Category: Uncategorized

There Will Be War Volume VI

Volume VI is now out! Seven down, two to go.

THERE WILL BE WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It featured some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I, Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II, and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Hide and Seek” in Volume III . Many science fiction greats were featured in the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova.

THERE WILL BE WAR Volume VI is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 25 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Battleground” by Gregory and James Benford, “The Eyes of Argos” by Harry Turtledove, “The Highest Treason” by Randall Garrett, “Crown of Thorns” by Edward P. Hughes, and “See Now, a Pilgrim” by Gordon Dickson. My personal favorite in this volume is “Nonlethal” by DC Poyer.

New Release subscribers, be sure to check your emails, as the bonus book is an especially good one this time around. Also, I’d like to encourage fans of the series to leave reviews for the benefit of those who are not familiar with it; some of the previous volumes are pretty scanty in this regard.

Mailvox: dealing with failure

CA writes about the challenge of responding to repeated failure:

I find your blogs very informative. Your books, TIA and Cuckservatives, were very enjoyable reads.

Some of your postings about failure are interesting but I am not sure that it is always possible to adopt a logical position and carry one’s emotions along.

I failed in three jobs in succession (one of which I was sacked from) in 2011-12. The night of my sacking, I immediately started looking for new work (I’d lacked this resolve after the second job ended badly). I had to claw my way back through unpaid internships. I would like to feel that this was character building. In reality, I’m stuck trying to impose a logical position (What could I have done better?, What did I learn?) onto an emotional one (this is so unfair, why did these things happen to me?)

I’m haunted by the fact that I have failed more than those around me. It is really painful.

Failure can be painful, but it doesn’t have to be. I not only have multiple failures, but I experience failure so regularly that most of you have no idea that they have even happened.

Within the last year alone, one of the three startups I supported went under, one nearly went under, and the third has had to radically change its business model because events haven’t gone according to plan.

Now, for some people, that amount of failure in quick succession would be very painful emotionally. And I’m not going to pretend that I was completely unperturbed, especially because as recently as one year ago, the failed business was doing very well and was even in the process of growing. But the reason I’m not upset about these things is that they were only three of the projects in which I was involved, and since I was not responsible for any of them there was next-to-nothing I could do about it.

I truly don’t even think about them much. Things are what they are, and trying to fix those projects would only harm the other ones that are going rather better. Never reinforce failure.

But rather than trying to impose logic on his emotions, which is always bound to fail sooner or later, I think the correct thing for CA to do is this:

  1. Accept the emotions. Go ahead and be upset. Go for drinks with one of your friends, bitch about the situation, and get it out of your system. Then stop thinking about it, stop dwelling on it, and above all, STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. Nobody cares, not really. It didn’t happen to them, after all, and they don’t want to think about it happening to them.
  2. Don’t waste time trying to analyze and learn from the situation now. It’s too close in time. It’s too raw. The time to analyze it is when you’re already starting to get back on your feet.
  3. Stop comparing yourself to others. Their situations are different. Their talents and abilities are different. Their connections are different. Their roll of the dice is different. This doesn’t denigrate their success, it merely puts it in perspective.

Never be haunted by the success of others. Instead, try to learn from them, try to be useful to them, and try to become the sort of connection for them that can be useful to both of you. You can learn from anyone; if I can usefully learn from someone I despise as much as John Scalzi, (and I have) then you can certainly learn from those for whom you merely feel envy.

Don’t be afraid of failure or weighed down by it. Develop cornerback’s memory. Just because you got burned once doesn’t mean you’re going to get burned the next time. It’s a new play. It’s a new game. And constantly replaying the previous one in your head is only going to reduce your chances of success next time.

I don’t care if you’ve been knocked down once, three times, or two hundred times. The answer is always the same. Get back up and get back in the fight.

