The rogue agency

The NSA and CIA don’t answer to Congress:

In 2007, reporter Charles Davis asked then-Chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee – Jay Rockefeller – about clandestine U.S. operations against a foreign government.

DAVIS: Reports quote administration officials as saying this is going on and it’s being done in a way to avoid oversight of the Intelligence Committee. Is there any way—

ROCKEFELLER: They’ll go to any lengths to do that, as we’ve seen in the last two days [during hearings on FISA].

DAVIS: Is there anything you could do in your position as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee to find answers about this, if it is in fact going on?

ROCKEFELLER: Don’t you understand the way Intelligence works? Do you think that because I’m Chairman of the Intelligence Committee that I just say I want it, and they give it to me? They control it. All of it. ALL of it. ALL THE TIME. I only get –  and my committee only gets –  what they WANT to give me.

This is shocking … but not new. The NSA was created in secret … and Congress wasn’t even notified.

 This description of Congress’s feeble attempts at oversight is almost amusing:

Amash
said that intelligence officials are often evasive during classified
briefings and reveal little new information unless directly pressed.

“You don’t have any idea what kind of things are going on,” Amash said. “So
you have to start just spitting off random questions. Does the
government have a moon base? Does the government have a talking bear?
Does the government have a cyborg army? If you don’t know what kind of
things the government might have, you just have to guess and it becomes a
totally ridiculous game of twenty questions.“

I have to admit, I am genuinely curious about this talking bear? Does anyone know if the government’s ownership of it was officially denied?

Too religious, too difficult

This article on Gene Wolfe summarizes the current problem of traditional SF/F publishing. If the man who is widely considered to be among the greatest living SF writers could not get published today, then it should be entirely apparent that there is a serious problem in the industry:

Lots of novel readers—from the highest brow to the lowest—nod politely when the science-fiction writer Gene Wolfe is mentioned. But even among science-fiction fans, one gets the sense that they’re saying, “Yes, yes, we know how good he is, but we’d rather talk about such bestselling authors as Neil Gaiman or Robert Jordan, Laurel Hamilton or Neal Stephenson.” As Glenn Reynolds, the inveterate science-fiction enthusiast and popular blogger of Instapundit.com, recently wrote, “Gene Wolfe is a superb writer, but I’m not crazy about his storytelling.” I recently asked a veteran New York editor whether Wolfe could find a publisher today if he were just coming along as a young writer. “Probably not,” she admitted. His writing is too religious, too difficult, and too strange.

I think one could quite reasonably question if JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, or HP Lovecraft could get published today. Tolkien might well be accounted too difficult, Lovecraft too strange, and Lewis is more openly religious than Wolfe. It’s fascinating, too, to note that Wolfe appears to have anticipated my own argument that the philosophical problem of evil and suffering is not a problem for Christianity.

It is a familiar charge of modern atheism that the existence of pain argues against the existence of God. “For some time it has seemed to me,” Wolfe insists, “that it would be even easier to maintain the position that pain proves or tends to prove God’s reality.”

Pain necessarily implies pleasure just as shadow implies light and evil implies good. The opposite of pain is not pleasure, but rather insensate nothingness, the gray, unfeeling goo of the no-believers.

Setting the record straight… again

I have to admit that I do not understand how lying about my easily confirmed CV is supposed to serve as a substantive form of criticism.  Do these critics imagine that denying history is a valid and convincing form of rhetoric? I recently mentioned that when critics attempt to dig through my words in search of a disqualifying quote, they tend to forget that I started as a nationally syndicated columnist. In other words, unlike the average person blithely expressing himself on the Internet, I have always been aware that my statements are public and will be carefully examined for critical purposes.

This prompted the following response:

You
mean “World Net Daily? LOL….. You know, they’ll give a column to
anyone with a heartbeat and a willingness to say nasty things about
black people. Not really something to brag about . Especially since your daddy got you the job, he having been on the board of directors.

No, I did not mean WND. This should be obvious, given that WND is not a national syndicate. I began writing a column for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1994. This column was picked up for national syndication by Chronicle Features, the syndicate arm of the San Franscisco Chronicle, in 1995. I was the sixth columnist in the Pioneer Press’s 145-year history to be syndicated. The syndicated column was picked up by the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal/Constitution, among others. My favorite was the North Bay Nugget. During this time I also wrote several major reviews for Computer Gaming World and Electronic Entertainment, such as those on Heretic, Dark Forces, and TIE Fighter.

