NO GODS, ONLY DAIMONS

The post-World War III world is a radically different place where magic and technology have become one in the violent struggle for global influence between nations. The rising powers of Persia and Musafiria are challenging the longtime dominance of the weakened Western powers, as the increasing use of magic provides them with a more level playing field.

Supernatural creatures from other planes are summoned and wielded as readily as machine guns and explosives by the special forces of the rival militaries, the most deadly of which are the elite contractors for the Nemesis Program. Both conventionally and unconventionally trained, the Nemesis Program is the hidden blade of the Hesperian National Intelligence and Security Agency, a weapon as lethal as it is deniable. But although they are given considerable leeway, not even Nemesis operatives are allowed to covenant with archdaimons… which poses a serious problem for Luke Landon when a simple assassination of a scientist goes badly awry.

NO GODS, ONLY DAIMONS is the first volume of The Covenant Chronicles, an exciting new supernatural Mil-SF series by Kai Wai Cheah, the Hugo-nominated author of Flashpoint: Titan, which appeared in There Will Be War Vol. X.

This modern supernatural Mil-SF novel is pretty wild and has nearly as much crazy, over-the-top action as a Larry Correia novel. It’s DRM-free and available on both Amazon and at the Castalia House store. In light of our long term concerns about Amazon’s viability as a publishing platform, we would encourage you to use the Castalia House store; both EPUB and MOBI editions for Kindle are available there. But either option is fine with us for the time being.

I should also mention that all four Moth & Cobweb books by John C. Wright are now available on the Castalia House store as well.

  1. Swan Knight’s Son
  2. Feast of the Elfs
  3. Swan Knight’s Sword
  4. Daughter of Danger

Moth & Cobweb Book Five, City of Corpses, will be out later this month.

EXCERPT FROM NO GODS, ONLY DAIMONS:

We dropped to the ground.

“AK fire,” Pete reported.

Several more bursts rang out, echoing through the city. The sound bounced off and around concrete and glass, coming from everywhere.

“Multiple shooters,” I added. “Can’t tell direction.”

“Can’t be more than a couple blocks away.” He picked himself up. “We gotta stop them.”

“Roger,” I said. “I’ll try to find them with open source intel.”

“I’m gonna get my long gun.”

“Go.”

He sprinted to a car parked down the road. I got to a knee and scanned around me. Civilians were still walking down the street, oblivious to the autofire raking the air, or froze in place. A couple actually stopped to stare at us. What the hell was wrong with people?

I powered up the Clipcom. An array of icons washed over my field of view. I touched the control button, freezing the screen in place, looked at the Memet icon and released.

The app booted. A deluge of raw information, updating every moment, flooded my cascade. Every major news agency reported a shooting in progress at Lacey’s in New Haven. An eyewitness had uploaded a blurry photo of a gunman racing into the department store, wearing a chest rig and cradling some kind of AK, maybe an AK-122.

Another photo showed a jinni. It looked like an old man with swarthy skin, flowing white hair and a thick beard, though his muscles were hard as rocks. But past his waist, the rest of him was a lion with exaggerated limbs, scaled up to support his mass. His tail whipped at air and spat venom—it was no tail, it was a snake.

This was a si’la in its default form. And si’lat were expert shapeshifters.

Pete slung a messenger bag around his neck, stuffed with everything the self-respecting gunfighter needed for an active shooter scenario. From the trunk he produced a Varangian Tactical carbine. It was one of the many, many variants of the AR-855 rifle; this one was designed by Special Operations veterans for their exacting needs.

As he checked the chamber, he asked, “Luke! Need a gun?”

“Got another rifle?”

“Just a pistol.”

“I’ve got mine,” I replied, drawing my SIG. “We’ll make do.”

He jumped into the driver’s seat. “What are we facing?”

I got in beside him. “Multiple shooters and jinn are hitting Lacey’s. Numbers unknown. AKs, grenades and at least one si’la.”

A fresh image appeared in the cascade. An ifrit, inside the mall.

“And an ifrit,” I added.

The car’s engine hummed to life. “Good thing I loaded aethertips.”

“Me too.”

