Mailvox: God and morality: the connection

Groggy doesn’t understand why the question of morality and the question of the existence of God are intrinsically related:

I never really understood why the question of whether morality was objective was tightly coupled to the existence of God.

For example Sam Harris says morality is objective, and it can be discovered and solved through science alone in The Moral Landscape.

It seems that science deals with the objective, hence science would be a good tool for dealing with morality, if morality were purely objective.

If the 10 commandments just come down from God and are dictated to us, without us having any say, then isn’t that subjective morality, because then morality is just whatever God says it is?

I think J. Peterson would say that God speaking in the 10 commandments is not a literal truth but a deep psychological truth (evolved, even), built into the human mind which needs to come out through religious expression, and is more akin to ‘objective’ morality, I suppose.

For example if God had commanded in the 10 commandments – Thou Shalt Murder, would it be right or wrong? If morality is objective, then murder would always be wrong regardless of what the 10 commandments say.

I just never really understood why “morality is objective” was associated with Christianity and “there is no objective morality” was associated with Atheism. I don’t see the logical connection.

If somebody could explain it I would be very grateful.

The intrinsic connection is because if there is, in fact, a Universal Moral Standard, (or to use the more common term, Universal Law), then logic dictates that there must be a Universal Lawgiver. This is why atheists are driven to deny objective and/or universal morality, due to the implication that if it exists, a Creator God exists too.

The fact that Sam Harris says morality can be discovered and solved through science alone is in itself evidence that it cannot be, because Sam Harris is an inept philosopher and his argument is both illogical and incorrect. I addressed this four years ago, both on this blog and in the appendix of the book On the Existence of Gods.

Unfortunately, Harris appears to have adopted Richard Dawkins’ favorite device of presenting a bait-and-switch definition in lieu of a logically substantive argument. He repeatedly utilizes the following technique:

1) Admittedly, X is not Y.
2) But can’t we say that X could be considered Z?
3) And Z is Y.
4) Therefore, X can be Y.

For example, in an attempt to get around Hume’s is/ought dichotomy, Harris readily admits that “good” in the sense of “morally correct” is not objectively definable and that what one individual perceives as good can differ substantially from that which another person declares to be “good.” So, he suggests the substitution of “well-being” for “good” because there are numerous measures of “well-being,” such as life expectancy, GDP per capita and daily caloric intake, that can be reduced to numbers and are therefore measurable. After all, everyone understands what it means to be in good health despite the fact that “health” is not perfectly defined in an objective and scientific manner. Right?

However, even if we set aside the obvious fact that the proposed measures of well-being are of dubious utility – life expectancy does not account for quality of life, GDP does not account for debt and more calories are not always desirable – the problem is that Harris simply ignores the way in which his case falls completely apart when it is answered in the negative. No, we cannot simply accept that “moral” can reasonably be considered “well-being” because it is not true to say that which is “of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong” is more than remotely synonymous with “that which fosters well-being in one or more human beings.”

A Creator God-defined morality can be described as arbitrary, but it cannot be described as subjective. If God had defined murder as good, then an act of murder would be good, in exactly the same way that if the NFL defines a pass that goes out of bounds incomplete, then the pass is incomplete even if the receiver clearly caught it. Groggy’s problem is that he is unconsciously assuming a deeper concept of good by which the objective standard itself is to be judged.

Anikanocracy

Spandrell explains how Biological Leninism is being used to reinforce Cultural Marxism:

In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn’t get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That’s why they can be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they’d rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dredges of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know it, if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.

Ethnics were tricky though, because they always had a gambit which could increase their status even further: independence. Which is why both Russia and China soon after consolidating the regime started to crack down on ethnics. Stalin famously purged Jews from the Politburo, used WW2 to restore most of the Tsar’s territory, and run such a Russia-centered state that to this day people in Kyrgyzstan speak Russian. The same in China, a little known fact of the Cultural Revolution was the huge, bloody purge in Mongolia and the destruction of many temples in Tibet. After that was done with, the Communist party became this strong, stable and smooth machine. The Soviet economy of course worked like shit, and that eventually resulted in the collapse of the system. But as China has shown, central planning is orthogonal to Leninist politics. China, of course, had to know. It had been running a centralized bureaucracy for thousands of years. Leninism was just completing the system.

