Fisking George Will

In case you haven’t noticed, Vladimir Putin is the new Hitler. Because fascist. And threat-crisis. Also, Hitlerian:

Vladimir Putin’s Hitlerian Mind. The Russian president’s fascist revival in Eastern Europe poses a unique threat to the West. Vladimir Putin’s fascist revival is a crisis that tests the West’s capacity to decide. 

When Will speaks of ‘fascism’, he means it in the mythological sense of the word, not the historic. You know; big bad Hitler plotting to conquer Planet Earth and exterminate or enslave all non-Aryans blah….blah…blah.  Notice how Will cleverly embeds the allegations of a “fascist revival” and a “crisis” as a given, and then quickly redirects the subject to how the West should handle it.

Salesmen refer to this cunning rhetorical tactic as ‘assumptive selling’. Sorry George. We will not allow you get away with slipping such poisonous assumptive ‘mickeys’ into our journalistic drinks. Either prove your underlying premise of a “facist revival’ (in the sense you mean it), or cut the crap about some dangerous “crisis” caused by Putin.

At a certain point, one loses one’s innocence about the strangely repetitive coincidences concerning which first Britain, and then the USA, continually find themselves engaged in fighting wars on other people’s territory for reasons that are never, ever their fault.

I thought it was interesting that there was barely even a handwave in the less-than-halfhearted attempt to declare Assad the new Hitler.

Johnny’s teacher can’t read either

The fruits of the ongoing demolition of public education are being harvested around the world:

As a teacher with six years’ experience, you might imagine that I would have been in my element as I chatted about the eight-year-olds in my charge and offered their parents encouragement and advice. Instead I was consumed with embarrassment. And no wonder. The father opposite me — a lawyer — was looking at me as if I was dirt under his shoe.I had been telling him about the new drive to improve literacy standards in our school when he had interrupted me.

‘Can you repeat what you just said?’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I could possibly have heard you correctly.’

I had no idea why he was getting so agitated. To humour him, I repeated slowly: ‘I said that me and the headmistress are doing all we can to improve standards.’

I might as well have told him that we were planning to bring back the birch. Throwing his hands up in the air, he launched into a tirade that left me red hot with shame.

‘Me and the headmistress?’ he ranted. ‘Don’t you know it should be: “The headmistress and I”? How can you call yourself a teacher when your grammar is so poor?’

I wanted the ground to swallow me up. Many years later, I still feel there was no excuse for his rudeness, but I can understand why he was so angry. I’d feel the same if a child of mine was being taught by a teacher like me.

And the shocking truth is that there are thousands of teachers in schools the length and breadth of the country who are just like me. We have degrees in English from respectable universities, yet wouldn’t know a subjective pronoun from an objective one if it hit us in the face.

Public school is dead, it merely hasn’t stopped moving yet. It is an archaic artifact of 18th century industrialization that is technologically outmoded, societally destructive, and observably dysfunctional.

The one-punch standard

The football world has been striking poses left, right, and center, pretending that Ray Rice is the Second Coming of OJ Simpson. The Ravens released him and are giving out free jerseys in exchange for his old ones, the ever-sanctimonious Roger Goodell added an indefinite suspension on top of the previous two-game suspension, and various players and commentators are ritually denouncing him.

And for what? A single punch.

This is absolutely and utterly absurd. There are punches thrown in NFL games and practices every single week. If the NFL were to apply the one-punch standard consistently, half the African players would be out of the league by the end of the season.

This is not to say that Ray Rice is a good guy. If you watch the video closely, it looks like he does something to provoke her in some way at the elevator buttons. It almost looks as if he spits at her, she shoves him, he shoves back, and then she charges him and gets KO’d. We’re clearly not dealing with a pair of innocent angels here.

But here is the salient point. He’s not “beating her up”. He’s not abusing her. He’s not attacking her. In fact, the reason she got knocked out isn’t because he’s a big strong man, but because she was rushing at him. What he threw was clearly a defensive punch, and quite likely an instinctive one. I’ve been knocked out in much the same way while sparring, by walking directly into the sort of jab that one normally wouldn’t even feel. Remember, F=MA, so while Rice has a fair amount of Mass, a significant part of the Acceleration that provided the knockout force came from her rushing towards him.

