King Log is now King Stork

Who would have dreamed, back in the 1980s, that patriotic American dissidents would be fleeing to Moscow in pursuit of safety:

Putin said Russia ruled out handing Snowden over to the United
States. Putin said that Snowden was “not a Russian agent” and that
Russian intelligence services weren’t working with him, according to
Reuters.  He said that Snowden should choose his final destination
and travel there, but also offered some compliments to the National
Security Agency leaker.  Putin said he considered Snowden to be a
rights activist, calling him a “new dissident,” according to The
Associated Press, and compared him to Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei
Sakharov.

Putin makes it possible for our generation to understand how historical strongmen became popular in their day.  In the meantime, he’s certainly winning the world’s favor by protecting the man who revealed just how pernicious the US empire has become.

That “mythical” war on Christianity

As is so often the case, atheists whine about nonexistent persecution in the West while Christians are facing the real thing in the East and Middle East:

Horrific video shows Syrian Catholic priest being ‘beheaded by jihadist fighters in front of cheering crowd’. Father Francois Murad’s death was confirmed by Vatican news agency. Footage of 49-year-old’s gruesome death was filmed on a camera phone. The Syrian priest was killed last 23 June in Gassanieh, northern Syria.

This is bad enough, but it’s even more troubling that the Obama administration is actively supporting the Syrian jihadists and supplying them with weaponry.  If one simply looks at his actions, his comment about “my Muslim faith” looks less and less like a slip of the tongue, and more and more like an intentional thumbing of his nose at the American people.

Spare a thought for Father Francois Murad today, who showed courage unto death.  Keep that in mind the next time you are tempted to hold your tongue, or look the other way, for fear of what the world might think.

Because respect

Like the SFWA member quoted below, I am bound by the confidentiality rule, but these quotes from Twitter should give everyone a sufficiently accurate image of the anklebiting junior members now running wild within SFWA, as well as for the disdain they openly display for the men, who, back in the day, created the organization and actually wrote genuine science fiction:

Jason Sanford ‏@jasonsanford 26 Jun
Pournelle (noun): Term for a well-known author who complains things were better “back in the day” when jerks could act with impunity.

Jason Sanford ‏@jasonsanford 26 Jun
I’d be nice if people RT’d last tweet. I’d love Pournelle to become a meme. Not that real Pournelle’d understand memes if they bit his butt.

Scott Edelman ‏@scottedelman 26 Jun
Sigh … what did he do now?

Jason Sanford ‏@jasonsanford 26 Jun
Pournelle is being his usual self on the
usual forums which can’t be mentioned due to the usual privacy policy.

Jason Sanford ‏@jasonsanford 26 Jun
But this may all tie in with an organization beginning with S, ending with A, and a FW in the middle.

Jason Sanford @jasonsanford 27 JunPournelle
(noun): Term for well-known author who complains things were better
“back in the day” when jerks could act with impunity.

Jason Sanford ‏@jasonsanford 27 Jun
It’s a good day when your words have irked the Pournelles of our genre. See previous tweet for definition of term.

Justin Howe ‏@JustinHowe 27 Jun
@jasonsanford Also my term for the Pournelles is “Dense Matter”. Such as, “And then we got stymied by the dense matter at the genre’s core.”

One can readily observe that there is no dearth of jerks acting with impunity these days. What horrifically nasty little creeps! Jason Sanford and his herd of never-will-bes are not worthy to so much as shine the shoes of veteran SF authors like Jerry Pournelle, Mike Resnick, and Barry Malzberg, no matter how many participation ribbons and affirmative action trophies they give each other in the pretense that they are Real SF Riters.

And in addition to snapping at the ankles of 80 year-old men, the pinkshirts are now waxing enthusiastic about [REDACTED: CASE PINK SWASTIKA] because apparently SF conventions are just overflowing with perverts uncontrollably attracted to the hairy dugs and misshapen posteriors of shambling quasi-bipedal manatees.

I shitteth thee not.

Needless to say, this is all being driven by the sort of overweight, unemployed “writers” who spend considerably more time talking about themselves – and, one is forced to presume, eating –  than they do actually writing anything. Because respect.

What any of this has to do with writing and publishing science fiction, I leave to your imagination.

The ironic thing is that [REDACTED: CASE PINK SWASTIKA] will almost surely have the unintended consequence of exposing homosexual harassers instead of the intended targets. Women, especially overweight and unattractive women, have absolutely no idea how overtly aggressive gay men tend to be in comparison with straight men. Based on the sob stories dating back decades that have been shared on various blogs, I would estimate that I have been “sexually harassed” by gay men 2x more than any ten female SFWA members combined have been “sexually harassed” by straight men.

