Category: Uncategorized

She Knows Some Bad People

This is a short piece about Neil Gaiman by a woman with whom I was briefly acquainted; I also knew the “Mike” to whom she refers, and even spent quite a bit of time talking to him about Traveller at the one science convention I ever went to, which I believe was called Minicon. He had contributed a few adventures to Marc Miller’s excellent SF game, and I was interested in obtaining the video game rights to it. Elise was a bit of a character, as she attended the Minnesota writers workshop that consisted of Lois McMaster Bujold, Pat Wrede, Joel Rosenberg, Bruce Bethke, and Peg Kerr, among others, at which I was a guest for a few months in the mid-90s. However, I was always a bit confused as to what Elise was doing there, as she never wrote anything and didn’t appear to ever read anyone else’s work either. I don’t believe Mike aka John M. Ford belonged to the writer’s group, or if he did, he never showed up while I was there.

The one thing I remember about Elise was that she was what I consider to be a full-time professional feminist. So, if she says she didn’t know Gaiman was up to the various shenanigans of which he has been repeatedly accused, I have absolutely no doubt that she didn’t, because she struck me as the sort of woman that is obsessively interested in complaining about every form of male oppression. Which tells us that Gaiman was more than a bit circumspect in his predations, and that he was very much a self-controlled and intentional stalker of insecure and starstruck young women.

I’ve known Neil Gaiman since the very early nineties, when Mike said a friend was coming to a local book-centric fantasy convention and that we should look after him. Apparently he sounded trepidatious or something; Mike said something about how of course there were the comics but the friend said he’s only written one book and he only wrote half of that. Sure, Mike, we can make your friend welcome. So we did. I wrote elsewhere about how this left me for some years with a habit of checking in on Neil at events or when he had a recording session where I worked. I’d go by to see how he was doing, ask whether he’d eaten lately, see if he needed anything. I didn’t quite march over and tell him to put on a sweater, but it was like that. (He always had a leather jacket; a sweater wasn’t necessary.)

Over the decades there were shared meals in various cities, late night convention conversations, visits to the house, gatherings and parties, some with musicals written by Mike because Neil had made a typo on the invitation too good for Mike to resist. For many years I’ve navigated to Neil’s house by singing the American Pie filk Mike wrote about Neil’s invitation to his annual Guy Fawkes Day party which contained the driving directions. One verse ended “The tower lights will be alive; you’ll see the house as you arrive. But do not park upon the drive!” because that last bit was emphasized on the invitation.

Mike and Neil meant a lot to each other. Back in the day, watching the two of them talk writing at a restaurant or sushi bar or a room at a convention late at night was a true delight. When Mike died, Neil helped me through the aftermath. He gave one of the eulogies. He did kind things. He wrote a foreword for Mike’s posthumously published book Aspects which was pretty much another eulogy. He told me it was the hardest thing he ever had to write, and that we were very lucky to have had Mike in our lives.

One time at the house Neil gave me beeswax from his beehives. I used it to make pendants where meteorite dust was sealed into tiny corked glass bottles with the beeswax and sterling silver wire. Stardust in a bottle.

For decades, my metric for buying a new pair of glasses was that whichever one made me wonder what Neil would think of it was the one I’d probably buy.

He took me to my first Tori Amos concert many years ago.

So yeah, I’ve been friends with Neil for somewhere upwards of three decades.

After the news broke, I walked through my house, and every room had something Neil had written, or some art or music that he had introduced me to, or something he had given me. He’s woven through so many memories, with Mike and without. I looked through various correspondence, all the notes with “So much love to you,” all the snippets of news and shared silliness. Years. Decades.

And you know what? Not one bit of that cancels out any of what the survivors say. He’s been my friend for a long time. And I believe them. Which is a tangled set of feelings from one angle, but from another perspective what rings true to me is clear. I believe them.

When I see people saying “Oh, everybody knew,” I shake my head. Everybody did not know. I didn’t know. Nobody in any of the whisper networks told me, or warned me, or asked me to help anyone who had been hurt. And I never figured it out for myself. When the news broke, I was shocked.

