The end of air supremacy

ESR called this one in “Battlefield Lasers”, which appeared in Riding the Red Horse.

If history teaches us anything about military technology, it’s that cheap systems scale up faster than expensive ones do. It is already easy to imagine an up-gunned version of Rodriguez’s laser pointer slaved to a radar with a couple of bog-standard servomotors. Off-the-shelf parts, incremental cost less than $3K each, with most of it the development budget going for the targeting firmware. Cost per shot, effectively free.

Call it the PlaneZapper. You could sit it on a roof, power it off wall current, and it would blind every pilot it can see. Including drone pilots; even if there’s a peak-clipping filter between a drone’s sensors and its pilot’s screen, the effect will be like whiteout. Altitude and cloudy skies might save pilots from the early versions of the PlaneZapper, but for anything that has to fly low and slow this could already be a death knell. Close air support and medevac are obvious vulnerabilities.

Apparently someone at Boeing was reading Raymond:

Wednesday morning, the company showed off its Compact Laser Weapon System for media in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s a much smaller, significantly more portable version of the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD) Boeing demonstrated last year. This setup looks like an overgrown camera, swiveling around on a tripod.

In the demo, Boeing used the laser to burn holes in a stationary, composite UAV shell, to show how quickly it can compromise an aircraft. Two seconds at full power and the target was aflame. Other than numerous safety warnings to ensure no one was blinded by the two-kilowatt infrared laser, there was no fanfare. No explosions, no visible beam. It’s more like burning ants with a really, really expensive magnifying glass than obliterating Alderaan.

Instead of a massive laser mounted on a dedicated truck, the compact system is small enough to fit in four suitcase-sized boxes and can be set up by a pair of soldiers or technicians in just a few minutes.

This means that the battle for air supremacy is going to have to move higher, which is to say, space.

The first two reviews

Interestingly enough, the very first review of SJWs Always Lie is by an individual whose SJW attack is mentioned in the book, Paz Dickenson:

Vox Day’s short new book “SJWs Always Lie” is essential reading for anyone interested in modern online moral panics triggered by Social Justice Warriors. Vox explains what these people are, how they function, and what to do if you’re attacked. As someone who has personally lived through his own political correctness lynching I agree wholeheartedly with his recommendations.

The book includes chapters that comprise the best short summaries I’ve read of Gamergate and the Sad Puppies movements to date, and having just been released it includes even the most recent developments.

I’m very pleased to see others who have experienced SJW attacks can endorse both the descriptions of the attacks as well as the recommendations on how to react to them. Another reviewer who is mentioned in the book, Gorilla Mindset author Mike Cernovich, one of my GGinParis cohosts, reviews SJWs Always Lie with a completely different angle in mind, and frankly, one I’d never really considered, which is to say professional public relations:

No one ever attacked me with such rabid dishonesty as the social justice warriors.

SJWs lied about every area of my life. They lied about verifiable facts. For example, SJWs claimed I wasn’t a real lawyer. (Anyone can ascertain my ability to practice law by checking the California State Bar website!)

SJWs called me a racist, a rapist, and accused me of moving to Vietnam for underage sex tourism.I also had to stay in a hotel after SJWs attempted to have a police SWAT team sent to my home. A 350-pound woman falsely accused me of threatening her with rape.

Fortunately my business model is anti-fragile. The more hate I receive leads to more books sold. SJWs actually helped me make Gorilla Mindset a best seller, as my unwavering mindset in the face of their death threats proved the power of mindset. SJWs lined my pocket with their attacks, and for the most part have moved on to exploit vulnerable people.

Yet even I was a bit shell shocked by the attacks. I had never encountered such hateful people in my life.

SJWs Always Lie would have helped me anticipate their tactics and thus fight more effectively. SJWs Always Lie is the public relations book every celebrity and public relations strategist will deny owning.

