An idea so dumb even Florio doesn’t support it

Jerry Jones wants to turn the NFL into the NBA. Why not, when Roger Goodell appears to be intent on turning it into the WNBA?

If Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had his way, more than 12 teams would be in the postseason right now. Jones was asked on 105.3 The Fan (via ESPN.com)
whether he would support expanding the playoffs from six teams per
conference to eight teams per conference, and he said he likes that idea
because it would allow more teams to enter the playoffs and give more
fan bases a reason to get excited about the NFL in January.

This is so mind-bogglingly stupid. I don’t know if Jerry is a liberal or not, but his reasoning certainly is. Liberals are binary thinkers who believe everything is static, and that the situation will remain the same except for whatever changes they introduce to it. They don’t deal well with complexity and they don’t understand that the act of introducing those changes intrinsically changes the previous situation.

Jones assumes that because twelve fan bases are (supposedly) excited about their team making the playoffs, increasing the number of fan bases to sixteen will increase the overall excitement. But that isn’t true, because increasing the percentage of teams that make the playoffs from 37.5% to 50 percent will reduce the perceived value of making the playoffs.

In fact, it’s been obvious to me that the value of the playoffs has already been watered down, as no one really starts to think their team has a chance to make the Super Bowl until the divisional round of the playoffs anyhow. The difficulty teams are having in selling out their tickets to the wild card round can’t be entirely blamed on this, as I suspect the economy and the New NFL rules are at least partly responsible. Regardless, the fact that three of four home teams are already having a tough time selling tickets with four games this weekend only underlines the idiocy of the idea of further expanding the playoffs.

The fans obviously realize how bad the idea is. In the PFT poll with 16,398 voters, 75 percent are against it.

2013 and beyond

It seems some other bloggers are beginning to get into the habit of being open with their traffic numbers; it’s nice to see people gradually getting over the idea that hiding this information from people will somehow inflate their perceived importance. Here are the Google pageviews for a few other bloggers, with the Global Alexa rank given in parentheses.

Whatever: 7,519,279
Steve Sailer: 6,635,426
Rational Male: 2,543,859

Being open with our traffic is a healthy exercise, I think, because it prevents us from getting too carried away with any exaggerated sense of our own importance. The numbers are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to mainstream media sites like Fox News and the New York Times, but remember, there was a time when those media outlets were once very small too. If anyone else has a site for which they’d like to share their Google pageviews, leave the data in the comments and I’ll add it here.

It strikes me as almost criminal that such an original thinker as Steve should have only 6.6 million pageviews per year when clueless wonders such as Malcolm Gladwell are bestselling authors, but as Steve himself notes, “The reality is that web searches bring a lot of people to individual
postings I’ve written and then … it doesn’t make much impression on
them. They presumably stare blankly for awhile and then they’re on their
way. I suspect that my combination of highbrow content without highbrow
affectation is a turnoff for the vast majority of random visitors.”

They are the sort of people who gravitate to liberal blogs that invariably describe themselves as “thoughtful” while mindlessly repeating pablum straight out of the New York Times without ever evincing evidence of having had a single original thought of their own.

I don’t appear to have Steve’s problem, as the admitted reluctance of many bloggers to link here means that most of my traffic consists of regular readers rather than web searches and fly-by-nighters. Of course, it also means that the level of engagement, the average visit duration, and the quality of the discourse tends to be higher, so I see it as a net positive. This is also why, as the traffic continues to grow and the blog increasingly comes to the attention of various self-appointed activists, I’ll be cracking down harder and harder on the disruptive elements who will seek to interfere with the discourse here.

Disagreement is expected. Dissent is fine. Substantive criticism is both encouraged and appreciated. Mindless, reflexive ankle-biting is discouraged. Derailing is not permitted and trolls will be actively and aggressively pursued. Alles klar?

I’m also interested in opening up Alpha Game again to other regular contributors in 2014 as it was never intended as a single author blog. The initial batch of contributors all ran out of steam within the first month or two back in 2011, which is not terribly surprising, so this time I intend to take a different approach and begin by adding a single additional contributor who will focus on a particular aspect of Game. I want to add depth rather than breadth. This focus could be anything from Game in literature to Game and improving marital relations. However, if you’re not able to commit to four 500-word posts per week, please don’t even think of volunteering. Remember, I’ve been doing this for a while now and the fact is that the vast majority of people with the inchoate urge to write don’t really have all that much to say.

