Holland v Mexico

I’m really looking forward to this one, which is the most interesting matchup of the first round of the Knockout Stage. Holland should win, but Mexico is playing very hard for Herrara and the Mexican keeper was easily the best in the Group Stage. A very good test for the Oranje if they are to flatter themselves with the idea that they are serious contenders for the title.

Costa Rica v Greece should actually be worth watching. Greece is, as always, an old, untalented, defensive-minded team, but they have a crazy ability to give much better teams a difficult time. Costa Rica was the shock winners of a group that literally no one gave them a chance to win, so one has to consider them the favorite here.

HOLLAND 2 MEXICO 1: Ugh. Great game and down to the wire, but even so, ugh. I was supporting Holland, but seeing Robben dive three times in the box, and on the third one draw the penalty that won the game, was truly ugly. Ochoa was awesome, but there was no stopping the cannon blast from Wesley Schneider that tied the game in the 88th minute.

FIFA is really going to have to give serious thought to replay on penalties.

The choice facing the West

Islam or Christianity. Secularism is not an available option. Here is the Muslim vision for Britain under Sharia:

If the Muslim sees a kaffir with nice clothes, the kaffir has to take his clothes off and give them to the Muslim. The kaffir, when he walks down the street, he has to wear a red belt around his neck, and he has to have his forehead shaved, and he has to wear two shoes that are different from one another. He [the non-believer] is not allowed to walk on the pavement, he has to walk in the middle of the road, and he has to ride a mule. They can have churches, but are not allowed to ring the bell….

We cover up all the women and put a niqab on their faces, including Queen Elizabeth and Kate Middleton as well, the whore, the fornicator.

Christianity will survive its abandonment by Western civilization. Western civilization will not survive its abandonment of Christianity. It is said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. If that is true, then obviously the 1st Amendment cannot be either.

There is no such thing as “moderate” Islam. The War of the Third Wave of Islamic expansion is already underway, the problem is that only one side is aware of it.

Birth-defective literature

John C. Wright answers a question concerning whether books can contain messages concerning politics, religion, or philosophy without being propaganda:

I am a Christian, hence I regard God as the ultimate floor of reality, the one necessary being from which all contingent beings flow. If I am a faithful Christian, this one ultimate reality influences all lesser realities, and there is no neutral ground. Even something as lighthearted as a fight scene, I must decide if the characters act like pagan warriors or chivalrous knights, that is, with the romance of Christendom. Even a love scene must show love to be romantic, as a Christian sees love, or as situation of shameful weakness, erotic madness, or mutual exploitation, as various pagan and secular worldviews see love.

The Leftist for whom politics is the ultimate floor of being is an idolater, and makes power arrangements his personal little crappy god. It influences everything in his thought and life, and if left unchecked will eventually ruin his writing.

The Leftist who is a faithful Leftist only on their sabbath days, and otherwise ignores the business (and that would be the majority of Leftists) can write a perfectly passable story about space pirates kidnapping space princesses without any hint of politics, to the satisfaction of all involved. He will write his love scenes with romance and his fight scenes with chivalry without noticing or caring about the origin of these Christian cultural artifacts. He will not think of them as particularly Christian, merely as part of the moral atmosphere and cultural background of his society. He will not notice the incongruity between his art and his philosophy.

The distinction Wright is making can be seen very clearly in the difference between Larry Correia’s MONSTER HUNTER NEMESIS and Greg Bear’s DARWIN’S RADIO, both of which I recently finished reading. Now, Bear is much more highly regarded in the science fiction community. DARWIN’S RADIO won the Nebula Award for best novel and was nominated for the Hugo, Locus SF, and John W. Campbell awards. Bear is a multiple award-winner who is described as a hard SF writer “who often addresses major questions in contemporary science and culture with fictional solutions.”

Larry, on the other hand, can’t get nominated for the Hugo without being accused of rape, child abuse, and sexual deviancy… no, wait, that was Marion Zimmer Bradley. Or was it Samuel Delany? Anyhow, the point is that his books are generally considered little more than pulp urban fantasy that is popular among right-wing mouth breathers due to its heavy gun-porn content. And that’s not an entirely unfair characterization, if one looks solely at the early Monster Hunter books.

But here is the interesting thing. I will come right out and say that NEMESIS will hold up much better over time than DARWIN’S RADIO, and eventually will be seen to be a deeper, more serious novel, because, under the skin of its hellacious action-fury, the former contains the significant examination of some long-contemplated philosophical questions, whereas despite its erudite flights of scientific fancy, the latter contains nothing deeper than cheap atheist propaganda.

