In fairness, he didn’t shoot her

You know, I don’t recall ever seeing Eric Estrada grounding and pounding a woman on CHiPs. The California Highway Patrol is caught on camera protecting and serving the California public by beating the hell out of a woman:

A barefoot woman described as harmless was subdued and pummeled by a California Highway Patrol officer in an incident captured on video. The California Highway Patrol (CHP) is investigating the incident, which occurred on Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Video shot from a by-passing car shows the CHP officer chasing the woman on foot through traffic. In the video, the officer catches up to the woman from behind, spins her around and takes her to the ground. The pair struggled, but the officer ends up on top. From that position, he begins punching her rapidly in the head.

“He is beating her up, yo,” a man filming the incident is heard saying.

“Oh my gosh, why?” a woman asks….

“No one condones when he gets on top of a woman, and this is a big officer, and he punches her repeatedly,” Diaz said. “I think he punched her in the head 15 times.”

I have no doubt the CHP will investigate the incident with all of the justice and impartiality shown by every other police department when investigating its officers.

The exposures continue

It appears the British Parliament may contain almost as many pedophiles and pedophile defenders as SFWA:

More than 10 current and former politicians are on a list of alleged child abusers held by police investigating claims of a Westminster paedophile ring. MPs or peers from all three main political parties are on the list, which includes former ministers and household names. Several, including Cyril Smith and Sir Peter Morrison, are no longer alive, but others are still active in Parliament.

The existence of the list was disclosed by Peter McKelvie, the whistleblower whose claims prompted Operation Fernbridge, the Scotland Yard investigation into allegations of a paedophile network with links to Downing Street. Mr McKelvie, a retired child protection team manager who has spent more than 20 years compiling evidence of alleged abuse by authority figures, said he believed there was enough evidence to arrest at least one senior politician….

Mr McKelvie, who helped bring the notorious paedophile Peter Righton to
justice in 1992 when he worked in Hereford and Worcester child protection
team, said: “I believe there are sufficient grounds to carry out a formal
investigation into allegations of up to 20 MPs and Lords over the last three
to four decades, some still alive and some dead. The list is there.”

In a letter to his local MP Sir Tony Baldry last month, Mr McKelvie suggested
that a further 20 MPs and Lords were implicated in the “cover-up” of abuse
of children.

The Guardian has already done one story on Marion Zimmer Bradley. One hopes the newspaper will continue investigating her defenders and enablers, and then look into Ed Kramer, Samuel Delany, and the connections between Walter Breen, L. Ron Hubbard and a science-related gifted kids program.

The strange link between physics and ESP came to the forefront in the
character of Jack Sarfatti, whom we already introduced. Sarfatti was, in
1952, part of an after-school group of gifted children, being tutored
by Walter Breen of the Sandia Corporation, an organisation famous for
atomic weapons research and development. Breen was helped by others from
Sandia to lecture to these children. In 1952, Sarfatti received a
phone-call from outer space – quite literally, he felt. It seemed to
predestine him to become a leading physicist, interested in time and
space, other dimensions, etc.

Sarfatti reiterated that the enigmatic phone calls he received occurred in the summer of 1953. “I met Walter Breen soon after that via Robert Bashlow who recruited me and Johnny Glogower. Also Robert Solovay (briefly). Breen was working for Professor William Sheldon at Columbia Psychiatry Department funded by Eugene McDermott, a World War II Intelligence leader, co-founder of Texas Instruments and University of Texas at Dallas – and part of the Charles Lindburgh, Arthur Young ‘Round Table’ group. Saul-Paul Sirag says that L. Ron Hubbard was part of that scene along with Puharich. 

What this suggests is that the science fiction freakshow of sexual deviants may not necessarily be just three or four bad actors, each operating more or less on their own. It is well known that pedophiles tend to run in loosely affiliated packs, and the fact that there have been at least three confirmed pedophiles, Breen, Bradley, and Kramer, and one serious red flag, Delany, active in the relatively small science fiction community, indicates that there could be as many as ten times that number involved, as is apparently the case in Westminster.

