A failure in mass propaganda

The New York Times gives up on the global warming scam:

The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but we’ve been hearing less and less about “global warming” and “climate change” over the last year.  It’s not too hard to figure out why the New York Times suddenly decided that riding the AGW/CC charade in support of its big government ideology wasn’t going to work any longer, as James Delingpole’s victory dance on the corpse of the Met Office’s scientific credibility demonstrates:

Was there ever a government quango quite so useless as the Met Office?

From its infamous ‘barbecue summer’ washout of 2009 to the snowbound winter it failed to predict in 2010 and the recent forecast-defying floods, our £200 million-a-year official weather forecaster has become a national joke.

But of all its recent embarrassments, none come close to matching the Met Office’s latest one.

Without fanfare — apparently in the desperate hope no one would notice — it has finally conceded what other scientists have known for ages: there is no evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening.

When the predictive models fail, as all of the global warming and climate change models have, it is clear that the science behind it, such as it is, is junk.  Now, the various bureaucracies that have been formed and funded to address the nonexistent problem will fight furiously to survive and maintain their existence, (which is to say their government funding), but the verdict of history is already clear.

There is no man-made global warming.  There is no anthropogenic global climate change.  The skeptics were right and the “scientific consensus” was completely wrong.  Remember that the next time an interlocutor attempts to appeal to a scientific consensus.

The Curse of Tebow

The amusing thing about yesterday’s AFC divisional playoff game is that if Tim Tebow had been playing quarterback for the Denver Broncos instead of Peyton Manning, the Broncos probably would have won that game.  Manning’s two interceptions, the first returned for a touchdown, absolutely killed the Broncos.  There is no way that a team that benefits from not one, but two, special teams touchdowns should lose a game at home.

And Champ Bailey’s career as a starting cornerback appears to be all but over in light of his extreme toasting by Torrey Smith.  It’s time to move to the nickle, Champ.  Or safety.  The fifth gear, it is gone.  My condolences.

It is looking like we’ll see a Patriots-49ers Super Bowl, with one last ring for Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.  But this is the NFL, and we all know that anything can happen on any given Sunday.

This should also settle the 2012 MVP question conclusively in the favor of AD.

Of language versus substance

Let me be first perfectly clear about one thing.  I could not care less about the so-called “Christian” market.  I have never been a CBA author, I will never be a CBA author, and while I am an evangelical Christian, I am not of the evangelical Christian culture.  I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the works of the modern authors who are popular within that world, and as a writer, I consider my peers to be George R. R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, and Steven Erikson, not Jerry Jenkins, Ted Dekker, or whoever happens to be writing the books du jour in that market.

To me, a Christian novel is one that is written from a worldview perspective that contains the idea that Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of Man in some form.  It doesn’t matter if the idea is overt or an analogy.  That’s it. The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are clearly Christian works, as is Ray Bradbury’s excellent short story, “The Man”.  And yet, none of these three works ever so much as mention the words “Jesus Christ” or even portray various Christian activities such as baptism or communion.

My view is clearly not the most common opinion.  And while I certainly respect the right of my fellow Christians to place a more stringent series of requirements on what they believe is, or is not, Christian fiction, I really don’t care in the slightest what their opinion happens to be.  To a certain extent, I suspect that the divide centers on the idea that a Chinese novel must be either a) written by a Chinese man and set, at least in part, in China, or b) written in the Chinese language.

Now, I am a Christian, and the various books and stories in the Arts of Dark and Light series overtly utilize something that is clearly recognizable as Christianity in a manner that is historically consistent with the medieval milieu.  Some characters are observably “Christian”, others are pagan, others are simply… something else.  But I don’t write in what could be described as the contemporary Christian language.  And therein lies the difference.

I hadn’t intended to say anything about what happened right before A THRONE OF BONES was published, but as it happens, my publisher at Hinterlands has broached the subject in a surprisingly candid article about his decision to publish the book on the Speculative Faith Blog.  He writes:

Things were going along pretty well until two days before the book was to release. I got a note from the folks at a prominent Christian fiction writers group in America saying that if we released this book, they would take MLP off their list of approved publishers. That meant that all MLP books would not be eligible for their annual award.

