Author: VD

Meme of the Week

The Meme Warriors have spoken. Of the five daily memes that went out last week, Russia DNC proved to be the most popular by a nose. Media Chimps was second, while my personal favorite of the five, Zuckerberg 2020, finished a respectable third. Ironically, the most conventional meme – admittedly, all five were rather more verbose than the norm – finished last.

  1. 26.2%  Russia DNC
  2. 24.2%  Media Chimps
  3. 22.3%  Zuckerberg 2020
  4. 17.6%  CNN Godfather
  5. 09.7%  CNN Zombies
If you haven’t seen all of these, you may want to consider signing up for the Daily Meme Wars. Regular meme service will resume on Monday.

He must be jealous

John Scalzi opines, mostly in experienced, but uninformed ignorance about Milo’s bestselling book, which actually made the New York Times bestseller lists on the merits of its own performance.

This is a little bit of publishing inside pool which apparently Yiannopoulos is not aware of (or is trying to fudge), but: You don’t count wholesale orders because wholesalers will eventually return books if they don’t sell them. The publisher has to make them whole for that, either by shifting credit to other books (which in this case Yiannopoulos as a self-publisher of a single book does not have), or by refunding the money. Yiannopoulos may have shipped 105,000 hardcover copies of the book, but that’s not the same as having sold them. I don’t know in this case what “direct orders” mean — it could be sales to individual book buyers (in which case that would be a sale) or to individual booksellers (in which case they are probably returnable, as book stores are loath to stock anything on a non-returnable basis), or to organizations which are making a “bulk buy” for their own reasons, say, a conservative organization who wants to hand out copies to employees or on the street or whatever.

But however you slice it, by Yiannopoulos’ own words (and by his apparent lack of understanding of how bookselling works), he probably has not in fact sold all 100k of the hardcover books. Also, with regard to the wholesalers and other booksellers, I do hope someone in his organization is keeping money in reserve to deal with returns when they (inevitably) happen. I’m also curious as to how he as a self-publisher is dealing with long-term storage and shipping of the books; I really don’t see Yiannopoulos himself handling that. I don’t picture him as a detail-oriented person. Perhaps this will be a job for the interns.

With all of this said, and again with the reminder that I find Yiannopoulos a hot feculent mess of a person, sales of 18,000 hardcovers in one week is pretty darn good. It was enough to land Yiannopoulos at #3 on the USA Today list and at #4 on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction list (and #2 on the paper’s print/ebook combined list). He’s a legitimate bestseller. And those 18K sales don’t cover ebook sales, which given his audience demographics I suspect are pretty high. Most authors would be absolutely delighted to have 18k in hardcover sales in their first week. People exercising schadenfreude about all this are thus advised to temper their glee somewhat. The book is not a failure in any manner except in contrast to Yiannopoulos’ industry-specific hype, and also (if the professional reviews are to be believed) as a book worth reading.

Can Yiannopoulos sell 100,000 copies of his book? I suspect so in the long run, especially considering that Yiannopoulos can now have it as a rider for speaking events that whomever is having him speak will be obliged to purchase a certain number of the book in order to have him appear — and speaking events and appearances are the actual bread-and-butter for a creature such as Yiannopoulos, for which this book is mostly advertising.

Has he sold that many in the first week? I doubt it. The actual number, in all formats, across all retailers, is somewhere between 18,000 and 100,000 copies. Which, again, is not at all a bad number of books to sell in the first week. Had Yiannopoulos been smart, he wouldn’t have alleged selling 100K books in his first week at all, he simply would have taken those USA Today and NYT list rankings and waved them about happily, and built PR around those.

But apparently he’s not really that smart. Now most of the stories are about how he only sold 18,000 copies in his first week, rather than the 100,000 copies he alleged.

It’s rather amusing to see Scalzi opining on someone else’s book sales and strategies, in light of how his fans claim that anyone doing the same to Scalzi is doing so out of envy. (For the record, I am not envious of Scalzi’s career nor do I think he is envious of Milo’s.)

