A warning to fake reviewers

Someone should send news of this legal decision to the attention of Virginia Conterato of Minneapolis, the fake reviewer of A Throne of Bones. As well as the various fake reviewers on GoodReads.

In a decision that could reshape the rules for online consumer reviews, a Virginia court has ruled that the popular website Yelp must turn over the names of seven reviewers who anonymously criticized a prominent local carpet cleaning business.

The case revolves around negative feedback against Virginia-based Hadeed Carpet Cleaning. The owner, Joe Hadeed, said the users leaving bad reviews were not real customers of the cleaning service — something that would violate Yelp’s terms of service. His attorneys issued a subpoena demanding the names of seven anonymous reviewers, and a judge in Alexandria ruled that Yelp had to comply.

The Virginia Court of Appeals agreed this week, ruling that the comments were not protected First Amendment opinions if the Yelp users were not customers and thus were making false claims.

It will be interesting to learn what position GoodReads and Amazon take on this, since in most cases the reviewers are customers, but are provably making false claims with the complicity of the site host given its ability to check if they have purchased the book or not.

Given where this appears to be going, I think Amazon would be well-advised to take a strong position against fake reviews and only permit those who have a) bought the books and b) are willing to click a checkbox affirming that they have read the book in its entirety are permitted to post reviews there.

I have always felt that it was fraudulent to post a fake review and it is good to see that this is indeed the case.

The survival genius of the House of Saud

Courtesy of Steve Sailer comes this fascinating explanation on the way the House of Saud survives by destabilizing its rivals by the War Nerd:

The Middle East has been Saudi-ized while we looked on and laughed at those goofy Saudis who didn’t understand progress. No wonder they’re content to play dumb. If we took a serious look at them, they’d be terrifying.

And of all their many skills, the one the Saudis have mastered most thoroughly is disruption. Not the cute tech-geek kind of disruption, but the real, ugly thing-in-itself. They don’t just “turn a blind eye” to young Saudi men going off to do jihad—they cheer them on. It’s a brilliant strategy that kills two very dangerous birds with one plane ticket. By exporting their dangerous young men, the Saudis rid themselves of a potential troublemaker while creating a huge amount of pain for the people who live wherever those men end up.

Saudis have shipped money, sermons, and volunteers to Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Russia’s North Caucasus just as they’re doing now in Syria. It’s a package deal—to get the money, you have to accept the Wahhabism and the volunteers. And it works. The Saudi package is usually resented at first, like it was by the Afghans who were outraged to be told they were “bad Muslims” by Saudi volunteers.

But Afghan Islam has been Wahhabized over time. The same thing happened much more dramatically in Chechnya, where Saudi volunteers showed they were serious about war and religion, a nice change from the coopted quasi-Soviet imams the Chechens had known before. Saudis like Ibn al-Khattab, Abu al-Walid, and Muhannad (all noms de guerre) provided the only real jobs a young man could get in Chechnya, and in the process did a great job of miring the Chechens in an endless war that has killed something like 160,000 people while forcing Chechen women into Saudi-style isolation, eventually leaving Chechnya under the control of Ramzan Kadyrov, a second-generation death-squad commander who does most of the Kremlin’s killing for them. This is a typical Saudi aid result: A disaster for the recipients, the Chechens, and their enemies, the Russians, but a huge win for Saudi. Same thing is going on in the rest of Russia’s North Caucasus, especially in Dagestan, where the Boston Marathon bombers’ parents live.

And one aspect of that victory is the elimination of potentially troublesome young males who might have made trouble inside Saudi. Jihad is like the princess in those fairy tales: It draws all the daring young princes to undertake quests no underwriter would insure, and in the process gets them far away from home during their most aggressive years. Better yet from the Sauds’ POV, most of them die.

It certainly puts a troublesome spin on America’s various crusades for global democracy, does it not?

Sparklepunter retreats

The bravely outspoken Chris Kluwe is rapidly retreating from his
previous comments about the moral imperative to blackball Mike Priefer
and render him unemployable now that current Vikings are speaking out against him.

Harrison Smith came to the
defense of special-teams coordinator Mike Priefer on Friday, calling the
accusations made by former punter Chris Kluwe “a shame.”

As
a rookie in 2012, Smith said he attended many special-teams meetings
with Priefer and Kluwe. “In my experience with Coach Priefer, he has
been nothing but a
classy guy,” Smith said in a phone interview. “He’s been respectful for
everybody’s views, whether you’re black, white, Mexican, any religion.
… I just think it’s a shame to take a shot at a guy when he can’t
defend himself. I just don’t think it’s very fair that you can say
whatever you
want that somebody said something to you and you don’t really have any
person to back it up. I don’t think that’s good. I just think it’s a
slippery slope.”