As much as I believed in this book and its author and our goals, I was not prepared to let one book sabotage the chances of all my other authors receiving an award I think has value.

Oh, the drama. Was I going to cancel the book? Was I going to go through and remove everything this organization found objectionable? Was I going to hurt all my other authors? Was I going to succumb to what some folks said amounted to blackmail? (I didn’t think it was blackmail, by the way. I saw it as them adhering to their guidelines.) Remember, this was all happening 36 hours before the book was set to release.

I finally asked the organization if it would change anything if I created a new imprint and released the book under that imprint. They said, “Oh, yeah. If you did that, the problem would go away.”

“Really?” sez I. “All my other books would still be eligible for the award?”

“Sure.”

And thus, Marcher Lord Hinterlands was born, a brand new imprint for one book (so far).

A Throne of Bones by Vox Day released on December 1, 2012. It weighed in at just under 300,000 words and over 850 pages in hardcover. It is currently our overwhelming bestseller both in hardcover and in e-book.

I am one of those who saw the situation as something uncomfortably akin to blackmail.

Now, I should also mention that I am entirely happy with the solution; what author wouldn’t like having their own personal imprint?  Nor did I have a problem with the organization telling Jeff that my book would not be eligible for any of the awards they give out.  I also think that the way in which the situation was speedily resolved to everyone’s satisfaction was a testimony to the way that Christians with strongly differing opinions can come and reason together to find a way past their differences.

However, having been blackballed on at least two occasions at different publishing houses, (I’m not being paranoid, I was told as much by the individuals within the publishers who originally approached me and asked to publish my work; on more than one occasion I’ve been paid to NOT write a book), I think it is unwise for Christian organizations to be seen appearing to practice the same sort of blackballing, and worse, guilt by association, that I’ve seen in certain secular publishers.  On the one hand, I think it is wrong for secular publishers to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing their specific left-wing ideology on the market, on the other, I think it is wrong for Christian publishers and other professional organizations to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing a highly antiseptic view of what is, and is not, Christian, particularly when that view appears to be based more on cultural values than upon genuine spiritual or doctrinal issues.

The most problematic aspect of the situation, in my opinion, was that the organization asked to see the manuscript before it was published, thereby causing it to look as if they were behaving in an inappropriately censorious manner.  While they certainly have the right to act in whatever manner they see fit ex post facto, the attempt to intervene prior to publication was, in my opinion, totally unacceptable and amounted to the same sort of ideological policing that I have criticized in the SF/F market.  I tend to suspect that they were merely trying to anticipate a potential problem and head it off at the pass, which is what ultimately happened, but nevertheless, I don’t think that anyone except the author and the publisher should be addressing these sorts of issues prior to publication.

I leave it to the readers to decide whether my books are Christian fiction or not.  I don’t care.  I consider them to be epic fantasy, written in the tradition begun by George MacDonald and exemplified by J.R.R. Tolkien.  And to those who will roll their eyes at the idea of “a Christian answer to George Martin” and imagine it is meant in the Stryper sense, let me hasten to disabuse you of that notion.  A THRONE OF BONES is neither an homage nor an imitation, it is a challenge.  It is intended as a literary rebuke.

I believe Martin and some of the other authors of epic fantasy have not extended the sub-genre so much as they have betrayed it.  And in doing so, even as they have attempted to make their works more “realistic” than those of their epic predecessors, they have actually made them much smaller in terms of the human experience.  In their colorblind rejection of what they suppose to be “black and white” morality in favor of their beloved “balance” and “shades of gray”, they have inadvertently turned their backs on the full rainbow spectrum of colors.  They paint ugliness, but no beauty.  They sketch images of hate, but none of love.  Their sex isn’t erotic, it merely the slaking of appetites.  Their work, for the most part, is quite literally and intentionally soulless.

I’m not at all interested in attempting to become their polar opposite, as some erroneously see it.  Still less am I trying to write some saccharine, watered-down version of their works.  Instead, I’m attempting to embrace the whole.  Good and evil.  Love and hate.  Joy and sorrow.  Beauty and ugliness.  Art and philosophy.  I am not saying that I have been, or will be, successful in this, I am merely pointing out that to claim that A THRONE OF BONES is an imitation of Martin, or any other author, is not only to miss the point, it is missing the entire conversation.