So again, the genius of Leninism was in building a ruling class from scratch and making it cohesive by explicitly choosing people from low-status groups, ensuring they would be loyal to the party given they had much to lose. It worked so well it was the marvel of the intellectual classes of the whole world for a hundred years.

Meanwhile, what was the West doing? The West, that diehard enemy of worldwide Communism, led by the United States. What has been the American response to Leninism? Look around you. Read Vox. Put on TV. Ok, that’s enough. Who is high status in the West today? Women. Homosexuals. Transexuals. Muslims. Blacks. There’s even movements propping up disabled and fat people. What Progressivism is running is hyper Leninism. Biological Leninism.

When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. “Never forget class-struggle”, Mao liked to say. “Never forget you used to be a serf and you’re not one now thanks to me”, he meant.

In the West, though, by 1945, when peace and order was enforced by the United States, the economy had improved to the point where class-struggle just didn’t work as a generator of loyalty. Life was good, the proletariat could all afford a car and even vacations. Traditional society was dead, the old status-ladders based on family pedigree and land-based wealth were also dead. The West in 1960 was a wealthy, industrial meritocratic society, where status was based on one’s talent, productivity and natural ability to schmooze oneself into the ruling class.

Of course liberal politics kept being a mess. No cohesion in a ruling class which has no good incentive to stick to each other. But of course the incentive is still out there. A cohesive ruling class can monopolize power and extract rents from the whole society forever. The ghost of Lenin is always there. And so the arrow of history kept bending in Lenin’s direction. The West started to build up a Leninist power structure. Not overtly, not as a conscious plan. It just worked that way because the incentives were out there for everyone to see, and so slowly we got it. Biological Leninism. That’s the nature of the Cathedral.

If you live in a free society, and your status is determined by your natural performance; then it follows that to build a cohesive Leninist ruling class you need to recruit those who have natural low-status. In any society, men have higher performance than women. They are stronger, they work harder, they have a higher variance, which means a fatter right tail in all traits (more geniuses); and they have the incentive to perform that the natural mating market provides. That’s the patriarchy for you. Now I don’t want to overstress the biology part here. It’s not the fact that all men are better workers than women. In a patriarchy there’s plenty of unearned status for men. But that’s how it works: the core of society is the natural performance of men; those men will naturally build a society which benefits them as men; some men free-ride on that, some women get a bad deal. Lots of structural inertia there. But the core is real.

To get to the point: in 1960 we had a white men patriarchy. That was perfectly natural. Every society with a substantial proportion of white men will end up being ruled by a cabal of white men. Much of its biology; part of its is also social capital, good cultural practices accumulated since the 15th century. White men just run stuff better. They are natural high-status. But again, nature makes for messy politics. There is no social value on acknowledging truth: everybody can see that. The signaling value is in lies. In the unnatural. As Moldbug put it:

In many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.

Or as the Chinese put it, point deer, make horse.

The point again is, that you can’t run a tight, cohesive ruling class with white men. They don’t need to be loyal. They’ll do ok anyway. A much easier way to run an obedient, loyal party is to recruit everyone else. Women. Blacks. Gays. Muslims. Transexuals. Pedophiles. Those people may be very high performers individually, but in a natural society ruled by its core of high performers, i.e. a white patriarchy, they wouldn’t have very high status. So if you promise them high status for being loyal to you; you bet they’re gonna join your team. They have much to gain, little to lose. The Coalition of the Fringes, Sailer calls it. It’s worse than that really. it’s the coalition of everyone who would lose status the better society were run. It’s the coalition of the bad. Literal Kakistocracy.

There’s a reason why there’s so many evil fat women in government.