The article also notes that Vikings kicker Blair
Walsh has also spoken publicly in defense of the special teams coach.
Underlying Sparklegate is the fact that there isn’t a single sane player
in the NFL who wants the league to get into the business of politically
policing the views of its players and its coaches. Even if Priefer did
say it would be a smashing idea to put all the gays on an island and
nuke it until it glows, not only is that his perfect right to express
his opinion, but I guarantee it is a more moderate view than that held
by many of the black players in the league. They’re not exactly what one
would call keen on “that sweet stuff”. Can’t be in there with that,
nah.

As an NCAA D1 sprinter, I competed against several
future NFL players. And believe me, merely being a) white, and b) under
200 pounds was enough to provoke suspicious stares and the occasional
interrogation about your sexual preferences. From what I observed, elite
black athletes really do not like the “little white faggots” who
fetishize them.

Remember, the NFL does not only consist
of educated white coaches who speak in hyperbole. As politically
correct as the league is, it also has to be coldly realistic about the
possibility of groups of 75 IQ steroid-addled physical specimens
reacting to an inappropriate pass in the locker room by beating someone
to death. The Hernandez case is bad enough; like it or not, the NFL has
very good reasons for wanting to keep homosexuality tightly locked in
the closet and none of them involve religious white conservatives.

It appears Sparklepunter is finally beginning to realize just how deeply he has put his foot in it. If he doesn’t continue to rapidly backtrack, he’s going to come out of this looking more racist than a card-carrying Ku Klux Klan member.

Hitler’s escape to Residencia Inalco

This is either the non-fiction coup of the 21st century or a spectacular example of WND going off the rails of the crazy train:

In the National Archives at College Park, Corsi discovered a clipping from the U.S. military newspaper “The Stars and Stripes” published Oct. 8, 1945, reporting a shocking statement made by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the supreme commander of the Allied Forces.

The short piece read: “There is ‘reason to believe’ that Hitler may still be alive, according to a remark made by Gen. Eisenhower to Dutch newspapermen. The general’s statement reversed his previous opinion that Hitler was dead.”

Tracing Hitler’s escape route, Corsi found in the National Archives documentary evidence Hitler got to Argentina in a German submarine, the U-530 that mysteriously surfaced outside the harbor at Mar del Plata under the command of Otto Wermuth and his executive officer, Karl Felix Schuller, after having spent weeks making surreptitious drops of passengers along Argentina’s Atlantic shore.

Hidden away in the National Archives, Corsi found a U.S. naval intelligence report written July 18, 1945, by the Naval Attaché in Buenos Aires who notified Washington there was reason to believe U-530 had landed Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun in the south of Argentina before the submarine journeyed on to surrender at Mar del Plata.

Corsi had newspaper reports translated of Hitler and Braun being welcomed by wealthy Nazi sympathizers among Argentina’s large German community. The Germans there had constructed a mansion hidden away in the dense mountain forests of Bariloche to provide the Nazi führer with comfort and security in his elder years

Corsi writes: In 1943, architect Alejandro Bustillo, at the request of German supporters of Hitler then living in Argentina, designed and constructed an elaborate resort residence for Hitler and Eva Braun, Residencia Inalco, located in a remote area between San Carlos de Bariloce Villa La Angostura, bordering the Nahuel Haupi Lake, outside the city of Bariloche, in the province of Río Negro, Argentina.”

In southern Argentina in the region of the Andes adjoining Chile, he writes, “the surroundings and the Hitler residence were selected and designed to have a distinct feel of Hitler’s Obersalzberg retreat above the town of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Hitler moved into the residence in June 1947.”

For all that he likes to tackle controversial subjects, Corsi is a careful reporter and his statements here are extraordinarily detailed, so it should be fascinating to see how this plays out.  Either way, it is one hell of an attention-grabbing trailer. And those whose instinct is to mindlessly dismiss it as “conspiracy theory” should keep in mind what happened after Corsi called Obama’s birth certificate into question. Considering how inept the current administration has shown itself to be, I wouldn’t put it past them to try to pass off some ribs from the local barbecue shack as Hitler’s real remains from the bunker.

I can’t say I would be in the least bit shocked if it turned out to be true that the suicide in the bunker was a red herring. I can recall that even as a juvenile WWII enthusiast, I thought it was all rather suspiciously convenient that the bodies were burned and buried. And, as we now know with regards to the many Nazis protected by American military and scientific elite, it’s no longer unthinkable to believe that the top brass might have struck a deal with Hitler in order to remove him as an obstacle to a speedy unconditional surrender.

