Unit sales of adult nonfiction increased 4%, led by Ready or Not!, a new cookbook by Michelle Tam and Henry Fong, which sold more than 20,200 copies in its first week. The book just beat out Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur, which sold 20,003 copies (both Ready or Not! and Milk and Honey are published by Andrews McMeel). Unit sales in adult fiction fell 6% compared to last year. The book that made the biggest splash was Two by Two by Nicholas Sparks, which sold just under 22,000 copies in its first week, putting it in second place on the category bestseller list.
This is interesting, because our more successful books are normally expected to do around 2,000 copies in their first week. SJWADD should top that without too much trouble. So, while we still have a long way to go, we are about one-tenth of the way to the top already. Not bad for Year Three.
A Google Research project indicating that underrepresented minorities and Ivy League graduates were more likely to receive softball interviews at the company was shut down by Google’s human resources department upon seeing the results, according to an insider. The Google insider (alias “Chuck”), who worked at the company for several years, was part of a team tasked with determining which Google employees were most likely to succeed at the company based on their interview feedback. According to Chuck, the predictive model they created determined that employees who received mixed feedback at the interview stage performed far better than those who received only good feedback. Those who were most likely to receive only good feedback (“inflated interview scores,” in the words of Chuck) tended to be Ivy League graduates or underrepresented minorities. Those who were most likely to receive mixed feedback (and, according to the model, go on to achieve the most success at Google) were more likely to be white and Asian men who did not go to Ivy League schools. The insider’s team had been tasked with the project by Google’s HR department, but according to him, they promptly shut it down once they realized its results would not serve their goals.
Google is an SJW-converged organization at war with reality. That is why it is doomed.
Unite the Right, Divide the Nation Perhaps most troubling are the group dynamics at work here, which are indicative of an identity movement’s spiral towards violent extremism. Though the groups that will coalesce in Charlottesville represent a spectrum of far-right viewpoints, they all share a common goal: Redefining the boundaries of the American identity — i.e., what it means to be a “real” American, and who gets to be included in that group. This process involves several steps, the first of which is framing the identity of the “in-group” (those deemed to be “real” Americans) as inseparable from the derogation of an “out-group” (those who aren’t included in an increasingly narrow construction of American identity). The groups that make up the Unite the Right rally have differing perspectives on exactly where to draw the line separating the in-group from the out-group. The definition of the out-group is flexible and may include Muslims, immigrants, Jews, African Americans, liberals, feminists, and more. This so-called “fluidity of groups” often accompanies the transition to extremism.
But that’s just it. Paper Americans are not real Americans. They are Mexican. They are Chinese. They are Jews. They are already members of a nation that is not the American nation. And the myths of “proposition nations” and “nations of immigrants” “Judeo-Christian America” and “Black Roman Britain” notwithstanding, they will remain members of that distinct and sovereign nation regardless of where they reside. A dog does not become a horse by virtue of being born in a stable. It is not merely the Right that is being forcibly united whether it will or not. The next generation is already divided into White Americans and Not-White Not-Americans. Note, in particular, the difference between White girls and Black-Hispanic-Asian girls.
Now, all of the White cucks, conservatives, and liberals will still cluck and posture about how they are colorblind and so forth. But unlike the tango, it doesn’t take two to war or identity-politick. All politics in the USA are now identity politics, whether people realize it or not.
The 2017 Hugo Award winners. I think we can state that the convergence of mainstream published “science fiction” is now complete. Notice anything about the winners? Best Novel The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books) Best Novella Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing) Best Novelette “The Tomato Thief”, by Ursula Vernon (Apex Magazine, January 2016) Best Short Story “Seasons of Glass and Iron”, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press) Best Related Work Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer) Best Graphic Story Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening, written by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda (Image) Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) Arrival, screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on a short story by Ted Chiang, directed by Denis Villeneuve (21 Laps Entertainment/FilmNation Entertainment/Lava Bear Films) Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) The Expanse: “Leviathan Wakes”, written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, directed by Terry McDonough (SyFy) Best Editor – Short Form Ellen Datlow Best Editor – Long Form Liz Gorinsky Best Professional Artist Julie Dillon Best Semiprozine Uncanny Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas, Michi Trota, Julia Rios, and podcast produced by Erika Ensign & Steven Schapansky Best Fanzine Lady Business, edited by Clare, Ira, Jodie, KJ, Renay, and Susan Best Fancast Tea and Jeopardy, presented by Emma Newman with Peter Newman Best Fan Writer Abigail Nussbaum Best Fan Artist Elizabeth Leggett Best Series The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen) John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer Ada Palmer (1st year of eligibility) The best part is that NK Jemisin is now the two-time Hugo Award winner for Best Novel. In succession.
