Lions Den I: Larry Correia

I thought the inaugural Lions’ Den should start off with a literal literary bang, so I asked my fellow co-founder of the Hispanic-Latino Science Fiction Writers Alliance and Gun Club, Larry Correia, if he would do the honors. Being both fearless and heavily armed, he did not hesitate to kick the door down and stride right in with HARD MAGIC, the first book in the Grimnoir Chronicles.

“The Grimnoir Chronicles trilogy is kind of hard to
categorize. It is an alternative history, epic fantasy, noir-pulp sci-fi, diesel
punk saga about 1930s Great Depression superheroes battling the magical samurai
of Imperial Japan. Yeah, good luck pitching that genre to an editor. However,
they are also a lot of fun, and the series turned out really well. It starts
out with Hard Magic, then Spellbound is the sequel, and the final book of the
trilogy, Warbound, is coming out this week.
“On this project I was originally brainstorming a regular
epic fantasy story, lots of magic, big interconnected plots, lots and lots of
characters, but it kind of mutated, mostly because I was talking with author
Mike Kupari at the time about how cool the styles of the 30s were and how everybody
loves Zeppelins. So I wound up setting this epic fantasy story in an
alternative history version of the 1930s.
“As a history nut I find the period between the world wars
absolutely fascinating, and it was a period that I’d already studied a lot so I
could add some cultural authenticity. This was also when men wore hats, and
that’s just cool. I’m a big fan of hard boiled crime novels, Chandler and
Hammett especially, so this was my chance to take on those kind of characters. I
love the vibe, I love the style, and as a gun nut there was so much classy
hardware to choose from.
“This world diverged from ours in the 1850s when a handful of
people began to develop magical powers for an unknown reason. As time goes on,
the numbers with magic grow, until by the 30s it is about one in a hundred
people with some measure of power, and one in a thousand capable of truly
impressive feats. The reason it gets a superhero vibe is because each person’s
magic can screw with one part of the laws of physics (and as a writer known for
his action scenes, this meant I could do some crazy stuff). By the time Hard
Magic begins the world has been changed in a lot of drastic ways by the introduction
of magic, which as a history geek, enabled me to have a lot of fun.
“Hard Magic has two main characters, “Heavy” Jake Sullivan,
who is a war hero, ex-con, forced into working for J. Edgar Hoover to catch
magical fugitives. He can control the direction and strength of gravity. And Faye
Vierra, a teenage dustbowl Okie refugee, who is a teensy bit crazy, can
teleport, and is potentially the most dangerous person in the world. Hard Magic
is about them getting involved with a secret society known as the Grimnoir and
their battle to keep a Tesla super weapon from falling into the hands of the
deadly Imperium.

“I like to say that this is the only book I’m aware of that
features a teleporting magic ninja fight on top of a flaming pirate dirigible.
And somehow, despite my unabashed love of pulp awesomeness, Hard Magic has been
nominated for and won some awards and been really well received. I’ve got back
to back Audie wins for the audiobooks of the first two, and Hard Magic was a
finalist for best novel in France!  That
was certainly unexpected.”
     – Larry Correia

The three reviewers have volunteered and been assigned.  I will post their reviews here in two weeks.

Voltairean revenge

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” 
– Voltaire

9 Jun 2012 … Hugo Schwyzer ‏@hugoschwyzer 
I stopped engaging with Men’s Rights Activists: the huge support for guys like Vox Day ..

In light of Mr Schwyzer’s less than entirely astonishing self-immolation, I can’t even imagine what sort of three-ring circus of scandal is lurking in McRapey’s future. I mean, the man is already calling himself a rapist and posting pictures of himself wearing dresses.

Pharyngulan facts

I found the juxtaposition of this comment at Pharyngula with other ones from the same thread to be entertaining.

“This is a science blog. We deal in facts not in long-disproven and corrosive fantasies.”

Apparently these are the science facts concerning advertising that would improve an ad where a man pushes an elevator button and unleashes the sexy possibilities inherent in the elevator’s other occupant.


“You push the ‘stop’ button and… The woman is Emma Peel. She immediately incapacitates you with several painfully well-placed karate chops. You crumple to the floor with a whimper. When the elevator door opens, Steed looks in, pokes you in the kidney with his umbrella then tells you, “Let that be a lesson to you, old chap.”

Emma Peel is a fictional character from 1960s English television.

“And then she just gives him a “WTF?” look, and he gets kinda uncomfortable and embarrassed, pushes the button to start the elevator again and wishes for the ground to swallow him up while he apologizes. Oh yeah, I’d like to see that. I could then imagine assholes really backing off even if I can’t kick their ass, and then the next step being not pushing that button at all. Like, the next scene of the commercial being the same guy imagining how he’d like to get stuck in the elevator with her, maybe glancing at the button for a second, and then just standing there until his floor. Boring, I know.”

