Yemen falling to Shia

It looks like there is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia being fought in Yemen. And Iran’s proxies are winning.

The Iran-backed ethnic Houthis that captured and occupied Yemen’s capital city Sanaa last year are following up from Friday’s announce military mobilization have seized much of the city of Taiz and the surrounding province. They’ve taken control of the airport and security and intelligence buildings in Taiz, and have set up checkpoints in the area.

Yemen’s internationally recognized president Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi was forced last month to flee Sanaa, which is Yemen’s largest city and is in in the north of Yemen, to Aden, which is Yemen’s second largest city, and is a port city in the south of Yemen. Taiz is Yemen’s third largest city, and it’s located about halfway between Sanaa and Aden, so it’s a critical waypoint on the Houthis’ planned assault on Hadi’s forces in Aden.

The Houthis have been using Yemen’s air force for bombing strikes on Aden every day since Thursday. Now that the Houthis have control of Taiz airport, it’s expected that further air strikes will be launched from there.

It now seems unavoidable that within the next few days there will be a sectarian civil war between the Shia Houthis versus Hadi’s Sunni tribal militias. This will be further complicated by the presence in Yemen of two Sunni terrorist groups, the Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh) and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

The Houthis are now in control of the army and air force, and they’re backed by Iran which is suspected of shipping additional weapons to them. Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have expressed deep dismay at the Shia takeover of Yemen, but it remains to be seen whether they take any military action to counter it. If they do, then the result will be a sectarian proxy war in Yemen between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The National (UAE) and CNN and AFP and AP

Meanwhile, the US has been forced to retreat and evacuate Al Anad air base.

Another SFWA resignation

Holly Lisle resigns from Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America:

Ms. Kate Baker
Operations Manager
SFWA

Dear Ms. Baker,

I’m canceling my SFWA membership.

While it was encouraging to see SFWA edging toward acceptance of the indie publishing model, it’s too little and too late, and offset by an appalling reason behind the change of SFWAs incorporating state.

SFWA moved from Massachusetts to California for the purpose of allowing SFWA to claim tax dollars to offer grants. I’m aware that there were other—good—reasons for the organization’s move, but this particular poison pill in the changes made to SFWA requires me to walk away and never look back.

This is interesting, as her letter indicates how the SJWs in the SFWA intend to survive the opening up of the SF/F market and the inability of the publishing gatekeepers to protect their income: as government-funded parasites.

It helps make their continued move towards unpopular academic-style fiction somewhat more comprehensible, as you may recall Neal Stephenson’s explanation of the difference between popular fiction that is funded by fans and academic fiction that is funded by bureaucrats.

Ed Brayton wants to kill nationalists

Ed Brayton is one of those low midwits who stumbles through life thinking that he’s intelligent because he’s a little smarter than the average idiot. I’ve rubbed his nose in his own incompetence several times in the past; believe it or not, he’s actually dumber than PZ Myers. But he’s really outdone himself this time:

People often ask me how I manage to troll the right-wing fever swamps without becoming hopelessly misanthropic. Mostly I’m able to laugh rather than cry or explode in anger. But bullshit like this makes me want to climb a tower with a high-powered rifle and start picking people off.

When Andrew Zink passed the microphone over to his classmate and allowed her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic, he said, he knew most students wouldn’t support his decision.

As president of the student senate at Pine Bush High School in New York, Zink leads the pledge every morning. But on Wednesday, a teacher asked him if he would mind if a classmate did it instead. It was National Foreign Language Week, and the students were encouraged to learn about different cultures.

 “I wanted to say yes because I felt this is the right thing to do,” Zink, 18, said in an interview Thursday with the Los Angeles Times.

Outrage quickly flowed throughout the campus, about 75 miles north of New York City. The principal apologized to the school later that day, Zink said, for allowing the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in a different language.

  But the apology did little to quell student and parent anger.

 “The anti-Muslim sentiment started to build,” Zink said. “The poor girl who read it, she’s so sweet and when she finished reading it people called her a terrorist. They told her to go back to the Middle East. They mercilessly degraded her and I felt awful for her.”

 Zink didn’t get by unscathed either. He said he was threatened over Twitter and received death threats.

Of course he did. Because xenophobes are fucking idiots and I really don’t want to share this planet with them anymore.

I don’t wish to share the civilized West with fifth column-coddlers like Mr. Brayton myself. I suggest we send Mr. Brayton to live in the Dar al-Islam where he can discover what true xenophobia is, and why it exists in the first place. When the civil wars start across the West, don’t forget what side these treasonous idiots were on. And don’t offer them safe haven when they try to escape those whose invasion they supported either. When they cry and plead that they’ve seen the light, tell them “too late now.”

