Are they afraid of ghosts?

Isn’t it interesting how buildings that are involved in events of questionable veracity so often need to be torn down afterwards?

The day after a task force unanimously recommended razing and rebuilding Sandy Hook Elementary School, residents expressed relief tinged with sadness on Saturday in the small New England town that became a focal point of the national debate on gun control…. A 28-member task force of elected town officials decided late Friday night to demolish the 56-year-old school and build a new one on the same site.

This seems more than a little strange.  I went to a school that was built in 1913 and is still being actively utilized.  And how difficult would it be to clean up a few classrooms?  But if a school shooting can be reasonably expected to produce $57 million in construction business, conspiracy theorists may have to seriously rethink who has an incentive to be hiring patsies.

The downside of disruption

Game Developer goes the way of Computer Gaming World:

Had I written this editorial two weeks earlier, I’d probably be writing about how enthusiastic I am to introduce our first-ever mobile-themed issue. In the past few years, mobile games have grown into a part of the industry no developer can afford to ignore, and the fact that Game Developer hasn’t ever devoted an entire issue to the topic until now is rather shortsighted on our part.

Then I found out that Game Developer’s parent company UBM Tech was axing all its print publications. That’s right – if you haven’t already heard, Game Developer’s last official issue is the next one (June-July). Stick around for it; it’s gonna be good.

Interesting timing, as I just happened to hear from the immortal Dr. Johnny Wilson last week. I still very much miss the old CGW from its glory days of the early and mid-1990s.  I used to read that thing from cover to cover the moment it arrived in the mail. And I’m still looking for that 1993(?) issue that Mike Weksler wrote about 3D graphics about me and Chris Taylor; if anyone has a copy of it somewhere or can even ID the issue, I would appreciate it.

I can’t say I’ll miss Game Developer anywhere nearly as much, but it was a good magazine, even if occasionally a little too much given to articles stating the total obvious by lesser developers and idiotic demands for more transgendered and Esquimaux developers.  But it is still a loss to the game development world, and demonstrates what too often happens when a small company, successful in its niche, sells out to a larger corporation.

Health evaders and the B Ark

I wonder what they’re going to call the millions of Americans who refuse to turn over their health information to the IRS next year?  Health evaders?  Health protesters?

When Obamacare’s individual mandate takes effect in 2014, all Americans
who file income tax returns must complete an additional IRS tax form. The new form will require disclosure of a taxpayer’s personal identifying health information in order to determine compliance with the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. As confirmed by IRS testimony to the tax-writing House Committee on Ways and Means, “taxpayers will file their tax returns reporting their health insurance coverage, and/or making a payment”.

Whatever they call them, I tend to imagine there are going to be a fair amount of them.  Honestly, I don’t see how this whole creaky system is going to survive much longer.  History shows that there is a lot of ruin in a nation, but at this rate, the entire business activity of the USA is soon going to be computers trading stocks with other computers and people filling out forms for the IRS and other government agencies.

Welcome to the B Ark economy.

Pulp Writer review

Jonathan Moeller reviews The Last Witchking:

Last year, I read A THRONE OF BONES by Vox Day, and thought it was one of the more interesting new epic fantasy novels I’ve read. The author was kind enough to send me an advance copy of THE LAST WITCHKING, a group of three short stories set in A THRONE OF BONES’S setting of Selenoth. Specifically, THE LAST WITCHKING, THE HOBLETS OF WICCAM FENSBORO, and OPERA VITA AETERNA.

The first story deals with the titular LAST WITCHKING, and provides an origin story for one of the villains in A THRONE OF BONES. In Selenoth, the “Witchkings” were the pejorative name for a race of extremely powerful sorcerers that once ruled and tyrannized much of the world. The elves eventually destroyed the witchkings, but before they did, the last two witchkings conceived a child and hid him among the humans, intending that child to be the instrument of vengeance upon their enemies….

[T]he Selenoth books are a welcome breath of fresh air. SF/F publishing
has become too ossified and moribund (science fiction and fantasy are
supposed to be the literature of the speculative, yet every writer these
days seems to have the exact same standard-issue SWPL worldview) so
books from a writer who is capable of regarding organized religion as
something other than a peculiar superstition practiced by the peasantry
are most welcome.