Mutual assistance

One thing most of you are going to have to understand is that the days of go along to get along are over. The Left is coming for you no matter what you do, no matter how careful you are to keep your head down and your mouth shut. One phrase I’m now seeing over and over again of late is an idea that was brought up often during the SFWA kerfluffle:

“Regardless of the reasons Kluwe was cut, if his description of Priefer’s
homophobic comments is accurate, then Priefer could (and should) face
NFL discipline. Open expressions of bigotry should have no place in the
NFL.”

“Hate speech, whether is it about race, gender or sexual preference has no place in any workplace.”

“I am a supporter of gay rights and equality. I also think that Kluwe is
telling the truth about Priefer. There is no place for a man like that
in any professional org.”

“Hate speech has no place in a work environment.”

And who defines bigotry and hate speech? Not you, that’s for sure. So, the Left can advocate the end of religion, the elimination of all Christians and anything else that they find desirable, and it will neither be considered hate nor bigotry, but if you even fail to show what is presently deemed sufficient enthusiasm for their latest insanity, there will be no place for you.

So, it is time to start making sure that there are places for you and for others like you who do not subscribe to the Left’s madness. DH’s new project is only one brick in a vast structure that will have to be built, because our predecessors failed us. To paraphrase the immortal words of Otter, they fucked up, they trusted the left. And now the left is running rampant through the institutions, just as Antonio Gramsci dreamed.

I received this email the other day from a self-described “Libertarian SQL Geek”

Vox, my current position will be eliminated in two weeks.  Yes, I’m being caught up in the Obamacare “we need to downsize to cover the costs of medical” rush. I view it as an opportunity.  If you have need of a database geek for projects, or know of anyone else in the who might have need of my services, please let me know, and feel free to pass my name along.

If you’re looking for a SQL guy, email me and I’ll pass it along. And actually, if you’re looking for anyone, let me know and I’ll post it here.

The idiot punter

Many people are rightly responding contemptuously to the hypocritical, self-serving, and poisonous article that Chris Kluwe wrote on Deadspin, in which he called one of the top special teams coaches in the NFL a “bigot” and called Leslie Frazier and Rick Spielman “cowards”. What a lot of people don’t know is that Kluwe also called Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Logan Mankins and Vincent Jackson “douchebags” back in 2011. He is a nasty little piece of work.

Now he’s spewing venom in public about the fact that he lost his job not because he was an overpriced, mediocre punter who finished 22nd in the league, cost more than 4 times more than his replacement, and then lost his job again when he was beaten out by a rookie in Oakland, but because Mike Priefer is a bigot. Seriously. And yet, who would you rather pay $1.63 million for the season, Kluwe’s salary or the cumulative salaries of Jeff Locke, (whose 2013 punting stats were nearly identical to Kluwe’s 2012 stats), Blair Walsh, (one of the best kickers in the league), Cordarrelle Patterson, (All-Pro WR with a legitimate claim to offensive rookie of the year), and Xavier Rhodes, (a mediocre, but improving cornerback).

It’s my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of
2012, that I was fired by Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn’t agree with
the cause I was working for, and two cowards, Leslie Frazier and Rick
Spielman, both of whom knew I was a good punter and would remain a good
punter for the foreseeable future, as my numbers over my eight-year
career had shown, but who lacked the fortitude to disagree with Mike
Priefer on a touchy subject matter.

That’s quite the sentence there. He doesn’t write any better than he punted. If you cut through all the cheap shots and name-calling, Kluwe is saying that he believes he was fired. This is news? We all know he was cut and justifiably so. He wasn’t terrible, but he wasn’t a particularly good punter either. He also had a serious downside; going back to 2002, no punter in the league gave up more return touchdowns than Kluwe. In fact, in the last 384 team seasons, not a single team gave up as many punt return touchdowns as the four (4!) that Kluwe did in 2008. Among Vikings fans, Kluwe was much less notorious for his mouth than for frequently outkicking the punt coverage and kicking untimely touchbacks when the team had the chance to pin the opponent deep in its own end.