As the admiral of the Germany Navy, Doenitz, who ultimately offered the surrender, would have likely been privy to any secret U-boat transport.

And, if it turns out to be true that Hitler escaped the bunker with the knowledge of U.S. officials, I think it is safe to say that we can confidently await the admission that the Moon landings were faked in another 20 years or so. Regardless if there is such a Nazi resort residence, one should be able to find it somewhere near here on Google Maps. It’s fascinating to see there is a “Refugio Berghoff” up in the hills, not far from the Aldea Andina Resort, in light of this:

“The Berghof was Adolf Hitler’s home in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, Germany. Other than the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia, Hitler spent more time at the Berghof than anywhere else during World War II. It was also one of the most widely known of his headquarters, which were located throughout Europe.”

Social policies have long-term consequences

That is Dr. Helen’s primary message in Men on Strike. She was interviewed by Jerry Bowyer in Forbes.

Jerry: “It’s interesting – you mention Kay
Hymowitz’s book, which is in some ways similar to yours but in other
ways very different. Let’s not single her out in particular, but there
does tend to be a scold-y tone. Yeah, that’s really going to work with
men, right? There does tend to be a scold-y tone in a lot of the “what’s
wrong with men” vein, the “failure to launch”, “they’re not going to
college”, “they’re not participating in the economy” – a tone that seems
to (interestingly for liberals) place no obligation whatsoever or no
causal effect whatsoever on larger societal factors.”

Helen: “I definitely think there is a scolding
factor and I think people are so used to shaming men, and that’s very
prevalent in the culture. I think that we see – I mean, there are so
many messages through the commercials, through the media, that men are
just no good. And so it’s just so easy to pick up and say that, “Yeah,
men are worthless. They’re not good fathers.” We’ve got so many messages
out there and I think that’s a really negative thing to be sending to
men and particularly young boys in schools and in society. Going back to
some of these books like End of Men or Manning Up, you’re right: the
message is basically, “You know what, you’re doing this because you’re
just an immature man.”

There’s a chapter in Hymowitz’s book about Child-Man in the Promised
Land and it’s looking at how men just have so many options and this is
why they’re doing what they’re doing. My point in my book is that men
are not going to participate in a society that is not going to reward
them for that behavior. In other words: if you’re a good father, a good
husband, and you do all of the things you’re supposed to do, society
still will go after you if you step out of line in any particular way.

In the old days, it was sort of like – fifty years ago a man was head
of household, looked up to, treated with respect, and now a married man
in many ways is seen as less of a man (not more of one) and it’s doubly
so if he has kids.

Men on Strike is a very good book, not so much because it contains anything that will be new to the readers here, but because it is putting those ideas in front of a lot of people who have never considered them before. And one of those things that many people haven’t seen before is what the Forbes writer describes as “a lack of scoldiness”; Dr. Helen is one of the few female writers on intersexual relations who is actually sympathetic towards men and understands that the world is not a zero-sum game where the sexes are concerned.

The fact that something is bad for men doesn’t mean that it is good for women.

Lessons of the 1920s

This isn’t a bad basic primer on the cause of the Great Depression and the connection between it and the beginning of the Great Depression 2.0.

The lessons of the 1920s are clear, and they bear directly on the build-up to the present crisis. Developed capitalism without social democracy and strong labor unions leads to productivity increases far outpacing wage growth, extreme inequality, insufficient working-class purchasing power, an unprecedented buildup of household debt and nowhere for profits to go but into capitalist consumption and financial speculation. With financial growth not reflecting comparable health in the productive economy, a bubble formed in stock market speculation and household debt grew faster than household income. By their nature, bubbles break. The popping of the speculative bubble brought about the stock market crash of 1929.

The crash and ensuing Depression afflicted what we have seen was a highly vulnerable economy. Because the economy had by the 1920s become industrially mature, growth no longer depended upon the breakneck expansion of the capital goods sector, but was now, and for the first time, fuelled by the production and consumption of consumer durable goods like refrigerators, radios, vacuum cleaners and, most importantly, automobiles. Consumption replaced investment as the driver of economic growth. (4) Robust growth would now require high wages.

