Category: Uncategorized

Joe Carter considers the matter and appears to accept its inevitable societal acceptance somewhat begrudgingly. I agree with his thoughts on its inevitability, although I don’t see that there’s anything to fear from it. It’s certainly a Biblical model far superior to the secular divorce culture we currently possess, and offers a familiar pro-child familial template that might allow the West to sustain itself without the need to import camel-sacrificing barbarians:

All of the major world religions – Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity – have condoned the practice of taking multiple spouses.

The same holds true for most every culture on earth. Out of 1170 societies recorded in Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, polygyny (the practice of men having more than one wife) is prevalent in 850. Even our own culture, which has an astoundingly high divorce and remarriage rate, practices a form of “serial polygamy.”

The fact that a mere mention of the concept is enough to cause feminists to explode with rage should alone suffice to recommend the institution. And while it’s not a vision that is very much in line with the modern woman’s Prince Charming / Pretty Woman fantasy, I don’t think destroying that pernicious fairy tale is necessarily such a bad thing.

(We’ll know it’s a done deal when the first Disney cartoon featuring Mickey and Minnie and Miranda Mouse appears.)

In any event, this is just one of the many signs indicating that the end of the Equalitarian Age is approaching. And a good riddance too. It will be interesting to see if the greater trend ends up being more in the direction of a traditional model like this one or a technological model complete with robot girls, smooth-talking vibrators and artificial wombs.

The answer is most likely some unforseeable combination of both, of course.

I just checked with Instant Publisher and saw that the status for the cover of “The Wrath of Angels” is now “PRINTED”. Can you feel the electricity in the air? So, I actually got around to updating that other website for the first time since 2004 and in the process uploaded a new short story entitled “Birth of an Order“.

Like several of the other stories, it’s set in the world of Selenoth, where religious faith meets magic and learned priests of the Immaculate engage in high-minded debates about whether elves have souls and hashing out whether orcs are legitimate candidates for eternal salvation or not.

It’s a little something to tide over the twenty or thirty of you who are planning to pick up Wrath, anyhow.

And it’s basically what I mean when I make comments about semi-civilized third worlders and destination transformation:

Turkish Airlines gets the hump
A job well done is worth celebrating, but Turkish Airlines say staff went too far when they sacrificed a camel. To mark the last delivery of 100 aircraft, maintenance workers clubbed together to buy the beast – and then consume it.

The sacrifice took place at Istanbul international airport.

One merely hopes that the rite didn’t take place as laid out by Aleister Crowley, although that headline is disturbingly suggestive. I’m wondering precisely where Turkish Airlines draws the line… at chickens? Goats? Presumably virgins are similarly off-bounds as well, although just give those increasingly pagan Brits a few years.

Vegetarian or regular meal?

Veggie, please.

Window or aisle

Window, near a bathroom if that’s possible.

And would you like to hump the virgin before we cut her throat?”

Oh, sure, why not? But I’ll pass on the communion afterwards, I’m a vegetarian, you know.

Somehow, this blog escaped Mr. Scalzi’s notice, but according to him – we exchanged email – I’m in some rather lofty company as William Gibson and Stephen Brust suffered the same fate.

1. Neil Gaiman’s Journal — Neil Gaiman (487) W
2. Whatever — John Scalzi (1,142) W
3. Making Light — Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (1,293) E
4. Beyond the Beyond — Bruce Sterling (5,240) W
5. The Sideshow — Avedon Carol (6,289) F
6. Paperback Writer — S.L. Viehl (6,916) W
7. Charlie’s Diary — Charles Stross (7,622) W
8. They Must Need Bears — Elizabeth Bear (11,541) W
9. The Mumpsimus — Matthew Cheney (14,156) C
10. Anna Louise’s Journal — Anna Louise Genoese (16,017) E

According to Technorati, Vox Popoli would come in at #8 here, right behind the estimable Mr. Stross. A Top 10 SF/F blog… how dreadfully embarrassing for the SFWA!

It does seem bizarre that this blog would come in ahead of those belonging to much better-known, better-selling, and generally all-around better writers such as David Brin and George RR Martin, but then, mysterious are the ways of the Technorati.

Burt Prelusky manages to get himself labled an anti-Semite:

Nothing that I have ever written has provoked as huge a response as a piece I wrote recently called “The Jewish grinch who stole Christmas”…. What I found most telling was that those who damned me didn’t, as a rule, refute what I had written; they were merely angry that a Jew had written the piece. They accused me of lending aid and comfort to bigots.

One of the very few points for which I was specifically taken to task was for referring to America as a Christian nation. To those people, I pointed out that I wasn’t claiming this nation is a theocracy, but Christians of one denomination or another compose nearly 90 percent of America’s population. That is 10 percent higher than the percentage of Jews in Israel, but I am willing to wager that none of my critics would deny that Israel is a Jewish state.

