That was both a disaster of incompetent strategy and a chaotic mess. Marchesio was sent off for nothing I could see, while Luis Suarez got away with BITING Chiellini in the shoulder. With a 1-0 win, Uruguay goes through, but they may lose their best player if Suarez is, quite rightly, given a multi-game ban by FIFA on the basis of the video. FIFA won’t want to take one of the game’s best strikers out of the tournament… but he clearly BIT the guy!
Category: Uncategorized
Another letter to SFWA
Dear SFWA President Steven Gould,
It has come to my attention that a convicted child molester still
belongs to SFWA as of 23 June 2014. In light of your concerted efforts
to expel me for a single tweet linking to a blog post deemed
unacceptable to the organization, it very much appears that you and the
rest of the SFWA Board have no similar objections to the sexual abuse of
children. Given the recent decision to award SFWA’s Grand Master award
to Samuel Delany, a public supporter of the North American Man Boy Love
Association, these facts raise some serious questions about SFWA’s
position concerning the sexual abuse of children.
I would very much appreciate it if you would explain to me and the rest
of the world how a single expression of a private opinion on a personal
blog merited expulsion from SFWA while multiple arrests over a period of
18 years, culminating in a conviction on multiple counts of child
molesting, did not.
If you do not respond to this email, as you failed to respond to my
previous questions concerning SFWA’s continued support for Marion Zimmer Bradley, be aware that you will leave everyone little choice
but to conclude that SFWA tolerates and celebrates the sexual abuse of
children by its members.
Sincerely,
Vox
Attachment: Screen shot of SFWA Membership List
I also tweeted this:
A lot of criticism of @monsterhunter45 by @scalzi, @jimchines and @damiengwalter. Absolutely none of SFWA member @edwardekramer. #askthemwhy
SFWA still harbors child molesters
SFWA’s sordid history of harboring child molesters is not, as some of its defenders would have you believe, nothing but a relic of freaky 1960s SF fandom. From the 2010 SFWA Directory:
Kowal, Mary Robinette (A)
Secretary of SFWA
[Address 1]
[Address 2]
[Telephone]
secretary@secretary.org
[personal email]
www.maryrobinettekowal.com
Twitter: maryrobinette
[SFWA Agent Code]
Kramer, Edward E. (A)
[Address 1]
[Address 2]
[Telephone]
[personal email]
[AOL email]
http://www.edkramer.com
Krasnoff, Barbara (A)
[Address 1]
Etcetera.
So who is this Edward E. Kramer? He is the founder of Dragoncon in Atlanta and an Active member of SFWA who was convicted in December 2013 of three counts of child molestation.
Back in February Deadline went behind the boycott of popular Atlanta sci-fi convention DragonCon, whose co-founder Ed Kramer avoided trial on child molestation charges for over a decade while receiving income from the annual fan fest. This morning in Gwinnett County, GA, the embattled Kramer pleaded guilty to three counts of child molestation and was sentenced to 34 months under house arrest — instead of the 20-year term recommended by the Gwinnett County DA’s office. It’s the latest apparent break for Kramer, whose health complaints led to numerous delays in a 13-year series of evasive legal motions believed to have been financed by his reported $150K per year (in 2011) shareholder cash flow from DragonCon. But as Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter explained to Deadline today, “We wanted a resolution of the case and the victims wanted a resolution of the case and they agreed to the recommendations.” Under the court’s nine-condition agreement, if the 52-year-old Kramer violates even a single term he could land back in prison for up to 60 years. Those include failing to pay each victim a $100K restitution, violating his house arrest, or coming in contact with any person under the age of 16.
This convicted child molester was actively supported and defended in official SFWA publications by a number of SFWA members, including Ann McCaffrey, Brad Linaweaver of the SFWA Grievance Committee, and other SFWA members, some of whom were among the 267 members of the Ed Kramer Legal Defense Fund.
What can we do to help our friend Ed Kramer? If money is needed, we should organize a benefit campaign. It is probably time to go to the media. It should be played up as flagrant anti-Semitism, which it clearly is. Ed needs to sue and seek criminal prosecutions of his torturers. And, quite frankly, of his accusers. As far as I can tell, he has suffered this ordeal merely because of a malicious lie. This sort of thing has happened before, not necessarily in the South. In Salem, Massachusetts, for example.Certainly, SFWA, if it is good for anything, should not leave Ed Kramer to rot.
– Darrell Schweitzer, Issue 199 (October 2004) of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Forum
This wasn’t the only defense of Kramer in the Forum or in other official SFWA publications. SFWA Member and Nebula Award winner Robert Sawyer wrote in 2006:
I do my best to bring up Ed’ name whenever I can. In fact, I mentioned and praised him in the latest issue of the SFWA BULLETIN (I happened to be on the Nebula ballot, and got to say a few words).
