#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
It’s official. I have seen EVERYTHING. A GAY JEWISH WEDDING WHERE THEY RODE IN ON A HORSE DRESSED AS A UNICORN
Or rather, proof of the lack thereof. But nevertheless, I think it’s an exaggeration to say that America has reached the depths of Roman depravity. Only when one of these drama queens is the elected President and the marriage-parody is consummated in public, on the horse, can we reasonably say it has reached that level.
It would be remarkable if the USA had a single political leader who cared as much about his nation and as little about his career as Greece’s newly ex-finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned after successfully leading Greece’s campaign to reject the Eurogroup’s ultimatum:
The referendum of 5th July will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage.
Like all struggles for democratic rights, so too this historic rejection of the Eurogroup’s 25th June ultimatum comes with a large price tag attached. It is, therefore, essential that the great capital bestowed upon our government by the splendid NO vote be invested immediately into a YES to a proper resolution – to an agreement that involves debt restructuring, less austerity, redistribution in favour of the needy, and real reforms.
Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants, and assorted ‘partners’, for my… ‘absence’ from its meetings; an idea that the Prime Minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today.
I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum.
And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride.
We of the Left know how to act collectively with no care for the privileges of office. I shall support fully Prime Minister Tsipras, the new Minister of Finance, and our government.
The superhuman effort to honour the brave people of Greece, and the famous OXI (NO) that they granted to democrats the world over, is just beginning.
I don’t agree with Mr. Varoufakis on much, but his defense of Greece’s national sovereignty in the face of tremendous pressure from the banks and the European political class was as magnificent as it was astonishing. I hope that he soon realizes that Greece no more needs the European Union or the Euro weighing it down than it needed to pay the odious debts demanded by the Eurogroup.
We are very pleased to announce that Mr. John C. Wright has published SOMEWHITHER, The Unwithering Realm, Book One, with Castalia House:
SOMEWHITHER is the first part of A TALE OF THE UNWITHERING REALM, a new science fantasy series from science fiction master John C. Wright. It is an adventure, it is a romance, and it is a coming of age story of a young man who is not a man, in a world that is only one among many. It is a tale of a greater and darker evil with longer reach than anything Man can imagine, of despair without bounds, of pain beyond measure, and of the faith required to surmount all three. It is a story of inexorable destiny written in the stars and the stubborn courage that is required to defy it.
Ilya Muromets is a big, ugly, motherless boy who does not look like anyone else in his Oregon town. His father is often absent on mysterious Church missionary work that involves silver bullets, sacred lances, and black helicopters. Ilya works as a janitor for Professor Achitophel Dreadful of the Cryptozoological Museum of Scientific Curiosities, and he has a hopeless crush on the Professor’s daughter, Penelope, who pays him little attention and appears to be under the impression that his name is Marmoset.
One night, when Professor Dreadful escapes from the asylum to which he has been temporarily committed, he sends a warning to Ilya that not only is his Many Worlds theory correct, but those many worlds are dominated by an unthinkably powerful enemy determined to destroy anyone who opens the Moebius Ring between the worlds. And, as it happens, prior to his involuntary absence, the Professor left his transdimensional equipment in the basement of the Museum plugged-in and running….
So it is that Ilya, as he has secretly dreamed, is called upon to save the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter. With his squirrel gun, his grandfather’s sword, and his father’s crucifix, Ilya races to save the girl, and, incidentally, the world.
590 pages. No DRM. Available at Amazon and Castalia House. From the reviews:
I will give the gentle reader fair warning. SOMEWHITHER is crazy. The reader who described it as a “Bronzepunk Bildungsroman” wasn’t kidding. It is massive and over the top in every single way. It defines “kitchen-sink book” and there is probably not another science fiction writer alive today who could reasonably attempt a book like this. You may love it. You may find it bewildering. You may wonder if Mr. Wright should join Professor Achitophel Dreadful as an involuntary guest at the asylum. But you will definitely marvel at it.
The only way I can describe it is to imagine that Dan Brown dropped acid and was pumped full of sodium pentathol and caffeine after reading about Our Lady of Fátima. And that doesn’t even do it justice. Mr. Wright provides his own description here.
So how would I classify SOMEWHITHER? Is is high fantasy, sword and sorcery, scientific fantasy, space opera, or elf opera, or what?
