Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

The story begins, as ever, with a small group of social justice-minded community elites who sought to establish themselves as the arbiters of social mores. This group would decide who deserved a presence in SFF and who deserved to be ostracised.

Their victims are littered across the SFF community. In 2013, the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) were targeted by a shirtstorm-like cyber-mob of digital puritans after one of their cover editions was deemed to be “too sexual.” The controversy did not die down until two of its most respected writers, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzburg, were dismissed from the publication. This occurred despite a vigorous counter-campaign by liberal members of the sci-fi community, including twelve Nebula award winners and three former presidents of the SFWA. 

Unfortunately, the current crop of elite figures in the SFF community have become either apologists or out-and-out cheerleaders for intolerance and censorship. Redshirts author John Scalzi, a close friend of  anti-anonymity crusader Wil Wheaton – was head of the SFWA at the time of the controversy and quickly caved in to activist pressure. This was unsurprising, given that he shared many of their identitarian views.

But Scalzi is, if anything, merely the moderate ally of a far more radical group of community elites. He hasn’t gone nearly as far as former SFWA Vice President Mary Kowal, who handles political disagreement by telling her opponents to “shut the fuck up” and quit the SFWA. Or former Hugo nominee Nora Jemisin, who says that political tolerance “disturbs” her. Or, indeed, the prolific fantasy author Jim C. Hines, who believes that people who satirize religion and political ideologies (a very particular religion, and a very particular ideology, of course) should be thrown out of mainstream SFF magazines.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

And guess whose pocket is being picked to buy these particular votes?

Read it.

A few decades ago, if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds. If you saw a barbarian swinging an axe? You were going to get a rousing fantasy epic with broad-chested heroes who slay monsters, and run off with beautiful women. Battle-armored interstellar jump troops shooting up alien invaders? Yup. A gritty military SF war story, where the humans defeat the odds and save the Earth. And so on, and so forth.

These days, you can’t be sure.

The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?

There’s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land?

A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It’s about sexism and the oppression of women.

Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It’s actually about gay and transgender issues.

Or it could be about the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy.

Do you see what I am trying to say here?

Apparently ‘progressives’ are taking over the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre and turning it into another Voice of the Crust.

Fortunately, we have our Baen to keep us warm.

Read it.

Obama’s and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new attack on Alaska oil production can have a consequence that extreme environmentalists have dreamed about all along—shutting down all remaining production bringing oil from the Arctic coast.

This would happen because the giant Alaskan pipeline must have minimal flow to function. Otherwise it must be totally dismantled in accord with the law allowing for its original construction. After years of delaying new production and causing billions of dollars of losses for the companies involved, Obama’s new attack may be the final blow. Already the pipeline is carrying only some 25 percent of its capacity of two million barrels a day. Less input will allow corrosion and other damages, making it impossible to operate.

Read it.

As Attorney General Eric Holder is about to leave office, Senator Ron Wyden has sent him a letter more or less asking if he was planning to actually respond to the various requests that Wyden had sent to Holder in the past, which Holder has conveniently ignored. Wyden notes, accurately, that the government’s continued secrecy on a variety of issues “has led to an erosion of public confidence that has made it more difficult for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to do their jobs.”

I’m thinking that the answer is No.

Read it.

Next step: Chaotic Well-Intentioned.

Read it.

A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

Read it.

Four months ago, Demeteriya Nabire was killed by a crocodile when she went to the lake near her home to fetch water. The animal later came back to the area but found Nabire’s husband waiting, ready to take revenge.

Not something you read about every day.

Tim Worstall at The Register discovers that, yes, government employees are pretty much all socialists.

“Whenever regulators gather to discuss market failures…”

The subject under discussion is the ownership of data and EULAs and all that stuff that so excites a certain sort of techno-pessimist. And that’s what leads to the spraying: the assumption being made that people who are trading something they don’t value much for something they value more is a market failure.

To an economist this is what markets do: people don’t seem to value that data, that information, about who they are, where they are or what they do – or not very much. They certainly don’t seem to value it as much as the things they get by allowing access to it: the Facebooks, Googles and so on of this world.

That’s not the usual definition of a market failure, that’s the efficient working of a market. The data, the thing being valued, is moving from a place where it isn’t highly valued to one where it is more valued. Moving something from a lower valued use to a higher is the very definition of wealth creation.

The piece he’s sputtering about appeared in The Guardian, which is pretty much all socialists too. Funny how that works.

Read it.