What this means is that there is no coming back for the Democratic Party. They will continue to purge whites, who even at their most incompetent are more potentially disloyal than blacks, Africans, and Hispanics. No amount of bad behavior will cause them to be abandoned; who will now more slavishly follow orders than Senator Franken, whose career is now entirely dependent upon the willingness of feminists to pretend to look the other way?

This concept of Biological Leninism and what can be termed anikanocracy, which is rule by the most incompetent, is a potentially significant concept that might provide for a useful predictive model.

Harry and the Half-Blood Princess

I was asked for my take on the recent engagement of Prince Harry, so here it is.

The fact that the engagement of Harry Windsor to Suits actress Meghan Markle is an obvious mistake that is likely to end in disaster can be observed in the fact that every media outlet in the UK, who collectively are normally the bitchiest, most skeptical media this side of a Hollywood gossip column, is tripping all over each other in a competition to see who can coo more positively about how an English prince is marrying a divorced, mixed-race American actress who is pushing forty.

(Yes, I know they say she’s 36, but if that’s actually true, she’ll be the first actress ever known to honestly report her age. Hollywood ages are the opposite of reported NBA heights and Democratic poll shares; to get a more accurate estimate, you need to add two or three.)

Think about it. How on Earth did the British media, which has never missed a possible Harry Potter-related headline just happen to miss this one? And yes, I know she will be a duchess, not a princess, that’s not the point. The real reason the British media is so happy about Ms Markle instead of the traditional twenty-something English Rose one would have expected is that it can now anoint the couple the symbol of the New Britain, which is Not British, but Afri-Pakistani. About the only thing she is missing is being a Muslim.

The thing one has to keep in mind about all this is that Harry is, for the most part, an idiot. That’s not my word, that’s a quote from an otherwise fawning article about the man. “Harry was again mortified, more for embarrassing his grandmother again than for what he had brought on himself. Yes, he was an idiot, but Harry has always been a bit of a wild child with a tendency to party harder than most.”

Sure, it was idiotic to dress up like a Nazi or party naked in Las Vegas, but surely this time, he’s got it right with his older American actress divorcee, right? No red flags there! There was a time, not too long ago, that even a king would have to abdicate in order to marry such a creature, and given how that marriage ended, it’s more than a little remarkable that the man’s niece blithely granted her royal permission for Prince Harry to follow in his great-uncle’s footsteps. In light of her approval, one wonders what would be sufficient to cause that permission to be denied, a history of axe-murdering? Multiple arrests for DUI and prostitution?

Harry is a prime example of a situational alpha who is a low delta at heart, and a delta with some noticeable gamma strains to boot. On the one hand, he’s extremely rich, extremely famous, tall, courageous, and better-looking than the average man. On the other, he has always severely underkicked his coverage; he’s had a long tendency to involve himself with older, not-very-attractive women. One would expect a “wild child” in his position to have a track record with women that made Leonardo diCaprio’s look modest, but if the media is to be believed, Harry has mostly been involved with women who are a bit old, a bit fat, or a bit plain.

There is nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but the pattern is indicative of a deep internal insecurity where women are concerned. And if you doubt my take on the matter, consider this observation from an article about the couple’s first post-engagement appearance together.

As they walked around the garden, Meghan could be seen wrapping a protective arm around her fiancé and tenderly patting his back. ‘The dramatic thing was that she was leading him, just like a professional dancer leading the amateur on Strictly,’ says Judi. ‘She was leading the choreography rather than him, which is quite outstanding for a royal couple. She also has this trait of putting her hands on top of this. The person who does this is normally the one in control – she’s leading the game.’ 

Interpretation: Harry is a Mama’s boy who lost his mother at a young age and has never recovered from the loss. His sociosexual rank is completely out of whack as a result, as he combines elite social rank with infantile sexuality that is desperate for the Lost Mommy. Unless she possesses acute foresight and iron-clad self-discipline, this older actress is most likely going to eat the prince alive and control his life to an extent that will become distasteful to his family, to the public, and eventually, to Harry himself.

That doesn’t mean the marriage won’t work out. There are stranger combinations that have made true love matches and successfully paired-off for life. It simply means that the odds against that happening are formidable. I would give a 10 percent chance that it doesn’t ultimately end in divorce.

