Tag: decline and fall

Decline and fall

In a single family. A Virginian inadvertently chronicles American genetic decline:

My people are pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater. I am Frederick Venable Reed Jr, my mother’s maiden name being Betty Venable Rivers–a cousin marriage, which some will suggest explains a lot. The Venables were prominent in the gentility of Southside Virginia.

Why is this of interest, if indeed it is? There are reasonable people today who believe that traits such as politics, way of life, occupation, talents, and intellectual bent are genetically determined. Some time ago I found an interesting study showing that families–those studied were English–maintained distinguishable traits for many generations, suggesting that these were innate. For a generation or two similarities might be explained by children copying their parents. Over many generations, it would appear otherwise.

I wondered whether this would hold for my own family. It seems so. The first mention of Venables was of Walter de Veneur at the Battle of the Ford in 960. He did nothing astonishing, but I think that just being mentioned by name would suggest membership in something similar to the upper middle class. The name is baronial, from the town of Venables, near Evreux, in Normandy. In France, it morphed into various Latin and French forms such as le Venour, or Venator, or Venereux, becoming, after the clan came to England with William of Orange, Venables-Vernon. (Spelling was not an advanced science in those days.) These never sank into the lower classes nor rose to produce dukes or earls, but several barons, members of Parliament and such. Upper middle class. Honorable mention. Respectable, but not important.

Richard Venables is recorded as having purchased land in Virginia in 1635. The Venables became a distinguished family, of the ruling class but without doing anything to get them into textbooks. They were in the House of Burgesses. In 1776 Nathaniel Venable founded Hampden-Sydney College, which provided schooling for many of Southside’s leaders.

The Cavalier society of Tidewater was perhaps the high point of American civilization. The people were extraordinarily literate, steeped in the thought of the Enlightenment, imbued with a profound and kindly Christianity. From them came the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, the Lees and Custises. It is hard to imagine any modern politician, or his ghost writer, writing either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, the latter being the framework, enduring until perhaps 1960, of an entire nation. The Virginians did.

All that illustrious lineage, and now Fred is reduced to denying human biodiversity in defense of the members of La Raza Cosmica with whom he cohabitates. It rather reminds me of the women who are ferociously proud of their blue eyes and blonde hair raising their brown-eyed, black-haired children. They have proven themselves wholly unworthy of their heritage by virtue of failing to pass it on.

Fred writes: “The facial resemblance to the men in our line is strong. So is the character and cast of mind.” When the former disappears, the latter usually will as well. As Le Chateau likes to say, physiognomy is real.

See, that’s precisely the problem, Fred. They’re not your children’s people. You’re the end of the line. Whatever comes after is not that pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater of which you are so proud.

Indeed, if my experience is any guide, people will very likely tell your grandchildren that they have no connection whatsoever to the Cavaliers and they are lying if they claim they do.

Secularism’s pyrrhic victory

The Atlantic laments that shiny, sexy, science fiction future predicted by the It’s a Small World secularists has not come to pass:

Over the past decade, pollsters charted something remarkable: Americans—long known for their piety—were fleeing organized religion in increasing numbers. The vast majority still believed in God. But the share that rejected any religious affiliation was growing fast, rising from 6 percent in 1992 to 22 percent in 2014. Among Millennials, the figure was 35 percent.

Some observers predicted that this new secularism would ease cultural conflict, as the country settled into a near-consensus on issues such as gay marriage. After Barack Obama took office, a Center for American Progress report declared that “demographic change,” led by secular, tolerant young people, was “undermining the culture wars.” In 2015, the conservative writer David Brooks, noting Americans’ growing detachment from religious institutions, urged social conservatives to “put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations.”

That was naive. Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But it’s also making America’s partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they haven’t stopped viewing politics as a struggle between “us” and “them.” Many have come to define us and them in even more primal and irreconcilable ways.