Speaking of Brayton’s reliable intellectual ineptitude, this is my favorite set of Braytonisms, from when he was running away from a proposed 2010 debate with Ellis Washington:

“As for your challenge to debate, I will consider it – if you can give a coherent answer to the following question”
– Ed Brayton, February 26, 2010

“Ellis Washington did not challenge me to a debate.”
– Ed Brayton, March 1, 2010

Don’t go out without carrying

And if you are confronted, don’t hesitate to use lethal force. Because the vibrants, particularly the younger ones, won’t hesitate to kill even when it’s absolutely unnecessary and they’ve already got what they demanded:

According to NBC Philadelphia, the three black teens were playing basketball when one of them got the bright idea to go rob someone at random. After seeing a different man out walking his dog and deciding not to rob him, they saw 51-year-old James Patrick Stuhlman.

Stuhlman apparently would usually walk with his 13-year-old daughter, but on the night of his murder he had told her to stay home because it was getting late, likely saving her life. As he walked down the dark street on March 12, the father and owner of a local landscaping company saw three teens approach him, and upon running into him they announced a robbery.

“At one point, he did plead for his life,” Captain James Clark said Thursday at a news conference, according to the New York Daily News. “He said, ‘Please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me,’ and they still shot him one more time.”

On Thursday, 15-year-old Brandon Smith and a 14-year-old whose name has been withheld were arrested by police and said they had decided to rob Stuhlman rather than the other man they saw because he looked more vulnerable.

At this point, every robbery by young Africans is sufficient reason to believe one’s life is in imminent danger and is sufficient justification for lethal self-defense. Of course, in the mainstream media’s version, the three murderers were merely “teens” and “high school freshmen”.

Civil disobedience

The Germans aren’t exactly known for it, but when they do it, they do it well:

“A few years ago the German Minister of Justice—kind of like the
Attorney General here in the United States—he was pushing very hard for
Germans to have biometric data on their national ID cards, and he wanted
all Germans to be fingerprinted. And the Germans pushed back,
particularly privacy advocates and those in the Chaos Computer Club.
And so what they did is when the German Minister of Justice was out at a
restaurant, they went ahead and after he left they got the glass that
he had left behind, and they were able to lift his fingerprint off of
the glass. They then took a photograph, brought it into Photoshop,
cleaned it up, and then were able to replicate it on 3D printers, in
latex. … [They] included it as a handout in their Chaos Computer Club
magazine that went out to 5,000 people, and they encouraged their
readers to leave the Justice Minister’s fingerprints at crime scenes all
over Germany, which they did.”

This points out the only way one can reasonably expect to gain any privacy, which is by flooding the system. It is a known fact that figuring out what information is valuable is much harder than obtaining raw data in the first place, so rather than futile attempts to lock things down, one’s focus should be in flooding the data collectors with vast quantities of meaningless information.

4GW coming to America

The USA is about to discover the distinct military disadvantages of permitting a massive Fifth Column of immigrants in its midst:

A division of ISIS published a ‘kill list’ containing the names, photos and addresses of 100 US military members online and called upon its ‘brothers residing in America’ to kill them. The list was posted online by the ‘Islamic State Hacking Division’. The group claimed it hacked several military servers, databases and emails to obtain the information.

The ISHD said it wants ‘lone wolf’ attackers to go after the military members and ‘kill them wherever you find them’.

The list did appear to match up with information which was available online, TheBlaze reported.

The posting read: ‘With the huge amount of data we have from various different servers and databases, we have decided to leak 100 addresses so that our brothers in America can deal with you. And now we have made it easy for you by giving you addresses, all you need to do is take the final step, so what are you waiting for? Kill them in their own lands, behead them in their own homes, stab them to death as they walk their streets thinking that they are safe.’

Notice how even ISIS recognizes that which neither the Democratic nor Republican parties are willing to admit. America is land that belongs to white Christian people of European descent, (only after being conquered and taken from my people, of course), it is not part of the Dar al-Islam, and it does not belong to the ISIS “brothers in America” who have invaded it or to the millions of other alien immigrants who presently reside in it. Not yet, anyhow. And perhaps not ever.

Perhaps after members of the US military begin dying in their own lands, Americans will begin to take the concept of defending their own lands, and their own people, seriously.

More Hugo predictions

One Aled Morgan responds to the Chaos Horizon Hugo predictions, which were as follows:

  1. Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
  2. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
  3. Monster Hunter Nemesis, Larry Correia
  4. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
  5. Skin Game, Jim Butcher  

First, the two I’d be astonished not to see on the ballot:

Lock In
Ancilliary Sword

Then very likely:

The Three Body Problem
Annihilation

Then at about the same level of probability fighting for the fifth slot:

Monster Hunter Nemesis
My Real Children
The Goblin Emperor
Symbiont

Possible but unlikely:

The Peripheral
The Darkling Sea

What you’re overlooking about Scalzi is that he has a massively popular blog, he has orders of magnitude more readers than the “Sad Puppies”, and while he never opersteps the line he encourages his fans to nominate him… and they do. The same goes for Grant, who has made the ballot so often already but doedn’t win — she has the same kind of nominating fans.

