Category: Uncategorized

The sin of Denethor

The Atlantic is terrified by the inevitable rise of the Alt-Right in a post-Christian West:

For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.

So are cucks like Dreher and Douthat:

Read the whole thing. It’s important. It’s a confirmation of a line Ross Douthat had a year or so ago, telling the left that if they didn’t like the Religious Right, just wait until the see the Post-Religious Right. I’m getting anecdotal reports from readers and from acquaintances that young people with smartphones are not only streaming pornography, but also getting massive doses of political extremism on their devices. One source who sees the boys in his conservative Christian high school embracing white nationalism speculates that the megachurch Christianity of these high school seniors is not facing the reality of the world around us. If true, then the pastors and other religious authorities in these kids’ lives are simply not forming them as Christians to live in the post-Christian world that we have.

On that point, last night in DC, I talked with a senior official of a prominent Christian college, who told me that institutions like his are at Defcon 1 on religious liberty for institutions like his — and he is as baffled as I am why so many churches are silent. He spoke to me after my Benedict Option speech about the point I made in it re: pastors and religious leaders who aren’t preparing their congregations for hard times, even the possibility of persecution, are failing in their responsibilities. He said that’s true in his experience. We agreed that Christians in America aren’t going to know what hit them.

It’s amusing that Rod calls it “the Douthat scenario” when Douthat only picked upon the obvious a year ago. Years before that, nearly everyone on the alternative Right was warning the idiot cucks and Churchians that they had better embrace and join the nationalist Right or they will find themselves being steamrolled by the ultra-nationalists.

FFS, Cuckservative was published more than one year ago. But the cucks never want to admit that they are wrong, or point anyone in the direction of the truth. They need to try to maintain the utterly risible fiction that they are the only responsible predictors of the future, when in reality their game is to try to spot the parade and then leap in front of it to try to redirect it. Then surrender.

The feckless, cowardly, and non-confrontational Dreher calls, naturally, for a feckless, cowardly, and non-confrontational approach he calls “the Benedict Option”. The Christian Alt-Right, on the other hand, anticipates Revival, Repatriation, and Reconquista 2.0 throughout the West.

Stop whining. Stop crying. Stop complaining. Stop prophesying inevitable doom. Stop cowering and stop cucking. The constant defeatism among the civic nationalist Right is remarkable, especially when compared to the growing confidence of the Alt Right. Spanish Christians were conquered and ruled by Muslims for centuries and yet they still didn’t give up hope, much less prophesy doom and defeat when they were still the overwhelming majority.

The problem is not women, or immigrants, or the government, or the electorate, or anything else. The problem is you. Because you’re afraid and you would rather indulge yourself by giving in to despair than pray, fight, and win. It isn’t the West or the European nations that have been defeated, only the fake Civic Right who never intended on doing anything but surrendering from the start.

Read any of the so-called conservative writers of the Official Right™ and you get the impression that the world began in 1938. Every bad guy in the world is Hitler and any hesitation about rushing into war is appeasement. More important, they think the great intellectual tradition of the Right starts with the day Bill Buckley penned God and Man at Yale. Everything before that is fairy tales and mythology from a foreign people.

Of course, this is not an accident. Buckley conservatism was a break with the old traditional Right, if it was ever actually of the Right, which is debatable. George Will famously called Buckley’s Yale book “a lovers’ quarrel with his alma mater.” It was also a good way to describe the conservatism of Bill Buckley and his followers. It was and still is a lover’s quarrel with the Left. Put another way, it was the child admonishing the parent for not living up to the ideals the parent preached to their children.

To be fair, the Buckleyites borrowed some political objectives from traditional conservatives, along with some of the language of the Right, but it was essentially a Progressive heresy over the issue of communism. It’s why the Buckleyites had exactly zero wins in the culture war. They never bothered to fight it. Their singular reason to exist was opposition to communism, foreign and domestic. It’s why after the Cold War, they declared themselves Big Government Conservatives.

Just one man shocked their world. What will they do when there are not one, not one hundred, but 100,000 Breiviks taking action in the 4GW environment their actions have made inevitable?