The following is an excerpt from one of the many hilarious stories in LawDog’s second straight bestseller, THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES. SQUEAKS, Part 1 Many, MANY moons ago—and don’t even ask, ’cause I won’t tell you—when I was still a pup, the family lived in Nigeria. We had a bungalow at the Odibo Estates, out near the Biafran border. Every evening peddlers, called traders, used to walk up and down the main road, offering various knick-knacks and merchandise for sale or trade. Ali Cheap-Cheap was one of the busier traders, and he spent a lot of time on our front porch haggling with Mom. Now, Ali Cheap-Cheap was very proud of his ability to acquire just about anything you might want or need. One evening, Mom was visiting on the front porch with the visiting wife of one of the English engineers. Said wife had never been outside of London before, and as a consequence, she loathed Africa. She and Mom were chattering and griping when along came Ali Cheap-Cheap. Old Ali Cheap-Cheap didn’t have anything that Mom or the English lady wanted, so, before he wandered off, he asked if, “Madams want for anything?” The English lady got a funny look in her eye, tapped her snake-hide purse and said, “I want one of these.” “Yes, madam,” replied Ali, and off he trotted. About three weeks later, Mom and her new English friend were on the front porch again, when along came Ali Cheap-Cheap. With a friend. Ali and friend had a cane pole slung over their shoulders, and there was a burlap bag hanging from said pole. Now, at this point I should mention that also on the front porch, in addition to the two ladies, was a Mongoose-a-minium, in which lived our pet kusimanse, or as it is known to science, Helogale parvula, the pygmy mongoose. This Mongoose-a-minium had a Plexiglas ceiling which Dad had assured us was unbreakable. Riiiight. Up to the porch came Ali Cheap-Cheap and his buddy. Mom was eyeing the burlap bag with some trepidation, having had some nasty experiences with what the locals tended to store in burlap bags, when Ali and buddy proudly lifted it and announced to the English lady, “Oh, madam! We have your beef!” I should interject here that “beef” is bush slang for any animal. Wait for it. Mom had risen to her full height, and was about to order Ali to get his beef away from her house, when Squeaker, our pygmy mongoose, wandered out of his apartment, and screamed in sheer outrage. It was always amazing how much sheer volume that little hairball could put out. Ali and his buddy were startled by the shriek and dropped the burlap sack onto the Plexiglass roof of Squeaker’s residence. The unbreakable glass promptly shattered and caused the burlap sack and its contents to fall into the Mongoose-a-minium. It turned out that inside said sack was one observably scared 15-foot python. Squeaker, who was about the size and girth of a tennis ball, offered up a brief prayer to the Mongoose God for the meal he was about to partake of, and latched onto the snake’s tail with tooth and claw. The snake discovered that he has been dumped into a place which reeks of mongoose, panicked and attempted to slide up the side of the Mongoose-a-minium and down onto the porch, but was hindered in doing so by Squeaker, who was not only still firmly attached to the python’s tail, but was bracing all four legs against the wall to prevent his meal from getting away. Did I mention that the snake was approximately fifteen feet long? Squeaker didn’t even slow him down. The python hit the porch floor with Squeaks gnawing away at his tail like a chipmunk on speed, and noticed that, in the interest of ventilation, the sliding glass door in the front of our house was open about six inches. Yep. You guessed it. In goes the snake. Now, Dad and one of his Brit buddies named Tom were sitting in the house, drinking whiskey-and-sodas. Tom looked down and saw several yards of snake whip by, shrieked, and made a flat-footed, sitting-down leap all the way from the sofa to the top of the bar. Whereupon he proceeded to utter genteel curses upon all and sundry at the top of his lungs. Dad looked down, lifted his feet, ensured that his drink didn’t tip over, and watched the snake haul scales with bemused interest. Dad didn’t ruffle easily. And yes, things just got crazier from there. If you haven’t acquired a copy of LawDog’s African adventures yet, you really must. It’s genuinely THAT funny.