And keep this description in mind when you read plaudits about the wonderfully warm “Chip” Delany, who has provided considerably more cause for suspicion than the recently convicted Rolf Harris ever did.

To people throughout the world, myself included, he was the beloved uncle: warm, colourful, comforting. Lovely touchy-feely Rolf had this ability to make you feel as though you were the most important person in the world…. Experts in pathological sex offenders say the really clever ones spend only one per cent of their time grooming their actual victims — but 99 per cent of their time grooming the people around them. Often working as teachers or priests or entertainers, they are expert at persuading people they are trustworthy — tirelessly giving to charities, visiting the sick, cheering up the masses — to the extent that no one would believe a bad word against them.

Everyone knows that I am not a fan of SFWA. I think it is an outdated organization that has outlived its purpose and thereby enmeshed itself in left-wing ideology in a misguided attempt to remain relevant to writers. But my feelings and motivations have absolutely nothing to do with what other people have done over the last 50 years. Pattern recognition has always been a strength of mine (see: Financial crisis of 2008), and SFWA’s increasingly bizarre non-reaction to revelations of FIVE DECADES of child abuse and the public defense of child abusers by its members is tripping my radar. It may be simple incompetence, or it may suggests that there is more to the situation than the isolated acts of a few bad apples.

France v Germany

And Brazil v Colombia. Two big games. While I really like the way the French have been playing, the Germans regularly raise their game and I expect them to be able to hold off the very good French attack UNLESS they play the same high offsides-trap that they featured against the USA. That’s simply not going to work when France can throw three fast strikers against it, particularly given a French midfield that actually believes in providing its attackers with through balls.

I’m expecting the big upset in the later game. Brazil has not impressed me, not even a little bit. Fred has shown nothing, Hulk is a brute who tries hard and bears absolutely no resemblance to the Romarios and Ronaldos of World Cups past, and Neymar is clearly struggling with the weight of having to carry the nation’s expectations very nearly on his own. Colombia isn’t afraid of anyone and they are playing very well as a team. I think they’ll win and they won’t even need extra time or penalties to do it.

Germany 1 France 0. Frankly, a rather boring game. Germany scored early on a set piece, France never seemed to feel much sense of urgency, and I didn’t see a single through ball attacking Germany’s high defensive line. France had a chance or two, but nothing too crucial, and neither team seemed to have much in the way of energy. Rather disappointing from the same French team that crushed a good Swiss team 5-3.

FIRST HALF: Brazil 1 Colombia 0. This is the best Brazil has looked all tournament. The goal was a bit lucky, since Thiago Silva caught the Colombian defender sleeping on the far post, but Brazil has had most of the good chances. Colombia has a 4-on-2 that is so inept they don’t even manage to get a shot off. At this point, Brazil looks capable of winning by three.

The rape of beauty

John C. Wright explains the reason behind the Left’s determined destruction of beauty of every kind:

The most precious, profound and important of the great ideas which the Left has raped from us is beauty. I need spend no time on the proposition that life without beauty is a nightmare: those who have seen true beauty – sublime beauty, if even for a moment – have nothing to which they can liken it except the ecstasies of mystics and the transports of saints. Beauty consoles the sorrowing; beauty brings joy and deepens understanding; beauty is like food and wine, and men who live surrounded by ugliness become shriveled and starved in their souls.

Why, if beauty is so important, is there no discussion of it? The victory of the Left in this area has been so sudden, so remarkable, and so complete, that the discussion of beauty has lapsed into an utter and a desolate silence. Have you, dear reader, read anything discussing beauty, putting forth a coherent theory of beauty, or even extolling beauty’s central importance of the human soul in a year? In 10 years? Ever? This may be the only essay you will read on the topic this decade, and yet the topic is one of paramount importance. It is a matter of life and death not for the body but for the spirit.