Science: it’s what a woman can imagine.

“Of course there could also be the sci fi option of the woman morphing into some sort of predatory alien, werewolf, vampire who the idiot has just trapped himself in a confined space with. One of my colleagues is a confident, karate black belt who, I could imagine would give a guy who did this such a stare that he would probably wet himself.”

Science: it’s what a woman can imagine. The interesting thing is the psychological projection.  Since she just about wets herself when men stare at her, she assumes that men must do the same.  Because confidence. And karate.

“You push the stop button and suddenly the rest of the elevator continues, while the small square of floor you were standing on stops in mid-air. You’re now 129ft up in the air, with no way down, Asshole.”

That would be a great commercial… if you’re selling female revenge fantasies to women.  I’m not sure it’s suitable for selling anything to men.

But the fact that the Pharyngulans don’t understand the point of advertising isn’t surprising as they are mostly unemployed graduate students who couldn’t figure out that obtaining a science degree in a market oversupplied with them was unlikely to lead to worthwhile employment.  We’re not dealing with a particularly bright lot here.

What is surprising is their insistence that the West possesses a rape culture, when there are genuine rape cultures in a number of the non-Western societies whose inhabitants most of the Pharyngulans favor importing for reasons one can only assume are science-based.

Carlos Danger for Fed Chairman

As far as I can tell, there are three requirements for being appointed Federal Reserve Chairman:

  • He must be a Jew.  There hasn’t been a Gentile at the helm in nearly three decades.
  • He must be of the political elite. 
  • He must be a man.

There has been a lot of talk about Larry Summers or Janet Yellen being appointed to succeed Helicopter Ben by Barack Obama.  While Summers and Yellen are both Jewish, and therefore ethnically eligible, Summers is handicapped by being completely wrong about the housing crisis and Yellen is ineligible by virtue of being female.

Also, Yellen is the current Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, so how likely is it that she can fix what she helped break in the first place?

While there are no shortage of economists who did foresee the housing crisis, unfortunately, only Peter Schiff is Jewish and he is observably not of the political elite. Neither is the corpse of Murray Rothbard, which despite being dead for 18 years, would make for a better Fed Chairman than either Summers or Yellen.

So, where can we find a Jewish man who is of the political elite who will not be inclined to simply continue Helicopter Ben’s dysfunctional strategy?  My suggestion? Anthony Weiner aka Carlos Danger.

Carlos Danger would be the perfect Fed Chairman.  Set him up with a webcam, and internet connection and a Twitter account called @bigphatmoneymaker and he’ll happily spend his time at the office sending inflationary pictures to starstruck land whales instead of sending trillions of inflationary credit dollars to undercapitalized European banks. The global economy will be saved, the Lizard Queen’s reputation will no longer be sullied by association, and the women’s magazines will devote cover after cover to “The Glamorous Woman Behind the Fed”.

The bi-factional ruling party is happy. The media is happy. Hoi polloi is happy. Everybody wins.

Why the rabbits can’t think straight

An English professor and evolutionary psychologist attempts to explain the inability of certain rabbits to successfully engage in honest dialectic and why they are limited to rhetorical discourse:

Surveying the modern intellectual scene, the world of public discourse
among the educational elites, I conclude that dishonesty does not only
reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of thinking – but it actually reduces applied intelligence – probably by re-wiring the brain.

What I am suggesting is that, although the fundamental efficiency of
neural processing is an hereditary characteristic which is robust to
environmental differences and changes (short of something like
destructive brain pathology – encephalitis, neurotoxin, head injury,
dementia etc) – habitual dishonesty (such as is mainstream among the
modern intellectual elite) will generate brain changes, and a
long-lasting (although probably, eventually, reversible) pathology in
applied intelligence – such that what ought to be simple and obvious
inferential reasoning becomes impossible.

I mean impossible.

Habitual dishonesty (most notable political correctness) is a form of
learning; and learning strengthens some brain pathways and brain
connections; while allowing other pathways and connections to wither and
(perhaps eventually) perish.

Therefore, even on those rare occasions when a typical modern
intellectual tries to be honest and to think straight – they cannot do
it, because their reasoning processes have been sabotaged by their own
repeated habits of dishonesty – their attempts at honest thoughts will
be inhibited, and instead channelled down the usual lying pathways…

Thus, in modern intellectual life, honesty is punished and dishonesty is rewarded; honest brain pathways decay, dishonest brain pathways enlarge.

After years and years of conditioning in dishonesty, the typical modern
intellectual (whether journalist, scientist, lawyer, teacher, doctor or
whatever) becomes physically unable to think straight.

I’m far from the only one to observe that the trolls and anklebiters that seek to infest the blog are reliably dishonest.  But I had always thought it was a Machiavellian tactic and assumed that they knew they were lying.  After all, how many times can you have your positions methodically destroyed and still turn around and espouse it if one is not pathologically dishonest or simply playing a game?