Three University of California, Davis, students placed a community refrigerator on their lawn and invited neighbors to use it and share food. At the end of the first month, people were not only sharing food but books as well. Then the Yolo County health department stepped in. They said the fridge was an unregulated food facility and shut it down.

Well, what do you expect from a county named Yolo?

Read it.

Be the first on your block to use it in the title of a hit song.

Read it.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

If you don’t know anything about the SCA, that’s alright — they don’t know anything about you, either.

Try it.

(The one for the 16th Amendment, by choice.)

Apparently I was at the Battle of Kursk. They don’t say which side I was on, although they do say that I ‘helped stop Hitler’ … so I’ve got that going for me.

Read it.

Bill Ayers, call one of your politicians.

Read it.

The effect on my potential ingestion of salami? Not so delightful.

Read it.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has also weighed in, urging 8:30 a.m. or later for high schoolers. Ignoring the evidence on school start times is the equivalent of ignoring the evidence on the harmful effects of lead paint exposure, asbestos or second-hand tobacco smoke.

I’ve been pushing this for years. Not that anybody listens. ‘You don’t have any kids so we don’t even see you.’

Read it.

President Obama’s new budget plan doesn’t just propose spending a historic amount of money over the coming decade. It also seeks to jack up the amount of tax revenue, all in the name of Mom, apple pie, and the great American middle class.

Read it.

When my father worked a Post Office job during college, there was a four-person crew in the local black hole of correspondence to which he was assigned in the Bronx. Well, two of them were actually in the office at any given time—the other two were down the street at a bar. They took turns, which is only right. Given that context, reports of increasing customer dissastisfaction and lousy management from the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General don’t seem that bad after all.

Jerry Pournelle often says that the aim of government is to hire and pay government workers. I suppose that if they ever get around to doing some actual work, that’s gravy.

Read it.

President Obama released his FY 2016 budget yesterday. It contains dozens of tax increases that go on for page after page. Buried in there is a series of tax increases on U.S. employers who also do business abroad. Because the U.S. has a “worldwide” tax regime, any further U.S. taxation of overseas income represents a double tax on that income. By definition, these overseas profits have already faced taxation in the country where they were earned. The United States should instead move to a “territorial” tax system, where the IRS only taxes profits earned inside our borders. That’s what the rest of the developed world does, and it’s time to modernize the code to reflect current best practices.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all: Groundhogs are rodents -> rodents have teeth.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

A new study from Lund University in Sweden indicates that inherited viruses that are millions of years old play an important role in building up the complex networks that characterise the human brain.

Read it.

They’ll need Chris Hemsworth for the opening, of course.

Read it.

Mayor Dean refers to the two out of three groups that have brought political Islam and sharia law to Nashville; Kurds and Somalis. They have been brought to Nashville through the federal refugee resettlement program.

Immigrants-turned-advocates talk about “Nashville for all of us” but instead choose to live like the Mayor’s office said, in enclaves. They complain about being treated as “the other,” but through self-segregation, guard against assimilating into and adapting to the American culture.

When they self-segregate its called preserving their culture. When native-born Tennesseans self-segregate, it’s called racism.

Kurdish Islamist agitator Remziya Suleyman whines endlessly about being thought of as “the other.” However, she was quick to appropriate Nashville’s generous spirit for her community’s political purposes, calling it “Little Kurdistan.”

Read it.

America spends tons of money on education even though the final product isn’t very impressive. If children are indeed the future, then they’re certainly an expensive one: Of the $3.2 trillion in total expenditures for local and state governments in 2012, education accounted for nearly 28 percent, or $869.2 billion, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau. That figure topped government spending in any other sector, almost doubling the second-largest recipient of taxpayer dollars—public welfare.

Read it.

The Sino-American relationship may be in decent shape. It’s other countries we should be worried about.

Read it.

President Barack Obama’s latest budget is his most populist ever, seeking big tax hikes to pay for ambitious new spending on education and infrastructure in a dare to Republicans to find common ground.

The ‘Vote For Us And Get Free Stuff’ Democrat program has to be paid for somehow.

Read it.

Feel free to barf at the thought. I did.

Read it.

I guess it wasn’t Walmart after all.

Read it.

For six consecutive years, Ann Legra’s performance as a teacher has been declared “unsatisfactory.” Yet Washington Heights in New York City cannot seem to get rid of this arguably worthless first-grade instructor. Their most recent attempt to dump her from P.S. 173, the city’s second try, has failed.

Where is the Mafia when you really need them?