Maybe it’s the values of hierarchy, authority, and tradition that churches instill. Maybe religion builds habits and networks that help people better weather national traumas, and thus retain their faith that the system works. For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum.

For years, political commentators dreamed that the culture war over religious morality that began in the 1960s and ’70s would fade. It has. And the more secular, more ferociously national and racial culture war that has followed is worse.

What were they expecting? Did they know NOTHING of the history of pre-Christian cultures? Christianity has transformed EVERY culture with which it has come into contact, from Aztec to Viking, and reliably transformed it in the direction of what we consider to be civilization.

Not only that, but for all the dancing and No True Atheism on the part of the atheist apologists, it is a historical fact that non-Christian modernists have slaughtered people on a scale that no Christians ever have. From Genghis Khan and Zhang Xianzhong to Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mao, the great murderers of history have never been Christian.

Like Voltaire or diaspora Jews who prefer living in someone else’s homeland to their own, many secularists are beginning to discover that they would rather live a godless life in a Christian society than do so in a godless one.

Winter is coming

I addressed this in last night’s Darkstream. Civic nationalism is total bullshit; it’s nothing more than localized stealth globalism. Yes, Americans bleed red, so do kangaroos and iguanas and Nigerians.

There are no New Americans. There are only Not Americans. And the more Not Americans that reside in the USA, the less American it will become. X can never be Not-X, and redefining X makes it Not-X, by literal definition.

Yes, this flies in the face of all the civic rhetoric you were taught as a child. It’s time to grow up and stop cucking. Demographic winter is coming.

The decline of trust in the USA

Bill Bishop attempts to address it, in the Washington Post, of all places.

The easiest sell of President Trump’s life is that a “corrupt” media produces “fake news.” After all, fewer than 2 in 10 Americans have “a lot” of trust in news organizations, the Pew Research Center has found, and we live in a “Matrix”-infused “conspiracy culture,” according to social scientists, where one is thought to be impossibly simple to not understand that the world is ruled by collusion and machination.

Trump has helped make trust a big deal for media types, and they are now searching for ways to regain the faith of their readers. To combat the “fake news” charge, the New York Times, for example, is running full-page ads and even bought a television spot during the Oscars declaring that “the truth is more important now than ever.” For some, the problem is that journalists have allowed too much of their personalities to creep into their work. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editor David Shribman prescribes “less analysis and more reporting, less personality and more facts.” For others, there’s a need to demonstrate that journalists are not faceless elites but real people. Washington Post opinion writer Dana Milbank wrote of his newsroom colleagues: “They hail from all corners of this country, from farms and small towns, the children of immigrants and factory workers, preachers and teachers.” But even local papers, the ones most closely connected to their readers, are struggling to defend their integrity. One editor of a rural California paper accepted an op-ed about the danger of “fake news” in an attempt to instill some faith among the anti-press crowd.

You can hear similarly fretful discussions in dozens of other professions. The president has maligned politicians, scientists, judges, teachers, labor union leaders and intelligence officials, among others. “Donald Trump’s most damaging legacy may be a lower-trust America,” the Economist’s Lexington column predicted. Trust in American institutions, however, has been in decline for some time. Trump is merely feeding on that sentiment.

The leaders of once-powerful institutions are desperate to resurrect the faith of the people they serve. They act like they have misplaced a credit card and must find the number so that a replacement can be ordered and then FedEx-ed, if possible overnight.

But that delivery truck is never coming. The decline in trust isn’t because of what the press (or politicians or scientists) did or didn’t do. Americans didn’t lose their trust because of some particular event or scandal. And trust can’t be regained with a new app or even an outbreak of competence. To believe so is to misunderstand what was lost.

Well, I certainly think the behavior of the media, the political class, and the university professors has contributed to the decline in trust.  However, look at how the USA is more heterogenous and more US residents now possess national backgrounds from historically low-trust peoples.  Thanks to Robert Putnam, there is now an understanding that a more diverse population is a lower trust one due to inter-group dissimilarities.

