It’s not science, but it sure looks like fiction

Now, I’m not at all surprised that the SFWA warren is hopping madly with news of a shocking sexual harassment scandal now that it has been made clear by the SFWA owsla that it is open season on all non-crossdressing men in the organization – and at the annual gathering of angry land whales known as WisCon, no less – but even I assumed it would take more than a few weeks before the next inevitable pinkshirt scandal exploded all over the increasingly dysfunctional organization’s face.

As it happens, I may actually have met know the woman who is accusing a Tor editor of sexual harassment.  If Elise Matthesen is the same the Elise I knew back in the late nineties, she was a completely useless and not terribly ornamental member of an otherwise excellent writing group in Minneapolis, she never actually did any writing, and all she wanted to do was talk about herself and babble about feminism, sexual harassment, and so forth.  And if  since it is her, I will not be at all surprised if it is eventually determined by the publishing house and the convention alike that the “harassment” was nothing more than a product of her fevered but uncreative imagination.

According to Ms Matthesen, the gentleman who sexually harassed her was a Tor editor, albeit one of the old school Tor editors who actually published genuine science fiction once upon a time: “My name is Sigrid Ellis. I was one of the co-hosts of the party Elise
mentions. The person Elise reported for harassment is James Frenkel.”

Now, I have no idea what actually happened, nor do I care in the slightest, but I have to say, I’m a little bit dubious surprised to learn that it is the Elise of my erstwhile acquaintance, not because she appears to have made a false claim of sexual harassment, (if you’d asked me about her yesterday, I’d have told you that I’d be surprised if she didn’t have dozens of them to her credit), but because the following account would make for the longest piece of fiction she has ever actually managed to write:

 “We’re geeks. We learn things and share, right? Well, this year at
WisCon I learned firsthand how to report sexual harassment. In case you
ever need or want to know, here’s what I learned and how it went.

Two editors I knew were throwing a book release party on Friday night
at the convention. I was there, standing around with a drink talking
about Babylon 5, the work of China Mieville, and Marxist
theories of labor (like you do) when an editor from a different house
joined the conversation briefly and decided to do the thing that I
reported. A minute or two after he left, one of the hosts came over to
check on me. I was lucky: my host was alert and aware. On hearing what
had happened, he gave me the name of a mandated reporter at the company
the harasser was representing at the convention.

The mandated reporter was respectful and professional. Even though I
knew them, reporting this stuff is scary, especially about someone who’s
been with a company for a long time, so I was really glad to be
listened to. Since the incident happened during Memorial Day weekend, I
was told Human Resources would follow up with me on Tuesday.

There was most of a convention between then and Tuesday, and I didn’t
like the thought of more of this nonsense (there’s a polite word for
it!) happening, so I went and found a convention Safety staffer. He
asked me right away whether I was okay and whether I wanted someone with
me while we talked or would rather speak privately. A friend was
nearby, a previous Guest of Honor at the convention, and I asked her to
stay for the conversation. The Safety person asked whether I’d like to
make a formal report. I told him, “I’d just like to tell you what
happened informally, I guess, while I figure out what I want to do.”

It may seem odd to hesitate to make a formal report to a convention
when one has just called somebody’s employer and begun the process of
formally reporting there, but that’s how it was. I think I was a little
bit in shock. (I kept shaking my head and thinking, “Dude, seriously??”)
So the Safety person closed his notebook and listened attentively.
Partway through my account, I said, “Okay, open your notebook, because
yeah, this should be official.” Thus began the formal report to the
convention. We listed what had happened, when and where, the names of
other people who were there when it happened, and so forth. The Safety
person told me he would be taking the report up to the next level,
checked again to see whether I was okay, and then went.

I had been nervous about doing it, even though the Safety person and
the friend sitting with us were people I have known for years. Sitting
there, I tried to imagine how nervous I would have been if I were
twenty-some years old and at my first convention. What if I were just
starting out and had been hoping to show a manuscript to that editor?
Would I have thought this kind of behavior was business as usual? What
if I were afraid that person would blacklist me if I didn’t make nice
and go along with it? If I had been less experienced, less surrounded by
people I could call on for strength and encouragement, would I have
been able to report it at all?