However, in reading comments by the same individuals made when safely ensconced in their warrens, I observed that they not only espoused the same positions there, but genuinely appeared to believe that they had acquitted themselves well despite making absolutely undeniable blunders.  That’s when I began to realize that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way their minds worked.  It’s not so much that they will readily tell lies and espouse nonsense, but that they will continue doing so even when the falsity of their positions has been exposed and is observable for all to see.

This isn’t true of all rabbits. Rabbits like PZ Myers and McRapey know when they are shown to be wrong.  The avoidance patterns of their behavior and their swift reactions to when they are caught out betray this. They fear being seen to be wrong, which why they resolutely avoid public debate with anyone capable of calling them out and exposing them on their nonsense, but that very fear shows their awareness of it.  They may be dishonest at times, and will readily assume false postures, (e.g. “I’m done pretending to be nice”), but their dishonesty is not pathological and usually serves some sort of identifiable purpose.  This is very different from the behavior we often see from anklebiters here, where no amount of knowledge suffices to correct them and no rational purpose underlying their behavior can be discerned.

I don’t know if Charlton’s theory is correct. But it is certainly an area where a considerable amount of scientific research would be justified, and let’s face it, some of these brains could only be improved by dissection.  On the other hand, as Markku pointed out, there may be a spiritual element involved, as CS Lewis described in The Great Divorce.

“But, beyond all these, I saw other grotesque phantoms in which hardly a trace of the human form remained; monsters who had faced the journey to the bus stop-perhaps for them it was thousands of miles-and come up to the country of the Shadow of Life and limped far into it over the torturing grass, only to spit and gibber out in one ecstasy of hatred their envy and (what is harder to understand) their contempt, of joy. The voyage seemed to them a small price to pay if once, only once, within sight of that eternal dawn, they could tell the prigs, the toffs, the sanctimonious humbugs, the snobs, the “haves,” what they thought of them.”

Rules of writing I

A few weeks ago, Stickwick asked me if I would put down some of my thoughts concerning how one goes about writing fiction.  This is the first in who knows how many posts in response to her request.

1. Thou shalt know thy world

Many authors of SF/F don’t appear to give much, if any, thought to the world in which they are setting their novels.  I am not saying it is necessary to go to the lengths of a Tolkien and develop at least four of your own new languages and write a literature in each of them, only that if one simply leaps in and starts writing a novel without making some conscious decisions about the setting, one is going to be making unconscious decisions about it.

And most of the time, those unconscious decisions are going to draw heavily upon novels we have read or movies we have seen.  This is why, in many books in which one can readily observe that little conscious thought has gone into the setting, one can often recognize the various elements that are derived from other novels.  Even worse, those unconsciously copied elements are seldom harmonious and are not infrequently contradictory.

Let me make clear that I am not necessarily talking about the entire world here, only the section of the fictional world as it is exposed to the reader throughout the course of the novel. For example, in her Brother Cadfael novels, Ellis Peters seldom describes much of the world outside of Shropshire, but she provides a considerable amount of detail concerning Shrewsbury Abbey and the surrounding town and the bits of news that trickle in from outsiders indicate that she is well-versed in the relevant English history.

Exercises:  These should be answered here in the comments to permit discussion of them.  Try to come up with examples that someone else has not already provided.

1.  Name an example of a science fiction or fantasy world the author has clearly contemplated in some detail.  Explain why you believe that to be the case.  Middle Earth and Selenoth don’t count.

2. Name an example of a science fiction or fantasy world concerning which the author does not appear to have given sufficient thought to the setting.  Identify the primary disharmonious element that causes you to conclude that.  And just to forestall the obvious attempts at wit, Middle Earth and Selenoth don’t count.

Daring to judge God

I always had my doubts about the legitimacy of Desmond Tutu.  His recent theological posturing confirms my suspicions that he was always more about winning the favor of a fallen world than serving God:

Tutu, who retired as Archbishop of Cape Town in 1996, has long campaigned for gay rights. 

‘I would refuse to go to a homophobic heaven. No, I would say sorry, I mean I would much rather go to the other place,’ he said. ‘I would not worship a God who is homophobic and that is how deeply I feel about this.’

At 81 years old, it would seem Mr. Tutu will soon have the option to experience the consequences of his decision.  Most likely to his surprise, as this is the statement of a deeply silly and superficial man with no reverence for the God he once affected to serve, and, I would argue, neither hope of Heaven nor fear of Hell.  Give him another few years and I have little doubt he’d come out as an atheist.

God is not homophobic. He is not afraid of homosexuals but merely regards them as abominations, perhaps because alone among sinners, they define themselves by their sin and assert their pride in it.

Wikileaks: Manning didn’t aid enemy

Bradley Manning has been found not guilty of aiding the enemy.  That’s a bit of a surprise and should help Edward Snowden breathe a little easier.