There is no discussion of it because by convincing the public that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the Left has placed it beyond the realm of discussion. According to the Left, beauty is a matter of taste, and arbitrary taste at that. There is no discussion of taste because to give reasons to prefer tasteful to tasteless things is elitist, nasty, uncouth and inappropriate. To have taste implies that some cultures produce more works of art and better than others, and this raises the uncomfortable possibility that love of beauty is Eurocentric, or even racist. To admire beauty has become a hate crime.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there is no difference between fine art as opposed to mere decoration, no difference between Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and wallpaper. Obviously there is a difference: we decorate an otherwise useful tool to make it more pleasing to look at or handle, like painting details on a car or putting embroidered images on fabric. Popular art is meant for entertainment; it is meant to please the eye and wile away the time. But an episode of I Love Lucy is not made for the same purpose as Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Art is not meant to be useful. When you hold a baby in your arms and look at him, merely look at the wonder and miracle of new life, you don’t do that because the baby is useful.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there is no such thing as training the taste. One can sit down and watch well done popular entertainment – for example, a Mickey Mouse cartoon – with pleasure and enjoyment, and no study is needed to prepare you to appreciate and understand it. But to sit down and read Milton’s Paradise Lost for pleasure, one needs a passing familiarity with classical and Biblical figures to which he alludes, and one’s pleasure is increased if one is familiar with the epic models, the Virgil and Homer, on whose themes Milton plays out so creative and striking a variation.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then anything, anything at all, can be declared to be beautiful merely by the artist. Like God creating light from nothing by the power of His word, the artist creates beauty not by any genius nor craftsmanship, but by his naked fiat. It is beautiful not because he actually created anything, but only because he says so….

The strongest argument against the atheism so beloved of the Left is
not an argument that can be put in words, for it is the argument of
beauty. If you see a sunset clothed in scarlet like a king descending to
his empurpled pyre, or wonder at the gleaming thunder of a waterfall,
if you find yourself fascinated by the soft intricacy of a crimson rose
or behold the cold virgin majesty of the morning star, much less see and
enter a cathedral or a walled garden, or you hear Schiller’s “Ode to
Joy” by Beethoven or see the David of Michelangelo, or become immersed
into the song and splendor and Northern sorrow of Wagner’s “Ring” or
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, if indeed you see real beauty and for a moment you forget yourself, then you are drawn out of yourself into something larger.

In that timeless moment of sublime rapture, the heart knows even if
the head cannot put it into words that the dull and quotidian world of
betrayal, pain, disappointment and sorrow is not the only world there
is. Beauty points to a world beyond this world, a higher realm, a
country of joy where there is no death. Beauty points to the divine.

The creative instinct is the urge to celebrate the divine. Which is why most forms of modern art, from performance narcissism to Pink SF/F is a perversion of the creative instinct, because they exist to celebrate ugliness and evil while attempting to degrade the very concepts of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

Defending the kiddy fiddlers

As an explosion of historical child abuse cases are being revealed in Britain, from popular entertainers to Members of Parliament, it can be readily observed that the British elite’s reaction to the exposure of the pedophiles in their midst was not dissimilar to the current non-reaction of the SFWA concerning the revelations concerning Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ed Kramer, and Samuel Delany.

His paedophile campaign ran into the buffers of derision from the press and hostility from fellow parliamentarians, some of whom denounced his use of parliamentary privilege to name Hayman and accused him of grandstanding.

It is hard to imagine today, as celebrities from that era are brought before the courts for historic sex offences, that this matter was treated so lightly by Parliament. Dickens believed this was because influential people were involved in the abuse and were determined to shut him up.

In reality, it stemmed more from a startling indifference to what was then called “kiddy fiddling”. It was as though because it had always gone on, it was not something to get too worked up about.

For his part, Dickens simply could not understand how an organisation such as PIE was allowed to exist…. Frustrated, Dickens brought a Bill before Parliament “to make it an offence to be a member of any organisation, association, society, religious sect, club or the like that holds meetings at which support is given to encourage, condone, corrupt or entice adults to have sexual relationships with children.”

Is it really that hard to imagine today? The British Attorney General’s dismissal of Sir Peter Hayman’s subscription to the Paedophile Information Exchange network is more than a little remniscent of the defenses various SFWA members have offered of SFWA Grand Master Samuel Delany’s being a regular reader of the NAMBLA bulletin.

“Sir Peter Hayman had subscribed to PIE, that is not an offence and there is no evidence that he was ever involved in the management.”

