Category: Uncategorized

Two weeks

Adam Piggott, Gentleman Adventurer, reviews Owen Stanley’s The Missionaries:

When I lived in Uganda there was an old joke that would routinely do the rounds:

“In Africa, what’s the difference between a tourist and a racist?”

Answer: “Two weeks.”

Occasionally I would recount this joke to a particularly inane group of Swedes who were about to depart for a gorilla trekking excursion into the remote Bwindi forest. They would get all self-righteous and mutter at my blatant prejudice and soon after they would depart. It was not uncommon to bump into them again after they had returned from their excursion.

“Ya, now your joke, we understands.”

Like all good jokes its premise is founded in truth and also of shared experience.

“The Missionaries,” by Owen Stanley, depicts a fictitious land known as Elephant Island, located somewhere in the confines of the Bismarck Sea, its people closely resembling the ways and mannerisms of Papua New Guinea. As colonialism no longer allows the natives to practice their favorite pastime of headhunting, the burden of keeping law and order falls to a small group of misfit expats, who despite their individual shortcomings, keenly understand the idiosyncrasies of the local population….

I have not enjoyed a novel as much as this in a very long time. In fact,
this novel could not have been published by the regular publishing
industry as it skewers the type of people who haunt that industry as
much as NGOs in misbegotten locales in the far corners of the globe. It
is a credit to Castalia House that the author has sought them out and I
sense that this will be a breakthrough work not just for Stanley but for
this small publishing house as well.

It appears his instincts are correct. Not only have we recently signed a number of new authors about whom we are extremely enthusiastic, but some of the existing authors have stepped up their game as well. Just as Mutiny in Space will not be our only SF juvenile and Brings the Lightning will not be our only Western, The Missionaries will not be our only literary satire.

The media comes after the Alt-Right

As I mentioned a few days ago, it’s a big mistake for anyone on the Right to talk to the mainstream media. As I was explaining to one of the Dread Ilk yesterday, only a complete amateur believes he can somehow spin media coverage to his advantage, and only a complete innocent believes the media is genuinely interested in his story, giving him the chance to set the record straight, or wants to present both sides of the situation.

When a journalist contacts you, he already has the story outlined, the narrative is already established, and often, it has already been approved by an editor. Unbeknownst to you, your role has already been established, and if you are on the Right, you are almost certainly playing the role of the villain of the piece. The reason they are calling you, and will spend up to six hours talking to you, is to glean that single sentence or two they can use to put you on stage in your appointed character as Richard III or Iago.

You’re not going to play them. The average journalist has successfully played hundreds of people and is an expert at pretending to be a new and sympathetic friend before ritually sacrificing you before the public. They don’t hesitate to edit and elide, to insert nonexistent dialogue and false reaction faces, in order to present an intentionally false version of events. They are more cunning and insidious than you suspect. Consider that despite my customary caution, Amy Wallace of Wired managed to disarm my defenses by first interviewing Larry Correia and Brad Torgerson in an entirely friendly manner, then reading the pre-release version of SJWAL before interviewing me.

She then spent three freaking hours talking to me about the Hugos and science fiction, when all she was really after was a means of character-assassination required to support the SF-SJW Narrative of racist Puppies. She didn’t care about Correia or Torgerson or the Hugo Awards, I was the target all along. The only reason she failed was due to her being a parochial American; she didn’t realize the kill-quote that sounded so horrendously racist to Americans was, in fact, an accurate reference to a genuine and widespread problem in Europe, an issue that soon after broke into the English-language media via the UK.

Anyhow, several major news organization are now working on a stories about the Alt Right and connecting it to the rise of Trump. All of us have refused to talk to them, which means that they will have to make do with putting on their Kabuki play without an on-screen villain, or at best, a foolish lesser player or two dressed up in the villain’s clothes.

As Cernovich rightly points out, they need us more than we need them. We can help them sell their Narrative if we are foolish enough to play along, but we have no need of their exposure or their false promises of presenting our side of the story to the public. We will do that ourselves, and we will ultimately replace them as people increasingly turn to us for the simple reason that we tell the truth exactly as we see it, we do not knowingly push false narratives on the public and pretend that they are true.