It might be called an urban fantasy, in that the the tale stars a modern American boy, indeed, a Boy Scout, son of a secret agent of the parallel-world traveling Knights Templar secretly working for the Pope, who pops through a rabbit hole or Moebius wormhole, and ends up in a parallel world ruled by the Tower of Babel. Except he is from Tillimook, Oregon, which is rural rather than urban.
It might be called sword and sorcery, on the grounds that he is armed with his grandfather’s katana, a prize brought back from Japan after World War Two, so there is a sword involved, and there is definitely enough sorcery to choke a horse.
It could be called high fantasy, if we meant it reads like something inspired by a muse who had ingested a hallucinogenic drug. It is high in that sense.
SOMEWHITHER is a Christian Rock Opera, like JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, but not so blasphemous, but just as stupid.
So think of SOMEWHITHER as more like GODSPELL, but if they decided to use ninjas and vampire-hunters to portray Our Lord and His apostles instead of clowns in makeup.
BREAKING: Greek interior ministry projection says ‘no’ camp will get more than 61 percent of vote.
17 25 31 40 50 percent reported, 61 percent NO, 39 percent YES. Now, the bankers will double-down, threaten, and promise economic apocalypse if they aren’t bailed-out. Or bailed-in. They always do. But the people are finally beginning to realize that the bankers are serving only themselves.
But how is that possible? After all, we were told that the Greeks are desperate to stay in the EU and in the Euro. June 28: In a poll conducted by Alco for the Greek newspaper ‘Proto Thema’, 57%
of the participants said they would vote yes in the upcoming referendum,
favoring a deal.
What an amazing 18-point turnaround in only one week! Or, you know, perhaps the media is not to be trusted.
UPDATE: Heh. Glenn Reynolds is the master of pith:
TIME.com @TIME
‘No’ campaign likely to win tight referendum vote in GreeceInstapundit.com @instapundit
Not that tight.
And let’s face it, Martin van Creveld is damn near the top of the list of thinking writers these days. I think I may have posted this link before, but since Instapundit has a decent discussion going in the comments, I thought I’d post Ann Sterzinger’s review of Martin van Creveld’s EQUALITY: THE IMPOSSIBLE QUEST again in case anyone happened to miss it the first time:
Equality: The Impossible Quest is—by the by—one of a spate of solid but genuinely daring recent releases from Castalia House, a small press led by Vox Day.
If you haven’t spent all your money on my publisher, Nine-Banded Books, do yourself a favor and give Castalia House a look.
Day is, at the moment, my favorite fantasy novelist, despite the gulf between his version of theology—from reading his blog he seems pretty sure that in this reality there’s a single, just God up there—and mine, if you can call mine such.
Or likely my enjoyment grows from that gulf. Yeah, I know, you’ve blocked everybody you disagree with from your Facebubble, and the wrong cat meme triggers your cis-clawed stress syndrome. You poor, chicken-shit things; in fearing you might become what you detest, have you forgotten what a pleasure it is to escape the cage of your own brainham once in a while? Stretch your legs, fella!
(Cough.) Anyhow, Day’s work, both on his own writing and in co-curating Castalia House, is a beacon in the dull word blizzard. (I’ve written about Riding the Red Horse, a unique collection of military essays and military science fiction that Day and Kratman put out in December, but I can’t keep up. They’re killin’ it.)
And van Creveld’s Equality is one of Castalia’s most absorbing releases, if you’re interested in history anyway—past history, not the historical destiny of your marching-drum ideology—the sort of history that’s not only full of holes where the victors and the monks wrote over chunks of the evidence, but the sort of history that, as far as we can tell, indeed has been repeating itself rather drearily.
As van Creveld says in his preface, the histories of our other two unattainable ideals, liberty and justice, have been written before—or, rather, attempted; there’s too much to read on all three of these subjects for one guy to do it at a go. But van Creveld does his best to describe all our tragic, failed attempts at equality.
