Category: Uncategorized

The Grand Inquisitor cleans house

Attorney General Sessions asks all remaining Obama-appointed prosecutors to resign:

In a move that will likely provoke further media, and pundit, fury despite it being a routine act that is concurrent with every change in administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has asked all remaining Obama-appointed U.S. Attorneys for their resignation.

Sarah Isgur Flores, Director of Public Affairs at the Department of Justice, released the following statement:

“As was the case in prior transitions, many of the United States Attorneys nominated by the previous administration already have left the Department of Justice. The Attorney General has now asked the remaining 46 presidentially appointed U.S. Attorneys to tender their resignations in order to ensure a uniform transition. Until the new U.S. Attorneys are confirmed, the dedicated career prosecutors in our U.S. Attorney’s Offices will continue the great work of the Department in investigating, prosecuting, and deterring the most violent offenders.”

Trump had previously asked the Obama-appointed U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, to stay on. In addition, the Obama-appointed U.S. attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, Dana Boente, is currently serving as acting deputy attorney general, and Trump has nominated the Obama-appointed U.S. Attorney for Maryland, Rod Rosenstein, for the deputy attorney general, Politico adds.

However, as NBC adds, Preet Bharara is one of the Attorneys asked to resigns, suggesting that something may have changed in the amicable realtionship between Trump and Bharara in the past few months.

The issue of removing U.S. attorneys at the change of administration has been a contentious one in past years. According to Politico, in 2007, President George W. Bush’s administration sought to defend his firing of eight U.S. attorneys by asserting that President Bill Clinton had fired all sitting U.S. attorneys in 1993 “in one fell swoop,” as a top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales put it. However, that was not true. In both the Clinton and Bush administrations, the vast majority of U.S. attorneys were replaced in the first year, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2007. The Clinton team asked for resignation letters in March, but also allowed many prosecutors to stay until their successors were confirmed.

Now we appear to be getting somewhere. Still not tired.

Various and sundry

  1. We have need of a research intern for a one-time job tracking down authors. If you’re seriously interested, email with RESEARCH in the subject. DONE
  2. We want to hire someone who is very knowledgeable about a) computer and video games, and b) role-playing games to write questions for our trivia games. We want about 1,000 of the former and 2,500 of the latter. If you’re seriously interested in one or the other, email with Q:VG or Q:RPG in the subject. We already have a lot of (a) thanks to the volunteers, but I just don’t have the time to finish off the list. For more information, reference this post. A word of warning: it’s more work that it looks like, so if you’re not borderline OCD, it’s probably not for you.
  3. A slightly longer excerpt from THE CORRODING EMPIRE, now on preorder at Amazon, has been posted at Castalia House.

The first number produced by the extrapolated algorithm was off by one-ten billionth. There were nine zeros behind the decimal point. It was a tiny error, all but impossible to detect unless one was looking specifically for it.

The second number was off by twice that. Two in ten billion. Or, rather, one in five billion. One might more reasonably fear being struck by lightning. On a cloudless day. Indoors.

And yet, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the size of the error that mattered so much as the fact that it existed at all. Somehow, Geist concluded, even though it was impossible, the data set must have become garbled. Garbage in, garbage out. He had run the extrap-algo more than a million times in the past month, using it to check and and re-check Orland’s agro-surveys. But there was no denying it. Somewhere, somehow, something had introduced an unknown variability into the process, but whether it was to be found in the data or the equations, he did not know.

He spoke in the direction of the softly glowing pseudo-door.

“Dr. Orland,” he said, “Got a minute?”

The door evaporated, revealing an attractive young woman in custom blue-green shimmering Chrysoletts, sitting with her feet up on her multi-tiered desk. She was reading something which, judged by the guilty expression that flashed across her face, had nothing to do with biogenics.

On a related note, this Amazon search may amuse you. And on a completely different note:



Catholics against the Alt-Right

The Catholic opposition to the Alt-Right is every bit as feckless and dishonest as one would tend to expect from a fully converged institution:

Christopher Hale, executive director of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, argued that along with denouncing the extremism and bigotry central to white nationalism and the alt-right there should also be an effort to engage with people drawn to this movement. “We need to understand better as Catholics how did Steve Bannon and the alt-right come to be?” he said.