But I haven’t seen anyone connect the fact that low-trust immigrants tend to bring their lack of trust with them to these observations of declining trust, even though the demographic math would indicate that it is likely an additional contributor.

Mailvox: the lament of the dispossessed

A former civic nationalist writes to tell of his experience of discovering his white identity, much to his dismay.

I’m a recent reader of your site, and its been a boon to my ability to put language to the “race realism” I have been aware of and experienced over the course of my life. I’ve experienced first-hand the truth that race+proximity=war. The Soviet collapse brought Eastern European migrants to my Columbus, Ohio school district. These in turn formed a criminal mob, pooled resources, and bought all kinds of property. I lived across the street from a group that bought the church there. Kenyans, Somalis, and Mexicans also flocked to my area, crashing the school district, trashing the surrounding areas. Ghettos spread, crime spread, and people divided along racial lines at school, often resulting in fights. School became prison where white people were not permitted to defend themselves. This planted the seed of race realism, as you term it, though it would be many years before it germinated.

I married into a Baha’i family, and adopted the religion despite growing up as a Christian. Things were more or less fine until I had Baha’i friends who were Mexican, Japanese, and Iranian turn on me along racial lines and prevent me from participating in conversations about race/white privilege, etc…even though the religion espouses the belief that the Earth is but one country and mankind its citizens…they were not aware of the monumental irony or hypocrisy. Or how enraging it was that they live in my country, enjoying the fruits of what my forefathers built, and are more successful than I am, while simultaneously excluding me from important political/cultural discourse.

Baha’i is a religion for multi-culti liberals, and white people are gradually being shunted out of it. I discovered here that I hadn’t ever stopped being a follower of Christ, and that the simplicity of His words, deeds, and example appeal ever more to me than their pseudo-intellectual, religiously dressed-up, UN-worshipping, secular humanist, Israeli-apologist “faith”. I turned my back on these people.

My experience in the Army was not much better. In my training class of 230, whites were outnumbered by minorities, and my mestizo drill sergeant, who was a straight-up no-apologies killer, resembled more the visage and character of a cartel guy than an apple-pie Uncle Sam man. Both black drill sergeants were post-thug, but explicitly black. The female drill sergeants were either male-hating feminists, or resembled a man more than a woman in manner and appearance. The two white ones were war-weary and half-crazed, one being a rampant alcoholic. It was a total shit show, where the racial lines were barely hidden by a forced civic nationalism. That civic nationalism I dared to believe in and live out almost got me killed later. I discovered it to be a dangerous breeding ground of lies and illusions, not typically shared by members of minority groups. They didn’t share the weight of the chains I took up in the name of service to them and my supposed fellow country men. That realization broke me.

Recently, my family got caught in the sizeable crossfire of black-on-black gang violence. These people live half a mile from me, and their petty tribal violence keeps spilling out into my neighborhood. The Nu Black Power group in town has members who support their gangland “warriors”. I can do very little about this because I have no tribe and the law is against me. Some of my ever smaller group of friends have turned on me over my reaction to that event. I was forced to become explicitly white that day for the sake of my wife and children.

Everything that I’ve read of yours about these things, I have experienced first-hand. Everything I formerly believed is gone. I have no land, no flag, and I have no tribe.

What is he to do, he asks? There are only ever three choices. Run, fight, or surrender. That is a choice that every man has to make for himself. And if you will not surrender, have nowhere to run, and no tribe with whom to fight, then you have to either make or find one.

It’s a very sad situation. I would even say it is tragic considering how totally unnecessary it was and how easily it could have been avoided. But I’m not even a little surprised, because I’ve been pointing out that the USA is stone-dead for more than 13 years. If you want to better understand what has happened, and why we are now where we are today, then you might want to consider acquiring a copy of the newly published hardcover edition of the first volume of my collected columns, Innocence & Intellect, 2001-2005, for future reference. It has turned out to be an inadvertent history of America’s decline at the very moment of its supposed triumph.