I saw every game in which he punted and at no point did I think it was surprising that Kluwe lost his job. There were fans who wanted to get rid of him after 2008 and 2010. Was it surprising that the Vikings drafted Jeff Locke in the 5th round? Sure, but not as surprising as drafting Christian Ponder in the 1st round or the Jaguars drafting Bryan Anger in the 3rd round. Don’t forget that a few months later Kluwe lost the Oakland job to an undrafted free agent, Marquette King. We’re not talking about Ray Guy here, or even Andy Lee.

Furthermore, Kluwe is actually dumb enough to argue that the Vikings would have been fully justified to cut him for his immoral beliefs:

If there’s one thing I hope to achieve from sharing this story, it’s to make sure that Mike Priefer never holds a coaching position again in the NFL, and ideally never coaches at any level. (According to the Pioneer Press, he is “the only in-house candidate with a chance” at the head-coaching job.) It’s inexcusable that someone would use his status as a teacher and a role model to proselytize on behalf of his own doctrine of intolerance, and I hope he never gets another opportunity to pass his example along to anyone else.

In other words, Kluwe thinks it is absolutely fine to deprive someone of a livelihood on the basis of their beliefs. So, what is he complaining about then? If employers have the right to fire people for their beliefs, then the Vikings’ coaches were right to cut Kluwe. If they do not and the coaches were wrong to cut Kluwe, then how can he possibly call for Mike Priefer, who coached the Vikings special teams to fifth and sixth-place DVOA rankings in 2012 and 2013, to never again hold a coaching position at any level. If the NFL is going to take such a radical pro-homosexual position, it had better realize it is going to lose most of its fans.

As the Vikings themselves stated: “Any notion that Chris was released from our football team due to his
stance on marriage equality is entirely inaccurate and inconsistent with
team policy. Chris was released strictly based on his football
performance.”

Kluwe is the scrawny, shrewish public face of left-wing totalitarianism. He demonstrates how if you permit a leftist into your organization, he will attempt to destroy you if you do not allow him to dictate your actions, your words, and even your thoughts. Obviously, by Kluwe’s own standards, he should never have been permitted to play in the NFL in the first place.

Just shut up and go away, Kluwe. We Vikings fans never thought much of you anyhow.

Solving the teacher problem

Dave Eggers has the solution: pay them more!

McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a minimum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money.

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

Well, I can trump Mr. Eggers’s brilliant plan. I’ll bet 100 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $1 million and rose to a minimum of $1.5 million.As for how we’ll pay for it, the answer is obvious: we’ll find a way!  Translation: borrow the money and pay it back with all the new wealth generated by the taxes paid by a much better-educated generation of public school students.

Note that this brilliant plan, which ignores a few small things such as supply and demand, as well as the ramifications of debt, is the product of the founders of 826 tutoring centers. One can only presume that the tutoring centers are sponsored by Brawndo, because it’s got electrolytes that students need.

It’s fascinating that Eggers and company look at the global test results and fail to observe one more thing that Finland, Singapore, and Korea all have in common: very few Africans and Hispanics. That may not have much impact on teacher retention, but I’m guessing it has more than a little to do with the USA’s lower global ranking with regards to student performance.

The closing of the scientific mind

David Gelernter has a very good article in Commentary on the descent of science into, if not quite religion, something that is at the very least a distinct and readily identifiable philosophy:

The modern “mind fields” encompass artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind. Researchers in these fields are profoundly split, and the chaos was on display in the ugliness occasioned by the publication of Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos in 2012. Nagel is an eminent philosopher and professor at NYU. In Mind & Cosmos, he shows with terse, meticulous thoroughness why mainstream thought on the workings of the mind is intellectually bankrupt. He explains why Darwinian evolution is insufficient to explain the emergence of consciousness—the capacity to feel or experience the world. He then offers his own ideas on consciousness, which are speculative, incomplete, tentative, and provocative—in the tradition of science and philosophy.