The sad fact is that the ACLU is made up in good part of Jews, and it is that organization and its lawyers who are leading the assault against Christmas. What makes it particularly unfortunate is that most Jews are not only opposed to the policies of the ACLU, but are embarrassed by and ashamed of the organization. However, when every ACLU lawyer who appears on TV to announce the latest attempt to remove Christian symbols and traditions from America seems to be Jewish, it’s all too easy for Christians to assume the rest of us support this vile campaign.

These are exactly the same points I have made in the past. It’s interesting to note that not even being Jewish is enough to defend one against charges of anti-Semitism these days.

I just wonder, do these ACLU Jews truly believe that the Jews have so many friends around the world that they must look to create enemies at every turn? But after reading Harry Kemelman’s “X the Rabbi Y Z” mysteries again, I am beginning to think that this seemingly illogical predilection for irritating the majority is actually a reliable group survival mechanism which serves to combat the natural human tendency towards assimilation.

From a Social Darwinist point of view, this strategy would appear to be wildly counterproductive. But it actually isn’t, if one is primarily concerned in maintaining the purity of the social group rather than the survival of its individual elements. While the mechanism would increase the risk of losing part of the group in any one society, it would also increase the probability that the group as a whole would survive untainted.

Not a bad trick, really, although more than a little hard on the individual members of the group.

The Telegraph inquires into British emigration:

Almost one in 10 British citizens are now living abroad, according to new figures from a leading think tank. Are you one of them? If so, why? And what has been your experience of the move? Do you feel welcome in your new environment? Do you still regard Britain as home?

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) estimates that the total figure for British expatriates now stands at 5.5 million.

So, ten percent of Mexico now lives in the United States, while ten percent of Britain has fled Tony Blair’s Cool Brittania. An increasing number of Americans are leaving too, of course, as the USA follows Britain’s lead, the primary difference is that America’s size has allowed her to better disguise the effects of the third world migration while the British Labor party has managed to be even more damaging to Britain than the Bush-Clinton-Bush trifecta was to the United States.

I spent two weeks in London recently and it was more than a little sad to see how much the city had changed since I was last there. One can’t truly imagine how the spy cameras are everywhere – it’s truly Big Brother and his little corporate friends run amok – and one can go a surprising amount of time without hearing any English being spoken. Needless to say, if I was British, I’d have left too.

The funny thing is all the “good riddance” people who posted. I mean, this sort of exodus threatens to pose a real problem for Britain, the Telegraph is interested in knowing why people have elected to vote with their feet, and all the morons can do is repeat the same idiocies that caused all these expats to leave in the first place.

It’s amazing how often in an otherwise unfair world, one gets what one deserves.

This ad would be amusing even if it didn’t upset the feminists. The best part is when the PS/3 explains that she is educated. Right, that’s what every man wants, an educated girl. That’s why there are so many magazines full of pictures of women’s diplomas, complete with long and tedious essays about what it feels like to be a female (fill in the blank).

For the Nth time: Ladies, men don’t give a damn about your educations! And Intelligence |= Education. The mere fact that so many women can’t understand either of these very simple concepts underlines their relevance.

A PhD is Sociology isn’t one-one hundredth as attractive as a cheerful smile, pretty eyes or a nicely formed, nicely fit behind. Ask 100 men if they would rather date a girl with a Harvard degree on her resume or the Victoria’s Secret catalog, more than 95 percent would prefer the latter. Make it the Pirelli calendar and that figure rises to 100 percent.

Feministe complains: “I mean, talk about original!” You mean, original as in the way women inevitably defeat men with snappy retorts and superior athletic skills on television? Sure, that was funny the first 500 times, but now….

The only reason things like G4 exist in the first place is because women with sensibilities similar to Jessica and Amynda have destroyed what little entertainment was to be found in mainstream television. Not that it’s any great loss, of course.

She watch channel zero.

Shell is being forced by the Russian government to hand over its controlling stake in the world’s biggest liquefied gas project, provoking fresh fears about the Kremlin’s willingness to use the country’s growing strength in natural resources as a political weapon.

Fortunately, Dear Leader has looked into Vladimir Putin’s soul, so we know that no matter how many people are poisoned, no matter how many properties are seized, it’s being done for the right reasons.

Of course, given last year’s Kelo decision, the United States doesn’t exactly have any grounds for complaint. To silence his critics, all Putin has to do is point out that the Russian government will receive more tax revenue from Gazprom than it will from Shell.

Dr. Helen has a reasonable thought after perusing a certain children’s book:

I think more boys would enjoy reading and writing if they were encouraged to read and write about things that held their interest, as opposed to what librarians and teachers give them on a reading list.

I have to agree. I began reading at an early age, was far more interested in books than in food, sport or pretty much anything else until Intellivision and the Apple II came along, and yet even I found many of the books we were required to read in high school to be utterly gruesome. I still won’t read Saul Bellow or Graham Greene to this day, even though I suspect I might rather like the latter now based on what I remember of “The Power and the Glory”.

And “Giants in the Earth”, yikes, one should be able to find that in the thesaurus as an antonym for “engaging”.