Now, I can state, with certainty, that Scalzi has it mostly wrong. I won’t say more than that, because Milo’s secrets are not mine to tell, except to observe that no author publishing through the major publishers really understands how the world of independent publishing works at the top. In fact, even trying to compare unit sales doesn’t even make sense, because Milo will be making somewhere between 3x and 5x more per unit than Scalzi and other mainstream-published authors depending upon whether one is utilizing hardcovers, trade paperbacks, ebooks, or audiobooks as the metric.

Where Scalzi is correct is when he notes that Nielsen Bookscan woefully undercounts book sales, so much so that I pay it absolutely no attention whatsoever. And I am absolutely confident that Milo will sell more than 250,000 copies of Dangerous before the end of 2017; my expectation is that he will sell somewhere between 300k and 350k this calendar year. And that is copies sold to the reader, NOT merely units in the distribution channel

As for permitting the media to spin the story of Milo “only” selling 18,000 copies, that is the statement of a man who is accustomed to the media fawning on him and repeating his lies without question. No matter what Milo did, the media was going to find a way to say something negative. But  his assumptions about Milo’s dishonesty is a timely reminder of the 3rd Law of SJW: SJWs Always Project.

Regression to the mean

This is the statistical reality that will always confound the civic nationalists and their ideals of uplift. Iron Spartan comments concerning a couple with whom he is acquainted.

There are a pair of black doctors married to each other at a local hospital. They have two sons and a daughter. With every advantage normally associated with whites, one son failed out of high school, (which is an achievement on its own in the current education environment) went to prison for stealing cars and breaking into houses shortly after his 18th birthday, the other son made it into college and failed out by midterms, and the daughter has two kids by different daddies before she turned 18.

It doesn’t matter how well you train the cat to fetch or teach the dog to use the litter box. Their kittens and puppies are naturally going to revert to what is normal behavior for their kind if they are not subjected to exactly the same training by external forces that their parents were. It is one of the great ironies of the Civil Rights movement that racism, segregation, and the continuous repression of the black minority may have been the primary contributor to keeping the black family together in the USA.

Conservatives always like to blame the Great Society for the demise of the black family, but the reality is that the influence of its perverse incentives were relatively limited. It appears that the most destructive aspect of the Great Society, in this particular regard, is that it permitted African-Americans to return to the dyscivilizational social arrangments historically preferred in African culture.

Every race has its exceptional individuals. Every race has statistical aberrations who should not be judged by the general stereotypes and averages. But societal policies that are made on the basis of exceptions and aberrations are almost guaranteed to be disastrous, whether the outliers are to the right or the left side of the Bell Curve.

The blessings of immigration

Acid-throwing attacks are popular in Pakistan:

A GROWING and worrying trend of acid-throwing attacks in Pakistan has seen a surge of women left with disfigured faces and left blinded for life. When a young, bright and highly intelligent woman from the district of Rawalpindi, in Pakistan was raped, there was a hushed and uneasy quiet that fell amongst the village whenever she passed through. She decided to ignore it, and shunned it aside as this is the attitude many people in India and Pakistan towards rape. They do not blame the attacker, but the victim herself.

No less than a few weeks after, the young woman who was slowly trying to adapt and recover from her initial horrific rape attack, found herself doubled up in pain in an alleyway screaming for help as her face and eyes burned, one late afternoon coming home. The reason? As the young woman had brought shame to her family, for being raped she was now no longer pure and thought of as dirty…. The young woman, who has fled Pakistan to come to Scotland, admits she finds it difficult to get out there and socialize with people.

Now see if you can guess what’s happening in the country where Pakistanis have been immigrating?

A horrific wave of acid attacks have overtaken London, leaving victims gruesomely disfigured and suffering life-altering injuries amid a growing trend that’s seen the corrosive liquid become the weapon of choice for British attackers…. The use of acid in attacks has even spread to children as young as 12 who have been arming themselves with substances “for self-defense.”

“British.” Sure they are. What are they contributing beyond acid attacks, child molesting, rape, and societal destruction? They have to go back. Every single last one. Only true Western nationals should be permitted residence in other Western countries. And even they should not be given full citizenship, let alone voting rights.

Educating orcs

It’s mostly impossible. So why even bother?

King’s College London will replace busts and portraits of its founding fathers with ethnic minorities amid pressure from students, according to a dean. The world famous institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience plans to move portraits of former faculty staff from the main entrance wall.

