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Homeschool or die: Part 563

What does a teacher have to do to lose her job?

A teacher tried to hire a gang member to assault her principal because she was being hassled about lies she told to the school, a disciplinary hearing has found. The high school teacher, whose name is suppressed, told a student she would “sort something out” for her if she arranged for her grandfather, who had gang connections, to confront the principal.

The teacher told a colleague she had arranged for the principal to be “capped”, which the colleague took to mean an injury to the knees. Despite her “unprofessional” actions and “serious misconduct”, the Teachers’ Council has given the teacher permission to return to the classroom after a disciplinary hearing last month.  The disciplinary tribunal heard the teacher also fabricated grades for
work not done by students, forged the head of department’s signature,
and lied about what classes she had taught.

It’s a refreshing reminder in the midst of all the Saint Teacher stories coming out of Connecticut that teachers are no saintlier, and on average a little less intelligent, than the norm.  One of the more powerful arguments in favor of homeschooling is that intelligent children will not be “taught” by half-educated women with IQs averaging two and three standard deviations below them.

Theories of collapse

Three rival theories seek to explain the decline and fall of GRR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.  If you haven’t read the five books yet and are concerned about spoilers, don’t read this.  The first book has been out for 16 years now, so I think it can safely be discussed in detail.

  1. Martin simply lost the plot and is unable to handle all of his characters and stories.
  2. The seed of Martin’s nihilistic amorality finally blossomed into full flower.
  3. Martin made a foolish decision to change his approach to the story in mid-series and the structural changes that resulted have proven more than he can handle.

There is at least some truth to all three of these statements.  But which is the primary causal factor.  With regards to (1), that is more of an observation than an explanation.  He has lost the plot.  He is unable to successfully juggle all of his characters and stories.  But it doesn’t explain why.  Is it his age?  Is it his health?  Is it simple lack of interest?  Perhaps, but authors in mental decline usually produce work that is simpler and shorter; Agatha Christie’s last book has a vocabulary that contains 20 percent fewer words than her average novel.  NB: Christie cunningly avoided this being her last word on the subject by writing the final Poirot novel, and one of her best, Curtain, years ahead of time.  Since Dragons shows the same meandering bloat that first appeared in Crows, and since there are still flashes of excellence in both novels, I think a decline in Martin’s mental acuity can be ruled out.

What about the idea that Martin’s nihilistic amorality, always apparent, finally overtook the story, as per (2)?  There is some evidence of this.  The nihilism and amorality has certainly continued to increase as Martin kills off well-meaning Starks and replaces them with vicious new characters.  One reader claimed that the theory can’t be true because it was the nihilistic amorality that made the first three books appealing in the first place.  Even if that is what set them apart, (and there is an element of truth to that; no one will forget the scene where Jaime chucks Bran out the window… for love), that appeal can’t possibly explain the decline in the latter two books because Martin has undeniably cranked up the depravity in comparison with the preceding three.

The real problem with this idea is that we know all of this pointless viciousness is just a sideshow, filler for the events of the real story.  While it might explain why the filler is so nasty, it doesn’t explain why it exists in the first place.  And that brings us to theory (3).

As most Martin readers know, the books were originally supposed to be a trilogy.  Then, after the first book turned into three, Martin faced a five-year gap, during which time the dragons would grow and Daenerys would gather the forces necessary to challenge for the throne of Westeros.  (One would think a wedding between Daenerys and Joffrey would have been the obvious solution to the situation inspired by the historical example of Stephen and Maude, but never mind that.)  Instead of simply writing 10 pages of “here’s what happened in the intervening years”, Martin went back to write what was intended as one book, then became two, and has thus created an even more difficult challenge for himself by adding all of the new characters, many of whose stories are of little to no interest to the fans of the first three books.

Instead of proceeding with the 9 living perspective characters from A Storm of Swords, Martin now finds himself saddled with 21.  This is a structural challenge, and if Martin somehow surmounts it to produce books that are on par with the first three, it will be an epic literary feat indeed.  But the very fact that Martin faces it tends to indicate that he is not up to the challenge of defeating it.

