Unserious about war

This is why the Western militaries are going to lose their next major war. They simply are no longer serious about warfighting; as the Z-man observes, they are more interested in posturing than victory:

Way back when the Bush administration launched the invasion of Iraq, the prevailing assumption among those who were in charge was that it would be a cakewalk. The people would embrace us as liberators. People who had some clue about how the world works knew it would be an ugly mess, as is the case with all wars. War is, by definition, the ugliest of human activities. It’s purpose is to kill and destroy.

Inevitably, stories turned up about abuses. One essential way to prepare soldiers for war is to dehumanize the enemy. Men, even trained killers, are not going to kill people they see as sympathetic. There’s no way to finely calibrate the mind of a soldier so in every war there are abuses, even when care is taken to avoid them. That’s why things like the Abu Ghraib prison incident happened. War is and always will be an ugly business.

That knowledge should lead Western governments to use their technological and economic advantages to avoid getting into wars with the barbarians on the edge of civilization. Instead, they start wars they never intend to win, so they can preen and pose about their virtue and morality, when something terrible inevitably happens. It means some guy in uniform gets to be strung up in order to please the vanity of our rulers.

Remember, most militaries that suffered catastrophic defeats had been previously successful. The US military can’t even claim the same. As for the virtually nonexistent militaries of the Great Britain, France, and Spain, they can’t even defend their own borders.

If the USA is foolish enough to go to war with North Korea, things may turn out very, very differently than everyone is expecting.

Nail bomb in Russia

A nail bomb thrown onto a train by a suspected terrorist has ripped through a carriage in St Petersburg killing at least 12 people and injuring 50 more today.


The terrifying incident, which is being investigated as a terror attack, took place on a train that was travelling between Sennaya Ploshchad and Sadovaya metro stations.


The attack has left dozens injured, including children, and witnesses described seeing a man throwing a backpack onto the train moments before the explosion and a second explosive device was found and made safe in a nearby station.

20 years ago, one would assume Chechens. Now, given all the insane war drums beating, it could be anyone from Ukrainians to the CIA.

The prescient president

A pattern is emerging. The God-Emperor says something. The opposition media explodes in a paroxysm of disbelief and mockery ridiculing his disturbing and comical ignorance. They are somehow simultaneously laughing and terrified. Then events prove the God-Emperor right. Israel Shamir recounts three recent incidents:

The third case of Trump being ridiculed and fully vindicated is the most remarkable one. There were recently many threats against Jewish institutions all over the US. The Jewish media connected the threats with Trump’s election. They called it a “wave of threats”, “second wave of threats”, “third wave of threats”. Apparently, dozens, if not hundreds of Jewish institutions received intimidating calls and threats.

The Jewish journalists are usually Trump-haters. Not for some specific Jewish reasons: they are for immigration, for race-mixing (always excepting Jews), for re-gendering, and for finance. For them, Trump’s attack on financier George Soros, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs Chair and CEO Lloyd Blankfein has been an antisemitic attack as they are Jewish.

So it was easy for them to blame Trump for the threats. At his press-conference, Trump made a short work of Jake Turx, a Jewish reporter who insinuated that Trump encouraged antisemitism. He said that the Jews probably did the threats themselves, or something to such effect. The Jewish media exploded once again. How did he dare?

The ADL, the Jewish wannabe gestapo, wrote: “anti-Semites alleged that Jews themselves are behind the numerous bomb threats to Jewish institutions as a way to garner sympathy for being a victim and that the Jews are using the cemetery desecration to force President Trump into making a statement about anti-Semitism.”

The Pennsylvania Attorney General claimed that Donald Trump said to him that Jewish people might be behind the threats and attacks on Jewish Community Centres to “make others look bad”, another liberal-Jewish publication alleged and concluded: “The President of the United States should never be claiming that threats and attacks are “false flags.” America needs a president, not a bigoted conspiracy theorist in chief.”

And then Trump called upon the FBI and had their sent agents to Israel. There, in a rather small southern town of Ashkelon, lived a young hacker with his five computers and three antennas who made all the threats single-handed. What’s worse, he did it for two years, and Israeli police did nothing to apprehend him – until they saw FBI agents. Then they immediately arrested the guy who spilled the beans right away. Apparently FBI knew all about him, but while Obama was at the helm, they did nothing.

If he were a goy, Jews would call to crucify him – and Trump. But as he was a Jew, the responses in the Jewish media were very kind and understanding. He was a very young and very patriotic young man, he was sick, and he did not understand what he did, but he surely acted for perceived benefit of the Jews.