“I’ve seen no evidence (doesn’t mean it’s not out there; I’m not
trying to be willfully ignorant here) that Delany’s position was
anything other than intellectual.He was responding to the contents of their newsletter, which may
have been interesting and/or thought-provoking intellectual discussion
for all I know.”

Despite reports that the SFF community is reeling, neither SFWA nor its president, Steven Gould, have publicly said anything despite being directly asked about the scandals. But attempting to sweep the whole problem of child abuse in SFWA under the carpet as nothing more than the accusations of a bitter ex-member is not going to work any better in the long term than the British attempt to dismiss child abuse by its entertainers, diplomats, and politicians as “the fantasies of a deluded man”.

I suspect Jo Walton will eventually come to regret her repeated praise of Delany on Tor.com, just as Ann McCaffrey and Robert Sawyer likely came to regret their defenses of Ed Kramer in the official SFWA publications and Jim C. Hines and Tor.com itself have come to regret their past celebrations of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

“We didn’t know,” they cry, some honestly, some not. But it seems readily apparent that the only reason many of them did not know was because they were determined not to look for fire amidst all the smoke. For example, notice that the Toad of Tor is STILL trying to defend Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Just F-ing Keftastic @Keffy Jun 13
THERE ARE FUCKING COURT FUCKING DOCUMENTS. And you still got people waffling about WELL WE DON’T KNOOOW and making excuses based on “vibes.”

tnielsenhayden @tnielsenhayden Jun 14
Pointing out that there remain areas of considerable uncertainty is not necessarily a defense of pedophilia.

Not necessarily, no. But remember, Teresa Nielsen Hayden is one of the very members who demanded an 80-page investigative report of my supposed racism on the basis of a single tweet. But when it comes to Marion Zimmer Bradley, there “remain areas of considerable uncertainty” and when it comes to SFWA Grand Master Samuel Delany, it would appear his constant dwelling on things such as “racist porn”, “racial ephithets”, “father/son homosexual incest starting very young” and “bestiality” “on almost every page” don’t merit an investigation or anything except repeated public celebrations of the man.

Consistently looking the other way for decades, ignoring all the obvious signs, and then belatedly trying to hide behind “areas of considerable uncertainty” is, taken in sum, a de facto defense of the pedophiles in science fiction.

Ridley was right too

The events of recent years have seen the post-mortem reputation of Enoch Powell rise considerably. One tends to expect that Nicholas Ridley’s reputation will rise over time in the eyes of the English people as well:

In the first week of July 1990, I had gone to his Oxfordshire home to conduct an interview for The Spectator, which I then edited. At some point I asked him, in quite a desultory fashion, about the drive towards European Monetary Union.

It was a light-the-blue-touch-paper moment — emphasised by the way the chain-smoking Ridley dragged hard on his cigarette between making his explosive points: ‘This is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe.

‘It has to be thwarted. This rushed takeover by the Germans on the worst possible basis, with the French behaving like poodles to the Germans, is absolutely intolerable . . . I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might just as well give it up to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’

Startled, I interjected that the then German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was surely preferable to Hitler — he wouldn’t be dropping bombs on us, after all.

If anything, this made Ridley even more vehement: ‘I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back, than simply being taken over by economics. He’ll soon be coming here and trying to say that this is what we should do on the banking side and this is what our taxes should be. I mean, he’ll soon be trying to take over everything . . . You don’t understand the British people if you don’t understand this point about them. They can be dared. They can be moved. But being bossed by a German — it would cause absolute mayhem in this country, and rightly, I think.’

In the uproar that ensued following the publication of the interview, Margaret Thatcher immediately demanded Ridley’s resignation. Three months later, she gave the go-ahead for the pound to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), then seen as the precursor to membership of full European Monetary Union.

That made me feel less bad about Ridley losing his job over my interview with him, since I imagine he would have detested the idea of being part of a government that had joined the ERM. And when German refusal to countenance sterling devaluation within the ERM led to Britain’s humiliating exit on September 16, 1992 (Black Wednesday), he would probably have felt vindicated.

Ridley was correct about the general direction and nature of the EU, even if he was not necessarily correct on every detail. That being said, I do not understand why Ridley, or any national leader, would not vehemently oppose giving up sovereignty on principle. Everything else springs from single key aspect.