It’s interesting to see Mike declare that the book isn’t a polemic because I am a polemicist, I had conceived of the book as a polemic, and indeed, began writing it as a polemic. But then, the patterns that I kept seeing over and over in the different SJW attacks, across different industries and in different countries, were too obvious to ignore, and after describing those patterns, it seemed only natural to explain some strategies for dealing with them. And somehow, in the process, what began as a specific polemic was transformed into a more general cultural 4GW handbook.

And Skittles Boy violate Amazon’s review policy when he scribbled a one-star review that is even less intelligent than the fake one. I particularly liked how I’m supposed to be “piggybacking on a topic he knows will be popular for his own obvious self-aggrandizement.” All together now: SJWs Always Lie! 

“We have a zero tolerance policy for any review designed to mislead or manipulate customers.”

Happy Birthday, #GamerGate

This is the chapter-heading cartoon for Chapter Eight: Striking Back at the Thought Police, from the #1 Political Philosophy bestseller, SJWs ALWAYS LIE: Taking Down the Thought Police.

From the Dedication:

This book is for all the gamers around the world who simply wanted to be left alone to play their games in peace. You didn’t go looking to fight a cultural war, the social justice warriors in game journalism brought their war to you….

This book is for the thousands of sealions whose names I don’t know, who sent emails and created memes, who persisted and leveled up, and who, in doing so, shattered the SJW Narrative.

This book is for #GamerGate.

Cheating with nonexistent women

Forget the data hack, this revelatory analysis about Ashley Madison should kill the entire online dating business. Such is the sexual desperation of men that I don’t know it will, but it absolutely should:

When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison….

It’s worth noting that those 12,108 women’s accounts may represent the only true number we’ve got for women who used the site. After all, paying to delete an account is a sure sign of activity, though of course it’s evidence of disengagement rather than the amorous engagement that Ashley Madison promised.

Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.

The men’s accounts tell a story of lively engagement with the site, with over 20 million men hopefully looking at their inboxes, and over 10 million of them initiating chats. The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.

Sure, some of these inactive accounts were probably created by real, live women (or men pretending to be women) who were curious to see what the site was about. Some probably wanted to find their cheating husbands. Others were no doubt curious journalists like me. But they were still overwhelmingly inactive. They were not created by women wanting to hook up with married men. They were static profiles full of dead data, whose sole purpose was to make men think that millions of women were active on Ashley Madison.

Granted, it’s hard to feel any sympathy for men whose primary interest was cheating on their wives, but this sort of scam is an unconscionable preying on the lonely and the desperate.

SJWs Always Lie

There WILL be an offer tonight for the CH subscribers, so if you are one, you might want to hold off on buying it today. The official announcement is tomorrow, but seeing as the cat is out of the bag, there is no harm in mentioning that it is available on Amazon now.

UPDATE: Sweet Smoked SJW, I was NOT expecting this, particularly not after what may be the most haphazard and lackadaisical “book launch” in history. I’m turning in, so if someone wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on the numbers and posting them in the comments, I’d appreciate it.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#842 #306 #286 #251 #238 Paid in Kindle Store

Just because this made me laugh. Vox Day… Machiavelli… Plato.

The trademark family incompetence

There are two ways to look at this column by the entire NYT editorial board. Either the New York Times really fears the Democratic Party candidate running against Jeb Bush, or he was simply so horrendous at his staged appearance at a Mexican restaurant that they actually had to address the facts for once:

Jeb Bush went to the border town of McAllen, Tex., on Monday to raise money and to talk about immigration, in English and fluent Spanish. Because the Republican presidential campaign has been so fixated on border security and the immigrant peril — thank you, Donald Trump — it was a chance to see how the supposed expert on this fraught subject handled it.

Short version: He was awful.

In less than 15 minutes, Mr. Bush managed to step on his message, to give Mr. Trump a boost and to offend Asian-Americans, a growing population that is every bit as important as Latinos in winning presidential elections. And he failed to give Latino voters any persuasive evidence that he had anything better to offer them than his opponents in a revoltingly xenophobic Republican campaign.