Actually, come to think of it, I was once “sexually harassed” by a famous female author at a professional convention. [ALERT: TRIGGER WARNING!] I accepted her gesture as the compliment it was obviously intended to be, smiled, removed her hand, and continued with the conversation. But apparently the concept of gracefully rejecting an unwanted or inappropriate invitation is completely beyond the pinkshirted manatees.

Because respect.

At this point, I suspect the SFWA’s old guard is thinking “you know, we would have been a lot better off if we had simply called [REDACTED]’s bluff, maintained the membership standards, and permitted her to walk away mad.”  Lower standards seldom produce desirable results.

Milton Friedman: heretic Keynesian

I find it fascinating that as time has gone on, more and more economists are coming around to my view, which I explained in The Return of the Great Depression, that Milton Friedman was not an opponent of Keynesianism, as was always taught in the economics department of my university, but rather, a practitioner of a heretical form of it.  The freshwater vs saltwater conflict was an entirely internecine battle between Keynesians, it was not on the level of Hayek vs Keynes, let alone Mises vs Marx.

In an excerpt from his new book, David Stockman writes about how Friedman’s activities as an influential economist completely contradicted his very good essays on human liberty:

At the end of the day, Friedman jettisoned the gold standard for a
remarkable statist reason. Just as Keynes had been, he was afflicted
with the
economist’s ambition to prescribe the route to higher national income
and prosperity and the intervention tools and recipes that would deliver
it. The only
difference was that Keynes was originally and primarily a fiscalist,
whereas Friedman had seized upon open market operations by the central
bank as the
route to optimum aggregate demand and national income.

There were massive and multiple ironies in that stance. It put the
central bank in the proactive and morally sanctioned business of buying
the government’s
debt in the conduct of its open market operations. Friedman said, of
course, that the FOMC should buy bonds and bills at a rate no greater
than 3 percent
per annum, but that limit was a thin reed.

Indeed, it cannot be gainsaid that it was Professor Friedman, the
scourge of Big Government, who showed the way for Republican central
bankers to foster
that very thing. Under their auspices, the Fed was soon gorging on the
Treasury’s debt emissions, thereby alleviating the inconvenience of
funding more
government with more taxes.

Friedman also said democracy would thrive better under a régime of free
markets, and he was entirely correct. Yet his preferred tool of
prosperity
promotion, Fed management of the money supply, was far more
anti-democratic than Keynes’s methods. Fiscal policy activism was at
least subject to the
deliberations of the legislature and, in some vague sense, electoral
review by the citizenry.

By contrast, the twelve-member FOMC is about as close to an unelected
politburo as is obtainable under American governance. When in the
fullness of time,
the FOMC lined up squarely on the side of debtors, real estate owners,
and leveraged financial speculators—and against savers, wage earners,
and equity
financed businessmen—the latter had no recourse from its policy actions.

For me, Milton Friedman is, like Margaret Thatcher, a tragic figure of history, an well-intentioned individual with a genuine love of human freedom who nevertheless betrayed his ideals with his professional actions.

Teachers are substandard

I have previously calculated, on the basis of their SAT scores, that school teachers today have an average IQ of approximately 95.  And based on this email posted at Chaos Manor, it is clear that education majors have been the absolute dregs of academia for quite some time now:

I worked my way through college. The university I attended generously
provided jobs to many students. One job I held was that of Computer
Operator on the IBM 360/70 in the university computer center.

After my first semester working in the computer center, I worked the
wake-up shift, 0600 – 0900. Many of the universities administrative
computational jobs came to me to run because things were quiet at that
time, and, thus, the demands on the CPU were less.

The university faculty senate had expressed some concerns about the
school’s reputation, or rather the lack of it. They wanted to know why
this was. So they compiled years of grades, punched them onto 80-column
cards, and toted those cards down to the computer center where they
spilled those data onto a tape. That took the better part of a day and
all that evening which meant they did not have time to run the
statistics on those data and print them out. Problem was that the
computer center had promised Dr R, the president of the faculty senate,
the report the following morning.

Charlie, my boss, left it to me on the morning shift to run the stats
and print out the results. As soon as I woke the Beast, I ran the job.
It printed out half a box of fanfold paper. I tore off the last page,
picked up the printout, and took it to the counter to look through it.

Of course, I knew what this was and what it meant. I scanned to the
math department. As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs, a few incompletes ― all the grades
in the table. The distribution was normal but the mean was shifted
slightly toward the lower end; that is, the department gave fewer As
than expected and more Fs than expected.  I scanned to the physics department. Much the same story as with the
math department but shifted even more toward the lower end.