So indeed the threats and attacks were “false flags”, as these awful antisemites and bigoted conspiracy theorists had claimed.

Note the implication that the Israeli police may have known about the man’s two-year campaign of threats, but did nothing about it until the God-Emperor sent the FBI there. That doesn’t mean they genuinely did know, but it does tend to underline the conclusion that all accusations of so-called “anti-semitism” and all acts of vandalism by unknown perpetrators should be viewed very skeptically. The SPLC and the ADL profit from crying wolf, after all, and now we are informed that crying wolf is “for the perceived benefit of the Jews”.

Meanwhile, the opposition media has learned nothing from its continued humiliation at the God-Emperor’s hands, as this hysterical tantrum by the LA Times demonstrates:

It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”

Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.

Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced…. It is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation.

“What nation is that?” said the Alt-Right.

Susan Rice reported to be responsible

Mike Cernovich reports on the identity of the Obama Administration official who was responsible for identifying the incoming Trump officials who were being inadvertently spied upon:

Susan Rice, who served as the National Security Adviser under President Obama, has been identified as the official who requested unmasking of incoming Trump officials, Cernovich Media can exclusively report.

The White House Counsel’s office identified Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking after examining Rice’s document log requests. The reports Rice requested to see are kept under tightly-controlled conditions. Each person must log her name before being granted access to them.

Upon learning of Rice’s actions, H. R. McMaster dispatched his close aide Derek Harvey to Capitol Hill to brief Chairman Nunes.

“Unmasking” is the process of identifying individuals whose communications were caught in the dragnet of intelligence gathering. While conducting investigations into terrorism and other related crimes, intelligence analysts incidentally capture conversations about parties not subject to the search warrant. The identities of individuals who are not under investigation are kept confidential, for legal and moral reasons.

That’s a pretty big scoop by Cerno. Impressive. Especially if it leads back to Obama, as one would tend to assume will eventually prove to be the case. Rice is hardly an individual inclined to go rogue.

Zerohedge has more on the unmasking.

And guess who had authorization to unmask individuals who were ‘incidentally’ surveilled? Former CIA Director John Brennan, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Obama’s National Security advisor Susan Rice. Also of note is the claim that New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has been sitting on the Susan Rice story for at least two days:

Yes, average IQ matters

Sure, accidents happen. But you don’t often get a series of accidents like this unless you’ve lowered a society’s average IQ by at least half a standard deviation or so.

The fire was started by a man smoking crack under the bridge in an area north of downtown Atlanta where the state of Georgia stores noncombustible, construction materials, authorities said. It rapidly grew with smoke billowing high above the city’s skyline. It didn’t take long before chunks of concrete weakened by the high heat began flying off the bridge, leaving firefighters to scramble away for safety. No one was injured.

Basil Eleby was charged with first-degree arson and first-degree property damage. He remains in jail on a $200,000 bond. Two other people with him were charged with criminal trespass, authorities said.

The closed section of I-85 is a key link to Atlanta’s northern and northeast suburbs. It carries about 400,000 vehicles a day in a city where there are surprisingly few alternative routes for its size.

One has the impression that the Atlanta reporter understands the meaning of “combustible” about as well as he does comma placement.

Fictional is not a synonym for false

National Catholic Register interviews John C. Wright:

What do you think is the place of such elements in science fiction?

Hmm. Good question. Science fiction is by and large based on a naturalistic view of the universe. When penning adventures about space princesses being rescued from space pirates by space marines, religion does not come up, except as local background and local color, in which case, the role of religion is to provide the radioactive altar to the Snake God of Mars to which our shapely by half-clad space princess is chained, that our stalwart hero can fight the monster.

Now, any story of any form can be used as a parable or as an example of a religious truth: indeed, my latest six-book trilogy is actually about faith, although it is portrayed in figures as being about a man’s love for his bride.

Fantasy stories, on the other hand, once any element of magic or the supernatural is introduced either declare for the Church or declare for witchcraft, depending on whether or not occultism is glamorized.

Note that I speak of occultism, not magic itself. Merlin the magician is a figure from King Arthur tales, of which no more obviously Christian stories can be found, outside of Dante and Milton, but no portrayal in olden days of Merlin glamorized the occult. Again, the way characters like Gandalf in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Coriakin in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, or Harry Potter, even those they are called wizards, are clearly portrayed either as commanding a divine power, or, in Potter’s case, controlling what is basically an alternate technology or psychic force. There is no bargaining with unclean spirits, no rituals, not even a pack of tarot cards. These are like the witches in Halloween decorations, who fly brooms and wave magic wands, and nothing like the real practices of real wiccans, neopagans or other fools who call themselves witches.

