Almost indescribably good

People occasionally ask me why I am such a Babymetal enthusiast. All I have to say is that they are, quite literally, one of the very best bands in the world, from technical and songwriting perspectives, even if one ignores the awesome Japanese theatrical elements. They’re uniformly excellent.

One thing I like about twentyone pilots is the way they can move effortlessly between musical lanes. What most people don’t realize is that Babymetal’s range is even greater. It’s not just the signature combination of J-Pop and power metal of Doki Doki Morning, or even the big chord, big chorus metal of Karate, that is chiefly of note in this regard, but the fact that Babymetal has the ability to do everything from X-metal-tribute power ballads to metal-infused Deep Forest. This is what you can do when you assemble exceptional talent under a unique vision; I view it in some ways as a conceptual model for Castalia House.

Consider the heavily emotional No Rain, No Rainbow, which features a guitar solo that reminds me more than a little of my favorite anthem, My Chemical Romance’s Welcome to the Black Parade. Su-metal is absolutely no joke as a vocalist, and I love the fitting, if uncharacteristic, restraint of the Kami band here.


English speakers will probably not understand why Su-metal is on the edge of crying at the end, so a translation might help.

Even the despair becomes the light.
Though an endless rain continues to fall.
Even the despair becomes the light.
A sad rain throws a rainbow far far away.


We shall never meet again,
But I want not to forget you forever.
If the dream continues, I wish I’ll never wake up from it.


An endless rain fills my heart forever.

However, my favorite Babymetal song is one of the less well-known songs from Metal Resistance, From Dusk Till Dawn. Some compare it to Enigma on steroids, but I think Deep Forest is the more accurate comparison. It really shows off Koba-metal’s skill as a producer.

And if you don’t believe these guys can do anything they want musically, and do it better than most, have a listen to the Kari band, which is the fusion jazz project of three of the Kami band members.

News is Conspiracy Theory +15

Spacebunny joked yesterday that she was old enough to remember when Echelon was conspiracy theory. It has now become readily apparent that what used to be derided as “conspiracy theory” is nothing more than the news, 15 years early. Consider a few historical references from this blog.

The Patriot Act and the IAO are constitutional abominations. The War on Terror is being used exactly in the same way that the War on Drugs has been used for decades – to provide the federal government with the ability to infringe upon the liberty of the American people. Your house can get stormed with a no-knock raid if an anonymous telephone call accuses you of the wrong sort of botany project, and soon the same thing will be the case if you happen to visit the wrong web sites or use dangerous terminology in your emails. Echelon is still out there transcribing American faxes, emails and telephone calls, after all.
– October 22, 2003

The US government sees fit to eavesdrop on everyone inside and outside the United States with its Echelon system, but unlike a parent trying to raise a child, that level of oversight is necessary. Terrorists, don’t you know. Why, without it, we wouldn’t have caught bin Laden and prevented the 9/11 attacks….
– December 10, 2004

Arrived too late, the act has been done.
The wind was against them, letters intercepted on their way.
The conspirators were nine of a party.
By Caesar the Younger shall these enterprises be undertaken.

Echelon and the Bush administration’s spying on Americans will be defended by the Supreme Court, should it ever get that far. Most likely, they’ll do so by refusing to hear a challenge against it.
– January 3, 2006

CIALeaks proves, once and for all, that Edward Snowden is one of the greatest heroes in American history. One hopes that the God-Emperor will recognize this and offer him a pardon; it is the CIA that is far more of an enemy to the President and the American people than the Russians these days.

Even better, President Trump should appoint Snowden to be the head of the NSA and charge him with turning it into a government agency that is entirely compatible with the U.S. Constitution and rule by the people. #SnowdenForNSA

“We’re winning!” he cried, as the ship went down

This is an almost remarkably stupid post by an SF-SJW who clearly has not been paying much attention to developments over the last two years or so.

The puppies’ experiences as nerd-fuhrers may well come to define their adult lives but their flirtations with moral entrepreneurship failed to secure them the kind of following that might provide access to the lucrative world of conservative cultural commentary. Even worse, their attempts to cultivate a right-wing alternative to the stuttering multiculturalism of mainstream genre spaces appears to have resulted in little more than a handful of underwhelming blogs supporting the work of a few self-publishing authors.