There is a reason the prosecutor saw fit to allow Rice to avoid trial, most likely because there is considerably more than a reasonable doubt involved. One never knows with the inaptly named U.S. “justice” system, but it is highly unlikely that Rice would have been convicted of the one count of third-degree aggravated assault with which he was charged. To call his one-punch KO an assault, or even abuse, is to insult the men and women who are genuinely assaulted and abused. While ignorant people only look at the effect of Mrs. Rice crumpling to the ground, anyone with fighting experience is looking at how she rushed at him, how he retreated to the side of the elevator, and how he didn’t step into the punch or snap his hips. The police appear to have taken notice of these things as well.

“After reviewing surveillance footage it appeared both parties were
involved in a physical altercation,” read the Atlantic City Police
report.”

Lest you forget, intent matters greatly with regards to the law, and there is absolutely no indication that Ray Rice entered that elevator with any intent to harm his fiance or that he had any intent to do more than keep her off him when she rushed him. In fact, the only party that is seriously harming his fiance, now his wife, is the NFL, as Roger Goodell is depriving her husband of his ability to support her. That will certainly have more long-term negative effects on her than thirty seconds of unconsciousness did.

I see this as nothing more than pink shoes in October. It’s just another aspect of Commissioner Goodell’s clumsy and misguided attempt to market the league to women. Ask yourself this: how many of you, male or female, would still have your job if you were held to the one-punch standard being applied to Ray Rice?

Tres libros en español

Thanks to our extremely prolific Spanish translator, Emilio, the first two QUANTUM MORTIS books are now available in Spanish. There is QUANTUM MORTIS Un Hombre Disperso:

Además de un aerovar blindado armado con misiles, su confiable Esfinge CPB-18, y las políticas muy liberales de la DMIC cuando se trata de daño colateral y accidentes civiles, el Jefe Tower también está equipado con su xenofobia extrema y una inteligencia computarizada aumentada de nivel militar que cree haber encontrado a Dios. Así que cuando los restos desintegrados del heredero a la corona de una familia real alienígena son descubiertos en las calles de Trans Paradis, la pregunta no es si podrán encontrar a los asesinos en algún momento, sino quien, de entre los criminales y los investigadores contribuirá más al número total de muertes.

And if you’re interested in improving your Spanish, you may wish to note that there will be a free giveaway of QUANTUM MORTIS La Gravedad Mata later this week.

Cuando un embajador alienígena es encontrado muerto en órbita mientras
intentaba regresar a su planeta de origen, estando acompañado por la
renombrada empresa de mercenarios “Perros de Guerra Incorporados”, las
sospechas surgen de forma natural. Sin embargo, descubrir la verdad
sobre lo ocurrido no es lo más relevante para la administración
planetaria, al menos tratándose de sus intereses, y de hecho no les
molestaría en lo más mínimo limitarse a suponer que la muerte del
embajador fue un accidente. Por si fuera poco, cuando el Jefe de
Suboficiales Graven Tower llega a la escena del crimen, surge otra
pregunta: ¿En verdad son compatibles los métodos dinámicos de
investigación de la DMIC con el casco ligeramente blindado de una nave
espacial?

And last, but most certainly not least, there is John Wright’s beautiful fantasy tale, Una Estrella Brillante para Guiarlos.

Esta novela corta es brillante y agridulce, nos remonta a los más
grandes y amados clásicos de la fantasía infantil. Este hermoso cuento
de hadas escrito por John C. Wright no intenta revolucionar o imponerse a
estos clásicos, sino que es un homenaje lleno de amor y nostalgia. Nos
recuerda que el para siempre no siempre es feliz. El camino de la vida
sigue, y el mal tiene que ser enfrentado y vencido por cada nueva
generación.

Whores in the workforce

Once more, women are disemboweling a primarily male occupation by entering it en masse while refusing to accept any responsibility for their actions and lack of job performance:

I am tendering my resignation as we speak, as are some writers for other sites. This industry is beyond corrupt. It is beyond destructive. It’s become a cult, so bloated on its own self-righteousness and loathing of everyone who doesn’t conform to the hivemind that it is that it’s impossible to stay and not become either part of that hivemind or completely fucking insane.

This isn’t just an issue of “whore fucks around and drags down women/sets feminism back.” This is a critical problem with women across the board. Once they get hired they cannot be fired unless they are caught doing something illegal.

