Author: VD

Tortious interference

Although the specific elements required to prove a claim of tortious interference vary from one jurisdiction to another, they typically include the following:

  1. The existence of a contractual relationship or beneficial business relationship between two parties.
  2. Knowledge of that relationship by a third party.
  3. Intent of the third party to induce a party to the relationship to breach the relationship.
  4. Lack of any privilege on the part of the third party to induce such a breach.
  5. The contractual relationship is breached.
  6. Damage to the party against whom the breach occurs.

Any of those elements missing?

UPDATE: Since some people seem to want to go on the warpath, let me be perfectly clear here: Amazon is not to blame. I even suspect that it is entirely possible that Tor Books is not to blame either, based on a) when the book was pulled and b) the fact that the book has shown as Live for nearly 24 hours but still does not have a page on any Amazon site. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is a rogue low-level SJW employee, possibly two, in a specific department.

I have already spoken to the manager of one department and they have begun to investigate why Corrosion is Live but not available. They’ve done everything we asked and we have no problem with the way we have been treated.

That ship has sunk

The God-Emperor tells Republicans to get in line:

President Donald Trump arrived on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning with a stern message for Republicans who’ve been wobbly about dismantling Obamacare: Give me your vote or you may lose your seat in 2018.

During a closed-door meeting with the House GOP conference, the president gave a full-throated endorsement to the House repeal bill that will come to the floor for a vote on Thursday. He warned that if Republicans don’t pass the bill, “I honestly think many of you will lose your seats in 2018.”

Trump even called out the bill’s most vocal critic in the House, Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who’s led the conservative opposition to the Republican health care plan. “Mark, I’m gonna come after you” if he keeps it up, Trump said, according to multiple sources.

The sources cautioned that Trump may have been “half joking,” as one put it. He winked and he smiled at Meadows, and acknowledged the congressman was a strong supporter of his campaign.

But singling out Meadows in front of his colleagues sent a clear message: Trump wants him to get in line. And fast.

I have no doubt that the bill isn’t as good as it should be. Who cares? The point is that Republicans have to stop pretending that they’re going to act someday and start acting. Their careers depend upon it.

No one is interested in the noble principles and noble defeats of conservatism any longer. That ship has sunk.

“Scalzi at his best!”

Well, that’s certainly true. At long last, the much-anticipated Foundation rip-off The Collapsing Empire is out, and by all accounts, McRapey has surpassed himself. From one of the first reviews:

Scalzi laces his plot with plenty of humor, some of it gentle, some of it barbed, and some of it rather broad. I enjoyed little exchanges like this one between the emperox and her aide:

“[T]he executive committee…wants to marry me off.”
“They want to preserve an existing alliance.”
“An alliance with terrible people”
“Really nice people don’t usually accrue power.”
“You’re saying I’m kind of an outlier,” Cardenia said.
“I don’t recall saying you were nice.”

Scalzi’s characters come alive much better than is common in space opera. I enjoyed getting to know them and even to care about them, from spunky Cardenia, who had never expected or wanted to become experox, to Kiva, the potty-mouthed member of a powerful guild family. (SF readers who decry the relative deficit of strong female characters in the genre, take note. In retrospect I realize that most of the really memorable characters in the book are women.)

Brilliant stuff! Spunk and potty-mouthed wit! Keep in mind these excerpts are not clunkers I am cherry-picking as being particularly terrible, these are excerpts that fans and Tor employees have been selecting on the basis of a belief that they are the best the book has to offer. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are assured is “the heart of modern Sci-Fi” and “the best SF writer of his generation.”

Which, if either statement were true, would be a damning indictment indeed.  Fortunately, it’s only obese midwits less well-read than the average illiterate Venezuelan peasant, who think snarky space romance is the height of cleverness, that actually believe that.

Seeing the SF-SJWs unite in a desperate attempt to convince the reading world that Scalzi is actually a good science fiction writer very much reminds me of the Democrats trying to convince everyone that Hillary Clinton was a good presidential candidate. Not only are their efforts unconvincing, but their bizarre overselling reveals that even the people pushing the idea don’t believe it.

But don’t worry, you can totally trust the SF-SJW reviews. And the New York Times bestseller ranks achieved months in advance of publication too.

The Collapsing Empire (The Interdepency #1)
by John Scalzi (Goodreads Author)

Renay’s review May 24, 2016
it was amazing
Can’t say much about this yet BUT DON’T WORRY I WILL, I WILL HAVE SOME WORDS.