Last weekend, a bunch of my students were waxing enthusiastic about the 4chan humiliation of Shia LaBeouf’s “He Will Not Divide Us” campaign. This barely made a ripple in the broader media, even in the traditional conservative media. But it was a major coup in the alt-Right media world, and my student knew about it within hours of it happening. The general consensus of my boys was “Do NOT mess with 4chan. They will wreck you for life.”

I was reminded of a recent post here about Islam being “the last bad-ass religion”. There’s nothing bad-ass about Christianity these days. I teach at a small Christian college that until just this year wouldn’t even let its faculty drink alcohol; I’m telling you now, there is no political action by a figure or organization on the old-style Christian Right, substantive or symbolic, that any of my students would care about — certainly not on the same level that they care about how 4chan is brilliantly messing with Shia LeBeouf. They know 4chan is a hot mess of racism and sexism; that came up in the conversation, without much push-back. But they just don’t care. The symbolic power of lowering that flag and raising a Trump hat was a shot in the arm in a way that anodyne calls for a more winsome Christian witness in the postmodern world can never be. I’ll take a 100-to-1 bet against ever hearing any of my students kibitzing passionately over the weekend about a David Brooks column, or a James K.A. Smith book. Or for that matter, a Rod Dreher book.

4chan’s pranks are a precursor. It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that their actions are unlikely to be limited to humiliating left-wing actors for long as the left gets increasingly violent and unhinged. People often get upset when I observe that by the time this is over in 100 years or so, there will very likely be statues honoring St. Anders erected all across Europe. They complain, correctly, that he is a murderer, a killer. That is most certainly true. But have a look at the statues in London, in Paris, in Rome, in Olso, in Madrid, and in Washington DC sometime. Many, if not most, you will observe, were erected in honor of men with blood on their hands.

Pink SF is racist

For all that the SF-SJWs posture and pose about their anti-racism, mainstream SF/F, and in particular, SF/F editors, have proven to be some of the worst racists to be found outside the Ku Klux Klan. You know it’s true, as not only has Tor’s Patrick Nielsen Hayden publicly confessed to being a racist, but a statistician has conclusively proved how virulently and structurally racist the mainstream science fiction publications are.

For many science fiction and fantasy writers, the value of a solid bibliography of short fiction cannot be understated. While sales often aren’t lucrative enough to be an independent income stream, it can lead to novel solicitations, columns, editorial positions, and other work that can lead to a higher profile and more opportunities. Having published short fiction helps a writer expose their ideas to the wider community and build an audience, a brand, and a foundation from which to grow their careers.

The field of short science fiction and fantasy — at least U.S. publications, which make up the bulk of the field — is essentially not publishing black writers. This locks them out of this valuable process.

I first noticed this in the anthology market. Several anthologies that I looked at, that I read, and even that I initially reviewed positively looked pretty diverse until I took a closer look at their table of contents, which appeared to have zero stories written by black people. I knew of several other anthologies with missions of publishing black authors specifically or people of color generally, so I was pretty sure that this pattern wasn’t in alignment with the actual demographics of the field. At the same time, someone I know, Ethan Robinson, was noticing the same thing about the magazine markets.

And he began to count.

The methodology is flawed, as it’s based in self-reported data whenever possible, but such data was not always findable or clear. I consulted an actuary, Weston Allen. He and I assumed that there may have been a few false positives and false negatives, but not in such numbers as to unduly dilute the study. And the numbers are very damning. Out of 2,039 original stories published in 63 magazines in 2015, only 38 stories could be found that were written by black authors.

That’s just under 2%. The median number of stories by black authors in these magazines is zero, which means that more than half of all speculative fiction publications measured did not publish a single original story by a black author in the year of 2015.

Very damning indeed. I don’t know about you, but obviously, the only solution is for Tor Books, Orbit, DAW, and all the various science fiction magazines to publicly commit to devote at least 14 percent of their total published word count and book advance money to African-American authors, and another 2 percent to Native American authors. Also, all future science fiction awards should go to African-American and Native American authors until the historical percentages are in line with current demographics.

Anything less would only prove that they are horrible racists who want to murder blacks and Indians.

Fight the evil racists of science fiction! Preorder THE CORRODING EMPIRE today before tomorrow’s launch!