It will be poisonous if the tech right feels compelled to not only hide their beliefs but also to actively pretend to believe in progressive diversity values. This pretending will embitter them, probably pushing many to the more radical alt-right This is EXACTLY what happened to me! One HR director in particular was hard-core SJW and good friends with one of my managers so I was stuck. One of the things she did that still sticks in my mind was an online training/brainwashing course where 1) we HAD to pass it in order to remain employed and we were told that this was because it was the company’s responsibility to demonstrate nondiscrimination in order to meet federal requirements – which was, first of all, bullcrap, and second, a way to shift the responsibility for the nonsense onto the employees. 2) it contained questions such as “Check the boxes next to groups which are discriminated against” and “white men” was an incorrect answer. You could select it, and it would just make you redo the question over and over until you gave the “right” answer. I wasn’t familiar at the time with Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” but he totally nailed what was going on: the point wasn’t to make us believe something we didn’t agree with, the point was to make us complicit. My reaction – which SHOULD have been to quit and find another job, but I wasn’t wise enough yet – was to manipulate my own responsibilities and the work that needed doing such that I could get everything done for the week in a couple hours, then spend the rest of the time goofing off and surfing the net. Not a good use of time on my part; a worse use of employee resources by the people in charge. My morale basically went to zero for several years as a result of these sorts of policies, and the value they got out of me correlated. I’m out of IT now. I’ve gotten the impression this sort of problem is too widespread for me to want to put up with it.
Romance and the Power of the Female Gaze panel with Donna Maree Hanson, Carrie Vaughn, Nick Hubble and Cassandra Rose Clarke. #Worldcon75
Ye cats. I don’t care how big and influential Castalia House becomes in the future. You will never, ever, see me at one of those things. My one experience 20 years ago at MiniCon was considerably more than enough for me. Besides, I have far more important things to do. Tonight, two teams from my soccer club are playing a friendly; the veterans are playing the men’s second team. I am the starting left wing for the former, while Ender is a starter for the latter. The kid is brimming with confidence, claiming his team just has to keep it close until the second half, when they’re counting on us running out of gas. It’s not a bad strategy, since we probably have an average of 16 years per player on them. Our oldest player is a few months older than me, and he’s 22 years older than their oldest player. I realized how much is on the line when I ran into the star of the first team yesterday. He asked if I was playing, and when I said that I was, said that he’d see me there. I was a little surprised (and concerned, since he is exceptional), but he explained that most of the first team guys are coming to watch. Which means the losers will not hear the end of it any time soon.
A 5-time IT manager with 26 years of experience explains the reality of diversity in technology
Large Tech Company – Team of 11 Diversity policy that caused me a lot of problems. I didn’t have the proper control over who I could interview and my main problem was finding competent engineers regardless of race or sex. I did end up interviewing a very diverse set of candidates which made the process extra grueling as I wasted time with so many under-qualified diversity candidates. Some of these diversity interviews were my most memorable for how bad the candidates were. As an example an Indian woman with a very impressive resume and monster SQL background. Only interview I ended after 10 minutes because the candidate asked me what SELECT meant in an example statement I white boarded and asked her to correct. Turns out the recruiting company had rewritten her resume for her and she was just a blatant diversity candidate. I complained to my manager about this as a waste of my time and was reminded my team was all white and with only one female. I did so many interviews I knew were I waste of my time that I started just trying a few new techniques on the candidates as interview practice for myself. It was such a waste of time for myself and the candidate and I felt bad wasting time but I had no choice. There was no chance I would hire them but HR’s method of forcing diversity just kept tossing bad candidates at me. I eventually worked around the process by finding my own candidates and secretly pushing them through the screening process. I could have been fired for this but my resource problem was so bad I didn’t have a choice. For unrelated reasons I left that position. The single female on my team was promoted to take my place, against my recommendation. She was a pretty good engineer but had no experience managing and the team fell apart less then a year after I left. All my former team members all told me it was due to the ruthless micromanagement by my replacement. In my experience, micromanagement is the behavior of a lot of new managers thrust into a job that is too big for them to handle regardless of sex/race. Also, I never filled the SQL dev position but my replacement did hire a different Indian women as the SQL dev. I did hear she was incompetent and fired after 6 months. I learned from this to always have full hiring control of my team or be doomed to fail.
