The epic flop of Windows 8

Karl Denninger suspects it is even worse than is being reported:

There is another interesting batch of numbers here as well in the desktop figures:
SunOS         0.01%
FreeBSD         0.04%
Windows 98    0.12%
ChromeOS/Linux    0.14%
BB Playbook    0.15%
WinXP/64         0.69%
Linux         4.09%
Windows 8    4.52%
Apple iPad    8.10%
Vista/Win2008    8.28%
MacOS         14.75%
WinXP         17.88%
Windows 7    41.25%

Note carefully those Windows 8 figures.  4.5%, or less than Vista?!  In addition note all the people still running XP — there are a hell of a lot of them!  In fact those desktop machines identifying themselves as Linux machines compares favorably with those running Windows 8!

I would say Microsoft has flopped the Win8 release in a big way — far worse than is being reported.

Worse than Vista?  Yowzers, that’s pathetic! Blogger doesn’t report in this kind of detail, but I do find it interesting to note that the Android percentage, at 12%, presently exceeds that of iPhone and iPad combined at 11%.

The new Dawn rising

Golden Dawn and Movimento 5 Stelle look to be the first Nationalist parties to take back control of their countries from governments under the control of the global fascists:

It wasn’t just that their symbols looked like swastikas. Or that thousands of Greek flags filled the marble square beneath the Acropolis. Or that they were marking the 560th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople.

It was that there were so many of them. Angry men and angry women furiously screaming “Greece belongs to Greeks” in the heart of ancient Athens, as tourists – some befuddled, some shocked – looked on or fled at the sight of neo-Nazis coming to town.

“Now we are in the thousands,” thundered Nikos Michaloliakos, the bespectacled mathematician who leads Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party. “Long live victory!”

Like the soldiers on whom they model themselves, the Greeks who subscribe to the ultra-nationalist, neo-fascist dogma of Golden Dawn are the first to say they are at war. This week, as Antonis Samaras’s coalition government struggled to contain an escalating crisis over efforts to curb the extremists, it was they who appeared to be winning that war.

There is going to be war.  In Europe, it will be the European nationalists against the globalists and their African and Muslim jannisaries.  In the USA, it is going to be a confusing affair, with shifting alliances between the Black, Brown, Red, and White Americas, with Black, Brown, and Red America serving the interests of the globalists.

Of course, to say “there is going to be war” is somewhat misleading.  The war actually began in 1965; the first invasion soon after.  This nationalist response is a belated one, and is the result of the various nations finding themselves backed into a corner from which there is no other escape.

The globalists are going to try to crack down and keep the nationalists out of power, but the resulting exposure of what has always been their anti-democratic nature is going to completely eliminate their ability to claim any moral superiority over the nationalists.

This doesn’t mean Golden Dawn or the other nationalist parties are full of well-meaning angels.  Make no mistake about it, they are simply the lesser evil of the two options on offer.

The dangerous vision of the SFWA

I posted a pair of comments that were in line with my post yesterday on the SFWA Forum.  (Forum posts are private and one is not allowed to quote them elsewhere, otherwise I would quote the posts to which I was responding.) This resulted in numerous complaints to the moderator, a warning for “abusive behavior”, the deletion of the following posts, and a temporary removal of my posting abilities there by a creature with the unlikely Warrior Woman name of Cat Rambo.
Not that it will likely make a
difference, but I don’t see how “Moahr Titz” is going to
improve the Bulletin. As for more diversity, that’s a fantastic idea
if you want to render the Bulletin of absolutely no interest to
anyone except women who derive vicarious pleasure from listening to
other people moan about the travails of life. If this was the
Organization for Respecting Women and not the SFWA, hey, these
various suggestions are fine. But they have absolutely nothing to do
with science fiction. Consider: it will be a pretty hollow victory to
claim that everyone in professional science fiction is finally
respecting women, minorities, dwarves, and fairies in the desired
manner if in the process you manage to drive away three-quarters of
the science fiction readership.
The Bulletin absolutely should have
scantily clad women being rescued by manly men from bug-eyed aliens
on the cover from time to time. It should have robots and spaceships
too. Whether you find that offensive or not, that’s part of what
science fiction was, and is. Science fiction is supposed to be the
literature of dangerous ideas, not safe and inoffensive and
respectful and politically correct ones.
And if you can’t handle that
concept, then you should get the hell out of the field and the
organization. You don’t belong in either of them.
I therefore encourage every member
of the SFWA who is offended by the Dialogues or the Bulletin covers
to follow e. Catherine Tobler’s excellent example and resign from the
organization. Because regardless of your literary talents and
interests, you are clearly not fit to be a science fiction writer.
Science fiction isn’t about respect, equality, or inoffensiveness, it
is about science and the future.