Let’s see. VP is now the biggest, most well-trafficked blog of any science fiction writer. The Castalia House blog is seeing record traffic and already has more comments and commenters per post than Black Gate. Castalia House publishing continues to grow at a rate of 100+ percent year-on-year in both January and February. Larry Correia continues to sell vast quantities of books.

And a novel we published as an in-house joke is ranked much higher on Amazon than the current Hugo Award winner. On preorder.

Of course we’re not weighing in heavily on the Hugos this year. The Dread Ilk decided not to do so last year, even before the rules changes were ratified. Instead, we used those resources to build Infogalactic and Infogalactic News, which already have more traffic than VP does. Gab is going gangbusters, Crypto.Fashion is doing extremely well – speaking of Rabid Puppies – and there are a whole host of other projects in various stages of development, some of which will directly affect the SF/F book publishing world.

And the God-Emperor now rules. Still. Not. Tired.

But let’s not tell the secret kings on their sinking ships any of that. It’s going to be vastly amusing to watch them panic and scurry once they realize that their Great and Powerful SF Establishment is not only full of holes and taking on water, it is on the verge of having to slash contracts and writers on a scale that we have never seen before.

Amazon has realized that the Pink SF invasion is not good for sales. The converged publishing houses that still haven’t figured that out are going to die, and soon.

“Warning: Do not add books from any Romance category to these categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Children’s.”

So, it’s tomorrow…

Indigo March 06, 2017 4:00 PM
Check back tomorrow for a more accurate ranking comparison.

The Corroding Empire
#30 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera


The Collapsing Empire
#166 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera

Group-thinking is not smarter

Researchers debunk the idea that diversity makes groups more intelligent or more effective:

What allows groups to behave intelligently? One suggestion is that groups exhibit a collective intelligence accounted for by number of women in the group, turn-taking and emotional empathizing, with group-IQ being only weakly-linked to individual IQ (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). Here we report tests of this model across three studies with 312 people. Contrary to prediction, individual IQ accounted for around 80% of group-IQ differences. Hypotheses that group-IQ increases with number of women in the group and with turn-taking were not supported. Reading the mind in the eyes (RME) performance was associated with individual IQ, and, in one study, with group-IQ factor scores. However, a well-fitting structural model combining data from studies 2 and 3 indicated that RME exerted no influence on the group-IQ latent factor (instead having a modest impact on a single group test). The experiments instead showed that higher individual IQ enhances group performance such that individual IQ determined 100% of latent group-IQ. Implications for future work on group-based achievement are examined.

This falls into the category of science confirming common sense. Women and gamma males, both of whom tend to be obsessed with rules and process, almost invariably get in the way of the smart individuals who drive accomplishment. Sounding boards are useful, but they are vastly overrated, particularly by the kind of people who are incapable of fulfilling a proactive role themselves.

Anyone can critique an idea or offer a nonsensical spin on it. In most cases, it is not “helping” to do so, but distracting, if not demoralizing. That is one reason why I crack down hard on those whose immediate reaction to any announcement is to try to come up with an alternative or an improvement.

My rule of thumb is this: if someone doesn’t explicitly ask me what I think about something, I try to avoid telling them what I think about it. “Congratulations” or “I hope it goes well” is by far the most useful thing you can tell anyone who tells you about a new idea or a new product.

Build your own platforms

Disqus no longer wishes to permit Occidental Dissent to be part of the discussion:

“Hi there,

We wanted to reach out to inform you that your site has been found to be in conflict with the values and terms of use of Disqus. Because of this, Disqus is unable to offer your site continued discussion services past the next 30 days.

Site activity or content that can result in the termination of discussion services include:
– Technical misuse of Disqus services: generating a large amount of nonsense threads, posts, or other objects.
– Featuring copyrighted material, which results in DMCA takedown requests.
– Adult-oriented sites which result in abuse complaints, users with inappropriate avatars or behavior visiting other Disqus sites in an unwelcome way, or are otherwise misusing Disqus services.
– Using Disqus on pages that contain hate speech, which violates Disqus’ Terms of Service and results in abuse complaints.

Additional information on these Basic Rules may be found here …”

The Right would do well to adapt this friendly denial of service approach. The next time someone you don’t like, or of whom you don’t approve, wants you to bake a cake or whatever, just inform them that they are in conflict with your values and terms of use.

It’s particularly useful for breaking up with women. “Hey, I’m really sorry, but you’ve been found to be in conflict with my values. Because of this, I’m unable to offer you continued relationship services.”