They will be replaced with likenesses of more black and minority ethnic scholars, it has been reported. The decision follows concern among academics that the current teaching is too ‘intimidating’ for ethnic minorities.

It’s not too intimidating, it’s simply too difficult because they’re not intelligent enough, on average, to grasp the required concepts. After 50 years of constant dumbing-down to no avail, at what point are the universities going to finally recognize the obvious fact that orcs cannot, in general, be educated? They just can’t. The evidence is overwhelming. It is not even remotely deniable any longer, not even by the most generously inclined.

Sure, there are exceptional individuals from low-IQ minority groups. That doesn’t mean that MIT and Caltech should change their academic programs to accommodate the average individual simply because there are the occasional +4SD and +5SD individuals capable of handling them.

A leading cause of death

Are you kidding me? ANOTHER Clinton-related “suicide”:

Haiti Official, Who Exposed The Clinton Foundation, Found Dead In Miami

Klaus Eberwein, a former Haitian government official who was expected to expose the extent of Clinton Foundation corruption and malpractice next week, has been found dead in Miami. He was 50.

Eberwein was due to appear next Tuesday before the Haitian Senate Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission where he was widely expected to testify that the Clinton Foundation misappropriated Haiti earthquake donations from international donors.

According to Miami-Dade’s medical examiner records supervisor, the official cause of death is “gunshot to the head“. Eberwein’s death has been registered as “suicide.”

Eberwein, who had acknowledged his life was in danger, was a fierce critic of the Clinton Foundation’s activities in the Caribbean island, where he served as director general of the government’s economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social, for three years.

According to Eberwein, a paltry 0.6% of donations granted by international donors to the Clinton Foundation with the express purpose of directly assisting Haitians actually ended up in the hands of Haitian organizations. A further 9.6% ended up with the Haitian government. The remaining 89.8%  – or $5.4 billion – was funneled to non-Haitian organizations.

“The Clinton Foundation, they are criminals, they are thieves, they are liars, they are a disgrace,” Eberwein said at a protest outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan last year.

Are we really supposed to believe in this increasingly unlikely string of timely, but entirely coincidental suicides? That’s two in a week! At this point, “investigating Hillary Clinton” must be rapidly approaching the top ten list of causes of death in America. Typhoid Mary was less lethal.

Can you imagine if she had won the presidency? There would have been an epidemic of “suicide” to rival Japan’s WWII-era Divine Wind.

Mailvox: the very rich are different

This is a contribution from a friend of the blog.

If I Were A Rich Man …

“Dear God, you made many, many poor people.
“I realize, of course, that it’s no shame to be poor.
“But it’s no great honor either!”
-Fiddler on the Roof

There is an old – and very cynical remark – that the very rich are different from the average person – they have more money.  Which is true.  But what isn’t encompassed in that rather sardonic bon mot is just what having vast wealth can do for you.  Being wealthy offers opportunities that are, perhaps, not always understood by the poor.

If you’re a rich man, you can buy a house for cash.  You do not have to worry about taking out a mortgage, let alone paying it back.  If you’re a rich man, you can buy a car for cash and afford comprehensive insurance, as well as everything from the very latest gadgets to basic maintenance.  You do not have to worry about taking out a loan or meeting payments.  If you’re a rich man, you can afford lawyers and accountants and everything else you might need to smooth out any little problems you may encounter.  NHS waiting lists?  Go private and be assured of the best of care.  Even being accused of a terrible crime – with a slam-dunk case against you – can be mitigated with expensive lawyers and cash shovelled around like snow.

If you’re a poor man, you do not have these options.  If you want to buy a house, you have to take out a mortgage – and the bank will start talking tough if you miss a payment.  If you want to buy a car, you need another loan – and you can’t afford comprehensive insurance beyond the (legally-required) third-party insurance.  You have to struggle with tax and suchlike on your own and, if you are picked up by the police, you can’t afford to post bail, let alone hire a lawyer.

Indeed, in some ways, the paragraph above is optimistic.  If you don’t earn enough to qualify for a loan, you have to rent – and that eats up your disposable income.  A car accident, even one that wasn’t your fault, can fuck up your life … and God help you if you need medical treatment.  Even in Britain, with the NHS, waiting lists are so long that you might expire before you see a hospital.

