The benefits of interventionism

Strangely enough, we’re not hearing so much about those wonderfully inspiring purple fingers in the lead-up to the coming Iraqi elections:

Children in Iraq could be legally married before the age of nine under sweeping legislation tabled on Tuesday that introduces new religious restrictions on women’s rights. As almost its last act before elections at the end of the month, the Iraqi parliament looks likely to pass new marital rules for its majority Shia community with a draft law criticised by human rights activists as “legalised inquality”

The legislation has been approved by the governing coalition in an effort to attract support from Shia Muslims in the April 30 vote.

Current Iraqi law sets the legal age for marriage at 18 without parental approval and states girls as young as 15 can be married only with a guardian’s approval. It does not allow for special provisions according to sect. But the legislation, known as the Jaafari law, introduces rules almost identical to those of neighbouring Iran, a Shia-dominated Islamic theocracy.

That’s certainly an effective way to reduce the rate of illegitimate births by teenage mothers. Remember, we are reliably informed that representative democracy is the best possible form of government for all human population groups and sub-species. And since all morals and cultural norms are relative, on what basis can anyone complain about six-year old girls getting married, especially anyone living in a degraded culture where men can “marry” men, women can “marry” women, and female children are permitted to obtain contraceptives and abortions without parental consent.

It’s democratic progress, ergo inevitable. Relax and enjoy it.

Lion’s Den IX: Sarah Hoyt

Sarah Hoyt is dipping her toe into the cold, but liberating waters of independent publishing with her book WITCHFINDER. She describes it thusly:

In Avalon, where the world runs on magic, the king of Britannia appoints a witchfinder to rescue unfortunates with magical power from lands where magic is a capital crime. Or he did. But after the royal princess was kidnapped from her cradle twenty years ago, all travel to other universes has been forbidden, and the position of witchfinder abolished. Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, son of the last witchfinder, breaks the edict. He can’t simply let people die for lack of rescue. His stubborn compassion will bring him trouble and disgrace, turmoil and danger — and maybe, just maybe, the greatest reward of all.

Sarah adds: This book was very strange. First, it started as an almost joke.  A friend
suggested we collaborate on it because, hey, people liked regency fantasies,
and we wrote a proposal (which was nothing like this.  For one, it was for a
much shorter book) and we sent it to my agent.  My agent first balked at
sending it out because “you have a woman from present-day Earth and someone
in the regency.  No one will know what to do with it.”  (Apparently she
never read things like Diana Wynne Jones Chrestomanci series or the ton of
time travel romance books that were so popular in the eighties.  Okay, truth
be told, I never read those either, but I DID hear of them.  Impossible not
to.)  Then she sent it out under pressure (or at least she said she had) and
the rejections agreed with her opinion. So, this book went in the drawer with about fifteen others that never sold
in proposal.

Two and a half years ago when I started blogging every day (and wasn’t out
politically yet) my biggest issue was what to blog about.  (It still is,
because there isn’t something that fascinating to me every day.)  So I
decided to make Fridays easier by posting a chapter of a novel every Friday. 
Why Witchfinder?  No idea.  I think it more or less was the first one to
come up.  Also, it was definitely not a Baen novel, so no problems with
upsetting my publisher.

I wrote to my friend, asked her if she’d send me a quit-claim on the novel.
She did.  I started posting it.  I thought it would be a shortish novel and
never come out officially, but I gave people the option of donating $6 and
when it was done, I’d edit it and send them an ebook.  I made $5k.  While
it’s not the advance I normally get for science fiction and fantasy, it was
the advance I got from Prime Crime for mystery.  (SF/F pay me better.)
Also, when I sent it out to be edited, my three editors who are two trusted
friends and my husband (yes, I know typos escaped.  Part of it was the way
it was written.  You should have seen it before) all thought I should
publish it.  Which led to my publishing it.

But structure/plot/possibly typo-ing it all feels very odd to me.  If you’d
asked me if I could write a novel a chapter a week over two years, I’d have
said you were nuts.  And yet, when I read it (other than continuity typos,
like people changing name, which I was still fixing at the last minute) it
read as well (or as badly, depending on your opinion!) as any other of my
works. Except perhaps the world building got WAY more convoluted than it
normally does, because I world build in sudden fits of brilliance and a year
and a half is a lot of time for such fits.
So, in a way this novel is a first two ways: it’s my first slow-written
novel, and my first indie novel.

VD: If you’re interested in reading WITCHFINDER, writing a review, and sending it to me for posting here, please send me an email with WITCHFINDER in the subject. And if you have any questions for Sarah about her book, please post them in the comments here.

I’m also looking for 10 launch reviewers for both a)  AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LANDS and b) TRANSHUMAN OR SUBHUMAN. For the former, you’ll need to be able to read it and post a review on Amazon over the coming weekend. Email me with either AWAKE or TRANSHUMAN in the subject, but not both, please.

