’s no point denying it, so I nod.
“That’s what everyone thinks at first. We all did. But this is a good outfit. Our sergeants know their shit, and our officers mostly leave us alone. We get the job done, and we look after each other. I’ve been TA for almost two years, and I wouldn’t take a garrison post on a colony if you paid me double.”
The others at the table nod in agreement.
I’m still disappointed about not going into space, and I have no idea whether I’ll feel the same way about the TA in two years. For better or for worse, however, this place will be my home until my service time is up, so I decide that I might as well make the best of it.
“You play cards, Grayson?” Hansen asks.
“Sure,” I say, and pull my chair up to the table.

The cancer in SF/F, part I

Adam Roberts asks who owns the political soul of science fiction

I make no apologies for writing science fiction.
I love the genre with a deep and geeky love. Becoming professor of
19th-century literature at the University of London has done nothing to
diminish my capacity for that mode of enthusiasm that fans call “squee”.

Being
a literature professor means, in effect, the government pays me to read
books; and, taking my job seriously, I read a lot, in and out of genre.
I think the novel is most alive today as a literature of the fantastic:
at their worst, SF, fantasy and magic realist novels can be very bad;
while at their best, they’re by far the most exciting kinds of writing
being published.

But here’s the thing: my genre divides
politically in a manner unlike others. Writers of historical or crime
fiction might be rightwing or leftwing, but few would attempt to define
those genres as intrinsically left- or right-leaning. SF is different:
the genre defines itself according to two diametrically opposed
ideological stances.

Roberts didn’t have to tell us which side he is on: his use of the word “squee” was all that was necessary to let us know that he was of the enscalzied left wing of science fiction.  But his question is more interesting than it might first appear, because although the answer is obvious to anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention to the world of professional, published science fiction over the last 20 years, there is more to it than simply looking at who is getting published, who is winning awards, and who has been running SFWA for the last decade.

There is no question who presently owns what would be best termed “the trappings” of science fiction.  It is the scalzied manboobs, the cisgendered queers, the obese cat collectors, the Red Diaper socialists, the female imperativists, and the professional race whiners who presently dominate science fiction, not because they have more talent to offer than those on the right, but due to a) science fiction’s longtime affiliation with the secular humanist, sciencistic left and b) the long march through the publishing institutions that has gradually and methodically gone about excluding every editor and author even remotely suspected of harboring views that have been, or may be, deemed ideologically undesirable.

The long march isn’t the product of my imagination. I first became aware of it when Pocket Books, to their credit, thought it would be a good idea to assign an editor who had at least a modicum of religious awareness to my Eternal Warriors novels, but couldn’t find a single religious individual in house.  They finally had to hire an external editor, a Jewish woman, because the organization’s collective theological knowledge amounted to zero.

So much for the heirs of the Western intellectual tradition; the reviewer at Black Gate who reviewed Summa Elvetica genuinely believed that the argument presented therein was a real one written by Thomas Aquinas.  However, having read the Summa Theologica, I can assure everyone that while the Angelic Doctor contemplated many issues, the question of whether elves have souls naturally united to them or not was not one of them.

One need only look at the increasingly mediocre works that have been nominated for, and in some cases even won, science fiction’s highest prizes to realize that the genre is dominated by the ideological left and is in severe decline from both the literary and revenue perspectives.  When six of the top 10-selling SF books in 2012 are either ripped off from an Xbox game or were first published more than a decade ago, it shouldn’t be difficult to observe that there is a very serious problem with the science fiction that is presently being published.

Now, some will wish to dismiss my observations as the embittered rantings of a fourth-rate fantasy author, even though the sales of one of my books, at around 41,000, would have put me at number three on the 2012 list of bestsellers.  But even if one dismisses me, the problem is that I am far from the only former Asimov and Analog subscriber who no longer bothers to even pirate, let alone buy, The Year’s Best Science Fiction collections because so little of it is worth reading anymore. As an SFWA member, I have a vote for the Nebula, but at least in the case of the Best Novel category, there is simply nothing for which one can credibly vote.

It is simply impossible to call any of the novels presently up for this year’s Nebula or Hugo the best novel in SF/F with a straight face. And if one of them truly does merit the description, then the genre is in even worse shape than I have observed.  It should not be controversial to suggest that it is highly unlikely that anyone from this year’s class will one day be named a Grandmaster of Science Fiction.

CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Robert Heinlein could not get published in today’s SF/F publishing environment, which has ironically turned Harlan Ellison’s concept of SF being a place for “dangerous visions” on its head. The fact that the Guardian chose to head the linked article with a picture of Iain M. Banks was particularly apt, as science fiction is today in much the same position as the unfortunate Scottish author, who recently announced that he was terminal with a cancer that had developed unbeknownst to him. (One has to respect his mordant wit; in response to the bad news he asked his longtime girlfriend if she would do him the honor of becoming his widow.) Science fiction is not only terminal, its professional community is still largely ignorant of that readily observable fact.

Science fiction is dying because it has been invaded by a parasitical and hostile ideology that has metastasized and spread throughout the genre. This ideology is opposed to science because science is weakening the assumptions on which it is founded. It is opposed to heroism because heroism is intrinsically anti-egalitarian. It is opposed to masculinity because its adherents are women and feminized gamma males. It is opposed to Western civilization because Western civilization is Christian.  It is opposed to free discourse because free discourse reveals its many incoherencies, contradictions, and complete flights of fantasy.

Roberts’s summary of the difference between left and right is accurate, but incomplete: “Heinlein’s imagined interstellar future is an environment designed to
valorise the skill sets (self-reliance, engineering competence,
willpower, bravery and manliness) that Heinlein prized. Left-leaning
Iain M Banks’s Culture novels posit a high-tech geek utopia in which the
particular skill sets, ethics and wit‑discourse of SF nerds turn out to
be the gold standard of pan-galactic multi-species civilisation.”

But it is more than that. Roberts omits to mention that feminism, equalitarianism, cultural relativism, massive central government, unrestrained sexual adventurism, and ideological strawmen are de rigueur for the science fiction of the left.  And that is when it is more than simple romance novels in space or rewritten Regency romances with a modest sprinkling of magic.

The fact that Roberts considers the genre’s greatest writers to be “Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr, Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Cadigan, Justina Robson” shows that he is speaking only of the genre’s left and also suffices to show the inferiority of the works produced by that side of the genre. With the exception of Le Guin and Sheldon, no science fiction fan would trade a single Herbert or Heinlein novel for the complete collected works of all the others… well, perhaps some of the later Heinleins.

The fate that awaits the world of professional published science fiction is that which ultimately befell the art of Socialist Realism. Because it is imposed by a small, centralized group that happened to seize the relevant power, it will collapse and fade away once the group’s power ceases to be relevant.  As it so often does, economic and technological changes have eroded the power of the gatekeeper’s, which is why we can watch the collapse of Nightshade Books and anticipate the coming closure of other publishers and imprints which are infested with the ideological cancer.

SF/F’s left-wing gatekeepers made the same error that the ABCNNBCBS cabal made when instead of simply reporting the nation’s news, it attempted to turn itself into the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party. But there will be no singular Fox News prison-raping its competitors in the case of SF/F, instead, there will be Glenn Reynold’s army of a thousand Davids, with successful independent authors like Larry Correia and Marko Kloos demonstrating to every other writer deemed politically incorrect and/or unpublishable by the gatekeepers that the gates have been torn down. They no longer exist.

More on why the ongoing collapse of the gatekeepers is not reason for despair, but promises to be very good news for fans of traditional SF/F in part II.

The war on white women

Somehow, we never seem to hear much in the media about a real war on women:

The body of a 33-year old white female, Melinda McCormick, was found shortly after 2:00 am Sunday, March 31 in a burning apartment at the Melei Apartments in the 3000 block of Mobile Highway.  All three have confessed, investigators said.

Deputies say an autopsy shows McCormick was hit 40 times with a hammer, lead pipe and crow bar.  She was still alive when her bed sheets were set on fire, according to the State Fire Marshal’s Office. They were caught on video (see below) headed to and away from the area of the apartment.

Williams reportedly told investigators that he hated white people, and that was a partial reason for the crime.  The trio allegedly planned to steal Social Security money from McCormick.  

It’s also getting ludicrous how hard the advertising agencies are now pushing the “white women love black men” theme.  During one commercial break, I counted  four white woman-black man couples compared to only three white woman-white man couples and zero white man-black woman couples.  (There was one Asian woman-white man couple.) None of the women were the fat, lower-class bleached blondes that one normally sees with black men; one commercial was particularly amusing because despite the black man being very handsome and upper middle-class, the slender, pretty brunette model quite clearly couldn’t even fake being attracted to the guy.  They were supposed to be portraying a happy couple at home, but despite being all smiles and so forth, she never once actually looked at him.

It reminded me of watching Angel, how hopelessly awkward the scenes between Fred and Charles were, and how forced it appeared for Fred to choose Charles over Wesley, especially when Charles himself appeared to have been considerably more attracted to the girl who played his little sister.