My media policy is fairly straightforward. I will only do recorded radio or podcast interviews with Alt Right-friendly parties who are not part of any mainstream organization. Any interview with a newspaper or a blog must be written; no telephone or Skype interviews. No television period. No radio unless it is live and the purpose of the interview is clearly provided beforehand.

UPDATE: One of the organizations has asked me if I am willing to respond in writing to their written questions. While I’m not quite certain how that will work in a broadcast environment, I have agreed to do so, partly as an experiment, but mostly because I would prefer to provide the quotes being utilized rather than have them resort to cherry-picking them from my various writings.

Hillary skates again

Well, Justice Thomas already warned us that the Rule of Law no longer applies to the United States of America:

FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday announced the agency is not recommending the Justice Department bring charges against Hillary Clinton, while also denouncing the former secretary of state and her aides for the way they handled classified information through private email servers.

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is information that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” Comey told reporters in Washington, D.C., noting that the probe has found that the former secretary of state used several different email servers and numerous devices during her time in office.

Even so, Comey added later, “Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case. Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before deciding whether to bring charges.”

Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said the campaign was happy the FBI probe was now in the rearview mirror. “We are pleased that the career officials handling this case have determined that no further action by the Department is appropriate,” Fallon said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon. “As the Secretary has long said, it was a mistake to use her personal email and she would not do it again. We are glad that this matter is now resolved.”

Seriously, how on Earth does this woman continue to get away with everything? I mean, even if you were a Power That Be, why would this, of all women, be the one that you’d go out of your way to protect no matter what she does?

They can’t find anyone more competent? They can’t find anyone less cartoonishly hateful?

How to avoid raising SJWs

Jean-Batave explains seven ways to avoid inadvertently turning your children into SJWs:

1. Be present

As simple as that. Be there. Listen to them. Spot the early signs of SJW friendly attitude and nip them in the bud. A girl with an absent father, like a ship with no rudder, will turn to an ocean of cocks. A boy with an absent father will turn to crime, or worse, feminism.

Keep them close in their formative years. You are a rock, an example. Live by what you preach. There is only so much you can do. The idea here is to create a strong, independent mind that will be curious, hard to manipulate and ready to question the pre-conceived ideas that the exterior world will feed them.

2. Find the ideal environment

It starts by choosing the right mate. More on that here. Avoid criminogenic urban hives. Make sure that you approve of the local community before you move in somewhere. Don’t let them go to university. Make them learn something that will bring them a stable future.

3. Be direct but constructive

Tell them that life is unfair, that family is sacred and explain what death is, among other things. Explain clearly what are the concepts of hard work, merit, strength and beauty, that men and women are very different. That physical appearance and money are important, but that they are not the panacea. No matter what they say, no man wants to hear that he is weak and no woman wants to hear that she is unattractive.

The idea of not sending one’s children to university will be controversial, and hard for many Americans to even contemplate, but the reality is that most young men and women don’t belong at university and learn nothing that is useful or beneficial there. Even those pursuing professions that legitimately require a university degree will likely benefit from working a year or two before returning to school.

An eighth way is to teach them the value of honesty, particularly with the importance of being honest with oneself. No one who values truth and honesty will ever become an SJW, because a necessary aspect of SJWdom is a willingness to lie to oneself and others.

Gamaliel unmasked

The Witchfinder General unmasks the anti-GamerGate Wikipedia administrator Gamaliel, who was, until recently, an Arbitration Committee member, Wikimedia DC board member, and the editor-in-chief of Wikipedia’s quasi-newspaper, The Signpost.

Unmasking Gamaliel

Your author has decided to name Gamaliel. Last year I concluded that there was no public interest in unmasking Gamaliel. He was a mere administrator and there is a convention that only in exceptional circumstances is a low ranking person in a large organisation named.

Recent events have caused me to review that decision and I have concluded that it is in the public interest now to name Gamaliel and reveal his occupation and employer—The former Wikipedia Arbitrator and Administrator known as Gamaliel is known as Robert Manuel Fernandez in real life.