But keynote speaker Michael Sean Winters, a fellow at Catholic University’s Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies, highlighted the challenges of that approach. “The main difficulty in engaging the alt-right as if it were just another political movement is found precisely in its anti-democratic stance,” said Winters, also a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. “Normally, when we as Catholics engage those with whom we disagree, both sides accept democratic norms to shape that engagement. The alt-right derides democracy and openly states its desire to undermine democracy.” Winters added:

Engage, but do so warily, and only when repeatedly noting the fact that the positions the alt-right espouses are not just wrong, but contemptuous of the means by which a liberal democracy sorts out the complexities of public policy, means that we value and celebrate, and which we accord to these provocateurs even if they wish not to accord them to anyone else. Winters pointed to the church’s intellectual and moral traditions as resources to contest the resurgence of white nationalism. “It is often joked that Catholic social doctrine is the ‘best kept secret’ in the Catholic church,” he said. “Let it be secret no more. The most sophisticated response to both these alt-right haters, and to the ever-present difficulties of democracy, is found in that doctrine. I often say and shall say again: There is no problem facing the political life of this country that is not leavened by an encounter with Catholic social doctrine.”

There is no panacea to eradicate the diseases of white nationalism and Islamophobia. The church’s manifold capacities—theological, pastoral and prophetic—will be required at different places and times. Catholics don’t all need to speak with the same voice or use the same tone. But the message should be unambiguous and urgent. The alt-right movement is built on an edifice of racism, social sin, and exclusion that must never be tolerated.

The idea that Catholics are great defenders of democracy and the will of the people is a lie worthy of Goebbels. It is a big lie; not only is it historically false, but it is categorically and observably false. Just yesterday, Mr. Bergoglio was reported to have come out against populism, which is nothing more than “the will of the people”, which is a truer form of democracy than the sham “democratic norms” that proscribe the will of an unelected, anti-democratic elite using ancient rituals and rhetoric as cover.

Note the appeal to “Catholic social doctrine”, which has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity or the Bible.

We are, of course, contemptuous of them, as we are contemptuous of all liars. If the Catholic Church sets itself against the truth, it will be destroyed for its faithlessness. Now, granted, neither these wormtongues nor the current Pope speak legitimately for all Catholics, they are merely converged pseudo-priests attempting to lead the faithful astray.

They will not engage with us, even warily, because they know we will expose their falsehoods and false teachings. “Social sin” is no more sin than “social justice” is justice. We don’t ask these wormtongues to tolerate us, we merely observe that they have no place in the Christian civilization they are attempting to destroy.

Clinton’s office covered for pedophile

No doubt this news will deeply shock everyone, especially those who are familiar with the term “Pizzagate”:

“Inspectors learned in conversations with Department employees…that in some cases superiors in [diplomatic security] and in senior levels of the State Department have prejudiced the commencement, course and outcome of [special investigations division] investigations,” the early draft said.

“Sources referred to [diplomatic security] sometimes circling the wagons to protect favored [diplomatic security] rising stars from criminal charges or from embarrassing revelations that could harm a promising career,” the draft continued.

“One case, which triggered outraged comment from several [special investigations division] sources, relates to allegations that a Regional Security Officer engaged in serious criminal conduct including sexual abuse of local embassy staff during a series of embassy postings. Sources also reported that a senior [diplomatic security] official successfully protected some agents on the Secretary’s Detail from investigations into misbehavior while on official trips,” the November 16 draft said.

It is unclear why this critical text was stripped from the report before the inspector general published it in February 2013.

Another passage that was removed from the public report suggests officials in Clinton’s office may have protected an ambassador from a child abuse investigation.

“Sources reported that a senior ‘7th Floor’ Department official ordered [diplomatic security] to stop the investigation of an ambassador accused of pedophilia, and another such senior official had [diplomatic security] stop an investigation of an ambassador-designate,” the draft reads.

The seventh floor is the location of the secretary of state’s office, as well as the offices of the deputy secretary and the undersecretaries, according to the State Department’s website. If any of these details were removed because of exculpatory information, this is never stated.

The same section of the final report, titled “Need for Independence,” makes no reference to the pedophilia allegations or the sexual abuse charges that were covered up by State Department staff.

Notice that these pedophilia allegations keep popping up around people associated with Hillary Clinton? And notice how “stopping the investigation” rather than “investigating” is always the absolute top priority whenever allegations are made?

Curiouser and curiouser.

UPDATE: 8 minutes from posting to the first paid pedo-defender. That must be a new record. Also, please note that if you quote a troll, your comment will be spammed along with his. Don’t come crying to me when your comments stop appearing as a result, you’ll know why.

I’m leaving the first one up as both an identifier and a time-stamp.

The only issue that matters

Immigration unseats a once-popular mayor:

Rutland Mayor Chris Louras, who endured months of withering criticism for his plan to bring Syrian refugees to the city, lost his reelection bid on Tuesday. In unofficial voting results, David Allaire, a city alderman and leading critic of the resettlement, trounced Louras, a 10-year mayoral incumbent, by a 776-vote margin, according to results cited by the Rutland Herald and WCAX-TV.