I did not begin writing for WND until 2001. It soon became the third most-popular weekly column there after Ann Coulter’s and Pat Buchanan’s and was nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate two years later. My father did not get me the job there. Nor can that column even be reasonably be described as a job, as I never took money from WND for any of those columns.

Another critic asserted a non-existent double standard.

The point is that Vox’s double standards is funny. He gets a little
uppity about people taking him out of context, but has no problem doing
the same. It’s funny. Even funnier though is his touting of his “column”
at WND that his daddy insisted he be given. And it was so meaningful.
People still talk about the amazing insights he offered. We know the
import of his views based on the many offers he’s had to recreate this
column elsewhere.

First, I don’t take people out of context. Second, my daddy didn’t insist that I be given a “column” at WND; Joseph Farah asked my father if I would be willing to write a column there. Third, I am contacted by various news sites inquiring if I might be interested in contributing to them on a fairly regular basis. And then there was this pair of individuals who questioned my veracity concerning a pair of game advances that were each worth more than 60+ times an advance that Mr. Scalzi bragged about:

“Ha, there is no way this is true. What was the advance for and when?”

“$2.4 Million in advances in one year. Not bad….RIGHT…….And yet, still no game from Vox Day. You
just have to wonder how far the guy will go to soothe his envy of
another writer who outpaces him so consistently. It’s a little vulgar.”

As it happens, the two advances that year were rather more than $2.4 million combined; there is an article in the Star Tribune which specifically discusses a $1.8 million advance that Fenris Wolf received for one of the two contracts mentioned. I’m not envious of a writer who brags about $20,000 advances. I’m not even envious of one of my European friends who received an advance more than ten times bigger than that on his most recently published novel. I don’t want to receive advances from anyone.

Those are the facts. The publicly available and undeniable facts. It is true that many are not familiar with them as I don’t often discuss these things, and in fact, I would not be inclined to mention them at all if they were not already public information. But they are what they are, as anyone can readily determine for himself. The problem, I suspect, is that when facts get in the way of the favored narrative, these critics prefer to reject those facts instead of modifying their narrative accordingly.

How Coleco scored Donkey Kong

I ran across this interview with the driving force behind the Colecovision and found it to be fascinating. It seems incredible to think you could once get the rights to great arcade games like Zaxxon and Turbo for $5,000.

Bromley knew this title – which was hitherto unknown in the West – could be the game to propel his console into the public consciousness. He also knew he had to act fast. “A meeting was arranged for the next day,” he reveals. “I said I wanted the rights to Donkey Kong. I didn’t want Atari to find out about this game. After a lengthy conversation Makihara-san told me Yamauchi-san wanted $200,000 advance and $2.00 per unit royalty. It was around 10:00AM and Yamauchi-san knew that I needed to catch my train, so then he added the kicker: the US$ 200,000 must be wired to his account by 12:00 midnight, or there was no deal.”

The odds were most certainly against Bromley. “The most Coleco had ever paid for an advance for any license up to then was $5,000,” he says. ”Also, they never, ever paid more than 5% of their selling price; the worst case would be about 90 cents. Now because of the need to wire the money before 12:00AM Tokyo time, I needed to take the next available train. I would have to call as soon as I got back to my hotel in Tokyo which would be in the afternoon and therefore wake up Arnold Greenberg in the US, the only one who could authorise an immediate wire transfer. I was to call him at home, wake him up, and then ask him to wire $200,000 for a game he has never seen or heard of. If that wasn’t bad enough, he then has to agree to more than twice the usual royalty amount!”

Bromley stayed firm, spurred on by the fact that he knew that Donkey Kong would be a smash-hit once western gamers laid eyes on it. “Upon my return to Tokyo, I called Arnold Greenberg from my room – I was shaking a little,” he admits. “It was about 4:00 AM in the morning and I got: ‘Whaaaaa? Do you know what time it is?’ I referred him to a conversation we had days before with marketing and sales; we all agreed we needed a really spectacular game to bundle with the ColecoVision console to create an impact. I then told him of the conditions: $200,000 advance and the $2.00 per unit royalty. I said: ‘I have found that game.’ To my surprise all he said: ‘is it really that good?’ I told him that it was as good as Pac-Man. He asked what it was called and I uttered ‘Donkey Kong.’ Silence. For the first time I realized how silly the name sounded. What seemed like an hour later he said: ‘OK. Let’s do it,’ and said he would wire over the money as soon as the banks opened that day.”