1. Gamaliel is no longer junior. He held an international, policy-setting, elected position on the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee.
2. Gamaliel read my article ‘Paedophiles of Wikipedia’ and breached policy by not banning an admitted paedophile.
3. Gamaliel works in an educational institution as an assistant professor and a librarian and is in a position of trust.
4. Gamaliel has made potentially ruinous allegations against users of Wikipedia like The Devil’s Advocate and afforded them no opportunity to respond – indeed this blog treated Gamaliel and Jimmy Wales better and allowed them the opportunity to comment in advance.
5. When I put this article on hold out of pity for Gamaliel, his acolytes claimed contacting his employers was, ‘extortion’ … before doing far worse to David Auerbach.

Gamaliel is Robert Manuel Fernandez, Assistant Professor, Reference / Instructional Librarian at Saint Leo University, Florida.

I don’t know that it’s much of an “unmasking”, actually, but regardless, Fernandez is the poster boy for a considerable amount of what is wrong with Wikipedia. He is also a useful study in SJW entryism, even though Wikipedia itself is an SJW-controlled organization, in light of how he continually wormed his way towards positions of internal influence.

I suspect an inordinate number of Wikipedia administrators are low-level academics at lesser institutions. That’s why they have no shortage of time to spend thought-policing Wikipedia pages for any content that might call the SJW Narrative into question. It also explains why they almost invariably demonstrate terminal midwittery.

The bonfire of science

In which it is once more demonstrated that scientific evidence is VASTLY less reliable than other types of evidence, because, in most cases, no one ever bothers to actually check the results:

A whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” MRI-based science has been invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data.

The problem is simple: to get from a high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain to a scientific conclusion, the brain is divided into tiny “voxels”. Software, rather than humans, then scans the voxels looking for clusters.

When you see a claim that “scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it”, they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software.

Now, boffins from Sweden and the UK have cast doubt on the quality of the science, because of problems with the statistical software: it produces way too many false positives.

In this paper at PNAS, they write: “the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.”

For example, a bug that’s been sitting in a package called 3dClustSim for 15 years, fixed in May 2015, produced bad results (3dClustSim is part of the AFNI suite; the others are SPM and FSL).

That’s not a gentle nudge that some results might be overstated: it’s more like making a bonfire of thousands of scientific papers.

It is not even remotely reasonable to take scientific evidence at face value anymore, much less the pseudoscience so often being substituted for the results produced by genuine, if often flawed, scientody.

It is not even remotely surprising that the flaw the scientists failed to pick up in this situation was statistical, for as I’ve previously observed, most scientists have very little training in math or statistics, and despite their habit of regularly citing statistics, most of them are more or less statistically illiterate.

Never forget that while there are certainly some brilliant scientists, most of them are literal midwits as there are relatively few credentialed scientists with IQs over 132. A study of all the U.S. PhD recipients in 1958 reported an average IQ of 123; the Flynn effect notwithstanding, it is highly unlikely that the average IQ of today’s increasingly diverse and vibrant PhD recipients has risen since then.

The Great Rebellion

Joel Kotkin tries to explain why the world is rebelling against the experts claiming the right to lead it:

The Great Rebellion is on and where it leads nobody knows.

Its expressions range from Brexit to the Trump phenomena and includes neo-nationalist and unconventional insurgent movement around the world. It shares no single leader, party or ideology. Its very incoherence, combined with the blindness of its elite opposition, has made it hard for the established parties across what’s left of the democratic world to contain it.

What holds the rebels together is a single idea: the rejection of the neo-liberal crony capitalist order that has arisen since the fall of the Soviet Union. For two decades, this new ruling class could boast of great successes: rising living standards, limited warfare, rapid technological change and an optimism about the future spread of liberal democracy. Now, that’s all fading or failing.

Living standards are stagnating, vicious wars raging, poverty-stricken migrants pouring across borders and class chasms growing. Amidst this, the crony capitalists and their bureaucratic allies have only grown more arrogant and demanding. But the failures of those who occupy what Lenin called “the commanding heights” are obvious to most of the citizens on whose behalf they claim to speak and act.

The Great Rebellion draws on five disparate and sometimes contradictory causes that find common ground in frustration with the steady bureaucratic erosion of democratic self-governance: class resentment, racial concerns, geographic disparities, nationalism, cultural identity. Each of these strains appeals to different constituencies, but together they are creating a political Molotov cocktail.