Administrators apparently found her classroom in chaos, with students running around, getting into fights, and attempting karate moves on a door, while she was off in the corner at a table, apparently “re-sharpening pencils” that were too sharp, in order to prevent accidents. In one school year she was absent 27 times and late 37 times.

…

According to the New York Post, Legra has responded to her punishment by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the city’s Department of Education of discrimination on the basis of her race, gender, national origin, and medical disability (asthma). She’s not going anywhere without a fight.

Read it.

The Obama budget calls for a stealth increase in the death tax rate from 40% to nearly 60%. Here’s how it works:

Under current law, when you inherit an asset your basis in the asset is the higher of the fair market value at the time of death or the decedent’s original basis. Almost always, the fair market value is higher.

Under the Obama proposal, when you inherit an asset your basis will simply be the decedent’s original basis.

Example: Dad buys a house for $10,000.  He dies and leaves it to you. The fair market value on the date of death is $100,000. You sell it for $120,000. Under current law, you have a capital gain of $20,000 (sales price of $120,000 less step up in basis of $100,000). Under the Obama plan, you have a capital gain of $110,000 (sales price of $120,000 less original basis of $10,000).

There are exemptions for most households, but this misses the larger point: the whole reason we have step up in basis is because we have a death tax. If you are going to hold an estate liable for tax, you can’t then hold the estate liable for tax again when the inheritor sells it. This adds yet another redundant layer of tax on savings and investment. It’s a huge tax hike on family farms and small businesses.

Not to mention everybody else.

Read it.

The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.

The same person who would never trust an optometrist to repair her car’s transmission, or trust an automobile mechanic to prescribe contact lenses to correct her myopia, routinely trusts strangers who specialize in winning popularity contests called “elections” to interfere into her and her neighbors’ lives in many intimate and expansive ways.

And then, when a skeptic of the pretensions of politicians (and of their entourages) suggests that these politicians (and their entourages) address the problems they diagnose, not with government force, but by themselves risking only their own money and effort toward correcting the alleged problems, the response is one of utter dismissal.  ”Ha!  We don’t know anything about actually running actual businesses.  We have no experience at hiring and managing workers.  We haven’t the training or business connections or professional demeanor to, say, profitably employ the low-skilled workers who we nevertheless assure you are currently underpaid.  We have no ability, say, to persuade private investors to risk their funds on alternative-energy projects that we nevertheless assure you will be amazingly profitable.  We have no practical abilities at all!  Yet because we’ve won the most recent election, or because we’ve earned PhDs and read lots of books and academic-journal articles and know what a chi-square test is, we are uniquely qualified to force people to act in ways that we prescribe but which we, on our own, would never dare undertake.  We are paid to rule, not to risk; we are paid to demand of others, not to do of ourselves.”

The fact that such people continue to be called “Progressive,” continue to be considered to be unusually humane and (amazingly) empathetic, and continue to be taken seriously baffles me to no end.

— Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist

The Atlantic, Voice of the Crust, finds the Next Crisis.

More people with low incomes now live outside of cities, and some areas are ill-equipped to deal with the influx of the poor.

Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

Read it.

The thinking went – not so very long ago – that little by little, with the bumps of age and lifestyle, this initial stash of neurons died, taking our brain function along with them. Yet, strange as it may sound, canaries, video games, and young blood are finally putting that punishing prospect to rest. Studies involving bird song, gaming, and the rejuvenating factors of young blood have shown not only that neurons can be generated throughout adulthood, but also that the maddening aspects of aging, such as memory loss and slower processing speed, can be partially reversed.

Read it.

Last century, William Stanley Jevons, the famous economist who was in part responsible for the marginal revolution, reasoned that because the easy-to-get coal was already gotten, what was left was coal that was harder and harder to reach. Therefore, he argued, we would reach a point where coal would be much scarcer and much more expensive.

As I wrote in my bio of Jevons, here was his error:

Jevons failed to appreciate the fact that as the price of an energy source rises, entrepreneurs have a strong incentive to invent, develop, and produce alternate sources. In particular, he did not anticipate oil or natural gas. Also, he did not take account of the incentive, as the price of coal rose, to use it more efficiently or to develop technology that brought down the cost of discovering and mining (see natural resources).

Read it.

A team of researchers led by Harvard geneticist George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has made big strides toward a future in which the predominant chemical factories of the world are colonies of genetically engineered bacteria.

In a new study, scientists at the Wyss Institute modified the genes of bacteria in a way that lets them program exactly what chemical they want the cells to produce — and how much — through the bacteria’s metabolic processes. The research was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Read it.