If you’re rich, you are insulated from the world.  You can afford to live in a gated compound, with round-the-clock security patrols.  You don’t have to worry about thugs on the street or terrorists, not when you’re secure.  You can cope with almost anything just by throwing money at it.  You can even weather the consequences of your own stupidity if you try.

Imagine two people – Richie Rich and Polly Poor – who get into a car accident.  Both of them are unharmed – and it was a genuine accident, so neither of them are threatened with arrest – but their cars are beyond immediate repair.  And they both have an important engagement in an hour.

Richie Rich calls his insurance firm.  They send him a replacement car and a breakdown truck.  He takes the car and drives to his engagement.  By the time he gets home, the insurance firm has decided that the car is a write-off and offered to let him keep the loaner.  Richie Rich decides he wants to upgrade and takes the money instead, then purchases a new car.

Polly Poor doesn’t have insurance.  The remains of her car are impounded until she pays a fine, which she cannot pay.  She has no way of getting to her engagement until a passing motorist takes pity on her and drives her most of the way.  But by the time she gets there, she’s terribly late.  Her boss gives her the sack.  When she gets home, she discovers a whole series of bills she cannot even begin to pay …

Being rich, in short, offers security from the outside world.  It also offers power.  If you’re rich, people like Hillary Clinton will hunt you up for donations.  You’ll have influence, which you can turn into power.  (The song I quoted above includes a line about just that.)  People like Bill Gates and Donald Trump wouldn’t have anything like the influence they do, let alone power, if they didn’t have money.

“Sir, I’m afraid you’ve gone mad with power!
“Of course I have.  You ever tried going mad without power?  It’s boring.  No one listens to you!”
-The Simpsons Movie.

I’m sure some of you are thinking by now that I’ve turned into a raving socialist, if not a communist.  Horror of Horrors!  Trust me – there is a point to this.

Being rich also offers more options than are available to the poor.  Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to move in a hurry.  Being rich, you don’t have loans or anyone who would have to sign off on your move.  You can just buy a house somewhere else and go there, hiring movers to assist with your possessions.  Or, if you have to leave really quickly, you can just rent an AIRBNB for a couple of months while you hunt for a new place to live.

Why not?  You have the money, don’t you?

What all this tends to mean is that the very rich are insulated from the consequences of their own decisions.

I’ve noticed, when I’ve dealt with the top 10%, that they have a certain unconscious (and sometimes very conscious) arrogance.  If you happen to believe that £20’000 is small change, you’re not going to empathise with someone who doesn’t have a hope of making that in a year.  The cost of living is meaningless to someone who can afford it without batting an eyelash.  Saying that the poor should save seems to be good advice, for example, but it tends not to take into account the simple fact that the poor cannot save!  They have to spend every penny they earn just to keep their heads above water.

And move to a better area?  How?

No one in their right mind wants to live in a suburb infested with druggies, gangsters and other genuine deplorables.  No half-way decent parent would want to bring up children in such shitty surroundings.  But what happens if they cannot afford to leave?  Going somewhere a little more upmarket might be beyond them.  What happens then?

I wrote all this – in a blaze of fury – after reading an article in the Daily Mail.  George Clooney is apparently planning to move back to LA from Britain after the security situation in the UK deteriorated.  He fears for the safety of his wife and children.  How can you blame him?  If you’re a parent, your children are your first priority.  If you feel that life is unsafe where you are, you need to take them elsewhere.  What self-respecting father could do anything else?

What is maddening about this is the reason the security situation across Europe is deteriorating.  Migrants, terrorism … and spineless governments.  And Clooney was one of the very wealthy celebrities who urged Angela Merkel to throw open the doors and invite countless migrants into Germany.  Clooney and his fellows had the influence to ensure that their wish to feel good about themselves outweighed any commitment to the safety and security of the German – and European – population.  They pushed a narrative that preached helping refugees – and completely ignored the very real risks to national security.