Keeping in mind, of course, that Rao is not talking about literal sociopathy here, it’s merely the term he’s chosen for his Gervais Principle model. Here he provides a useful distinction between the two types of Sociopaths:
[E]ffective Sociopaths stick with steadfast discipline to the letter of
the law, internal and external, because the stupidest way to trip
yourself up is in the realm of rules where the Clueless and Losers get
to be judges and jury members. What they violate is its spirit, by
taking advantage of its ambiguities. Whether this makes them evil or
good depends on the situation. That’s a story for another day. Good
Sociopaths operate by what they personally choose as a higher
morality, in reaction to what they see as the dangers, insanities and
stupidities of mob morality. Evil Sociopaths are merely looking for a
quick, safe buck. Losers and the Clueless, of course, avoid individual moral decisions altogether.
This is why I find the Clueless of the SF world to be so mind-bogglingly stupid. While they correctly recognize me as a Sociopath who is dangerous to the system, they don’t understand that I am the proverbial Good Sociopath. And because they are so Clueless, they completely fail to recognize the Evil Sociopaths already well-ensconced within their midst.
I mean, how hard can it possibly be for anyone conversant with this model to identify a specific Evil Sociopath who has repeatedly taken advantage of ambiguities in the science fiction world’s rules in order to make a quick, safe buck? You’d think Rao was describing that individual.
The depths of dishonesty and economic depravity to which the EU and the IMF have been willing to descend are simply astonishing:
If you haven’t been following developments in the Greek-EU standoff, you’re really missing out. This might be the best story of the year. And what makes it so riveting, is that no one thought that little Greece could face off with the powerful leaders of the EU and make them blink. But that’s exactly what’s happened. On Monday, members of the Eurogroup met with Greece’s finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, to decide whether they would accept Greece’s terms for an extension of the current loan agreement. There were no real changes to the agreement. The only difference was semantics, that is, the loan would not be seen as a bailout but as “a transitional stage to a new contract for growth for Greece”. In other words, a bridge to a different program altogether.
In retrospect, Varoufakis’s strategy was pure genius, mainly because it knocked the EU finance ministers off balance and threw the process into turmoil. After all, how could they vote “thumbs down” on loan package that they had previously approved just because the language was slightly different? But if they voted “thumbs up”, then what?
Well, then they would be acknowledging (and, tacitly, approving) Greece’s determination to make the program less punitive in the future. That means they’d be paving the way for an end to austerity and a rethink on loan repayment. They’d also be conceding that Greece’s democratically-elected government had the right to alter the policies of the Eurogroup. How could they let that happen?
But, then again, how could they vote it down, after all, it was basically the same deal. As Varoufakis pointed out in a press conference on Monday:
“We agree to the terms of our loan agreements to all our creditors”. And we have “agreed to do nothing to derail the existing budget framework during the interim period.”
See? It’s the same deal. This is the conundrum the Eurogroup faced on Monday, but instead of dealing with it head-on, as you would expect any mature person to do, they punted. They put off the loan extension decision for another day and called it quits. Now maybe that was the smart thing to do, but the optics sure looked terrible. It looked like Varoufakis stared them down and sent them fleeing like scared schoolchildren.
Now, remember, Monday was the absolute, drop-dead deadline for deciding whether the Eurogroup would approve or reject the new terms for Greece’s loan extension. That means the Eurogroup’s task could not have been more straightforward. All they had to do was vote yes or no. That’s it.
Instead, they called ‘Time Out’ and kicked the can a little further down the road. It was not a particularly proud moment for the European Union. But what’s even worse, is the subterfuge that preceded the meetings; that’s what cast doubt on the character of the people running EU negotiations. Here’s the scoop: About 15 minutes before the confab began, Varoufakis was given a draft communique outlining the provisions of the proposed loan extension. He was pleasantly surprised to find that the document met all his requirements and, so, he was prepared to sign it. Unfortunately, the document was switched shortly before the negotiations began with one that backtracked on all the crucial points.
I’m not making this up. The freaking Eurogroup tried to pull the old switcheroo on Varoufakis to get him to sign something that was different than the original.
Once you know someone is dishonest, don’t work with them. You know, you absolutely know, that they will screw you over without hesitation every time they have both motive and opportunity.
Even if the Eurozone were a benefit to its members – and there is copious evidence, from Romania to Iceland, proving that it most definitely is not – the fact that the IMF-ECB-EU Commission triumvirate would try to play such a childishly stupid game with the fate of nations on the line should be sufficient to convince every citizen of every nation in Europe that both the EU and the Euro are disasters that cannot possibly function as advertised.