Nagel was immediately set on and (symbolically) beaten to death by all the leading punks, bullies, and hangers-on of the philosophical underworld. Attacking Darwin is the sin against the Holy Ghost that pious scientists are taught never to forgive. Even worse, Nagel is an atheist unwilling to express sufficient hatred of religion to satisfy other atheists. There is nothing religious about Nagel’s speculations; he believes that science has not come far enough to explain consciousness and that it must press on. He believes that Darwin is not sufficient.

The intelligentsia was so furious that it formed a lynch mob. In May 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece called “Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong.” One paragraph was notable:

“Whatever the validity of [Nagel’s] stance, its timing was certainly bad. The war between New Atheists and believers has become savage, with Richard Dawkins writing sentences like, “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sadomasochistic, and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad….” In that climate, saying anything nice at all about religion is a tactical error.”

It’s the cowardice of the Chronicle’s statement that is alarming—as if the only conceivable response to a mass attack by killer hyenas were to run away. Nagel was assailed; almost everyone else ran.

Science is in desperate need of an intellectual cleansing, a return to the scientific fundamentals of its methodology. Indeed, both Science and Christianity are in much the same boat these days, as both Method and Faith have become corrupted by those who claim to speak in its name.

Mailvox: Atheist Philosophy in action

BH is bemused by a PhD’s resort to an amusing variant of the very atheist logic I mocked six years ago in TIA:

I’ve been parrying on FB with an honest-to-God PhD engineer at IBM who asserts “evolution must be true because GPS works.” His logic: because general relativity is learned from observing the stars, and the stars are billions of years old, therefore evolution is true.

Because I learned to eat crumbs that fall from the table of the most able Internet Cruelty Artist, I’ve been mercilessly pointing out his errors in reasoning, illustrating his absurdities, etc., while laughing at him.  He demanded acceptance with the premise that “ALL science requires that evolution be true.” (He repeated it over and over, comment after comment… gee, Aspergers much?)  So I asked him if my dentist needs to believe in evolution in order to clean my teeth.  ‘Yes, they need to understand that bacteria evolved 500 mya before they can clean teeth.’

I hadn’t personally encountered this level of idiocy before.

As I have occasionally noted, it takes a considerable amount of education to reduce a formerly intelligent individual to the level of a complete idiot. A PhD isn’t absolutely necessary, but it does appear to help. The IBM engineer is merely engaged in the usual bait-and-switch; he’s trying to defend evolution by cloaking it in the protective veil of real science that provides reliable results.

The new Marcher Lord Press

This should suffice to explain my rather cryptic post the other day. Marcher Lord Press has been sold:

Steve Laube has officially purchased Marcher Lord Press from Jeff Gerke. There will be a question and answer post on Monday, January 6th on Steve’s own site that we will link when the post is up.The official press is as follows:

STEVE LAUBE BUYS MARCHER LORD PRESS

(Phoenix, AZ) Steve Laube, president of The Steve Laube Agency, has agreed to purchase Marcher Lord Press, the premier publisher of Science Fiction and Fantasy for the Christian market. The sale was finalized on January 1, 2014. Laube has long been a champion of the genre, going back to his days as an acquisition editor at Bethany House Publishers. Jeff Gerke, the founder of Marcher Lord Press, said “I could not have found a better person to buy the company I started in 2008.”

Marcher Lord Press has a backlist of about 40 titles with many of them nominated or winning both Christy and Carol awards for being the best in their genre.

I certainly wish Mr. Laube great success with Marcher Lord. That being said, I will not be a part of it. I have reacquired all the publishing rights to the Selenoth and Quantum Mortis books and will be re-releasing them through the publishing arm of Alpenwolf.

Alpenwolf will continue to release hardcovers as well as ebooks and the books will continue to feature covers from the two artists who provided the six existing covers, JartStar and Kirk DuPounce.

Mailvox: The Fahrenheit Registry

Anang laments his inability to continue supporting authors who are his political enemies: 

As an author you
obviously want your works reaching the widest possible audience without
sacrificing your own creative vision. At the same time, I believe an
author’s ideology, his Weltanschauung is
reflected in his works. I’m a new and proud male American citizen. Why
should I pay my good money to read or watch something that ignores and
insults my gender, my politics or the things that made me want to be an
American?

