Tag: conspiracy

Neoreactionary space

It’s an informative visual, and certainly an excellent list of blogs well worth reading, but I’m a little surprised to see myself listed in between the Christian Traditionalists and the Ethno-Nationalists rather than triangulated between Christian Traditionalists, Economists and Masculine Reaction, which would put me right in between Taki and Roosh.  It’s always interesting to see what people take away from the blog.

Not that I object to the placement, of course, since my conceptual approach has become increasingly holistic as the intrinsic relationship between diverse subjects such as economics and Christian theology, or ethno-nationalism and pick-up artistry, becomes more and more readily apparent as 21st century realities render progressive 20th century visions moot.

And Neoreactionary is an apt description for the broad spectrum of intellectuals opposed to the progressive, globalist, multicultural action from 1965 to 2008. We’re not the reactionaries epitomized by the Archie Bunker caricature, we’re not the political naifs of the Silent and Moral Majority, as we know the reality of the successful Gramscian Long March and we know the progressive arguments much better than they do themselves.

Whether it is the financial crisis of 2008, the implosion of the great global warming fraud that marks the turning point, or something altogether else, I don’t know. But I have observed that something has changed, and that the conceptual energy is now on the side of we neoreactionaries and not the intellectually exhausted equalitarians.

One has only to look at the roster of TED talks to see how worn out and tired their ideas are. We are going to win in the long run because our concepts are derived from observable reality whereas theirs are not. In the war between ought and is, is always wins.

Here we go again

The Official Story of the Boston Marathon bombing is already falling apart:

 We have no idea whether or not the Chechen brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were the Boston terrorists. But several parts of the official narrative are already falling apart. Initially, the claim that they robbed a 7-11 is totally false. USA Today reported on April 19th:

“There was a 7-Eleven robbery in Cambridge last night, but it had nothing to do with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. Margaret Chabris, the director of corporate communication at 7- Eleven,
says the surveillance video of the crime was not taken at a 7-Eleven
and that the suspect that did rob the 7-Eleven does not look like
Tamerlan or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. “The suspect in the photos for that particular 7-Eleven robbery looks nothing like the suspects,” Chabris says. “The police or someone made a mistake. Someone was confused.”


At an earlier press conference morning, when [State Police
Superintendent Timothy Alban] described the manhunt and standoff that
resulted in the death of an MIT police officer, he also said that the
two brothers robbed a 7-Eleven.”

Moreover, the FBI initially denied ever having spoken with either of the brothers.  But CBS news notes: “The FBI admitted Friday they interviewed the now-deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev two years ago and failed to find any incriminating information about him.”

This is why I always say that the one thing we can always be sure is not the complete and unvarnished truth about any event such as Oklahoma City, Waco, Pearl Harbor, Sandy Hook, or 9/11 is the government’s Official version of it.  Keep in mind that didn’t seem at all likely to me that a petty bombing with pressure cookers that killed fewer people than die in many car crashes could be some sort of false flag.  I mean, what would be the point?

And yet even without most conspiracy theorists suspecting any funny business or actively looking into perceived contradictions, the government’s Official Story is falling apart.

I will say that the one thing that did bother me about the Official Story was way the bombers supposedly carjacked the guy, told him they were the bombers, and then let him go. That seemed remarkably stupid. So now, one has to wonder, were they the patsies?  Perhaps not, perhaps they were simply morons. Even smart people do very stupid things under pressure sometimes. But that just takes us back to the original question: what was the point?

And then, we also have the mercenaries on site as well as the ever-popular “in yet another incredible coincidence, there just happened to be a bomb drill taking place at the same time a real bomb went off”.  Which is why, regardless of what happened in Boston, you might want to avoid these places next month: “Beginning sometime between May 7
to May 29, local, state and top level federal authorities will respond
to simulated weapons of mass destruction attacks in three cities — Denver, Portsmouth, N.H., and the Washington, D.C.-area.”

UPDATE: Images from the shootout.  I enhanced the one here to make it easier to distinguish the details. As one has learned to expect, the police shooting was so bad that they actually managed to put a bullet in the second floor of the house from where these pictures were being taken.