Tibetan religious tradition has it that when the Dalai Lama dies, the Buddha of Compassion leaves his body and incarnates in the body of a young child. The monks immediately go out in search of this blessed child, and when they find him – as they inevitably do – he is tested by a group of high lamas and enthroned as the reincarnation of his successor.


Imagine, however, if the lamas refused to recognize that the Dalai Lama was, in fact, dead. Suppose that instead of going in search of the Buddha’s new carnal home, they hooked the corpse up to a life support machine and waited patiently for the Holy One to awake and rise up. It’s not hard to see that they would be doomed to disappointment, and furthermore, would fail to find the next Dalai Lama as well.


This is precisely our dilemma today, for America, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, is dead. By every measure, large and small, the original vision of limited government by, for and of the people has been folded, spindled and mutilated beyond recognition. When one reads the Constitution, one simply marvels at the distinct difference between its words and our present reality.

There is no us

Univision’s Jorge Ramos declares that the USA belongs to 60 million Latino invaders, not We, the People, the Posterity of the Founding Fathers:

Univision senior anchor Jorge Ramos declared on Friday that the United States belongs to Latino migrants, emphatically stating to a Spanish-speaking audience that “it is our country, not theirs.”
Ramos took an unusual tack, pivoting from talk of diversity and togetherness into boasts of conquest. Mass immigration, particularly illegal immigration, was a fait accompli. There is nothing the U.S. can do about it, and they must accept that America is “not their” country and that illegal aliens, particularly Latinos, “are not going to leave,” he said.

“I am an immigrant, just like many of you,” Ramos said in Spanish, as translated by the Media Research Center. “I am a proud Latino immigrant here in the United States. My name is Jorge Ramos, and I work at Univision and at the Fusion network.”

“And you know exactly what is going on here in the United States. There are many people who do not want us to be here, and who want to create a wall in order to separate us,” he said.

“But you know what? This is also our country. Let me repeat this: Our country, not theirs. It is our country. And we are not going to leave. We are nearly 60 million Latinos in the United States,” he continued. “And thanks to us, the United States eats, grows and, as we’ve seen today, sings and dances.”

“So when they attack us, we already know what we are going to do. We are not going to sit down. We will not shut up. And we will not leave. That is what we are going to do,” he added.

Yet another nail in the coffin of the historically illiterate civic nationalists. And yet another brick in the strong intellectual foundation of the Alt-Right. The message is very clear: “It’s our country now. You lost, just like the Indians so get over it and get out.”

It doesn’t matter whether you are a libertarian, a conservative, a liberal, a progressive, or a constitutionalist. Your ideology is outdated and irrelevant. It’s all identity politics now, and politics is a subset of war. If the matter cannot be resolved politically – and the fact that this is the largest invasion in human history strongly suggests it cannot be – it will be resolved with violence.

The USA will be physically divided. At this point, the only serious questions are a) where the lines will be drawn, b) the level of violence involved, and c) precisely whom is going to be permitted to remain where.

Extinction 2200

Half of all species will reportedly be threatened by extinction by 2200.

One in five species on Earth now faces extinction, and that will rise to 50% by the end of the century unless urgent action is taken. That is the stark view of the world’s leading biologists, ecologists and economists who will gather on Monday to determine the social and economic changes needed to save the planet’s biosphere.

“The living fabric of the world is slipping through our fingers without our showing much sign of caring,” say the organisers of the Biological Extinction conference held at the Vatican this week.

Threatened creatures such as the tiger or rhino may make occasional headlines, but little attention is paid to the eradication of most other life forms, they argue. But as the conference will hear, these animals and plants provide us with our food and medicine. They purify our water and air while also absorbing carbon emissions from our cars and factories, regenerating soil, and providing us with aesthetic inspiration.

“Rich western countries are now siphoning up the planet’s resources and destroying its ecosystems at an unprecedented rate,” said biologist Paul Ehrlich, of Stanford University in California. “We want to build highways across the Serengeti to get more rare earth minerals for our cellphones. We grab all the fish from the sea, wreck the coral reefs and put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We have triggered a major extinction event. The question is: how do we stop it?”

