This guy won a peace prize?

The neocons really appear to be desperate to start a war with Russia before Obama leaves office.

PRESIDENT Obama has deployed US special forces troops along Lithuania’s border with “aggressive” Russia.

Tensions between Washington and the Kremlin have reached Cold War levels amid reports Vladimir Putin is deploying nuke-ready missiles in the Russian province of Kaliningrad – which borders Poland, Belarus and Lithuania.

US military chief General Raymond T Thomas told the New York Times that America has a “persistent” presence in the Baltic states bordering Russia. He added that many former Eastern Bloc countries are “scared to death” of Russia and the vulnerable states are “desperate” for America’s leadership.

The US and its Nato allies will send battalions of up to 1,200 to each of the three Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – and Poland by spring this year, reports the New York Times.

Lithuania’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius confirmed Russia’s military activity in Kaliningrad is terrifying the region. He said: “Iskander missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads have been deployed. There are S-400 missiles and modernised jets.”

Still doubt that a Hillary Clinton victory would have meant war? However, I don’t think Putin is having any of it, as his restrained response to the expulsion of the 35 Russian diplomats tends to demonstrate. He knows Trump isn’t going to embroil the USA in a war just to please the neocons.

This is astonishingly dumb on so many levels. How, exactly, are special forces troops supposed to defend against nuclear warheads?


Thinking the Forbidden Thoughts

From the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance:

Jason Rennie, editor at Superversive Press, has just announced the publication of Forbidden Thoughts, an anthology of short fiction stories and non-fiction articles. The book features an introduction by the great Milo Yiannopoulos and stories and articles by an impressive roster of heavy hitters in the right-minded sci fi world. Featured authors include John C. Wright, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Nick Cole, Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, Brian Niemeier, Sarah Hoyt, and Vox Day.

Nick Cole gives a hint of what to expect:


A bunch of us malcontents got together and wrote some stories that are fairly reactionary to the PC agenda driven oatmeal currently drowning the SciFi market like a psychotic butler holding a wicked child under the water in the scum laden fountain of the creepy haunted mansion of the deranged old aunt with some weird ideas about “right” and “wrong.”


We had A LOT of fun.


Yes.  I took a few shots at some luminaries. Writers have been doing that forever.  It’s okay.  They can take it.  They’re in the “in crowd.”


My contribution is from the QUANTUM MORTIS universe. It’s a short story called “Amazon Gambit”, and while it doesn’t involve MCID or Graven Tower, I expect fans of the late Joel Rosenberg will recognize it for the tribute that it is meant to be.

Given the lineup, it should be interesting to discover whose stories are the favorites. The idea, as I understood it, was to come up with an idea that would be ruled out-of-bounds by the SF-SJWs and mainstream gatekeepers. I am quietly confident that mine will be considered one of the more appalling contributions to the collection.


How big is your brand?

Castalia author Mike Cernovich puts things in perspective:

You can monitor my brand in real-time on Amazon by watching my sales rank. You can do this for any author. Amazon ranks books based on how many copies have been sold over the past hour to 24 hours.

  • Mike Cernovich, Gorilla Mindset – #9,431
  • Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade Kindle Edition by  #5,476
  • Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life – #6,548
  • Lena Dunham, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” – #23,209
  • MILO, Dangerous – #897
  • Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal – #1,646
  • Hillary Clinton, Stronger Together – #152,422
  • Mike Cernovich, MAGA Mindset – #47,065
  • Ben Shapiro, True Allegiance –  #40,936
  • Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie – #5,022
  • Mike Cernovich, Danger & Play: Essays on Masculinity – #27,356

For those keeping track at home. I’ve surpassed Ben Shapiro, who had a ten-year head start on me and also has many billionaire sugar daddies, and am on par with Vox, whose IQ is way higher than mine and who has been writing longer than I have. (He’s my editor, proof that I work with the best!)

My brand is bigger than a Hillary Clinton surrogate (Lena Dunham) who had her own TV show, and not as large as MILO, Trump, or Scott Adams.

MILO is a once-in-a-generation talent, so there’s no competing with him, ever. No one can.

Amazon sales rank is much more relevant than the mainstream publishers, and the authors published by them, want to admit it is. Yes, it doesn’t capture all possible sales, but the fact is that it captures far more than is required for a statistically relevant sample.