It may be time to offer this forlorn candidate some free advice. Although if he really is the smarter Bush, he knows these things already:

1. He should never let himself say the words “anchor babies” ever again. He got in trouble for using that derogatory reference to the children of unauthorized immigrants in passing, in an interview, then dug himself a hole by defending his use of it. On Monday, he dug deeper. He tried to explain that he had been talking about “Asian people” who arrive on tourist visas through organized schemes to give birth to American babies on American soil.

Though the phenomenon is real, Mr. Bush was blasted by Asian-American groups for repeating the slur. And, astoundingly, he handed Mr. Trump the opportunity to send out tweets like this: “In a clumsy move to get out of his ‘anchor babies’ dilemma, where he signed that he would not use the term and now uses it, he blamed ASIANS.”

Speaking as a great-grandson of a Mexican revolutionary, Jeb Bush’s positions on immigration aren’t merely wrong, they are obscenely stupid. Trump is going to crucify him on this issue; the imbalance here could actually win Trump the nomination despite all of Bush’s structural advantages.

Stick to the rape rape, fat boy

George Rape Rape Martin tries to put a little SJW spin on the Hugo Awards:

I had picked Mike Resnick in Short Form and Toni Weisskopf in Long Form, and indeed, each of them finished above all the other nominees in the first round of voting… but well behind No Award. This was a crushing defeat for the slates, and a big victory for the Puppy-Free ballot of Deirdre Moen. Honestly? I hated this. In my judgment the voters threw the babies out with bathwater in these two categories. Long Form had three nominees who are more than worthy of a Hugo (and one, Jim Minz, who will be in a few more years), and Short Form had some good candidates too. They were on the slates, yes, but some of them were put on there without their knowledge and consent. A victory by Resnick, Sowards, Gilbert, or Weisskopf would have done credit to the rocket, regardless of how they got on the ballot. (All four of these editors would almost certainly have been nominated anyway, even if there had been no slates).

((Some are saying that voting No Award over these editors was an insult to them. Maybe so, I can’t argue with that. But it should be added that there was a far far worse insult in putting them on the ballot with Vox Day, who was the fifth nominee in both categories. Even putting aside his bigotry and racism, Beale’s credential as an editor are laughable. Yet hundreds of Puppies chose to nominate him rather than, oh, Liz Gorinsky or Anne Lesley Groell or Beth Meacham (in Long Form) or Gardner Dozois or Ellen Datlow or John Joseph Adams (in Short Form). To pass over actual working editors of considerable accomplishment in order to nominate someone purely to ‘stick it to the SJWs’ strikes me as proof positive that the Rabid Puppies at least were more interested in saying ‘fuck you’ to fandom than in rewarding good work)).

It’s amusing how the SJWs in science fiction are claiming five awardless categories as a win while simultaneously trying to figure out how to prevent it from happening again next year. And, Martin demonstrates the truth of the observation SJWs Always Lie, as he tells a whopper about Toni Weisskopf when he claims she would “almost certainly have been nominated anyway, even if there had been no slates”.

The fact is Toni Weisskopf never even came CLOSE to being nominated prior to Sad Puppies 1. In 2012, she finished in 14th place. In 2011, 10th. In 2010, 11th. She wasn’t even trending in the right direction! Without the Puppies, she would never, ever, have received a nomination and the data shows that the 2015 Long Form nominees would have been virtually identical to the pre-Puppy years, including the aforementioned Liz Gorinsky, Beth Meacham, to say nothing of the Torlock who lobbied for the creation the award so he and his fellow Tor editors could finally win something, Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

And it’s fascinating to hear this particular fat old white man speaking about the “bigotry and racism” of this particular American Indian. A few of you will know why. In any event, my credentials as an editor – the correct word is plural, Georgie, perhaps someone can explain that to you – are observably better than Rape Rape’s editor, considering how fat with filler his recent novels have become.

But here is a free piece of editorial advice for you, Rape Rape. I know you like it an awful lot, but even so, I recommend you include a little less rape and deviant hate sex in your next book and a little more conventional human affection between men and women who actually love one another. The world you have created is not grim and realistic, it is a cartoonish and nihilistic nightmare. And worse, it’s gotten really boring.