I’ll explain the philosophical questions of NEMESIS on Monday, when I review the book that is easily the best of the Monster Hunter series to date. And as for the propagandistic elements running so strong within DARWIN’S RADIO, the book is almost startling for its contempt for the unwashed, easily frightened masses, with a lack of faith in humanity surpassed only by Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”.

The core idea is a response to the fossil and DNA dichotomies that falsify the models supporting the theory of evolution by natural selection: evolution doesn’t merely punctuate its equilibrium, but occurs instantaneously across a broad spectrum of a species under stress because [long complicated theory concerning viruses I couldn’t possibly explain on the basis of a single reading.] Informed? Highly. Ingenious? Absolutely. But then recall that the “major question” he’s nominally addressing (despite never expressing any serious doubts about the consensus dogma), is “why doesn’t the evidence support the conventional neo-Darwinian synthesis?”

And his answer is absurd. Magic Science Elves or Alien Uplifters or even a bored, sadistic Creator God would have been considerably more plausible than the Magic Ancient Virus-Program, which raises far more questions than it purports to answer. The real question underlying the nominal one is: “just how terribly would those awful little people who are too ignorant to place blind faith in scientistry react if they found themselves in a situation where living as a traditional married couple would cause them to a) believe that the wife was unfaithful, and, b) humanity was on the verge of becoming extinct through miscarriages.

As you can probably imagine, it isn’t long before we are treated to riots, televangelists, thousands of women being murdered by their husbands, the president and several governors being assassinated by a bomb, and even a ritual lampooning of Pat Robertson.

“They’re calling it ‘original sin,’ you know that?”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Augustine said.

“Tune in the Christian Broadcasting Network. They’re splitting constituencies all across America. Pat Robertson is telling his audience these monsters are God’s final test before the arrival of the new Kingdom of Heaven. He says our DNA is trying to purge itself of all our accumulated sins, to…what was his phrase, Ted?”

The aide said, “Clean up our records before God calls Judgment Day.”

“That was it.”

“We still don’t control the airwaves, Frank,” Augustine said. “I can’t be held responsible…”

“Half a dozen other televangelists say these unborn children are the devil’s spawn,” Shawbeck continued, building up steam. “Born with the mark of Satan, one-eyed and hare-lipped. Some are even saying they have cloven hooves.”

Augustine shook his head sadly.

“They’re your support group now,” Shawbeck said, and waved his arm for the aide to step forward. He struggled to his feet, shoved the crutches into his armpits. “I’m tendering my resignation tomorrow morning. From the Taskforce and from the NIH. I’m burned out. I can’t take any more of this ignorance—my own or anybody else’s. Just thought you should be the first to know. Maybe you can consolidate all the power.”

Oh, that dreadful ignorance! Oh, those awful violence-prone Christians! Only turning to science and giving unlimited power to politicians wise enough to unhesitatingly accept the untested and unproven assertions of scientists can save Man! With only superficial changes, this could have just as easily been a book about global warming, or nuclear disarmament, or an unexpected attack by rapidly evolving salamanders.

That’s what Wright means when he talks about the leftist ruining his own writing. I found myself putting down DARWIN’S RADIO twice, and had to force myself to finish it once it became clear that the philosophical message was not merely an integral part of the story, the message WAS the story. The characters, the plot, even the “major questions addressed” were only there to serve the all-important Message: Evolution by natural selection is real despite the appearance of the evidence and only Scientists can save you from the blind fury of the ignorant masses.

So, it’s not terribly surprising to discover that despite its scientific erudition and its panoply of literary awards, DARWIN’S RADIO is presently ranked #731,269 on Amazon and Greg Bear is now reduced to writing game tie-in novels for an Xbox game. This leads me to conclude it might be interesting, and more than a little informative in this regard, to compare Bear’s CITY AT THE END OF TIME to John C. Wright’s CITY BEYOND TIME.

An apt simile

I’m not sure Damien understood quite how funny this was, if one presumes that he is referring to Larry’s fans and the Dread Ilk:

In the social media era, we lend authors immediate credibility when we follow them. I’m thinking of some of our right wing friends here who deploy their fans like paramilitary forces. Strange times!

I have to admit, I did laugh at that one. What the Left simply can’t seem to understand is that when they attack an author for his beliefs, they are providing motivation to all of his fans who happen to share those beliefs, because the fans uunderstand that it is not the author, but their own beliefs that are under attack. The author is merely the symbol.