It’s moderately amusing that Kotkin first asserts that nobody knows where the Great Rebellion is leading before promptly explaining where it is going to go. He doesn’t know. No one does, but the idea that someone whose sympathies clearly lie with the dishonest, predatory elite that has met with such a visceral rejection from widely disparate people suggests that he will no more be able to anticipate its direction than he was able to see it coming in the first place.

What “Independence” day?

I don’t celebrate the 4th of July. I don’t celebrate “Independence Day”. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas eloquently expresses my feelings towards the Imperial USA and its regime in his recent opinion in WHOLE WOMAN’S HEALTH v. HELLERSTEDT, 136 S. Ct. 1001 (2016)

“The majority’s embrace of a jurisprudence of rights-specific exceptions and balancing tests is ‘a regrettable concession of defeat—an acknowledgement that we have passed the point where ‘law,’ properly speaking, has any further application.”

John Wright has more on this from his lawyer’s perspective on his site. And in case you missed the vital phrase there, I’ll point it out: we have passed the point where ‘law,’ properly speaking, has any further application.

Now, this isn’t news to me. I wrote back in 2004 that the country formerly known as “America” was dead. Today is perhaps the most fitting day on which to remind everyone that the iUSA is not America, and that one cannot fix a corpse.

Tibetan religious tradition has it that when the Dalai Lama dies, the Buddha of Compassion leaves his body and incarnates in the body of a young child. The monks immediately go out in search of this blessed child, and when they find him – as they inevitably do – he is tested by a group of high lamas and enthroned as the reincarnation of his successor.

Imagine, however, if the lamas refused to recognize that the Dalai Lama was, in fact, dead. Suppose that instead of going in search of the Buddha’s new carnal home, they hooked up the corpse to a life support machine and waited patiently for the Holy One to awake and rise up. It’s not hard to see that they would be doomed to disappointment, and furthermore, would fail to find the next Dalai Lama as well.

This is precisely our dilemma today, for America, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, is dead. By every measure, large and small, the original vision of limited government by, for and of the people has been folded, spindled and mutilated beyond recognition. When one reads the Constitution, one simply marvels at the distinct difference between its words and our present reality.

Our paper Federal Reserve Notes are not Congress-issued gold and silver coins. Our direct taxes are not apportioned. We are entangled in a veritable web of foreign alliances, Congress shamelessly makes laws regarding speech, religion and guns, and the judicial branch has arrogantly assumed for itself unchecked supremacy over the other two branches.

Regardless of whether one see these changes as blasphemous treason against the Constitution, or as reasonable and necessary modifications to what was designed to be a living document that evolves with the times, it is impossible to deny that they have been made. It is likewise impossible to assert that a massive central government possessing eminent domain, owning over a third of the land, and claiming more than a third of all income is either limited or small.

For many years, conservatives and other freedom lovers have placed their trust in the Republican Party, hoping that it would fulfill its promises to return America to its national birthright of freedom and individual liberty. Those promises, unsurprisingly, were broken by the party of Abraham Lincoln, who is most famous for converting what had been a voluntary Union of free association into a forced Union made by military might.

Any last vestiges of hope in the Republican Party have been shattered by the current regime, wherein a Republican President, Republican House, Republican Senate and Republican-nominated Supreme Court have demonstrated that they have zero interest in the timeless vision of America’s founders. Supporting them in the hopes that they will revive American liberties is akin to hoping that shock paddles will suffice to revive a month-old corpse. American freedom is not only dead, it has been rotting for some time.

There are those who say that a vote for a third-party candidate, such as the Libertarian Party’s Michael Badnarik or the Constitution Party’s Michael Peroutka, is wasted. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, these are the only votes that are not wasted, for positive change will only come from those outside the corrupt bi-factional system. After all, it was neither the Tories nor the Whigs who fought for American independence.

Like the Tibetan lamas, we must go in search of those in whom the spirit of freedom and liberty burns. The revival of American liberty is still in its infancy, as only 482,451 people voted for the Libertarian and Constitution presidential candidates combined, 0.96 percent of those who voted for the victorious Republican, George W. Bush. But that is 482,395 more people than the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, and as for those who believe our present bipartisan system is eternal, well, tell it to the Whigs.

Or, for that matter, to the optimates and populares of Rome. The choice is simple, if not easy. A revival of liberty or the continued stink of an extinct republic as it decomposes into dictatorial empire.

America is dead. Let us go, then, and find her.