Fools, because, as I did when I challenged God, they meddle with forces of which they have no understanding. I meddled with bright forces, and was spared. They meddle with dark, and they think they can escape the price.

Fantasy stories generally are hostile to Christianity, some intentionally and some negligently. The negligent hostility springs from the commonplace American desire for syncretism, that is, for all religions to be equal. Even some fairly Christian-themed fantasy stories yield weakmindedly to this temptation, as in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising or A Wrinkle in Time is a science fantasy novel by American writer Madeleine L’Engle, where the forces of light are portrayed as ones where Christ is merely one teacher among many, each equally as bright and good, but makes no special nor exclusive claim. Or tales where the crucifix will drive back a vampire, but so will any other sign or symbol of any religion, from Asatru to Zoroastrianism, because all religions are equal, dontchaknow.

Such syncretic fantasy stories are perhaps more dangerous that those which are openly hostile to religion in general and Catholicism in particular, because such stories as are openly hostile can be read with pleasure and enjoyment the way one would read the Iliad by Homer or the Aeneid of Virgil, as pagan works where the reader suffers no temptation to bow to the stupid gods the writer evidently favors. In this category I place the work of Philip Pullman and Michael Moorcock. Socialist anarchist materialists are so autistic when it comes to spiritual matters, their worlds portrayed in their make believe has little or no power to sway real faith in anything real. Their ideas, when they venture into spiritual themes, are like listening to colorblind men discussing how they would make a better rainbow.

More dangerous are writers of real skill and talent whose spiritual vision is awake, but whose loyalty is in the enemy camp: I put the remarkably talented Ursula K LeGuin in this category, for she can capture the spiritual look, feel, and flavor of Taoism without ever once revealing her own spiritual preferences; and likewise Mr. John Crowley, who is a gnostic, and peppers his work with themes that make the heresy seem quite inviting and new.

In my fantasy stories, magic is always portrayed as unlawful for humans, dangerous, and innately corruptive; elves are beautiful but dangerous; the Church is a mighty fortress bold as an army with spears and trumpets. Because that is the way it really is.

Stories and fairy tales are fictional. That does not mean they are false.

The growing problem of immigration

Once more proving that the USA is not, and has never been, “a nation of immigrants”:

Proponents of immigration to the United States often contend that the country is a “nation of immigrants,” and certainly immigration has played an important role in American history. Nevertheless, immigrants currently represent 13.5 percent of the total U.S. population, the highest percentage in over 100 years. The Census Bureau projects that by 2025, the immigrant share of the population will reach 15 percent, surpassing the United States’ all-time high of 14.8 percent, reached in 1890. Without a change in policy, that share will continue to increase throughout the twenty-first century. Counting immigrants plus their descendants, the Pew Research Center estimates that since 1965, when the United States liberalized its laws, immigration has added 72 million people to the country—a number larger than the current population of France.

Given these numbers, it is striking that public officials in the United States have focused almost exclusively on the country’s 11 to 12 million illegal immigrants, who account for only one quarter of the total immigrant population. Legal immigration has a much larger impact on the United States, yet the country’s leaders have seldom asked the big questions. What, for example, is the absorption capacity of the nation’s schools and infrastructure? How will the least-skilled Americans fare in labor market competition with immigrants? Or, perhaps most importantly, how many immigrants can the United States assimilate into its culture? Trump has not always approached these questions carefully, or with much sensitivity, but to his credit he has at least raised them.

Notice that the intrinsic dishonesty of the civic nationalists rears its head again when they claim second-generation Mexican immigrants are NOT immigrants, because paperwork, but fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-generation American colonists somehow are. How could the USA ever have been “a nation of immigrants” when, dating back to the American Revolution, the majority of white Americans of English descent were citizens born in the United States?

Where was George Washington born? Where was Thomas Jefferson born? Where was John Adams born? From where did they emigrate?

The dead end of rap

I was talking to a young girl who intensely dislikes rap the other day. When I asked her why she disliked it, she said, “it’s so boring”. And, despite being a fan of Public Enemy since the “Sophisticated Bitch” and “98 Oldsmobile” days, and having been one of the very few non-Africans at the PE/NWA concert at First Avenue in 1988, I had to admit that she is absolutely right. Rap simply hasn’t gone anywhere musically since NWA’s innovation of posing as modern gangsters and dropping f-bombs every fourth word; how can anyone who has ever heard Chuck D bear to listen to Jay-Z ruining yet another lovely song with his inept, droning monologues?

