Super Bowl XLIX

This would be the Super Bowl open post. I’m standing by my pre-playoff prediction of New England over Seattle.

UPDATE: 14-14 at half. New England should be winning this, but Carroll’s gutsy coaching is keeping Seattle in it. Great call with six seconds left; that’s plenty of time for a quick shot into the end zone, then kicking the field goal.

But Belichick are making Seattle pay for Lane’s injury. And Wright may be a great cover linebacker, but that’s not good enough to stay with Gronk. Bad matchups on both the Gronkowski and Mathews touchdowns.

UPDATE 2: Patriots 28, Seahawks 24. Crazy game, but fun. Seattle absolutely had it, but Pete Carroll had to get cute instead of simply doing the obvious and winning the game.

A SJW Hugo slate

JASON SANFORD IS CAMPAIGNING FOR HUGO AWARDS! I REPEAT: JASON SANFORD IS CAMPAIGNING FOR HUGO AWARDS! Call the Thought Police! Alert the Social Justice Media! Sound the Raciss Siren… oh, wait a minute… never mind, it’s all right, he’s got his SJW card.

Best Novels

  The Mirror Empire: Worldbreaker Saga 1 by Kameron Hurley. See my original review of the novel.
    
    The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. This is why we need translated fiction! This novel, which spans recent Chinese history as it revolves around a strange case of alien contact is one of the best hard science fiction novels I’ve read in years. Can’t wait to read the next book in the trilogy.
    
    Defenders by Will McIntosh. Just when I thought I’d read every type of alien invasion and military SF story out there, along comes Will McIntosh with something new.
    
    Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. Wow. That’s all I could say after reading this novel, which explores what happens when first contact happens in Lagos, Nigeria. I’ve always loved Nnedi Okorafor’s amazing ability to create true-life characters which both resonate with readers and stories and twist you into new directions — and Lagoon does this and far more in superb ways. Unfortunately, the novel is hard to find in the USA (I had to order a copy from the UK). The USA release is slated for later this year.
    
    Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. If I could, I’d nominate the entire Southern Reach series as one complete work. See my original review of the series.

He’s got a woman (check), a Chinese man (check), a white man (tsk tsk), a black woman with an African name (check, check, check), and another white man (seriously? Bad SJW!) Alas, poor McRapey. Too white, and for the first time in his life, too male.

But where are the Native Americans? Where are the Hispanics? Where is the transgendered handicapable lesbian Baha’ist from Papua New Guinea? Why does Jason Sanford hate Mexicans and Indians and Belgians?

Anyhow, I now look forward to seeing all the Hugo voters who pointed and shrieked at Larry Correia treat Jason Sanford in precisely the same manner. Don’t you? In the meantime, you can play SJW bingo! See if you can find all five!

  • “explores this topic in a unique and interesting manner.”  
  • “An all-too-rare fictional look…”
  • “a subgenre which until recently limited itself in unacceptable ways.”
  • “opens our eyes to new realms of possibility and imagination.”
  • “beginning an amazing journey as an author…”

My favorite part is the way Sanford uses the word “amazing” four times. But remember, he’s a PROFESSIONAL writer, people. Don’t try this at home.

    Unready for 4GW

    No one serious believed that Obama was even remotely capable of handling foreign policy, but most erroneously assumed that he was smart enough to hand off responsibility for it to foreign policy veterans. That has not turned out to be the case, as Jerry Pournelle notes Peggy Noonan’s recent column in the Wall Street Journal:

    No one thinks this administration is the A Team when it comes to foreign affairs, but this is unprecedented push-back from top military and intelligence players. They are fed up, they’re less afraid, they’re retired, and they’re speaking out. We are going to be seeing more of this kind of criticism, not less.

    On Thursday came the testimony of three former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger (1973-77), George Shultz (1982-89) and Madeleine Albrigh t (1997-2001). Senators asked them to think aloud about what America’s national-security strategy should be, what approaches are appropriate to the moment. It was good to hear serious, not-green, not-merely-political people give a sense of the big picture. Their comments formed a kind of bookend to the generals’ criticisms.