Martin is also lying about there not being any anti-Puppy party. As Chaos Horizon has demonstrated, there were observably six different statistical factions voting in the 2015 awards.

Core Rabid Puppies: 550-525
Core Sad Puppies: 500-400
Sad Puppy leaning Neutrals: 800-400 (capable of voting a Puppy pick #1)
True Neutrals: 1000-600 (may have voted one or two Puppies; didn’t vote in all categories; No Awarded all picks, Puppy and Non-Alike)
Primarily No Awarders But Considered a Puppy Pick above No Award: 1000
Absolute No Awarders: 2500

2,500 Absolute No Awarders, up from 600 in 2013. They exist, Rape Rape. Unlike you, statistics don’t lie. We know who the SJWs are. The maximum number of principled “No Slate” voters was 285; that’s how many people voted No Award over Guardians of the Galaxy compared to the 2496 who voted No Award over Toni Weisskopf, the 2350 who voted No Award over Kirk Douponce, and the 2672 who suddenly decided that 38-time nominee and 5-time winner Mike Resnick was no longer worthy.

The post-awards spin that the 2,500 SJWs in science fiction voted No Award on the basis of unmerited nominees simply doesn’t hold up to either statistical analysis or a comparison with past Hugo winners.

What will Vox do?

The SJWs are worried:

“The real burning question is, ‘what will Vox Day attack next?’”
– Charles Stross

“What will happen in 2016. We both know the question is what will Vox Day
do? The Sad Puppy plans are secondary to what ever Vox Day does. I
assume he will try to run some kind of disruption campaign but what kind
we won’t know until next year.”
– Camestros Felapton

Of course, I am not at liberty to reveal the Rabid Puppy 2 strategy, in part because we are still in the first two stages of the OODA loop, observing and orienting. (Sorry, Tom, I couldn’t resist.) But in the interest of further demoralizing the already-retreating enemy, I’m not reluctant to reveal one of the new weapons in our arsenal.

That’s right. The Evil Legion of Evil is training a corps of Amphibious Assault Otters. Armed with acid-filled squirt guns and supported by a crack squad of Attack Manatees, they will emerge from the rivers and literally melt the faces of the SJWs attempting to burn bridges as they continue to retreat. Good day, sir! I said good day!

In other news, the International Lord of Hate has pronounced his verdict on the 2015 awards. He does not sound especially pleased with SF fandom. Consequences may never be the same.

Before Sad Puppies came along, Toni had never received a Hugo nomination. Zero. The above-mentioned Patrick Nielsen Hayden has 8 15. Toni’s problem was that she just didn’t care and she didn’t play the WorldCon politics. Her only concern was making the fans happy. She publishes any author who can do that, regardless of their politics. She’s always felt that the real awards were in the royalty checks. Watching her get ignored was one of the things that spurred me into starting Sad Puppies. If anybody deserved the Hugo, it was her.

This year Toni got a whopping 1,216 first place votes for Best Editor. That isn’t just a record. That is FOUR TIMES higher than the previous record. Shelia Gilbert came in next with an amazing 754. I believe that Toni is such a class act that beforehand she even said she thought Shelia Gilbert deserved to win. Fans love Toni.

Logically you would think that she would be award worthy, since the only Baen books to be nominated for a Hugo prior to Sad Puppies were edited by her (Bujold) and none of those were No Awarded. Last year she had the most first place votes, and came in second only after the weird Australian Rules voting kicked in (don’t worry everybody, they just voted to make the system even more complicated), so she was apparently award worthy last year.

Toni Weisskopf has been part of organized Fandom (capital F) since she was a little kid, so all that bloviating about how Fandom is precious, and sacred, and your special home since the ‘70s which you need to keep as a safe space free of barbarians, blah, blah, blah, yeah, that applies to Toni just as much as it does to you CHORFs.  You know how you guys paid back her lifetime of involvement in Fandom?