It’s also an important lesson in what passes for Japanese business ethics. I had to laugh upon reading it, having run into similar issues with both Konami and Sega in the past. Fortunately, having studied in Tokyo, I was more prepared for them than Mr. Bromley was, although it’s hard to argue with how well it worked out for him. What a pity Coleco didn’t tough it out the way Nintendo did; the industry would have been the better for it.

THE ALTAR OF HATE

Today Castalia House published my collection of short stories entitled THE ALTAR OF HATE. It consists of one novella, one poem, and eight short stories. Some of the stories will be familiar to longtime Dread Ilk, having been originally available on my old Eternal Warriors web site back in the day or published in Stupefying Stories. As the collection is dedicated to Bane, who would have enjoyed its dark and occasionally sinister bent, it contains the poem that is here on this site, “Bane Walks On”. And there is a new story, one with which I am particularly pleased, that involves the application of a particular Maupassant mechanism to the futuristic world of Quantum Mortis.

The cover illustration was created by our newest artist, Jeremiah, who did an excellent job working under the direction of JartStar. The title story was inspired by a visit to Venice some years ago; I very much doubt any writer can visit that eerie, decaying city without feeling the proddings of a brooding, water-logged muse. I very much like the cover art, as in addition to the Venetian theme it reminds me a little of the paperback edition of Mona Lisa Overdrive, an image that Psykosonik once used as the cover of our demo tape.

From the initial reviews:

“Each story has its appeal across multiple genres, although to me the
story from which the title is derived was particularly moving.”

“From an eldritch tale blended with computer insider humor, an ode to a
fallen friend, to science fiction with a twist, this is a good
collection of Vox’s shorter writings to date.”

“The stories move along, but one feels the uneasy eyes of the abyss
staring back as you progress, as it were, through a darkened ancient
forest. Only an author of the first rank could achieve this.”

In other Castalia news, fans of Tom’s Rathaverse will be pleased to note this comment to a reviewer hoping for a sequel: “Look for The Court-Martial of Ratha Flower Wood, maybe before Christmas.”

The new evil empire

The European public has finally begun to figure out that the Eurofascists of the EU are cut from the same cloth as Napoleon and Hitler:

Britons see Russia in a more positive light than the European Union,
despite recent tensions with Moscow over Ukraine, according to a poll
published on Saturday. The league table of 27 “liked”
countries and institutions put the European Parliament — for which
elections are being held in May — sixth from bottom, and the EU fourth
from bottom. Only Saudi Arabia,
Iran and North Korea ranked below the European parliament when those
polled were asked how positive or negative they felt towards them.
Israel was fifth from bottom and Russia was seventh from bottom. Canada was top.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the British fear the EU more than the Russians. The EU is an invading and occupying force. The Russians are doing little more than securing their national interests in responds to EU and US provocations, and in doing so, proving that national interests supersede artificially-drawn political boundaries.

What shall we feel?

Fred Reed asks an honest question:

What am I, and people my age, supposed to feel other than raw contempt for pig-ignorant, self-righteous, utterly useless illiterates whom society will have to feed and house like barnyard animals for the next fifty years?

I suspect that in another two decades, this will be the moderate position. There is nothing to salvage them. “Education”, the progressive answer to all social evils? Education is what turned them into utterly useless illiterates in the first place.

The iceberg’s tip

I find it both amusing and absurd to observe how certain trolls simply cannot manage to control themselves. Despite my supposedly controversial style, in my entire history of Internet use, I have only been asked twice to refrain from commenting on an Internet site. In both cases, I not only refrained from commenting there, but ceased regular reading there as well. I even declined an invitation to return to one of the sites when contacted and encouraged to do so.