Thinking back, I wondered whether anyone had thought he must be OK to be around because of people like me who were his friends. It’s happened before. I don’t like being used as cover… What I say to my friend when we next talk will be between me and him. What I most want to say is “You know fairy tales. You WRITE fairy tales. What did you think was going to happen??”

DISCUSS ON SG

Kiev Regime Running Out of Time

Zelensky is lurching from one senseless act of desperation to another in a futile attempt to improve Ukraine’s negotiating position vis-a-vis Russia. These acts are futile, because Russia is not going to negotiate with him, and turning him and his cronies over for trial are almost certainly going to be one of the Russian conditions when it negotiates the surrender of Ukraine with its NATO masters.

The 2024 Kursk Offensive was a small and feeble echo of the Unternehmen Wacht am Rein, the final, failed offensive of the Wehrmacht in 1944. Its failure means that missile strikes on nuclear plants are about all the Ukrainians have left to offer in the way of threats.

There was still some hesitation on my part on whether the Kursk madness was truly a sign of an AFU reaching its critical end point or not, though mostly I leaned on the affirmative. However, the latest desperate move seems to fully avow this interpretation of events. But, I believe there are a few multi-varied nuances to properly interpreting Zelensky’s threatening signal.

First: it can be said that this act of desperation was a strong signal to Zelensky’s own “partners” in the U.S. and the West. I predicted long ago—last year—that once things finally grind down to the gristle for Ukraine, Zelensky would have no choice but to begin threatening his partners through escalation to save his own hide. He would threaten not only pushing Russia’s red lines in unnerving ways which would pose the threat of nuclear annihilation to the U.S., but as a last ditch effort he would also float the threat of unveiling many secrets and ‘skeletons in the closet’ of his Western partners as blackmail.

But what’s happening now is in effect a double nuclear blackmail. Not only was Zelensky trying to reach the Kursk nuclear plant for this very purpose, but has now acted out his furious frustration at the ZNPP, as well. It’s difficult to know for certain, but captured AFU POWs have in fact now attested to the Kursk plant as being the objective, or Kurchatov, the town where the plant sits. This was supposed to have been reached in the first day or two, which now appears to have been a miserable failure being covered up by more antics.

But getting back to the second point. I believe the ZNPP strike was also a double threat toward Russia. ZNPP may be currently inactive, but Kursk is in operation, and Zelensky likely meant to send a symbolic message that the Kursk nuclear plant may be “next”. In essence, it is saying: “Be wary, the Kursk plant is in my sights. This is just the first demonstration of my seriousness.”

But why would Zelensky threaten his partners as well? The obvious answer is to shock them into providing more aid and committing totally to Ukraine’s victory. “Give us everything or we’ll take the entire world down with us in a ball of nuclear flame.” Funny how much similarity there is between Zelensky and Israel, what with their Samson Option and all.

The only answer to a Samson Option is to call the bluff. It may not be entirely a bluff, but it’s almost certainly a partial one. And for the citizens of most countries across the West, the threat to eliminate their capital cities is not necessarily seen as a negative anymore. To paraphrase Ivan Drago, if we die, we die. Otherwise, you live in a permanent state of submission to the whims of a weak psychopath, which is obviously worse than death. These acts of increasing desperation by the Kiev regime are indicative of both its weakness as well as its awareness that it is rapidly running out of options.

Apparently, the enemy, relying on the help of its Western masters… is striving to improve its negotiating positions in the future. But how can we talk about negotiations with those who conduct indiscriminate strikes on civilians, civilian infrastructure, or try to threaten nuclear energy facilities?
– President of Russia, Vladimir Putin

To say nothing of those who have absolutely no electoral mandate to govern, represent, or speak for the people of Ukraine.