It’s always interesting to see which of the three stories contained in Witchking are preferred by various readers.  I also find it amusing that people who haven’t read Hoblets assume it is some sort of Shire ripoff – somewhat ironic in light of how Robert Jordan admitted he was intentionally ripping off The Shire in the first book of The Wheel of Time – whereas those who have read it have expressed some degree of frustration at the way in which it is not even possible to identify what they are.

No tyranny lurking under the bed

Now go the fuck to sleep, says Big Brother Obama.  Larry Correia takes exception:

Let’s see… The first American president that’s actually had to argue that he’s not a dictator, who has to have a big debate over whether it is okay to just waste American citizens on US soil without any due process, who broke thousands of federal laws in order to ship guns to Mexican drug cartels to drum up phony stats against his political enemies, and who blamed a terrorist attack on a YouTube video, says that the idea that potential tyranny looms is just silly.

Sounds legit to me!

Sure, Barack Obama has grown the federal leviathan bigger and stronger and more intrusive than it has ever been, and it was already bloated, absurd, and terrifying before, but talking about how this government could become too powerful and thus tyrannical like all of the other governments in human history which did the same thing before… well, that’s just crazy talk!

Why, one wonders, is it important to Obama that Americans “reject these voices”, the voices that “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity” and of lurking tyranny?

We know his executive branch is actively targeting political foes in a way that not even Nixon or Clinton ever dared.  We know that his administration regularly lies to the press and the public, about Benghazi and about the IRS investigations.  We know he is openly claiming the legal right to assassinate any American, inside or outside U.S. borders, without due process.  And we know he is seeking to disarm the American people.

So, with all due respect, I submit it would be unwise to heed his advice.  First, it is  simple fact that government is a separate entity; it is neither the people nor the nation.  Second, while government is not necessarily and intrinsically sinister, the actions of the current U.S. government and the present administration most certainly are.

The working model

Dan Drezner points it out for anyone who has somehow failed to notice:

So, in all, this has been a pretty crappy week for people who dislike conspiracy theories.

I would go so far as to say that unless you accept the basic concept of conspiracy theory and actively look for conspiracies behind most significant current events, you cannot possibly understand history or reasonably hope to anticipate the future in any meaningful way.

It is better to pick up a few false signals than recognize nothing that takes place around you.

To the printers

I am sorry for the delay in getting the new Summa Elvetica out the door.  We had some technical errors caused by a domain transfer problem, did an extra round of errata-hunting edits to ensure a much cleaner text than before, and since the book ended up being a few more pages than anticipated, another revision of the dustjacket turned out to be required.  But it is now off to the printers and should be reaching to those who preordered sometime the week after next.

We may or may not do an ebook version, as all of the stories the hardcover contains are already available in ebook format.  So, if you want the complete-to-date collection of Selenoth stories, this would be your book to go with A THRONE OF BONES.  Kirk redid the spine, so, although it is not part of the Arts of Dark and Light series proper, SE+ should at least look tangentially related next to them on the bookshelf.

The book is a 6×9 hardcover of 488 pages, priced at $25.99.  It contains Summa Elvetica, eight other novellas, novelettes, and short stories, and a very slightly updated map.

It’s been interesting to see how people’s opinion of SE has changed a little since the publication of A THRONE OF BONES, including my own. What didn’t necessarily work all that well as a full-fledged novel in its own right actually holds up rather nicely as a part of the larger series.  Even though I didn’t see it at the time, it seems Jamsco was correct to observe that it held the seeds of something bigger and better all along.

The thing that I find a little astonishing is that with the publication of SE+, the total page count of the complete Selenoth collection now exceeds that of The Lord of the Rings, 1,342 to 1,147.(1) Now, of course, that doesn’t include The Hobbit, The Simarillion, or the various lost tales.  And Selenoth will never rival Middle Earth, although I do hope it will eventually come to surpass Westeros, Malazan, Randland, and the Four Lands.

(1) Knowing that someone was bound to raise the typography issue, I went ahead and tabulated the word counts. They are virtually identical at this point, with a slight edge to LOTR at 475,202 as Selenoth is presently at 471,387.