Contrast with that the behavior of Ann Morgan, who is not only one of the trolls who continues to read this blog and attempts to post easily identifiable comments here, but apparently can’t even manage to keep her troll-dentities straight:

Rose colored glasses March 22, 2014 7:13 PM

**It celebrates the Egyptians, Chinese, Mayans, Indus to downplay Christian Civilization without ever once considering the barbarity of those civs.**

So… on the planet you came from, Christians never burned women alive for nonsensical reasons, held slaves, or spent 400 years trying to wipe out the Cherokee and Souix…

Ann Morgan March 22, 2014 7:16 PM 

This comment has been removed by the author.

Don March 22, 2014 8:08 PM

Ann did you forget which sock puppet you were using? What is that, three on this thread alone. I would be honestly interested in hearing why you think you cannot stay away even when you have been told. Worse you simply cannot follow the rules so we always know it’s you. You fool no one but yourself. Go do something quit hating Christians and blaming others for how you respond to your problems. It’s spring go for a walk. Throw rocks at the beach, go to Church tomorrow, I promise though it might hurt giving up sin and pride is painful at first, you’ll be happier in the end.

While I normally delete the trolls’ comments, I leave those I consider to be educationally illustrative. This example of a troll attempting to resurrect itself should help explain to some of the relative newcomers why I occasionally nuke what superficially appear to be innocuous comments, but are actually the tip of an incipient and entirely familiar iceberg.

For some reason, the trolls never seem to grasp that virtually no one, in the entire history of the Internet, shows up for the first time on an established blog and promptly vomits forth a massive series of comments indicating familiarity with both the blog and its regular commenters. It should be obvious that changing one’s identity will never fool anyone so long as one insists on saying the exact same things that resulted in one’s identification as a troll in the first place. But then, logic does not appear to be a strong point with these creatures.

Speaking of one’s critics, I thought it was amusing to see that someone is attempting to imitate my cruel tactic of directly quoting Mr. Scalzi’s words. While I have no doubt he’ll be able to dig up a few careless infelicities, people tend to forget that I started as a nationally syndicated columnist. This means that I have always been aware that my words will be mined and carefully sifted for the purpose of attacking me. That is why quotes cited for use against me are usually modified or grammatically incomplete.

Otherwise, they tend to say more about the critic’s particular ideological bent than anything else. I mean, does anyone who has read this blog for more than five minutes seriously think I am even slightly embarrassed with people seeing observations like these being publicly attributed to me? I mean, what is the implied argument here, women DO have a Magic Vagina Power with a range of 30+ yards?

On Doctor-Assisted Suicide
I suspect euthanasia advocates would feel differently if it was legalized, but the doctor was required to use an axe.

On Male Intuition
Men can, as it happens, tell when a woman doesn’t have any idea what
she’s doing. As hard as it may be to believe this, a woman’s Magic
Vagina Power does not actually ensorcel every male within a 30-yard
radius and cause them to believe that a woman is automatically
superlative at every form of human endeavor.

On Public Education
“Is sending your kids to American public schools parental malpractice?” Yes.

Combative and confrontational

Since we are all about the evidence here at VP, be it scientific, documentary, or testimonial, here is a documented example of the sort of thing that a certain Baen author pointed out a certain Tor author is prone to overlooking on the part of the Tor editors when he is busy on pinkshirt patrol policing the behavior of other SF/F publishers.

The Baen author wrote: “Scalzi’s editor Patrick Nielsen-Hayden has been a rather routine and
divisive voice on his Making Light blog for many years now.  Often
combative, often confrontational.  Both he and his wife.  How much
division have the Nielsen-Hayden duo sown?  How much has their invective
and their involvement in various controversies helped to put up walls
in fandom?  Has Scalzi ever once called either of them out for it?”

Then someone sent me this little rant, courtesy of Teresa Neobatrachia Hayden, as she threatened those who dared to criticize her husband, the self-declared racist, Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

There’s been a big LJ thrash recently, one of those maelstroms of online
stupidity that take on a life of their own. All kinds of good people
got trashed, starting with Elizabeth Bear. Patrick got involved when he
posted some consoling remarks to Lisa Spangenberg. In the course of
those remarks, he observed that (1) some people are stupid; and (2)
some people don’t argue as well as others. The mob took this personally,
and lit into him.

What would you expect from a group that’s
self-selected for agreement with the statement, “I’m stupid, and I don’t
argue well”? Things got extremely ugly.