With wages stagnant, working-class households’ ability to sustain the consumer durables boom became dependent, as it would again from the mid-1970s onward, on unsustainable household debt levels. Supplementing income-based purchasing power with credit had been a fact of life since the late nineteenth century, but the debt increments increased especially rapidly during the 1920s. The proportion of total retail sales financed by credit increased from 10 percent in 1910 to 15 percent in 1927 to 50 percent in 1929. When working-class purchasing power and household debt approached their limit by 1926-1927, the rate of growth of consumer purchases began to decline. Key growth markets like autos and construction became saturated and excess productive capacity became conspicuous. Production fell and profits were directed to financial speculation and bubble creation. The stock market and the economy responded accordingly. The Great Depression was at the door.

A comparable dynamic was in effect during the period preceding September 2008. From the mid-1970s to the year before the housing bubble began to leak, 2005, the gap between productivity growth and flat wages grew wider and wider. As in the 1920s, national income shifted steadily and increasingly to the top. Inequality approximating that of the 1920s grew. 1928 and 2007 were the highest inequality years since 1900. (Each year, not coincidentally, was followed by a major meltdown.) Workers once again resorted to debt to maintain living standards. The ratio of outstanding consumer debt to disposable income had more than doubled, from 62 percent in 1975 to 127.2 percent in 2005. Since 1995 the debt burden, measured by the percentage of household income pledged to debt service, had become increasingly concentrated in the lower three income quintiles. Financial speculation, which had accelerated since the mid-1970s, took off with a vengeance after 1999. Echoes of the 1920s were loud and clear.

That’s a great piece of data I hadn’t seen before, concerning the increase in the percentage of retail sales “financed by credit” from 1910 to 1929. It clearly shows the same debt parabola that we often observe before a period of credit contraction.

Tedious remakes

I don’t usually find myself agreeing with third world Marxists who natter on about “neo-imperialist fantasies of power and domination”, but I have to admit, the man isn’t entirely wrong when he points out how taking a fictional work out of its historical milieu often means sacrificing part of its heart and soul:

Shorn of their historical context, sequels and remakes today seem no
more than rebranding exercises in an age of socioeconomic crisis,
widespread uncertainty and creative stasis. Unlike most novelists, those
refurbishing James Bond or Philip Marlowe can count on a ready-made
store of readerly understanding and good will. As they do with the
numerous renderings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in India and
Indonesia, audiences respond to familiarity spiced with the right
measure of novelty and strangeness. Such tickling of the mass
unconscious can be remunerative too: Unfocused nostalgia has a powerful
lure in postindustrial cultures that seem to have a recurrent present
but few clear traces of the past nor an avid anticipation of the future.

Naming the recent remakes of Bond  in his witty book “The Man Who Saved
Britain,” Simon Winder blurts out, “I’m sorry: I just can’t go on it’s
all so terrible. They’re roughly the same, come out at irregular
intervals and tend to have the word ‘Die’ in the title.” The
increasingly pained-looking Bond played by Daniel Craig seems to concur.

Britain is geopolitically too insignificant, and non-Western markets —
as well as political sensitivities — matter too much now for 007 to be
able to fulfill neo-imperialist fantasies of power and domination. The
artless seducer of women with names like Pussy Galore and Octopussy, a
man who once charmingly hoped for sex to have “the sweet tang of rape,”
also risks driving away a crucial demographic from the theaters. It is
surely a sign of the times that in “Skyfall” a non-misogynist Bond
retreats to his family estate in secession-minded Scotland, improbably
preoccupied with a childhood trauma after what seems to have been a
wholly unexamined life.

As will become clear in the near future, I’m not intrinsically opposed to remakes. The new Star Trek movies are better than the originals in many ways, in fact, some of their worst aspects are their determination to insert callbacks to their predecessors. No doubt Trekkies found it totally sweet when whoever it was shouted “KHAAAAAAN” just like the other guy did in the movie before him. I just rolled my eyes.

Speaking as one who has created a new detective, (to the extent that Graven Tower can properly be considered a detective as opposed to a law enforcer who applies Arnaud Amalric’s approach to the detective arts), it’s understandable that many writers prefer to simply borrow existing characters. It’s much easier to lean on an existing store of known and well-loved characteristics than to try to create new ones.

One could even make a logical case for encouraging those who are better with plot and style to mine the public domain rather than inflict their cardboard creations on us. The problem is that many of those who are already characterization-challenged can’t seem to resist putting their inept skills to use, thereby transforming the characters we know and love into cheap parodies of themselves.

Sure, it’s not uninteresting to imagine what Holmes might be like if he lived today. But instead, we’re presented with alternative concepts, and asked to imagine what a character might be like if he wasn’t that character at all, but merely happened to be prone to utilizing the same catchphrases. Thus we have Watson transformed into an Asian woman and Holmes depicted as a gay vampire and all the deplorable host of modern politically correct(1) cliches that render most modern fiction so bloody tedious and unreadable.