UPDATE: Someone pointed out in the comments that having only one income stream makes risk-taking all but impossible and failure all the more devastating. That’s correct. And that is why you should always devote at least 10 percent of your productive time to secondary and tertiary potential income streams.

Gamma reviews

This is not a Gamma review:

Gamma Reviews: Advanced Review Copies

Advanced Review Copies, or ARCs, are the books that the publishers print out early with ordering information including print run size & co-op information instead of a back cover blurb. These are given out to bookstore buyers, professional reviewers, (and, in the case of Baen, lucky people at the Baen Roadshow.)

Now THIS is a Gamma review:

What I thought of the new Ghostbusters: I liked it, and would happily rewatch it. It’s definitely the second-best Ghostbusters movie, and much closer to the original in terms of enjoyment than the willfully forgotten Ghostbusters 2. There are legitimate criticisms to make of it: the plot is rote to the point of being slapdash, the action scenes are merely adequate, and Paul Feig is no Ivan Reitman, in terms of creating comedic ambiance. But the film got the two big things right: It has a crackerjack cast that’s great individually and together, and it has all the one-liners you can eat. And now that the origin story of these particular Ghostbusters is out of the way, I’m ready for the sequel.

But what about the Ghostbusters being all women?!??!?? Yes they were, and it was good. If you can’t enjoy Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones snarking it up while zapping ghosts with proton streams, one, the problem is you, not them, and two, no really, what the fuck is wrong with you. The actors and the characters had chemistry with one another and I would have happily watched these Ghostbusters eat lunch, just to listen to them zap on one another. And in particular I want to be McKinnon’s Holtzmann when I grow up; Holtzmann is brilliant and spectrum-y and yet pretty much social anxiety-free and I honestly can’t see any sort of super-nerd not wanting to cosplay the shit out of her forever and ever, amen.

BUT THEY’VE RUINED MY CHILDHOOD BY BEING WOMEN, wails a certain, entitled subset of male nerd on the Internet. Well, good, you pathetic little shitballs. If your entire childhood can be irrevocably destroyed by four women with proton packs, your childhood clearly sucked and it needs to go up in hearty, crackling flames. Now you are free, boys, free! Enjoy the now. Honestly, I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence that one of the weakest parts of this film is its villain, who (very minor spoiler) is literally a basement-dwelling man-boy just itchin’ to make the world pay for not making him its king, as he is so clearly meant to be. These feculent lads are annoying enough in the real world. It’s difficult to make them any more interesting on screen.

But this is just the latest chapter of man-boys whining about women in science fiction culture: Oh noes! Mad Max has womens in it! Yes, and Fury Road was stunning, arguably the best film of its franchise and of 2015, and was improbably but fittingly nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Oh noes! Star Wars has womens in it! Yes, and The Force Awakens was pretty damn good, the best Star Wars film since Empire, was the highest grossing film of 2015 and of all time in the domestic box office (not accounting for inflation. Accounting for inflation, it’s #11. #1 counting inflation? That super-manly epic, Gone With the Wind).

And now, Oh noes! Ghostbusters has womens in it! Yes, and it’s been well-reviewed and at $46 million, is the highest grossing opening for its director or any of its stars and perfectly in line with studio estimates for the weekend. Notably, all the surviving principals of the original film make cameos, suggesting they are fine with passing the torch (Harold Ramis is honored in the film too, which is a lovely touch), and Ivan Reitman and Dan Aykroyd are producers of the film. If your childhood has been ruined, boys, then your alleged heroes happily did some of the kicking.

I’m an 80s kid; my youth is not forever stained by a Ghostbusters remake, any more than it was stained by remakes of Robocop or Point Break or Poltergeist or Endless Love or The Karate Kid or Clash of the Titans or Footloose or Total Recall and on and on. I think most of these remakes were unnecessary, and I don’t think most of them were particularly good, or as good as their originals, and I question why film companies bother, aside from the “all the originals were made before the global movie market matured and there’s money on the table that can be exploited with these existing brands,” which is, of course, its own excuse.