“I’m simply wishing him luck and I’m moving on,” Louras told Seven Days Tuesday night. He declined further comment, saying he would “not hazard a guess” as to what the election results say about Rutland’s support for refugees.

Allaire did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

While Louras campaigned on a series of issues, and touted a reduction in many categories of crime, along with an improved downtown business district, the refugee debate has dominated political life in Rutland for the past year.

Louras had beaten Allaire in two previous mayoral elections. town-meeting-day.png

A Rutland native, Louras reached out to refugee resettlement officials in late 2015 and hatched a proposal to bring 100 refugees from Syria and Iraq to the city, which has been losing population for decades. The mayor pitched the plan, without consulting the Board of Aldermen, as a humanitarian imperative and economic development initiative.

What is remarkable is how many politicians are so uncharacteristically willing to risk their careers for such a wildly unpopular cause. Is it because they are drinking the ideological (((Kool-Aid))) or are they being somehow incentivized to further the invasion of America?

The USA desperately needs negative immigration to reduce the societal stresses leading to balkanization, secession, and civil war. There is ZERO benefit to immigration at this point in time. None whatsoever. It does not “benefit the economy”. Every single pro-immigrant program, from student visas and H1B visas to anchor babies and family laws, needs to be shut down.

It is time for the God-Emperor to grasp the nettle, and unleash the full power of the executive branch on the reaction. The time for negotiations, sweet reason, and half-measures is past.

The hottest man in the world

It has been determined by Big Data, courtesy of Amazon. The hottest man in the world is a wealthy, chubby-chasing, Alpha Male cowboy with a secret baby.

You’re welcome, ladies.

And gentlemen, you no longer complain that you don’t know what women want. Put on a Stetson and take her out for an expensive pizza. Don’t forget the breadsticks.

H1B: the real cost-benefit

Why the H1B visa program should be shut down without delay:

A close look at H1BPays.com’s data shows that, as you move past the Googles and Microsofts of the IT world, H-1B salaries tend to cluster around the $65,000 to $75,000 level.  There is a reason for this.  If outsourcing companies pay their H-1B workers at least $60,000, the company is exempted from a number of regulations designed to prevent visa abuse.

But $60,000 is far below 2016 market rates for most tech jobs.

In 2014 (the last year we have good data), Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata Consultancy used 21,695 visas, or more than 25 percent of all private-sector H-1B visas used that year. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Uber, for comparison, used only 1,763 visas, or 2 percent.

What’s the difference? Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, and Tata are all outsourcing companies. Their business model involves using H-1B visas to bring low-cost workers into the United States and then renting those workers to other companies. Their competitive advantage is price. That is, they make their money by renting their workers for less than companies would have to pay American workers.

 This is the real story of the H-1B visa. It is a tool used by companies to avoid hiring American workers, and avoid paying American wages. For every visa used by Google to hire a talented non-American for $126,000, ten Americans are replaced by outsourcing companies paying their H-1B workers $65,000.

That’s how you kill high tech in America. It’s time for the God-Emperor to shut the program down entirely. There is ABSOLUTELY zero need for it. Let Microsoft and Google move to India if they think they can get better coders there.

How Wikipedia determines reliability

Even I didn’t realize things were this bad at Wikipedia:

In the modern world, bigoted oddballs who are over-familiar with the internet can wield tremendous power — and this potty-mouthed man is a case in point. For when he’s not posting obscene images or racist sentiments, Cockram is a regular editor of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where (according to multiple posts on his Facebook feed) he operates under the alias ‘Hillbillyholiday’.

Last month, ‘Hillbillyholiday’ was the architect of a cynical PR stunt which saw this newspaper publicly smeared by damning its journalism ‘unreliable’. He and 52 like-minded anti-Press zealots, almost all of whom remain anonymous, collaborated in a vote which persuaded Wikipedia, the sixth most popular website in the world, that it ought to ban the Daily Mail.

The move by the online encyclopedia — which was founded in 2001 and has in a few short years become a hugely influential source of information — was revealed in the pages of the Left-wing Guardian newspaper. It reported that Wikipedia’s editors had decided, in a democratic ballot, that the Mail’s journalism cannot be trusted.

No statistics were offered in support of this claim, which, incidentally, came days before the Mail won Sports Newspaper Of The Year for an unprecedented fourth straight time, and was shortlisted for 15 awards at the British Press Awards, the news industry’s Oscars. (Indeed, as we shall see, the Mail has an enviable record on accuracy.)

Neither did Wikipedia, nor The Guardian, bother to shed much light on how this decision was reached. If they had, then it would have become apparent to readers that this supposed exercise in democracy took place in virtual secrecy, and that Wikipedia’s decision to censor the Mail — the only major news outlet on the face of the Earth to be so censored — was supported by a mere 53 of its editors, or 0.00018 per cent of the site’s 30 million total, plus five ‘administrators’.