I scanned to the department of education, and I said to myself, said
I, “Oh, the shit’s gonna hit the fan.” ED gave 80% As, 20% Bs, and
nothing below a B.

This report exploded like a bomb in the faculty senate. Dr R, the
president of the senate, made a motion his own self to sever the
Department of Education from the rest of the university and another that
admission to the School of Education would not give admission to the
rest of the university. The recriminations were many and bitter. I heard
that the President of the University called in the campus cops to
restore order and prevent the threatened assaults.

I ran this report when I was a sophomore. When I graduated, the war was still on. So if you are an education major and you think I have no respect for you . . . you’re right. I don’t. Moreover, I won’t.

This also serves as a fitting response to those who ask how a mother can homeschool without a degree in physics, math, or womyn’s studies.  The correct answer is: why do you think your children can be adequately educated by a collection of women with a sub-normal IQs whose only education is in what is quite literally the easiest possible course of collegiate study.

Datagate goes international

I was catching up on the Italian news this morning and saw that Datagate is what the Italian press is calling the explosive new revelations that the NSA has secret agreements with European countries to spy on European citizens as well. The news is not quite so readily available in English, although Prachi Gupta’s article at Salon is still accessible:

The
NSA has been working with at least seven European other countries to
collect personal communications data, according to Wayne Madsen, a
former NSA contractor who has come forward because he does not think the
public should not be “kept in the dark.” According to Madsen, Denmark,
the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy all have formed secret
agreements with the US to submit sensitive data.

The Guardian reports:

Under
international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified
documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust
level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third
party relationships.

In an interview published last night on the PrivacySurgeon.org blog,
Madsen, who has been attacked for holding controversial views on
espionage issues, said he had decided to speak out after becoming
concerned about the “half story” told by EU politicians regarding the
extent of the NSA’s activities in Europe.

He said that under the
agreements, which were drawn up after the second world war, the “NSA
gets the lion’s share” of the sigint “take”. In return, the third
parties to the NSA agreements received “highly sanitised intelligence”.

The
news could be potentially damaging to countries, particularly Germany,
whose chancellor Angela Merkel has vocally condemned the NSA program
that recently came to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

This sounds like Echelon on steroids, dwarfing anything Orwell imagined in Big Brother. Moreover, as La Repubblica reports, the Observer article has already been removed from the web “pending an investigation: 

“Datagate, anche l’Italia collabora” 
Poi il Guardian rimuove la pagina web
Il Telegraph: quella fonte è inaffidabile
Foto Ma l’articolo è comunque finito in edicola

“Datagate, Italy also collaborates”
Afterwards the Guardian removes the web page
The Telegraph[sic]: that source is not found
Photo But the article is nevertheless still on the newspaper stand

Note that La Repubblica mistakenly refers to The Telegraph when the link actually refers to The Guardian.  These revelations should give a massive boost to the growing anti-Merkel forces in Germany, as it reveals her to be a shameless and bald-faced liar.

Fictitious profit

Some SFWAns around the Internet have been pointing to this profit calculation to “prove” that rapacious publishers are ripping them off by more than doubling their hardcover royalties on ebooks.  As one has learned to expect from the fun bunch, they have no absolutely idea what they’re doing.

Look at Harper’s own numbers:

$27.99 hardcover generates $5.67 profit to publisher and $4.20 royalty to author
$14.99 agency priced e-book generates $7.87 profit to publisher and $2.62 royalty to author.

So, in other words, at these average price points, every time a
hardcover sale is replaced by an e-book sale, the publisher makes $2.20
more per copy and the author makes $1.58 less. If the author made the
same $4.20 royalty on the e-book sale as he/she would have on a
hardcover, the publisher would STILL be making an improved profit of
$6.28.

Now, I have less use for mainstream publishers than just about anyone who publishes books these days, but this calculation is completely misleading for the obvious reason that it is using the wrong price from which to calculate the profit.  As per DBW:


“After months of consistent declines to a low near $6.00, they’re on the rise again. This week, the average price of an ebook best-seller is $9.48, up slightly from last week, which was the first time the price was north of $9.00 in all of 2013.”

Since the average price of an ebook is more like $8.00 on average, this means that if we plug it into the Harper model, the ebook generates $4.50 profit to the publisher and $1.50 to the author.  And it has gone as low as $3.15, although we can safely disregard this lower figure because it was unduly influenced by low-priced, self-published bestsellers. Regardless, both figures, you will note, are less than the $5.67 in gross profit minus author’s royalty generated by the hardcover sale.

