The cowardice of Hollywood

This is how to how to make a corporation kneel, submit, and behave, everyone:

With theater chains defecting en masse, Sony Pictures Entertainment has pulled the planned Christmas Day release of “The Interview.” U.S. officials have reportedly linked a massive cyber attack against Sony to North Korea, which is at the center of the Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy.

“We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees, and the American public,” Sony said in a statement. “We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome.”

In announcing the decision to cancel the holiday debut, Sony also hit back at the hackers who threatened movie theaters and moviegoers and who have terrorized the studio and its employees for weeks.

“Those who attacked us stole our intellectual property, private emails and sensitive and proprietary material, and sought to destroy our spirit and our morale – all apparently to thwart the release of a movie they did not like,” the statement reads.

A few hours after making the announcent, a studio spokesman said that Sony had “no further plans” to release the comedy, either on VOD or DVD.

Christians aren’t comfortable killing people who insult their faith and their Lord and Savior. That’s one reason most anti-religionists are so much more inclined to attack Christians rather than Muslims. But no one was actually harmed in the cyber attack on Sony; all that happened was some information that the studio would rather have kept under wraps has been distributed to the public.

Perhaps entertainment corporations would be more inclined to show civility and respect to Christians again if some of us applied the lesson we’ve learned from the supposed North Korean example.

It is, of course, vastly amusing to see a Hollywood entity complaining about someone else seeking to destroy their spirit and morale. Isn’t that exactly what Hollywood has been relentlessly doing to Western civilization since the 1960s?

It’s not easy to make the North Koreans look good, but Sony somehow managed it. They’re typical SJWs, paper tigers, able only to apply the heat but never to bear it themselves. No wonder people in Hollywood are always giving each other “courage” awards and talking about how brave they are. They are cowards and they know it.

If Sony had any balls at all, if they were truly convinced of their own rectitude, they would have released the film even if every theatre in America refused to show it. And the fact that they backed down after several sets of information were released makes one wonder what it is they are still trying to hide. From now on, we know that North Korea has an effective veto over Sony, if not the rest of Hollywood.

What a pity they didn’t decide to target The Hobbit(ses) for the desecration and war crime that Peter Jackson let his wife commit on Tolkien’s text. As with the Star Wars prequels, I saw the first one, and as a result, will not watch the second two.

Filmmaker Judd Apatow called it a “sad day for creative expression” and said, “When we cave to threats, it trains people to threaten us.”

As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ll take Hollywood’s tears over the impact this will have on “creative expression” seriously on the day it releases a movie that sympathetically portrays Nazis rounding up Jews or presents a powerful emotional defense of KKK members defending their families and community from the depredations of black Americans. Until then, their tears are best seen as nothing more than a complaint that a new party has forcibly insisted on claiming the same sort of veto power that Hollywood’s other interest groups possess.

Of books and games

Ken Burnside of Ad Astra Games chimes in:

So, one of my other gigs – beyond making Cool Space Combat Games, is
being a science checker for SF writers for Baen.  I got asked by Vox Day
to write a science article for their new anthology series “Riding the
Red Horse” – which released yesterday. In its first day of
release, it’s done impressively – it’s climbing up the paid Kindle
listings and is a category leader in Military SF and SF in general.

Ken’s “The Hot Equations: Thermodynamics and Military Science Fiction” is a must-read for any science fiction author. And check this out… Ad Astra is about to come out with the Traveller version of Squadron Strike!

From the most recent review of RIDING THE RED HORSE: “I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of mil sci-fi short stories and essays on war. Each
story left me wanting more of the universe in which it takes place (my
favourite of the shorts was the last one: “Turncoat” by Steve Rzasa,),
and each essay made me marvel at the genius of the respective author. I
wouldn’t consider myself a military theory buff, but the essays in this
collections certainly awakened a hunger in me to find out more and
explore the world of war-gaming.”

Ocean-front diplomacy

Never let it be said that Obama doesn’t think ahead:

President Obama announced sweeping changes to U.S. policy with Cuba on Wednesday, moving to normalize relations with the island nation and tear down the last remaining pillar of the Cold War.

Under the new measures, the United States plans to reopen its embassy in Havana and significantly ease restrictions on travel and commerce within the next several weeks and months, Obama said. Speaking from the White House, he declared that a half-century of isolation of the Communist country “has not worked.”

“It’s time for a new approach,” he said.

The history-shaping overtures come after more than 18 months of secret negotiations with the Cuban government of President Raul Castro. The final touches appeared to be arrangements for a series of simultaneous prisoner releases.

It’s probably one of the smartest moves of his presidency, if not the smartest. Cubans don’t vote for Democrats anyhow, and no one gives a damn about them anymore since they’re massively outnumbered by Mexicans now. It’s all upside for Obama; no doubt there are plenty of big-money interests just slavering to snap up Cuban real estate.