For the Hugos, what’s important is not wide readership but readership within Worldcon going fandom. Lots of the measures you’re assessing would be great if this were a wide-constituency vote, but it isn’t. It’ll be around two thousand people. SFWA’s even smaller, and everyone in SFWA knows each other. Butcher’s really really popular in the wider constituency, but his books don’t feel like the kind of thing people nominate for Hugos to the people who nominate, so I’d say it has zero chance except with Sad Puppies. And I expect a backlash against Sad Puppies this year.

I have to admit, The Three-Body Problem looks pretty good. I find the concept interesting, seeing as I used a variant of it to explain some of the problems with Keynesian economic theory in RGD. As a fan of Japanese literature both ancient and modern, I’m curious to see what Chinese SF is like. I tried Vandermeer’s Balzac’s War and ended up putting it down before long, but perhaps his Southern Reach Trilogy is better. In any event, Holmwood, who both reads the occasional Scalzi book and is a Sad Puppy supporter, offers a mild correction:

John Scalzi is a good author. I enjoyed both Old Man’s War and Agent to the Stars. His books are pushed heavily by his publisher (deservedly so) and Lock-In was a better work than Redshirts which won previously. That said, I believe his blog’s readership is a good deal smaller than (say) that of Vox Day, and certainly smaller than Day, Correia, Wright, Torgersen, Hoyt, etc combined.

Back to the general topic of Puppies, sad and otherwise.

I would be both surprised and disappointed if Puppies locked up overwhelmingly to vote a slate en masse without regard to quality. So far that’s not been the case, though I’m well aware there are those who’d love to poke a stick in the putative SF establishment fans’ collective eyes and do just that.

But this, while very well and good, VIOLATES THE NARRATIVE. Tudor leaps in to explain that Whatever is not merely big. It is ENORMOUS:

Scalzi’s blog is not big, is enormous. There are many good SF writers, but there are only a handful NY Times Bestsellers. Scalzi became one because of his blog. I only like some of his books but even I read his blog regularly. And if an author will write on his blog about her/his new book, than it’s certain that its sales will receive a great boost.

And so it fell to me to actually provide the relevant facts of the matter:

John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, is not reasonably described as “enormous” and his blog readership is considerably smaller than mine, let alone the combined readership of the various Sad and Rabid Puppy authors. The most traffic Mr. Scalzi ever had is just over 1 million Google pageviews per month back in May 2012. Since then, his blog traffic has declined to around 450,000 pageviews per month. By comparison, my blogs alone now enjoy traffic of 1.5 million pageviews per month, about three times that of Mr. Scalzi’s Whatever.

In 2014, Mr. Scalzi’s blog had 5.6 million annual pageviews whereas mine had 15.7 million. Where Mr. Scalzi is very popular, however, is on Twitter, where his 70k+ followers are more than all of the aforementioned authors combined. Whether Twitter followers or blog readerships are more predictive of Hugo success, I leave to Chaos Horizon to predict.

The reason many people have a false impression of Mr. Scalzi’s blog is that Mr. Scalzi has historically been prone to a considerable amount of exaggeration. For example, in an August 2010 interview with Lightspeed magazine, he claimed Whatever had 2 million monthly pageviews. The actual number of pageviews that month was 305 thousand, or about 15 percent of the amount claimed.

I do find it intriguing that more than a year after the greater part of Mr. Scalzi’s claimed blog traffic was exposed as nonexistent, there are still those pinkshirts who fail to recognize that the numbers in the science fiction market simply do not add up in the way they apparently believe they do. I wonder what would suffice to convince them otherwise?

As for Holmewood’s concern about quality, I would simply urge the prospective Worldcon voter to compare the Rabid Puppy slate to last year’s Hugo winners. I contend that the Rabid Puppies are, across the board, considerably superior in terms of both science fiction essence and and science fiction quality to the 2014 winners.

The danger of global warming

Dr. Patrick Moore explains why AGW/CC is not merely nonsense, but dangerous, anti-human nonsense:

I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that
it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof
of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the
science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict
the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the
doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric
carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to
unlivable temperatures.

In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years,
since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels.
Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings
colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than
today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels
revolutionized civilization. The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase
and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is
preposterous.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
announced for the umpteenth time we are doomed unless we reduce
carbon-dioxide emissions to zero. Effectively this means either reducing
the population to zero, or going back 10,000 years before humans began
clearing forests for agriculture. This proposed cure is far worse than
adapting to a warmer world, if it actually comes about.