But after a certain and hopefully relatively early point in your life, you realize remakes are just a thing the film industry does — the first Frankenstein film listed on imdb was made in 1910, and the most recent, 2015, and Universal (maker of the classic 1931 version) is planning yet another reboot in 2018 or 2019 — and maybe you get over yourself and your opinion that your childhood is culturally inviolate, especially from the entities that actually, you know, own the properties you’ve invested so much of your psyche into. It’s fine to roll your eyes when someone announces yet another remake, tweet “UGH WHYYYYYY” and then go about your life. But it causes you genuine emotional upheaval, maybe a reconfigure of your life is not out of the question.

(Not, mind you, that I think these shitboys are genuinely that invested in Ghostbusters, per se; they’re invested in manprivilege and, as noted above, would have wailed their anguished testeria onto Reddit and 4chan regardless of which cultural property had women “suddenly” show up in it. This is particularly ironic with anything regarding science fiction, which arguably got its successful start in Western culture through the graces of Mary Shelley. Women have always been in it, dudes. Deal.)

The happy news in this case is that, whether or not this Ghostbusters reboot was necessary, it’s pretty good, and fun to watch. That’s the best argument for it. I’m looking forward to more.

So brave. But having finished demolishing his own reputation as a movie reviewer in the interest of virtue-signaling his feminist superiority to “manboys” and “shitboys”, whatever they are, McRapey also had to be the first to comment on his own post on his shrinking little blog.

John Scalzi says:
JULY 17, 2016 AT 12:15 PM
To get ahead of any potential “but there are women saying their childhood was ruined too!” nonsense: Maybe there were? But if there were, and they weren’t gamergate-like sockpuppet accounts, a) I didn’t see much of them, b) they were swamped by the wailing boys, c) the advice to them is the same as to the whining dudes: Remakes happen, maybe get over it.

To get ahead of “it’s sexist to bag on the men here,” argument, leaving the whole larger argument about power stuctures and sexism and all the stuff you recognize play into sexism when you think about sexism on a level higher than “this is a playing card I can slap down in this game called Rhetoric,” you can imagine me in that Wonka meme pose, saying “Tell me again as a man how I can’t criticize men, that’s adorable.”

Finally, to get ahead of any “beta cuck” stupidity, I’m not the one who just spent half a year wailing about the ruin of my childhood, boys. I do find there’s an correlation between the sort of dude who questions my masculinity and the sort of dude who whines excessively about how mean the world is to him, waaaaaaaaaaaah. And this is me in the Wonka pose again.

All of which is to say, Mallet is out for general whiny male bullshit. Behave, children.

Spacebunny cracks me up. Her entire response: “Isn’t he married? Why is he trying so hard?” Sadly, despite his brave and heroic efforts, Scalzi got it wrong in the end. You see, the official feminist line is that Grrlbusters is not only better than the original, but seeing it is important.

The nerdy guy doesn’t get the girl. That was a standard trope in the 80s, and the Ghostbusters of 1984 was no exception. The lack of consent factor that makes all of the Zhoul-possessed Sigourney Weaver scenes difficult to watch is not an issue here, because there is no romance in the new Ghostbusters, creepily possessed or otherwise. Yes, Erin (Kristin Wiig) awkwardly hits on Kevin (Chris Hemsworth) but it’s generally met with disapproval from her fellow Ghostbusters (if not laughter) and Kevin seeming to be oblivious to it. And even better than the nerdy guy being the hero is the fact that the nerdy guy is the villain and the nerdy girls save the world. Boom.

An appreciation for their receptionist by the Ghostbusters. I loved Janine as a kid. As a child, I thought that Janine pining quietly for Egon was romantic. Now it pisses me off. That and the fact that nobody paid any attention to her, generally speaking, because she was competent and therefore invisible. As doofy and dumb as Kevin is, and even though Erin hits on him, the team still values him and learns to work with him because they genuinely care about him. That’s not subtext. That’s actual text.