That’s a pretty positive five-star review, particularly for a book that wasn’t actually published for another 10 months.

UPDATE: My position on fake reviews is what it has always been: never write fake reviews, for good or for ill. If you have not read a book or played a game, then you should not even consider reviewing it. As a former nationally syndicated professional game reviewer, I do not approve of fake reviews no matter who the author or developer is. Unlike most published authors, I have always abided by Amazon guidelines and never review books or games on Amazon. The only place I write reviews are a) on this blog, and b) on Recommend.

UPDATE: Castalia author-to-be Brian Niemeier addresses the increasing desperation of Tor Books. He’s got a good point. If Tor actually had any confidence in their author’s ability to compete with our book, they wouldn’t have freaked out and begged Amazon to take it down. When Alexandra Erin published a parody of SJWAL, did we do that?

No, we simply laughed at the fact that the book, along with the parody and the parody of the parody, ranked as the #1, #2, and #3 bestsellers in the Political Philosophy category.

Another hapless attack

The strength of the Alt-Right political philosophy can readily be seen in the utterly inept attempts to critique and discredit it. Fred Reed foolishly attempts to have a go:

Something called the Alt-Right that believes the white race to be superior and wants to rid the country of of encroaching dark scum. The Human Biodiversity movement, HBD, more scientific and less surly but picking whites while conceding that yellow are smarter. Finally IQists, who believe that IQ is a reliable measure of genetic intelligence. They too put yellows as more intelligent.

The Alt-Right believes that the whites are innately–i.e., genetically–superior to all other races, that they have dominated the world through higher intelligence, and that their mastery is the result of Darwinian selection. Whites, they say, have a marvelous track record of achievement, and they don’t want to dilute it by intermarriage.

They have a point. It is not thought politic in today’s racial climate to notice the obvious, that white Europeans have been far and away the most successful race yet. (The “yet” is important.) No other has even come close. Various peoples have learned to use the products of European civilization–the Japanese, Latin Americans, Thais, etc. at length–but have not engendered it. Look around you and see whether you can find anything that was not invented by European whites (other than paper and gunpowder).

But:

International Physics Olympiad. Internationally, top four contestants were Chinese, Chinese, Korean, Korean, with eleven of the top fifteen being east Asian. The US first appeared in sixteenth place. The American team: Jason Lu,  Srijon Mukherjee, Vincent Liu,  Abijith Krishnan,  Jimmy Qi. Less than six percent of America is Asian. International Physics Olympiad. Internationally, top four contestants were Chinese, Chinese, Korean, Korean, with eleven of the top fifteen being east Asian. The US first appeared in sixteenth place. The American team: Jason Lu, Srijon Mukherjee, Vincent Liu, Abijith Krishnan, Jimmy Qi. Less than six percent of America is Asian.

Many in HBD concede that north Asians, specifically, the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are more intelligent than white Europeans. While many outside of HBD (including me) doubt the reliability of IQ tests as measures of intelligence, the HBD people do not. They often assert that observation supports their view–that achievements of both individuals and peoples track IQ, that high achievement is therefore evidence of high IQ.

It would then seem to be Asians, not whites, who are wildly over represented in intellectual achievement. Races other than white and yellow races are not even in the running.

Although Asians comprise only 13 percent of California’s population, three-fifths of the state’s National Merit Scholarship Semifinalists have Asian last names. (Good article on this: Taki’s Magazine) These Semifinalists are in the top .5% in intelligence, or one in two hundred. The Asian kids outnumber the whites by more than four to one.

Psychometricians, who are neither the highly politicized IQists nor racist peddlers of Hitlerian pseudoscience, but very careful statisticians, put Chinese IQ at above 105, white at 100. This is not a trivial difference, and has serious consequences at the high end of the distribution.

China rises with astonishing speed. Alt-Righters are thus caught in a trap: Their arguments for the superiority of whites to blacks and Latinos equally show the superiority of Asians to whites. Anyway, if their conclusions are correct, the Chinese will be well advised not to intermarry with whites and thereby lower their mental capacity. I presume that HBDists will sympathize with this attitude as they too want to protect their genetic purity.

