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.

It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up

The IRS-Lerner scandal looks like it has the potential to be a lot bigger than Watergate ever was:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

It would certainly be unexpected if it turned out to be IRS shenanigans that took down the Obama administration. At this point, even the cowardly House Republicans and the RINOs in the Senate have to be seriously discussing a special prosecutor and a possible impeachment. Especially in light of the amnesty-related debacle on the southern border.

Invasion, not integration

The mass immigration of the late 20th century is simply not the same as the European immigration of the 19th century. All social policies formulated on the basis of the false equivalence will not only fail, but lead to considerable bloodshed in the near future. The reason is that most of these immigrants have no desire to assimilate into Western society; they come not as supplicants, but conquerers.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called on Turkish citizens living in France to apply for dual citizenship and be integrated with the French society, but also stay loyal to their roots, especially their language and religion, Hurriyet Daily News reported.

“There are 620,000 Turkish citizens living in France,” he said while addressing the Union of European Turkish Democrats, or UETD, in Lyon June 21. “Why don’t they apply for dual citizenship?” he asked….

Erdogan advised Turks in France not to forget about their French citizenship. “Feel proud of your identity. Particularly do not forget or let forget your language and beliefs. France needs people like you,” he said. “Do not become assimilated and let our kids be assimilated.”

Turkey is no more immune to the expansionary pressures of the Third Jihad than other Islamic nations. The West is still waiting for its Charles Martel 2.0, but the sooner Europe and America begin their Second Reconquistas, the less terrible it will be for the West and the West’s invaders alike. A better question would be: why are 620,00 Turks living in France instead of Turkey? That is a Turkish invasion more than five times larger than Sultan Suleiman I’s army of 120,000 that conquered Hungary and besieged Vienna.

The first step is to reject all amnesty and immigration “reform”. The second is to end dual-citizenship. And the third is to end birth citizenship. Then, and only then, can the invasions begin to be rolled back with the mass deportations that will make Eisenhower’s million-Mexican Operation Wetback look petty.

Meanwhile, in England, more than 500 “British” Muslims have traveled to Iraq to fight for the establishment of the global caliphate. If Baghdad falls, it won’t be long before they are fighting for it in Londonistan.

Reyaad Khan, 20, once dreamed of being the first Asian Prime Minister.
Now, he is pictured holding a Kalashnikov rifle alongside Islamist
militants, and is urging fellow Britons to join ISIS.
Former school friends said he was a studious pupil who loved
sports, but he is now one of 500 from the UK who have been radicalised
and have fled to the Middle East to fight.  

Given advancements in human genetics and the scientific understanding
of their implications, I think safe to assume that more than one
European nation will eventually adopt genetic-based citizenship
standards on much the same grounds that Erdogan is assuming that
Turkish-French dual citizens will remain Turkish in terms of language,
identity, and beliefs.

The coming tragedies and
atrocities will not be the fault of those who are determined to defend
their nations and cultures and keep them alive at any cost, but those
who blithely threw history and logic out the window in the name of the myth of human
equality.

Germany v Ghana

MESSI! 1-0 was a harsh result for Iran, who played Argentina to a near-draw and were robbed of a clear penalty. Both goalies were excellent, but one defender just isn’t enough to shut down Messi, whose 90th minute goal was the thing of beauty one expects to see from a truly elite international. A very good game, though, and probably the best the Iranians have ever played at the World Cup, their defeat of the USA a few Cups back notwithstanding.

Messi’s strike wasn’t even his most impressive move of the game. My favorite was when he took on three defenders and went through ALL THREE of them before being stymied by the fourth. He may not be at the absolute top of his form that he was when Barca was destroying everything in sight, but this is the best he’s ever been at the World Cup. Which is saying something, as only Batigol has scored more goals for Argentina.

I have to admit, though, I do kind of miss watching Unfrozen Caveman Striker.

I can’t imagine Germany having any trouble at all with Ghana, and I very much doubt I’ll even bother to watch Bosnia-Nigeria.