I’d be astonished if he doesn’t come out of it with a sweet post-presidential villa.

Deutschland gegen Islam

The German and international media is going to have no more success disqualifying PEGIDA than the UK media has had in disqualifying UKIP or the French media has had in disqualifying National Front:

Its members have been dubbed the “pinstriped Nazis” and they refer to their demonstrations as “evening strolls” through German cities. But on Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people joined Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West, in a march through Dresden carrying banners bearing slogans such as “Zero tolerance towards criminal asylum seekers”, “Protect our homeland” and “Stop the Islamisation”.

Lutz Bachmann, the head of Pegida, a nascent anti-foreigner campaign group, led the crowds, either waving or draped in German flags, in barking chants of “Wir sind das Volk”, or “We are the people”, the slogan adopted by protesters in the historic “Monday demonstrations” against the East German government in the runup to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Associating themselves with the freedom demonstrations has given Pegida protests an air of moral respectability even though there are hundreds of rightwing extremists in their midst, as well as established groups of hooligans who are known to the police, according to Germany’s federal office for the protection of the constitution.

“The instigators are unmistakably rightwing extremists,” a federal spokesman said.

It was the ninth week in a row that Pegida had taken its protest on to the city’s streets in the eastern German state of Saxony.

Its first march, advertised on Facebook and other social media, attracted just 200 supporters. By last week the figure had risen to 10,000. By Monday night it had grown to an estimated 15,000.

Nine weeks to go from 200 to 15,000. At that rate, by the middle of next year they’ll be on the verge of throwing the traitoress Merkel out on her fat ass. Once the first anti-immigrant party takes power and people see how much better things are with the Third World flow going the proper way, the other electorates will rapidly follow suit.

That’s why you’ve got the English media freaking out about the rise of anti-immigrant parties in France, Germany and Sweden. Christendom will rise again. It’s absolutely ludicrous to ever count out a faith that began with just eleven frightened, cowardly men who abandoned their leader. Christianity doesn’t need numbers. It just needs the faith of a mustard seed.

Correia on guns, etc

An interview on guns in fiction:

Ryan: What are the common pitfalls in fiction where it’s clear that the author has never held or fired a modern firearm?

Larry: It isn’t just guns, but any topic where the
reader is an expert and the author is clueless. The problem is that when
you write something that the reader knows is terribly wrong, it kicks
them right out of the story and ruins the experience for them. Guns are
especially hard because they are super common in fiction, and there are
tons of readers who know about them.

Most of these really glaring errors can be taken care of with a
little bit of cursory research. Technical things can be taken care of by
a few minutes on the manufacturer’s webpage, which will keep your
characters from dramatically flipping off the safety on a gun that
doesn’t have one.

Beyond that, however, is the actual use of the gun. The character
using it should have a realistic amount of knowledge based on their
skill, knowledge, ability, and training. If you are gong to be writing
about a character who is a professional gunslinger, then you need to do
some research to make sure that person does what a professional
gunslinger would do.

And speaking of Larry Correia, Daniel somehow manages to abuse a writer at the Atlantic even more comprehensively than Larry’s customary prison-raping of various Guardian contributors in The Wrong Corpse and the Highbrow Coroner:

Noah Berlatsky at The Atlantic declares science fiction dead of terminal nostalgia:

    Poor George Orwell wants his panopticon back.

He also quotes an important fresh voice in science fiction that:

“we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”

Then he spends the rest of the article writing about Marvel comic books and their related movies.

The thesis, that science fiction has lost its way in a retrospective swamp of camp nostalgia for Star Wars, Star Trek and comic books is a bait-and-switch, however:

    Science fiction is everywhere in popular culture, and it seems like it’s managed to be everywhere in the present by largely jettisoning the future.

Berlatsky has switched terms on the reader. He isn’t talking about science fiction as a genre, he’s complaining about pop culture, as if that has anything to do with the core idea factory of science fiction, which, and always has been, books.

It does not.

If the reader needs any more confirmation, the critic’s only example of a “current” science fiction writer whose ideas run counter to the prison of pop culture is…Octavia Butler, a prog-writer who has been dead for nearly a decade, and whose most prominent work is more than thirty years past its publication date.

The ironic thing is that Berlatsky may well have a credible defense in resorting to the example chosen. The corpse of the late Octavia Butler, as it rots and feeds the worms, is arguably producing more interesting, less noxious output than are the Pink SF writers giving each other awards these days.

Dr. Pournelle health report

From Jerry’s blog:

    “Jerry had a small stroke. He is recovering well at a local hospital. Prognosis is good, though they’re running more tests and he’s expected to stay at least another day or two.