The errors in Fred’s critique are entirely obvious:

  • The Alt-Right does not believe the white race to be intrinsically superior. It believes that each nation finds its own race and culture to be self-preferable, including the various white nations. That being said, the fact that so many diverse population groups observably prefer white cultures and societies to their own does tend to indicate the objective superiority of those cultures and societies.
  • The Alt-Right does not believe that whites “have dominated the world through higher intelligence, and that their mastery is the result of Darwinian selection” for the obvious reason that the Alt-Right knows that a) there is a wide range of intelligence between the white nations, b) the most dominant white nations have not always been the most intelligent white nations, c) national intelligence is far more likely to be the result of various non-Darwinian selection processes such as sex selection and social class distinctions, and d) the white race is not the most intelligent. Unlike Fred, the Alt-Right understands that both average intelligence and the maximum elite intelligence are merely factors in the success of a society, factors that are heavily influenced by other cultural and genetic elements, such as Christianity, time expectations, and in-group trust.
  • Fred relies upon a measure of intelligence in which he does not believe as the basis for his strawman argument. This is doubly dishonest.
  • Intellectual aptitude is not intellectual achievement. Fred is confusing the two. I am a National Merit Scholarship Finalist; that is an indicator of my intellectual aptitude. SJWAL and AODAL are intellectual achievements.
  • There is no trap. First, the Alt-Right points to both white intellectual aptitude and intellectual achievement in distinguishing the white nations from other nations. Second, the Alt-Right case is not made on the basis of that aptitude and achievement, but upon the right of whites to exercise that aptitude and achievement on their own behalf and in their own interests. 
As so often happens, the argument for the Alt-Right is only strengthened by comparison with the feeble and dishonest nature of the arguments being made against it. The more they refuse to understand our case, or correctly characterize it, the more appeal it will hold for those who consider it honestly.

The old Fred would be embarrassed by the inept arguments he is offering here. I shut down my WND column when I felt that I was starting to phone it in. So, if my own ability to present coherent arguments similarly deteriorates with age, for the love of all that is beautiful and true, don’t hesitate to encourage me to hang up my pen and devote myself to fiction and philosophical contemplation.

The process of self-destruction

The Saker observes that the imperial USA is actively engaged in the process of destroying itself through multiple channels:

Political suicide: the Neocons’ refusal to accept the election of Donald Trump has resulted in a massive campaign to de-legitimize him. What the Neocons clearly fail to see, or don’t care about, is that by de-legitimizing Trump they are also de-legitimizing the entire political process which brought Trump to power and upon which the United States is built as a society. As a direct result of this campaign, not only are millions of Americans becoming disgusted with the political system they were indoctrinated to believe in, but internationally the notion of “American democracy” is becoming a sad joke.

And just to make things worse, the US corporate media is finally revealing its true face and has now unapologetically shown the entire world that not only is it not in any way “fair” or “objective”, but that it is a 100% prostituted propaganda machine which faithfully serves the interests of the US “deep state”.

A key element of the quasi-constant brainwashing of the average American has always been the regular holding of elections. Never mind that, at least until now, the outcome of these elections made very little difference inside the US and none at all outside, the goal was never to consult the people – the goal has always been to give the illusion of democracy and people-power. Now that the Democrats say that the Russians rigged the elections and the Republicans say that it was the Democrats and their millions of dead voters who tried stealing it, it become rather obvious that these elections were always a joke, a pseudo-democratic “liturgy”, a brainwashing ritual – you name it – but never about anything real.

The emergence of the concept of the 1% can be “credited” to the Obama Administration, since it was during Obama that the entire “Occupy Wall Street” movement took off, but the ultimate unmasking of the viciously evil true face of that 1% must be credited to Hillary with her truly historical confession in which she openly declared that those who oppose her were a “basket of deplorables”. We already knew, thanks to Victoria Nuland, what the AngloZionist leaders thought of the people of Europe, now we know what they think of the people of the USA: exactly the same thing.

The bottom line is this: I don’t think that the moral authority and political credibility of the US have ever been lower than today. Decades of propaganda by Hollywood and the official US media machine have now collapsed and nobody buys that counter-factual nonsense anymore.

It is really rather remarkable how desperately the bi-factional ruling party has been lashing out since the God-Emperor became the nominee, and how ineffectual their flailings have been. The unraveling of the government’s moral authority is not yet complete, but it is advanced and aggressive.

No pizza, only Russians

This article is practically dripping with Narrative:

The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of multiple congressional panels examining Russia’s intervention, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that there was “circumstantial evidence of collusion.” There also is “direct evidence . . . of deception, and that’s where we begin the investigation,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California.