Well, I actually know the answer to that one: I wouldn’t have. I know
this because I did not report it when it happened to me in my twenties.
I didn’t report it when it happened to me in my forties either. There
are lots of reasons people might not report things, and I’m not going to
tell someone they’re wrong for choosing not to report. What I intend to
do by writing this is to give some kind of road map to someone who is
considering reporting. We’re geeks, right? Learning something and
sharing is what we do.

So I reported it to the convention. Somewhere in there they asked,
“Shall we use your name?” I thought for a millisecond and said, “Oh,
hell yes.”
This is an important thing. A formal report has a name attached. More about this later.

The Safety team kept checking in with me. The coordinators of the
convention were promptly involved. Someone told me that since it was the
first report, the editor would not be asked to leave the convention. I
was surprised it was the first report, but hey, if it was and if that’s
the process, follow the process. They told me they had instructed him to
keep away from me for the rest of the convention. I thanked them.

Starting on Tuesday, the HR department of his company got in touch
with me. They too were respectful and took the incident very seriously.
Again I described what, where and when, and who had been present for the
incident and aftermath. They asked me if I was making a formal report
and wanted my name used. Again I said, “Hell, yes.”

Both HR and Legal were in touch with me over the following weeks. HR
called and emailed enough times that my husband started calling them
“your good friends at HR.” They also followed through on checking with
the other people, and did so with a promptness that was good to see.

Although their behavior was professional and respectful, I was
stunned when I found out that mine was the first formal report filed
there as well. From various discussions in person and online, I knew for
certain that I was not the only one to have reported inappropriate
behavior by this person to his employer. It turned out that the previous
reports had been made confidentially and not through HR and Legal.
Therefore my report was the first one, because it was the first one that
had ever been formally recorded.

Corporations (and conventions with formal procedures) live and die by
the written word. “Records, or it didn’t happen” is how it works, at
least as far as doing anything official about it. So here I was, and
here we all were, with a situation where this had definitely happened
before, but which we had to treat as if it were the first time — because
for formal purposes, it was.

I asked whether people who had originally made confidential reports
could go ahead and file formal ones now. There was a bit of confusion
around an erroneous answer by someone in another department, but then
the person at Legal clearly said that “the past is past” is not an
accurate summation of company policy, and that she (and all the other
people listed in the company’s publically-available code of conduct)
would definitely accept formal reports regardless of whether the
behavior took place last week or last year.

If you choose to report, I hope this writing is useful to you. If
you’re new to the genre, please be assured that sexual harassment is NOT
acceptable business-as-usual. I have had numerous editors tell me that
reporting harassment will NOT get you blacklisted, that they WANT the
bad apples reported and dealt with, and that this is very important to
them, because this kind of thing is bad for everyone and is not okay.
The thing is, though, that I’m fifty-two years old, familiar with the
field and the world of conventions, moderately well known to many
professionals in the field, and relatively well-liked. I’ve got a lot of
social credit. And yet even I was nervous and a little in shock when
faced with deciding whether or not to report what happened. Even I was
thinking, “Oh, God, do I have to? What if this gets really ugly?”

But every time I got that scared feeling in my guts and the sensation
of having a target between my shoulder blades, I thought, “How much
worse would this be if I were inexperienced, if I were new to the field,
if I were a lot younger?” A thousand times worse. So I took a deep
breath and squared my shoulders and said, “Hell, yes, use my name.” And
while it’s scary to write this now, and while various people are worried
that parts of the Internet may fall on my head, I’m going to share the
knowledge — because I’m a geek, and that’s what we do.

It should be fascinating to see just how interested the pinkshirts are in continuing their crusade, not against elderly writers and maverick outsiders, but an editor at the largest genre publisher who is married to one of the finest female SF writers.  Especially in light of the fact that his accuser is a well-known whack-job.  Which, of course, doesn’t mean she’s lying or delusional, only that she’d better be able to produce some evidence or eyewitnesses to back up her claim.

