Category: Uncategorized

What makes a classic?

Last week, I criticized Mur Lafferty for attempting to dismiss some of the classics of the genre unread. Reading some of the comments on that post got me to thinking about an obvious question: what makes a classic of the genre? Obviously, an ability to stand the test of time is the most important element in defining a classic, as a brief perusal of the bestsellers of 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago will demonstrate, but there must be more to it than simple longevity since there are no shortage of unread classics, both within and without the SF/F genre. Is there some sort of magic formula that allows us to distinguish between the merely popular and the temporally transcendent? We know that sales quantities are both objective and incapable of determining literary greatness, but does this mean that greatness is entirely subjective or are there some reasonably objective elements involved?

Read the rest at The Black Gate.

Sky Patrol USA

Congratulations, Americans! You are now officially living in a police state patrolled by machines in the skies:

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm on June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said. Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three counties. He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead, its sensors helped pinpoint the suspects, showing they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

That was just the start. Police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since then. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

“We don’t use [drones] on every call out,” said Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks. “If we have something in town like an apartment complex, we don’t call them.”

The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which operates eight Predators on the country’s borders to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers. The previously unreported use of its drones to assist local, state and federal law enforcement has occurred without any public acknowledgment or debate.

I have little doubt that 99 percent of all Americans who hear about this will dismiss it as any serious cause for concern “because at least the drones aren’t armed”. The interesting question is what will come first, the first use of an armed drone to kill American citizens inside the US, or the first shooting-down of a military drone by American citizens.

Forget the hacking involved in the capture of a Sentinel drone by Iran. A $200 souped-up Hawk Sky radio-control plane is all that’s needed to take down a $5 million Predator or a $30 million Reaper. I note that 70 of the 223 Predators and Reapers in operation through 2009 were “lost during combat operations” although the military has only admitted to four of them being shot down.

The Week in Alpha

Music and emotional resonance, otherwise known as sexual counterpush.

An Epic Gamma Fail which has to be read to be believed.

Answering a question regarding what came first, the socio-sexual rank or the temperament.

Addressing yet another critic’s take on the supposedly lack of need for a socio-sexual hierarchy in light of Roissy’s sexual hierarchy.

And finally, an intriguing post from Alpha Game’s resident Omega, who is demonstrating in real time how even the lowliest of the low can, with ambition aforethought, make his way up the socio-sexual hierarchy. He’s not yet a player, but he is no longer outside the Game.

UPDATE: The average British woman is heavier than you think. And she’s still 10 pounds lighter than the average American woman.

Stage Three

European banks on the verge of collapse:

Senior analysts and traders warned of impending bank failures as a summit intended to solve the European crisis failed to deliver a solution that eased concerns over bank funding.

The European Central Bank admitted it had held meetings about providing emergency funding to the region’s struggling banks, however City figures said a “collateral crunch” was looming.

“If anyone thinks things are getting better then they simply don’t understand how severe the problems are. I think a major bank could fail within weeks,” said one London-based executive at a major global bank.

Stage 1 was the 2008 credit crunch that led to the autumn banking bailouts. Stage 2 is the “recovery” which was nothing but the banks borrowing free money and gambling it in order to “shore up” their balance sheets. Stage 3 is the 2012 credit crunch that leads to the collapse of many of the banks that were propped up in Stage 1 as the Stage 2 bets fail to prove sufficient.

One thing that hasn’t been much discussed is the way in which the EU’s designs on the City (London) would probably kill the majority of the big UK and US banks within months. That is probably why Cameron found the backbone to exercise the British veto; it wasn’t in the interest of the British people, but rather in the interest of the Anglo-American banks.

And as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes, the new Merkozy-led EU treaty has nothing to do with resolving the burgeoning financial crisis.

The leaders of France and Germany have more or less bulldozed Britain out of the European Union for the sake of a treaty that offers absolutely no solution to the crisis at hand, or indeed any future crisis. It is EU institutional chair shuffling at its worst, with venom for good measure.

Of course, Evans-Pritchard fails to note that for Britain, being bulldozed out of the EU would be the best thing for it.