There is no point crying about this attempt to shut down dissent and police both thoughts and speech. It’s what converged organizations do; they are more interested in your submission than your business. Pointing out their double standards and hypocrisy will accomplish nothing; they know they are hypocrites and they consider it to be a virtue.

So, build your own platform. That is the only way to avoid being techno-silenced.

Meanwhile, the Zman explains the worthlessness of the Establishment Right and why the Alt-Right need spare no sympathy for pseudo-rightists like Charles Murray now that SJWs are attacking them as well as the actual Right.

When Ann Coulter gets screamed at on campus, guys like Murray just shrug, because after all, Coulter deserves it. She’s a bad thinker.

That’s the thing with these guys. They don’t care about free speech or the open exchange of ideas. They care about their free speech and their access to the marketplace of ideas, which means staying in good with the Left. When a John Derbyshire is shut down by the campus lunatics, Conservative Inc is silent. To defend Derb or anyone else the Left has ruled out of bounds would risk their standing and that can never happen. The only core principle of these so-called conservatives is to remain on the good side of the Left.

This is not supposed to happen to good thinkers like Charles Murray, so it is a big deal to the people who pretend to be on our side. It also offers another opportunity for Conservative Inc. to pretend they are on the front lines fighting the Left. As I pointed out the other day, these guys are looking for a way to insert themselves at the front of the movement they claim to lead, at least until things get serious. You just know that one of them will be declaring himself the “respectable” version of the Dissident Right.

The incident is a good reminder of Official Right’s worthlessness. Murray’s piece reads like an apology. That’s because it is an apology. The boys and girls of Conservative Inc have always worked to position themselves at the edge of what the Left considers the respectable Right. Twenty years ago, the Bell Curve was right at the edge. Now, the Left considers it heresy and Murray knows it. It’s why he invested so much effort into advertising his opposition to Trump. It’s part of the long apology for his past heresy.

Murray is fond of the label Establishmentarians to describe his peers. While it is true that they are forever defending the establishment, they have no say in what is and what is not the “establishment.” That’s decided by the Left. Since that is always changing, most of these guys spend their days trying to justify the latest movement of the Overtone Window as conservative. It’s why a Jonah Goldberg was out declaring homosexuality a core conservative principle  It’s why a National Review is pro-tranny.

It’s also why the most important project of the Dissident Right is discrediting those palace guards of the Progressive establishment. Guys like Charles Murray are useful opponents for the Left and not just because they are always willing to take a dive. Like the tomato cans that fill up the fight card for a weak champion, Conservative Inc insulates the Establishment from a real challenge. Instead of having to face off against people who are willing to punch back, the Left likes these journeyman who are just happy for the payday.

Of course, if you punch back, or even permit others to punch back, you will be deplatformed. The choice is always the same, no matter what the context. Fight back or submit.

Bureaucratic resistance

On March 6, 2017, the President signed a new Executive Order (E.O.) on Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States that contains provisions that impact visa adjudication and issuance procedures (NOTE: this E.O. does not yet have a number.  End Note).  This new E.O. has an effective date of March 16, 2017 and revokes its predecessor, E.O. 13769, as of that date.  We will not begin implementing the new E.O. until the Department of Justice confirms that pending litigation does not interfere with implementation of the new E.O.  Further guidance will follow. 

A tale of two preorders

The Corroding Empire
#15 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera

The Collapsing Empire
#151 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera

And to think that we didn’t even have to pay seven digits for the right to publish the former! A collapsing empire indeed.

Many thanks to Alexandra Erin for the inspiration!

Mike Cernovich – Sam Harris debate

Cerno has accepted Harris’s challenge:

Sam Harris, who said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Hillary Clinton would win the election (and also that Trump “terrified” him) wants to debate me….

One topic could be this: How could Sam Harris support Hillary Clinton when it’s Clinton who wanted to import radical Islam into the U.S. with her open borders policy?

Whatever, I accept Sam’s debate challenge. I suggest Dave Rubin of the Rubin Report moderate it on neutral territory.

Interesting that Harris’s fans want him to debate Mike. They probably underestimate him; I have no doubt at all that they don’t want him to debate me. I doubt Mike will have much trouble with him, though. Mike is smarter than most people think, and Sam, although smart enough, is very intellectually careless, and habitually leaves very large holes in his arguments.

I would expect Mike to be able to spot those holes without too much difficulty.