And while it is only a snapshot in time, and cannot capture the conventional sales from major publishers made via the bookstores, it is a vastly more accurate, and comprehensive, picture than that provided by the newspaper bestseller lists, or, God forbid, the SJW-converged awards. As Spacebunny mentioned to me yesterday, the Newbery Medal used to be an indicator of great books you should read, like The Black CauldronA Wrinkle in Time and The Dark is Rising. Now it is a reliable indicator of books you should avoid reading at all costs.

But the fact of the matter is that the Amazon rankings correctly indicate that bestselling authors such as Vaughn Heppner (#1,005), B.V. Larson (#884), and David VanDyke (#2,058) have bigger personal brands, and are much bigger influences on SF readers, than conventional authors such as John Scalzi (#8,062), Charles Stross (#9,127), and even China Mieville (#28,169), especially since the latter are heavily reliant upon their publisher’s brands, distribution, and marketing efforts. Sure, more people recognize the names of the latter trio, but far more people actually buy and read books published by the former. And that’s the aspect of brand that counts.

At Castalia, we’re intent on building up the personal brands of our authors, not churning through authors with one predatory two-book deal after another, sitting on the rights as long as possible, then begrudgingly purchasing the mercenary allegiance of those who sell the best. Whether an author sells 50,000 books or 25 books, if we like the quality they are producing, we’ll keep working with them. That’s why you almost always see the authors we’ve published bring us additional books. And also that’s why we’ve invited our authors to begin blogging at the Castalia House blog, including Nick Cole, David the Good, Peter Grant, and Mr. John C. Wright, Esq.

Our goal this year is to make Castalia House the best, most intelligent, SF/F-related site on the Internet. I hope you’ll be a part of that.


He did not enjoy the smell of heresy

The God-Emperor Ascendant puts the fear of himself into the House Republicans:

The Trump effect has landed forcefully on Capitol Hill.

Less than two hours after President-elect Donald Trump criticized House Republicans — in a tweet, of course — for trying to gut an ethics investigative unit on the first day of business in the new Congress, those plans lay in shambles in the Republican conference’s meeting room…. By aiming his social-media fire hose on fellow Republicans — even as he assembles a Cabinet filled with billionaires and insiders — Trump made clear that he intends to continue giving voice to the anti-establishment outsiders who propelled him through the Republican primaries against much more seasoned politicians and to an electoral-college win against Democrat Hillary Clinton.

That may give Trump leverage over those members of the Republican conference who have claimed the “outsider” mantle for the past six years, a period when the most conservative Republicans have gained stature back home by flouting leadership, whether it was John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) as speaker or Ryan for the past 15 months.

These Republicans regularly turned their backs on party leadership and claimed ideological purity in their carefully crafted districts that were bastions of like-minded conservatives. They operated on the assumption that the only likely political penalty was a primary challenge from the right.

Now, their party’s leader wields a Twitter account with 18.5 million followers. As he prepares to enter the Oval Office in little more than two weeks, Trump is far more popular in their districts than they are. He employs as his chief strategist the former leader of Breitbart News, a conservative media outlet that has included among its top targets the skewering of Republicans not deemed suitably conservative.

As a result, the first day of the 115th Congress served as a sort of beta test of how some Republicans will react when Trump sics his media power on them. If the most conservative flank tries to buck Trump on a pricey infrastructure deal, how will they handle the heat from Trump’s Twitter feed? If moderate Republicans try to block his moves on health care, will they withstand the heat if Trump goes to Breitbart to attack them by name?

On Tuesday the answer came fast: Run for cover.

It is good to see Donald Trump putting the bully back in the bully pulpit. Someone needs to keep the corrupt bastards in line.

Want to get re-elected, Congressman? Then you’d damn well better play ball.


Con star or fighter?