By giving 2,496 votes to No Award….

The real winner this year was Vox Day and the Rabid Puppies. Yep. You
CHORFing idiots don’t seem to realize that Brad, Sarah, and I were the
reasonable ones who spent most of the summer talking Vox out of having
his people No Award the whole thing to burn it down, but then you did it
for him. He got the best of both worlds. Oh, but now you’re going to
say that Three Body Problem won, and that’s a victory for diversity! You
poor deluded fools… That was Vox’s pick for best novel. That’s the one
most of the Rabid Puppies voted for too.

Here’s something for you crowing imbeciles to think through, the only
reason Vox didn’t have Three Body Problem on his nomination slate was
that he read it a month too late. If he’d read it sooner, it would have
been an RP nomination… AND THEN YOU WOULD HAVE NO AWARDED IT.

There is no question that the Rabid Puppies and I won this year. In addition to hand-picking Best Novel and burning five awards (we should have had seven, dammit), I received more votes for Best Editor than Patrick Nielsen Hayden ever has. Also, and perhaps more importantly, I’m not going to be fired for attacking a female Tor Books author in public at a professional venue.

Screaming about “blood libels” at a woman of Jewish descent, Patrick? Really?

Schengen is dead

Mass deportation or mass migration. Those are the two choices facing Europe. And only one of them will permit the avoidance of systemic violence. Americans would do well to understand what “free trade” and “open borders” looks like when labor has the mobility of capital.

The migration crisis that Europe has feared for so long has now materialised. At the weekend, the Italian navy picked up 3,000 people from ramshackle craft in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya. The Greeks are struggling to cope with the thousands arriving via Turkey. On the Macedonian border with Greece, riot police tried in vain to hold back hundreds of migrants making their way towards Germany and beyond. In the end, they relented and put many of them on chartered trains heading north.

What is to be done?

The problem for the EU is that the clamour from desperate people wanting to enter its gilded portals cannot be heeded without causing domestic political upheaval. It is all well and good refugee groups and other humanitarian grandstanders calling for the gates to be thrown open to all-comers; this will simply not be countenanced by Europe’s voters. In Berlin, where Angela Merkel held emergency talks with French president, François Hollande, the pressure is mounting on the government after it was confirmed that Germany expects 800,000 refugees this year, more than the entire EU received in 2014.

Unsurprisingly, the Germans are now complaining that they are being asked to take too many migrants, all of whom must have arrived through other countries. The demands for “burden sharing” are growing as the crisis deepens. But what exactly does this mean? Since there are no borders in Europe under the Schengen Treaty, a quota system – whereby, say, Finland takes 50,000, Ireland 30,000 and the UK 100,000 – is meaningless: once the migrants are in the EU, they can go where they want. Conditions could be attached to residency qualifications and working rights, but how would they be enforced? ID cards would have to be issued throughout the entire EU; all incomers would have to be fingerprinted and have their biometrics taken and stored; restrictions would need to be imposed on family reunion.

When the founding fathers of the old Common Market established free movement of people as a fundamental principle, they did not for a moment envisage a borderless entity of 26 continental countries (including four non-EU nations), not least because much of Europe at the time was under the heel of the Soviet Union. When the Schengen agreement was signed, in 1985, there were 10 member states – and only five wanted to take part. Britain and Ireland retain an opt-out to this day. In 1990, the formal abolition of frontiers and visa controls coincided with the collapse of communism and the first wave of immigration into western Europe began, principally from countries that have since joined the EU. This latest encroachment is far more problematic since there are, in theory, millions of people who would like to come to Europe.

Considering that refugee camps are already being attacked in Germany, Italy, and Sweden, and that Hungary and Serbia are building walls of the sort they never needed to erect during the Cold War, this is is not immigration, this is not migration, this is invasion. Europe has fought off invasion from the South before, and it will do it again. As the 700-year history of the Reconquista shows, there is no such thing as an irreversible trend.