Contra this, Google’s CEO, Pichai Sundararajan doubled down and claimed Google “really need to have people internally who represent the world in its totality. And yet, the company has yet to implement a policy of aggressively hiring Nazis, Eskimos, Christians, or Mbenga bushmen from Cameroon.
“To the girls who dream of being an engineer or an entrepreneur, and who dream of creating amazing things, I want you to know that there’s a place for you in this industry, there’s a place for you at Google,” he told the crowd gathered at a company recreation field. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” he said to cheers and applause. “You belong here and we need you.” Pichai told the audience, which included about 50 contest finalists from seven countries including the U.S., that seeing the girls gave him hope for the future. “At Google we are very committed to building products for everyone in the world,” Pichai said. “To do that well, we really need to have people internally who represent the world in totality. It’s really important that more women and girls have the opportunity to participate in technology, to learn how to code, create and innovate.”
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has cancelled its much anticipated meeting to talk about gender issues today. The move came after some of its employees expressed concern over online harassment they had begun to receive after their questions and names have been published outside the company on a variety of largely alt-right sites. “We had hoped to have a frank, open discussion today as we always do to bring us together and move forward. But our Dory questions appeared externally this afternoon, and on some websites Googlers are now being named personally,” wrote Pichai to employees. “Googlers are writing in, concerned about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall.” Pichai was set to address the search giant’s 60,000 employees in 30 minutes in an all-hands meeting about a recent post by recently fired employee James Damore. Several sites like this one [literally, this one -VD] has been publishing internal discussion posts and giving out information on those employees. In addition, in a move that many Googlers found already disturbing, Damore did his first major interview with alt-right YouTube personality, Stefan Molyneux (ironic, I know, since Google owns the online video giant).
It’s cute they think we’re not going to find out what their internal discussions concern. Google spies on us, we keep an eye on them. Seems fair. They’ll strike back soon enough. We’re expecting it. My prediction is a “surprise” leak of their critics’ embarrassing emails and URL histories.
My free trade debate opponent, Dr. James Miller, has published a piece on Business Insider about the way in which conservatives like himself are gravitating towards the Alt Right under the growing pressure from SJWs in technology.
Many Business Insider readers won’t trust an anonymous Breitbart interview, but for what’s relevant to this article, please do trust that this Googler’s views accurately reflects how many on the right think about SJWs. Vox Day, a leader of the alt-right, wrote a book called “SJWs Always Lie” with the explicit goal to “show you how SJWs operate, teach you how to see through their words, explain how to correctly anticipate their actions, and give you the weapons you need to successfully thwart their inevitable attempts to disqualify you, discredit you, and destroy your reputation.” Damore’s firing is probably going to cause many Silicon Valley Republicans to prepare themselves by reading this book. The key difference in tactics between the alt-right and traditional right is that the alt-right doesn’t place much value on playing fair, and they mock conservatives’ seeming desire to lose honorably. On a recent Periscope video Vox said that his supporters in tech companies (which he claims are numerous) should “be the second or third most enthusiastic SJW in your group.” He considers SJWs to be the enemy that’s beyond reason. When a commentator suggested that publically supporting SJW views might give them legitimacy, Vox said “F— legitimacy. You are thinking like a conservative…” It will be poisonous if the tech right feels compelled to not only hide their beliefs but also to actively pretend to believe in progressive diversity values. This pretending will embitter them, probably pushing many to the more radical alt-right…. Business works best if different political tribes don’t seek to crush others when they have a temporary upper-hand. If, however, the right perceived that SJWs are after them, it’s understandable (if regrettable) that they will treat SJWs likewise when they have the power. Although the left greatly outnumbers the right in tech, if the right uses stealth tactics and the left doesn’t, the right might eventually gain an advantage in the career-destroying game because they will more easily locate high-value targets. As a free market Republican, I dislike most of the alt-right policy views. But my kind are not inclined to fight an underhanded company by company dirty political war, while the alt-right is. If SJWs force the tech right into these fights, they will push them into the eager arms of the alt-right.
People have no use for the McClellans and the parade ground generals once the shooting starts. They need Grants and Shermans and Pattons, and they know it. The Alt Right is the only right that fights. That is why it is the only Right that will command any allegiance from all the various right-leaning, pro-Western, pro-Christian, pro-freedom, pro-white, and pro-nationalist populations.