Todd Kincannon explains the difference on Gab:

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
If you are ever wondering whether somebody is a real fighter or just a Conservative Media Star™ (or wannabe), ask me. Ann Coulter, fighter. A.J. Delgado, fighter. John Derbyshire, fighter. Everybody at Taki’s Magazine and @VDare, fighters. 99% of National Review, Conservative Media Stars™.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
I’ve always thought military analogies in politics are lame, but here we go: I fought in the trenches to get Trump elected. The Trump people know who I am and what I did. All of them think Bill Mitchell is a useless clown who did nothing but run his mouth to people who were already voting Trump.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Tweeting “Rah Rah Sis Boom Bah” stuff all day does not tangibly help the cause. That’s all Bill Mitchell has ever done, and all he appears capable of doing, either due to a lack of brains, a lack of balls, or both. My money’s on both.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
People who only preach to the converted are not useful allies in fighting the Left, especially when their entire goal is to become a Conservative Media Star™. That’s Bill Mitchell. People like that are useless and always have been. And there are a helluva lot of them.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Bill Mitchell, Erick Erickson, Jonah Goldberg, Kurt Schlichter, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Glenn Beck, and many, many more, far too many to name. All each cares about is being a Conservative Media Star™. Not one of them actually cares if we accomplish anything in fighting the Left.

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Seriously, the number one word associated with Bill Mitchell in real Trump operative circles is “clown.” The number two word associated with Bill Mitchell by actual Trump operatives is “who?”

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
There is a third category of people who are fighters but not for the things we believe in. Bill Kristol is an example. He’s a true fighter, but he fights for the globalists. I respect Bill Kristol, though I strongly disagree with him. I do not respect the Conservative Media Star™ crowd.

I’m not part of the Trump People, nor am I an actual Trump operative, but I have to confess, when this Bill Mitchell stuff blew up on social media as the post-election drama du jour, my reaction was most definitely “who?”

Followed by: “I don’t care.” I still have no idea who he is. NB: This is not an invitation to inform me. I rest content in my ignorance of the matter.


The banished slave-girl

After which the God-Emperor Ascendant sent her to NBC, shorn, dishonored, unwanted, and unloved. From the Carlos Slim blog:

Megyn Kelly, who arrived at Fox News 12 years ago as a television news neophyte but rose to become one of its two biggest stars, has decided to leave the network to take on a broad new role at NBC News for an undisclosed amount, people briefed on the negotiations said on Tuesday.

The NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, wooed Ms. Kelly away from Fox News by offering her a triple role in which she will host her own daytime news and discussion program, anchor an in-depth Sunday night news show and take regular part in the network’s special political programming and other big-event coverage.

The move will herald a seismic shift in the cable news landscape, where Ms. Kelly had become the second-most watched host — after Bill O’Reilly of Fox News — and often helped define the national political debate, especially over the last year as Donald J. Trump regularly attacked her, at times in viciously personal terms.


All their base

In which we are reliably informed that their base, such as it is, are now belong to us. A rhetorical strategy courtesy of the Evil Legion of Evil’s Xcruciator, which, uncharacteristically, does not involve wood, nails, or hammers.

Ordinarily, which is to say ordinarily when dealing with a sane enemy, it would be considered unwise to do him a small injury, or to motivate him to greater efforts. And, were we still dealing with the old mainstream Democratic Party, especially the party as it was before the Dixiecrats became Republicans, it would be a mistake to provoke them in minor and non-ruinous ways. Happily or unhappily, that party is deader than chivalry. What’s left are mostly the Trigglypuffs, along with the genocidal lunatics – like the aforementioned incestuous child molester, Lena Dunham – who want straight white men extinct, reinforced by the left-wing professorial freakshow, and egged on by myriad self-righteous and unutterably stupid assholes, molesting innocent women and their families, on public conveyances, when said women have had the bad judgment to be fathered by men the assholes don’t like.

Oh, yes, yes, there are, no doubt, some sane men and women hovering around the top echelons of the Democratic Party. But if they’re sane, they’re equally corrupt, venomous spiders, dripping with poison, at the center of left wing insanity. However, those spiders aren’t really in control of the movement anymore. Nobody is. Instead, the left is largely a bunch of self-willed, albeit unintelligent, bombs, just like Trigglypuff, waiting to go off at the slightest emotional jar.

And we – yes, we right wing knuckle-draggers – control those bombs because we can emotionally jar them. Hence, to paraphrase, ‘somebody set up them the bomb.’


Take Off Every Zig…

where “zig” is equal to “act , to include speech, perpetrated by the right that causes Social Justice Warriors to emotionally explode.”