Meanwhile other academics celebrated the demise of the white race and encouraged open immigration to increase the population of those rich western countries now siphoning up the planet’s resources and destroying its ecosystems at an unprecedented race.

As, in Zimbabwe, politicians dined on rare rhino steak.

If white people aren’t supposed to care about their own extinction, why should they care about the extinction of any other species?


“[Africa’s] population is likely to go from roughly one billion now to around 4 billion,” said Dasgupta. “Can you imagine what tensions there are going to be there, especially with climate change coming and hitting the continent more than anywhere else? What do you think is going to happen when the arid regions spread, and a hundred million Africans try to swim across the Mediterranean? It is terrifying.”


Sooner or later, Europeans are going to sink the ships. You see, multiculturalism and Western do-gooderism comes at a price that is simply too high for civilization to pay.

The threat to free speech

While Milogate has dominated the news, the flamboyant ex-Breitbart editor is far from the only observer concerned about the future of free speech across the West. Military historian and Castalia House author Martin van Creveld has observed as much as well:

Freedom of speech is in trouble—and the only ones who do not know it are those who will soon find out. The idea of free speech is a recent one. It first emerged during the eighteenth century when Voltaire, the great French writer, said that while he might not agree with someone’s ideas he would fight to the utmost to protect that person’s right to express them. Like Assange and Snowden Voltaire paid the penalty, spending time in jail for his pains. Later, to prevent a recurrence, he went to live at Frenay, just a few hundred yards from Geneva. There he had a team or horses ready to carry him across the border should the need arise. Good for him.

To return to modern times, this is not the place to trace the stages by which freedom of speech was hemmed in in any detail. Looking back, it all started during the second half of the 1960s when it was forbidden to say, or think, or believe, that first blacks, then women, then gays, then transgender people, might in some ways be different from others. As time went on this prohibition came to be known as political correctness. Like an inkstain it spread, covering more and more domains and polluting them. This has now been carried to the point where anything that may offend anyone in some way is banned—with the result that, as Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind has shown, in many fields it has become almost impossible to say anything at all.

Let me give you just one example of what I mean. Years ago, at my alma mater in Jerusalem, I taught a course on military history. The class consisted of foreign, mostly American, students. At one point I used the germ Gook. No sooner had the word left my mouth than a student rose and, accused me of racism. I did my best to explain that, by deliberately using the term, I did not mean to imply that, in my view, the Vietnamese were in any way inferior. To the contrary, I meant to express my admiration for them for having defeated the Americans who did think so. To no avail, of course.

And so it goes. When the Internet first appeared on the scene I, along with a great many other people, assumed that any attempt to limit freedom of speech had now been definitely defeated. Instead, the opposite is beginning to happen. Techniques such as “data mining” made their appearance, allowing anything anyone said about anything to be instantly monitored and recorded, forever. All over Europe, the thought police is in the process of being established. Sometimes it is corporations such as Facebook which, on pain of government intervention, are told to “clean up” their act by suppressing all kinds of speech or, at the very least, marking it as “offensive,” “untrue,” and “fake.” In others it is the governments themselves that take the bit between their teeth.

When people as diverse as Roosh, Milo, and MvC are speaking out about the danger to free speech, you can be certain that it is a serious problem. And, of course, this threat is only one aspect of the larger, existential threat to Western civilization itself.

On a related note, a visual guide to how social justice warriors coopt organizations and communities.

Prime pedophile

Before you dismiss the Pizzagate rumors as too incredible to be legitimate, note that police in the UK have now concluded that the Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974, the man who lied Great Britain into the European Union, was a pedophile.