Just ask any man who has dealt with HR complaints what women in the office are really like. They can’t be dealt with on any level, because they are treated like rock stars with CEO clout. A lot of guys in STEM are being driven out of their jobs because the ladies in marketing think nerdy guys are “too unattractive” to even be in their presence.

Of course, a significant contributing element is the MALE response to problem employees who happen to be women. Male employees don’t like to complain to HR because it is unmanly while male managers like to play white knight and refuse to hold female employees accountable to the standards they expect of male employees. So until they do, and until men put steady pressure upon HR to discipline and fire women for the same behavior for which they discipline and fire men, absolutely nothing is going to change and corporate America will continue to spiral downhill in an unproductive whirlpool of bureaucracy and paperwork.

But if you find yourself in a similar situation and you are willing to quit anyhow, why not first at least try putting pressure on your employer to get rid of the useless parasite employees. That way, even if they choose the parasites over you, you’ll have forced the executives to realize that they face a situation. Maybe they know and don’t care. But in most cases, they probably have no idea what’s going on.

Those who seriously believe in the equality myth won’t believe that the increased reluctance of men to work for large organizations is a problem, because female employees are every bit as productive as the men who are quitting. Of course, all the observations about falling corporate productivity, the increasing lack of tech innovation, the difficulty of finding high quality employees, and the constant lament about where all the good men have gone would tend to testify otherwise.

The EU prepares for a winter cold war

The EU strategy is obvious: stock up enough natural gas to try to outlast the need Russia’s gas exporters have for European cash. Zerohedge points out three possible problems with that strategy:

1) What if the weather is considerably colder than normal this winter? (i.e. they need more supply)

2) Russia has already committed to supporting the sanctioned firms.

3) German industrials will need energy in the spring.

This also ignores one fundamental flaw in the concept. If the EU is stocking up on its gas supplies, then it is already paying the Russian firms for the gas they would have otherwise expected to buy during the winter. Now they’re buying it early, which means this tactic won’t put any more financial pressure on the Russian firms than it would have if they took delivery later, and accordingly, paid later as well.

Perhaps they’re expecting that the Russians will take all their newly received cash and put it in the NYSE, which will then crash violently, thereby depriving them of it. A stroke of pure genius!

Immigration and unemployment

Think this just might be one reason why there are so many people unemployed and underemployed these days?

The number of foreign-born individuals holding jobs in the United States hit a recorded high of 24,639,000 in August, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS has been tracking the number of foreign-born workers annually since 2005 and monthly since 2007. The BLS does not distinguish between foreign-born individuals who are in the United States legally and those who are here illegally.

Meanwhile, there are 9.6 million unemployed Americans, also according to the BLS. This doesn’t count all the people who have stopped looking for work. Now, while it is true that there is probably not a perfect match between the skills employers are seeking and the skills possessed by the nearly 10 million unemployed Americans, but it should be obvious that with 2.6 employed foreign-born workers for every unemployed American, mass immigration has a) significantly reduced American wages, and b) prevented the U.S. economy from reaching full employment.

The economy is not a zero-sum game. But it is also not a game where mathematics is entirely irrelevant.

Economists and politicians have blithely assured the various publics that immigration is good for national economies for decades. The problem with this assumption is that it is an observable fact that despite experiencing the greatest mass immigration in Western history, the Western economies have been in the doldrums for 15 years.

Books worth reading

A new review of QUANTUM MORTIS: A MIND PROGRAMMED:

James Jesus Angleton famous described the eternal battle between
espionage and counterintelligence as “a wilderness of mirrors.” I
thought of that phrase while reading A Mind Programmed, the latest installation in the Quantum Mortis
series of science fiction stories. Few people or things are what they
seem in this story, and even when you see what they really are, you
still have questions….

I’m new to science fiction, but I enjoyed A Mind Programmed. Though a bit dialogue heavy and slow in the middle, the book spun a good yarn and kept my interest throughout. 

And there are several Amazon reviews of John C. Wright’s ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM worth reading, such as this one by Kyle Robinson:

Given my fondness of fantasy literature, it might surprise some acquaintances to learn that I never read much fantasy when I was a child. I never read Narnia, Redwall, Harry Potter, or any of the other books in the genre. (I only read CS Lewis’s Narnia books earlier this year, in fact.) This places me outside of Wright’s target audience, perhaps, and gives me something of an outsider’s perspective on his story One Bright Star To Guide Them.