    They seemed to be in agreement on these points:

    • We are living through a moment of monumental world change.
    • Old orders are collapsing while any new stability has yet to emerge.
    • When you’re in uncharted waters your boat must be strong.
    • If America attempts to disengage from this dangerous world it will only make all the turmoil worse.

    Mr. Kissinger observed that in the Mideast, multiple upheavals are unfolding simultaneously—within states, between states, between ethnic and religious groups. Conflicts often merge and produce such a phenomenon as the Islamic State, which in the name of the caliphate is creating a power base to undo all existing patterns.

    Mr. Shultz said we are seeing an attack on the state system and the rise of a “different view of how the world should work.” What’s concerning is “the scope of it.”

    Correct diagnosis, wrong prescription. Observe that these foreign policy experts are more than a decade behind William Lind, who described these extra-state upheavals in both ON WAR and FOUR GENERATIONS OF MODERN WAR.

    And Lind is also correct to assert that America MUST disengage from “this dangerous world”, as the very danger is primarily the result of disastrous Anglo-American meddling in the Middle East. Islam is what it is, but it would not not be resurgent and aggressively expansionary if the British, followed by the Americans, had not made it possible through their insanely inept Middle East policies.

    The West needs to adopt a siege mentality, expel the non-Westerners, and let the fire burn itself out. Continued engagement only guarantees that it will be necessary to fight an indefinite number of fires within the West itself.

    The Divide-by-Zero Left

    John C. Wright observes how the other side has transformed over the course of his lifetime:

    Something rotten, very rotten has happened to the Left just in my lifetime. They used to be champions of free speech; and now they are its most vehement opponents.

    They use to be able to give some sort of argument or logical reason
    for their position, even if an incorrect argument; now they have no
    argument, none of them, aside from wild and insincere accusations
    delivered in a mechanical fashion without any hope of being believed,
    phony as a three-dollar bill.

    They used to be firmly on the side of the workingman; now they hate the workingman as a white racist oppressor.

    They used to be in favor of free love and the sexual liberation; now
    they object to rocket scientists wearing shirts with cartoon women
    printed on them, they object to science fiction magazines showing a
    scantily clad warrior princess slaying a monster, and they call all sex
    rape, and demand strict segregation of women and men. On the same day as
    these protests, they appear in front of the Pope, writhing on the
    ground naked with crosses and crucifixes inserted into their vaginas. So
    the Puritan rules apply arbitrarily, without sense or order, to anyone
    or no one.

    They used to be in favor of Blacks and other minorities; now their
    disgust for all the impoverished and dispossessed is plain to see. All
    they want is to keep the Blacks on the plantation, addicted to welfare,
    addicted to crack, their children aborted, their parents unwed.

    They used to be in favor of the Jews, and other minorities; now they
    kneel to Islamic Jihad at every opportunity, vowing that those who
    slander the prophet of Islam will no be in the future, and ergo the Left
    now curse the Jews, and pray daily for the destruction of Israel, and a
    new Holocaust in the warhead of a Muslim nuke.

    What? You say that his the not what the Left says? That they say they
    are creatures of purity, goodness, and sweetness, who live only to help
    others out of the depth of their hearts and the depth of your wallet?
    No, that was the old Left, back when the Left still had some scraps of
    sanity and intelligence.

    They serve Sauron and have forgotten their own names.

    They do not say what they are, because, if you listen to them, they
    say that words mean nothing, that truth is relative, that all
    civilizations are no better than savagery, that no religion is better
    than another, and that anything which is not illegal is allowed.  So of
    course they say they are perfect angels: because the word has no meaning
    to them, no words have meaning, and telling the truth is not correct.
    Only political correctness is correct.

    Now they have gone fullbore barking moonbat mouthfoaming evil.

    To summarize: the answer to the question “is the Left evil or stupid?” is “yes”. The truth is what we always expected: they never held the values they professed. They were charlatans; they never had any intention of fighting for free speech with which they disagreed, they never gave a damn about blacks, Jews, homosexuals, immigrants, or science.

    All those things were to them were tools. All those things were was a means of attacking that which they hate and want to destroy, Christian civilization in the West. They are literally nothing, they stand for nothing, they seek only to destroy and they have absolutely no more conception of what will come after the fall of Western civilization than Karl Marx did the Worker’s Paradise.