I also addressed the idea that the Dialogues column between Mike Resnick and Barry Salzberg should be forcibly retired with alacrity.

How about a regular column by women
writers complaining about sexism in [science
fiction/fantasy/horror/publishing/games] and how there are not enough
female [fill-in-the-blank]. That would be totally new and different
and impossible to find anywhere else!
Maybe every four issues we could
change it up with a column by a black writer complaining about racism
in [science fiction/fantasy/horror/publishing/games] and how there
are not enough black [fill-in-the-blank].
Who wants to read about the history
of yucky old science fiction by some old white guys of whom nobody
has ever heard anyway?

So, praising the decision of a member to quit, expressing the opinion that others of similarly delicate minds would do well to follow her example, and noting that women are inordinately inclined to be easily offended, speech-controlling fascists resulted immediately in fascistic, speech-repressing activity by an offended woman.  In the eyes of the present SFWA, criticism equals abuse.

And you thought the Sports Guy was joking.  Women really do ruin everything. Even for themselves. Perhaps especially for themselves.

No wonder a number of SFWA members refuse to post on the Forum and stubbornly stick with the old ones on SFF.net.  The SFWA Forum doesn’t just stifle discourse, it actively eliminates it altogether.

Harlan Ellison wept.

Generation X Aptitude Test

Khyron creates the GXAT:

1. Do you want to change the world?

A. Yes, and I’m proud to say we did it, man. We changed the world. Just look around you!

B.
Yes, absolutely, and I promise I will get back to doing that just as
soon as interest rates return to where they’re supposed to be.

C.
Omigod, omigod, changing the world and helping people is, like, totally
important to me! I worked in a soup kitchen once and it was so sad but
the poor people there had so much dignity!

D. That question is so stupid and absurd that there is obviously no reason to continue this pointless exercise.

If you answered D, you are Generation X.   Thus endeth the GXAT.

Women Ruin Everything: SFWA edition

A female writer quits the SFWA because she believes it isn’t sufficiently feminized:

It began with issue #200 of the Bulletin—all right, #199 if we want to get technical. It began with the Resnick and Malzberg
Dialogues, a long-time feature of the publication. It began when two
men sat down to have a dialogue about editors and writers of the female
gender. How fantastic, I thought, because I, being a writer and an
editor and female, had a keen interest in such things. I love reading
anthologies such as Women of Wonder (and its sequel) and seeing
how women impacted and contributed to this forward-looking and -thinking
genre I love. I hoped they might include the women who inspired me and
introduce me to many I hadn’t yet discovered.

That’s not what I found. I found a dialogue that seemed more focused
on how these “lady editors” and “lady writers” looked in bathing suits,
and that they were “beauty pageant beautiful” or a “knock out.” I am
certain no condescension was intended with the use of “lady,” but as the
dialogues went on, I felt the word carried a certain tone—perhaps that
was a fiction of my own making. As I listened to these two men talk
about lady editors and writers they had known, I grew uneasy. Something
wasn’t right…..

And now, apparently, we who voiced complaint are having another finger leveled toward us, saying how dare we?
How dare we voice a contrary opinion—surely we want to silence all
thoughts that are unlike our own! Surely we want to strike these men and
their dated notions from all records!

Because we ask to be respected and have our point of view respected
does not mean we wish to obliterate the point of view of another. Because we ask to be treated with the same thought you would give a
person of your own gender, a person of a different gender, a person of a
different religion, a person of your own religion, a person of your own
race, a person of a different race, does not mean we seek to tear down
anything you believe, follow, or espouse.

This woman isn’t content with the ruination of both the organization and most of the science fiction publishing houses, now she wants to put limits on the opinions expressed by the old lions of the field, eliminate the very sort of artwork that helped make the old SF publications popular in the first place, and be held immune from criticism for her fascism.

She is, plain and simply, lying.  She clearly wants to silence all thoughts that she finds insufficiently respectful.  She does wish to obliterate a masculine point of view that she finds offensive. It is women like her, and their gamma male allies, who have devastated science fiction, who have driven most of its male readers away from books and toward games, and who are responsible for the genre’s declining sales and inability to replace the classics of previous decades.  This is little more than an attempt to silence the remnants of the SFWA’s old guard.

As we learned yesterday, I am unpublishable by the present standards in the publishing industry.  But I am far from the only one, very far from it.  I am no Heinlein or Herbert, perhaps more akin to a Resnick or Malzberg, but it should be abundantly clear that none of these four men could get break into publication today, that their perspectives are intrinsically offensive, and none of them would be able to successfully navigate the maze of scalzied manboobs and feminist fascists who have infiltrated the genre and now control the editorial gates at the professional magazines and publishing houses.