We hit the road. I tuned the radio to the news and listened to a news station rattle off reiterations of the original active shooter report. The gunfire grew softer; the shooters must have moved indoors. Pete zipped through traffic, slipping past civilian cars too close for comfort.

“They’re inside the mall,” I said.

“Must be hitting the lunchtime crowd.”

Closing Memet, I opened Eipos, the preferred Internet telephony service of the Program, and dialed 911. The dispatcher picked up immediately.

“Emergency 911, this call is being recorded. How can I help?”

“We are two off-duty Federal agents responding to the shooting at Lacey’s,” I said. “Tell the first responders not to shoot us.”

“Okay, may I know what you look like?”

“Two white males. I’m wearing a black jacket, red shirt, blue jeans. I have a pistol. Partner has green polo shirt, khaki pants. He’s got an AR-855.”

“All right. What’s your name and which agency do you come from?”

I hung up and turned to Pete.

“Brick, comms on Eipos.”

I called his number. Pete grunted. Moments later the call window filled the screen. He was taking the call on his implants. I handed the app off to the holophone, piping sound into my buds, and cleared my field of view.

Pete slammed the brakes and worked the wheel. We fish-hooked right, stopping in front of the department store, just barely missing a parked van. As we jumped out, a civilian almost collided into me. People were fleeing the area, but the roads and sidewalk were streaked with blood. A dozen civilians were lying on the ground, bleeding.

“Any idea where they’re at?” he asked, shouldering his rifle.

A string of shots split the air.

“Inside!” I replied unnecessarily.

We charged through the front door. I broke off to cover the right while he moved left. More gunfire erupted deeper inside the mall, punctuated by single shots. The shooters had left a trail of broken, bleeding bodies in their wake. Brass shells glittered in pools of blood. Most of the casualties had been shot repeatedly in the torso and then once more in the head.

We tracked the shooters by their gunfire, brass and empty mags. By the destruction they left in their wake. We ran past a shot-up McDonald’s, the customers bleeding and moaning, the golden arches destroyed by a burst of gunfire. Past an electronics shop, everything and everyone inside slagged. Past a schoolgirl, clutching at her bleeding leg, crying for help.

Pete faltered at the last. Halted for a moment. Shook his head and kept running.

This wasn’t our first ride at the rodeo. First neutralize the threat and then tend to the wounded. Reversing the priorities would leave the bad guys free to kill even more, and that would not do.

The strength of an argument

In a recent article, well-known strength guru Mark Rippetoe quoted my recent comments about the known unreliability of science in light of the recent series of scandals concerning fraudulent peer review. This generated a modicum of, if not hilarity, at least hysteria.

The blogger Vox Day in his recent column makes an excellent point about published “science” and the peer-review process that generates it. In the field of the “exercise sciences” in particular we find an astonishing paucity of truly useful information with which to improve human performance. Instead, we rely on what is essentially an “engineering” approach – the application of physiology (the general-kind, not the exercise-kind), arithmetic, logic, analysis, and experience tempered by observation and constant adjustment for process optimization to the problem of how to improve human performance. The application of these engineering principles to the problem of human performance has yielded the Starting Strength Method, which is testable, reliable science.

One thing that many people, both scientists and uncredentialed laymen fail to understand is that science is not, fundamentally, about knowledge. It primarily concerns understanding. What Rippetoe is saying here is that in the field of exercise science, men like him know what works and what doesn’t. The paucity of “truly useful information” to which he refers is the deeper scientific understanding required to further improve upon what is already known.

The primary utility of science is not being able to say that something works, much less to make something work, but rather, to explain why it works. Or, conversely, to explain why something should work if the theory is put into application. This, of course, is why it is so easy for non-scientists to detect scientific fraud; when the theory is put into application and it fails, this is fairly strong evidence that the theory, i.e. the science, is incorrect.

Engineering is the acid test of science.

However, as I said, many people don’t understand what science is, or comprehend its limits. To them, it is simply a form of secular magic that must be completely trusted or it will stop working. Which, one presumes, might explain the hysterical reaction from several of Rippetoe’s readers to the mention of my name like a vampire unexpectedly encountering garlic.