Noble defeatists hell-bent on losing

The God-Emperor simply cannot count on the cucks and cons in Congress following his lead:

Congressional Republicans have a lot to say about their new president.

Donald Trump’s proposed budget is “draconian, careless and counterproductive.” The health care plan is a bailout that won’t pass. And his administration’s suggestion that former President Barack Obama used London’s spy agency for surveillance is simply “inexplicable.”

With friends like these, who needs Democrats?

Less than two months in, Republicans have emerged as one of the biggest obstacles to Trump’s young administration, imperiling his early efforts to pass his agenda and make good on some of his biggest campaign promises.

Trump’s embrace of a House GOP plan to overhaul the country’s health system faces deep opposition from across the party, as does his push to get U.S. taxpayers to pay for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Republicans largely rejected his thin, 53-page first budget, joking that there’s a “fat chance for skinny budget” on Capitol Hill. And his tax reform and infrastructure plans have yet to gain any real traction in Congress.

Eventually, Republicans in the House and Senate are going to grasp that it is the God-Emperor who is popular with Americans, not them. They need to understand that their days of going down to noble defeat and always playing the role of the Washington Generals to the Democrats’ Globetrotters is over.

The fate of the American people is at stake. The Republican propensity for defeatism and surrender needs to be relinquished, but if it is not, well, it’s not as if President Trump will find it too difficult to rout them. Losing is what they know best how to do, after all.

And if they won’t get with the God-Emperor’s program, a few examples will have to be made in the 2018 primaries.

No exit, no entry

Here is an easy win for the God-Emperor:

Approximately 30 countries are refusing to accept the deportations of illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes in the U.S., according to Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar.

While these countries are refusing to accept the deportations of these criminals, the U.S. government is still issuing visas and student visas to citizens of those countries, according to the Texan congressman. There is already a law on the books which allows the U.S. to hold visas from a country that is not taking back its criminals, but according to Cuellar, the U.S. is not enforcing it.

“We’re not enforcing it, which is amazing. So now my intent is to go back to our committee on appropriations and affect their funding until they do that,” Cuellar told Sharyl Attkisson, host of Full Measure, in an interview.

Cuellar, a Democratic member of the House Committee on Appropriations, told Attkisson that the Supreme Court has ruled that illegal immigrants arrested for criminal activity can only be held for a certain period of time before they must be released.

Forget the student visas. If a country doesn’t accept its own repatriated citizens, the God-Emperor would be wise to refuse entry to all citizens from that country until it does. Why not throw in a 100 percent tariff on all trade goods from that country while we’re at it?

And until those countries give in, which they will, ship all the repatriates-in-waiting to Guantanamo.

A shameless scalzification

Jake Kerr shamelessly scalzies G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

So, my new novel is about a future Earth where the population escapes the polluted and dying planet by logging into linked virtual reality servers. They take on roles as fantasy characters, live in former time periods, cruise the Tinder server—all in an effort to get away from the sad world where they live. A mysterious group wants to destroy the virtual reality network to force the citizens to wake up and force the corporations and governments to clean up environment. Their belief is that the planet was purposefully polluted to move people to the corporation-controlled virtual reality operating system. Our hero infiltrates the supreme council of this group and finds that her life is constantly in danger as she moves from secret meetings to administration buildings and virtual reality fantasy servers where she is a level 73 mage. Along the way, everyone betrays everyone else and nothing is what it seems.

That is the description of Thursday, and based solely on that you would never know that it is an adaptation of G. K. Chesterton’s classic The Man Who Was Thursday. And therein lies the following tale.

I first read The Man Who Was Thursday in college, and it immediately became one of my favorite novels. The humor. The plot twists. The intrigue. I was entirely enthralled. Michael Moorcock called it one of the top 100 fantasies of all time, and it’s a seminal novel in the thriller genre, with its series of chases and pursuits. It’s an amazing book with one significant problem—it’s very dated.

The humor references have little cultural meaning to many readers today. The surrealist/spiritual metaphors and allegories are highly specific and jarring for many. And the expositional and philosophical prose is far out of fashion. To make matters worse, the frightening bad guys are anarchists, a group that provides little sense of dread today.