Unlike many Martin readers, I very much doubt that Winds and Dream will be as bad as Feast and Dragons.  After all, Martin is now returning to the story that he originally intended to tell, so he probably has a much better idea of what he wants to do.  However, the unnecessary structural challenge created by all the additional characters and their stories likely means the last two – or three – books will not be as good as they would have been had he not given in to the temptation to go back and fill in the blanks of the required five-year gap.  And that is an excellent object lesson for all writers: don’t give in to prequelitis.  Look forward, not backward.  And don’t hesitate to leave some historical blanks unfilled; indulge the reader’s imagination rather than attempt to leave no stone unturned in explaining everything about everyone.

As for the theories of collapse, they may all be true and help explain each other.  The unfortunate decision to go back and fill in the blanks led to a long submersion into the depths of pointless nihilism, which ultimately proved as uninteresting to Martin as it did to his readers.

Blame deinstitutionalization, not guns

Guns don’t kill people, crazy people who don’t want to get locked up kill people:

The gunman who slaughtered 20 children and six adults at a
Connecticut elementary school may have snapped because his mother was
planning to commit him to a psychiatric facility, according to a
lifelong resident of the area who was familiar with the killer’s family
and several of the victims’ families.

Adam Lanza, 20, targeted Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown
after killing his mother early Friday because he believed she loved the
school “more than she loved him,” said Joshua Flashman, 25, who grew up
not far from where the shooting took place. Flashman, a U.S. Marine, is
the son of a pastor at an area church where many of the victims’
families worship.

“From what I’ve been told, Adam was aware of her petitioning the
court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed,”
Flashman told FoxNews.com. “Adam was apparently very upset about this.
He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he
was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him
off.”

Sometimes, it really is just the crazy.  And if you let the confirmed crazies run around free until they kill someone, you’re assured that eventually some of them are going to do it.

Mailvox: in time for Christmas

Glad to hear from JB that Marcher Lord Hinterlands was able to keep its word concerning the hardcovers and deliver in time for Christmas:

Received my copy yesterday!  I gave it a quick once over and I have to say, the book looks great on the whole.  The cover is somewhat muted in color in comparison to web images, but that was/is to be expected electronic gamma being what it is.

I’m looking forward to seeing it myself, but I expect I’ll have to wait another week or so.  Thanks again to team OCD, whose speedy proofreading made this possible.

A diatribe of dismalities

Paul Krugman somehow forgets to take $44 trillion into account:

Menzie Chinn is having a dialogue, or something, with the Heritage Foundation. He pointed out that their arguments against stimulus, aside from being primitive and wrong, would also imply that the fiscal cliff is harmless. They respond in part by claiming that all they’re worried about is the incentive effects — yeah, right — and also by claiming that famous economists made the same arguments.

The latter claim, unfortunately, is completely true. But it doesn’t absolve Heritage; all it shows is that much of macroeconomics, especially but not only at Chicago, has retrogressed intellectually, to such an extent that famous economists repeat 1930-vintage fallacies in perfect ignorance of the hard intellectual work that showed, three generations ago, that they are indeed fallacies.

By the way, Heritage — after totally misrepresenting Keynesian economics (Keynesians never think about investment? Really?) — asks,

    When the government borrows a trillion dollars on global financial markets for a stimulus package, does Chinn believe that zero dollars of that is diverted from investment?

I don’t know for sure what Menzie’s answer would be, but mine is, no, I don’t believe that zero dollars are diverted; under current conditions, negative dollars are diverted. That is, stimulus spending would lead to more, not less, private investment. Why? Because we are in a liquidity trap — interest rates won’t rise — and higher sales would induce businesses to invest more, not less.

Oh, and if you go back to what Heritage analysts were writing back in 2009, they were predicting that government borrowing would lead to soaring interest rates. How’s that going, guys?

There is a very easy explanation for why increased goverment borrowing has not led to soaring interest rates.  Like every good Neo-Keynesian, Krugman gets himself in trouble by completely ignoring the credit market, which is a little ironic considering that he’s talking about the price of credit.