The best part is that the SFWA leadership genuinely believes that it is people like Resnick, Malzberg, and me who are the problem.  They don’t realize that they can get rid of every single non-crossdressing male who has ever published in the genre and that won’t even slow down the more radical pinkshirts, as those women are so angry, narcissistic, and delusional that they are capable of seeing racism in a stiff breeze and sexual harassment in a handshake.

If I ever went to an SF/F convention, I can only imagine the pinkshirts would no sooner catch sight of me in the distance before they’d burst into tears and start racing for the “mandated reporters” to be the first to claim that I beat them to death and abused their corpses.

The downside of corporate profits

As PJ O’Rourke points out in Don’t Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards, a high rate of profits not always a harbinger of economic good news:

[Adam] Smith spotted the exact cause of the 2008 financial meltdown not just before it happened but 232 years before, probably a record for advice to sell short. In Book II, chapter 1 of The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote, “A dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitant… If it is to be let to a tenant for rent, as the house itself can produce nothing, the tenant must always pay the rent out of some other revenue.” Smith therefore concluded that, although a house can make money for its owner if it’s rented, “the revenue of the whole body of the people can never be in the smallest degree increased by it.” Bingo. Subprime mortgage collapse.

Smith was familiar with rampant speculation, or “overtrading,” as he politely called it. The Mississippi Scheme and the South Sea Bubble had both collapsed in 1720, three years before his birth. In 1772, while Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations, a bank run occurred in Scotland. Only three of Edinburgh’s thirty private banks survived. The reaction of the Scottish overtraders to the ensuing credit freeze sounds familiar. “The banks, they seem to have thought,” Smith said, “were in honor bound to supply the deficiency, and to supply them with all the capital which they wanted to trade with.”

According to Smith, the phenomenon of speculative excess has less to do with free markets than with high profits. “When the profits of trade happen to be greater than ordinary,” he said, “overtrading becomes a general error.” And rate of profit, Smith claimed, “is always highest in the countries that are going fastest to ruin.”

Judging by how America invested in 2007 and voted in 2008 that would be us.

In this vein, it may be pertinent to note that both corporate profits and their stock prices reached record highs in 2013.  Both are actually higher than the previous peak in 2007.

 
Considering the recent political and geopolitical events, with the Supreme Court solidifying the moral breakdown of the country, the Senate doing its best to cement the existing demographic fracturing, and foreign nations as diverse as Ecuador, Russia, and Switzerland all openly demonstrating their contempt for the administration’s imperial overreach, it should not come as a tremendous surprise to see that certain economic indicators are flashing signs of an incipient crisis.

Blood on their green hands

Whether it is God or the Devil, someone clearly has a wicked sense of humor:

The White-throated Needletail – the world’s fastest flying bird – was
thousands of miles off course after turning up at Tarbert on the Isle of
Harris. It was first seen by two bird spotters from Northumberland on Monday.  There has not been a sighting of the species in Britain since 1991 when a
single bird was seen four times – in Kent, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and
finally Shetland.

Now 22 years later another White-throated Needletail turned up in the UK, but after
more than 80 twitchers flocked to Harris – with scores more on their way –
the bird flew into a wind turbine at Tarbert, witnessed by around 40 people….

“It is tragic. More than 80 people had already arrived on the island and
others were coming from all over the country. But it just flew into the
turbine. It was killed instantly. The corpse will be sent to a museum but obviously this is just
terrible.”

I can see where he’s coming from, but sometimes, one man’s tragedy is another man’s chuckle.

Atheist rationality in action

This would appear to count as additional evidence of my scientific hypothesis concerning atheism being an indicator of mild autism. It’s impressive how many conventional atheist talking points he manages to hit on in his rant. And notice he makes false claims of being threatened as well as threats of “digging up dirt”; such actions are endemic to the more emotional elements on the Left.

And never forget, these are the people who claim to have reason on their side.

How dare you say ignorant!

An illuminating development in the Zimmerman trial:

A teenage friend of Trayvon Martin was forced to admit today in the George Zimmerman murder trial that she did not write a letter that was sent to Martin’s mother describing what she allegedly heard on a phone call with Martin moments before he was shot.