    It is not possible to compromise with them because there is no middle ground on which to meet them. It is like trying to divide by zero. It’s not merely undesirable, it can’t be done. Their principles and their objectives are a constantly moving target, always pushing the outer limits, stretching them out further.

    Reject them. Don’t seek their approval or try to reason with them or hope to win them over through dialectic and discourse. Their sickness is not of the mind, but of the soul.

    Greco-German chicken

    I have the impression that the Greeks are not bluffing here:

    As Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos politely puts it, “Developments since the Greek election on Sunday have moved very fast.” And indeed, so far the new Tsipras cabinet, and here we focus on the words and deeds of the new finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, has shown that the market’s greatest hope – that the status quo in Greece will continue – has been crushed into a pulp (and so have Greek stock and bond prices) especially following yesterday’s most recent comments by the finmin in which he said that Greece “does not want the $7 billion” from the Troika agreement and that it wants to “rethink the whole program”, culminating with an epic exchange with Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem in which Greece made it clear that the “constructive talks” are over.

    And suddenly the Eurozone is stunned, because what had until now been its greatest carrot when it comes to dealing with Greece, has become completely useless when the impoverished, insolvent nation itself says it no longer needs a bailout, seemingly blissfully unaware of the consequences.

    So earlier today the ECB’s Erikki Liikanen, tired of pleasantries and dealing with what to Europe is a completely incomprehensible and illogical stance, one which is essentially a massive defection by Greece in the European “prisoner’s dilemma”, and which while leading to a Greek financial collapse and Grexit – both prerequisites to a subsequent Greek economic recovery unburdened by the shackles of the Euro – would also unleash a European depression, came out and directly threatened Greece that it now has 1 month until the end of February to reach a deal with the Troika, or else the ECB would cut off lending to Greek banks, in the process destroying the otherwise insolvent Greek banking sector.

    And since only the ECB backstop has prevented a banking sector panic, the ECB is essentially betting the house, and the sanctity of the Eurozone (because after a Grexit all bets are off which peripheral leaves next) that the threat, and soon reality, of a bank run (at last check Greece had about €145 billion in deposits still left in its bank after JPM’s latest estimate of €15 billion in outflows in January) will finally force Varoufakis and Tsipras to sit at the negotiating table with the understanding that not they but the Troika has all the leverage.

     Meanwhile, Germany has already ruled out any debt cancellation: “German Chancellor Angela Merkel ruled out any cancellation of Greece’s debt and said the country has already received substantial cuts from banks and creditors.”

    The challenge that the EU faces is that they have nothing. Their only argument is that of a coven of vampires arguing with their victim: “you need to keep letting us bleed you, because if we die, you die.” But that argument means nothing to a dying man.


    Once it’s clear that they can’t get any more out of the EU, it costs Greece nothing to allow the entire Euro edifice to collapse. They are already bankrupt, and it is no longer in their interest to permit the EU to continue concealing that simple fact.

    RIP Colleen McCullough

    Razib Khan mentioned her death at Unz:

    I was aware that Colleen McCullough was ill, so sadly it is no surprise that she has died. To many McCullough is known for her Masters of Rome series. I particularly think that the first two books in the series, The First Man in Rome and Grass Crown were exceptional. The later novels cover the career of Julius Caesar and his heirs (both Augustus and Antony), which are rather well known to us. In contrast the life and times of Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla are not familiar to many modern people. In fact it is likely that their names would not ring a bell with the vast majority of people due to the decline of the classical education (which was the province of a narrow elite in any case when it was in vogue). But these were significant figures in their time whose influence echoes down the generations.

    I never read The Thorne Birds, but I did enjoy the first three Rome novels. The Masters of Rome series inexplicably fell off a cliff with the fourth novel, Caesar’s Women, but the first three were both entertaining and educational. I even suspect, to a small extent, they may have had some influence on my choice of Rome’s Social War as a conceptual start to Arts of Dark and Light.