DISCUSS ON SG

Educating the Englishman

Richard Dawkins, who is considerably less intelligent than the average individual who has never read one of his books tends to imagine, attempts to criticize the USA’s Constitutional limits on democracy. This is a rather transparent attempt by the hapless evolutionist to avoid criticizing his own kingdom’s even more stringent assaults on democracy, probably because if he did, he would be arrested, imprisoned, and convicted within 48 hours. Devon Eriksen wasted no time in setting Dawkins straight:

Richard Dawkins: Electoral College could deliver presidency to party with 73,000 votes against “losing” party’s 260,000. US Senate election: Single voter in Wyoming wields more influence than 65 Californians. Convicted felon can be President but not superbly qualified US citizen born abroad.

Devon Eriksen: You see, the people who wrote the Constitution understood that a nation is more than just a collection of people. It also consists of all the organizations, processes, institutions, and industries required to actually keep those people alive and have a functional society.

All of these things need political power to defend and advance their interests, allowing them to function.

So, the Constitution itself was designed as a balancing act. Some things are up for a vote, and others are not. And when representation is apportioned, it is not doled out equally by head count.

This is not a bug. It’s a feature. And it’s incredibly wise.

The more technologically advanced a civilization becomes, the fewer actual thinking human people are employed by life-sustaining industries.

That’s a good thing. It is the whole fucking point of technology… free up most of your population from whacking at the dirt with a stick to survive, and they can be engineers, businessmen, tradesmen, entertainers, and artists. People are freed from drudgery, invent cool stuff with all their newfound spare time, and life is better.

But what about those life-sustaining industries? They still have to run. They still need political power in order to make sure the laws protect them, and society sees to their needs. But their work involves very few people, and a lot of machines.

And machines don’t vote.

So it’s not only very important, but gradually more and more important, to the health of your nation that the political will of a cattle rancher in Wyoming carries more weight than that of a fashion magazine editor in San Francisco.

Because fewer and fewer people in your society even understand what is necessary to keep everyone fed.

With the partial exception of Switzerland, the West never had any democracy. In the USA, it is not only limited by the Constitution, but even more strictly by the courts, which make a habit of overturning every referendum that doesn’t please the elite and mostly foreign oligarchy that actually runs the empire masquerading as a “republic”. But both “democracy” and “freedom” are useful rhetorical terms for the imperial propagandists, as they don’t have any substantive meaning that tends to contradict the inverted definitions that are used today.

Dawkins, like most secularists, is orders of magnitude away from understanding anything about the modern world. In rejecting every aspect of the supernatural, he is completely unequipped to make any sense at all between the ancient war between the fallen god of Carthage and the fallen god of Rome, much less the Divine Invasion that is in, but not of that war.

DISCUSS ON SG

Clown World Never Rests

British doctors are ordered to ask men if they are pregnant:

British health authorities have instructed doctors performing X-ray, CT and MRI scans to ask men whether they are pregnant.

The “inclusive pregnancy status guidelines for ionizing radiation” were developed by the Society of Radiographers (SoR). According to The Telegraph, the guidance came in response to an incident in which a transgender man had a CT scan while pregnant. The decision was justified by the fact that the radiation from X-ray, CT and MRI scans can be harmful to unborn babies.

Doctors have therefore been told not to assume the gender identity of patients when performing all such procedures and inquiring of all people between the ages of 12 and 55 about pregnancy, including men, transgender, non-binary, and intersex patients.

I don’t want any medical services whatsoever from any doctor who doesn’t know the difference between men and women. Or from satanic globalists. It’s only a matter of time before they declare mandatory euthanasia is good for you.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Backhanded Compliment

There is no question that Chris Langan is smarter than I am. Nor is there any question that he’s genuinely as intelligent as he claims to be. And while we’re all familiar with being damned by faint praise, this may be one unusual example of being praised by faint damns:

As far as Germany is concerned, everyone is forever knocking the so-called “nazi stud farms” of the 1930’s and 40’s. But before one can even dream of doing this in any meaningful way, one must consider the alternatives available in the present reproductively degenerate environment … and we’re not just talking about genocidally replacing indigenous Europeans with maladaptive foreigners. As I say, the situation here is nearly as bad. As one of the premier bouncers in New York, if not the best-known of all, I was nothing if not accessible to women. That I didn’t get any reproductive play on Eastern LI, where rich and pampered women abound, and that I simultaneously watched these decadent party girls having out-of-wedlock children by a succession of dunces, creeps, and minority players, is really quite informative when you come right down to it. Truly, the Caucasian genome is in freefall.