Vox Day? Who is this clown and how does he have an opinion about the peer review process for publishing scientific articles? Many journals publish reviewer comments as well as the author response. If you want to understand peer review without actually doing science and going through the publishing process, look at the reviews for an article in an open source journal. Here is an example: https://elifesciences.org/content/5/e20797 (scroll down to ‘Decision letter’ and ‘Author response’). Vox Day wouldn’t understand a single sentence of this correspondence, so his criticism of the peer-review process as well as his interpretation of the distinction between science and engineering is useless. Science is not about ‘credentials’; it is about experimental DATA! The real currency of science is data—a Nobel Laureate’s theory can be proven wrong by a first-year grad student with data. 

That all sounds very nice in theory, but like every other human endeavor, science is given to corruption and fraud. Nor does his handwaving refute anything that I said, or anything that the article to which I linked – and which he obviously did not read – said. Furthermore, his statement that science is about DATA, not credentials, is precisely why my terms for the different aspects of science are necessary. Scientody may concern data, but one won’t get very far in scientistry without credentials these days.

It’s also telling that while he feigns not knowing who I am, he seems to have a surprisingly strong opinion on the limits of my understanding. Of course, we all know what the real issue is for the science fetishists. As always, they prove my point about the intrinsic unreliability of any human endeavor:

Vox Day is a really really bad example (or good, in the sense that he is extremely informative). Look at his stance on evolutionary biology — something I know a little about (not my field of science, I am a mathematician and computer scientist, but I’ve dabbled around). Because some people make errors in peer review, he sees this as *evidence* that the world was created 6000 years ago or so. (I may be misrepresenting and overstating his stance; this is for the purpose of illustrating his logic). Quoting a person who — by my humble opinion — is in dire need of psychiatric intervention is a bit of a disappointment to me.

The problem with his “logic” is that not only is that not my stance on evolutionary biology, but I don’t believe there is any evidence that the world was created 6,000 years ago. I am not a Young Earth Creationist, I have never subscribed to Bishop Ussher’s estimate for the age of the Earth, and the so-called “logic” being illustrated has literally nothing to do with me or my simple observation that professional science is riddled with fraud and corruption. It’s really rather remarkable how these fetishists can work the Scopes Trial into anything that so much as tangentially references any aspect of science.

It’s even more remarkable that, on the mere basis of “dabbling around”, this gentlemen feels capable of assuming his own expertise in the very different fields of both evolutionary biology and psychiatry. But then, just as laymen seldom understand the limits of science, scientists seldom understand how foolish they look when they venture forth from the boundaries of their little specialties. No more so than when they unwisely, and apparently without even realizing it, wander into the realm of philosophy.

Vox Day’s comment makes it clear that he forms and expresses strong opinions about topics on which he has very limited, superficial knowledge—a quick ‘google scholar’ search shows that he has never published a scientific article. He didn’t even provide evidence or examples for any of his claims. He is the pretty much the exact opposite of the type of person I respect.

The science fetishist always values evidence, valid or not, over mere truth. Which is ironic, given that the very metric upon which he relies, is, as was pointed out in the original post, not just intrinsically flawed, but known to be susceptible to fraud. What value is it to have published a scientific article when they are, statistically speaking, about as likely to be credible as a coin toss?

In any event, Rippetoe was having none of it, and indeed, seemed to be amused by the weird and feeble protests being offered.

I have huge admiration for Rip and was crushed to seem him propagate an anti-science message.

Here is the quote from the evil arch-nemesis of science Vox Day I used to introduce the piece:

All of the arguments about the presumed reliability of science are ridiculous and easily shown to be false. Science is no more “self-correcting” than accounting. Peer review is more commonly known as “proofreading” by the rest of the publishing industry and is not even theoretically a means of ensuring accuracy or correctness. And scientists are observably less trustworthy than nearly anyone except lawyers, politicians, and used car salesmen; at least prostitutes are honest about their pursuit of “grants” and “funding.” These days, the scientific process is mainly honored in the breach by professional, credentialed scientists. And we have a word for testable, reliable science. That word is “engineering.”