    Sad Puppies, working as designed

    This criticism of award-eligibility posts by what appears to be a garden variety pinkshirt proves that the International Lord of Hate effectively made his point last year with Sad Puppies 2, and also underlines the importance of The Ensaddening:

    It’s that time of year again when the blogosphere is suddenly full of awards eligibility posts. Some people consider them useful and some people think they’re a bad thing. I used to believe there was something a little bit off about them, and I put that down to being, well, British. Blowing your own trumpet and all that. Bad form, you know. But my opinion on them has hardened of late. Having seen what a mockery the Hugo Awards were last year – which is not to say they haven’t been for many, many years – but in 2014 I was more than just an observer on the sidelines…

    In 2014, I joined the Worldcon, which allowed me nominate works for the award. I took my vote seriously. I read novels I believed might be award-worthy, so I could put together a reasonably well-informed ballot. But the way everything worked out only brought home to me quite how corrupt is the culture surrounding the Hugos. And part of that culture is the awards eligibility post.

    So why are they bad?

    For one thing, awards are not about authors – they’re about what readers think of individual works. When an author enters a conversation about their book, they skew the conversation. We’ve all seen it happen. It usually result in authors bullying fans. When an author does the same with awards, they skew the awards.

    It’s not a level playing-field. If Author A lists the eligible works they had published in 2014 and a couple of thousand people see that list, and Author B does the same but hundreds of thousands of people see their list… and if 0.01% of those people then nominate a work, guess who’s more likely to appear on the shortlist? Popular vote awards are by definition a popularity contest, so to make it acceptable for those with the loudest voices to shout across the room just makes a mockery of the whole thing.

    Awards are fan spaces. Authors should not invade fan spaces. This is not to say that authors are not fans themselves. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t behave as fans in fan spaces. But an awards eligibility post is an author-thing not a fan-thing. (This leaves posts where authors recommend others’ works in something of a grey area. Big Name Authors have Big Loud Voices, and their endorsement can still skew an award.)

    The amusing thing is that most of these would-be critics of Larry Correia know perfectly well who is the individual most to blame for the current state of the Hugo Awards, but they are hesitant to point fingers and call him out for the fraud that he is. And that individual is none other than our old friend McRapey, who was the first to breach the dividing line between author and fan when he openly campaigned for the Best Fan Writer award, and managed to get himself nominated for it in 2007 before winning it in 2008. He justified his actions at the time by claiming that “authors are fans too”. I’ve repeatedly shown that McRapey is a charlatan and a liar, but he does have a gift for ruthless self-marketing; his SFWA presidency was part and parcel of the same self-inflating campaign.

    Since then, other authors have attempted to follow Scalzi’s path to status among the publishing gatekeepers, including Jim C. Hines, the 2012 winner, and Kameron Hurley, the 2014 winner. Hurley even puts a price tag on her Fan Writer Hugo.

    If you want to know what magical thing happened between MIRROR EMPIRE and THE STARS ARE LEGION to finally get me to what most folks in the industry used to consider a solid mid-lister advance, it’s one word:

     Hugos

    So when people tell me that Hugos don’t matter, awards don’t matter, and promotion don’t matter, you can imagine the $13,000 face I make.

    (That’s the point that Brad Torgersen missed in his calculations of Hugo value. They are worthless for selling books to readers, but they are very helpful for getting advances from status-seeking pinkshirt publishers.) But there is more than that. As Kaedrin points out, even if we ignore Scalzi’s two Dadaesque nominations for Redshirts and “Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue”, it appears that his 2006 nomination for Old Man’s War may be sketchy. Unless the rules have changed, how can anyone argue that The Martian is not eligible given that Old Man’s War was also self-published more than a year prior to its 2006 nomination?

    The Martian suffers from eligibility issues – it was self published in 2012, then snapped up by a publisher and put into fancy editions and audio books in 2014 (where it has sold extremely well). General consensus seems to be that it will not be eligible, but I think there are a few things going for it. One is that self-published works that get bought up by a real publisher and come out a year or two later have made it onto the ballot before (an example that comes to mind is Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which was self-published in 2003 or 2004, after which it was promptly bought up by Tor and republished in 2005, garnering a Hugo nomination in 2006).