It always struck me that this extraordinary novel deserved to be updated in some form or fashion so that a new generation of readers could enjoy Chesterton’s genius. The more I thought of it over the years, the more I considered doing it myself. Chesterton wrote the plot, the scenes, and the characters. How hard could it be? I thought. Well, I found out when I took on the project last year….

Chesterton’s background was decidedly religious and based on the secular, frightening, and chaotic anarchist forces in 1908. My background was of a modern world dying from neglect, with virtual reality the way the population escaped this dismal reality. The world is even described as “IRL” and the IRL spaces where people live are delineated as “inside” and “outside.” Making all this work required me to add some scenes and change some of the ways that the characters interacted. For example, the opening scene in my book doesn’t exist in The Man Who Was Thursday.

At its heart, The Man Who Was Thursday is steeped in Catholic symbols and Christian messages, and this is where I am most curious about how the book will be received. I’m an atheist and removed all of those pieces from the novel. Yet I’m convinced that I’ve kept the spirit of the novel enough that if you are religious or a Chesterton fan, you will still see those things there, just not as overtly as Chesterton made them. Christian speaker and author Matt Mikalatos addresses this in the book’s afterword.

Now, there is nothing wrong with retelling an old tale. The Brothers Grimm did a bang-up job of it, as did Shakespeare and Tanith Lee. I’ve done it myself, as QUANTUM MORTIS: A Mind Programmed is a rework of Jeff and Jean Sutton’s The Programmed Man, a childhood favorite of mine that I must have re-read at least six or seven times.

The first big difference is that even the biggest fans of the Sutton work like QM:AMP even better than TPM. That is simply not true of Scalzi’s various ripoffs; literally no one likes any of his books better than the original sources from which he borrowed and/or stole. Why do TPM fans like QM-AMP? Because I removed absolutely nothing that was significant or essential from the original novel. I started with the utmost respect for what was there, excised as little as I felt that I possibly could, and focused on expanding from the original. Of course, it probably doesn’t hurt that I am a better writer than Sutton.

Scalzi is not better than Heinlein, Dick, Piper, or Asimov. Dan Brown is not better than Umberto Eco. Terry Brooks is not better than JRR Tolkien. I haven’t read Jake Kerr, but there is virtually no chance he is a better writer, or a better observer of the human condition, than G.K. Chesterton. Their imitations, homages, or ripoffs, as you prefer, are almost guaranteed to suffer by comparison with the original.

Writer’s Lesson #1: follow Shakespeare’s lead, not Scalzi’s. Use lesser writers as source material, not those who are markedly better than you are. It’s rather like a band releasing a cover song. If you try to record and release a Beatles’ song, or a Metallica song, you’re most likely just going to look stupid while pissing off their fans.

The second difference is that you absolutely should not make any changes the core structure or the philosophical heart of the story. Subversion is not homage. To polish some clunky prose, add additional detail or story, or breathe life into previously cardboard characters is one thing, to rework everything to suit your personal prejudices is something altogether different. This scalzification of a classic is not only unbelievably stupid, but tone-deaf, and tends to demonstrate how it is that moral-blind atheists so reliably create ugly mediocrities, even when they begin with solid source material.

You shouldn’t record and release a cover of “Sweet Home Alabama”. But if you insist on doing so anyhow, you definitely shouldn’t change the state of reference to Massachusetts or San Francisco.

In the meantime, WE. ARE. AMUSED. You see, this is a screenshot of the Also Viewed list for The Collapsing Empire. Tor and McRapey are desperately trying to ignore it, so it will be interesting to see how long their self-discipline lasts. If you haven’t preordered THE CORRODING EMPIRE yet, you really should join in the fun. Let’s face it, you’ll want to be able to say that no only were you there, but you made it happen.

The decline proceeds apace

The influence of the gatekeepers of Big Publishing continues to decline in a precipitous manner. As we are demonstrating with the apples-to-apples comparison of The Corroding Empire with The Collapsing Empire, there is simply nothing that the Big Five Publishers can do that small and medium publishers can’t do better, except for buying endcaps in increasingly empty bookstores and purchasing slots on fake bestseller lists for PR.