In a painfully embarassing moment, Rachel Jeantel was asked to read the letter out loud in court.

“Are you able to read that at all?” defense attorney Don West asked.

Jeantel, head bowed, eyes averted whispered into the court microphone, “Some but not all. I don’t read cursive.”

It sent a hush through the packed courtroom.  Jeantel, 19, was unable to read any of the letter save for her name.

Note that for all of the recent pointing and shrieking, crying “raciss”, asserting “white privilege”, and public demands for expulsion from non-crimethinking society, not a single individual has attempted to contest the observation that Ms Jemisin and “people like [her]“, who are imperiled by the laws of Florida and Texas, appear to be incapable of building or maintaining an advanced technological civilization.  Indeed, if we are to consider the examples of the late Mr. Martin and the sub-literate Ms Jeantel, (who claims to have graduated from Norland High School and to be studying criminal justice at Miami University), it is not unreasonable to ask what percentage of “people like [her]” are capable of constructively participating in one in now that we are twenty years into the Age of Information.  It is clearly greater than zero. It is not at all clear that it is 100.

…

This is not to imply that Ms Jemisin is sub-literate.

…

Or that she did not write the books with her name on them.

…

Nate’s take on metals

In which he addresses the nervous Goldie-come-latelies:

You’re seeing lots of
leveraged folks being forced to sell. This is literally a forced
collapse. When this sort of thing is happening… you’re near the
bottom. It may not be the actual bottom… but you’re near it. When it
turns… we’ll be on a long term bull market in gold that is going all
the way to 3500 or so around 2015… and that’s assuming my
hyper-inflation prediction does not hold. That’s just the technicals.
If you start looking at actual claims on gold verses actual inventory…
its a much different picture… which could literally result in 1oz
coins being worth about 100k each in today’s dollars.

This is why I have repeatedly warned people not to look at metals as an “investment”.  If you’re paying attention to the daily, or even monthly, gold price, you might as well be day-trading equities. Gold, like land, is about inter-generational wealth, not short-term money making. It will be around when the most stable extant bank finally fails.  It will be valuable when the last of the current political entities collapses into barbarism and chaos. It is not an investment, it is insurance.

Those who bought in at $500 or less are simply looking at the dramatic price action and shrugging.  Perhaps it will drop to $1k next, or leap up to $5k. If you’re not leveraged and you’re not trading, it doesn’t matter which happens to come next. It’s rather like being an owner of Apple stock in the 1980s and fretting over where its price is today.  If you want to make money, then do something productive and earn it; buying X rather than Y and hoping the price goes up isn’t being productive.

Don’t put your faith in gold.  It won’t save you from anything except perhaps abject poverty. Don’t put your trust in it; it is a mindless substance. But it is more substantial and lasting than either credit money or fiat money.  And it will hold its core value in periods of inflation and deflation alike, regardless of how it is presently priced in the currency du jour.

Not exactly the best and brightest

The linked article on the destruction of the American university was mildly interesting, mostly for its complete wrongheadedness about what parties have been responsible for the drastic decline in higher education, but the discussion in the comments were considerably better, as one tenured PhD schooled an untenured one. In doing so, he illustrated that at least part of the problem is an intellectually-challenged higher education faculty that simply does not understand economics and supports the very immigration that has rendered them permanently poor.

The amazing thing is that these maleducated wretches are STILL spouting Marxist nonsense, blaming the conservatives they hate instead of the progressive elite responsible, and failing to realize that a modicum of basic Adam Smith is all that is necessary to understand why their expensive degrees are almost completely worthless and why their employment prospects are so dim:

There seems to be a highly questionable premise running throughout
the discussion on this blog — that people have ever been able to make a
decent liviing working as adjuncts, or that they will ever be able to do
so in the future. Given the economics of the situation, and the
enormous hurdles to unionizing or organizing in any meaningful way, the
primary goal should be to reestablish a greater number of full-time
positions. The harsh economic reality is that most community colleges
will probably never be able to pay adjuncts enough to make a living, and
most decent four-year colleges will not pay adjuncts a decent wage
because they don’t have to.