This inability to grasp the basic facts of the rapidly changing market for books is why the SF/F writers are going to be taken completely by surprise when more publishers “unexpectedly” go the way of Night Shade.  These authors think ebooks have made their publishers nearly 40 percent more profitable, all at the expense of the royalties paid to them, when the reality is that despite the ebook’s much lower cost of production, (which, keep in mind, has no impact on the publisher’s overhead), the publishers are actually running somewhere between 20 percent and 45 percent LESS profitable on a per-unit-sold basis alone.

If the publishers were to do as the post’s author suggests and pay the same $4.20 royalty on the ebook that they presently do on the hardcover, they’d make a profit margin of 7.1 percent instead of 42.6 percent.  That would barely pay their rent and utility bills, never mind their payroll.  Note that historically, commercial publishers have run at 40 percent profit margins; even the powerful academic publisher, Elsevier, has seen its operating profit margins slip to 36 percent.  SF/F genre publishers aren’t doing anywhere nearly so well.

Falling retail prices and shrinking profit margins are why the publishers have been cutting their midlist authors and offering fewer, smaller contracts.  They simply can’t afford to publish moderately successful authors anymore, and if average ebook prices fall to $4, as I expect them to within the next 2-3 years, they will not be able to afford publishing anyone who hasn’t already proven to be a reliable bestseller… usually through self-publishing.

Deen proves Hoyt right

Prof. Stephen Clark writes in to Instapundit:

The cancellation of Paula Deen’s book at this time is about avoiding
being seen as enabling what appears to be an evolving protest as
expressed through the advance orders, coupled with a desire to flip off
the protesters. Just another page in the ongoing cultural aggression
being waged by the bicoastal elite. It does, however, neatly illustrate
the inherent viciousness of the class.

Taken in
combination with the complete inactivity concerning Alec Baldwin’s
recent comments on Twitter, it also shows the utter hypocrisy of that
class.  By the elite’s standard metric, Baldwin’s speech was every bit
as hateful and unforgivable as Deen’s theatrics, if not more so, but he
hasn’t been fired from his show or lost any endorsement contracts.

Now,
I certainly don’t pity Mrs. Deen in the slightest, as like James
Frenkel, she is simply reaping the harvest that she helped sow with her
active support of progressives and the establishment of today’s
political elite.  And there are worse fates than being paid millions of dollars to not write a book or two. But she does serve as what should be an educational
example to all the Scalzis and Hineses and Goulds of the world; no
amount of goodthink, political posturing, or progressive flag-waving is
going to save you when the pinkshirts and/or savages you have championed
turn on you and tear you apart without warning.

John
Scalzi was very fortunate that his inept political satire last year was
accepted as such. That didn’t have to be the case; it was far more
potentially offensive than the “lady editor” comment that sparked
Bulletingate. If it had served the whims of the pinkshirts to destroy
him, (for example, if they had had a candidate for SFWA president they
wished to push), he would have found himself the bewildered recipient of
the same sort of ideological hysteria to which Messrs. Resnick and
Malzberg were inflicted.  As readers here have probably noted,
pinkshirts tend to fall silent and run away as soon as they meet with
direct opposition willing to openly confront them; the only thing even
the most abject apologizing accomplishes is to inspire them to go into a
feeding frenzy.

In fact, because he has shown obvious Scalzi-like weakness in his obvious desire to appease the pinkshirts, I think it
quite likely that Steven Gould, the incoming president, will soon come
under attack from the organizational left for one reason or another.

To return to Mrs. Deen, the cancellation of her book, which at the time was Amazon’s #1
bestseller prior to its release, also shows that Sarah Hoyt was
absolutely right and that “business reasons” have absolutely nothing to
do with the ideologically driven decisions of the publishing
gatekeepers.  That defense, which was never the least bit convincing to
anyone with actual experience of mainstream publishing, has now been
exploded in a very public and undeniable manner.

And it also demonstrates the importance of building distribution channels that circumnavigate the attempts of the gatekeepers to control what is made available to the public.

Vibrancy in South Africa

Keep the ongoing race war in South Africa in mind as you listen to half-savage race hustlers posturing about how dangerous Australia, Texas, and Florida are for “people like [her]”.  African-American leftists and their liberal white knights like little better than to wax nostalgic about the dangers of 19th century lynching while remaining utterly silent about 21st century savagery that is now seen everywhere from Africa to Europe and the Americas.

Mandela’s passing and the looming threat of a race war against South Africa’s whites. As a widow mourns the latest murdered Afrikaner farmer, a chilling dispatch from a nation holding its breath.