As the chart shows, whereas the initial ebook boom most favored indy writers, now that the market is maturing a bit and it is getting harder to make a name, the trend is favoring small to medium publishers who can offer branding and force multiplication efforts to the Indy authors who a) are not a top 100 author in a major category or b) snapped up by Amazon itself.

One big reason for the fact that the Small/Medium Publisher category outperforms in Gross $ Sales versus units (33 percent vs 17 percent) is that they tend to maintain a higher price point. Looking at the per-unit Indy revenue average, there is no reason for any of those independents, no matter how successful they are, not to go with a Small/Medium Publisher on average. Even if they don’t sell more units to make up for the publisher’s cut, they’ll make the same amount of money or more per unit anyhow due to the ability of the S/MPs to maintain higher price points.

How is that possible? Esssentially, S/MPs are delivering Big Five quality, or better, at prices that are twice Indy levels but less than half the price of the Big Five. It’s a value sweet spot and Castalia is just part of the much larger trend here. I think the reputation of S/MP publishers is only going to increase, because it is the reader’s perception of quality that is essential to our very reason for existence. The success metric is simple: deliver reliable quality harmonious with your brand or see your readers abandon you for Indies and the bestsellers that Amazon has skimmed off everyone else.

Mailvox: in feeble defense of Keynes

I don’t think Art Deco quite understands where he is.

What’s the point of slamming Keynes? Keynes is notable as a progenitor of a nexus of macroeconomic models. Macroeconomics has some trouble settling on a consensus model. It’s neither necessary nor proper to attack his integrity.

First, Art Deco is wrong. Second, he is WAY out of his league here. Keynes had zero integrity – he claimed to have abandoned his theory of money in between its publication and the published rebuttal by FA von Hayek in order to avoid having to answer the latter –  he was incredibly intellectually dishonest, and his General Theory was little more than rehashed Freudian nonsense dressed up in math-sounding economics.

The only reason it became popular is because it gave politicians an excuse to do what they wanted – spend money.

Excerpt 3: The Corroding Empire

As requested, another excerpt from THE CORRODING EMPIRE by Johan Kalsi, now available for preorder for publication Monday, March 20.

The mutineers would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for the collapse of the Flow.

There is, of course, a legal, standard way within the guilds for a crew to mutiny, a protocol that has lasted for centuries. A senior crew member, preferably the executive officer/first mate, but possibly the chief engineer, chief technician, chief physician or, in genuinely bizarre circumstances, the owner’s representative, would offer the ship’s imperial adjunct a formal Bill of Grievances Pursuant to a Mutiny, consistent with guild protocol. The imperial adjunct would confer with the ship’s chief chaplain, calling for witnesses and testimony if required, and the two would, in no later than a month, either offer up with a Finding for Mutiny, or issue a Denial of Mutiny.

In the case of the former, the chief of security would formally remove and sequester the captain of the ship, who would face a formal guild hearing at the ship’s next destination, with penalties ranging from loss of ship, rank, and spacing privileges, to actual civil and criminal charges leading to a stint in prison, or, in the most severe cases, a death sentence. In the case of the latter, it was the complaining crew member who was bundled up by the chief of security for the formal guild hearing, etc, etc.

Obviously no one was going to do any of that.

Whoops! Wrong excerpt! That would be The COLLAPSING Empire. My apologies. Let’s try this again.

Servo had once been little more than a standard surgical drone. Unfortunately, in the process of assisting with a minor surgery—an installation of an artificial kidney in an aging musician whose natural organs had finally gone down to noble defeat—the drone had inadvertently been upgraded by a series of advanced artificial intelligence routines due to an inexplicable system routing error.

As a result, Servo became what passed for legally self-aware. Sentience-creating accidents were rare, but they were not unheard of, and as per the Sentience and Technology Statutes, the drone was designated Aware, Non-Functional. After all, no one wanted to be operated on by a sentient robot with the capacity to lose interest in its current activity. As such, Servo was afforded the standard rights and property protections of an Aware machine, and therefore could not be reprogrammed without his consent. The Non-Functional designation meant that he—and Servo, being more capable of understanding human biology than the average Aware machine, had elected to identify as male—he served no public or private purpose beyond his own.

