Tor editor “not expected to recover”

From Facebook:

Late this afternoon David [Hartwell] had a massive brain bleed from which he is not expected to recover.

Hartwell was John C. Wright’s editor at Tor Books; he was also friendlier to the Puppies than any of the SF-SJWs are likely to believe. I had the privilege of speaking with him when he called me last year after the Rabid Puppies overturned the SF applecart; he was the previously unnamed individual who explained the unusual structure of Tor Books to me, using the analogy of a medieval realm with separate and independent duchies. He wanted to avoid cultural war in science fiction even though he clearly understood that it appeared to be unavoidable; it was out of respect for him that I initially tried to make a distinction between Tor Books and the Making Light SJWs before Irene Gallo and Tom Doherty rendered that moot.

Despite his leftward leanings, David Hartwell struck me as being one of the last remaining sane individuals in the editorial offices there, and he was perhaps the only one capable of reigning in the lunatic impulses of Patrick Nielsen Hayden and the Torstapo. By his own account, he even managed to talk the notorious award-whore into standing down and letting long-time bridesmaid Lou Anders of Pyr finally win PNH’s Best Tor Editor Award (also known as Best Editor (Long Form) Hugo) in 2011.

I expect he will be missed by many, and that things in the science fiction world are going to get even more, shall we say, interesting, in his absence.

UPDATE: David Hartwell has died. Requiescat in pace.

She hasn’t forgotten

Sarah Palin endorses Donald Trump for president:

Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice-presidential nominee who became a Tea Party sensation and a favorite of grass-roots conservatives, will endorse Donald J. Trump in Iowa on Tuesday, officials with his campaign confirmed. The endorsement provides Mr. Trump with a potentially significant boost just 13 days before the state’s caucuses.

“I’m proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for president,” Ms. Palin said in a statement provided by his campaign.

I can’t help but suspect the abuse Sarah Palin experienced at the hands of the Republican establishment might have had just a little something to do with her decision to throw her support to Trump. But regardless, this is a big deal, as it is an indication how women who are concerned about immigration and vibrancy are going to vote.

Yes, Green Bay should have gone for 2

ProFootballTalk considers Mike McCarthy’s decision to settle for overtime:

Three days later, the sports world continues to buzz about the epic Packers-Cardinals playoff game. And one of the many questions that continues to bubble up from time to time is this: Should the Packers have gone for two after scoring on a :00 Hail Mary pass?

In hindsight, absolutely. But if coach Mike McCarthy had opted to go for two and if his team had failed to convert, he would have become a pin cushion for criticism in the aftermath of what would have become his team’s latest failure in a playoff game. Apart from the fact that coaches who do the conventional and fail get a pass while those who do the unconventional and fail don’t, a McCarthy decision to go for two would have been directly responsible for the fifth straight failure to get to the Super Bowl despite having one of the best quarterbacks of the Super Bowl era on his team.

It’s not hindsight. It was the obvious thing to do. In 2015, the Packers went for it 6 times and scored the conversion 4 times for a 66.7 percent success rate. The league average was 47.8 percent.

But Mcarthy’s decision is even worse than the statistics indicate. The Packers were underdogs. The underdog should ALWAYS go for the winning two-point conversion. I was at a Vikings-Cowboys game in 1995 when the Aikman-Smith-Irvin Cowboys were the defending Super Bowl champions and the dominant team in the league.

The Denny Green-coached Vikings managed to tie the game with 30 seconds left. It was a chance at a huge upset; the Cowboys were clearly the better team and the only reason we were in it was due to a very rare Emmitt Smith fumble. The two-point conversion was our one shot at winning the game.

But like Mike McCarthy, Denny Green choked, and played to continue the game rather than to win. Sound familiar?

The Cowboys won the coin toss and needed
just five plays to win the game. Smith broke through a huge hole on the
left side and outran safety Charles Mincy to the end zone just 2
minutes 26 seconds into overtime. 

The players can tell when their chickenshit coach isn’t even trying to win, and they play accordingly.

A mysterious change

The most interesting thing is the way that the massive global pro-immigration media blitz of last summer, complete with PICTURES OF DEAD CHILDREN only managed to reduce the German anti-immigration position by three percentage points. Clearly the clueless moderates are more susceptible, as support for immigration briefly jumped six points. Of course, you should never put much credence in polls.

We don’t need to speculate about whether pollsters manipulated their findings, because the pollsters have admitted it themselves. Survation announced the morning after the result that they had decided not to publish their own “final” poll of the campaign because – in the words of company CEO Damian Lyons Lowe – “the results seemed so “out of line” with all the polling conducted by ourselves and our peers – what poll commentators would term an “outlier” – that I “chickened out” of publishing the figures.

The techno-gods have spoken

Do you see what happens when you unverify Milo, Twitter? Do you see what happens, Twitter?

Millions of internet users are unable to use Twitter after the site crashed at around 8.20am GMT. Users of the micro-blogging site are being confronted with the image of a broken robot and cannot view or send any tweets online or on their phones…. An outage map created by downdetector.co.uk shows the problem is affecting users in western Europe, including the UK and in Japan. 

Je suis Milo.