I wonder whether any of
those draggletailed loudmouths have noticed that Patrick has now deleted
his entire Live Journal, all the way back to the beginning. I doubt
they have. They don’t strike me as the sort to go back and see the
damage they’ve done. Patrick has as usual taken them seriously; whereas
they, knowing themselves better than he does, will have known they
weren’t worth listening to, and assumed they’d had no effect.

I
tender them my congratulations. Whatever good there was in Patrick’s LJ
is gone now. Those members of the mob who actually wanted someone to
listen to them now have one less person to do it. The junior literary
critics and wanna-be writers have lost one of the central editors in
science fiction from their conversation. And if any of that lot
professes to care about Patrick personally — please understand I’m not
rating that probability very high at the moment — it should be obvious
to them what kind of effect they’ve had.

I know Patrick better
than anyone else. This is serious damage. The nithings who’ve hurt him
will have moved on to some other inane topic by now. There’s nothing
worthwhile I can do to them. It wouldn’t take away his hurt — and
besides, they wouldn’t understand most of what I had to say to them.

One
other issue: when Patrick and I first registered our Live Journal
accounts, it never occurred to us to use anything other than our real
names — or rather, our real initials, which are easily traced to us,
and which we’ve used as userIDs in other forums where our identities are
or were known. Has it not occurred to the people attacking him that
they can say anything, whereas what they say about him will show up
whenever someone Googles his name? In terms of public reputation,
they’re playing with Monopoly money, and he’s playing with the real
thing.

Some of the people who are using false names are known to
him. Some of them are known to or evident to me. In those cases, I’ve
told Patrick who they really are. It’s only fair. Just on the other side
of the boundary for people whose identities he can figure out are
people whom he can almost figure out: this one is a VP student. This one
is someone he knows at conventions. This one is a reviewer he’s had
dealings with. And so forth.

Do any of those safely pseudonymous assholes ever stop to reflect that if he can tell they’re a former VP student, but not which one,
all former VP students become “people who may be traducing me on LJ at
this very moment”? The same thing goes for people he knows from
conventions, or wanna-be writers who might submit something to him.
Entire classes of people become potential attackers. That’s why I
identify everyone I can: it exculpates everyone else in that class.

Those
of you I can’t identify are not off the hook. I suggest that you never
seek to take credit under your real name for anything you’ve done or
written under your LJ pseudonym, because it’s unlikely that I will ever
forget you or what you’ve done.

Did Toni Weisskopf ever threaten anyone in the industry or publicly question the extent of their sexual experience? Alternatively, did Mr. Scalzi ever wax outraged and hold his very own editor to public account? Meanwhile, the overweight amphibian croaks about hurt… what about the terrible pain her husband inflicted on us People of Color? What about the FeelBad he has caused us? What about the way our tender feelings are bruised, even years later, by Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s cold declaration of racism?

It certainly explains a lot about the rot in SF/F over the last three decades to know that this pair of half-witted lunatics were editors at the largest publisher in the genre. Between them and the Peter Jacksons, it is a tossup as to which marriage was more disastrous for modern science fiction and fantasy.

Speaking of Mr. Nielsen Hayden’s reputation, I find it more than a little amusing that one has only to type “patrick nielsen h” into Google and the fourth autocomplete suggestion is “patrick nielsen hayden racist”. Despite all the pointing and shrieking that has been directed at me over the years, the accusation doesn’t even come up that quickly for me. What a grand editorial legacy to leave behind: racism and McRapey.

Science and raciss Africans

It’s telling how SWPLs decry whites who are openly less than enthusiastic about mudsharks, but tend to remain entirely silent concerning blacks who discriminate against other blacks who associate with whites in any way:

A new study of 212 black college students made available to Secrets found little open-mindedness: Blacks don’t like it when other blacks associate with whites, to the point of refusing help to an African-American experiencing “a run of bad luck” — just because they have white friends.

The study in the April edition of the authoritative journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found the so-called “black code” alive and kicking, prompting blacks far more than whites to frown on one of their own if they associate with the other race.

And it is particularly ironic that it is most often those who insist that the natural world is all there is and subscribe to the theory of evolution by natural selection who are most upset by the logically inevitable preference of one distinct population sub-species for its own kind in preference to the members of other sub-species that have evolved differently.

Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the “black code”, as it is not only scientifically logical, but is precisely the sort of thing that the Constitutional right of free association is designed to protect.