If you’re in LA, this is the place to be.
Don’t go in hopes of seeing me. I can’t see spending money to be tortured with awful, loud music. But if you’re into that sort of thing, and what passes for dancing in this society, knock yourself out.
No, this has nothing to do with me being old (though I do seem, unaccountably, to be aging). I’ve never been into clubbing, or awful, loud music. The twenty-year-old me wouldn’t have gone, either.
If weather and other circumstances permit, SpaceX is flying to ISS on CRS-6, with another landing attempt, and in Colorado Springs, Tory Bruno will be announcing the design details and name of their Atlas replacement.
When a memo like this has to be issued, things have gone pretty far south. Isn’t it pretty much illegal everywhere except Nevada and some foreign countries? Why not just issue a more general memo that Department employees should obey the law?
Here’s a good overview of what Google, Thiel and others are doing. I wish they’d stop calling it “immortality,” though. That’s not the goal, and if it were, it would be unrealistic. It’s just indefinite lifespan. As I often notes, expansion into space and extended lifespan go hand in hand.
[Update a while later]
Sorry, link was missing. Fixed now.
…changed after a donation to the Clinton Foundation.
Pure coincidence, I’m sure. Who could imagine Clintons being corrupt?
Some thoughts on the increasingly insane environment on college campuses, and witch hunts in the media.
[Update a few minutes later]
“http://thefederalist.com/2015/04/09/to-lie-about-rape-is-to-enable-evil/”:
To lie about rape is to enable evil. There is no polite way around that fact. It’s not the job of survivors to package rape into a neat media package for liberals and conservatives to eviscerate each other with.
The terror clings to you. Facing it, reporting it, enduring the medical exams and procedures, and following the judicial process is unimaginably difficult. What Rolling Stone did was provide an assist to perpetrators, robbing survivors of credibility. It’s unconscionable. It degrades our shared existence as Americans.
They don’t care.
Makes as much sense as “…because it is hard.”
If you focus on the muscle, the fat will come off naturally.
Not a big challenge, but Obama’s unjustly arrogant condescension provided a good opportunity.
[Early afternoon update]
Iran pulls the rug from under Obama:
Obama says his doctrine is “we will engage,” but it looks like the actual doctrine is “we will be fooled.” Of course they insist that nobody will make a fool of them, however they reserve the right to make fools of themselves.
It’s painful to watch. It’s hard not to think that Iran is out to humiliate Barack Hussein Obama. With this calculated slight, they not only want to wipe the floor with his reputation, they want to see him crawl. And he probably will. Obama gave them Iraq, allowed Iran into Syria, permitted Hezbollah to take over Lebanon, and let them run him out of Yemen all in the expectation that Rouhani would give him his “game changer,” his “once in a lifetime deal.”
And now, after he’s handed in all that earnest money and proclaimed his purchase to the world, they won’t deliver the merchandise. He’s been had, pure and simple. They gave him a special surprise gift and he’s proudly opened it in front of relatives and friends, only to discover it contains a pile of … .
Iran knows he won’t fight, because he’s already scuttled his position in Iraq and allowed himself to be humiliated in Syria by drawing “red lines” with crayons. His “moderate rebel forces” in Syria have all defected to someone else. Iran watched America flee from Yemen, Obama’s counterinsurgency “model,” leaving a list of local U.S. intelligence agents to fall into their hands. Those men are probably being hunted down or dying in agony. Tehran probably gaped in amusement as he made enemies with their oldest ally in the Middle East, Israel, all for the sake of the agreement they have now thrown in his face.
But, but…legacy!
…clearly, the people who instigated today’s parade of falsehoods at Entertainment Weekly were not eager for reconciliation. This was straight-up character assassination. A slash-and-burn hit job. Aided and abetted by media devices which are programmed to seek and spread controversy, for the sake of clicks, likes, and money.
Is Sad Puppies 3 a terrible thing? It is if you ask the opponents of same.
Is Sad Puppies 3 hateful to women or ethnic minorities?
Only if you believe Sad Puppies 3 participants like Annie Bellet or Rajnar Vajra don’t count.
I think perhaps what some people (unused to the insider baseball of SF/F) might not be clear about, is that Sad Puppies 3 is not a thing invented to keep anyone off the Hugo ballot for demographic reasons. It was invented to (originally) poke fun at some tired predictabilities in the selection process, as well as scuttle the notion that the award was actually all about quality, when it’s more or less been a popularity and quasi-politicized contest the whole time. Along the way we fairly skewered the concept of literary affirmative action — that works and authors should be judged on the basis of author or character demographics and box-checking, not the audience’s enjoyment of the prose — so perhaps that’s where opponents of SP3 thought they found a toe-hold? And used it as best as they could to rope in a lot of outside media, in a clownish attempt to punish and discredit both Larry and myself.
Obviously, anyone who tries to make a coherent case for me being racist or sexist . . . has over 21 years of contradictory evidence to overcome. You cannot have lived my life, and be a racist or a sexist. It is an ontological impossibility. I’ve seen too much of the elephant, to borrow a phrase. Plus, my wife probably would have thrown me out on my butt a long time ago — she being the far more astute judge of character, than either a low-rent tabloid blogger or a pernicious and vindictive SF/F personality.
And from Robert Tracinski: How to fight back in the culture war:
The other thing we’ve come to expect from the Social Justice Warriors is a bitter, dismissive hatred for the fans of their own field, who stubbornly refuse to be reformed by their betters. A rant from “progressive” writer Philip Sandifer, echoing last year’s proclamation that “Gamers Are Dead,” declared “The Day Fandom Ended.”
Sandifer argued for “the moral duty of progressive voices to form a blocking majority, and to loudly admit that fandom as it stands is broken, and that any work proclaimed to be the best of the year by a fandom this broken is demeaned by the association.” So he advocates that “progressives” should buy their way into the final ballot and vote for “No Award Given” in every category. “The 2015 Hugos should simply be blank.”
In other news, he’s going to take his ball and go home.
Not to be outdone, “Jeopardy Jerk“ Arthur Chu decided to live down to his epithet by denouncing “democracy” as such. It’s like Stalin said: the problem with elections is that you never know ahead of time who’s going to win.
Inherent in leftism is the notion that we all must be guided by a small elite, a revolutionary vanguard, and that if we resist our indoctrination, it is necessary to dissolve the people and elect another.
To be sure, it is possible some of the Sad Puppies nominees won because of their right-leaning politics rather than their quality. And it also appears that the proprietor of the competing slate, Rabid Puppies, has said a few genuinely objectionable things. But the science-fiction establishment might want to take a moment to ask how they have so alienated their core audience as to provoke this kind of mass protest vote. Than again, forget I said that. “Progressives” never ask that question. Inherent in leftism is the notion that we all must be guided by a small elite, a revolutionary vanguard, and that if we resist our indoctrination, it is necessary to dissolve the people and elect another.
I’d like to be a conscientious objector, but they won’t let me.
[Late-morning update]
It’s almost like they were all reading off the same script.
[Thursday-morning update]
The Social Justice Warriors aren’t so tough when even “sad puppies” can beat them.
[Bumped]