Memento mori

For me, the best thing about all these Baby Boomer icons beginning to die off is the way that the godless narcissists who made a quasi-religion of them are in total despair about what it says about something they have denied for decades, namely, their own mortality. I don’t think Ed Driscoll is GenX, but he sounds as if he is in this take on the Eagles’ breakup:

So let me get this straight: throughout the documentary, a running leitmotif is that the band was desperate
to add some decent rock under their soaring harmony vocals. The band
fires British superstar engineer-producer Glyn Johns (whose previous
resume included the Stones, the Who, the Beatles, and Led Zeppelin’s
first album) because he emphasized their harmonies and country sound. In
response, they bring in Joe Walsh to rock out. And finally, when their
other guitarist does something that’s actually rock and roll and utters a punk rock-style sneer to corrupt power, the entire band implodes?

Perfect.

But I’m glad for the many fans of the Eagles that they got one last chance to see the band on tour last year. I’m told it was an excellent concert; while I wasn’t a fan myself, I had a lot of respect for them as songwriters.

Still, the Baby Boomers are dying, and soon we will have a chance to remake the civilized world they spent fifty years doing their damndest to destroy. Let’s learn from their mistakes, shall we?

We have certainly learned that nothing good ever comes of believing yourself to be eternally young and cool. And wisdom and experience should always be respected, not dismissed out of hand.

“Christianity under siege”

Donald Trump, of all people, is speaking out in defense of Christians around the world, when far too many Churchian leaders prefer to preach about tolerance and parodies of marriage:

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump touted his faith at Liberty University on Monday, telling the conservative college that Christians have to ban together because their religion “is under siege.”

“We’re going to protect Christianity,” he said. “If you look at what’s going on throughout the world…Christianity is under siege.”

Trump pointed to targeting of Christians by terrorist groups in Syria and urged Christians to work together to use their “power” within the United States to enact change.

He added that “I’m a Protestant. I’m very proud of it, Presbyterian to be exact. …[but] bad things are happening, very bad things are happening.”

To be precise, Christianity needs no more protection than reality does. It simply is. But Christendom does.

UK debates Trump ban

And even Piers Morgan, who is far from the brightest bulb in Albion, is appalled at the stupidity on display in the UK:

Why I’m so embarrassed today for Britain. The same parliament that hasn’t banned a single UK citizen from returning after fighting for ISIS is seriously debating banning Trump from its shores

As I write this column, members of the UK Parliament are debating whether or not to ban Donald Trump from entering Britain. They’ve allocated three hours of time to do this.

Time that could have been spent debating terrorism, famine, nuclear weapons, the Middle East refugee crisis or the Syrian War.

But no, instead British law-makers have concluded their own time is best served seriously considering a proposal to ban a man who may end up being the next President of the United States.

The reason they’re doing it is, of course, is because Trump recently called for a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. in the wake of an horrific mass shooting by two Islamic terrorists. Like many, I didn’t agree with what Trump said and indeed, I wrote him an open letter at the time saying it was ‘dangerously wrong and bigoted’.

But to ban a foreign politician for expressing an opinion is utterly absurd. Particularly a foreign politician who stands an increasingly good chance of becoming leader of the world’s biggest superpower and Britain’s supposedly closest, most powerful ally.

Can you imagine a situation where President Trump, if he is elected, is actually banned? It would make Britain the laughing stock of the world, and confirm to Americans that we’re just as pathetically petty and small pond in our thinking as you’ve always suspected.

What they should do is put it to a referendum. Let the people of Britain – the actual British people, not the millions of invaders – decide if they would rather ban a) Donald Trump or b) Muslims from the UK. I suspect the Donald might not do so poorly.

But regardless, it would be hilarious if Parliament banned Trump prior to his winning the Republican nomination, and then the election. Nothing would make it more obvious that the rest of the world no longer gives a damn about what is now nothing more than a powerless, petty province of the EU.

If the UK wants to matter again, it has to get out of the EU. #Brexit.

And these are the polite ones

A Swedish woman has a close encounter with a group of orcs:

Man: ‘Can I make sex with you?’

Girl: ‘What did you say?’

Man: ‘Can I make sex with you?’

Girl: ‘But, he tried to touch my a**, do you think that’s ok?’

Man: ‘Who?’

Girl:’He, the guy who just walked past, your friend! Is it ok to touch my a**, or what?’

Man: ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

Girl: ‘I’m sorry? What don’t you understand? He touched my a**. You’r friend grabbed my a**, what do you want? What do you want?’

Man: ‘No, No. Can I make sex with you?’

Girl: ‘No. Never.’

Man: ‘Why?’

Girl: ‘Absolutely not. Go! Leave!’

Man: ‘Why?’

Girl: ‘I am recording this whole thing, so yeah, mate keep going.’

Man: ‘I’ll give you money.’

Girl: ‘What did you say? Do you think I’m a w****?’

Man: ‘Calm down, I’ll give you money.’

Western women are all whores, right? Or at the very least, strong, independent women who don’t need a man to take care of them. After all, that’s what the police are for….

So, are you ready to stop shrieking at the nationalists, calling them “racists”, and help send all the orcs back to Mordor yet? Or do you still prefer to relax and enjoy it?