    “He felt well enough to call Mom [Mrs. Pournelle] from the hospital.

    “Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. More updates when we have them.”

They are permitting well-wishers to post comments, in case you would like to do so.

I can’t say I know Dr. Pournelle well, but after working with him over the last two weeks to get “His Truth Goes Marching On” and “Simulating the Art of War” into RIDING THE RED HORSE, I found myself marveling at how sharp he is despite being 81 years old. Of course, it probably helps when you’re starting with a mind that is around +4SD.

We did talk a little about the SFWA purge in passing; he was curious about my perspective on it. He was mildly appalled to hear what really happened, as you might expect, and thought the Board’s action was both ridiculous and short-sighted. But he also saw the humor in the incident, and laughed out loud when I explained the actual nature of the technical violation.

It’s such a pleasure to discover that a giant of one’s youth is also a genuinely good man. Here is to his speedy recovery.

Pity the poor troll

Poor Andrew Marston is sad that his trolling has rendered him unable to post things by people he likes, for fear that they’ll be treated the way he treats others.

I actually thought about linking to a video of Emma singing and playing
guitar. Don’t get me wrong, this has little to do with the elections, in
fact, I actually considered posting it the day after the election, but
then I found out Larry Correia and his poo-flingers are searching for
and conjecturing upon my posts elsewhere on the internet, and since
linking to a video of Emma by Emma could put us in a situation where
Correia or Vox could do a lot of damage, I am not linking to it.

Of course, there are a lot of things we could do. For one, we could let them know about how Andrew publicly bragged about posting pornography on the site of two underage girls:

If you had to confess to the most evil thing you have ever done, what would it be?

Yamamanama–I bet April Gaede knows the answer to that one… heh, heh… Oh yeah, Prussian Blue is on SomethingAwful. Lynx and Lamb’s diary was hacked or something, because it was overloaded with porn. Gay porn. Gay porn involving old people. Gay porn involving old white people. In response, April Gaede only allowed one character (!?) in the guestbook. In response to that, people made 42 posts with one character each.

Yamamanama–Child porn? Yeah, OK. I actually posted some examples of the stuff I spammed Micetrap Records with in that thread about Who Is White? 

He also goes by the name of yama the space fish. The guy is a certified nut case who posts porn all over the internet. I saw a few examples of his work on some WP sights before the mods had a chance to pull it off. He is one sick bastard. He posted a picture of children having sex on one sight,and another one of two elderly men having gay sex on another one. Then after they were removed he tried to say they were just pictures of a chineese girl in a bathing suit.

Andrew quite clearly doesn’t understand how “irritating people who can afford to pay for private detectives” works. Or that “annoying people with high-level connections at various Internet technology companies” is probably not a good idea. Or that all of that is completely irrelevant when he’s already posted so many names on his own site…. Andrew doesn’t really seem to understand how the Internet works. Now here is the punchline:

Andrew Marston aka Beardsley McTurbanhead
The fact that Blogspot turns a blind eye to your many harassment campaigns is sickening.

I’m sure it’s a coincidence that comments on Silence Without have all
disappeared now that Steve Sailer, Vox Day, and Andrew Bolt have linked
to it.

You’re projecting there, Andrew. I’m not harassing anyone. One single link to a blog site in the news that specifically mentions me by name doesn’t qualify as harassment or trolling in anyone’s book. You, on the other hand, were known for harassing many people for years before you ever discovered this blog. Now, perhaps you have forgotten, but I am literally publishing the book on 4GW,  and as you should have learned from the example of McRapey, I may be slow to start, but once I get rolling, I never, ever stop.

Burning question: Who’s going to have a lot of explaining to do after I get off the phone with the police department? Child porn is not a joke to them.

A partial list of names: Alauda*, Arachnothera, Beardsley McTurbanhead, Chokley Carmichael,
Clamps*, Comrade Questions, Daphis, Daphnis*, Freddy Foreshadowing,
Luscinia*, Luscinia Hafez, Starshine, Sunlight, Will Le Fey*, Yama*,
Yamamanama*, Yama the Space Fish.

Counterparty risk

Robert Prechter warned of this. It doesn’t matter if you traded right, if you can’t cash in your nominal winnings:

Dear Client,

Please be advised that that most Western Banks have stopped pricing USD/RUB. As such, FXCM can no longer offer this instrument to our clients and will begin closing any existing client trades in USD/RUB effective at Noon EST today, December 16th, 2014, 

So for those curious why there appears to be a collapse in Ruble volatility in the past few hours which in turn has sent both stocks and crude soaring, the answer is simple: nobody is trading it! 