Obviously, it’s the guns

What other explanation could there be?

A new report finds that Americans die younger and contract sexually
transmitted diseases more than any other high-income country in the
world. The report found that Americans had higher rates of chronic lung disease, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, drug-related deaths, infant mortality and homicides than countries that included Australia, Canada, Japan and many western European countries.

It’s really terrible how all of those legal guns are having indiscriminate sex and forcing Americans to gorge themselves with pizza and mainline heroin.  #GunControlNow!

Irony and the Marxian trade cycle

Karl Popper summarizes an amended Marxian theory of the trade cycle in The Open Society and Its Enemies:

“The amended theory of surplus population and of the trade cycle may be outlined as follows. The accumulation of capital means that the capitalist spends part of his profits on new machinery; this may also be expressed by saying that only a part of his real profits consists in goods for consumption, while part of it consists in machines. These machines, in turn, may be intended either for the expansion of industry, for new factories, etc., or they may be intended for intensifying production by increasing the productivity of labour in the existing industries. The former kind of machinery makes possible an increase of employment, the latter kind has the effect of making workers superfluous, of ‘setting the workers at liberty’ as this process was called in Marx’s day. (Nowadays it is sometimes called ‘technological unemployment’.)

Now the mechanism of capitalist production, as envisaged by the amended Marxist theory of the trade cycle, works roughly like this. If we assume, to start with, that for some reason or other there is a general expansion of industry, then a part of the industrial reserve army will be absorbed, the pressure upon the labour market will be relieved, and wages will show a tendency to rise. A period of prosperity begins. But the moment wages rise, certain mechanical improvements which intensify production and which were previously unprofitable because of the low wages may become profitable (even though the cost of such machinery will begin to rise). Thus more machinery will be produced of the kind that ‘sets the workers at liberty’.

As long as these machines are only in the process of being produced, prosperity continues, or increases. But once the new machines are themselves beginning to produce, the picture changes. Workers will be ‘set at liberty’, i.e. condemned to starvation. But the disappearance of many consumers must lead to a collapse of the home market. In consequence, great numbers of machines in the expanded factories become idle (the less efficient machinery first), and this leads to a further increase of unemployment and a further collapse of the market.

The fact that much machinery now lies idle means that much capital has become worthless, that many capitalists cannot fulfill their obligations; thus a financial crisis develops, leading to complete stagnation in the production of capital goods, etc. But while the depression (or, as Marx calls it, the ‘crisis’) takes its course, the conditions are ripening for a recovery. These conditions mainly consist in the growth of the industrial reserve army and the consequent readiness of the workers to accept starvation wages.

At very low wages production becomes profitable even at the low prices of a depressed market; and once production starts, the capitalist begins again to accumulate, to buy machinery. Since wages are very low, he will find that it is not yet profitable to use new machinery (perhaps invented in the meanwhile) of the type which sets the workers at liberty. At first he will rather buy machinery with the plan of extending production. This leads slowly to an extension of employment and to a recovery of the home market. Prosperity is coming once again. Thus we are back at our starting point. The cycle is closed, and the process can start once more.

This is the amended Marxist theory of unemployment and of the trade cycle. As I have promised, I am not going to criticize it. The theory of trade cycles is a very difficult affair, and we certainly do not yet know enough about it (at least I don’t). It is very likely that the theory outlined is incomplete, and, especially, that such aspects as the existence of a monetary system based partly upon credit creation, and the effects of hoarding, are not sufficiently taken into account. But however this may be, the trade cycle is a fact which cannot easily be argued away, and it is one of the greatest of Marx’s merits to have emphasized its significance as a social problem.”

What particularly struck me in reading the section leading up to this passage was a) the way that immigration is now utilized to supply the ranks of “the industrial reserve army” and b) the fact that even back in 1962, despite his apparent unfamiliarity with the Austrian School, Karl Popper was aware that “a monetary system based partly upon credit creation” was likely to have some significance on unemployment and the trade cycle.