On a related note, SF writer John Scalzi realizes to his regret that he’ll have to come up with a new concept for his next series:

Hey! That’s the plot of my next book! Nuts. Back to the drawing board for me…. Does the young author have his own Web site? Oh, my, yes. Personally, I eagerly await the movie deal, ancillary marketing and plush toys, all before the lad is eight. Man, I’ve been wasting my life.

Hey, at least he has a publisher for his fiction…. Actually, I should mention that I’ve very much enjoyed this first experiment in self-publishing. (And how many authors, even big name ones, can put their cover on their own computer?) Instant Publisher is very, very easy to use and it’s surprisingly entertaining to look up your order and see it go from “Preparing Cover” to “Ready to Print” and so forth. I absolutely had the irrational urge to upload another book once I’d completed the order for the first run of “The Wrath of Angels”, so perhaps I’ll put out a short story collection next, if anyone happens to be interested.

We’ll have to see how the quality is, but otherwise, if it weren’t for the mass distribution angle – or lack thereof – I’d vastly prefer this process to the hand-it-over-and-wait-18-months that I went through four times with Pocket Books.

Umberto Eco is an author and professor of semiotics (the study of signs and symbols) at the University of Bologna. His novels have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, including “The Name of the Rose,” which was made into a movie starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater. His latest novel is “The Island of the Day Before.” He was interviewed at the Whitney Hotel in Minneapolis, on December 12, 1996.

Your novels are very popular, but it’s said that many people don’t read them all the way through. Does that bother you?

I must confess, there are books that I love very much, and I didn’t read them completely. It happens. When “The Name of the Rose” came out, so difficult and full of Latin quotations, and it had the success, it started the legend that it was an unread book. I am content.

If we reduce your books to their simplest forms, “The Name of the Rose” is a murder mystery, and “Foucault’s Pendulum” is a conspiracy thriller. What is “The Island of the Day Before?”

First of all, this is one level on which you can read the stories. In the first two, there is a certain detection-like mystery story. But there is also present a metaphysical detection, some great questions about truth and the order of the world. In this sense, the third novel is following the same path.

All three are philosophical novels. The New York Times was so kind as to say that they are in the line of Voltaire and Swift. But there is a difference – the first two novels are novels about culture.

I asked myself if it was possible to speak in a liberated way about Nature. That’s where I got the idea of an island, an island in the Pacific, untouched by human hands. It was interesting that in the case of my character arriving there for the first time – not only for himself, but for all humankind – and watching the things that no human eye had seen before, he didn’t have names for them. I was excited about telling the story through metaphor, instead of using the names. From my semiotic point of view, it was an interesting experience.

I always thought that Adam faced an interesting task when God told him to name everything. Where did Adam start?

You know that the last of my scholarly books discusses the problem that has been discussed for the last 2,000 years by our civilization, which is: What was Adam’s language, the perfect language? Because there is a myth that the name given by Adam to the rabbit expresses the real idea of the rabbit. It is a utopian idea, we would like that our language was a transparent tool by which we really understand the nature of things.

But in “The Name of the Rose,” don’t you seem to suggest that ideas don’t matter by making Jorge, the blind librarian, the villain?

Do you think William of Baskerville has no ideas? Jorge is not the villain, he is one of the heroes … He is expressing certain attitudes of his time, but I don’t consider him a villain. It is a confrontation between two worldviews, and a worldview is a system of ideas.

Are there ideas as dangerous to our modern worldview as an Aristotelian treatise on laughter would have been perceived in 1327?

Even our times have been full of dictatorships that have burned books. What does it mean, the Salman Rushdie persecution, if not to try to destroy a book? We are always trying to destroy something. Even today we have this continual struggle between people that believe certain texts are dangerous and must be eliminated. So my story is not so outdated, even though it takes place in the Middle Ages. We are not better.

Even here, people are discussing whether it is advisable or not to allow certain kinds of information on the Internet. Is it really permissible to allow people to teach people how to poison your mother, or make a bomb, through the Internet? We are always concerned that there are fearful texts.

In 1995, you mentioned that you did not use the ‘Net. Do you now?

I am a very well-balanced surfer. I surf on the Internet when I want to look for something that I need. I can spend 10 or 15 minutes to surf for mere curiosity. I don’t spend the entire night as a paranoid drug addict. I wish that everybody was so well-balanced as I am, at least in this matter.

Do you get more satisfaction out of writing a scholarly work, a novel, or even a particularly good newspaper column?

There is no difference. Once you are involved in a project, a duty, you can do it with great passion. At the moment, I am writing a very technical paper. Unfortunately, in this case, I cannot invent. I have to say something, if not true, at least reasonable. (laughs)

In “The Name of the Rose,” there was a serious discussion of whether Jesus laughed. Do you believe that God has a sense of humor?

What is the strange and unique property of a human being? To know we are mortal … which is an important piece of knowledge, if not so exciting. And I think just because we are the only ones to know we have to die, we are the only ones who try to react by laughing. In this sense, if God exists, he has no need to laugh. But maybe he would smile … (laughs).