The thing is, a “YES” vote won’t save Greece, the Euro, or the European Union anyhow. It would be just one more futile kicking of an increasingly immobile can and extend the financial raping of the Greek people a little longer.
This is how I am voting in the Best Editor categories. Of course, I merely
offer this information regarding my individual ballot for no particular
reason at all, and the fact that I have done so should not be confused
in any way, shape, or form with a slate or a bloc vote, much less a
direct order by the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil to his
388 Vile Faceless Minions or anyone else.
Best Editor, Short Form
Best Editor, Long Form
Best Novel
Best Novella
Best Short Story
Best Fan Writer
Best Related Work
Meanwhile, we are informed that No Award is an act of kindness.
Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag on July 4, 2015 at 7:13 am said:
“No Award” is a kindness.
This is an important point.
While the Puppies have been pushing the narrative that “No Award” is unjust somehow, a betrayal of all that is Hugo, unwise and self-destructive, in reality it is a useful tool, a friendly warning to potential readers, and hopefully a wake-up call to unprepared authors.
“No Award” is an act of kindness to both readers and authors.
This is good to know. I am kind.
Or if you prefer, involuntary borrower-declared debt relief:
Greek banks are preparing contingency plans for a possible “bail-in” of depositors amid fears the country is heading for financial collapse, bankers and businesspeople with knowledge of the measures said on Friday. The plans, which call for a “haircut” of at least 30 per cent on deposits above €8,000, sketch out an increasingly likely scenario for at least one bank, the sources said.
Three things. First, as predicted, the bail-ins weren’t limited to Cyprus, and they won’t be limited to Greece. Second, notice that the amount of deposits immune to bail-ins has fallen from €100,000 to €8,000. Third, this is now entirely legal in most jurisdictions; banks around the world are preparing for just this scenario in your country, everywhere from Australia to the USA.
Remember, a deposit is just an unsecured loan to a bank. So, a bail-in is simply the bank unilaterally telling you that it is not going to pay back a percentage of the loan and will no longer be paying interest on the portion that it will not be paying back.
Why anyone would want to loan to such a borrower without collateral for the paltry amount of interest available, knowing that the borrower can decide at any time how much they want to pay you back (if they want to pay you back at all), is an interesting question to contemplate.
And they wonder why we so blithely ignore their idiotic, ideologically-driven opinions. An SJW “reviews” RIDING THE RED HORSE:
Disappointing and uneven collection
By Elisabeth Carey on June 12, 2015
Format: Kindle Edition
Theodore Beale (Vox Day) is nominated for Best Editor, Long Form, and also Best Editor, Short Form.This collection is included in the Hugo Voters packet in support of Theodore Beale’s nomination for Best Editor, Short Form.
Unfortunately, it’s a very uneven collection. It includes the very good The Hot Equations, by Ken Burnside, and the very disappointing Turncoat by Steve Rzasa. There is, early on, a casual endorsement of the probable “necessity” of genocide on the grounds that Those People aren’t smart enough to modify their behavior. A point Beale’s fans will have difficulty with is that such inflammatory language makes it less likely that readers will take in the point the author was attempting to make. A better editor would have caught it and told the author to dispense with pointless provocation and just make his point.
If this is the best evidence Beale has to offer, he has no place on the ballot.
I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced. Then again, if one takes the opinion of actual mil-SF fans and science fiction readers into account, there can be very little doubt that if the Hugo Award for Best Editor, Short Form, was actually based on editorial merit, I would not only have a place on the ballot, but win the award on the basis of RIDING THE RED HORSE.
Now, it is true, there are those who agreed with Elisabeth Carey and gave the anthology but a single star. Their opinions speak eloquently for themselves; these are the reviews in their entirety:
But what will be will be. It is of little import one way or the other. What is much more important is that Jerry Pournelle was sufficiently impressed with RIDING THE RED HORSE that he decided Castalia House was the right place to reprint and revive his excellent THERE WILL BE WAR anthology series. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the only award that matters and the only vote that counts.
I should mention that RIDING THE RED HORSE Vol. 2 is shaping up to be even more formidable than the original anthology. Many of the Vol. 1 contributors are back with a vengeance, and the new contributors include Martin van Creveld, Larry Correia, David Van Dyke, and Sarah Salviander.