Legalizing prostitution

Dr. Helen considers whether legal prostitution would free men from sexual control by women:

How can it be legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it? Who are you selling sex to if no men are allowed to buy it? Of course, any time one sees a feminist of the Catherine MacKinnon ilk, all logic goes out the window as long as men are rounded up and put in jail. This is sick, twisted logic and has no place in a free society. It was a group of women who apparently banned prostitution in the US according to this Wikipedia entry:

    Originally, prostitution was widely legal in the United States. Prostitution was made illegal in almost all states between 1910 and 1915 largely due to the influence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Perhaps women don’t want the competition from prostitutes for resources from men? Or they just feel disgusted that a man might be able to get sex so easily? I do wonder if men were able to go freely to prostitutes without fear of jail time if it would free them sexually from female and (and state) control?

It’s hard to think it would make too much difference, but then, the sexual marketplace does tend to look very different to a high status man to whom there are more sluts readily available than he can possibly nail than it does to a low status man who is working on a multi-year dateless spell.

The thing is, the Alphas and Betas don’t need more sexual access and I don’t see too many Deltas and Gammas availing themselves of whores because it’s hard to put a prostitute on a pedestal. It would tend to dispel the illusion of womanly virtue to which they cling, often in direct denial of the evidence.

My suspicion, and it is only that, is that legalizing prostitution might have a net virtuous effect on women, as the distinction between SMV and MMV would be more clear. In which case, the answer would be no, legalization would not free men from the sexual control of women.

In any event, there is no reason to ban prostitution except on grounds of religious morality, and if it is unconstitutional to ban everything from homogamy to abortion on those grounds, then I see no reason why the trade in sexual services should be limited in any way. Whether one pays the woman or not, the moral infraction committed is the same.

#uninstalled

Firefox on Vox Popoli: 20 percent, down from 34 percent.
Firefox on Alpha Game: 22 percent, down from 30 percent.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Eich debacle turns out to be the biggest negative for Mozilla since Google introduced Chrome. Chrome is actually down one percentage point, from 27 to 26 percent, as Pale Moon now accounts for 7 percent of the traffic here and 3 percent at AG.

There are even some suspicions that Mozilla is attempting to mitigate the size of the negative reports by manipulating its feedback reports: “C’mon Mozilla, I KNOW the UNHAPPY count exceeded 23,000 yesterday (8th),
others saw 50K for 7 day total. You can manipulate your own feedback
forum if you choose to do so, but you cannot manipulate your market
share. You COULD publish a full and unreserved apology, and reinstate
your fine ex-CEO. That might POSSIBLY stop the rot, and save your
organisation from going under.”

And that is why it is important to #uninstallfirefox. It is the best way to prevent Mozilla from controlling the narrative in a friendly mainstream media, which has been much quieter about the backlash than about the initial criticism of Eich.

Wobbling on Global Warming

The New York Times finally begins to recognize that scare tactics on global warming don’t work on anyone but children and the gullible:

[E]vidence that a fear-based approach backfires has grown stronger. A frequently cited 2009 study in the journal Science Communication summed up the scholarly consensus. “Although shocking, catastrophic, and large-scale representations of the impacts of climate change may well act as an initial hook for people’s attention and concern,” the researchers wrote, “they clearly do not motivate a sense of personal engagement with the issue and indeed may act to trigger barriers to engagement such as denial.” In a controlled laboratory experiment published in Psychological Science in 2010, researchers were able to use “dire messages” about global warming to increase skepticism about the problem.

Many climate advocates ignore these findings, arguing that they have an obligation to convey the alarming facts. But claims linking the latest blizzard, drought or hurricane to global warming simply can’t be supported by the science. Our warming world is, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increasing heat waves and intense precipitation in some places, and is likely to bring more extreme weather in the future. But the panel also said there is little evidence that this warming is increasing the loss of life or the economic costs of natural disasters.

Another big factor in the mass refusal to buy into the AGW/CC propaganda is the observation that no one who claims to be worried about global warming is living in a sustainable manner in wind-powered tents far away from the sea.

Fumigating the Firefox

Since Pale Moon is built upon a Firefox base, it still reports itself to be Firefox to web sites by default. Fortunately, it is trivially simple to turn this off and cause the browser to correctly report itself as PaleMoon.

  1. Create a new tab.
  2. Type “about:config” into the Address Bar as if it were an internet site (URL).
  3. Type “compatMode” into the Search box that will appear right below the Address Bar.
  4. On the line general.useragent.compatMode.firefox there are three settings: user set, boolean, true. Click on “true” and it will change to false.
  5. Close the tab.

That’s it. Web sites will no longer incorrectly attribute your pageviews to Firefox. If as many people have switched to Pale Moon as have switched to Chrome, the decline in Firefox usage may actually be twice what I originally estimated.

“A tollbooth on the bankster turnpike”

A retiring SEC attorney criticizes the Securities and Exchange Commission:

James Kidney, who joined the SEC in 1986 and retired this month, offered the critique in a speech at his goodbye party. His remarks hit home with many in the crowd of SEC lawyers and alumni thanks to a part of his resume not publicly known: He had campaigned internally to bring charges against more executives in the agency’s 2010 case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)

The SEC has become “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,” Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. “On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening.”