Also, our fans tend to be intrinsically more capable than those of our left wing counterparts. That’s not pandering or anything, it’s just that theirs don’t tend to be good for much more than fawning, favoriting tweets, feigning outrage, and pretending to donate money they don’t have.

Brazil v Chile

FIRST HALF 1-1: The Brazilian goal was clearly an own goal. The Chilean goal, on the other hand, was the combination of laziness by the Brazilian midfielder and an opportunistic Chilean jumping on the chance. Brazil doesn’t seem to be fully in gear, but Neymar is blowing by the central defense at will, so I would think Brazil will score two more and put the game away without too much trouble.

SECOND HALF 1-1: Brazil will be crying about it, but there was no question that Hulk controlled the ball with his forearm. Good call by the official. The goalies are keeping both teams in the game; both had excellent saves. Chile is attacking more and actually looks the better team despite their obvious lack of quality in comparison with Brazil. Extra time!

EXTRA TIME 1-1: WOW! Chile hits the crossbar in the last two minutes of injury time after a desultory 30 minutes where Chile ran out of steam and wisely switched to a defensive orientation. Brazil then counterattacks, but Neymar unwisely passes right instead of left on a 3-on-2 break. And it’s penalties.

PENALTIES: 3-2 Brazil. Great game. Neymar coolly fires home, the Chilean 5th penalty taker hits the post, and Neymar visibly falls apart with the relief. I can’t even imagine the amount of pressure he must have been feeling. But, as Ender says, I’m going to miss the Chilean coach. He’s awesome, both in terms of his tactics and the way he stalks the sideline like a pitbull, which he rather resembles. I think he is now my third favorite manager after Arsene “please to enjoy my impromptu 30-minute lecture on subjects unrelated to football” Wenger and The Special One.

The Brazilians seem to like him too. Several of them go out of their way to pay their respects. Interesting, too, to see a number of apparent Christians among the Brazilian players, including Neymar and Willian.

What killed Technorati

Technorati has gone the way of The Truth Laid Bear and many of the blogs it once ranked:

Once upon a time, not long ago, anyone in the world who wanted to gauge the relative impact of any blogger—say, HughHewitt.com vs. MichelleMalkin.com or Instapundit vs. Daily Kos or Fark vs. Eschaton—knew exactly where to go for the latest, up-to-the-moment rankings: Technorati. During the salad days of blogging in the first decade of the 21st century, nobody could touch Technorati when it came to searching and sizing up the roiling mass of hot-blooded humanity that came to be known as the blogosphere. You could forget all about the New York Times Best Sellers list. That was dead-tree media ranking other dead trees. The Technorati “Top 100 Blogs” was America’s ultimate guide to influence. It was the scorecard of the hat-tip champions.

Alas, those days are now done.

With little fanfare last month, Technorati quietly shut down its blog directory and rankings.

It’s not hard to understand why bloggers eventually lost interest in both blog-ranking systems. I know why I did. Neither system paid sufficient attention to their core market, and both allowed non-blogs to freely enter the rankings, which promptly pushed down the blogs that had once been ranked highly, even when they had considerably more traffic than they did before.  This old post is informational in that regard:

According to Sitemeter, there were 2,000 visits yesterday on only the 12th day of this blog. Thanks for stopping by, everyone! The Truth Laid Bear even had Vox Popoli ranked in the Blogosphere’s top 150, much to my surprise.

There were 17,245 Sitemeter visits here and at AG yesterday (40,304 Google Pageviews to use the modern metric), and yet even that 69 percent annual growth probably would not suffice to put me within shouting distance of the top 150 blogs today, much less the big corporate sites.

What both NZ Bear and Technorati should have done was to maintain a very clear distinction between site-rankings and blog-rankings, thereby preventing the situation where the corporate site equivalents of the Dallas Cowboys were being compared to SEC, Ivy League, and high school teams. It simply wasn’t even remotely meaningful for the proprietor of a little sewing blog or whatever to be informed that Fox News, CNN, and Jezebel got more traffic than she did. What had once been a useful comparison became an irrelevant statement of the obvious.

The other problem was sub-par metrics. Technorati, for example, put too much value on links in lieu of actual traffic. That’s why blogs like Whatever were so ludicrously overrated (and why their proprietors were always careful to conceal their actual traffic metrics), because they did a good job of cross-linking and driving up their Technorati rating at the expense of less-linked, but better-trafficked blogs.

In any event, to paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, the ranking systems come and go, but we are still here.