U.S. intelligence agencies charged in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the offensive, in which cyber operatives also hacked tens of thousands of emails from Democratic National Committee staff, Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and other Democrats.

A top priority of investigators is to determine who delivered those hacked emails to WikiLeaks, a London-based transparency site that published them online, the sources said. News stories about the emails embarrassed Clinton at key points in the campaign. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has denied that the Russian government was the source of the email dump.

As for the bots, they carried links not only to news stories but also to Democratic emails posted on WikiLeaks, especially those hacked from Podesta and made public in October, said Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford University Internet Institute who has researched the bot attacks.

Howard said that, as an example, bots had spread links to fictional stories that accused Clinton of involvement in running a child-sex ring in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor. The posts inspired a North Carolina man to drive to Washington and fire an assault weapon in the restaurant, according to police reports.

I’m frankly astonished that they haven’t tried to claim that the Russians are responsible for putting the evil murder art in the Podestas’ houses yet.

Notice how all these stories do the same thing and exaggerate the actual accusations in order to try to make it look ridiculous and unworthy of investigation. I don’t recall anyone ever saying Clinton was actually running anything at Comet Pizza. Let’s face it, she’s so inept that if she’d ever tried to run a child-sex ring, the videos would have somehow ended up being broadcast live on Nickelodeon.

And it seems a little strange that no one ever seems to ask why someone would drive from North Carolina to Washington DC for the express purpose of not shooting anyone. Did the guy ever even get charged?

Amazon pulls THE CORRODING EMPIRE

Fascinating. We just received an email from Amazon informing us that the title, cover, and author of THE CORRODING EMPIRE were “misleading”. This is rather amusing, of course, considering that Tor Books and John Scalzi have devoted an entire career to ripping off everyone from Heinlein to Star Trek.

In any event, we will have CORROSION by Harry Seldon, complete with a new cover, back up soon. It’s not like we aren’t in the habit of anticipating enemy action, after all.

Sadly for Tor Books, there will be no similarly easy fix for the disaster that is THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE.

The funny thing is that McRapey is dumb enough to actually brag about it. He has NO idea how this makes him look to normal readers. Note that this is actually the second time he’s gone running to Amazon to ban a book.

John Scalzi‏ @scalzi
Also, a few minutes ago got confirmation of a very cool thing involving Empire that I can’t yet tell you about, he said, entirely unsubtly.

Yeah, so, about that…. this is now publishing.

Amusement intensifies.

Nick Siekierski‏ @ResearchTeacher
@scalzi Reading The Corroding Empire now, love it!

John Scalzi @scalzi
@ResearchTeacher Tell that to the actual author. I’m sure they would appreciate the feedback.

I have to admit, I prefer the replacement title and cover myself. Tor really just blows from A to Z. It’s really rather remarkable how they’ve gone from Ender’s Game to this.

Mailvox: the necessity of Christianity

Stickwick had some thoughts about the IQ-related video I posted yesterday.

I found the Rushton video interesting. During the Q&A, someone astutely asked Rushton why the difference in terms of societal output between whites and higher-IQ Asians. Rushton said the answer is not known, but he’s wrong. The answer is well known amongst historians of science: it’s Christianity.

Pearcey and Thaxton, in their book, The Soul of Science, explain in great detail that it was the ideals and assumptions of Christianity that led to science and thus greater technological advances.

These ideals and assumptions include:

  •     Belief that the universe was created and ordered by a transcendent, rational mind
  •     Belief that the universe is lawful and knowable
  •     Belief in the reality of the physical world
  •     Belief that the physical world is of value
  •     Viewing physical work as noble, as a divine calling
  •     The Biblical admonishment to test claims
  •     Viewing the study of nature as a proper form of worship
  •     Belief in linear time
  •     Belief that mathematics forms the substrate of the physical world

Every non-Christian culture lacks at least one, and usually several, of these, which are all necessary for the development and advancement of science. This is why the intellectually advanced Greeks, and the technologically advanced Romans and Chinese, did not develop science, while the “backwards” medieval European Christians did.

The implications are obvious:

  1. If progressives are ever successful in completely secularizing the West, we will be relegated to second-world status.
  2.  If Asians, with their superior IQs and self-discipline, ever become Christian in sufficiently large numbers, they will eat our lunch in terms of scientific and technological advancements. 

This is why any efforts to make America and Europe great are doomed unless they are centered around Christianity.