Kidney said his superiors were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing difficult cases. The agency’s penalties, Kidney said, have become “at most a tollbooth on the bankster turnpike.”

This doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, but it confirms everything we suspected. Government regulation simply Does Not Work. It is easily coopted and corrupted, most particularly in industries where large quantities of money are involved.

Fines simply do not work when penalizing corporations. They just pass on the costs to their customers, or in the case of banks, create more money out of thin air. And it’s too easy to place the blame on employees who no longer work there.

A tale of two responses

Obviously the Firefox Input tool is not the only way in which people communicate their dissatisfaction with Mozilla. But by any measure, it should be readily obvious that the firestorm of criticism directed at Mozilla for forcing Brandon Eich’s resignation and the #uninstallfirefox movement, which is growing by the day, is considerably greater than the criticism aimed at the organization in response to Eich’s promotion to CEO.

It is both remarkable and telling that while Mozilla’s board and its employees were quite willing to speak out when their new CEO was supposedly a tremendous PR disaster, they have remained silent in the face of considerably greater public outrage. This is despite the Happy/Sad metric registering all-time highs and the number of messages running nearly 10x higher than normal and nearly all of them being negative.

Mozilla has made it clear that its values directly contradict those of Christians as well as everyone who believes in the separation of work and politics. As John C. Wright said: “No lover of liberty will continue to use Firefox after this day.”

If you haven’t switched yet, I encourage you to do so. Pale Moon works very well, and if that doesn’t work for you or if you are looking for greater privacy, I would recommend giving Epic Browser a look.

On this blog, Firefox use is already down by more than one-fifth, from 34 to 27 percent of readers. On Alpha Game, it is down by exactly one-fifth, from 30 to 24 percent.

Short-sighted GOP rules lawyers

In their efforts to force the unelectable Mitt Romney on the Republican grass roots in 2012, the rules lawyers of the Republica Party elite have created a serious procedural problem for the party’s nomination process in 2016:

Led by Romney loyalist and pitbull GOP lawyer Ben Ginsberg, the RNC made changes in the rules that would not only insure an orderly convention for the front-runner in 2012 but would make it extremely difficult—if not completely impossible—for an intra-party challenge to be mounted against a President Romney in 2016. Apparently, it never occurred to the majority of the Rules Committee that there might not be a President Romney in 2016  to protect….

Rather than only requiring a candidate to have a plurality of the delegates from five states in order to have one’s name placed into nomination, the rule was changed to require a candidate to have a majority of delegate votes in at least eight states as a prerequisite to nomination.

Under the new rule, only Mitt Romney would meet the test for nomination assuring that there would be no Ron Paul problem.

While this might worked out nicely for those controlling the GOP convention in 2012, the amended rule now poses a serious change in how the game is to be played in 2016. What’s more, given that the rule cannot be changed until the next round of delegates arrive at  the convention in 2016 and the Rules Committee convenes to establish the new rules of the convention, the Republicans are stuck with what they have wrought in 2012.

And that represents a very significant problem for anyone who believes the voters should have something to say about their party’s nominee or those who don’t favor a convention where the bosses and delegates get to decide who is the nominee, irrespective of what home state Republicans might have to say.

Based on the RNC issued memo in 2011 ruling that ‘winner-take-all’ elections will only be permitted when a candidate receives a majority of the votes cast in the primary battle, and given the deep bench of candidates likely to seek the 2016 GOP nomination, it seems unlikely that there are going to be a whole lot of states producing majority wins for candidates.

Thus, a Republican candidate who receives 49 percent of the vote in a “winner-take-all” state will not be permitted to get 100 percent of the state’s delegates. And that means it is an almost certainty that there will not be a candidate walking into the GOP convention with the requisite eight states producing a majority of delegates supporting a candidate now required to have one’s name placed into nomination.

And you think that these breathtakingly dishonest idiots are going fix everything that Obama has wrought? Or anything, anything at all? The odds are very good that they’ll make things considerably worse, as was the case with the Bush administration. Don’t vote Republican if you value freedom, small government, or the Constitution. Don’t be under the illusion that Republican rule will make things any better at all. Republicans are every bit as guilty of the destruction of the United States of America as their Democratic partners in crime.

Wenn Sie wollen

In case you’re interested in brushing up on your German, QUANTUM MORTIS Der programmierte Verstand is a free download on Amazon today. Dr. G did a great job translating it, and it’s considerably more accessible than the Goethe and Hesse I was assigned to read in my high school German class.

In other Castalia House news, we are days away from releasing John C. Wright’s AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND and weeks away from releasing Stickwick’s ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS curriculum, which is receiving rave reviews from the early reviewers. The latter will be available in PDF through Smashwords since EPUB/Kindle simply isn’t a viable format in this particular case.

UPDATE: Like David Hasselhoff, we are ein Bombenerfolg in Germany:

    #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Foreign Language Fiction > German
    #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Foreign Languages > German > Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction

 Amazon Bestseller-Rang: #16 Kostenfrei in Kindle-Shop
   Nr. 1 in Kindle-Shop > eBooks > Fantasy & Science Fiction > Science Fiction