As of this morning, 18 years after his first arrest for aggravated child molestation, 14 years after his arrest on three counts of child molestation, three years after arrest in Connecticut for “risk of injury to a minor”, 18 months after being arrested again in Connecticut for violating his bond, and six months after his guilty plea on three counts of child molestation, ED KRAMER IS STILL AN ACTIVE MEMBER OF SFWA! The screen shot below was taken this morning, 23 June 2014, from the SFWA member directory.
Ann Somerville tried to claim I unfairly tarred various SFWA members with being complicit by virtue of their silence regarding Marion Zimmer Bradley. She wrote: “Vox Day linked MZB with Delany as part of ‘Pink SF’ and then linked
them to Jim Hines, Mary Kowal, Rachel Swirsky, Marko Kloos, John Scalzi,
Sheri Tepper, and Mercedes Lackey, in a very clear attempt to smear
these upstanding and entirely non-criminal individuals by association.”
But most of them were associated with MZB, some of them, like Jim “Celebrate her legacy” Hines, directly and professionally. And then there is their continued association with Ed Kramer. The fact is that these “upstanding and entirely non-criminal individuals” chose to support, defend, and continue to associate with an SFWA member who they knew, at a bare minimum, to be an accused child molester. John Scalzi was SFWA president for three years during which Kramer’s abusive activities were a matter of public record; Scalzi is also known to have attended Kramer’s Dragoncon in 2008. Mary Kowal was on the SFWA Board during that time, as was Rachel Swirsky. And, to the best of my knowledge, not a single one of these SFWA members has ever publicly or privately demanded that a confirmed and convicted child molester be expelled from SFWA.
There is no more possibility of denying the facts. SFWA knowingly shields, supports, defends, and even praises child molesters. It should be obvious that any SFWA member who continues to associate with SFWA despite this long-time and continuing institutional support of child molestation is, at the very least, tolerant of those who rape and abuse children. But give them some credit, they are indubitably tough on tweets!
SFWA President Steven Gould still has not responded to my questions concerning SFWA’s ongoing support for the late Marion Zimmer Bradley. Perhaps SFWA members who are concerned about their organization’s continued association with convicted child molesters and NAMBLA supporters will see fit to ask him about SFWA’s connections to Mr. Kramer and Mr. Delany. Or perhaps they will continue to remain complicit in their silence.
UPDATE: Creepy rape enthusiast Jim C. Hines pretends to ignore the screenshot:
“Apparently, a certain SF/F troll is tweeting about SFWA harboring child molester Ed Kramer.
So I pulled up the online membership directory.”
I notice that SFWA scrubbed Ed Kramer from the membership directory AFTER I took the screenshot and posted it here this morning. Which makes John Scalzi’s tweet more than a little amusing:
John Scalzi @scalzi
.@jimchines The Naive Idiocy of Not Checking Your Facts Before Making Accusations Online
Or rather, the naive idiocy of failing to understand that some people are smart enough to anticipate your attempts to cover your ass.
Prizes for pedophiles and plagiarists
The Left gives its awards to any writer it deems politically useful, even if that writer is a sex criminal or didn’t actually do the original writing. Christopher Ketcham exposes the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chris Hedges as a serial plagiarist:
In early 2010, the editors at Harper’s Magazine began reviewing a lengthy manuscript submitted by Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter. In the piece, Hedges had turned his eye to Camden, New Jersey, one of the most downtrodden cities in the nation. Hedges’s editor at Harper’s, Theodore Ross, who left the magazine in 2011 and is now a freelance writer, was excited when he saw the draft. “I thought it was a great story about a topic—poverty—that nobody covers enough,” Ross said.
The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.
Given Hedges’s institutional pedigree, this discovery shocked the editors at Harper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times, where he reported from war zones and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism. In 2002, he had received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute. He has taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He writes a weekly column published in the widely read progressive website Truthdig and frequently republished on the Truthout website. He is the author of twelve books, including the best-selling American Fascists. Since leaving the Times in 2005, he has evolved into a polemicist of the American left. For his fierce denunciations of the corporate state, his attacks on the political elite, and his enthusiasm for grassroots revolt, he has secured a place as a firebrand revered among progressive readers.
A leading moralist of the left, however, had now been caught plagiarizing at one of the oldest magazines of the left.
Ross and the fact-checker, who remains an editor at the magazine and asked that his name not be used in this story, sat down to discuss the matter before approaching Ellen Rosenbush, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, and Rick MacArthur, the publisher, who knew Hedges personally. The fact-checker was assigned to speak to Hedges about the material lifted from Matt Katz. According to Ross and the fact-checker, Hedges told them that he had shared the draft with Katz, who, Hedges claimed, had approved his use of Katz’s language and reporting. (Rosenbush and MacArthur declined to comment on the record for this article.)