Zero native job growth since 2000

The facts are clear. The statistics are undeniable. Immigrants have taken ALL the new jobs created in America since 2000. The Center for Immigration Studies reaches three conclusions in a statistical study based on BLS data:

First, the long-term decline in the employment for natives across age and education levels is a clear in­dication that there is no general labor shortage, which is a primary justification for the large increases in immigration (skilled and unskilled) in the Schumer-Rubio bill and similar House proposals.

Second, the decline in work among the native-born over the last 14 years of high immigration is consis­tent with research showing that immigration reduces employment for natives.

Third, the trends since 2000 challenge the argument that immigration on balance increases job oppor­tunities for natives. Over 17 million immigrants arrived in the country in the last 14 years, yet native employment has deteriorated significantly.

Immigration is good for an undeveloped economy in a sparsely settled country. Immigration is BAD for a developed economy in a settled country. Attempting to justify the latter on the basis of the former is, at best, seriously misguided. The economic argument has long been used to justify all the negative societal costs of immigration, and yet, the net effect of third-wave immigration has observably been a net negative for the economy.

Apparently the “jobs Americans won’t do” is “all of the new jobs created since 2000”. There are fewer native Americans working now than were working 14 years ago, but 5.7 million more employed immigrants. If the millennials want to know why they can’t find jobs after graduation, that is the primary reason why.

An update on George RR Martin’s next book

John C. Wright has the EXCLUSIVE details:

Before I left SWFA, the last sight I saw of the SWFA Mansion in New Jersey was the sight of Mr Martin diligently at work, his eyes red with lack of sleep, his typewriter smoking, steaming, and emitting sparks, nine ashtrays filled with cigarette and cigar butts and broken hoohaks heaped about it, bags of Frito chips not only empty but ripped open and the chip-dust licked dry, drained bottles of cheap claret smashed in the hearth in a glittering pile, dead elfs on the doorstep, wounded muses with threadbare wings struggling to escape the chimney, and meanwhile a horde of medical technicians from the ninth planet of Etamin inserting a needle into the major veins of his arm so that much needed nutriment and saline could reach his brain, since in his fury he had forgotten all mortal food or perhaps foresworn it.

I saw a lonely and hooded traveler on the road walking away from the SFWA Mansion (at first I took this to be someone disgusted by news that the writers guild now protected with their silence the filth and perversions of pederasts, but who, unlike me, could make no public denunciation), and, running after the silent, looming shape, asked in wonder if George RR Martin was hard at work writing the next book in his much-loved series.

Let the fans rejoice! At last!

Expose or damage control?

The Guardian relies heavily upon certain left-wing SF/F authors while reporting on the Bradley revelations:

The world of science fiction and fantasy is in shock, following news that the daughter of the bestselling late fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley has accused her mother of abusing her as a child.

Authors such as John Scalzi, G Willow Wilson and Jim Hines have reacted to the allegations against a woman who had been regarded a pillar of the SFF community with horror. The writer Janni Lee Simner has announced she will be donating her earnings from a story set in a fictional world created by Bradley to an anti-abuse charity.

One wonders how John Scalzi’s one-word commentary via Twitter, Jim “Celebrate the Legacy of MZB” Hines’s belated attempt to cover his past as an MZB cheerleader, and a female convert to Islam who published her first novel in 2012 are deemed a reasonable representation of “the world of science fiction and fantasy”.  Scalzi, who spent more words denying that Ed Kramer was still on the SFWA membership list than he did discussing Bradley, is mentioned twice in the article, while Deirdre Saoirse Moen, who along with Moira Greyland is actually responsible for the revelations, is only mentioned once in passing.

Stephen Goldin, the longtime SFWA member and former editor of the SFWA Bulletin, whose posting of the MZB depositions on SFF.net substantiated Greyland’s accusations, isn’t mentioned at all. Neither is the original MZB tribute on Tor.com that prompted Mrs. Greyland’s original email to Miss Moen.

While it is good that coverage of the problem of child abusers in science fiction is spreading, this is yet another example of why you can never trust the mainstream media to do more than scratch the surface. That being said, this part of the article is poignant and illustrates the importance of exposing the monsters regardless of the cost to their reputations:

Greyland, writing to the Guardian via email, said that she had not spoken out before “because I thought that my mother’s fans would be angry with me for saying anything against someone who had championed women’s rights and made so many of them feel differently about themselves and their lives.  I didn’t want to hurt anyone she had helped, so I just kept my mouth shut”.