But Clooney – and his fellows – are insulated from the consequences of their self-righteous stance.  Clooney has impressive security.  He and his family don’t have to worry about the sharp upturn in sexual assaults, murders and religious conflict in Europe.  They can – and, if this article is accurate, they will – simply move away.  How many others have the option to just leave?

Very few.  Picking up and leaving your home isn’t easy at the best of times.  Your job isn’t going to move, is it?  Nor can you get a new loan if you’re having problems paying the one you already have.  Even if you don’t have a loan or debts, moving to a new region might be tricky.  And what stops the migrants from coming after you?

The very rich are different from you and me.  It is always someone else who pays the price for their self-righteous stupidity.

Is this what you wanted, Ms Pankhurst?

Moral abandon, rape, foreign invasion, and the defeat and occupation of England by the Franco-German Union, complete with annual payments of tribute. What a stupid, evil woman. If the anti-suffragettes of the day had had even a modicum of a glimmer of a true understanding of what the price of women’s suffrage would be for England, they would have executed the lot of them faster than the Chinese government’s crackdown on democracy activists at Tianenman Square.

How appropriate that some of the suffragettes wore head scarves. Very forward-thinking indeed.

Expel your SJWs

Any organization that does not actively work to keep out SJWs will eventually be converged by them, be it a church or a corporation. The Z-Man understands this, as he summarizes the decline of the mainline Protestant denominations in the USA:

Young people tend not to be attracted to the faith, even if their parents regularly attend services. As people get older, have families and begin to sink roots, they get more involved in their faith and attend services regularly. That’s the trouble with the mainline Protestant religions. The young are not coming back once they start having families. That means their children are not raised in the faith. As a result, these churches are now in a death spiral.

The story is familiar to anyone who has been paying attention. These churches made the decision to chase the latest social fads in the 70’s and 80’s, hoping to make themselves more appealing to the young. The only thing they did was make themselves less attractive to people interested in being part of a traditional Christian sect. It was not just in the pews, but in the clergy as well. Those feeling the call found that the church in which they were raised was not interested in defending and maintaining the faith.

The result is the clergy slowly radicalized. First came the women and then the feminist women. Soon they invited in the homosexuals and the clergy started looking like the faculty of a liberal arts college. That’s when the pews started to empty out. Why bother going to church, when you can get the same liberal lecture from television? That’s what started the decline in church attendance. Instead of offering a shelter from the storm, they decided to chase an over-served market – radical Progressives.

Talking to my friend, he tells me that there are elements within the Episcopal Church that know what must be done to save the church. The trouble is they are outgunned and out maneuvered by the radicals. That’s the thing. The conservatives make it a priority to serve the church and serve God, while the radicals are always scheming to advance the radical agenda. The conservatives are constantly outmaneuvered because they are not playing the political games. They end up getting marginalized, despite having numbers….

It’s another reminder that Progressives must be treated like rage zombies or highly contagious disease carriers. Once you let one into your organization, it will set about bringing in more of its kind.

SJWs always converge. That is their purpose. That is their jihad. People often ask me, “what can I do?” The answer is straightforward: actively work to deconverge every organization to which you belong. If you can’t, then leave it and find another one. And if you can’t find another one, create it yourself.

His name was Peter Smith

At this point, the Clinton emails have a more extensive body count than The Ring. It’s like watching a political horror movie in real time:

GOP operative who sought Clinton’s emails committed suicide

A Republican Party operative who said he tried to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers committed suicide days after speaking to The Wall Street Journal, records acquired by the Chicago Tribune show.

Peter W. Smith, an 81-year-old GOP donor from Chicago, was found dead in a Rochester, Minnesota hotel room on May 14. The Tribune obtained a state death record stating Smith committed suicide in the hotel on the date.

The Journal reported that Smith, a longtime opposition researcher for the GOP, “mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen by Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers” and implied he was working with Gen. Michael Flynn, then a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.

Smith said he had created a team to find the emails that might have been stolen by hackers during Clinton’s tenure as U.S. Secretary of State, although the Journal reported Smith was focused on obtaining the 30,000 emails Clinton claimed she deleted because they were personal.

That doesn’t sound suspicious at all. I’m only surprised that it wasn’t found that he committed suicide by shooting himself three times in the back of the head before being run over by a train on an abandoned railroad track.