Using the “ghost” as an allegorical commentary. One of the themes in this movie is the importance of being believed. Yes, in this movie, it’s about being believed about ghosts. Erin talks about how she saw a ghost when she was 8, every night for a year. Her parents didn’t believe her, and she went into therapy. Abby (Melissa McCarthy) was the only one who believed her, which was one of the reasons they became friends. It’s not that much of a stretch to think about all the things that women are also often not believed about, as children or as adults. And that part of the movie, thankfully, and pointedly, doesn’t devolve into comedy. It lets the moment of remembered trauma be serious.

Real friendship between the Ghostbusters. The other moment of seriousness that is allowed to be serious is at the very end, when Jillian (Kate McKinnon) stands up to give the gals a toast. Up to this point, the majority of Kate McKinnon’s screentime has been devoted to sight gags and making straight girls question their sexuality, both of which she excels at.

I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that sequel, Johnny. I expect it will be out around the same time that Paramount releases the Old Man’s War movie.  But at least we’ll have that television show based on Redshirts to look forward to.

3 police shot dead in Baton Rouge

Could be a holdup, could be targeted. 7+ injured:

Police have closed streets between Baton Rouge Police Headquarters and I-12 where law enforcement officers have been shot.

Sources say two Baton Rouge Police officers and one East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office deputy are dead following the shooting. Another officer was critically injured.

A witness told WBRZ News 2, a man was dressed in black with his face covered shooting indiscriminately when he walked out between a convenience store and car wash across from Hammond Air Plaza.  Shots were fired around 9 a.m. Sunday.

The black art of theology

Dalrock observes the evolution of Christian complementarianism:

From the beginning complementarianism has been an effort to split the
difference with Christian feminists (egalitarians).  This comes
naturally from their belief that feminism isn’t a manifestation of the
same discontent that caused Eve to want to be like God in the garden of
Eden.  Instead, complementarians see feminism as a misguided (but
entirely understandable) rebellion caused by the provocation of cruel
men.

Complementarians believe if they are nice enough to women, feminist
rebellion will go away as the reason for the rebellion is thereby
withdrawn (examples here and here).  This requires compromise when Scripture offends feminists, and this has lead complementarians to invent novel interpretations of Scripture. 
But this compromise is by no means a one time deal.  The compromises of
yesterday become the starting position for bargaining today, and
today’s new compromise will become the starting point for bargaining
tomorrow.

We can see this with the complementarian position on spiritual
headship.  Complementarians had to find an interpretation for Ephesians
5:26-27** that formally set them apart from egalitarians but caused
minimal offense to feminists.  But no amount of compromise with
feminists will actually avoid offending feminists, and this has lead to
multiple complementarian stances on the topic of spiritual headship.

In the latest CBMW quarterly journal David Croteau describes the two predominant complementarian compromises on spiritual headship, and then proposes rejecting the concept of spiritual headship altogether.

Theology: the art of convincing Christians that the Bible doesn’t mean what it says and God doesn’t want them to do what the Bible tells them to do.

And any woman who identifies herself as a “feminist” – or man, for that matter – should be expelled from the Church, no hesitation, no debate, no questions asked. Feminism is observably less compatible with Christianity than Satanism or Islam.

Mailvox: stop posturing, morons

The ironically named General Noitall has no idea how clueless he is, but that doesn’t stop him from making confidently authoritative statements that are complete nonsense:

Flynn, under Trump, is set to be Sec. of Defense or, more likely, Chairman of the Join Chiefs. And as we know, Flynn “has no idea how to defeat ISIS”. Yet Trump has promised to take out the IS. What’s absolutely clear about Trump is that his understanding of the geopolitical nature of the world amounts to zero. His understanding of force deployment and use is zero. His experience with the military and dealing with the worlds leaders is zero. But, he does have Flynn.