Greyland, a harpist, singer and opera director, said it was now clear to her that “one reason I never said anything is that I regarded her life as being more important than mine: her fame more important, and assuredly the comfort of her fans as more important.  Those who knew me, knew the truth about her, but beyond that, it did not matter what she had done to me, as long as her work and her reputation continued.”

It will be interesting to see if this is a genuine effort to dig into the larger problem of child abuse in science fiction or if it is an exercise in damage control. Meanwhile, Larry Correia’s #1 fan actually has a reasonable take on the Bradley revelations, comparing it to the Jimmy Savile scandal, and considering it in light of how people react to the moral failures of their cultural icons:

How far can we separate any cultural figure from the values they represent? And in rejecting the figure, do we risk rejecting values that should transcend the actions of any single individual? The Mists of Avalon and the Darkover series made Marion Zimmer Bradley a leader of the emerging feminist movement in science fiction, alongside writers including Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Margaret Atwood. In critical terms Bradley was rarely considered seriously comparable to those writers, but as a writer of popular, mythic fiction she reached an audience those more acclaimed figures of feminism SF did not.

Readers will ultimately choose whether the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley are remembered and continue to be read. Many readers, myself included, will agree with Redditor CJGibson that “to read/support these authors in spite of their positions or actions sends a tacit message that what they’re doing is OK”.

I don’t have any problem with people separating the work from the artist and continuing to enjoy it. The work and the artist are not the same and the work doesn’t NECESSARILY reflect the evils of the artist. I still listen to Lostprophets despite the appalling crimes of the band’s lead singer. (MZB’s work is no dilemma for me despite the observable overlap between her crimes and her fiction as I never thought much of her work in the first place.) I don’t believe in the whitewashing of history.

Where I have a problem, and where I believe a line must be drawn, is when the artist is still celebrated, honored, and lionized on the basis of his work while his known moral failings are ignored or even denied.

Immigration and sexual exploitation

The sexual exploitation of children is on the rise in America according to the FBI:

Six child victims and three pimps were discovered by law enforcement officers during the last several days in Texas. The apprehensions were made as the result of Operation Cross Country, an effort to curb commercial sex trafficking in the United States. Michelle Lee, a San Antonio-based FBI spokeswoman, told Breitbart Texas that the sexual exploitation of children is “increasing exponentially.” The victims and pimps found during the most recent sting were located in Austin and San Antonio, according to a press release from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The recovered children were victims of child prostitution….

The number of child victims, as well as the number of arrests, related
to child exploitation increases every year. Lee said, “It’s not just
because we’re getting better at understanding the threat. … The threat
is also getting worse. At least here in San Antonio, our observation is
that children are being victimized in increasing numbers when it comes
to sexual exploitation and trafficking. It’s increasing exponentially.”

It is ludicrous to attempt to blame the increase on “social media”. The real reason is immigration. There are four reasons why immigration is the primary cause of the increase in sexual exploitation:

  1. The stepfather effect: Men are far more likely to sexually exploit and abuse children of different races than children of their own race. The protective instinct all men is feel towards children is reduced due to the lack of visible genetic connection to the children.
  2. The color effect: In America, blacks, and particularly Hispanics, are much more likely to molest children than whites. Blacks are 1.85x more likely to molest children, and Hispanics are 2.35x more likely to do so. So, the more People of Color there are in a society, the more sexual exploitation of children there will be.
  3. The broken family effect: Immigration usually separates a nuclear family from an extended family, and often separates an individual from his nuclear family for extended periods of time. If they are children without the protection of a family, these individuals are more readily victimized. If they are adults, these individuals without the civilizing influence of a family more readily behave in a predatory manner, including a sexually exploitative one. 
  4. The cultural effect: Many immigrants come from cultures where it is acceptable to marry young girls as young as eight. The fact that they have changed their geographical location does not magically change their cultural values. They simply view underage girls as viable sexual objects in a way that no normal American does.

Since mass immigration, especially the immigration of unaccompanied children, has been on the rise, we can safely expect the sexual exploitation of children to continue to exponentially increase until the mass repatriations finally begin. The problem isn’t limited to America either; in the UK, there are many networks of “Asians” (mostly Pakistanis) who have been systematically preying upon British girls for years, luring them in with presents and handsome young boyfriends, then gang-raping them and turning them into prostitutes.

Now that the economy is in depression, both observably and statistically, one cannot even argue for the economic benefits of immigration. Mass immigration is a societally destructive force, and the only civilized long-term solution is the mass repatriation of the various immigrants to their native lands.