(1) “People forget that political correctness used to be called spastic gay talk.” – Frankie Boyle

Rights roundup

30 Years of Gun Control Denial

Left-liberals often declare themselves to be on the side of fact and
reason. And yet, they show almost no interest whatsoever in the actual
facts when presented with them, especially when those facts contradict
liberal reasoning.

 The Clueless Kluwe

I am, for my sins, a Minnesota Vikings fan. As one, I am more than a
little familiar with the ex-Vikings punter named Chris Kluwe, who in addition to giving up four punt returns for a
touchdown one season, has been an outspoken advocate of perverting the
sacrament of marriage. One year after being cut by the team and replaced
by a rookie punter at one-fourth the cost, Mr. Kluwe has penned an
outraged screed in which he claimed that he had unfairly lost his job
due to the actions of “two cowards and a bigot”.

Hey warmists

Tell you what. We’ll stop rubbing your face in the unseasonably cold WEATHER this winter just as soon as you stop trying to claim that unseasonably hot WEATHER proves the existence of global climate change.

We understand that one day is not a trend. We understand the difference between weather and climate. But, you seem to have forgotten that we’ve been listening to you babble about how one hot day in August means OMFG POLAR BEARS ARE DROWNING AND LOUISVILLE WILL BE BEACHFRONT AND WE’LL HAVE NO ICE FOR OUR MARGARITAS EVER AGAIN!

And when a ship full of moronic “climate scientists” gets stuck in supposedly nonexistent ice, understand that we’re going to give you some stick. Just take it with good humor for a change. I mean, it’s a big fat slow pitch just hanging over home plate. Of course we’re going to knock that sucker out of the park.

Protocols of the Learned Elders of Wye

I thought this 2006 article on Haaretz by Shmuel Rosner
concerning a conference discussing the survival of the Jewish people was intriguing, both for what it suggested in terms of what the future holds in store for America as well as what it implied about the Jewish perception of the transience of their relationship with America:

Two groups of Jews gathered together last weekend
at Wye Plantation, Maryland for a long discussion on the situation of
the Jewish people. The first group, which met Wednesday and Thursday,
consisted of the heads of 15 Jewish organizations such as the
Presidents’ Conference, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League, the Union of Orthodox Jewish
Congregations, the American Jewish Committee and others. In the second
group were the “thinkers,” as the organizers termed them: Natan
Sharansky from Israel, Charles Krauthammer from The Washington Post,
former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler, former Jewish Agency head
Sallai Meridor and many others….

The fear expressed that “a real decline of the West,
particularly the United States, would have dramatic consequences for the
Jewish people,” also led to controversy. Brandeis University president
Jehuda Reinharz agreed that this type of decline can be expected “in the
coming two decades” – but Stuart Eisenstadt was less emphatic about it.
He believes the United States will remain the leading power. In all
events, it was agreed the Jews “should strengthen cultural links with
non-Western civilizations, particularly China and also India,” powers
that are on the ascent. This is not a question of preference or
closeness; it is a question of survival, of readiness for the future.

I am very curious to know if there was any recognition that the observed decline of the West has any connection to a number of the policies that these organizations have supported for the last 50+ years? I also wonder why the targeted non-Western civilizations which are supposedly on the ascent, (raising some real questions about the participating economists given the ongoing Chinese meltdown), would be interested in stronger cultural links given the questionable consequences of those cultural links on the United States. The Indians might be amenable, but Chinese history suggests that the Han wouldn’t even blink before taking actions that would make Hitler look like a Righteous Gentile.

As an East Asian Studies major who is neither philo- nor antisemitic, I suggest the Elders of Wye might want to seriously rethink the potential of China as a safe landing place. Japan and Korea, too, are likely out.

The article tends to leave one with the unfortunate impression of rats congregating in order to contemplate the right time to leave a sinking ship. Or, to use a less ominous metaphor, magical golden geese who graciously convey manifold benefits and blessings on those with the courtesy to accept them discussing the right time to stop laying eggs and fly away before being greedily dissected. But regardless of whether one considers those discussing the timing of their exit as rats or golden geese. the mere fact that they are discussing the imminent sinking of the ship should be of no small concern to those who happen to be aboard it.

And before any philosemites feel led to cry holocaust, try to keep in mind that I didn’t forge the freaking article. If there is some non-pejorative way to view these discussions by a group of people actively making ready for an incipient American decline, by all means, feel free to share your interpretation. Regardless, it would be hard to deny that the conference participants do not see themselves as being a part of the American people.