We certainly know that General Noitall’s experience with the military is zero. How, pray tell, is a retired lieutenant general whose background is in intelligence ever going to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?

For those who don’t know how it works, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is appointed by the President, he is usually selected from among the chiefs of staff – the four highest-ranking generals and admirals- from one of the four armed services. One seldom becomes CJCS without first being Army Chief of Staff, USMC Commandant, Chief of Naval Operations, or Air Force Chief of Staff, and more often than not, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well. These top officers almost invariably have a strong background of field commands, they don’t come from intelligence or logistics.

A three-star officer such as a lieutenant general or a vice-admiral is simply not in the running, particularly one who is not even in the service anymore.

That doesn’t mean Michael Flynn couldn’t be named Secretary of Defense, but then, if elected, Trump could just as easily name the science fiction author Michael Flynn too. Regardless, Michael T. Flynn won’t be commanding any military operations, much less all of them. He’s a civilian.

Look, you’re not fooling anyone when you strike knowledgeable poses concerning things you know nothing about, and make stupid pronouncements that only suffice to demonstrate your ignorance. So stop trying!

None of us know what Donald Trump is going to do when he’s elected. Possibly Trump himself doesn’t know. But I think we can be quite confident that he’s not going to follow Michael Ledeen’s idiotic lead and declare war on radical Islam, Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, and whoever else Ledeen suspects might be in his imaginary Global Alliance of Evil.

A terrible candidate

Even the mainstream media is beginning to admit that Hillary Clinton is an almost exceptionally horrible candidate:

With a toxic cloud hanging over Clinton’s makeshift campaign office at the Radisson hotel in Manchester, Clinton’s chief speechwriter, Dan Schwerin, and her top policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, decamped for Sullivan’s mother-in-law’s house in the Seacoast town of New Castle to rethink the entire campaign’s approach.

There, huddled together in the February snow, they scrapped her spaghetti-on-the-wall policy approach and came up with a sturdy slogan that aimed to capture the historic nature of her candidacy while making a pitch to African-American and Hispanic voters: “Breaking Down Barriers.”

There was just one problem: Their candidate hated it.

“This is useless,” a frustrated Clinton vented when Schwerin and Sullivan — two of her longest-serving aides — presented the new plan to her that glum Tuesday morning of Feb. 9 in her Manchester hotel suite.

The feeling was mutual. Her staff admired her attention to detail, but knew she was often her own worst enemy. Clinton is known for taking a draft of a speech and changing it some indelible way to make it more literal and less readable. (The joke at her Brooklyn campaign headquarters is that she would take the public safety slogan “If You See Something, Say Something,” and, in her literal-minded way, change it to say, “If You See Something, Alert the Proper Authorities.”)

The entire episode illustrated Clinton’s paradox: On the one hand, she’s a deeply involved candidate who trusts her own instincts. But on the other, she still struggles, after all these years, when it comes to messaging — and remains almost hostile to the idea of a narrative that Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and even Donald Trump seem to craft so naturally.

Her best campaign strategy is to go into hiding until November and hope that the Democratic demographics do the job for her. It’s not a good sign when even your campaign staff are joking about how clueless and inept you are.

Interviews with more than half a dozen Clinton allies inside and outside her campaign reveal a candidate who remains deeply insecure when trying to commit to a message about her campaign, and reluctant to indulge in the rhetorical flourishes that make for the rousing poetry of campaigns.

Of course she’s deeply insecure. She’s never achieved one single damn thing on her own. She couldn’t even manage to keep her husband faithful.