And, of course, this doesn’t even get into the fact that due to FATCA, as the spouse of an American, Harry Windsor will now have to file an annual tax return with the IRS as a non-resident alien, and any future children with Ms Markle will be Americans subject to the US tax regime. Forget Queen Elizabeth’s approval; I can’t believe his accountant let him marry the woman.

Social media veto at UT

I don’t see how the University of Tennessee football program is likely to benefit from its decision to back out of hiring my fellow Bucknellian Greg Schiano because people were shrieking about it on social media:

As detailed by SI’s Bruce Feldman, the University of Tennessee on Sunday backed out of a deal to hire Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano as its next head football coach. The two sides reportedly signed a “memorandum of understanding” or MOU. As explained below, an MOU for a college coach is a formal record of the understanding between the coach and the school as to the key terms and conditions under which the university would employ the coach. Could Schiano sue the university for breach of contract, fraud or other claims? If all of the necessary parties signed an MOU, the answer would be yes.

Tennessee’s football program is in disarray after a season in which the team finished 4–8 and winless in SEC play. Earlier this month, the school fired head coach Butch Jones. The firing was not a surprise, but that the school would target Schiano—best known as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Rutgers before his time in Columbus—to replace Jones was surprising.

Schiano has a controversial reputation, in part due to his time as Penn State’s defensive backs coach in the early ’90s under former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, who is currently serving a lengthy prison sentence for sexually abusing young boys. In a 2015 deposition for a civil suit between the school and its insurance company concerning the payouts to Sandusky’s victims, another former Penn State assistant coach, Mike McQueary, testified he had heard through another coach that Schiano had recounted witnessing Sandusky molest a boy. In interviews with media, Schiano has denied the allegation, and he was never charged or otherwise implicated by any other party in the lengthy litigation of the Sandusky scandal.

I’m not a particular fan of Schiano, as I wasn’t impressed with his performance in Tampa Bay, but what high-caliber coach is going to want to go anywhere near Tennessee now? It’s been established that the authorities will bow promptly to the whims of the sufficiently vocal, so what coach smart enough to have options would want to go anywhere near that maelstrom of lunacy?

THERE WILL BE WAR Vol. VIII

Created by the bestselling SF novelist Jerry Pournelle, 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 features some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I and Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II. 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.

33 years later, Castalia House has teamed up with Dr. Pournelle to make this classic science fiction series available to the public again. THERE WILL BE WAR is a treasure trove of science fiction and history that will educate and amaze new readers while reminding old ones how much the world has changed over the last three decades. Most of the stories, like war itself, remain entirely relevant today.

THERE WILL BE WAR Volume VIII is edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, and features 21 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Surviving Armageddon” by Jerry Pournelle, the brilliantly inventive “Dinosaurs” by Geoffrey A. Landis, “As It Was In the Beginning” by Edward P. Hughes, and the haunting “Through Road No Whither” by Greg Bear.

We are pleased to be able to say that the classic THERE WILL BE WAR anthology series is now complete. I’m sorry the late great Jerry Pournelle was unable to see it back in print in its entirety, but at least he did have the chance to see it revived. All ten volumes are now available from the Kindle store for less than $50.

And I’m very pleased to be able to announce that the Pournelle family has graciously granted Castalia House permission to continue expanding the series, which we will do with Vol. XI next year.

From the first reviews:

  • The non-fiction presented interesting insight into survivalism (the precursor to preppers) and the politics and history of mutually assured destruction. The book missed the internet, cell phones, and the fall of the communism, but then so did most speculative science fiction…. The fiction was excellent, but the non-fiction made it even better. There Will Be War Volume VIII is definitely worth a read.
  • An interesting primer on the game theory and doctrine concerning the cold war as it appeared to be heating up in the 1980s. The most interesting parts of this collection are the late Mr. Pournelle’s descriptions of mutually assured survival to make a first strike an uncertain enough proposition to render it too risky to contemplate. Of all the works collected in this volume, these essays have the greatest continued relevance today. Nuclear winter may have receded into memory as a daily threat, but resilience against potential plagues, natural disasters, large scale terrorist acts, and even limited nuclear exchanges is of continuing relevance.
  • Having read all of the There Will Be War collections, I think this one may be my favorite overall, even if other collections have stronger individual stories or essays. The overall theme of Armageddon lends itself to the sober reflections we see in both the fiction and non-fiction stories, all of which have a truly eerie relevance today. 