The Marxian system is incomplete and outdated.  As Popper shows, some of its basic assumptions were incorrect and logically flawed from the start.  But the structural similarities between the domestic industrial exploitations of the 19th century and the international financial exploitations of the 21st century become increasingly apparent when one considers them from the perspective of both Marxian and Misean theories.

It is not clear to me that these apparent polar opposites can genuinely be synthesized in any useful manner; the Hegelian irony of an attempt to do so is not lost on me.  And yet, I suspect there may be something there.

Faith as economic artifact

Right on the socionomic schedule, the growth of the irreligious population begins to slow:

After years of marked growth, the size of Americans who identify with no religion slowed in 2012, according to a study released Thursday.  Since 2008, the percentage of Americans who identify as religious “nones” has grown from 14.6% to 17.8% in 2012, according to the Gallup survey. That number, which grew nearly one percentage point every year from 2008 to 2011, grew only 0.3% last year – from 17.5% in 2011 to 17.8% in 2012 – making it the smallest increase over the past five years….

Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup, says these results suggest “that religion may be maintaining itself or even increasing in the years ahead.”  “Our current ability to look at it over five years with these big surveys suggests the possibility that the growth [of the nones] may not be inexorable,” Newport says….

Atheist and humanist activists disagree and pushed back against the Gallup study.

Given that the vast economic depression that began in 2008 still hasn’t even been officially recognized, it should be no surprise that the pendulum has merely slowed, and not turned entirely.  I find it amusing that the atheists and humanists are so openly anti-science; one wonders what, precisely, their argument for the continued decline of religion might be founded upon.

What should actually concern the atheist and humanist activists is not the socionomic prediction that non-religious identification will decline as economic conditions continue to worsen.  What should bother them is that the growth in religious “nones” considerably outpaces the growth of those willing to identify themselves as atheism.  Not only do Low Church Atheists not identify with High Church Atheists, they often have a more favorable view of the religious than they do of their “fellow” atheists.

As for the inevitable appeal to “the youth”, the linear projections never pan out for the obvious reason that young people are stupid, inexperienced, and clueless.  Eventually, most of them grow out of it.

Spengler and the geography myth

In Form and Actuality, Spengler also appears to have anticipated my expressed doubts about the ability of non-Anglo Saxons to correctly grasp, let alone uphold and sustain, the Common Law-based Rights of Englishmen, on the basis of changes in their geographic locations:

“Today we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to us, then, are conceptions and purviews that they put before us as universally valid, when in truth their furthest horizon does not extend beyond the intellectual atmosphere of Western Man?

“Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his premisses take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant. When, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, or Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought, though a glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions should have sufficed to show that Aristotle’s intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of different structure from it. The categories of the Westerner are just as alien to Russian thought as those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For us, the effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as impossible as that of Russian and Indian, and for the modern Chinese or Arab, with their utterly different intellectual constitutions, “philosophy from Bacon to Kant” has only a curiosity value.

“It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom we might have expected to find it — insight into the historically relative character of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that his “unshakable” truths and “eternal” views are simply true for him and eternal for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the symbolism of history. Here there is nothing constant, nothing universal. We must cease to speak of the forms of “Thought,” the principles of “Tragedy,” the mission of “The State.” Universal validity involves always the fallacy of arguing from particular to particular.”

It would be a mistake to confuse Spengler’s historical relativism with modern moral relativism.  Anyone who speaks more than one language is familiar with the phenomenon of the untranslatable word; how much more untranslatable are the concepts that cross temporal, genetic, and cultural boundaries as well as mere linguistic ones? What the Ancient Greeks meant by the term we translate as “barbarian” is very different than our concept of the word, while even words as seemingly simple and straightforward as “African” and “infringed” are today interpreted very differently by people living at the same time within the same political boundaries.