Spain is the next deposit theft

Or, if you prefer the more genteel term, “bail-in”. Jeremy Warner warns: “Spain is officially insolvent: get your money out while you still can”

I’d not noticed this until someone drew my attention to it, but the latest IMF Fiscal Monitor,
published last month, comes about as close to declaring Spain insolvent
as you are ever likely to see in official analysis of this sort. Of
course, it doesn’t actually say this outright. The IMF is far too
diplomatic for such language. But that’s the plain meaning of its latest
forecasts, which at last have an air of realism about them, rather than
being the usual dose of wishful thinking….

All this leads to the conclusion that a big Spanish debt restructuring is inevitable. Spanish sovereign bond yields have fallen sharply since announcement of the European Central Bank’s “outright monetary transactions” programme. The ECB has promised to print money without limit to counter the speculators. But in the end, no amount of liquidity can cover up for an underlying problem with solvency.

Europe said that Greece was the first and last such restructuring, but then there was Cyprus. Spain is holding off further recapitalisation of its banks in anticipation of the arrival of Europe’s banking union, which it hopes will do the job instead. But if the Cypriot precedent is anything to go by, a heavy price will be demanded by way of recompense. Bank creditors will be widely bailed in. Confiscation of deposits looks all too possible.

I don’t advise getting your money out lightly. Indeed, such advise is generally thought grossly irresponsible, for it risks inducing a self reinforcing panic. Yet looking at the IMF projections, it’s the only rational thing to do.

The amazing thing about this isn’t that there are more deposit thefts in the works, or that a specific country has been identified.  No, the amazing thing is that this isn’t from Zerohedge, Max Keiser, or some other economic contrarian site, it’s the “assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph” and “one of Britain’s leading business and economics commentators”.

If you’ve got money in a Spanish bank, you can’t say you weren’t warned very clearly and specifically.  And if you’ve got your money in a bank in another country, such as the UK or the USA, be aware that your time is likely coming, sooner or later.  In the case of the latter, the Fed is already beginning to send signals that it is not going to “print” forever.

The secret of the Moon water

It came from Earth:

The latest results come from studies on the most extraordinary samples hauled back from the moon, including green-tinged stone collected by Apollo 15 in 1971, and orange material gathered by Apollo 17 in 1972.

The surprise discovery of the green rock, by Commander Dave Scott and lunar module pilot Jim Irwin, sparked a lengthy debate among the astronauts about the boulder’s true colour while Nasa controllers listened in.

Scientists focused on tiny droplets of volcanic glass that were trapped in crystals inside the rocks. The crystals protected the droplets from the violence of eruption, and so preserved in them a snapshot of the moon’s ancient interior.

Researchers found evidence for water inside the glass droplets in earlier work but the latest study goes further, showing that the lunar water is chemically identical to that on ancient Earth.

So, now we know that the water in the Moon rocks came from Earth.  And we already knew that the Moon rocks came from Earth.  At what point is it going to become sufficiently obvious that the “Moon landings” were filmed on Earth?

What more is required, signed confessions from Stanley Kubrick and Neil Armstrong?

There is no scientific evidence that Man landed on the Moon, after all.  Since the scientific evidence points quite clearly to the various “lunar” objects having a terrestrial origin, then must we not, as good rational scientific materialists, conclude that Man never landed on the Moon?

It’s all in the perspective

The fourth image is the one I find most amusing. Unless you play ASL, you can’t truly appreciate the level of awe with which ASL players are regarded in the wargaming community, or understand the suspicions which other gamers tend to harbor concerning wargamers.  On the one hand, the ability and commitment required to master a game of its encyclopedic complexity is, quite rightly, deemed impressive, bordering on insanity.  On the other, there is an idea that the average ASLer is just a little bit too enthusiastic about those 8-3-8 assault troops, especially if he happens to have sprung for those cool black counters provided by Heat of Battle.  For some reason, people who grasp that playing WoW doesn’t make you an elf don’t always seem to understand that playing the role of a German tactician doesn’t make you a Nazi.

I tend to find it more than a little amusing that the only site from which I’ve ever been banned was the wargame site ConSimWorld, when, in response to a discussion about the “right-wing” Nazis, I posted the complete text of the Munich Manifesto.

But I was rather proud of Ender this morning.  When I showed him the latest version of the forthcoming Selenoth-based game, he immediately identified the 1981 Avalon Hill game from which I’d taken the basic hit-damage mechanism.