Neither should it be any surprise to observe that the genre is dying, just like every other male-dominated endeavor that permits, or is forced, to allow the “equal opportunity” that somehow always ends with women telling men what they are allowed to think, say, and do.  It is the same pattern we have seen play out again and again and again. But I think Ms Tobler is to be congratulated for leaving the SFWA and I think her action shows that she is an admirable role model for many SFWA members. 


Dear Ms Tobler,


Congratulations on quitting the SFWA.  I’m sure it was a real shock to learn that the old lions of the field are not inclined to immediately adjust their thinking to your liking upon demand and I’m sorry you had to experience such palpable horror.


Now, if you will please take the rest of the feminist fascists who believe romance novels in space, necrobestiality, and rehashed Regency romances are science fiction with you, thus permitting the real SF writers to get on with the business of writing actual science fiction for readers who enjoy it, you will do a great service to both SFWA and the field of science fiction.


Best regards,
Vox

No, you’re not “exempt”, cop

These lawless police are going to be learning some very hard lessons if they don’t get themselves under control. They appear to think they can act with impunity simply because they wear badges. They are wrong. They are very, very wrong.

Grisham says he supports the police. He shouldn’t. In the USA, the police are the enemy of the people. They are the bad guys and the servants of evil. They are not your grandfather’s keeper of the peace, they are lawless enforcers.

Preach, preacher, saith the choir

Why the Grasshopper Generation is the most hated generation:

Pity the baby boomers, blamed in their youth for every ill and excess of American society and now, in their dotage, for threatening to sink the economy and perhaps Western civilization itself.

The revival of The Great Gatsby serves as a reminder that continuing to blame boomers even in their old age was not a foregone conclusion. The young people of the 1920s were as controversial to their older contemporaries as their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s. They were called flappers (less commonly “sheiks,” in the case of men), or Bright Young Things in England. The cartoons of John Held, Jr. have memorialized their hair styles, bobbed for women, slicked back for men — the Beatles cuts and Afros of their own time. But the gilded youth of that earlier age, having enjoyed bootleg liquor and cigarettes rather than stronger substances, were allowed to make a discreet transition to middle age and then little old lady and gentleman status without the medical clucking or cultural sneers of journalists. They vanished back into the multitude while the so-called Boomers seem destined to be hounded to death. Why?

I can think of a few reasons:

  1. They ruined American society.  Even the acts for which they can’t be held responsible, such as the 1965 Immigration Act, they resolutely supported.
  2. They are, to the extent that one can categorize an entire generation, short-sighted and selfish.  It is astonishing to compare the lack of interest my parents’ generation has in its grandchildren to the dedication that my grandparents’ generation showed to us. 
  3. They are obnoxious.  As PJ O’Rourke once pointed out, the Baby Boomers still clinging to their teenage music and styles would have been like his parents wearing zoot suits in their old age.
  4. They bankrupted the country and their families.  No generation was given larger inheritances by its parents’ generation.  And it is quite likely that most Boomers will leave nothing behind. 
  5. They were given wealth, peace, and power, and instead of being grateful for it, they scorned the traditions of their forefathers and squandered what they were given.

The ills of an entire generation cannot be placed at the feet of every single one of its members.  But neither can any individual member reasonably pretend the rightful anger that following generations will be directing at the Baby Boomers as a whole is unjustified.

Intelligence and reaction times

I tend to share Steve Sailer’s doubts about Michael Woodley et al’s paper on how reaction times are slower now than when Galton first measured them:

“It was an era of glorious scientific discovery. And the reason for the Victorians unprecedented success is simple – they were ‘substantially cleverer’ than us.  Researchers compared reaction times – a reliable indicator of general
intelligence – since the late 1800s to the present day and found our
fleetness of mind is diminishing. They claim our slowing reflexes suggest we are less smart than our
ancestors, with a loss of 1.23 IQ points per decade or 14 IQ points
since Victorian times. While an average man in 1889 had a reaction time of 183 milliseconds, this has slowed to 253ms in 2004. They found the same case with women, whose speed deteriorated from 188 to 261ms in the same period.” 

Back in the 1990s, I read up on Arthur Jensen’s research on his reaction
time experiments, and … I don’t know. It seemed very, very
complicated, even more complicated than reading Jensen on IQ.

How about me? I’m a reasonably intelligent person. Do I have good reaction times? In general, I’d say no.

I’m more than a bit dubious about this correlation between reaction time and intelligence myself.  While on the one hand, I am highly intelligent and have excellent reaction times – I’m a former NCAA D1 100m sprinter and can still outsprint most men 15 years younger –  on the other, I remember the sprinters against whom I ran.  Let’s just say many of them were not likely to be confused with rocket scientists.

Then again, I have no problem believing that the Victorian English were considerably brighter, on average, than the modern American.  A simple comparison of popular novels, then and now, should suffice to prove that.