The conquest and integration of the various peoples of Europe into an empire governed by a central imperial government has long been a dream of tyrants. But the EU is learning, as Charlemagne’s heirs, Napoleon, and Hitler learned before them, that while the conquest is not terribly difficult, the integration is impossible.

To date, the EU has been more Napoleon than Hitler; it has established its own version of the Continental System. And, like the Continental System, it is doomed by virtue of its structural opposition to the laws of economics.

It’s probably Jenny’s fault

I always find it amazing how vaxx-propagandists get worked up over American parents who don’t get their infants vaccinated against sexually transmitted diseases, then blithely turn a blind eye to mass immigration from countries with diseases for which there are not even any vaccinations:

Hundreds of West Africans could be carrying the deadly Ebola virus and not know it, potentially infecting hundreds more, as cash-strapped governments and overwhelmed aid agencies struggle to contain the virus’s spread.

At least 1,500 people have not yet been traced who are known to have come into contact with others confirmed or suspected to be infected with the haemorrhagic fever, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) told The Telegraph.

Many more could be moving freely in the three countries battling the virus, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, but fear of the illness and mistrust of Western medicine means they refuse to come forward to speak to doctors.

The current outbreak is the worst ever. So far 467 people have died and health staff have identified at least 292 other suspected or confirmed cases.

There were already serious concerns that Ebola had come to Italy with a boatload of illegal immigrants, which fortunately turned out to be a false alarm. Considering how Americans in Texas and Arizona are already catching tuberculosis and other diseases from the Border Intifada, it should be fascinating to see how Americans will react if one of those West Africans turns out to have hopped a plane to New York City… especially if it was in order to see Jenny McCarthy on The View.

Hugo recommendations: Best Editor

BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM

Liz Gorinsky, Tor Books: Jason Sanford says it’s hard to imagine Tor without Gorinsky. If she’s in any way responsible for the abominable Pink sewage they’ve been putting out for the last 20 years, she goes right to the bottom of the list. It’s remarkable that for all the Pink SF/F authors they’ve been relentlessly pushing over this time, their bestselling authors are still Orson Scott Card, Orson Scott Card and someone else, Robert Jordan, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, and Brandon Sanderson.

Lee Harris, Angry Robot:  I looked over their entire list of 2013 publications. Nice covers. Haven’t read a single book. Haven’t HEARD of a single book. I have heard of Wesley Chu; The Lives of Tao appears to be one of their best-regarded books. Tons of editorial reviews. 145 Amazon reviews averaging 4.2 rating. And #166,807 on Kindle. Translation: Hivemind hype.

Ginjer Buchanan, Ace: Retired after 30 years at Ace and Roc Books. Translation: a longtime gatekeeper and a nomination in lieu of a gold watch.

Sheila Gilbert, DAW Books: Sanford calls her “one of those people who helped shape the direction of our genre”. Translation: a longtime gatekeeper and likely responsible in part for the decline of the genre.

Toni Weiskopf: Baen Books: Published Larry Correia. Published our own Tom Kratman. Signed Brad Torgersen. The one mainstream editor willing to go against the grain and stand against the rising tide of Pink effluvience. She’s got my vote.

My vote for Best Editor, Long Form, and my suggestion to others, is Toni Weiskopf of Baen Books. My vote will go as follows:

  1. Toni Weiskopf
  2. Sheila Gilbert
  3. Ginjer Buchanan
  4. No Award

 I recommend leaving the other two editors off the ballot.

BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM

I don’t know anything about the various editors nominated. I will vote No Award and leave the category otherwise blank.

OTHER HUGO AWARD RECOMMENDATIONS

Best Novel

The “declining” labor force

Readers here are aware that the reason the unemployment rates are relatively low is because the BLS is playing games with the size of the labor force in order to undercount the number of people who are unemployed. The four-percent decline in the Employment-Population Rate, which is less easily gamed than the Unemployment Rate, demonstrates this clearly. So, the Administration and neo-Keynesian apologists have come up with various reasons for why people are “leaving” the labor force in order to justify their statistical shenanigans.