 It’s
a little sad actually, having discovered I think this way. It means I
can never enjoy some of the most creative artists currently living. I
threw away my collection of Naomi Novik’s fantasy books after I realized
she was a local party volunteer for John Kerry’s 2004 election. All her
meticulous research into creating an alternate, fantastical history of
the Napoleonic Wars was just to insert leftist ideology and harp on
social justice/race theory/gender inequality.

It’s
a very lonely feeling, to know you are cut off from nearly every work
of popular entertainment and art if you wish to avoid propaganda-filled attacks on your existence. I suppose that is why most men watch
sports.

I knew Novik’s books fell completely apart upon the visit to Australia, (never managed to finish that one), but I didn’t realize there was a sound political reason for it. I think Anang forgets that there are actually many excellent writers who support and sustain the Western intellectual tradition; the fact that they have been exiled by the Left’s gatekeepers doesn’t mean their works don’t exist or can’t be found. In fact, increasing the exposure and awareness of Blue SF/F writers is one of my objectives in the coming year.

Perhaps it would be helpful to maintain a political registry of SF/F writers so we can permit those who don’t wish to financially support their enemies to avoid doing so. This doesn’t mean one has to avoid reading them entirely, of course, as The Pirate Bay, LibGen, and other sites have far more books that one can hope to read in a lifetime. For example, here is LibGen’s list of the current SFWA president Steven Gould’s books, in the unlikely event that anyone feels any pressing need to read them. As an added bonus, I can tell you that the SFWA absolutely hates and fears those sites; the idea that people can download their books for free seems to bother them considerably more than simply being ignored.

Never mind that there is no evidence indicating that pirated books actually harm an author’s book sales. As I’ve noted, about one in five free Amazon downloads turns into a purchase of A Throne of Bones, which is why I’d love to give away more than the 21,760 copies that were downloaded in 2013.

My thought is that one can rate an author in terms of “noviks”, in honor of Anang’s epiphany.  10 noviks would indicate an author that conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, and traditionalists should avoid at all costs on the basis of his anti-civilizational beliefs and activities. On the other side, 10 “kratmans” would indicate a staunch defender of Western civilization. Here are a few suggestions for the scale:

Naomi Novik: 5 noviks
China Mieville: 9 noviks
Charles Stross: 7 noviks
Larry Corriea: 8 kratmans
JRR Tolkien: 10 kratmans

I leave it to the rest of you to provide the ratings. I shall merely post them as they are added.

Searching everything for any reason

So much for security in one’s papers and effects. At this point, the federal courts aren’t even really trying to pretend the Constitution is still in effect:

A federal court today dismissed a lawsuit arguing that the government should not be able to search and copy people’s laptops, cell phones, and other devices at border checkpoints without reasonable suspicion…. In June, in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request, DHS released its
December 2011 Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Impact Assessment of its
electronics search policy, concluding that suspicionless searches do not
violate the First or Fourth Amendments. The report said that a
reasonable suspicion standard is inadvisable because it could lead to
litigation and the forced divulgence of national security information,
and would prevent border officers from acting on inchoate “hunches,” a
method that it says has sometimes proved fruitful.

The absurd thing is that the reasoning that justifies the open abandonment of the Constitutional limitations on the federal government could be used to justify literally anything. Sure, a hunch could lead to stopping a terrorist attack, of course, it could just as credibly lead to stopping a demonic invasion by transdimensional god-aliens.

And yet, it strikes me that there is no “terrorist attack” or “demonic invasion by transdimensional god-alien” clause anywhere in the Constitution. It must be in one of those emanations or penumbras. This is why you can’t ever allow for “reasonable exceptions” in any organization. It never takes long for the reasonable exceptions to become unreasonable ones.

The rule of the game is now pretty simple. The federal government rules by a combination of force and fraud. They’re unwilling to openly throw out the Constitution, but the fig leaves they are using these days to cover their actions are growing increasingly small.