A fundamental problem for adjuncts, especially in professional fields
like law, business, engineering and communications (but also in many
other fields), is that decent colleges have an almost endless supply of
people willing to teach for non-economic reasons. My university
generally pays adjuncts $2,000-3,000 per course (depending on the field)
and basically hasn’t raised adjunct pay in at least 15 years. Some
other local colleges pay even less than we do. It’s embarrassing and
shameful. Yet we have a queue of people ready and willing to teach
courses for us. Many of them are retired and looking to stay active
intellectually; some are successful professionals wanting to “give back”
to their alma mater; still others are wanting to add a brownie point to
their resume by being associated with a university. Virtually no one
does it for the money. This is not a new phenomenon. Almost thirty
years ago, when I was a businessman and taught as an adjunct, I
considered my adjunct teaching at the University of Hawaii to be a
public service, and I donated the money (about $2,500 a course, even
then, as I recall) back to the university for student scholarships.

Somewhere along the line, some people got the idea that one could
make a living teaching as an adjunct. I don’t think that’s realistic.
In fact, it will probably become increasingly unrealistic, given the
education model that many universities are exploring (video and internet
lectures in which “master” professors will teach thousands of students
in basic courses, leaving more time for full-time faculty to teach
upper-division and graduate courses and to conduct research). So my
advice to people who can’t get a full-time teaching job is to get some
other full-time job, outside of academe. In the meantime, I would
highly encourage them to moonlight as adjuncts and continue their
efforts to organize or unionize if they feel that’s the best solution.
But I think a far smarter strategy would be to focus on restoring
full-time positions that would pay a living wage.

I believe your analysis of the situation has some validity. There
are many people who will adjunct for little or no remuneration. But
higher education institutions are not charity organizations. 

Personally, I spent several years to get a Ph.D. and expected to find
full-time work, but it hasn’t happened, and I am indigent. For seven
years I worked as a prison guard and caseworker to make ends meet (and
actually attain a middle-class lifestyle). Why should I make 60K (with
benefits) as a prison worker but only expect 16K as a community college
teacher at three schools? 


I know other administrators who feel the same as you do yet go along
with the exploitation of labor and the taking of surplus value. You
know in your heart that you are complicit in the slow unraveling of
higher education in the US.

Some questions for you:

* Why would anyone possibly think that getting a certain degree
automatically entitles them to a certain kind of job? (Tell that to the
hundreds of thousands of students who are have graduated in recent
years who are unemployed or underemployed. )

* How oblivious would one have to be to spend years working on a PhD
without understanding what the job prospects were for that degree?

* What kind of self-delusion and self-entitlement would it take for a
person to think that just because they spent years doing a certain thing
that the world somehow owes them a living wage for doing that thing?
(Every human being on earth would love to get paid well for doing
something they love. But not many of us are so naïve that we think we
are good enough to make a living wage playing basketball, playing golf
or taking travel photographs – my preferred occupations. )

* How could anyone who has spent time in the academy not understand
that good colleges and universities are, in numerous respects,
charitable organizations? (Benefactors give billions of dollars to
higher education, just like other kinds of charities. Hundreds of
thousands of people volunteer their time and money to colleges as guest
speakers, sponsors, advisors, fundraisers, etc., just like other kinds
of charities. And thousands of people like me give up lucrative
professional careers to teach – while most of our former colleagues are
getting rich and retiring early – because we believe that education is
something worth devoting/donating our time and energy to, even though we
receive pay that is far below what we could earn in our previous jobs.)

* Why should adjunct college professors be exempt from the laws of
supply and demand, while almost everyone else in the country is bound by
them? (If you are so unhappy with the laws of supply and demand in
the U.S., why don’t you just move to a communist country where such laws
don’t apply so much?)

* Where were you (or others like you) 30 years ago, when I was raising
hell about the inappropriate formation of an adjunct/non-tenure-track
underclass? (There was a real opportunity to address the problem then,
before it became the intractable problem that it is today.)