Wright has consistently delivered thought-provoking and compelling stories. Awake In The Night Land was a truly spectacular accomplishment and even if The Golden Age trilogy (which is essentially progressive rock in literary form) had a steep learning curve, the sheer imagination behind the series more than earned my continued respect for Wright. City Beyond Time – though book-ended by stories I felt were less compelling than the excellent tales in between – did not disappoint either. But after reading the first Everness book, I wondered if One Bright Star would end up retreading the same kind of story Wright told in that duology. And despite the appealing premise I was concerned that my lack of context would make this story more difficult to enjoy, despite the intriguing premise

The answer is a resounding No. One Bright Star is pure magic, radiating with the virtuosity of a writer whose literary muscle and knack for inscribing heartfelt emotion work in splendid unison. The world and its characters are made so compelling that you, the reader, should not be surprised if your lap is dribbled in drool upon finishing the story, as you salivate for more. One Bright Star is more immediately enjoyable and tightly orchestrated than the comparatively ponderous Everness, and Wright knits his story with a tangible melancholy that proves he is more than capable of making statements in fantasy that rival his science fiction output….

One Bright Star has one of the best endings I’ve enjoyed in recent
memory, and the fact that he draws from the reader such emotion toward
his characters and world in such a brief time is a testament to his
skill. By the end of the story, it’s easy to forget that you have spent
only a few dozen pages in Wright’s world, rather than hundreds. And
despite the fact that I never read Wright’s inspirations as a youth, I
was thoroughly walloped by the poignancy and emotional power of the
ending, which should be all the more stirring for those who have dwelt
within the worlds of Lewis, Tolkein, and Cooper.

You know a novella is really good when the chief complaint of the more critical reviews is that it isn’t longer:

I was sure a homage to Narnia written by John C. Wright would be right up my alley. However, I found myself disappointed by this novella. There’s a great story to be told here, and flashes of it shine through, but I think the novella is just too short to really flesh it out…. I’ve seen enough of Wright’s work to know that he’s capable of brilliantly expanding on the things that I felt were rushed, but for whatever reason he chose not to. 30 more pages would’ve made this book a masterpiece. 

The ironic thing about this criticism is that the novella is already an expanded version of the short story originally published in F&SF magazine. I have no doubt that Mr. Wright could easily expand the novella to a full novel, and indeed, a full trilogy covering both the childhood events and subsequent events. And perhaps he will one day do so, but the fact is that he really said everything that needed to be said in the novella.

And finally, there is this review of QUANTUM MORTIS: A MAN DISRUPTED:

Very good sci-fi noir. There have not been many good detective sci-fi noir novels. Effinger did some good near future books, but that was about it.

The setting here is a military police detective who, due to his world’s laws on embassies, is a member of a section assigned to police crimes involving embassies and governments in exile. Personal AIs, flying cars and power suits, body enhancements, police robots. However, the world has crowded mega towers, and a dark side that is well explored. Very well written, tight scenes. Enjoyable.

“Me very bad raciss too, can haz $2 billion?”

This mea culpa from an admittedly racist NBA team owner sounds more than a little financially motivated to me:

For the second time this year, the owner of a professional basketball team will sell his controlling interest of a franchise after his racially insensitive views were made public.

Bruce Levenson, who has led the ownership group of the Atlanta Hawks since 2004, informed N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver on Saturday that he intended to sell the team, effectively cutting short a league investigation into an email that Mr. Levenson sent two years ago to fellow Hawks executives detailing his thoughts on how the team could attract more white fans.

On Sunday, when the issue came to light, the Hawks released the text of the August 2012 email, in which Mr. Levenson speculated that the team’s black fans had “scared away the whites” and that there were “not enough affluent black fans to build a significant season ticket base.”