But when the editors at Harper’s asked Katz about Hedges’s account, Katz told them he had not in fact seen the manuscript. “When I went back to Hedges, he tried to clarify by saying he didn’t mean that he had actually showed Katz the draft,” the fact-checker said. “He lied to me—lied to his fact-checker.”
At this point, Ross said, he brought the matter to Rosenbush, and together—after a series of meetings that included the fact-checker, literary editor Ben Metcalf, and MacArthur—they decided Harper’s could no longer stand behind the piece.
“I do not believe I shared a text with Matt Katz, but this was a few years ago,” Hedges wrote to me when I asked him about this account. “I know I spoke with him several times as he wrote the series and covered Camden.” Katz told me that he did not remember seeing a draft, and he confirmed speaking with a Harper’s fact-checker. He declined to comment further.
The plagiarism at Harper’s was not an isolated incident. Hedges has a history of lifting material from other writers that goes back at least to his first book, War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, published in 2002. He has echoed language from Nation author Naomi Klein. He has lifted lines from radical social critic Neil Postman. He has even purloined lines from Ernest Hemingway.
One has to say this for the Hugo Award-winning John Scalzi. Unlike Mr. Hedges, at least Mr. Scalzi is willing to admit that he ripped off Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, H. Beam Piper, and Star Trek.
Forget the morality of Hedges’s plagiarism. What sort of idiot thinks stealing lines from ERNEST HEMINGWAY is going to pass unnoticed? And isn’t it remarkable how many of these former New York Times reporters turn out to be plagiarists?
Holland v Chile
I am a little bit nervous after watching the Oranje defeat Chile, 2-0. I’m not certain that Arjen Robben passing the ball while in shooting range is a definite sign of the Apocalypse, but it strikes me as an ominous harbinger indeed.. Other than that surreal moment, which was beautifully set up by a long ball from the left back, Holland was in charge without ever looking likely to score. But Schneider’s substitute put in a header for his first-ever touch of the ball in a World Cup match – not a bad start – and Holland finished with all 9 points.
While Croatia v Mexico is the more interesting game, I’m tempted to watch Brazil. They have really looked like nothing the first two games, and if they don’t kick it up a notch, they might very well lose, and lose handily, to European teams like Holland, France, and to a lesser extent, Germany, that are clicking on all cylinders. Perhaps the Brazilians are simply cruising, but it can’t be argued that with names like Fred, Hulk, Bernard, and Oscar, this team seems to lack more than a little of the traditional Brazilian magic.
UPDATE: 2-1 Brazil at halftime. They’re basically Neymar and everybody else. Two very nice goals by Neymar versus one unlucky bounce followed by a lazy defensive breakdown. Brazil may find it hard to score if one of the elite teams man-marks Neymar.
UPDATE 2: Switched to Mexico v Croatia after Brazil goes up 3-1 on Fred’s header. Mexico promptly scores twice; the second goal is an excellent ground cross and finish. Mexico ends up winning 3-1 and looks very good while doing so. Brazil wins the group on goal difference, but Mexico gave them a very good run for their money.
The complicit silence
It’s informative to observe that even though a few belatedly brave members of the science fiction Left are pointing out that “silence is complicity”, SFWA and most of its members are still completely silent about the child molesters they have honored in the past and continue to celebrate today:
And, as is clear from the Breendoggle documents, everyone in their vicinity knew what was going on. What is even more clear, because of the years involved was that many people knew for a long time. And, for a long, long time–the time it takes to ruin a generation of lives–the community still did nothing to stop him.
Let me repeat that. EVERYONE KNEW IT.
Adults. Knew.
And did nothing. Nothing. To stop it….
Friends, we have a problem in the science fiction & fantasy community. A big problem.
We have a culture of silence around our missing stairs. We expect the whisper network to warn newcomers about them–except the whisper network only works when people are connected. And a newcomer is, almost by definition, not connected….
We must confront this history and bring it to light.
I don’t know how we can make this right to the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have been injured by our complicity in these horrors.
Speaking of silence and complicity, I note that although a week has passed, neither Steven Gould nor any other member of the SFWA Board has responded to my letter to them concerning their continued support of Marion Zimmer Bradley. Keep in mind this is the same SFWA that recently gave its Grand Master award to Samuel Delany, the homosexual supporter of the North American Man-Boy Love Association.
A few wags have suggested, given SFWA’s longstanding support for child molesters and its members’ complicity in child molestation, the Nebula Awards should be renamed the NAMBuLA Awards.