* Where were you (and others like you) when I stood up in an
all-faculty meeting, with virtually no support from my faculty
colleagues, and told the president of my university that he needed to
resign because the central administration’s incompetence and greed were
destroying the finances and educational integrity of my university?

* Where were you (and others like you) when I was giving speeches and
writing academic articles and a book on the dangers of treating
universities like businesses instead of like educational organizations?

* What are you doing now (besides whining), while I am engaging the
trustees and central administration of my university in an attempt to
pressure them into getting rid of the silly business model that they are
using to run the university, which treats adjuncts as nothing more than
a cheap source of labor?

* Why should I continue to care about the plight of adjuncts like you,
when you blame innocent people for your own problems, when you refuse to
listen to basic facts and logic, and when you insult the very people
who are probably the best hope for solving the problem?

In no way, shape or form am I complicit in unraveling higher
education, as you so incorrectly suggested. Nor do I know in my heart
that I am guilty of any such thing, as you so dishonestly stated in your
posting. My job is not to ensure that you have a job. And I cannot
help you at all, if you are too thick-headed to act in your own best
interest by first understanding the problem and accepting responsibility
for your role in helping to create the problem in the first place.

One doesn’t have to be in denial about the dire state of American higher education to fail to feel any sympathy for the entitled, badly educated, would-be education professionals who have not only helped sow the seeds of their own indebted servitude, but still actively serve as intellectual shock troops and recruiters for the very system that oppresses them.

They also don’t seem to understand that all the social spending on the elderly, the vibrant, and the foreign they support means that there is little remaining for the liberal arts that the aspirational middle class used to proudly fund.  The same people that previously had no objection to paying for government-funded orchestras and theatres now resist being taxed to pay for the diversification of their schools and neighborhoods.

Furthermore, a graduate student with inside access notes that the tenured faculty absolutely bears considerable responsibility for the academic decline:

I’m currently a graduate student and a staff person at a major
college. I have the dubious honor of sitting in and taking notes during
the faculty meetings of one department. Our faculty have, at every
budget crunch opportunity, cut the funding for graduate students,
student activities, and part-time instructors. Our faculty bemoan their
salaries to any and every ear, but given a single whisper of power
behave as cruelly as any member of the relative 1% and abuse, exploit,
and exhaust the students.

College has been destroyed by the abuse of tenure. The faculty are
the 1%, the students and part-timers are the 99%. The Administration ARE
former faculty.
Our faculty are the -sole- source of the corruption, laziness, and
weakness of the department. They are each required to teach 2 courses a
semester and each of them asks for a ‘course buy out’ on the
justification their research is more important than students. Of 24
Professors, 11 are currently teaching. While our university has courses
with 500 students, our part-time instructors, the abused 3rd class, or
our graduate students teach those sections. Our professors select
’boutique’ courses, some of which enroll 5 students (undergraduate
courses with course caps of 55, but only 5 interested students because
the class is irrelevant to the major but interesting to the professor).
When professors buyout courses they ‘pay’ from their salary or a grant
approximately $4000. It costs our department over $11000 to reassign the
course (I do the budget). Our faculty declare tenure is end-all-be-all.

Tenure committees value research and publication, not teaching,
therefore so do our professors. They publish drek that goes straight to
archive, get tenure, and sit on their title for another 30 years. They
are not assets and are barely intellectuals. When we recently had a vote
in my department on whether to fund graduate student scholarships or
faculty travel, travel won in a vote of 2:22.

The administration, which is so denigrated, and rightfully so, in
this article is in fact made of up of former professors. My Dean is an
English PhD. He has pulled half of our TA and GA positions, leaving our
students without funding and forcing those who want to continue their
education into massive debt. He simply increased the minimum number of
students the other TAs had to teach (for the same amount of money). He
hired over 70 new faculty with the money ‘saved.’

Our Associate Dean in charge of curriculum is a Chemistry PhD who
taught for 20 years. He personally made the announcement, taking public
credit for the idea, to no longer require fine arts or foreign language
credits for undergraduates. This decision resulted in a huge reduction
of registrations and effectively killed our German, Russian, French,
Italian, Mandarin, and foreign literature programs. Without
undergraduate classes to teach, the graduate program is disappearing
too.