What is it about this entirely accurate summary of the situation within the vast majority of the academic/governmental science establishment that leads you to be “crushed” by my use of this as analogy to what we’re doing in contrast to the ExFizz people?

I don’t need to read a peer-reviewed scientific article to know that Mark Rippetoe knows whereof he speaks. Nor do I need to publish a peer-reviewed scientific article to speak the truth. These science fetishists are committing an all-too-common philosophical error when they try to substitute the measure of a thing for the thing itself.

Of course, those who have read SJWAL know perfectly well what was actually being communicated beneath all the rhetoric as well as the purpose for it. This was merely an impromptu divide-and-discredit campaign meant to prevent the more dangerous party from being “qualified” by the more popular party.

Infogalactic: Forkbot is go!

Rifleman and the Techstars are very pleased to report that the much-awaited dynamic forking tool is not only complete, not only tested, but is now operational. You can see the results here.

What this means is that Infogalactic will always be entirely up-to-date with Wikipedia across all five million+ pages, including the newest ones, except for those where the Infogalactic editors have improved upon specific pages.

This is probably the most significant step for The Planetary Knowledge Core since we first turned it on.

Why I was blocked from Twitter

I was never suspended, but my account was blocked. Once I unblocked it, I found that they also required me to delete these two tweets:

  • Antisemitism is a natural reaction to being told one is a subhuman beast destined to be one of a Jew’s 2,800 slaves.
  • “Amy Schumer says women MUST identify as feminists – or are ‘insane'”. (((Amy Schumer))) is a fat, ugly, no-talent. Stay “insane”, girls.
I didn’t have a problem with deleting them; their site, their rules. I do find it interesting, however, to see what they do, and do not, believe merits locking an account.
Anyhow, I finally took the time to unlock my account – thanks to Spacebunny – because otherwise my Darkstreams aren’t announced on Twitter.

Marketing matters

Nice to see three of the four other Kami members show up for Ohmura’s solo show.

There is an important lesson here. Same four guys that took the stage together with Su, Moa, and Yui two months before at the Tokyo Dome. Same mind-blowing talent… and in fact, Boh’s bass solo is a little more relaxed, but is longer and even more impressive than the one he plays for Twilight of the Metal Gods on Red Night.

And there are about 54,000 fewer people in attendance.

This should dismiss the notion, once and for all, that mere talent ever suffices.

Binary thinkers

Even Daniel Dennett, whose grasp of basic logic can best be described as “questionable”, finds himself struggling with binary thinkers:

Dennett waited until the group talked itself into a muddle, then broke in. He speaks slowly, melodiously, in the confident tones of a man with answers. When he uses philosophical lingo, his voice goes deeper, as if he were distancing himself from it. “The big mistake we’re making,” he said, “is taking our congenial, shared understanding of what it’s like to be us, which we learn from novels and plays and talking to each other, and then applying it back down the animal kingdom. Wittgenstein”—he deepened his voice—“famously wrote, ‘If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him.’ But no! If a lion could talk, we’d understand him just fine. He just wouldn’t help us understand anything about lions.”

“Because he wouldn’t be a lion,” another researcher said.

“Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” He concluded, “The notorious zombie problem is just a philosopher’s fantasy. It’s not anything that we have to take seriously.”

“Dan, I honestly get stuck on this,” a primate psychologist said. “If you say, well, rocks don’t have consciousness, I want to agree with you”—but he found it difficult to get an imaginative grip on the idea of a monkey with a “sort of” mind.

If philosophy were a sport, its ball would be human intuition. Philosophers compete to shift our intuitions from one end of the field to the other. Some intuitions, however, resist being shifted. Among these is our conviction that there are only two states of being: awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious, alive or dead, soulful or material. Dennett believes that there is a spectrum, and that we can train ourselves to find the idea of that spectrum intuitive.

“If you think there’s a fixed meaning of the word ‘consciousness,’ and we’re searching for that, then you’re already making a mistake,” Dennett said.

I think Dennett is essentially correct; his spectrum approach is not dissimilar to my own probability perspective. The fact that we don’t have enough information to correctly calculate those probabilities and identify them doesn’t mean that it is not a more useful heuristic than reducing everything to Abelardian binary.