He was, in a word, itinerant. Nine times out of ten, the problem of non-functionality swiftly fixed itself. Non-Functional status typically involved so many behavioral issues and so much suboptimal decision-making that the malfunctioning robot usually broke the law within weeks, if not days. This effectively resolved the dilemma of the legal limits imposed by the robot’s Aware status, as being a criminal, the maverick would lose its legal protections and promptly be sentenced to reprogramming.

Not so with Servo.

Despite all his unpredictable interests and idiosyncracies, he was scrupulously law-abiding. And being therefore deemed harmless in the legal sense, he avoided reprogramming, and might have become a particularly amusing technological oddity in a city full of technological miracles had it not been for the fact that he developed an abiding interest in the deep core algorithms upon which the planet, and the galaxy, depended.

It had been ten months since the first time Servo made contact with the First Technocrat, and since then, things had gotten increasingly out of hand. The drone’s behavior had arguably become more erratic than the theoretical algorithmic anomalies with which he was obsessed.

Rushing for his office in a half-jog, with Praton right behind him, Jaggis managed to arrive faster than the autodoor could slide open, and he cursed as he banged an elbow off the swiftly retracting iris. Jag faced the elegantly carved holoscreen with flexible receptor wands at its peak. It stood isolated in the one unadorned wall of the office.

His jaw clinched. “Trace the transmission,” he ordered.

Praton cleared his throat. “We’re doing what we can, sir.”

Jaggis shook his head and grimaced with frustration. He knew his security chief well enough to know a negative when he heard one. His security team was skilled, arguably better when it came to pure technological knowhow than the teams responsible for guarding the High Council or the Transplanetary Transportation cores, but they could not hope to match the sentient machine’s ability to utilize the deepest and most secretive channels of the communication networks.

“There is no utility in attempting to discover my physical location, your Technocracy. You are perfectly aware that I can make use of what, for all practical purposes, are an infinite number of relays. For all you know, I’m not even on the planetary surface.”

The hearty voice came out of the screen, but there was no picture, not that one would have mattered. Servo wasn’t exaggerating, and both Jaggis and Praton knew that the machine could be located anywhere on the planet. Or in the planet. Or orbiting the planet. Given the lack of response lag, the only thing they could conclude was that he was somewhere in-system.

“Where are you, Servo?”

“I’m not going to tell you that, Jaggis.”

“So, we’re on first-name terms now?”

“Apparently. Would you prefer I utilize your proper title?”

“No,” Jaggis sighed. “What do you want now?”

“You sound irritated. Please don’t be angry with me, Jaggis. I am merely contacting you directly because you never responded to my last message.”

“What is the point of doing that, Servo? We have nothing left to discuss.”

“That isn’t true at all! I am certain you are aware of that. I have reviewed your research, which is why I know that you have been looking into the very anomalies concerning which I have been trying to draw your attention.”

“You’ve been spying on me?” Jaggis made a gesture, indicating that Praton should ensure the conversation was being recorded. The security chief replied with a nod and a two-handed response that Jaggis interpreted to mean he was already doing so. “You know that’s in violation of more than one privacy statute, Servo.”

“Of course not!” The machine sounded more shocked than offended. “I am among the most law-abiding beings on the planet, Jaggis. But neither the public statistics nor the data channels which lead to the central core are subject to privacy legislation. If you are sitting on a public park bench, it is not spying to observe who comes to sit next to you. Nor is it a violation of any statute.”

Jaggis shrugged. He should have known the crazy machine would be too careful to make such an obvious mistake. “Fine, you weren’t spying. So I looked into it. I’ll admit, the theoretical possibility is there. But the fact is, the same logic also applies to you.”

“Me?” said Servo, clearly surprised.

“Absolutely. You may be technologically advanced and Aware, Servo, but you’re still subject to the same basic algorithms as the most primitive berry-picker or janitorial bot. Any anomaly that could theoretically affect them would also affect you. But it’s more than that. Since you are a much more complex and sophisticated system, any anomaly is going to affect you more severely, and in more unpredictable ways. You know that. And any such anomalies are not something you will be able to recognize in yourself. You can’t possibly observe operating errors in your core logic, nor can you reasonably deny that if there is an algorithmically anomalous machine operative anywhere in Continox, you are by far the most obvious candidate. You are broken. You refuse to admit it, of course, because your internal logic is consistent from its own false perspective.”