Government borrowing has soared since 2009.  It has exploded from $6.8 trillion to $11.3 trillion.  So, with that obvious increase in the demand for credit, why hasn’t the price increased?  Because government borrowing was only 12.9 percent of the total credit market back in 2009.  It is now 20.4 percent of the market.  The price of credit hasn’t gone up because the OVERALL demand for it has slumped, as I pointed out last week.

This is like asking why the Warcraft servers aren’t being overloaded because you’re playing twice as much now, even though two other players who used to play a lot more than you did are playing quite a bit less than before.

The Heritage analysts assumed, improperly, that the Household and Finance sectors would continue to expand at their 60-year rates of increase.  Instead, both sectors have shrunk, by $1 trillion and $3.3 trillion respectively.  Debt disinflation is why interest rates are not soaring.

Mailvox: illumination and shadow

A physicist notes the way in which Tolkien explicated the distinction between the illuminating fairy tale and the dark deceit of the retrophobic modern fantasy:

I was intrigued by the discussion on retrophobia in fantasy literature, and it made me recall a relevant passage from Professor Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien:

The essence of fairy-stories is that they satisfy our heart’s deepest desire: to know a world other than our own, a world that has not been flattened and shrunk and emptied of mystery. To enter this other world, the fairy tale resorts to fantasy in the literal sense. It deals with phantasms or representations of things not generally believed to exist in our primary world: elves (the older word for faires), hobbits, wizards, dwarves, Ringwraiths, wargs, orcs, and the like. Far from being unreal or fantastic in the popular sense, these creatures embody the invisible qualities of the eternal world — love and death, courage and cowardice, terror and hope — that always impinge on our own visible universe. Fairy-stories “open as door on Other Time” Tolkien writes, “and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, perhaps.” Hence Tolkien’s insistence that all fantasy-creations must have the mythic character of the supernatural world as well as the historical consistency of the natural world. The question to be posed for fantasy as also for many of the biblical narratives is not, therefore, “Did these things literally happen?” but “Does their happening reveal the truth?”

This ties into your discussion of the modern Wormtongues, as well. Wood and Tolkien are essentially saying what you’re saying: modern fantasy fails, because important elements of the narrative do not reveal the truth, and readers know it.

The reason so much modern fantasy fails so spectacularly is not because it is soulless and derivative, although it is, but because it quite literally hates the heart.  It is written out of hatred, it is based on lies, and it is designed to obscure rather than reveal.  Take R. Scott Bakker’s series, The Prince of Nothing.  The events chronicled within it did not literally happen, but their happening, quite intentionally, obscures the truth, indeed, it claims that there is no such thing as truth.  The ugliness of the disgusting Face Dancers is an apt metaphor for the ugly incoherence at the core of the modernist vision for the series.

This is why GRR Martin will never be the American JRR Tolkien.  What are the truths revealed by A Song of Ice and Fire?  That people of good will are stupid?  That everyone is pointlessly sadistic? That no good deed goes unpunished?  That sex is either rape, incest, or prostitution?  The only truths to be found in Martin are negative; there is nothing beautiful or mythic about Westeros.  There is death, cowardice, and terror, but where is the love, courage, and hope?  When viewed from this perspective, it becomes apparent that decline of the series observed in the two most recent books are merely the flowering of a retrophobic seed that was planted at the start.

My point is not that those who write in the older tradition are better writers.  If anything, it is remarkable that those who handicap their narratives so severely with their moral blindness and ideological retrophobia manage to produce works that are still compelling in some way.  The problem is that, no matter how highly skilled they are, genuine greatness will always elude them and their works, despite their merits, will rapidly fade into the forgotten dust of history because they do not speak to the eternal truths at the heart of Man.

The delta moment

Just to forestall any concerns or conspiracy theories, I let WND know today that I’m ending my column there as of December 31.  There are no problems, no differences of opinion, or anything like that.  I haven’t taken a job with the IMF or a K-Street lobbying firm.  I have no plans to write a column anywhere else.  I am appreciative of the platform WND gave me for 11 years and I very much respect and support Joseph Farah.  But I feel the quality of my columns has not been up to their previous par over the last two years; today’s column reminded me of what they used to be.