Seriously, is there a bigger pop music abomination than the massive steaming dump that Jay-Z inexplicably slathers all over Alphaville’s “Forever Young”?

But when I got to thinking about it, I realized that this musical dead end was inevitable. It was always going to be the case. Most of the early “rap is crap” critics were committing a category error when they complained about “rap music”. Their instincts were right, but their sneering arguments were mostly off base and therefore unconvincing. The fact is that rap is not, technically speaking, music at all. To call it music is akin to describing “scatting” or “falsetto” or “rhythm” or “electric guitar” as music. It is, rather, a non-melodic vocal styling; it is an element of music, or if you prefer, a musical tool, rather than a form of music in itself.

And while that vocal styling can be utilized in a broad variety of music, from metal to ambient, it is not music in itself. What is often known as “rap music” is a degraded, primitive form of music created mostly by non-musicians, which is necessarily going to be either sample-based (Public Enemy), childishly simple (Dr. Dre), or an additional vocal track added to existing music (Puff Daddy, Jay-Z).

In other words, “rap music” was never anything more than a proto-SJW seize-and-ruin operation and an exercise in branding. That’s why it hasn’t gone anywhere. It can’t go anywhere because there is no actual vehicle to do so.

This isn’t to say that rap hasn’t contributed anything to actual forms of music as a vocal styling. Dave Draiman does not rap, but his staccato delivery and multi-syllabic lyrics made Disturbed a better, more interesting metal band. I also suspect that the move from one bass drum to two, such as one sees in bands like Disturbed and Babymetal, represents a real advance in rock drumming that stems in part from the influence of faster, more complicated vocal stylings.

And who hasn’t enjoyed Beck or twentyonepilots making use of the various possibilities presented by it? But as a musical form in itself, it simply does not exist.

BOOK REVIEW: The Collapsing Empire

An established author who wishes to remain anonymous became interested in Scalzi’s latest as a result of the various shenanigans surrounding it and sent me his review of the book for posting here. His opinion of it is modestly more positive than mine, but I post it here, unedited, for the record. I also sent him a copy of Corrosion, so it will be interesting to see his perspective on that if he happens to read and review it.

The Collapsing Empire started its career as a published book with a major disadvantage – it had a great deal of hype.  Depending on who you believe, The Collapsing Empire is either the greatest space opera since Dune and Foundation or a millstone around Tor Books’ collective neck.  John Scalzi, known for Old Man’s War and Redshirts, has the problem that his latest novel will be judged against the hype, instead of being judged on its own merits.  In writing this review, I have done my best to ignore both sides of the ongoing culture wars and judge the book by its own merits.  You can judge for yourself if I have succeeded.

In the far future, interstellar travel is only possible through the Flow – an alternate dimension that allows FTL travel between colonised star systems.  (The science explanation is highly dubious, but I wouldn’t hold that against anyone.)  Humanity is united by the Interdependency, a network of colonies that are (mostly) dependent on each other to survive, and ruled by the Houses, led by the ‘Emperox.’  Unfortunately for the inhabitants of this universe, the Flow is actually changing – it’s either shifting routes (what the bad guys believe) or collapsing completely (what the good guys fear).  Either way, humanity is going to be in for some pretty rough times.  The Interdependency is so interdependent that only one world is habitable without massive tech support.

This sounds like the basis for a great space opera.  Humanity can – humanity must – find a way to survive when the Flow vanishes and all of its scattered star systems suddenly find themselves on their own.  (The tech base described in the book should certainly be up to the task.)  A lone star system can work to survive when the Interdependency vanishes.  Or humanity can find a way to travel FTL without using the Flow, or find a way to bend the Flow to humanity’s will.  Or …

These don’t happen.  Maybe they will in the sequel (the book ends on a cliff-hanger) but they don’t in The Collapsing Empire.  Instead, we get a mixture of local politics, interstellar shipping concerns and interstellar politics.  Some of these blend seamlessly into the story line, others don’t quite make sense.  I think it’s fairly safe to say that the most exciting part of the story is the mutiny in the prologue, which honestly doesn’t make sense (the mutineers are taking a terrible risk) and is completely unnecessary.  I’m happy to enjoy a Game of Thrones-style story about mighty aristocracies battling for supremacy, but that wasn’t what I was promised when I downloaded this book.