Some have conjectured that this is the result of Donald Sterling’s vengeful investigations, which certainly could be the case. But when you read the actual email itself, it sounds to me as if Levenson would simply like to extricate himself from an underperforming business in a manner that will not reduce the value of the business.

when digging into why our season ticket base is so small, i was told it is because we can’t get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs and they are the primary demo for season tickets around the league. when i pushed further, folks generally shrugged their shoulders. then i start looking around our arena during games and notice the following:

— it’s 70 pct black

— the cheerleaders are black

— the music is hip hop

— at the bars it’s 90 pct black

— there are few fathers and sons at the games

— we are doing after game concerts to attract more fans and the concerts are either hip hop or gospel.

Then i start looking around at other arenas. It is completely different. Even DC with its affluent black community never has more than 15 pct black audience.

Before we bought the hawks and for those couple years immediately after in an effort to make the arena look full (at the nba’s urging) thousands and thousands of tickets were being giving away, predominantly in the black community, adding to the overwhelming black audience.

My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant season ticket base. 

Levenson’s email demonstrates, yet again, that what the SJWs and SWPLs decry as racism is nothing more than “paying attention to readily observable reality”. I think my favorite part is the way Levenson is attempting to decry racism while simultaneously copping to racial insensitivity. It’s such a bizarre position that I think a financial motivation is the only reasonable explanation.

A rhetorical case for segregation

Obviously, the counter-argument is that anyone who doesn’t want their young son to be attacked and beaten into unconsciousness by a horde of vibrant youth while working is just a terrible, terrible raciss and bad person:

Kroger customers are afraid and outraged by a recent brutal beating that took place. Particularly, because it was unprovoked and could have happened to anyone.

WMC Action News 5 pulled up the video on a cell phone and went to the spot where the assaults happened. As you might imagine, shoppers who watched the video were outraged.

Some couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

“That’s a shame there is no excuse for any of that,” said James Murf.

The grocery store is practically brand new, built just last year. How two store employees and a customer could get beat up there has many baffled.

“I don’t know what the world is coming to when people just attack some random person,” said Barbara Michael.

A witness says he was standing there watching the fight as it happened. He declined to go on camera but told WMC he thought the hitting and kicking started after a Kroger employee exchanged words with a young man in the parking lot, over a shopping basket.

Translation: the employee was trying to do his job and the vibrant youth violently objected. In a free society, Kroger would simply announce that it will no longer permit any vibrants under the age of forty to enter its premises for insurance reasons. But we do not live in a free society, which is why the American people are eventually going to find themselves in a race war of epic proportions that will last until the historical state of ethnic homogenuity prevails. A five percent minority population appears to be the maximum limit of mutually beneficial inter-ethnic relations; it can be less, of course, depending upon the behavior of the minority.

Nobody in his right mind wants a race war. Or any sort of civil war. Wars are always unpredictable. But no one who is cognizant of history will deny that partition wars are how multiethnic empires usually come to an end. Reading WWI histories very much drives home certain similarities between the collapsing, decadent Austro-Hungarian empire and the still-powerful, but creaky Pax Americana; the USA has not yet lost its military dominance but the various cracks in its power are readily visible. And the problem is that the only reliable way to avoid race wars is not idiotic sloganeering and inter-racial propaganda, but segregated borders.

Jared Diamond and his theories of geographic determinism notwithstanding, those historical states did not come about by accident, any more than Zimbabwe now just happens to be almost entirely black or Iraq now just happens to be almost entirely free of Jews and Christians. It would be hard to identify a time in human history when some form of ethnic or religious cleansing was not taking place.

The evil myth of racial equality in America could only survive so long as vibrants were a mostly segregated minority, whose predilections and general dyscivicism were hidden from the white college students who only ever came across the vibrant best and brightest. The Civil Rights movement, which some conservatives still foolishly lionize, was a disaster for the USA; not as historically cataclysmic as the Immigration Act of 1965 or the combination of no-fault divorce and legal abortion, but a disaster nonetheless.

England is beginning to come to terms with the fact that Enoch Powell was right. I expect that America will eventually come to terms with the fact that Bull Connor and George Wallace were right as well. But the segregationists made one serious mistake. “Segregation now, segregation
tomorrow, segregation forever” is just a rhetoric. The more convincing argument, and the historical reality, is this: “Segregation now or elimination tomorrow.”

And before all the white boy liberals are tempted to play the Raciss Card, just remember, kemosabe, the Red Card trumps it. And my tribe knows all about the vital necessity of segregation for survival, or as we call it, the reservation.