Of course, it hardly comes as a surprise to anyone with a university degree to be informed that most tenured academics are narrow-minded, self-centered bastards.

Inflation vs Deflation XII

Nate closes out the Great Inflation Debate with his final entry:

So at long last we understand how hyper-inflation works.  It is caused
by hyper-velocity.  Meaning folks are spending their money as soon as
they get it.  I’m not going to go much into the differences in Weimar
and today… because honestly the differences are actually smaller than
Vox indicates.  See we have the worlds leading reserve currency.  
Companies and governments have enormous amounts of cash on hand ready to
dump.  As I showed previously… the Fed has no idea how much cash is
actually out there in the international market.  We know that there is
roughly 2 trillion in corporate cash reserves in the domestic market…
but we’re told its actually as much as 5 or 6 trillion in the
international market.. and that’s on the low end.  Kids… that isn’t
even counting what the governments around the world are hoarding.
 Remember one of the benefits of being the foremost reserve currency is
that oil is priced in dollars…  so to buy oil you first have to buy
dollars. That’s important  Its a big deal.  So there is a lot of demand
for dollars out there.  And a lot of dollars hoarded up.

And thus we see that the engine is certainly sufficient to put the
train in motion.  In fact there is probably enough cash out there to
blow it to hell and gone.  No.. its not like Weimar.  Its different.
 Its very different.  But history doesn’t repeat.  It rhymes.

A common, but often ignored, phenomenon is that even during
hyper-inflation the central bankers think that there isn’t enough money
to go around.  Why?  Because I have explained it is velocity driving the
problem.  Not an increased supply in money.  Remember that central
bankers are all worshipers of John Maynard Keynes.  Damn his eyes.  So
they see complex economic situations as simplistic equations that can be
manipulated with god-like precision.  They have equations that they
really believe accurately can describe something as complex as an
economy.  To much X?  Add a little Y.  To much V?  take away some Q.  I
know this sounds insane… because well… it is… insane.
 Keynesianism is far more idiotic than you probably think it is.

I leave it to the readers to decide which case they found more convincing. Of course, time will be the only meaningful judge, as for all we know, the current state of monetary disinflation could, at least in principle, continue until the sun grows cold.  In this regard, I somewhat disagree with Nate, in that if hyperinflation doesn’t at least begin to appear by 2016, I don’t think it would be necessary for him to concede. In any event, as one reader commented, there are no winners in this debate, everyone, including Ben Bernanke and Goldman Sachs, looks to lose out in some way.  It is better to be a shopkeeper in peacetime than a king in chaos; those whose times are ignored by the historians because “nothing happened” are the fortunate ones.

It might be interesting, however, to learn if your views were modified at all as a result of the debate.  By which I mean if you were formerly inclined to expect deflation but now consider hyperinflation more likely, or vice-versa.

Nate is putting the debate into epub format which will be cleaned up a little for typos and then made available as a free ebook for future reference.

Amend or go home

Remember when all the progressives and moderates were saying that a Defense of Marriage Amendment was unnecessary because Congress passed a law?  Yeah, well, they lied:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal law that defines
marriage as a heterosexual union, saying it violates the rights of
married gay couples by denying them government benefits.

Between legalizing abortion and the government dismantling of marriage, the USA has now officially entered Sodom and Gomorrah territory.   I wouldn’t put too much confidence in that “God bless America” notion.  The best-case scenario is that He’s not paying attention. Following American politics these days feels like watching Gibbon on fast-forward; an imperial decline and fall measured in years rather than centuries.

I find it remarkable that Republicans still bother passing this sort of law when it has been clear since at least 1973 that the Supreme Court will simply overturn anything that is effectively conservative. Amend or don’t bother.

UPDATE: And they effectively overturned Proposition 8 in California by refusing to hear it.  Taken together, these two “rulings” make it official: American democracy is entirely dead.

The court avoided a ruling on the merits in a second gay-marriage case
involving California’s Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage, saying that
both the Supreme Court and a federal appeals court lacked jurisdiction
to hear the case. That means a federal district court’s ruling striking
down Proposition 8 stands, which could clear the way for same-sex
marriage to resume in California.