Spengler’s observation underlies the problematic nature of mass immigration in general as well as the total madness of permitting mass immigration from non-European nations in a quasi-democracy in particular.  To expect any respect for the totemic foundations of Western civilization from those whose very structural worldviews are, quite literally, alien, is to defy both logic as well as millennia of recorded observations through history.  And even the modern fear of addressing the consequences of this madness beautifully illustrates Spengler’s point; would the highly civilized Athenians who brutally butchered the Melians for the crime of remaining neutral in the Peloponnesian War, hesitate to act in seeing their agoras overrun by aliens?  Would the Romans, who went to war with their own socii rather than permit them to claim Roman citizenship? Would the Chinese, past or present?

Why girls get better grades

It isn’t because they actually know the material better, but because they don’t annoy the teacher:

Despite having higher scores on standardized tests, boys get lower
grades than girls. Why? Because teachers are basing grades at least
partly on classroom behavior, and the standards are very much geared to
female norms….

“Boys in all racial categories across all subject areas are not
represented in grade distributions where their test scores would
predict. Even those boys who perform equally as well as girls on
reading, math and science tests are nevertheless graded less favorably
by their teachers.”

In summary, girls are able to substitute apple-polishing and classroom etiquette for an amount of knowing the material, and they are being rewarded for it, beginning in kindergarten.  Their better grades are eventually used to give them priority of place in college, thereby leading observers to erroneously conclude that they are “outperforming” men. 

Unsurprisingly, the boys who are smart enough to figure out the deck is stacked against them lose all respect for the system and opt out in varying degrees.

Guns and the slave mentality

Contrast New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s call for gun control with Robert Heinlein’s statement about freedom:

We don’t want to pass the point where society is so saturated with the most dangerous kinds of weaponry that people feel compelled to arm themselves or be left vulnerable, if indeed we haven’t already passed that point.

According to The Associated Press, a small Utah town is making a “gun in every home a priority.” The A.P. reported:

“Spring City Councilman Neil Sorensen first proposed an ordinance requiring a gun in every household in the town of 1,000. The rest of the council scoffed at making it a requirement, but they unanimously agreed to move forward with an ordinance ‘recommending’ the idea. The council also approved funding to offer concealed firearms training Friday to the 20 teachers and administrators at the local elementary school.”

That is not where we want to be as a country.

No, Charles, that is precisely where we want to be as a country.  America is a nation of armed free men who answer to no earthly power, it is not a nation of unarmed slave boys who cower before their masters in Washington D.C. lest they apply the whip.

“You cannot enslave a free man, only kill him.” 
 – Robert Heinlein

Blow doesn’t appear to realize that he is advocating a return to the evil that was inflicted upon his ancestors.  What is worse, not only does he not wish to be a free man, he doesn’t want anyone else to be free either.

What was the point of freeing blacks like him when they use their freedom to beg to be returned to their chains?  Instead of obediently carrying water like a servile house negro on the NYT plantation, Blow should recall the words of the free man, Frederick Douglas:

“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”

Those with the slave mentality of Charles Blow will quietly submit to the violation and elimination of their Constitutional right to bear arms.  Free men will never do so.  Nor should ever be so foolish as to do so, as Karl Denninger points out:

All told the count is somewhere north of 170 million citizens that have been executed not by combat in war or as “collateral damage” (accidental injury) but rather simply because once the government obtained an absolute monopoly on force it was able to slaughter people with impunity, and did.

170 million people is an extraordinary number.  Since we’re only 330 million out of a world population of something like 7 billion, it is not fair to charge all of them against us when making comparisons.  We’re about 5% of the world population, basically, so you could “charge” 8.5 million of those deaths (5%) to us in comparison.

How’s that work out?

Well, we have 11,000 firearms homicides, more or less, annually.

Objectively looking at this issue it would take 772 years for civilians to murder 8.5 million people, most of them one at a time, but the comparison table only runs in the last century.

It is therefore nearly eight times more likely that you will be slaughtered by your government wholesale if you give up your guns than the risk you run of being murdered by a bad guy if you don’t and this assumes that all of the 11,000 gun murders do not happen if we ban all or some firearms.

Guns in the hands of the American people are not the problem.  Guns in the hand of the American people are the PREVENTION of the problem.  If Charles Blow wants to return to slavery, then let him do so.  But he is a damned fool if he thinks free men, black, white, or any other color, are going to follow him there.