That smart people do suffer is simply true, and I do not envy anyone except the great men of the past; I feel like an alien in this world and wish I had never been born or at least in a century with refined manners. Call Oswald Spengler a gamma all you want: he was a genius superior to the Vox Days and van Crevelds.

To quote Nils M. Holm from this unfinished book “Bridging the Gap” (t3x.org):

“Having a job that pays the bills helps to find your way in this world, and having a jobs that allows for some extras, like a new car, vacations in foreign countries, or maybe an own appartment, is seen as the ultimate goal by many. However, this can be a stale experience when you are always on your own. You may find a partner, but never feel any connection to them, because they do not share your interests, your values, your empathy, your sensitivity, etc. Many relationships of high-IQ people are uneasy compromises at best. The alienation they first felt at home and then at school and in later life extends also to their closest connections.”

I don’t think that it’s just intelligence that is to blame here, although it’s obviously harder for Langan, who has essentially no intellectual peers outside of books, than it is for me. This is where I think the SSH really comes into play; Langan strikes me as a Delta, which would explain why his sense of alienation and inability to fit neatly into the various hierarchies of his life plague him in a way that it simply doesn’t bother a Sigma like me.

Langan’s historical failure to score with decadent party girls has nothing to do with his intelligence, in my opinion. I suspect that his problem was that he was looking for a unicorn in a cattle ranch; if he’d simply accepted what the urban cattle had to offer and been content with that, he probably would have cleaned up. I’ve had perfectly happy relationships with girls who couldn’t add 2 + 2 and come within an order of magnitude of 4; the difference between a woman with an IQ of 75 and an IQ of 120 is almost entirely irrelevant once you’re beyond the 2SD communications gap.

I think it would behoove smart men to understand that conflating a romantic relationship with an intellectual relationship is a fundamental category error. Once a woman has a child, her children are going to be her primary, secondary, and tertiary interests anyhow, so looking to her to fulfill your desire for intellectual discourse is very likely to prove disappointing even if she’s smarter than you are and shares your interests.

  • Every man thinks alone.
  • Philosophy is not a team sport.
  • Learn to enjoy the solitude.

This is why you should never envy your intellectual superiors. Because, at the end of the day, you have no idea what their gifts have cost them.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Migration Conspiracy

Simplicius notes the way in which mass migration into the UK was orchestrated by Clown World:

It was from the bowels of some shadowy think-tank called the Performance and Innovation Unit that the policy paper which birthed the new era of mass migration into the UK came about. The paper was released under Home Office head, Bilderberger, Jack Straw—who was Blair’s neocon-equivalent, and one of the key instigators of the Iraq War in the British government. It’s no surprise then that such deeply-rooted globalist comprador elite henchmen were instrumental in unleashing mass migration as a social weapon.

There are always multiple layers to the conspiracy in each country: the first veil was the lie about boosting the economy; the second was the lie about mass-migration being merely a way to rib Conservatives. But the true reason lays buried even beneath this hidden layer: mass-migration is the final weapon to destroy any ideological resistance to the globalist plan of centralizing power, to create, effectively, one world governance. By overrunning society with migrants and relegating native Brits to second class citizens, you disenfranchise and disinherit them to the point of torpor and impotence, clearing the way for total ideological subjugation allowing such madness as currently unfolding in the UK to reign.

There is nothing moral, civilized, or decent about mass migration. It is, as Martin van Creveld demonstrated, the flip-side of war. And in recent decades, it has been an effective form of asymmetric war on the British and American peoples.