Notice how the Supreme Court will jump in and wave the Constitution whenever it wants to override something, but turn around and claim it has no jurisdiction whenever it wants to leave a lower court decision intact.  Pass a law, pass a referendum, it doesn’t matter.  The black robes now rule.

Ideology of the gatekeepers

Amanda at the Mad Genius Club notes the connection between the rise of the Left’s ideological gatekeepers in publishing and the alarming discovery that boys no longer read books:

I’m happy with just writing stories folks want to read. After all, isn’t that really what we’re supposed to be doing? Writing
stories that entertain? If a story doesn’t entertain, folks aren’t
going to read it — or at least not finish it. If they don’t read it,
then what good is any message we might put into it? That message will be
lost because it was never read.

But that isn’t enough for the literati, for all too many editors and,
unfortunately, for the boards of too many professional organizations
these days. No, you have to be socially relevant and enlightened in your
writing. You have to promote what is “right” — as is defined by those
who have the loudest voice. Heaven help you if you write something that
might offend someone else, especially if you are a male of a certain
age.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned (and I know that means I have the wrong
beliefs and should probably be silenced now. Sorry, I’m a loud-mouthed
woman who isn’t afraid to exercise my First Amendment rights). But I
still feel that the story is the thing we should be concerned with and
not the message. As I said earlier, folks won’t read the message if they
don’t read the story. The corollary to this is: why is publishing in
trouble? Because it forgot that readers, on the whole, read to be
entertained and to forget about their troubles….

Don’t believe me, ask yourself why so many in publishing are trying
to convince us that boys don’t read….

Then we have those publishers and editors and writers who feel that
we must address all of society’s ills with our writing and “educate” our
readers so there will never be any racism or sexism or any other ism
they don’t approve of ever again.

She’s merely pointing out the readily apparent, but in light of how some writers have nevertheless attempted to deny there is any ideological bias in the SFWA and in SF/F publishing, and it is either a) one’s imagination, or, b) just a complete coincidence to observe that the field is now policed by gatekeepers who assiduously work to prevent the publication of any makehurt or crimethink, I think it is useful to have a look at what sort of works the publishers are actively seeking:

Here is an informative example from one publishing house that freely admits it is “of a progressive bent”:

What are we looking for?

As mentioned above, we’re now considering submissions within any
genres. We’re specifically looking for novels or collections which
demonstrate a significant crossover between genres – as the name or our
press suggests. CGP has always been a press with a progressive bent. Bearing that in mind, here are some things we want to see MORE of:

  • Queer Main Characters
  • MC’s of Color
  • Women MC’s
  • Disabled MC’s
  • Science saves the day!
  • Far future
  • Stories set outside North America

Beyond that, there is no hard-and-fast rule; any story that follows the above guidelines will be considered.

What are we NOT looking for?

  • Stories based off the assumption that any particular religion’s beliefs are real
  • Weak women being rescued by macho guys
  • “Science-as-villain”
  • Vampires, zombies, werewolves, Arthurian retellings, Eurocentric faeries, or ghost stories
  • Time travel

Though it should go without saying, any submissions promoting
discrimination, misogyny, bigotry, and/or hatred will be deleted without
notice or consideration.

Now, consider how many works of the Golden Age are unpublishable by these standards, particularly in light of the opinion of the majority of SFWA members that using the term “lady” as an adjective is competely unacceptable misogyny. And notice how the publisher is not only expressly anti-religious and anti-American, but is actively looking to publish secular science propaganda.  Religion can be the villain – so long as its tenets are shown to be false – but science cannot be.

Obviously, this is a small publisher, but don’t deceive yourself.  The major genre publishers may be much more open to vampires, zombies, and time travel than this one, but their standards, the books they have been publishing, and the books they are looking to publish, are all based on the same ideological standard even though they are less open about it.

Speaking of gatekeepers, if you’re submitting for ing-game publication, please keep in mind that we’re focused on action and story uber alles; the objective is most certainly NOT to become the mirror image of the conventional gatekeepers.