Star Citizen: a backer’s perspective

An old school Wing Commander fan explains why he backed Star Citizen and why, despite being a critic of Derek Smart, he has reluctantly come to conclude that Derek appears to be more or less correct:

After the initial crowdfunding campaign they kept promising more and more stuff. Not only had the game gone from being the “spiritual successor of Wing Commander” (a single player game), it was blowing up to be a full MMORPG. And I was fine with that. At first. I was so fine that when they showed off the Retaliator bomber I loved it and dished out $225 for one. And the idea of being information smuggler sounded cool so I dished out money for that too. But then as they continued to get millions of dollars every month I kinda saw it getting out of hand. I fully realise I know very little of what it actually takes to deliver a game and I know it takes a lot of time to make a game. A delay can easily be a year. But when they were promising new features, new ships without actually releasing much I kinda saw the problems of this ever being released. If they take two-three months to get a ship to “flight ready” and they keep coming up with 7-8 new ships every year, how are they ever to get done? If they add new feature to the scope before releasing the basic ones promised during Kickstarter like trading, how are they ever gonna get done?

And during July of 2015 Derek Smart happened. He’s a game maker who has tried to pull off these grand space games for years and never really made it. Which means he knows some of the pitfalls of even trying. He started criticising the “Star Citizen” project – very vocally, bullyuishly, annoyingly, contrived, “deliberately wanting to turn everything into a bad thing” way. And he got very personal against Chris Roberts, his wife and his lawyer (that all co-founded the studio) in a way that was really uncool. But he always stopped right at the border of lying or making shit up. Yes, he twisted everything into a negative thing. And I was right there to point out the actual facts. But the problem of trying to argue with him was the fact that “CIG” (the studio making the game) never managed to prove him wrong. They never managed to shut him up by stepping up to the plate and deliver. Instead, they made his case stronger by coming up with more irrelevant features (plants anyone?), more subscriber flare, more ship-concept sales, more of everything except actual game content. An all this while constantly missing “estimated” release dates that they themselves estimated and set.

Then they went ahead and wrote a new Terms of Service that we have to accept. Which is fine, Blizzard does it all the time. But I actually read those things, it’s a result of working with lawyers for 8 years – I actually read before I sign. And in this Terms of Service they had removed any accountability what so ever, every chance of demanding a refund. It was basically a carté blanche for them to sail away with the $117+ million they had gotten from backers and as long as the company CIG was still “active” and stating the game was still being worked on (without ever actually delivering anything) then we had no rights at all as consumers. I really wasn’t OK with that. So I refused to accept the terms of service. That had the side effect of me not being able to login to the so called “game”.

 Hey, I assumed Derek was full of it too at first, but that was a consequence of my complete ignorance about what he’d been up to since the Battlecruiser 3000 AD days. After he appeared on Brainstorm last year, and convinced a number of game devs, who were far more dubious about him than the average gamer can likely understand, that he knew what he was talking about and that there were intractable problems designed into the development plan, I freely admitted I’d misjudged him.

I even invited him to speak at DevGame, which he did, and where he was a hit with many of the larval game developers there.

The ironic thing is that I’ve known and liked Chris for a long time. I even tried to help him get funding for the Wing Commander reboot, and I could have easily been an early team member of Star Citizen; he was very interested in using my psychological AI approach for the AI-controlled wingmen back when it was still going to be a Wing Commander-style game.

But no amount of doubts about Derek or respect for Chris changes the facts on the ground. They are what they are. And repeatedly, they have demonstrated that Derek is correct, the skeptical industry observers are correct, and the final meltdown is coming into view. This TOS fiasco looks exceptionally shady to me, and likely marks the beginning of the end.

However, Chris may have one last maneuver in him. Derek and I were discussing this – Derek was initially of the opinion that there is no way out – but it’s what I would do if Chris unexpectedly asked me to rescue the project.

  1. Freeze all game development and release all game dev personnel.
  2. Take the massive amount of footage and effects and turn them into a movie.
  3. Release the movie and pray for sufficient success to provide the funding for developing a new Wing Commander-style game of the sort that people wanted in the first place.