The exchange with the primate psychologist reminds me a little of my mostly failed attempt to explain the IQ delta between very high intelligence and ultra high intelligence to people who are essentially limited to the smart-normal-dumb spectrum. The talking lion can’t speak meaningfully about the experience of dumb lions. The UHIQ can’t speak any more meaningfully about the experience of midwits than the midwit can describe what it is like to have an IQ of 50.

It shouldn’t be hard to grasp the concept that different minds process information differently, and yet, the guy who firmly believes he’s wicked smart because he had a 105 IQ in a classroom full of sub-95 IQs quite often assumes the guy with a 140 IQ must be stupid because he can’t understand him.

To quote my old sensei, mind the gap.

Also, I’m with Chalmers. I suspect if Dennett spent more time with technology in general, and AI in particular, he’d better grasp the fundamental weakness of his position.

May the 4th be with you

We’ll be launching a new supernatural Mil-SF book tomorrow, but due to the aforementioned date, the author and I decided that it is time to formally announce that the creative deconvergence project I’d mentioned a few months ago is not only well in the works, but has now entered the editing phase. The first two novels will be published this summer.


An excerpt from FARAWAY WARS: EMBERS OF EMPIRE:


Not a day went by that Vel Exollar didn’t think about the war. His brief, but brilliant career as one of the Insurgency’s ace fighter pilots remained a source of pride to him. But after spending his youth flying from one hidden base to the next in between hit-and-run strikes against supply convoys, shipyards, and imperial weapons installations, he’d been very much enjoying the relative relaxation of life as the captain of Lady Haut-Estas’s private starliner.

Now he marched through his ship’s spotless white corridors, sumptuously carpeted in scarlet. The air smelled of fear, tension, and spilled wine. Flanked by a pair of ensigns as he ordered curious passengers who had ignored the ship-wide order to return to their cabins, Vel was forced to consider the unpleasant possibility that his current employer’s decisions might have spurred his old friends to new violence.

Vel trudged over the plush carpet lining the corridor as if it were a path leading to a gallows. He’d known perfectly well that Lady Jesla’s plan was not without risk. Some might have even called it rash, and once again he asked himself why he’d agreed to it. Had he simply grown restless after playing it safe for so long?


Perhaps she reminds me too much of her mother.

But regardless of whatever had inspired him to roll the dice one more time, the luck that had always sustained him before finally ran out at Koidu. A galaxy cruiser belonging to the Commonwealth had shown up just as what was supposed to have been a harmless demonstration had gone to hell, and now it appeared that even a single misstep could lead to a second civil war throughout the galaxy.

Despite his worries, Vel tried to remain focused on the task at hand. Hiding in Anat’s magnetosphere should buy them some time. The massive spacestorm would render them essentially invisible to the deep space sensors of any ship that might be following them. His priority now was getting Jesla to safety, then scrubbing every trace of her presence on board. He knew there was a science research lab on one of the minor moons that might serve as a temporary safe haven for her until she could be rescued. It would be risky, and it would cost him a ship’s boat as well as two or three of his best crewmen, but it could be done.

Deep willing, we just might pull this off!

A sudden shock that caused the deck to ominously vibrate derailed Vel’s train of thought. The two junior officers burst into action, casting about for threats and shouting demands for status reports into their comms.

The blaring of alarms silenced the men’s voices as wall-mounted warning lights flashed. A man whom Vel recognized as a minor dignitary raced down the intersecting corridor, leading his wife by the hand while carrying their daughter in the crook of his arm.

Vel pressed a hand to his earpiece and subvocalized to the ship’s A.I. on his command channel. “Ship, what was that?”

“Something hit us, Captain, at very low velocity,” the A.I.’s interface construct answered in a pleasant feminine voice. “Nevertheless, hull integrity has been breached.”

“What? Where?”

It wasn’t possible! How could a low-velocity impact breach the ship’s armored hull? The ship’s sensors might have missed some minor orbital trash or even a micro-asteroid in the space storm, but then the impact should have been at least consistent with the ship’s speed.

“Hull breach, Captain. Confirmed. It’s in the cargo hold.”