I refuse to eat anything that looks like dog barf. Sorry.

Read it.

Somebody alert Shatner and Connery.

We have things that are supposed to be illegal that “really” are not, like sneaking across our national border, and we have things that are supposed to be allowed but are “really” against the “law,” like for example forming a Young Conservatives group on a college campus, smoking cigarettes, or wearing a “Proud to be American” tee shirt to a high school on Cinco de Mayo.

It is dangerous, living under two sets of laws like this. It’s not an Obama problem, it’s a baby-boomer problem. The hippies have reached the age where they’re expected to be in charge of things, but they still want to rebel against authority when they are the authority. Their generation has manufactured a contradiction which, I’m afraid, is not finished with doing all its damage yet.

— Morgan Freeberg

Read it.

According to Budweiser, a “true patriot” drinks beer from flag-embossed cans. WWE wrestling would have us believe that the spirit of the United States lies in roided-out biceps, scantily-clad women, and cut-off t-shirts. But above all else — ice cream, baseball, and hot dogs included — we take great pride in being “as American as apple pie.”

…

But there’s just one little problem with all this: apple pie really isn’t all that “American.”

I must confess that I’ve never been very fond of apple pie; mince is my favorite, with blueberry in second place, followed closely by pumpkin and cherry.

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

Over the last half-century, enormous efforts have been expended by individuals to get their groups, such as blacks, women, Jews, homosexuals, and Hispanics, certified as authentic victims of society. Just since 2013, the “transgendered” have achieved cultural validation as designated victims, while other potential identity politics groups, such as left-handers and the working class, seem to be fading ever further from the limelight of concern.

But what about nerds? Will they be able to use the enormous wealth and cultural influence they’ve created over the last few decades to achieve recognized protected status? Or will they be increasingly demonized as “hyperwhite”?

…

Because they are better at thinking about ideas than about people, nerds are particularly prone to misinterpreting women by taking what they say at face value. Nerds don’t know much about what women like, so they use logic, which fails.

The Other McCain has some wisdom for us, if we only have the wit to listen.

We are heirs of a tradition. Each of us is born into circumstances that were created by our parents, by our grandparents, by our ancestors, and by the civilization in which they lived. Human life existed before we born and will continue after our deaths. As children we inherit the past. As parents we create the future. Wisdom requires us to understand ourselves as a single link in an infinite chain of human existence, rather than to imagine ourselves as free-floating atoms unconnected to others.

Popular ideas of “democracy” — the modernistic idolatry that speaks the language of “rights,” “choice” and “equality” — obscure the truth of human existence, trapping us in the present tense, isolating us as rootless individuals removed from the authentic traditions of our inheritance. Children are taught that the past is not merely useless, but actually harmful, because human history is nothing but a catalog of oppression, atrocities and victimhood. Thus, the modern child cannot be allowed to believe that his grandparents were wise or virtuous, that the great achievements of our civilization are worthy of respect.

Read it.

Another thumb-sucker from The Atlantic.

When Carthan was a young boy, he says he’d have risked punishment for simply walking past the Jones mansion without a proper reason. “I look at the house now, how beautiful it is and well-built it is. I was told slaves built it,” Carthan said, sitting at his desk in the central hall, surrounded by his political memorabilia. “And I think about how well they lived back then, and how we lived back then. This house is huge. There are five bedrooms. It has three full bathrooms. We didn’t have bathrooms at all.” He pauses to let the contrast sink in. “It’s something to focus on,” he says.

But as the mansion’s flaking paint makes clear, the transformation was about a transfer of local power, not wealth. Families like the Joneses have long since left Tchula, taking their business and money with them. The remaining community is 97 percent black and achingly poor.

And, of course, the question that is never explicitly asked, much less gets answered, is ‘Are these people better off now than they were then?’ Such questions undercut The Narrative, something that a Voice of the Crust like the writers in The Atlantic are conditioned from childhood never to do.

In the Delta flatlands and the hillier country to the east, the landscape is dotted with towns and cities that figured prominently in the civil-rights era. Like Tchula, many of those places are now languishing.

Well, then, how did that whole ‘civil-rights era’ thing work out for you? Confrontation of injustice is often necessary but equally often reaches the point of diminishing returns, and the people who don’t keep their ultimate objective firmly in mind will almost always lose their way and wind up in a swamp (sometimes literally). There’s an old saying, ‘You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’, and like most Old Sayings it contains a lot of truth. The question ‘How can we get white people to treat black people with respect?’ is entirely different from the question ‘How can we make the lives of white people Hell as payback for the Hell they have made of ours?’, and it remains unclear which question the ‘civil-rights’ people are working from — the available evidence is that they consider the two as equivalent, and as long as that is the case, they’re going to be unhappy with the results.