Even if the idea of breeding racial differences out of existence appeals to you – and you should probably keep in mind that the one point three billion Chinese and one billion Indians would likely have a little something to say about how that turns out – the disproportionate frequency of black-on-white crime should call into question the wisdom of trying to push black men on white women.

Whether they embraced it or not at the onset, how do you think the late Miss McCormick’s friends and family feel about interracial romance now?  No amount of crying “raciss” is going to change the FBI crime statistics.

The gold drain

Does something very nasty this way come?

Over the last 90 days without any announcement, stocks of gold held at Comex warehouses plunged by the largest figure ever on record during a single quarter since eligible record keeping began in 2001 (roughly the beginning of the bull market)….

JP Morgan Chase’s reported gold stockpile dropped by over 1.2 million oz.’s, or rather, a staggering $1.8 billion dollars worth of physical gold was removed from it’s vaults during the last 120 days.  Scotia Mocatta’s gold stockpile removals were nominal in size when compared to JPM’s, but registered in at over 650k oz’s of gold, or over $1 billion dollars worth of physical gold was removed from its vaults over the last 90 days.

I don’t know precisely what this signifies, but it would appear to indicate a certain lack of confidence in the system among the wealthy global elite.

More minorities, more unemployment

It has always seemed more than a little strange to me that so many Americans blithely assume that browns, blacks, and yellows who relocate to the United States are going to take on all the characteristics of white Americans by the sole virtue of their geographic relocation:

Black Entertainment Television (BET) founder Bob Johnson said Tuesday
that the nation would “never tolerate white unemployment at 14 or 15
percent” and yet unemployment for the black community has been double
that of white Americans for over 50 years….

Johnson said the challenge was to figure out why the unemployment
rate for blacks has been so high, “and if that doesn’t change,
somebody’s going to have to pay— 34 million African-Americans are not
going to leave this country, millions of African-Americans who don’t
have jobs.”

“Somebody’s going to have to pay for them. Somebody’s going to have
to take care of them, and if somebody’s going to have to take care of
them, that money’s got to come from somebody. And whoever’s paying for
it is going to be upset about it, and they’re going to start looking for
somebody to blame,” Johnson said.

It has been understood for decades that the lesser cultural differences between white Protestants and white Catholics have been sufficient to create very different outcomes in various European countries. Hence the phrase “Protestant work ethic”.

In light of this, is it not worth considering the possibility that the “new normal” of higher unemployment rates and lower labor force participation rates is at least in part the inevitable result of the 1965 and 1986 immigration acts, which have resulted in the massive influx of people with different cultures, and observably different work ethics, than white Protestant Americans?

In 1991, the Employment-Population Ratio in the USA was four points higher than in Mexico, 61-57.  It was 53 in Nigeria, 50 in France, and 45 in Italy.  This is usually blamed on lack of economic development and capital, but it seems to me that since economic development and capital are consequences of human action, not causes, it is more likely that one reason for the previously advantaged state of the US economy was the result of the unique composition of its predominantly Protestant European labor force.

Now, there are obviously a wide variety of other factors involved, but all things being equal, does it really make sense to imagine that importing workers from countries that are less productive and less inclined to work is going to increase productivity and decrease unemployment in the long run?  We already know that women are less inclined to work, and work fewer hours when they do, than men.  So, ogic suggests that the more the labor force moves away from being male, white, and Protestant, the more unemployment there will be and the lower the employment-population ratio is likely to fall.

The “New Normal” of eight percent unemployment and sub-60 percent EPR isn’t necessarily the result of the financial shenanigans or even free trade, it is also partly the result of immigration from countries where the population is less inclined to work hard. Johnson’s comments also lead to the obvious conundrum: if there are fewer people working less hard, how are they going to be able to pay for the increasing number of people not working at all?

The anti-democratic disaster

Helmut Kohl admits what was always obvious:

Helmut Kohl has admitted that he ‘acted like a dictator’ to bring the euro into Germany to replace the beloved D-Mark. Germany’s longest-serving postwar chancellor said that he would have lost any popular vote on the euro by ‘an overwhelming majority’. He said in an interview conducted in 2002 – but only just now published – : ‘I knew that I could never win a referendum in Germany. We would have lost a referendum on the introduction of the euro. That’s quite clear. I would have lost and by seven to three.’

It never ceases to amaze me that those who fetishize the so-called “right to vote” have absolutely no interest in when various politicians, in Europe and the USA, render all voting entirely irrelevant.

If you believe that women should have the right to vote, how can you possibly oppose referendums on the Euro and EU membership?  How can you possibly oppose the right of sovereign US States to secede?  What is the point of supporting a right that you don’t actually get to use on any substantial issues?