Failing the stupid test

It’s not quite as dumb as buying a lottery ticket, but I’d be disinclined to hire someone who went and got a master’s degree instead of working because it reveals both a lack of foresight and an inability to understand basic economics:

I advise my own students, employees and relations to think carefully before signing up for expensive masters’ degrees. Most of the successful journalists, NGO leaders and authors I run across don’t have masters’ degrees and when the subject comes up they don’t recommend them to young people interested in these fields. There are exceptions where top teachers who are also leading people in a given field can become your mentor and help you enter a challenging and rewarding profession, but you have to look hard to find these.

I’m sure there must be some published authors with fancy literary degrees, but the strange thing is that barely any of the actual authors I know studied any form of writing in college whereas none of the English majors with advanced degrees I know have actually published anything.

And of the hundreds of guys I know in the game industry, I can’t think of a single one who has one of those ridiculous game development-related degrees.

Then there is this: “About one-third of people with master’s degrees make less money on average than a typical bachelor’s degree holder, said Stephen J. Rose, a labor economist with Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, citing U.S. Census data.”

America prepares

Amidst all the terrible news, there is the occasional silver lining:

This year’s Black Friday gun sales broke a record set in 2008 by nearly a third, and while fears about President Obama outlawing some types of firearms are thought to be behind 2008’s record, analysts say this year’s surge in sales is part of a long-term trend. Gun ownership was “politically incorrect” five years ago, but “what seems to be changing is social acceptance,” an analyst at investment firm Avondale Partners tells MSNBC. “I think there might be a changing view of firearms.”

Every state except Illinois now allows residents to carry concealed weapons, and a recent Gallup poll found that 47% of American households own a gun, up from 41% just a year ago.

Between the rapid growth of homeschooling and the rapid growth of gun ownership, Americans appear to stand a reasonable chance of preventing whatever plans their would-be masters have in mind for them. I think the concerns about FEMA camps and the use of the military are somewhat overblown now, especially in light of the proven inability of the US military to deal effectively with insurgencies even in much smaller, more open countries.

From the perspective of a life-long wargamer, I would certainly quail before the challenge of trying to suppress the heavily armed American people, especially since even in the elite, one never truly knows where another’s sympathy lies. The shooting of the police officer at Virginia Tech is a reminder that there are only 800,000 state, local, and federal law enforcement officers in the entire country. They could be wiped out in a week by a population that lives right next door to nearly all of them.

If I were an evil utopian mastermind willing to break as many eggs as needed in order to build a New Society, I’d be looking into biological weapons to counteract the outnumbered and outgunned authorities; one wonders if the zombie craze is yet another example of media programming. One thing that is clear is that not even the “gun-buyers are sick and crazy people” theme as was featured on House this season is convincing anyone.

But Christmas is coming, so do your part and bump that percentage up over 50 percent.

David Cameron finds his spine

It’s not enough. He still needs to give the British people their promised referendum on the Fourth Reich. But it is a start:

After a marathon meeting that started at dinner time on Thursday evening and finished at 6am on Friday, eurozone member states agreed to create an intergovernmental treaty to forge stricter budgetary controls for the group’s member states. Britain has opted to remain out of the treaty.

“I said before coming to Brussels, that if I could not get adequate safeguards for Britain in a new European treaty, then I would not agree to it,” David Cameron said.

“What is on offer is not in Britain’s interest, so I didn’t agree to it. Let me explain why this matters, of course we want the eurozone countries to come together and to solve their problems, but we should only allow that to open inside the European Union treaties, if there are proper protections for the single market and for other British key interests. Without those safeguards it is better not to have a treaty, but to have those countries make their arrangements separately. That is now what is going to happen.”

Frankly, I am astonished. I assumed Cameron was going to sell Britain out, as Thatcher, Major, Blair, and Brown all did before him. It doesn’t mean he won’t eventually do so, but then again, Britain has always been extraordinarily tardy about recognizing continental threats to its existence. This is a good sign, as it represents the first material cracks that will eventually break apart the third great attempt to subjugate Europe under an unaccountable and authoritarian regime.

Britain has no more to fear from being out of the European Union than it had from its refusal to join Napoleon’s Greater France or Hitler’s Greater Germany. David Cameron would do well to reflect upon which historical British leaders are revered today, the Wellingtons and Churchills or the Chamberlains and Blairs.

One more try

As you’ve probably noticed, I’m going to give Disqus another try. We’ll see how it goes; if it turns out to be more annoying than CoComment, we’ll simply go back to that.