Manning has been found not guilty of the most serious charge of “aiding
the enemy”. However the private has been found guilty on five counts of
violating the espionage act.

Mailvox: The Bank of Internet

If Amazon can’t make money as a retailer, perhaps it can do so as the Central Bank of Internet:

Two of my overseas contributors have asked to be
paid not via PayPal in their local currencies *or* in U.S. dollars.
Instead, they prefer to receive payment in the form of Amazon gift card
credits.

And a new global medium of exchange emerges…

Given the problems that Amazon is having which Karl Denninger has chronicled, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them introduce some sort of rival to PayPal before the end of the year.  Because they make no profit margin on most of their non-media sales, and because international media growth was actually negative last quarter, they’re going to have to do something different.

And as one banker I knew once told me, nothing makes money like money. Jeff Bezos is a smart guy, so if it so obvious that even we can see it, he’s probably already got it in the works.

Projection and quid pro quo

It is fascinating to read how some criticisms of Christianity appear to be little more than psychological projection.  Take the common Jewish accusation that Christian evangelicals are helping Jews return to Israel because they wish to immanentize the eschaton and bring about the Second Coming.  Now, this obviously makes no sense because most of those Christian Zionist evangelicals are premillennials, who believe that the hour of the Second Coming is a) unknowable, and b) pre-appointed.

As one who grew up in a premillennial evangelical Baptist church, I always wondered where in the world various Jews and atheists derived that concept, because, despite hearing more speculation about “the Rapture” and “the Tribulation” than I want to recall, I never once heard anyone even suggest that it was even theoretically possible to influence the timing of Jesus’s return.  Quite to the contrary, the primary concern was that the Second Coming might take place next Tuesday, before you were ready, thereby sentencing you to seven years of tribulation in the absence of practically everyone you knew.

However, the concept does sound an awful lot like Lubavitcher theology, which requires the seeding of Chabad Institutions all over the world in order to “to hasten the Messianic Age by spreading Jewish observance”.  I read Chaim Potok’s excellent novel, My Name is Asher Lev, for the second time, and this passage, about the young artist’s father upon his return from a six-month missionary trip to Europe, struck me as not only deeply ironic, but intentionally so:

“He had seen the sketchbook filled with drawings of Jesus and nudes. He had spent half a year of his life creating yeshivos and teaching Torah and Hasidus all over Europe.  Then he had returned to America and had discovered that his own home was now inhabited by pagans. He was in an uncontrollable rage.”

So, the man is quite literally occupied with establishing invasion points all over Europe, then returns “home” to another land he personally invaded from Russia, and reacts furiously to the observation that his son is assimilating the values of that land.  But that’s merely an ironic observation.  The more troubling one is this passage from Chapter 7, as we’ve all heard of Nazi claims that Jews are sub-human, but we don’t often hear of the opposite.


“We studied the meaning of the verse in Proverbs ‘The candle of God is the soul of man.’  The souls of Jews are like the flame of a candle, the mashpia said.  The flame burns upwards; it seeks to be parted from the wick in order to unite with its source above, in the universal element of fire.  Similarly, the soul of the Jew yearns to separate itself and depart from the body in order to unite with the Master of the Universe, even though this means that nothing will remain of its former nature as a distinct and separate entity.  It is in the nature of the Jewish soul to desire this union with the Being Without End, unlike the souls of the Gentiles, which are derived from the Other Side and which strive to remain independent beings and entities.


“We studied about the sitra achra, the Other Side, the realm of darkness and evil given life by God not out of His true desire but in the manner of one who reluctantly throws something over his shoulder to an enemy, thereby making it possible for God to punish the wicked who help the sitra achra, and reward the righteous who subjugate it.”

Now, this is from a novel in which the Hasidic organization bears a fictional name, so I don’t know if the Ladover teachings accurately reflect the Lubavitcher concepts upon which they appear to be based or not.  I’ve asked Chelm Weisman to clarify this for us, but it would certainly be educational to learn how widespread this notion of all non-Jewish souls being derived from the realm of darkness and evil happens to be.  And it would certainly help explain the old political proverb concerning the way in which Jews live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans.

Chelm notes: “I would say proceed with caution. Potok is a critic of chassidism, not an advocate (although a critic with great respect for and understanding of it).”  So, keep in mind that it may or may not be an accurate portrayal of Lubavitcher teachings, and even if it is, I suspect it is unlikely to be in line with other more conventional Jewish theologies.

The Seven Laws of Noah are a sound and proven basis for a sustainable society, even if the systemic corruption of the US court system appears to render Law number seven a little more questionable than the others.  But I am more than a little dubious about the prospects for long-term survival, let alone success, of any movement that posits more than 99 percent of the world’s population consists of demon souls from the dark side.