Too little, too late

If former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont had truly sought independence for Catalonia, he might have been taken more seriously. But this belated turning against the EU tends to underline both his current irrelevance as well as his earlier failure to understand the basic European political realities.

Deposed Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont has branded the EU a ‘club of decadent countries’ and said a British-style ‘Catexit’ might be the solution. The pro-independence politician attacked the organisation as outdated in an interview for Israeli TV after his failed attempts to get European backing for his cause from his hideaway in Brussels.

He claimed the EU was a ‘club of decadent and obsolescent countries controlled by a small few and closely linked to increasingly debatable economic interests.’

Arguing Catalonia should turn the tables on EU chiefs who have warned there would be in place in Europe for the region if it breaks away from the rest of Spain, he added ‘They’re constantly telling us we’re going to be left out of the European Union but the ones who should take that decision are the citizens of Catalonia. Lets see what the people of Catalonia say. Perhaps there are not many people who want to form part of this EU…so insensitive to the abuse of human rights, of the democratic right of a part of its territory only because a post-Franco right wants it to be that way.’

The leftist Puigdemont made the same mistake that many in the American Fake Right do. You cannot be both pro-nationalist and pan-European. Europe is not a race, Europe is not a people, and Europe is not a nation. It is a continent.

Pan-Europeanism is, like American civic nationalism, a form of Globalism Lite. No true nationalist can support either. And pan-Europeanism will not succeed any more than the repeated attempts at pan-Arabism or pan-Africanism has.

As I have previously stated on many occasions, the fundamental political divide is now nationalism vs globalism. And the latter comes in many flavors, more than a few of which are cloaked in false forms of fake nationalism.

Morality is objective

Again and again, we see that the rationales and justifications offered by atheists for their disbelief simply don’t stand up to even cursory philosophical analysis. (This is not to say their disbelief is not genuine, merely that its cause is seldom rooted in the explanations provided.) While on the emotional side, atheism may be little more than social autism, on the intellectual side, it appears to be primarily a combination of historical and philosophical ignorance.

Consider the following exchange:

AB: some people, psychopaths especially have no capacity for moral reasoning and no moral agency.

VD: Of course they do, if you define morality correctly. The fact that psychopaths have no EMPATHY does not mean they have no moral agency, because morality does not depend upon empathy.

AB: I think understand what you are saying but I simply cannot grok the idea fully as I cannot see morality as objective.

This is little more than a failure to understand what morality is, because while the existence of God is nominally disputable, the objectivity of morality is not, and more importantly, cannot be disputed.

The definitions of morality refer us to the definition of moral, which is given a follows:

  1. of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong;
  2. expressing or conveying truths or counsel as to right conduct, as a speaker or a literary work.
  3. founded on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than on legalities, enactment, or custom.
  4. capable of conforming to the rules of right conduct: a moral being.
  5. conforming to the rules of right conduct

Now, if “the fundamental principles of right conduct” are not mere legalities, enactment, or custom, then they must be objective, for the obvious reason that if the standard for right conduct is subjective, then no such standard exists, not being a fundamental principle. Morality not only is not subjective, it cannot be subjective, because a subjective fundamental principle is both an oxymoron and an actual contradiction in terms.

A psychopath has both a capacity for moral reasoning and moral agency because he is capable of conforming to the rules of right conduct even if he does not feel any empathy for others. He can even conform to the Golden Rule; even a psychopath knows how he prefers to be treated himself.

AB’s fundamental mistake is that he confuses the concept of a personal ethos with morality. But a personal ethos is an ersatz morality and is no more a system of universally applicable rules than a preference for calling pass plays over running plays or playing man-to-man defense instead of zone are official NFL rules.