As for those attempting to distinguish between the confirmed child molesters Bradley, Breen, and Kramer, and the SFWA Grand Master Samuel Delany, this raises the obvious question: has Mr. Delany actually denied ever having had any sexual involvement with underage boys? Has anyone from SFWA ever asked the known NAMBLA supporter about it? Or is this simply more silent complicity on the part of SFWA?
80 years of climate cooling
The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record
“When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.”
I note, again, that we global warming skeptics – deniers, if you prefer – have been consistently correct all along. And the more the charlatans’ Hot Earth models fail, going back to 1922, the more their frauds are uncovered and exposed, the more frantically they insist that this time, the Earth really is doomed.
The thing is, one didn’t, and doesn’t, have to know a single thing about climate or historical temperatures to recognize that they were lying. Because liars a) observably behave in a manner inconsistent with what they claim to believe, and b) are reliably wrong. We have not forgotten that we were told entire nations would be wiped off the face of Earth by rising sea levels
if the global-warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000.
What nation was that, Atlantis? Global warming is nothing more than a pseudoscience concocted to justify global government. Which means that it is only a matter of time before all the lies and the fictitious data used as its foundation are revealed to be fabricated and fraudulent.
CITY BEYOND TIME
Metachronopolis is the golden city beyond time. Ruled by the Masters
of Time, who can travel freely throughout the multitudinous time lines
of Man’s history, the city is a shining society of heroes and horrors.
For the arrogant Masters, who steal famous men and women out of the past
and bring them to the eternal city for their amusement, are not only
beyond time, but beyond remorse and retribution too.
CITY BEYOND TIME: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis is John C. Wright’s mind-bending and astonishingly brilliant take on
time travel. In making use of a centuries-spanning perspective similar
to his highly-regarded AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, Wright expertly weaves a larger tale out of a series of smaller ones. Part anthology and part novel, CITY BEYOND TIME is fascinating, melancholy, frightening, and a true masterpiece of story-telling.
As you can probably imagine, we are very pleased to be able to announce that John C. Wright’s latest book is available today on Amazon in Kindle format and at Castalia House in EPUB format. Featuring a cover by the inimitable Kirk DouPonce, the book consists of six of the aforementioned tales, which, in a manner more convoluted than I can possibly hope to summarize here, collectively tell of the fate of the shining city of Metachronopolis. At 167 pages, it is a relatively short book, but one that you will almost surely find yourself reading more than once as Wright expertly explores the paradoxes inherent in the logic of time travel.
As Wright’s fans have come to expect, CITY BEYOND TIME is more than just an intelligently entertaining story. It is also a thoughtful musing on the nature of power and its corrupting temptations. But no matter how deep the darkness runs, it can never do more than obscure the light.
And this is more than a book announcement, it is also a charity drive. About a month ago, Mr. Wright contacted me about the possibility of bringing some attention to a charity he wished to support. The charity, called Stillbrave, was started by
a Christian man who lost his daughter to cancer. Mr. Wright and his wife requested that half his royalties for the first month’s sales be donated to Stillbrave, which we agreed to do. Castalia House also agreed to match his donation.
So, if you buy CITY BEYOND TIME between now and July 23rd, about half the money Castalia receives will go to Stillbrave, in the name of Mr. and Mrs. John C. Wright. Obviously, you can simply donate directly to the charity, but if you also wish to honor Mr. Wright’s efforts, the most efficient means of doing so will be to purchase the book through Castalia House. If you have not yet read Mr. Wright’s work, you may be interested to know that we are giving away his AWAKE IN THE NIGHT today and tomorrow on Amazon.
USA v Portugal
This should be interesting. If the USA can’t do it now, against an injured and demoralized Portugal, then it will be clear it simply doesn’t have the horses to compete with the second-rate teams. But the win over Ghana looks a lot more impressive in light of Ghana battling a lazy Germany to a draw.
The impotence of the imperial USA
It’s always dangerous to bet on the invader. From the WWII-era women who fraternized with the Nazi occupiers to the US-appointed judge, people have discovered that sooner or later, the invader will go home and they’ll be left to face the judgment of those they betrayed:
There were reports of the execution of Iraqi judge, Raouf Abdel-Rahman, who sentenced Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to death, according to confirmed the pages on the social networking site, without official confirmation from the Iraqi government.
The pages on social networking sites, including Page MP Jordanian Khalil Attieh on the site “Facebook” to “revolutionaries Iraqis arrested him and sentenced him to death in retaliation for the death of the martyr Saddam Hussein,” he said, adding that Rauf tried to escape from Baghdad after wearing uniforms dancers.
But this goes both ways. I’m sure there were more than a few Spaniards who, after two or three hundred years, were convinced that Spain would always be Muslim.