No one who buys into the AGW/CC scam should be taken any more seriously than an economist who “invests” in a Ponzi scheme. AGW/CC is scientific fraud, it is historical ignorance, and it is political ideology. I’ve been saying this for years now, and every single piece of information that has come out since has strongly supported that contention.

#Comicgate

Dare we dream of a response to the SJWs in the comics world?

CB: And how will you react if and when they tell you some of your art is “problematic?”

EL: I don’t need to do a thing. I’m in charge here. Readers can buy what I’m selling or not. Ideally that’s what it should be. A candy bar company makes a candy bar and you can buy it or not. Those are your two choices. The internet assumes there are two other options: that candy bars can be pulled off the shelves and returned to their manufacturers unsold or that those buying candy bars can stipulate the ingredients. You want to make a different comic book? Make one of your own. You can buy the one I produce or you can not buy it, but you can’t dictate what goes on inside those pages. One guy makes that call.

CB: Lastly Erik, what do you think the long term effects will be if the comic industry continues to acquiesce to these sort of demands?

EL: The slippery slope is a return to the Comics Code. That, or some other kind of censoring body who knows better than the rest of us. Movies have gone in a direction where everything is pre-screened to an audience who weighs in on them and decides what’s good or bad and changes are made accordingly. The danger of taking cues from the audience is pablum like Star Wars Episode I where fans weighed in on what they wanted, George Lucas gave them what he thought they wanted and then they hated what he gave them. The audience is not wiser than the creative people. If they were better writers and artists than those in the field, they would be employed in the field. They’re mouthy amateurs and their suggestions should largely be treated like the witless ramblings of an insane person.

Years ago, Stan Lee instituted a new policy because of a number of letters from readers. Some vocal fans had complained that continued stories were problematic. Since distribution was spotty at best, many readers often missed chapters of continued stories and so they asked that Marvel stop producing continued stories. And so they did. The policy went into effect and a few months later all of their books were self-contained. And then another batch of mail came in complaining about the simple, dull one-part stories throughout the line. And so that policy was tossed out the window.

The danger is in thinking that the vocal few represent the entirety of your audience. They don’t. And so what we’re getting is situations like Jim Lee giving Wonder Woman pants in the Justice League because readers demanded it, then getting rid of them because other readers demanded it, all before the pants version saw print! These publishers are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to please everybody and not knowing who to listen to, and I can’t help but feel that a lot of the people yelling and screaming aren’t buying the comics, pants or no pants.

 #GamerGate has changed the rules. Blue SF is on the rise and the pinkshirts are reeling in dismay. All it takes is for one creator in an industry – just one – to stand up and say “I will create what I want to create” in order to inspire others to do the same.

The slaughter of the development houses

EA kills another legendary name in game development:

In an a move to consolidate its studios Electronic Arts has announced that it will be closing down Maxis. One of the sad truths of the video game industry is that game studios close down and disappear all the time. That being the case, there are still moments when you see certain names coupled with the words “shut down” and can’t help but feel a bit saddened.

Case in point, Electronic Arts has announced at GDC today that it will be closing down Maxis Emeryville in an effort to fold its staff and projects into other development houses under the Maxis brand. Recognizing that this consolidation will lead to many of the studio’s staffers losing their jobs, EA stated that former Emeryville employees “will be given opportunities to explore other positions within the Maxis studios and throughout EA.” The publisher also intends to work with employees leaving wholesale “to ensure the best possible transition with separation packages and career assistance.”

What is that now, six or seven classic development houses that have been devoured by the EA monster? I was seriously concerned when they acquired Origin, and downright bummed out when it became obvious that they were going to kill both the Ultima and Wing Commander franchises. Chris Roberts even worked out a deal to try to revive the latter a few years ago, but wasn’t able to find the funding, hence Star Citizen. One hopes that one day, he’ll be able to buy back the IP that EA is never going to utilize.

I have fond memories of Maxis. Roger, one of their tech support guys, was my initial contact there in my Transdimensional Evangelist days, and we used to go into the city from time to time when I was in town. We had some unforgettable evenings, most notably the time another Maxis employee who had a jeep with the license plate “JAHARMY”  was driving and took us to DV8.

Well, at least they’re keeping the brand name for now. I seriously wonder sometimes how EA even stays in business. They shut down a friend’s studio last year that was highly profitable, just because the overall revenue was under the level dictated by their new corporate policy. They didn’t sell it or anything, just shut it down and threw away literally millions of dollars in profit. So PopCap is next, after which it will presumably be Bioware’s turn.