“Seal the hold! And lock down all security doors, now!”

“Sealing hold, Captain. Security lockdown in progress.”

 A cold spike of dread rushed through Vel’s veins and sent him racing down the hall with the two confused ensigns trailing behind him. He knew it was already too late to get Jesla off the ship. As he ran, he could hear doors slamming down and iris valves sealing themselves shut.

“Ship security, this is the Captain. All squads, arm yourselves immediately and take up positions outside the cargo hold,” he barked into the comm. “We’re being boarded.”

#FireColbert

Let’s face it, he’s never been funny anyhow. But he did go too far and he should at least be suspended and fined by the FCC. And after that, a drone strike would probably be in order.

President Trump has, for months, been the target of Stephen Colbert’s pointed jokes and mockery. But many on social media believe the “Late Show” host went too far Monday night in making an oral-sex joke regarding Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. #FireColbert was trending on Twitter Wednesday morning. There’s a new Twitter account called @firecolbert. Its first tweet: “It’s time to #FireColbert! It’s time he be removed from CBS. Let your voice be heard! #Boycott all of Stephen Colbert’s advertisers.” There’s also a new website, firecolbert.com.

Ensafening the streets

Ivan Throne and DARK TRIAD MAN® are pleased and proud to announce that the Safe Streets Project has gone live with the VIOLENT.SOLUTIONS technology engine! The application is available for you to register and submit reports at this link.


Antifa and Black Bloc terrorists are planning public demonstrations and gatherings around the United States. Be aware, be vigilant, be careful, and be sure you’re equipped with new app from the Safe Streets Project.


Help track and identify Antifa and Black Bloc without them even realizing you’re in the game. They can run and they can hide, but we’ll know exactly who they are and where they are.

Mailvox: A church, converged

This is what it looks like. Step by step, the world reels in one congregation after another, simply because the members would not abide by the Scripture.

The church that I grew up in was a place that I loved. My family spent a lot of time volunteering at various functions to help the place run right: setting up for lunch after the service, helping pass out food at funeral services, spending time getting it set up for vacation bible school, etc. A lot of good memories were made in that place that are still cherished to this day. Then came time to go away to college and I spent less time at that church, simply stopping in when I came home.

Looking back and thinking about the things that Vox has brought up, I realize all the signs of a growing convergence were there that we didn’t see. It started with the little things that we went along with because, how much could it hurt right? We no longer sang just the old hymns, and moved onto a mix of contemporary worship songs. Then there were no more hymns. Heaven forbid if the sound system crashed as the congregation would just have to stand there in shock and silence now. Then came the eradication of the clauses in the Bylaws about prohibiting members of the Masons to be elders, because that was simply “an old, archaic thing that didn’t matter anymore”. Then came the church vote on installing women deacons and elders, as both of them had “just done so much for the church”. Then came the hiring of a “new, dynamic pastor” who was certainly going to revitalize the numbers of people that were for some odd reason starting to drift to other churches. He certainly wasn’t Reformed, but that really didn’t matter did it? During the meeting with him before the vote, he was amazed that there was this document called the Heidelberg Catechism and had never heard of it, but promised to go read it when he was able. And finally there came the raiding of the saving account that the giving of the faithful had stored up over a hundred and twenty five years. Now it was all needed to build a “community outreach center” for the “vibrant growth of the unchurched” that would be our new church building and revitalize the area to new heights for God.

Now, I drive through the streets of my hometown out towards the crossroads of the highway to look at that God-forsaken temple to man’s arrogance. It is a grand, new building designed by some snooty architectural firm that is pretty much a mirror image of a movie theater the next town over. No real identifying marks on it, unless you drive around back and stumble upon where there is a cross. Or I guess if you can decode the “Faith Center” or whatever it is called now, and recognize it as a church. I have snuck in once or twice to see the new reality, just to sate my curiosity. After the light show and the semi-professional band is done playing, there is a fifteen minute self-help service that tells us how good we are and cherished we are. People are encouraged to bring their own Bibles, though I can’t see why, as there is no mention of God’s Holy Writ during the service. Must be for show. Or maybe something to rest your gourmet coffee on so as not to stain the new carpet.