DISCUSS ON SG

Don’t Saw the Branch on Which You Sit

Richard Dawkins is banned from Facebook.

Facebook has nuked the account of famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins after he said that genetically male boxers should not be allowed to fight women in the Olympics. On Saturday morning, Dawkins posted on X about the shocking censorship – saying that there was no reason given for the sudden removal of his account.

“My entire @facebook account has been deleted, seemingly (no reason given) because I tweeted that genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics. Of course my opinion is open to civilised argument. But outright censorship?”

Yes, Richard. Because pagans don’t play by the same rules that Christians do. Welcome to the post-Christian world you made.

DISCUSS ON SG

Deplatformed from Life

The fall is a bitch when the Black Rider has no further use for you. The YouTube CEO is dead of turbo cancer and I very much doubt that any of the thousands of video creators who were unjustly kicked off of YouTube by her and her minions for nonexistent and unidentified “violations” will shed one single tear for the woman.

Susan Wojcicki, who served as CEO of YouTube for nine years during a period of massive growth for the video platform and was one of Google‘s first hires, died on Friday, Aug. 9. She was 56. Wojcicki’s death after a two-year fight with cancer was announced by her husband, Dennis Troper.

You can take the ticket when it’s offered. But all those millions and all that manufactured success won’t avail you much once you cease to be useful and you’re thrown from the high horse. And there is no question that the late YouTube CEO merited her fate, given that she actively pushed the shot that very likely killed her. If she had paid attention to what she called “misinformation about COVID-19” instead of banning it, she would probably still be alive and well.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki on Tuesday said the platform has removed more than half a million videos that contain misinformation about COVID-19 since February.

I don’t know why, but the wicked are always foolish enough to believe that their even more wicked masters won’t lie to them.

UPDATE: Big Bear has thoughts.

Wow, I was so mad at her when she deleted my YouTube account and my income for “hate” that turned out to be “true.” But seeing her deplatformed from life itself is humbling. At least I still get to be on rumble. She’s now not even allowed on bitchute. But seriously tho does this mean I can go back on YouTube?

DISCUSS ON SG

An Elegaic Opus

Some artists just know how to exit stage left.

A celebration of an artist’s life in the purest sense, Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is the definitive swan song of one of the world’s greatest musicians. In late 2022, as a parting gift, Ryuichi Sakamoto mustered all of his energy to leave us with one final performance: a concert film featuring just him and his piano. Curated and sequenced by Sakamoto himself, the twenty pieces featured in the film wordlessly narrate his life through his wide-ranging oeuvre. The selection spans his entire career, from his pop-star period with Yellow Magic Orchestra and his magnificent scores for filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci to his meditative final album,12. Intimately filmed in a space he knew well and surrounded by his most trusted collaborators, including director Neo Sora, his son, Sakamoto bares his soul through his exquisitely haunting melodies, knowing this was the last time he would be able to present his art.

I’ve loved Sakamoto since he was teaming up with David Sylvian, who is probably my all-time favorite musician and singer. Not that I’m any expert on pianists, but he’s my second favorite after my friend Cornelius. I think this documentary will be a must-see.

Recorded and filmed as he was dying of cancer, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Opus” — the Japanese film composer’s posthumous album and documentary of the same name — is clearly meant to be his final farewell.

As an album, it is fitting that the 20-song, hour-and-a-half recording of sparse piano played by Sakamoto is a retrospective, taking the listener on a journey through his half-century career.

One standout is the first-ever recorded version of the playfully lyrical “Tong Poo” from his early days with techno-pop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, also known as YMO. They were pioneers of 1970s electronic music and a Japanese act that landed on the global stage.

The album “Opus” is set to be released Friday from Milan Records. It showcases solo piano versions of the film scores that form the pillars of Sakamoto’s legacy, starting with the majestic theme for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” a film set in the final days of imperial China leading into its communist rule.

It won an Academy Award for best original score, making Sakamoto the first Asian to win the honor. The 1987 film, starring John Lone, also won best picture. The score also won a Grammy.