“Businesses don’t want to come to a town like Tchula,” observed Anthony Mansoor, who owns a hardware store downtown. “That bothers me. The people in this town worked so hard to get to where we are today, and in a lot of ways, things are better. But the town is broke. That’s the bottom line.”

Gee, why is that? Nobody seems to know, or want to. Every business in American isn’t run by racist white people, although you’d never know that from reading Voices of the Crust like this one. Why don’t they leave and go somewhere there are jobs? It’s happened before. The real bottom line is that black people in America have been sold a bill of goods by a Crust who need them as a victim class whose problems allow the modern Left to ride into power and whose votes can be bought in order to keep them there. It’s not complicated at all.

Read it.

This is NPR, so you have to take all this with a grain of salt. Still, he seems to be asking the right questions.

It’s hard to understand why you get 36 different first-class envelopes with 36 different pieces of paper from the same insurance company on the same day. That tells you something about the efficiency of the health care industry right there. But then, as you open each envelope, they’re as completely unintelligible to me as they are to you, as they are to everyone listening. But better yet, they’re also as unintelligible, apparently, to the people who write them.

I got to do what is probably a reporter’s dream … which is I took one of those explanations of benefits, which said, “Amount billed: zero. Amount insurance company paid: zero.” And the third column said, “Amount you owe: $154.” So it makes no sense.

I’ve had the same experience.

But here’s what I got to do: I had scheduled, as part of the reporting for my book, an interview with the CEO of United Healthcare, the largest health insurance company in the United States — and my health insurance company, as it turns out. I went out to Minnesota to interview him and asked him all kinds of questions about what he thought the impact of the Obama health reform was likely to be. And at the end, I took that explanation of benefits out of my suit pocket and said, “I’m wondering if you could do me a favor, could you explain this to me?” … “How can I owe $154 if nothing was billed?” He looks at it … and looks up at me and says, “I could sit here all day and I couldn’t explain that to you. I have no idea why they sent this to you.”

And that tells you everything that there is to know about American health insurance — although not even close to being what you want to know and perhaps need to know.

The insurance companies are not really the bad actors in this movie. The insurance companies are in many ways like us: They pay health care bills. The culprit here — and the reason that the Affordable Care Act doesn’t work is, is not going to work — is that nothing has been done to curb the marketplace of exorbitant bills and exorbitant profiteering on the part of hospitals, medical device makers and obviously the drug companies. The insurance companies are as much the victim of that as we are. Now, they’re terribly managed; again, the CEO of the largest company can’t even explain what his bill means. They’re incompetently managed; they’re not very nice people when you get them on the phone. But they’re sort of stuck in the same ditch we’re in, which is being forced — unlike the payers for health care in any other developed country on the planet — being forced to pay uncontrolled, exorbitant prices and high profits that are generated by nonprofit hospitals and by drug companies and medical device makers. In that sense, I kind of feel sorry for them.

As do I — your tax dollars at work.

In the sense that if you step back the way I did as a reporter and look at the economics of health care in the United States, it’s absurd. That nonprofit hospital makes a lot of profit. The executives are highly compensated. The people who sell all of the equipment that is in operating room have humongous profit margins. The [prescription] drugs that I was given … have humongous profit margins and we have done nothing in this country, unlike every other country in the free world, to control that because we have lived with the illusion that health care can be a free market.

Note the pervasive ‘progressive’ delusion that ‘free market’ means ‘small profit’. In fact, the whole hostility to profit — the larger the profit, the more the hostility — is one of the signature obsessions of the modern Left. The high profit margins for health care is quite simply explained by the fact that there is not, and never has been, a ‘free market’ in health care (or health insurance); it’s one of those ‘basic rights’ (like roads and schools) that people insist government subsidize and the costs of which are therefore grossly inflated.

Read it.

If you want to get anything done, there are two basic ways to get yourself to do it.

The first, more popular and devastatingly wrong option is to try to motivate yourself.

The second, somewhat unpopular and entirely correct choice is to cultivate discipline.

This is one of these situations where adopting a different perspective immediately results in superior outcomes. Few uses of the term “paradigm shift” are actually legitimate, but this one is. It’s a lightbulb moment.