The book flows well – I read it in an hour – but it was oddly choppy.  There are aspects that really needed an editor’s touch – the mutiny in the prologue stops long enough for the author to lecture us on his universe, which isn’t necessary as all the main points are covered in CH4 – and others that needed more consideration.  I had problems following the flow – hah – of time within the universe; we are told, on one hand, that it takes months to move from Hub to end, yet Marce leaves Hub (after a largely pointless escape sequence) and in the very next section he’s on Hub.

Cardenia Wu-Patrick is probably the most likable character in the story, although she takes pointless risks and is generally ill-prepared to assume the post of ‘Emperox.’  (Her aide quips that nice people don’t get power, which misses the point that Cardenia inherited her power – she didn’t earn it.)  Marce Claremont is young and overshadowed by his sister, who I felt would have made a more interesting POV character.  And Kiva Lagos is – put bluntly – a potty-mouthed bully and a sexual predator.  Her good aspects are overshadowed by her bad points.

I admit it – I cringed when I read the first section, where it is clear that Kiva has pulled a very junior member of her ship’s crew into sexual congress.  Consent is dubious at the very least – there isn’t even a sense that he’s using her as she’s using him.  And then, she comes on to Marce later in the book in a manner that, if she were a man, would be considered borderline rape.  To call her ‘problematic’ is to understate the case.  This might not be a problem if she was the villain – or the text even acknowledged the issues – but it does not.

There are other issues, deeper issues, that offend my inner critic.  On one hand, Count Claremont – the physicist who first realised that something was wrong with the Flow – makes snarky remarks about the lack of peer review, yet his own work has the same problem.  While this is acknowledged, it makes no sense.  Modern-day governments have no problem finding qualified scientists and putting them to work on secret government projects.  Why can’t the Interdependency do the same?  And on the other, the bad guys – who have also realised that there is something wrong with the Flow – have a plan to take advantage of the crisis, but don’t seem to realise the potential of their own technology.  It suggests, very strongly, that no one takes the crisis completely seriously.

And yet, it is made clear that the Flow has shifted before.  Humanity has lost contact with Earth – in the distant past – and a relatively small colony world in the more recent past – but this does not appear to alarm anyone.  Is Earth really that insignificant?  One may draw a comparison between the Flow’s slow collapse and global warming, but the loss of two entire worlds is a little more significant than anything we’ve seen on Earth.  I would have expected a serious effort to reduce the degree of interdependency since that disaster.  If nothing else, shipping foodstuffs and suchlike between star systems must be an economic nightmare.  (And the ‘lie’ that binds the Interdependency together is obvious from the setting.)

To be honest, the text tries to balance humour with story and fails.  The fact that there is a legal way to mutiny – which no one bothers to follow – make me smile and roll my eyes at the mixture of humour and absurdity.  There are moments of banter that are oddly misplaced or unintentionally ironic.  The ship names sound as though they have come out of Iain M. Banks – Kiva’s ship is called the ‘Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’ – but they have a very definite air of absurdity.  Banks made it work because the names suited the Culture – they don’t work so well in The Collapsing Empire.  And the very first line in the book is stolen directly from Scooby Doo.

In the end, The Collapsing Empire left me feeling oddly disappointed.  It’s shorter than I expected, given the price, and very little is resolved in the first book – the bad guys have taken a few blows, but the good guys haven’t even started to come to grips with the real problem.  I know that most books are set up as either trilogies or open-ended series these days, but there should be at least some resolution.  (If only because the second book might be delayed, increasing reader frustration.)  Off Armageddon Reef and The Final Empire, both also published by Tor, show how this can be done.

The Collapsing Empire is not the best SF novel of the decade, nor is it the worst.  It has high ideals and grand ambitions, but it doesn’t live up to them (nor the hype).  I probably won’t be picking up the sequel.

Upheaval in South Korea

Those massive protests have finally borne fruit:

Former South Korean President Park Geun-hye, who was removed from office earlier this month, was arrested Friday on charges related to abuse of power and accepting bribes.

“Major crimes have been ascertained and there is a concern that the suspect might attempt to destroy evidence,” Judge Kang Bu-young said in a text message to reporters. “The court recognizes the need, necessity and reasonableness of the suspect’s arrest.”

Prosecutors announced Monday that they were seeking to arrest Park on charges relating to abuse of power, accepting bribes and leaking important information. “The suspect abused the mighty power and position as President to take bribes from companies and infringed upon the freedom of corporate management and leaked important confidential official information,” said the statement from the Seoul Central District Prosecutor’s Office.

The level of international instability seems to be getting increasingly out of control. But is it the globalists losing control, or is it instigated chaos out of which order will be ever-so-helpfully offered?

Or, as is most likely the case, is it some combination of the two?