Elsewhere, the track “BB” is Sakamoto’s homage to Bertolucci, a tender love poem for his brilliant collaborator.

“Opus” also features the forlornly pensive music Sakamoto did for Bertolucci’s 1990 “The Sheltering Sky,” which juxtaposed emotionally lost American travelers with the ruthless vastness of northern Africa.

And it includes the music for “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” a 1983 film about a World War II prisoner of war camp, directed by Nagisa Oshima, in which Sakamoto also acted. It has become his signature piece.

Sakamoto’s sound has an unmistakably Asian feel that’s challenging to define, but evident through the utilization of certain harmonies, pentatonic motifs or scales. His sound is also evocative of Debussy but, to be fair, this is all Sakamoto.

Minimalist is another way some have described his ability to speak in the silences between the notes.

All the songs on “Opus” were immaculately recorded in Tokyo’s NHK 509 Studio, performed without an audience in 2022. The piano pedal shift, and, at times, his breathing, are present.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: A Bad Case Against Free Trade

I was asked to consider Paul Craig Roberts’s case against free trade, which he describes as follows:

In 2004 NY Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer and I opened a New Year with a jointly authored column in the New York Times. We raised the offshoring issue. American manufacturing jobs and the tech jobs of American professionals were being sent to Asia. We posed the question that if jobs offshoring was free trade, as economists claimed, was free trade any longer in America’s interest? My position was that jobs offshoring is a contradiction of free trade–more later–and Schumer was still in his idealistic period when he was concerned about the displacement of American labor by foreign labor in the production of goods and services that Americans consumed.

Our article caused a firestorm. The Brookings Institution in Washington called a conference and asked us to come and defend our position. C-Span broadcast the conference live and rebroadcast it a number of times. Schumer and I carried the day.

Delighted with the publicity, Schumer suggested a follow-up article. The NY Times was eager. We began a draft, and then it went cold. My explanation is that Wall Street, which was committed to jobs offshoring, got to Schumer and explained campaign contributions to him.

I continued on. Conservatives, free market economists, and libertarians, who are indoctrinated with free trade, but who do not comprehend the theory, called me a heretic. Nevertheless, both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post were intrigued that the “most ardent” of the “Reagan policymakers” had taken a position against the policy that Wall Street was imposing on the country.

The Wall Street Journal assigned Timothy Aeppel to arrange a series of debates to be published in the Wall Street Journal between me and Columbia University Professor Jagdish Bhagwati. The question was: Is jobs offshoring really free trade?

Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s theory of free trade rests on the principle of comparative advantage. What this means is that a country’s capital remains employed at home and is employed in areas in which the capital is best used. If all countries do this, there are gains from trade, and all countries will be better off than if they are self-sufficient. I have wondered if the free trade theory was used as a stratagem to repeal the British Corn Laws and reduce the income and power of the landed aristocracy.

Both Smith and Ricardo made it completely clear that if a country’s capital left the country, it was pursuing absolute advantage, not comparative advantage, and free trade theory is vitiated. This is the point I made. Without comparative advantage, there is no case for free trade.

This is trivial and irrelevant Econ 103-level criticism of free trade. No one has ever denied it, and it permits the discussion to be transformed from “is free trade good for the nation” to “is the current situation one in which absolute advantage or comparative advantage applies”.

Political matters are intrinsically rhetorical, so building a circumstantial case on what most people will see as a minor technical point is never going to be very convincing. It’s no surprise that despite the fact that he and Schumer “carried the day”, they ended up completely losing the political battle.

The point is not that “free trade is sometimes bad”, the point is that free trade is bad even in the case of comparative advantage that supposedly provides for mutual benefit, but destroys both nations in the process.

And yes, the free trade theory was never more than an excuse to repeal the Corn Laws. Ricardo was an an investor and politician, not an economist, and the arguments he presented were dishonest, incomplete, and wrong, which is why Joseph Schumpeter labled the structure of Ricardo’s arguments “the Ricardian vice”.

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