EXCERPT: Young Man’s War

This is an excerpt from Young Man’s War by Rod Walker

The man in charge of my first combat patrol was named Captain Jonas Howard.

Captain Howard had been in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he was willing to talk about, and some other places that he was not. He spoke in a slow Alabama drawl, rarely raising his voice, and constantly chewed sunflower seeds as a means of keeping nicotine addiction at bay. He had learned the truth about the Dark the same way that so many others in Black Division had—on patrol outside Kandahar, a hole ripping itself in the air, and then a horde of giant stinking alien bug-things swarming out to kill everything in sight.

Or so Captain Howard put it. He had bit of a flair for the dramatic.

Bull and I reported to Captain Howard’s HQ as ordered at 0500 one dark, dry morning. Howard’s HQ was a large tent with a space heater, since Castle Base had gotten a bit crowded since Invasion Day. I had heard rumors that Black Division had facilities elsewhere, and that General Culver was taking in more regular Army bases under his command, but I hadn’t visited any of them yet.

Howard stood outside his tent, watching as his men loaded up their armored troop carriers. There were already a dozen sunflower seed shells around his boots. If he wasn’t careful he was going to need dentures by the time he turned fifty, assuming any of us lived that long.

“Sir!” I said. “Corporal Roland Kane and Corporal Rufus Bullock reporting for duty, sir!”

We saluted. Howard sized us up, then saluted back after a moment.

I should have mentioned that. Listeners started at corporal rank, since in the heat of combat we sometimes had to tell privates to move quickly to avoid a Darkside attack.

“You two look too young to be corporals,” grunted Howard. He pointed at me. “You don’t look old enough to drive.”

“I am seventeen years old, sir!” I announced. My birthday had passed while in basic training. Maggie had scraped together enough flour to make me a cupcake, which had been nice.

“Don’t shout unless I tell you,” said Howard. “Some of those drones have ears like bats. Let me guess. You got bit by a zombie, the Division found you in time, and now you’re a Listener?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Howard’s gaze shifted to Bull. “And you. You’re a big fellow, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir!” said Bull with enthusiasm. “I am excited for the opportunity to bring destruction upon the Dark, sir!”

“You’re not bringing destruction to anyone,” said Howard. “You’re staying in the vehicles. The General himself will rip me a new one if I get one of his Listeners killed.”

“Yes, sir!” said Bull. “Then I am excited for the opportunity to bring destruction to the Dark vicariously, sir!”

Howard blinked and his lips twitched. I suspect he almost laughed. “Let’s hope you can retain that enthusiasm, Corporal. Both of you, report to Sergeant Mendez and do whatever he tells you.”

“Yes, sir,” Bull and I chorused in unison.

Sergeant Mendez turned out to be a Hispanic man in his middle thirties with a scarred face and tattoos that were occasionally visible when he took off his jacket. He looked like an enforcer for a drug gang, but he ran a tight ship. I suspect the fact that he looked like he could murder you with his bare hands without blinking helped him keep order.

“All right, you two,” said Mendez. “You’ll be with me in the second carrier.” He pointed at the second of the six M200 armored personnel carriers that would make up our patrol. “You’re new, so shut up, keep your ears peeled, and do your thing. You detect even a hint of Darksiders, you speak up right away, got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Bull and I said in unison.

“There’s going to be trouble on this patrol, so stay sharp,” said Mendez.

“How do you know there will be trouble, Sergeant?” I said.

“General said so,” said Mendez.

By now I had realized that most of the men of Black Division regarded General Culver as something like a prophet. It was well-known within the Division that Culver had been trying to warn Washington and the Pentagon about the Dark for years, and that he had been warning them something like Invasion Day was going to happen sooner or later. The Pentagon had ignored his warning, save for occasional demands to increase the number of female combat troops in the Division.

Well, General Culver had been proven right. It also helped that he seemed to be one of the few powerful people left with an actual plan other than hiding in a bunker someplace and hoping that his canned soup didn’t run out.