However, this article on Zerohedge makes it clear that people are not leaving the labor force voluntarily. Quite to the contrary, they are clinging harder to their jobs than ever before; the biggest change between 2005 and 2010 was the decline from 36.5 to 25.9 percent employed among the 16-19 age group. In other words, these young adults, who are now 20-23, never found jobs and never formally entered the labor force.

The same pattern is true all the way up through the 45-54 age group, which indicates people losing their jobs due to a lack of seniority, then being unable to find work again. From age 55+, a higher percentage of people were employed than before. People aren’t “leaving the labor force”, they are merely unable to find any work for extended periods of time. They are unemployed by every definition of the term, except for the BLS’s misleading measure.

The holistic solution

Tom Kratman offers a prospective curative for America’s civilizational decline:

Right now we’re stuck in a self reinforcing cascade of civilizational decay. What is happening to the police and to civil-police relations is partly cause and partly symptom. It is unclear that there is anything we can do about that that we will do.

So as not to be seen as too negative, however, let me offer a somewhat holistic solution: Kill all the common law felons in custody. Round up and kill all the people ever convicted of a common law felony currently at large without clear and convincing evidence that they have amended their lives (job, wife, home, no further crimes of any kind). For us, that’s probably in the range of 6 million people. And then we need to round up the progressives and kill them too. (Why do we call them “progressives,” anyway? Their job isn’t progess; it’s decay.) And then use all the overmilitarized police and prison guards to round up and kill or deport illegals. Then put them on the border to our south, and on small patrol craft at sea. They’ll be happier, and so will the rest of us.

That’s all pretty harsh, right? Unjust? Horrid? Horrible? Unthinkable? Yeah, well, the collapse of civilization, which is where we’re heading, is going to be a lot worse, and to much more innocent people. Think little kids turning on spits over low coals.

The most shocking thing about Tom’s proposed solution is that he didn’t mention crucifixion. Apparently he’s going soft these days. It may be a ghastly neo-Roman solution, but unfortunately, any student of history knows the man is probably correct in both his diagnosis and his ultimate prescription. We’ve already seen open beheadings on the streets of London. What more needs to be witnessed before the barbarians are rooted out, root and branch? Children roasting on spits in the streets? Gang rapes in the city center shopping malls? Or is the fear of being accused of racism and insufficient political correctness genuinely worth the collapse of civilized society in the eyes of the great majority of the population?

I don’t think so. I think most Americans are some combination of genuine ignorance, willful ignorance, frightened paralysis, and wishful thinking. Both the government agencies and the observant citizenry find themselves in the position of two opponents standing in a spreading pool of gasoline, both armed with flamethrowers, but neither wishing to set himself alight. No one is eager for the civilizational conflagration, except for the short-sighted and the foolhardy.

Nevertheless, I would go so far to suggest that if you are not an extremist with regards to a) Jesus Christ and b) Western civilization, you are objectively part of the problem. If you are prone to temporizing on various elements such as sex, race, culture, sexual orientation, criminality, immigration, and the mass issuance of credit, then you are contributing to the collapse by providing intellectual cover to those who are actively, if often inadvertently, working to demolish Western civilization.

Read your history. Pagan societies are not very pleasant places in which to live. Science is not a magic self-sustaining enterprise. Technology is not a given and it does not grow naturally on trees. Culture is the result of a complex interweaving of nature and nurture, and it cannot survive when both are significantly altered. We are facing a situation where the societal supports have been methodically withdrawn, one after the other, and with each failure to immediately collapse, it is widely agreed by the elite and the unwashed alike that the support removed is thereby proven to have been unnecessary. This is not valid logic. What took centuries to build is taking decades to dismantle; the fact that the structure does not instantly collapse does not indicate that it remains sound.

Because the progressives were permitted to experiment with withdrawing various civilizational supports, the West will soon find its options constrained to a few scenarios, all of them ugly, if it is to survive in a recognizable form. And if you are prone to temporizing your defense of civilization now due to your fear that someone will criticize you, why do you think you will dare to lift a finger in its defense when the price of doing so will be considerably higher?