  • Roelof du Plessis, 46 shot on his farm outside Pretoria by gang of black intruders
  • Fears rise that killings are part of a systematic bid to drive white people out of South Africa
  • President Jacob Zuma known to sing ‘struggle song’ about killing white Afrikaners

The statistics — and the savagery of the killings — appear to support claims by these residents that white people, and farmers in particular, are being targeted by black criminals. Little wonder that what unfolded on the Du Plessis homestead has sent tremors of fear through the three-million-strong white community.

Last month alone there were 25 murders of white landowners, and more than 100 attacks, while Afrikaner protest groups claim that more than 4,000 have been killed since Mandela came to power — twice as many as the number of policemen who have died.

It is not just the death toll, but the extreme violence that is often brought to bear, that causes the greatest fear in the white community. Documented cases of farm killings make for gruesome reading, with children murdered along with their parents, one family suffocated with plastic bags and countless brutal rapes of elderly women and young children.

It’s not an accident that the first thing the US government did once de Klerk was elected and it became obvious that apartheid was coming to an end was to arrange for the removal of South Africa’s nuclear weapons from its arsenal and the decommissioning of the weapons development program.  This was because both the US and the de Klerk administration knew the ANC government could not be trusted to behave responsibly with them and there was a real risk that they would be used against the Boers or Zimbabwe.

FrontPage reported in 2012: “There are now white refugee camps in South Africa with an estimated 300,000 or 7 percent of the white population living in tent cities and shacks. If any other ethnic group or race were on the receiving end of such treatment, it would be denounced as ethnic cleansing. Dr. Stanton of Genocide Watch, a respected human rights organization, has stated that the white population of South Africa is now in the sixth of the center’s eight stages of genocide. That sixth stage is defined as “Preparation.””

Keep that in mind as you hear the usual suspects encouraging you to celebrate the wonders of diversity.  Because historically, diversity has been a precursor to genocide.  And if Malema comes to power and he succeeds in following the example set by Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, don’t spare South Africa an ounce of sympathy once his goal is achieved as people who are absolutely every bit as civilized as everyone else on the planet mysteriously turn out to be unable to maintain an existing agricultural system capable of feeding the country for inexplicable reasons that no rational mind could possibly discern.

A bogeyman to white South Africans, Malema is popular among young blacks, and has also been an enthusiastic singer of Kill The Boer and another song called Bring Me My Machine-Gun. Polls this week showed a huge surge in support among young black South Africans for his policies, which he says will ignore reconciliation, and fight for social justice in an ‘onslaught against [the] white male monopoly’.

With chilling echoes of neighbouring Zimbabwe, where dictator Robert Mugabe launched a murderous campaign to drive white farmers off the land in 2000, Malema wants all white-owned land to be seized without compensation, along with nationalisation of the country’s lucrative mines.

Ominously, Malema, 32, who wears a trademark beret and has a fondness for Rolex watches, this month promised his new party will take the land from white people without recompense and give it to blacks.

‘We need the land that was taken from our people, and we are not going to pay for it,’ he said. ‘We need a party that will say those who were victims of apartheid stand to benefit unashamedly, and those who perpetuated apartheid must show remorse and behave in a manner that says they regret their conduct.’

And Malema isn’t merely thinking of South Africa when he encourages blacks to breed for the cause of global revolution.  “We want to see many kids, why? Because we must reproduce ourselves. For
our ideas to be sustainable, we have to reproduce ourselves. In the
whole of Africa, we are not more than one billion and the world has
seven billion people. In Africa we have not more than one billion
people… facing more than six billion. We have to be half of that so that
our ideas can dominate. I know that in some instances size does not
matter… but when it comes to a revolution, size matters.”

The multiculturalists and devotees of St. Diversity think that it doesn’t matter if America loses its white majority.  They don’t understand what Malema does, which is that demographics is destiny.

Introducing the orc

Development is proceeding apace on First Sword, as we’ve now got the gladiatorial schools operational in a rudimentary manner, which means that the various gladiator statistics and portraits are now accessible in the game.  In Selenoth, orcs are even more fearsome in the arena than they are on the battlefield, because the superior human unit discipline can usually be relied upon to carry the Amorran and Savondese forces through to victory can no longer be utilized to compensate for the greater size, strength, and sheer aggression of the orcs.

And in the arena, there is no ranged combat, which means the human gladiator isn’t merely concerned with the threat posed by swords, axes, daggers, and warhammers, but has to deal with the very real threat of having his face literally bitten off by his opponent.  Not all ludi are willing to feature orcs, as in addition to them being nearly as dangerous in training as they are in the actual arena, the spectators tend to be harsh on defeated orcs and it is the rare orc indeed who is granted missio by the favor of the crowd.

But for the stable owner who is brave enough to accept the risks, the rewards can be significant indeed.