The police chief investigating claims that Sir Edward Heath was a paedophile is convinced the allegations are ‘120 per cent’ genuine, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

More than 30 people have come forward with claims of sexual abuse by the former Conservative Prime Minister, according to well-placed sources. And they are said to have given ‘strikingly similar’ accounts of incidents to Wiltshire Police – even though the individuals are not known to each other.

The Mail on Sunday has been told that Wiltshire Chief Constable Mike Veale regards the allegations as ‘totally convincing’, and plans to publish a report in June.

Detectives have established that, contrary to claims that Sir Edward could not have committed the crimes as he ‘never drove a car’ and ‘always’ had a police driver with him, he did drive – and did have a car. They have photographic evidence that shows he is a driver, and have established that he had a driving licence. He also bought a Rover 2000 after being deposed as Tory leader by Margaret Thatcher in 1975, when he was 58.

Astonishingly, Mr Veale is also understood to support claims that Sir Edward’s alleged crimes were reported to police years ago but covered up by the Establishment.

The pattern is becoming ever more clear. Not only that there is evil in high places, but even the way that evil prefers to operate. At this point, given the sheer volume of confirmed cases and the fact that both the UK Prime Minister and the US Speaker of the House, as well as lesser parliamentarians and congressmen, are known to have been sex criminals, any Establishment politician who is pushing the globalist line has to be considered at least potentially corrupted.

Note that prosecutors have been discovered sweeping, not only accusations of rape and child abuse, but actual confessions, under the rug in Cleveland:

Assistant prosecutors in Cleveland “ignored” about 70 rape and sexual assault cases involving juvenile suspects and victims and failed to determine if criminal charges should be filed, the new Cuyahoga County prosecutor said Tuesday.

Prosecutor Michael O’Malley said additional sexual assault complaints involving juveniles are expected to be found in the coming weeks as his office continues reviewing more than 1,900 cases marked inactive in a computer system used by prosecutors.

“There was a conscious decision (by prosecutors) to make some of these cases inactive,” O’Malley said. “It’s outrageous.”

Charges have been filed in about a dozen of the 70 cases thus far, O’Malley said, adding that some may not result in charges while others will be sent back to police for further investigation. The review of the inactive cases could result in hundreds of new charges being filed, he said.

The prosecutor’s office was first alerted to the problem during O’Malley’s first week in office by an advocate from the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center acting on behalf of victims’ families who asked for an update about some of the cases that had been ignored.

The review has consumed the prosecutor’s office during O’Malley’s first six weeks in office. “We’re peeling the layers of an onion,” he said. “And every day there are more revelations.”

Some of the victims in the 70 cases were as young as 3 years old. And some of the cases, which date back three years, would have been easy to prosecute because suspects confessed, O’Malley said.

I would think the prosecutors should be arrested as well. If they’re ignoring this sort of thing, what are the chances they aren’t involved in it themselves? Of course, that would mean that Ohio may loses a future congressman or two on the political fast track.

Mailvox: the Collapsing Parodist

Tor sent out an email with a big excerpt from McRapey’s forthcoming attempt to take his inimitable skills at imitation to new heights and rip off both Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert AT THE SAME TIME:

Enter The Flow With Excerpts from John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire

The Collapsing Empire is available March 21, but in the meantime, you can transport yourself into Scalzi’s interstellar epic with excerpts on Tor.com. We’ll be posting chapters all week; you can get started right away with the prologue and Chapter One, and check back all this week for additional excerpts, collected below. Happy Reading!

Yesterday I received an email from an intrepid SF reader who boldly dared to go where few would bother. His conclusions:

I read the excerpt and postscript of it just yesterday. It is really bad – there’s an entire chapter where strategy or politics is discussed by some lady who has been walked in on while fucking Wesley Crusher, and she just keeps going at it while continuing the conversation. Deeply pathetic.

Wait… it turns out I made a mistake. The Amazon Look Inside copy has missing pages during the Wesley Crusher episode, which is why I thought it consumed most of the chapter. After reading the Amazon sample, I looked at the Wesley Crusher chapter that Tor posted, and she only has her conversation while having sex for about two pages or so. It is nevertheless patently ridiculous, although much much funnier in the Look Inside version where she has her third party conversation for about 15 pages while getting plowed by a boy toy.