Now think about that, for a bit. As I began, quoting Jean Raspail, the left is humorless and grim. They cannot take a joke. Indeed, they have only one joke: “He’s stupid,” as they have only one insult, “you’re stupid.” (Why is that? Well…it’s because they’re rather stupid, really. Exceptions are just that, exceptional.) We can provoke them at will, easily, any time we like.

Moreover, the more we do provoke them, for the next four years, provided we do so with humor, hence the more we can get them to act like the fascisti they are, the more likely it is that the Democrats cannot return to power, because social justice is now at the core of their base, so much the core, in fact, that they cannot repudiate it. White men? Hell, white people? Pretty much gone now, and apparently not broadly welcome to return.

That’s how we got Trump elected, really, that working class whites – and not inconsequential numbers of high quality blacks and Hispanics, too, be it noted – got tired of being ignored, except to be disadvantaged, and tired of being insulted. That’s why we’re in control of both House and Senate. That’s why we have a fairly hefty majority of state governorships. And that, o, most blessedly, is why we, not the left, are going to set the immediate tone for the Supreme Court and quite possibly create a supermajority within it that will last generations

But to make absolutely sure of that, to save the country, we need to keep the left out of power not merely through 2020, but all the way to 2024 and maybe beyond.

To that end I propose the following highly amusing program. I am going to drop a line to every right wing pundit I can think of, from Ann Coulter to Rush Limbaugh, referencing this column and suggesting that we should greet the ascension of Donald Trump to the oval office, this 20th of January, by flooding the internet, the airwaves, and the legacy media with the old but still fun meme:


All Your Base Are Belong To Us.

Make it so.


An unamenable authority

Notice how Apple attempts to utilize its position as a market gatekeeper to force other companies, such as Gab, to jump through various hoops, and potentially, even converge itself, in order to access the customers Apple controls.

An abbreviated summary of Gab’s travails, as described by Andrew Torba:

They want us to include our guidelines in the app and update guidelines to include the NSFW language. It’s absolutely beyond ridiculous the hoops they are forcing us through. Every rejection has more requirements. We will get there. Or we will raise hell about it.

Folks this is what we got back from Apple. Every time we fix what they want, they magically come up with new requirements. It’s absolutely disgusting. They want us banning people. They want us to add blocking. They want us removing content within 24 hours. This is insane.

Folks we are pushing back on Apple bigly.

  • We have feed filters. 
  • We have user muting. 
  • We have the ability to flag content.

There is absolutely no way this app should not be approved. Submitting an appeal, then raising hell on this issue in a very public way. Apple wants to play? We will play.

Here is our reply to Apple folks.
-We have feed filters.
-We have muting.
-We have flagging for illegal content.
-We review flagged content and can address it quickly if it breaks the law/guidelines.
-We can certainly show examples of “objectionable content” on any other social platform.

Now, as anyone who has been on Twitter or Wikipedia knows, there is a considerable amount of NSFW content, none of which is marked as such. But it’s pointless to try to base an argument on this obvious double standard, because SJW-converged corporations are shamelessly hypocritical and they don’t hesitate to play ideological favorites.

Just as a right-wing employee will be fired over the smallest perceived infraction that doesn’t even violate company policy while an SJW employee can violate multiple company policies at will without suffering any consequences, every Alt-Tech organization will be, to at least some extent, obstructed and frozen out by the SJW-converged tech giants.

That’s to be expected. The problem will get worse before it gets better, but it is only a problem in the short run, because whether the Alt-Tech organization runs the gauntlet, as Gab has, or elects to simply ignore it, as Infogalactic has to date, the experience will only make the Alt-Tech stronger and more disruptive.


On the radio

Today at 9 AM Eastern I’ll be appearing on Jesse Lee Peterson’s show. For details concerning where you can hear it, check @jlptalk on Twitter.

And for those who might be tempted to sperg about my “don’t talk to the media” policy, note that he’s a WND man. I am always pleased to speak with friends, allies, and colleagues, in public or in private.

UPDATE: the link to the recording.


I disavow

Barack Obama is guilty of being the worst anti-semite in the world, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center:

Obama’s refusal to veto anti-Israel U.N. vote ranked most anti-Semitic incident of 2016. Simon Wiesenthal Center puts U.S. abstention at top of annual list.

Dreadful. I disavow Obama and all his works. And anyone who doesn’t is a Nazi and worse than Hitler.