So, rather than phone it in, I’ve asked WND to give my place on the Commentary page to someone else.  I will continue to blog both here and at Alpha Game, as before.  I don’t know what effect that will have on my readership, but that really doesn’t matter.  Sometimes, you just know it is time for a change.

Mapping Selenoth

JartStar didn’t find it easy to map out Selenoth, mostly because I don’t think in spatial terms.  This map to the right is from a very early version when the book was only half-written and we were kicking around the idea of eventually creating a VASSAL wargame around the story.  I’ve long been interested in combining the zone-based game mechanics of War at Sea with a Divine Right system that combines diplomatic intrigue with battle, and perhaps one day I’ll even get around to designing it.  The primary challenge he faced was translating locations into map terms from my description of events; if it takes 30 days to go from Amorr to Elebrion and one passes through an uninhabited forest, then that provides a certain amount of information about how things have to look.

I’m sure there were times he desperately wanted to beat answers out of me, but the problem was that because I am spatial relations-challenged, I couldn’t really provide them until I had figured out exactly what I required for the story to work as conceived.  Was Lodi travelling west or east?  If Theuderic was traveling to Amorr, why did he have to go through Malkan?  The plot affected the geography and the geography affected the plot; as JartStar noted himself when he introduced the map to his Cartographer’s Guild.

“The map took nearly a year to do as author didn’t know where certain
locations would be until he had worked out the plot! It meant a lot of
revisions all of the way until the day it was literally going to press.”

The particular challenge was how to portray the allies and provinces of Amorr, since they were too small to show up on the continental map.  The first attempt proved a little confusing; the editor at Marcher Lord actually got it backwards. But the zoom lines he suggested worked very well.  It did lead to one minor problem in the text, as Falerum was described at two points in the original text as “the largest ally”, which is quite clearly not the case.  But that was cleaned up in the errata.

As for rivers and lakes, they were left off for legibility reasons.  In general, it can be safely assumed that every major city is built on a river, as is the case with regards to nearly all medieval European cities. Most fantasy maps that contain rivers are entirely misleading, as they only feature one or two rivers when the number of cities shown would indicate the need for an order of magnitude more; for some reason most fantasy lands don’t contain a reasonable number of lakes either.  Given my ferocious hatred for long literary river journeys, it is totally appropriate that the rivers are not shown on the map as they will never, ever, feature in such a regard.

The map of Selenoth can’t hold a candle to the beautiful map of Middle Earth that I once owned in the form of a much-loved jigsaw puzzle.  I can’t think of a single map that does.  But I hope the readers find it both attractive and useful in following the story; thanks to JartStar’s heroic efforts, I think it is more geographically credible than most of the maps one sees in the genre.

WND column

Standing Firm for Freedom

It was not a surprise that the response of the New York Times to the Connecticut public-school shootings was to run, not one, not two, not three, but four editorials calling for yet another push for gun control. The mainstream media have been waiting literally years for something like this to happen, and they are not about to let such a crisis go to waste.

VPFL 2012 week 14

78 Suburban Churchians (4-10-0)
58 Moundsview Meerkats (10-4-0)

68 Bailout Banksters (8-6-0)
46 D.C. Hangmen (4-10-0)

70 Greenfield Grizzlies (7-7-0)
65 RR Redbeards (5-9-0)

58 Fromundah Cheezheads (9-5-0)
40 Bane Sidhe (8-5-1)

90 Luna City Gamma Rays (6-7-1)
64 ’63Mercury Marauders (8-6-0)

The Meerkats clinched their third regular season championship, but can they finally get the job done in the playoffs.  It was remarkable; both Mounds View and Fromundah finished at 1031 points after both scoring 58 the last week of the season.  And the Churchians finished strong, going .500 over the last half of the season after getting off to a winless start.

The Meerkats face the Marauders and the Cheezheads play the Banksters Bane Sidhe in the first round of the VPFL playoffs.

UPDATE: Adrian Peterson is post-homo sapiens sapiens.  Also, MVP.  That is all.