Five thought police plus 53 editors is enough to permanently nuke a source for “reliability”. This fact alone is sufficient cause to justify, if not demand, the creation of Infogalactic.

Amazon rejects Pink SF

A first start at it, anyhow. Amazon tells Romance authors – and publishers – to stop inflicting their romances on the readers of other genres, starting with Science Fiction & Fantasy:

Do not add books from any Romance category to these categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy, Children’s.

PRAISES BE TO THE GODS! Unfortunately, it is too little, too late. I’ve been complaining about this sort of thing ever since Twilight got crammed into my horror genre.  :'(

Romance is a separate genre from sci-fi and fantasy. And I don’t care how much authors argue otherwise, no, your book cannot be both. You can’t serve two (or three) masters.

A romance, at its root, specifically focuses on romantic love between two people, with an emotionally satisfying ending (usually, happily ever after, or HEA). In a romance, the relationship itself is the most important and driving motivator of the plot.

A fantasy, at its root, specifically focuses on magic and the supernatural as the primary motivators of the plot, presented within a self-contained world. In a fantasy, the presence of magic and the supernatural is the driving motivator of the plot.

A sci-fi, at its root, specifically focuses on fantastic but logically plausible creatures and technological developments while looking at the consequences of such developments. It is generally defined as writing rationally about alternative possibilities.

The fundamental problem is that too many authors neither understand nor respect the meaning and function of genre categories. Genres exist to help READERS find the type of stories they want. As others have said, I can’t use Amazon to search for fantasy or sci-fi anymore because half the search results come up as romances.  Your romance might be set in a futuristic setting, but that doesn’t mean you are serving the needs of the science fiction genre. Just because the hero in your romance is a werewolf doesn’t mean it is a fantasy. It just means you took your romance and gave it a paranormal cosmetic makeover.

This is particularly frustrating since Amazon DOES, in fact, have rather substantial sub-categories that can call out your fantasy-leaning or futuristic leaning romances. There is zero reason to take a romance novel and shove it into a non-romance category.

Of course, the romance authors trying to game the system by putting their wereseal erotica in science fiction are whining up a storm. But the fact is, it is a massive turnoff to readers of military science fiction to see their bestseller lists infested by My Secret SpecOps Lover and whatnot.

Bullshit like The Quantum Rose isn’t science fiction any more than Taken by the T-Rex is. It’s just romance in space. Amazon should have done this a long time ago. It would be good to see them add this restriction to Western and Military categories as well.

Now, there is nothing wrong with writing, or reading, romance in space if that’s what floats your boat. But stop pretending it is science fiction! And stop pretending elf erotica is high fantasy! As one author, Edwin M. Grant, commented, Taken by the Alien Alpha Barbarian is not Military SF just because it’s set in space and the barbarian beats up a few people.

And as for those books that cross both genres, the obvious answer is to throw them in Romance. The Romance readers won’t mind, since they’re happy as long as there is a female protagonist pursued by two alpha males between whom she must choose. They don’t care if the alpha males are men, vampires, wereseals, elves, angels, or artificial intelligences. Most of the SF readers will mind.

It’s rather amusing. All the authors who understand what Amazon is doing and support it have a wide variety of book covers indicating various genres beneath their posts. All the authors who can’t understand it and think it is unfair and wrong have book covers that feature either a) women in poofy dresses or b) headless male torsos with abs underneath theirs.

You’re fucking romance writers. Now shut up and go away.

The fall of the house of Tor

It begins….

Now, obviously I am not going to reveal my sources, but I believe I can safely observe that one result of last year’s anti-PNH campaign is that I happened to make a few contacts in the publishing world aside from the obvious ones at Simon & Schuster and Random House. Some of you have probably noticed that we were among the first independent publishers to make use of Pronoun, which may have surprised those who were under the impression that we were anti-Macmillan, but that was never the case.

Anyhow, I understand that we can look forward to hearing that a number of Tor authors are going to suddenly develop newfound respect for the art of self-publishing. And, moreover, this harrowing of the authors is, at least in part, the result of the failure of a major new book from a top author upon whom the publisher was counting to produce significant revenue in a timely manner.

You see, when a Castalia author is late, it doesn’t harm us in the slightest. But when a big book from Tor Books slips, or worse, doesn’t produce, or even worse, slips and then doesn’t produce, that inflicts serious harm on their financial flows. And, contrary to the impression created by their sizable revenues, the big publishing houses tend to get by on relatively small margins, so even a moderate financial shortfall often has to be addressed by slashing books and contracts and authors.

So, keep your eyes open. We should learn exactly where the cuts have been made in the relatively near future.

Tor delenda est.