And this is what happened following the post: as soon as all those
short the RUB (long USDRUB) realized they have to take profits, the USDRUB tumbled some 500 pips (!) in the process sending stocks surging.

We appear to have a full-blown financial war underway. I wonder how long it will take Putin to put the ruble on the gold standard. That’s always been his trump card; it eliminates Russia’s ability to play the money multiplication game, but in the end, will provide Russia with a sounder currency than the so-called currency of last resort.

The randomness of scientistry

Science is finally turning scientody on scientistry… and the results are not as self-flattering to professional science as most scientists expected.

The NIPS consistency experiment was an amazing, courageous move by the organizers this year to quantify the randomness in the review process. They split the program committee down the middle, effectively forming two independent program committees. Most submitted papers were assigned to a single side, but 10% of submissions (166) were reviewed by both halves of the committee. This let them observe how consistent the two committees were on which papers to accept.  (For fairness, they ultimately accepted any paper that was accepted by either committee.)

The results were revealed this week: of the 166 papers, the two committees disagreed on the fates of 25.3% of them: 42. But this “25%” number is misleading, and most people I’ve talked to have misunderstood it: it actually means that the two committees disagreed more than they agreed on which papers to accept. Let me explain.

The two committees were each tasked with a 22.5% acceptance rate. This would mean choosing about 37 of the 166 papers to accept. Since they disagreed on 42 papers total, this means each committee accepted 21 papers that the other committee rejected and vice versa, for 21 + 21 = 42 total papers with different outcomes. Since they each accepted 37 papers, this means they disagreed on 21/37 ≈ 56% of the list of accepted papers.

In particular, 56% of the papers accepted by the first committee were rejected by the second one and vice versa. In other words, most papers at NIPS would be rejected if one reran the conference review process (with a 95% confidence interval of 40-75%).

What rightly concerns the writer is the fact that a purely random process would have resulted in a 77.5 percent disagreement, which is closer to the 56 percent observed than the 30 percent expected. And, of course, the 0 percent that the science fetishists would have us believe is always the case.

This is a very important experiment, because it highlights the huge gap between science the process (scientody) and science the profession (scientistry). Some may roll their eyes at my insistence on using different words for the different aspects of science, but the observable fact, the scientodically informed fact, is that using the same word to refer to the two very differently reliable aspects of science is incredibly misleading.

Homeschool or Die: Pakistan

4GW prefers to aim at soft targets:

At least 126 people have been killed, more than 100 of them children, after Taliban gunmen stormed a military school in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar, in the worst ever militant attack to hit the troubled region.

It was reported that one suicide bomber blew himself up in a room containing 60 children and a teacher was set on fire in front of pupils, with the children forced to watch.

The attack started with the gunmen, disguised as security guards, entering the 500-pupil school – which has students aged 10 to 18 – in the early hours.

The jihadists shot their way into the building and went from classroom to classroom, shooting at random.

Army commandos quickly arrived at the scene and exchanged fire with the gunmen. Eye-witnesses described how students cowered under desks as dead bodies were strewn along corridors. News images of the aftermath of the attack showed boys in blood-soaked school uniforms with green blazers being carried from the scene.

Around 160 children, aged 13 and 14, are being held hostage, with four gunmen still inside.  A police inspector said they had trapped the terrorists in the principal’s office. Many of the soldiers involved in the rescue operation are trying to save their own children.

And the world looks on… and learns. The strutting, swaggering militarized police in America have already seen their own families targeted in Los Angeles and Colorado, but they haven’t taken the lesson to heart yet and dialed down their confrontational tactics. And yet, how quickly the agents of the state stop strutting and swaggering when they finally grasp that their families are easily reached even when they live behind barricades and their children go to special schools protected with security guards….

It’s a tragedy, to be sure, and in the West, the sort of easily avoidable tragedy that will nevertheless come to West in time, as we have already seen in New York, London, Madrid, and Sydney.

There is one answer, and only one answer. Mass repatriation. If it is not enacted, then America, and England, and Italy, and Sweden, and Germany, and every other country in the West will see its children subjected to the same jihadist violence. The East does not, and never has, practice the formal Western way of war. And they will prefer to target the soft targets, the women and the children who are incapable of fighting back. Note that this sort of soft-targeting is the very subject addressed by my story, “A Reliable Source”, in RIDING THE RED HORSE.

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,’ said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani. ‘We want them to feel the pain.'” 

Speaking of soft targets: “Over 1,000 schools have been destroyed by the Pakistan Taliban since 2010.“

The answer is not to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here. It is to send them back over there so we don’t have to fight them here.


UPDATE: Final count: “Nine Taliban terrorists attacked the Army
Public School in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar today,
slaughtering 132 children in the deadliest terrorist attack in the
nation’s history.”