UPDATE: No way. Disqus is far more annoying than CoComment can manage at its most quixotic. All the new comment systems require a move to the newer Blogger interface to work properly, which significantly reduces one’s ability to control the layout of the blog.

UPDATE 2: Part of that may have been my fault. I may give it another whirl later. But it’s not promising that the Disqus Appearance Settings page gives you two options: Preview and Cancel… the SAVE option is conspicuously lacking.

Warning signs of junk science

ESR makes some excellent points here:

I’ve seen a lot of “scientific” panics ginned up from nonexistent or scanty evidence over the last several decades. There’s a pattern to these episodes, a characteristic stench that becomes recognizable after a while. I’ll describe some of the indicia, which I’ve culled from episodes like the Alar scare, the ozone-hole brouhaha, the AIDS panic (are you old enough to remember when it was predicted to become endemic among heterosexuals in the U.S.?), acid rain, and even the great global cooling flap of 1975.

So. Here is a non-exclusive list of seven eight symptoms to watch out for:

Science by press release. It’s never, ever a good sign when ‘scientists’ announce dramatic results before publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. When this happens, we generally find out later that they were either self-deluded or functioning as political animals rather than scientists. This generalizes a bit; one should also be suspicious of, for example, science first broadcast by congressional testimony or talk-show circuit.

Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of eschatological panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “a terrible catastrophe looms over us if theory X is true, therefore we cannot risk disbelieving it”, you can be pretty sure that X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to panic the herd into stampeding rather than focusing on the quality of the evidence for theory X.

Rhetoric that mixes science with the tropes of moral panic. When the argument for theory X slides from “theory X is supported by evidence” to “only bad/sinful/uncaring people disbelieve theory X”, you can be even more sure that theory X is junk science. Consciously or unconsciously, advocates who say these sorts of things are trying to induce a state of preference falsification in which people are peer-pressured to publicly affirm a belief in theory X in spite of private doubts.

Consignment of failed predictions to the memory hole. It’s a sign of sound science when advocates for theory X publicly acknowledge failed predictions and explain why they think they can now make better ones. Conversely, it’s a sign of junk science when they try to bury failed predictions and deny they ever made them.

AGW/CC was obviously bogus from the very start, which is why it has been so laughably easy to predict the failures of its models and anticipate its scandals. It is interesting to note how many other aspects of science are easily shown to be junk science this way, beginning with TE(p)NSBMGDaGF and including other notorious non-sciences such as string theory and macroeconomics.

This quote in the comments was particularly apt: “Prediction is everything, and it must work more than once. Explaining everything after the fact is merely making up complicated stories.”

The lawless society

I have been saying for years that there is no law in the USA, merely the pretense of law. Now the absence of justice in the so-called justice system is becoming readily apparent to everyone who is paying even casual attention:

Sarbanes-Oxley requires [John Corzine] as the CEO of a company to (1) guarantee that effective risk controls and rules are in place and (2) monitor their compliance. It renders failure to do so — that is, the old-fashioned “I didn’t know” defense that was routinely used after 2000-era failures in the Internet space — a felony.

Now of course Mr. Corzine is entitled to the presumption of innocence and he is entitled to a trial before being pronounced guilty, but the law on this point is clear: Executives, the CEO and CFO in particular, are required under Sarbanes-Oxley to factually know about matters such as this and they are required to attest to that knowledge — and the presence of appropriate and sufficient risk controls under penalty of felony indictment.

It appears that Mr. Corzine has admitted in front of a Congressional Committee that he does not know, and therefore this appears to be a prima-facie admission that he is in direct violation of this law.

If this is not dealt with on an expeditious fashion and the law is not enforced you have just seen proof on national television that there is no longer a rule of law in this nation of any substance.

The incredible thing is that the federal government is prosecuting and jailing hundreds of thousands of people for all sorts of drug “crimes”, but has no interest whatsoever in even arresting a man who admitted to stealing somewhere between $600 million and $1.2 billion dollars.

The USA may not be the most corrupt nation on Earth, but it is certainly among the most structurally corrupted. This is actually a more insidious form of corruption, because the law itself stands in open violation of Natural Law. We rightly condemn National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia because their governments legalized murder, and while events haven’t yet reached that level of extremis, it should now be clear that the USA has legalized fraud and theft.