Racism in education

It’s really terrible how some teachers in Australia are failing to respect the cultural imperatives of their New Australian students.

Teachers at a primary school in Sydney, Australia have been threatened with beheading and other violence from young Islamic students, prompting one of them to quit her job. Students as young as those in Year 5, according to the Daily Telegraph, are making the violent threats and pressuring others to read the Koran at Punchbowl Public School in Sydney.

Documents given to the newspaper allege that three staff members have taken a leave of absence owing to stress, received counselling and been awarded compensation after bullying from Islamic students.

One female teacher reportedly quit her job after it got too much for her. She claims she quit after receiving death threats to her family from her year 5 and 6 students, with some saying they would behead her. The teacher also said she made numerous complaints back in 2014 about the extraordinary behavior in the class. For example, she said, she was abused by students after she stopped them from hanging a Syrian flag in the classroom.

In another example, she claimed she was pushed into a corner by students who began marching around her chanting the Koran.

Frankly, if the woman hadn’t quit, she should have been fired. What right does she have to tell these New Australians, who are every bit as Australian as those descended from British convicts and shipped off to colonial Australia, that they should not be hanging Syrian flags, threatening her family, and promising to behead her.

After all, those are just New Australian customs, every bit as Australian as kangaroos, koalas, and gay pride parades, and they should be respected accordingly.

THE CORRODING EMPIRE

Galactic society is ruled by algorithms. From interstellar travel and planetary terraforming to artificial intelligence and agriculture, every human endeavor has become completely dependent upon the hypercomplex equations that optimize the activities making life possible across hundreds of inhabited worlds. Throughout the galaxy, Man has become dependent upon the reliable operation of ten million different automated systems. 


 And when things begin to go wrong and mysterious accidents begin to happen no one has any idea what is happening, except for a sentient medical drone and the First Technocrat of Continox. But their ability to even begin to try fixing the unthinkably complicated problem of galaxy-wide algorithmic decay is made considerably more difficult by the fact the former is an outlaw and the latter is facing a death sentence. 


Johan Kalsi is Finland’s hottest science fiction author. An accomplished geneticist as well as a 6’3″ ex-Finnish Marine, in THE CORRODING EMPIRE, Kalsi shows himself to be more Asimovian than Asimov himself.

From the reviews:

  • This was a very surprising and compelling read. Clearly modeled on Asimov’s Foundation, this book does a much better and more interesting job of making that world seem real and possible. Part thriller, some hard-ish sci-fi, and part dystopian novel, The Corroding Empire was strikes a very resonant tone…. Growing up on Asimov and having a special place in my heart for Foundation, I found this to be a fantastic book and homage, of sorts, to Asimov. It’s well worth the time and a first-rate addition to the genre.
  • The Amazon blurb brags that, “Kalsi shows himself to be more Asimovian than Asimov himself.” I wouldn’t go quite that far. The Corroding Empire fails as an Asimov pastiche in a few ways. The characters aren’t wooden cutouts, they are real, sympathetic, and relatable. The underlying theme of this book isn’t that everything would be so much better if only the technocrats were in charge instead of those lousy politicians – technocrats like the author, you know? This book doesn’t possess a strong undercurrent of contempt for the common man and all his problems, it sympathizes with the little guys who suffer whenever the managerial class screw up their five-year plans, as they so often do…. And in that way, this isn’t Asimov. It’s something far better.
  • A truly thought-provoking book of where man’s hubris may take us. A new type of apocalypse book. Mr. Kalsi takes us through a detailed tale of how the arrogance of man, the religion of science, the infallibility of man and how the system can control and predict everything leads to disaster.
  • I thought it was going to be largely tongue-in-cheek humor. Instead it’s a pretty strong straight sci-fi story, told as a series of vignettes over an expansive period of time. The comparisons to Asimov’s Foundation are apt but I would say it nods in Asimov’s direction rather than ripping him off.
  • Surprisingly brilliant. A taut, imaginative, superbly crafted tale in the finest traditions of Isaac Asimov.
  • As a re-telling of Foundation, as out-Asimoving Asimov, it deserves five stars. Heck, for having a MUCH better protagonist in Servo than Asimov had in Hari Seldon, I’d assign seven stars if I could.
THE CORRODING EMPIRE is $4.99 and DRM-free. Also, if you bought it and you subscribe to the New Release newsletter, you will probably want to check your email in order to take advantage of the free ebook offer.