Sadly, the misunderstood version is a better yarn. The ironic thing about it is that end of the book gives away that the Flow or whatever it is called has been based on some convoluted lie the entire time. And now they finish by having to establish a new lie to keep the galaxy going, or something.

It is surprisingly devoid of snark. Or anything resembling emotion. It reads like a damned board meeting or something. It’s like he plagiarized SFWA treasury meetings for inspiration.

Oh. My. I’m not surprised in the least. But I am amused. You know that later today, there will be an executive at Macmillan flipping through the book and saying, “wait, Patrick paid HOW much for this shit?” But then, I thought, surely the reviewer exaggerates!

No, as it turns out, no, he isn’t.

Chapter Two

Kiva Lagos was busily fucking the brains out of the assistant purser she’d been after for the last six weeks of the Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’s trip from Lankaran to End when Second Officer Waylov Brennir entered her stateroom, unannounced. “You’re needed,” he said.


“I’m a little busy at the moment,” Kiva said. She’d just finally gotten herself into a groove, so fuck Waylov (not literally, he was awful) if she was going to get out of the groove just because he walked into it. Grooves were hard to come by. People have sex, and he was unannounced. If this was what he walked into, it was his fault, not hers. The assistant purser seemed a little concerned, but Kiva applied a little pressure to make it clear festivities were to continue.


“It’s important.”


“Trust me, so is this.”


“We’ve got a customs official who won’t let us take any haverfruit off the ship,” Brennir said. If he was shocked or scandalized by Lagos’s activities he was doing a good job of hiding it. He mostly looked bored. “Offloading our haverfruit is why we came to End. If we don’t sell it, or develop licenses, we’re screwed. You’re the owner’s representative. You’re going to have to explain to your mother why this trip was the cause of the financial ruin of your family. So perhaps you might like to join Captain Blinnikka in talking with this customs official right now to see if you can resolve this problem. Or you can just go on fucking that junior crew member, ma’am. I’m sure those are equivalent activities as regards your future, and the future of this ship, and your family.”


“Well, shit,” Kiva said. Her groove was definitely gone, and the assistant purser, her little project, looked pretty miserable at the moment. “That was a pretty impressive jab you just gave to someone who can fire your ass, Brennir.”


“You can’t fire me, ma’am,” Brennir said. “I’ve got tenure with the guild. Now, are you coming or not?”


“I’m thinking.”

Well, it is sort of reminiscent of Asimovian naming conventions, I suppose. Awful as it is, I don’t think it quite manages to top this legendary exchange from the Hugo Award-winning Redshirts, though.

“Man, I owe you a blowjob,” Duvall said.


“What?” Dahl said.


“What?” Hester said.


“Sorry,” Duvall said. “In ground forces, when someone does you a favor you tell them you owe them a sex act. If it’s a little thing, it’s a handjob. Medium, blowjob. Big favor, you owe them a fuck. Force of habit. It’s just an expression.”


“Got it,” Dahl said.


“No actual blowjob forthcoming,” Duvall said. “To be clear”


“It’s the thought that counts,” Dahl said, and turned to Hester. “What about you? You want to owe me a blowjob, too?”


“I’m thinking about it ,” Hester said.   


You can tell from that gritty, realistic dialogue that McRapey has spent a lot of time with manly, military men, doing manly, military things. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that McRapey has written that I find funnier than this absolute jewel of pure, unadulterated fiction.


[Vox] really has a thing for me, which is straight-up pure envy, as far as I can tell.


My dear, very dear, Mr. Scalzi, while there are certainly authors whose literary accomplishments and talents I envy, from Umberto Eco and Hermann Hesse to Tanith Lee and Edgar Allen Poe, I can assure you, with 100 percent honesty, that you are not, and have never been, among them.