It’s a Hail Mary, but it’s the one approach for which Chris still has the resources, and perhaps more importantly, which still has the capability to provide outcomes that will keep everyone more or less happy, employed, and out of prison. Movies are much simpler than games, particularly big budget games, and although the chances of Chris making a good movie that will be successful enough to kick out the $25 million needed to remake Wing Commander are slim, slim is always a damned sight better than none.

A tale of two immigrations

An Englishman tells of his experience of immigrating to Provence, France:

More than a decade ago, long before we moved to the Loire region, my wife and I bought a 19th-century house in the heart of Carpentras, a Provencal market town with a population of 30,000, little more than a two-hour drive north of Nice.

The place had a rich history stretching back many centuries, the architectural legacy of which included a triumphal Roman arch and a magnificent gothic cathedral.

Our new home needed a lot of work, but the task seemed worth it because we could spend part of the year enjoying life in southern France. And at first our times in Carpentras seemed idyllic, wandering through market squares or sitting in a cafe under a cloudless blue sky.

But gradually, shadows began to creep across our retreat. What we had thought was a classic Provencal existence turned out to be something very different. Over the years, Carpentras underwent a dramatic change as the Muslim population grew and the town became ever more Islamified.

Although ethnic monitoring is illegal in France because it is seen as divisive and offends the concept of Gallic solidarity, it has been conservatively estimated there are at least 13,000 Muslims in the town, making up more than 40 per cent of the population.

Some have put the figure as high as 60 per cent. Two mosques, one of them a massive new block, have been established to meet the changing religious demographic. Inexorably, the streets were becoming filled with figures in Islamic dress, along with halal butchers and kebab shops.

In response to this transformation, the owner of the internet cafe opposite our house grew increasingly fervent in his support for the National Front, putting up large posters for Jean-Marie Le Pen in his windows, which were regularly smashed.

Throughout all this, we could sense that the gentleness of Provence, scented by grapes, lavender and sunflowers, was giving way to a mood of suspicion and latent threat.

One night I woke up to the smell of acrid smoke in the air. Looking out from my bedroom window, I saw to my astonishment that five cars had been set on fire in our street. On another occasion, while out in the countryside with my wife, I was menaced by a Muslim armed with scythe.

When, slightly shaken, I told this to a neighbour, who was a French army veteran, he recounted how a local Muslim had one day threatened to slit his throat.

There are now three options for France: surrender, mass deportation, and mass elimination. The French people can only choose one. Coexistence, which was their previous preference, is no longer on the table. And they will have to choose in the next ten years, because the window of opportunity for choosing is rapidly closing.

After that, there will be civil war regardless of what the French prefer, because Muslims reliably attempt to assume complete regional control once they reach a certain percentage of the population. See Nigeria for one example of that. The same thing may happen in London and several cities in the UK in the same time frame. It will also likely happen in the USA, as Americans are increasingly disinclined to repeat the French experiment with Islam and various forms of Muslim bans are already being openly discussed.

As for those who object that the mass deportations will lead to bigger government, well, it’s too late. The time to prevent that has passed, and you shouldn’t have been so blitheringly stupid as to champion mass immigration on the grounds of individual freedom of movement. Mass immigration will ALWAYS lead to bigger government one way or another, either because the immigrants demand it or because the natives demand it in response to being invaded.

Damned neocons never stop

Michael Ledeen is, without question, the biggest liar in the US political commentariat.

Ledeen told Pollock that “It’s not just radical Islam. It’s radical Islam, plus their radical, secular allies North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba. So we’re fighting a global alliance which is coming after us. We should stand up for our own values and waging political war against them as we did against the communism and fascism in the last century.”

I’m only surprised that Mr. “Faster Please” didn’t try to claim Iran was behind the Nice attack. What a fucking globalist liar.

As for his co-author Flynn, the fact that he was “PRESIDENT OBAMA’S DEFENSE INTEL CHIEF from 2012 to 2014” is sufficient evidence to prove he has no idea how to defeat ISIS.