    The Hugo Awards are corrupt. But Sad Puppies isn’t what corrupted them. Quite to the contrary, Sad Puppies is a necessary part of the process of cleaning them up and restoring them to something that actually recognizes excellence in genuine science fiction and fantasy. 

    The left-wing rot runs considerably deeper than most realize; consider this letter from John Norman to Locus, written concerning a WorldCon more than a decade ago:

    For those in the science-fiction community who are interested in freedom of speech, a free and open marketplace of ideas, in debate, dialogue, reason, and such, the recent convention is a considerable embarrassment. It seems a shame that the Millennium World Science Fiction Convention will be remembered for its suppression of dissent, an absence of authentic dialogue, its exclusionistic criteria for participation, and its parochial PC mentality. The past cannot be undone, though, I suppose, it is easy enough to lie about it.

    I received a note, dated June 21, 2001, in response to a letter of inquiry, dated June 7, 2001, my letter pertaining to the possible refusal of certain members of the programming committee to countenance an intellectually open convention. My first letter was dated April 7, 2001, and the program-participant list was several times added to, and updated, after that time. The following is my response to the note.

    Thank you for your note of June 21, 2001. Your note reads, in part, as follows: Thank you for your interest in being a Program participant at the Millennium Philcon. However, we are unable to accept your offer for this Worldcon. However, we expect to be able to have a mass autographing session at the Worldcon. Any writer in attendance will be welcome to come in and sign.

    It will be noted, in connection with the first paragraph above, that it was not made clear why the “acceptors and rejecters” were “unable” to accept my offer of participation. I thought they were in charge of programming. Without being sanguine to edit another’s discourse, I think, perhaps, they might have said something like “we refuse to let you participate” or, perhaps, “because of political pressures, from certain authors and/or fans, we feel it might our jeopardize our position in a personality network, to have an open convention.”

    I was sorry to be unpleasant, but how else could one possibly have construed such a lame and implausible remark.

    With respect to the second paragraph, their offer was empty, and insulting. For example, as my name did not appear on the list of program participants none of my fans would know that I would be there, and, accordingly, would not bring any books to sign. It is hard for me to suppose that this detail escaped the notice of the “acceptors and rejecters.”

    The grounds for my exclusion were clearly not logistic or professional. For example, I wrote to the committee months before the convention, arid their membership list had been updated, with new additions, several times since that time. That rules out the rationalization of not enough chairs in the hotel, or such.

    Similarly, the grounds for my exclusion could not plausibly be professional. Had I not sold enough millions of books? For example, I have had several million books published in the genre of science fiction, have a worldwide fandom, am available in several languages, and have had two movies made which were putatively based on my work. I think there are very few, if any, authors, much as we love them all, who had objectively made more of a contribution to the genre in the past fifty years.

    We have a long way to go. But we have stronger spirits, longer legs, and bigger guns. And, more importantly, unlike our predecessors, we see the enemy for exactly what they are. John Norman was right. “Science fiction’s future deserves more than to be a literary backwater despised by serious critics, and held in contempt by the average intellectual; it deserves more than to be a vehicle for an endless potlatch of prizes.”

    Republicans have clever new plan for failure

    The establishment’s “electable” candidate in 2016 will not be Mitt Romney:

    In a talk with his eldest son, Tagg, between runs down the mountain on Monday, Mr. Romney, 67, said he had all but decided against a third bid for the White House. The conversation, according to a person familiar with it, came after days of increasingly gloomy news reached the Romney family.

    Donors who supported him last time refused to commit to his campaign. Key operatives were signing up with former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. The Republican establishment that lifted Mr. Romney to the nomination in 2012 in the face of scrappy opposition had moved on.

    The news on Friday that Mr. Romney would opt out of the race revealed as much about the party in 2015 as it did about the former Massachusetts governor’s weaknesses as a candidate. Republican leaders, especially the party’s wealthiest donors, are in an impatient and determined mood. They are eager to turn to a new face they believe can defeat what they anticipate will be a strong, well-funded Democratic opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton….