The gatekeepers strike again

I’d previously made some allusions to the interest of a European publisher in putting out the Arts of Dark and Light series in audiobook and paperback next year, however, after being informed this morning that the publisher changed their mind about publishing it, it has become clear that I have reached the point where I am officially unpublishable by conventional publishers.  C’est la vie.

It’s the usual political gatekeeping of course.  I was told that some of my public statements would make it hard for them to defend the decision to publish with me, despite how much they liked the first book in the series.  The annoying thing is that this is the SECOND time this has happened with this particular publisher; I was assured that this time, my idiosyncratic opinions would not be an issue….

What it comes down to in the end is that I haven’t sold enough books or built enough of a readership to be deemed worth the criticism that comes with my level of notoriety.  The risk/reward balance is too high. Orson Scott Card’s views are every bit as offensive to the gatekeepers as mine are, but Tor Books isn’t about to stop publishing their bestselling author on that basis.  At a mere one million pageviews per month and paltry sales of around 12,000 ebooks annually, the controversy that comes with my name simply isn’t worth it to the publishers.  Now, once I reach 5 million pageviews, I expect they’ll suddenly start sniffing around again.  At 10 million and a top 100 Amazon rank in the Fantasy category, even the most liberal gatekeeper will magically cease to have any problem with my public statements.

Will it take a while for me to get there?  Sure.  But I will.  Fortunately, this is precisely the “that which does not kill me makes me stronger” sort of thing that gives me the motivation to surmount my natural laziness and get things done.  Whether I’ll still see any benefit to working with conventional publishers is a question I’ll consider when the situation arises. In the meantime, my first order of business is to find a reader for the audiobooks I will be publishing next year.  My second order of business will be to begin finding authors who would like to publish electronically through in-game stores with direct access to millions of players.  And my third order of business will be to formally announce the new games we are presently developing.

I would have preferred to take the easy way and turn the book distribution aspects over to a publisher so that I could focus entirely on the writing and game development.  But that’s no longer an option for me due to the political correctness that pervades the publishing industry throughout the English-speaking world.  Since the traditional channels are closed, I’ll simply have to create new ones.  Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention.

I’m not whining or complaining; this is the path I chose.  I’m not looking for sympathy or support.  And I’m not upset with the publishers; they are certainly free to make their own choices and render themselves increasingly irrelevant to various demographics if they like. Yes, it’s certainly irritating to AGAIN find out that a publisher who knows perfectly well how controversial I am when they start talking to me, and who assures me that my notoriety isn’t a problem, ends up getting cold feet before the deal closes.  (Or, in two cases, AFTER it closes.) Still, other than being a minor waste of time, it’s not an actual problem. I’m only irritated with myself because I should have known better; Spacebunny was openly skeptical from the start.

But this isn’t merely a problem for me. The suspicions that publishers have a political agenda and refuse to publish writers solely due to their politically incorrect views are well-founded and are based in absolute, well-documented fact.  Most writers won’t talk about this because they hold out hopes for one day being allowed through the gates and they don’t want to burn any bridges.  However, one advantage of discovering one has already inadvertently nuked all the bridges is that one has carte blanche to speak the truths that would otherwise remain unspoken.

To quote Standout Author Sarah Hoyt: “Like most pioneers, you’re being forced onto it by circumstances and
by the status quo becoming untenable.  But it doesn’t mean you can’t
take the opportunity to build something better. Now go and do it.”

And that is exactly what I intend to do.

The 157 visits of IRSgate

I think the time has arrived to officially tack -gate onto the growing Obama IRS scandal:

Publicly released records show that embattled former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House at least 157 times during the Obama administration, more recorded visits than even the most trusted members of the president’s Cabinet. Shulman’s extensive access to the White House first came to light during his testimony last week before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Shulman gave assorted answers when asked why he had visited the White House 118 times during the period that the IRS was targeting tea party and conservative nonprofits for extra scrutiny and delays on their tax-exempt applications.

By contrast, Shulman’s predecessor Mark Everson only visited the White House once during four years of service in the George W. Bush administration and compared the IRS’s remoteness from the president to “Siberia.” But the scope of Shulman’s White House visits — which strongly suggests coordination by White House officials in the campaign against the president’s political opponents — is even more striking in comparison to the publicly recorded access of cabinet members….

Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama’s friend and loyal lieutenant, logged 62 publicly known White House visits, not even half as many as Shulman’s 157. Former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, to whom Shulman reported, clocked in at just 48 publicly known visits. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earned a cool 43 public visits, and current Secretary of State John Kerry logged 49 known White House visits in the same timeframe, when he was still a U.S. senator.

Even the mainstream media isn’t buying the “Obama didn’t know anything” line any longer.  And the fact that many of the most liberal institutions are now refusing to attend the Attorney General’s off-the-record meeting tends to indicate the severity of the threat to the administration.