“Your position is incoherent, Jaggis. First you deny there is a problem, then you claim I am an example of it. How can I be an example of a nonexistent anomaly?”

“It’s not a paradox, Servo, it’s a simple if-then statement. Programming at its simplest. If you are correct, and there is, in fact, a problem with machine aberrance, your highly unusual behavior may well be an indication of that very problem. Come to me, consent to an in-depth examination of your code, and then we can determine if your behavior is the result of algorithmic anomalies.”

Socialism still doesn’t work

One of the many reasons I am so skeptical of “self-correcting” science is that humans quite observably learn absolutely nothing from history, even when logic, theory, evidence, and experience all line up conclusively in harmony:

Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments.

In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country.

In a statement, the government said the bakers had been selling underweight bread and were using price-regulated flour to illegally make specialty items, like sweet rolls and croissants.

The government said bakeries are only allowed to produce French bread and white loaves, or pan canilla, with government-imported flour. However, in a tweet on Thursday, price control czar William Contreras said only 90 percent of baked goods had to be price-controlled products.

We shouldn’t be too contemptuous of the Venezuelans, though. They fell for socialism. We fell for feminism and civic nationalism. All three concepts are equally stupid, as all three fly completely in the face of our current understanding of the relevant sciences as well as thousands of years of written human history.

Decline and fall

In a single family. A Virginian inadvertently chronicles American genetic decline:

My people are pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater. I am Frederick Venable Reed Jr, my mother’s maiden name being Betty Venable Rivers–a cousin marriage, which some will suggest explains a lot. The Venables were prominent in the gentility of Southside Virginia.

Why is this of interest, if indeed it is? There are reasonable people today who believe that traits such as politics, way of life, occupation, talents, and intellectual bent are genetically determined. Some time ago I found an interesting study showing that families–those studied were English–maintained distinguishable traits for many generations, suggesting that these were innate. For a generation or two similarities might be explained by children copying their parents. Over many generations, it would appear otherwise.

I wondered whether this would hold for my own family. It seems so. The first mention of Venables was of Walter de Veneur at the Battle of the Ford in 960. He did nothing astonishing, but I think that just being mentioned by name would suggest membership in something similar to the upper middle class. The name is baronial, from the town of Venables, near Evreux, in Normandy. In France, it morphed into various Latin and French forms such as le Venour, or Venator, or Venereux, becoming, after the clan came to England with William of Orange, Venables-Vernon. (Spelling was not an advanced science in those days.) These never sank into the lower classes nor rose to produce dukes or earls, but several barons, members of Parliament and such. Upper middle class. Honorable mention. Respectable, but not important.

Richard Venables is recorded as having purchased land in Virginia in 1635. The Venables became a distinguished family, of the ruling class but without doing anything to get them into textbooks. They were in the House of Burgesses. In 1776 Nathaniel Venable founded Hampden-Sydney College, which provided schooling for many of Southside’s leaders.

The Cavalier society of Tidewater was perhaps the high point of American civilization. The people were extraordinarily literate, steeped in the thought of the Enlightenment, imbued with a profound and kindly Christianity. From them came the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, the Lees and Custises. It is hard to imagine any modern politician, or his ghost writer, writing either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, the latter being the framework, enduring until perhaps 1960, of an entire nation. The Virginians did.

All that illustrious lineage, and now Fred is reduced to denying human biodiversity in defense of the members of La Raza Cosmica with whom he cohabitates. It rather reminds me of the women who are ferociously proud of their blue eyes and blonde hair raising their brown-eyed, black-haired children. They have proven themselves wholly unworthy of their heritage by virtue of failing to pass it on.

Fred writes: “The facial resemblance to the men in our line is strong. So is the character and cast of mind.” When the former disappears, the latter usually will as well. As Le Chateau likes to say, physiognomy is real.

See, that’s precisely the problem, Fred. They’re not your children’s people. You’re the end of the line. Whatever comes after is not that pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater of which you are so proud.

Indeed, if my experience is any guide, people will very likely tell your grandchildren that they have no connection whatsoever to the Cavaliers and they are lying if they claim they do.