    The
    campaign to deny Mr. Romney another chance began almost immediately
    after he mused to donors at a Friday get-together in New York City on
    Jan. 9 that he was open to the possibility of another run. By that
    Sunday afternoon, William Oberndorf, a prominent California investor who
    supported Mr. Romney in both of his previous presidential campaigns,
    had emailed a group of 52 powerful Republicans, including former
    Secretary of State George Shultz, the investor Charles Schwab, Gov.
    Bruce Rauner of Illinois and the Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos with a
    blunt message: we need to support someone else.
    Mr.
    Oberndorf wrote: “We are fortunate in Jeb Bush to have an extremely
    talented and able candidate who, I believe, has a far better prospect of
    winning a general election than Mitt. Moreover, Mitt has now run twice
    and has had his chance to be president. It is now time to cede the field
    to others.”

    Mr.
    Oberndorf requested that those on the email contact Mr. Romney’s
    longtime finance chief, Spencer Zwick, to make it clear that they did
    not want Mr. Romney to run again. And many of them did, Mr. Oberndorf
    said in an interview on Friday. “Of
    everybody I contacted, I only heard from one person who thought Mitt
    should give it another shot,” said Mr. Oberndorf. In the weeks after he
    expressed renewed interest in running, Mr. Romney contacted some of his
    most loyal supporters. But often, he found Mr. Bush had gotten there
    already.

    It’s amazing, though not entirely surprising, that the bi-factional ruling party wants to set up another choice between Bush and Clinton. It’s as if they can’t even bother pretending that Americans live in a democracy anymore, never mind a republic. It increasingly reminds me of the arrogance of the EU establishment, which is now openly anti-democratic.

    Cicero was right. It’s not dictatorship that follows democracy, but aristocracy.

    And the cluelessness of the arrogance is downright amusing. On what planet did Romney think anyone actually wanted him to be president? Then again, on what planet does anyone outside the Republican establishment want another Bush, much less one who is an anti-American open borders lunatic.

    Does this actually count as news?

    George R.R. Martin will not deliver in 2015:

    George R.R. Martin’s “The Winds Of Winter”, the fifth book of his bestselling fantasy saga “A Song Of Ice And Fire” (known to television fans as “Game Of Thrones”) will not be published in 2015. Jane Johnson at HarperCollins has confirmed that it is not in this year’s schedule. “I have no information on likely delivery,” she said. “These are increasingly complex books and require immense amounts of concentration to write. Fans really ought to appreciate that the length of these monsters is equivalent to two or three novels by other writers.”

    Instead, readers will have to comfort themselves with a collection, illustrated by Gary Gianni, of three previously anthologised novellas set in the world of Westeros. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” takes place nearly a century before the bloody events of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Out in October, it is a compilation of the first three official prequel novellas to the series, The Hedge Knight, The Sworn Sword and The Mystery Knight, never before collected.

    I know, I know… but my monster book, the second novel in Arts of Dark and Light WILL be out in 2015. Most likely late 2015, but 2015 all the same. As for The Winds of Winter, he’s going to have to step up his game considerably from A Dance with Dragons, because frankly, that was pretty bad. I’m not entirely sure he’s going to be able to come back from it.

    Mailvox: thought of the day

    A Nameless Reader has an observation:

    Random thought: The fact that people who are skeptical of one “consensus” tend to be skeptical of other consensuses suggests there’s a correlation in mental capacity – since one has to have a very high level of intellectual self-confidence and an ability to do independent research and thinking in order to sustain an argument against, e.g., evolution, global warming, Austrian investing, or vaccination, when there is enormous “consensus” pressure to adopt the other opinion, it would make sense that such iconoclastic beliefs would bundle.

    I don’t think there is any question about this. I have zero regard for consensus on the grounds of MPAI. In fact, if someone who I otherwise consider to be intelligent falls for an observably incorrect consensus position, I tend to keep a skeptical eye on his future assertions and conclusions.

    Everyone makes mistakes, but falling for the appeal to authority, or worse, the appeal to popularity, simply is not indicative of an functioning and intelligent mind. Consensus is another word for “lowest common denominator”.

    But keep in mind I’m not talking about skepticism and iconoclasm for their own sake, I’m talking about maintaining an open mind when there are obvious holes, if not outright flaws, in the consensus position.