SF/F Corruption: Part II

I had intended to continue on the SFWA theme with which I began the Corruption in Science Fiction series, but a pair of articles concerning the legitimacy of the bestseller lists caught my attention after being featured on Slashdot over the weekend:

The other day, I received an unexpected phone call from Jeff Trachtenberg, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. He said he wanted to talk about my bestselling book, Leapfrogging. At first, I was thrilled. Any first-time author would jump at the chance to speak with such a high-profile publication. But it turned out Trachtenberg didn’t want to discuss what was in my book. He was interested in how it had made it onto his paper’s bestseller list. As he accurately noted, Leapfrogging had, well, leapt onto the Journal’s list at #3 the first week it debuted, and then promptly disappeared the following Friday.

Suddenly, I wasn’t so thrilled anymore. I was just about to sit down to dinner with my family and now I was being put on the spot to discuss my role in perhaps one of the most controversial practices in the book publishing industry. I was tempted to make an excuse and plead the 5th. But I wound up talking to Trachtenberg several times over the next few days….

Trachtenberg asked me about my experience with a company called ResultSource,
the firm I had hired to help me hit the bestseller list from day one.
Trachtenberg said he had contacted all of the major New York publishers,
but no one would speak to him about the firm or the role of so-called
“bestseller campaigns” in helping authors reach the coveted status. No
comment. Dead silence.

I can’t say I was eager to be the first person to go on the record
about the topic. But then I realized something – Trachtenberg’s
surprising phone call was an opportunity to live up to what I urge my
readers to do in my book Leapfrogging.  I’ve seen the phenomenon of corporate silence repeatedly in my
career. There’s a big, smelly, ten thousand pound elephant in the
conference room. Everybody knows it’s there, but no one’s willing to
take the risk and point it out. As Trachtenberg was discovering,
bestseller campaigns are the unacknowledged pachyderm of the book
business.

There’s good reason why most industry insiders would prefer that the
wider book-buying public didn’t learn about these campaigns. Put
bluntly, they allow people with enough money, contacts, and know-how to
buy their way onto bestseller lists. And they benefit all the key
players of the book world. Publishers profit on them. Authors gain
credibility from bestseller status, which can launch consulting or
speaking careers and give a big boost to keynote presentation fees. And
the marketing firms that run the campaigns don’t do so bad either.

This sort of thing is hardly a new practice; the Scientologists kept L. Ron Hubbard’s books on the bestseller lists for years this way.  Nor is it a surprise to know that there is some hinky business going on behind the scenes at the New York Times; there usually is, and the NYT has gone to great lengths to keep hidden the method it uses to determine its bestsellers.  But it is a little surprising to see that all of the major New York publishers appear to be involved in this practice, at least to the extent that they are unwilling to openly deny that they utilize such tactics in order to market their books.

Now, upon reading this, my thoughts immediately went to a particular publisher of science fiction and fantasy, which just happens to be a publisher that appears to place an inordinate energy of effort into winning awards.  It also loves bestseller lists; here is Tor congratulating itself on its many bestseller listings in 2010 and 2011.

Tor was particularly pleased by its 2011 showing, in which its “30 New York Times bestselling books this year” annihilated their “2010 release list of 20 bestsellers”.  Interestingly enough, however, the Publishers Weekly list of the 115 bestselling fiction novels for 2011 shows precisely one Tor book on its list: The Omen Machine. Terry Goodkind. Tor (108,809).

After reading this, it also occurred to me that despite McRapey’s tale of the starship ensigns who were expendable hitting #15 on the New York Times bestseller list, Redshirts not only didn’t show up in PW’s list of science fiction bestsellers for last year, it’s only #6 on Tor’s own list of its top sellers, behind the immortal Imager’s Battalion by L. E. Modesitt, presently ranked 19,446 on Amazon a month after its release.  And despite being “a New York Times bestseller”, according to Publisher’s Weekly, Redshirts didn’t even make the top ten in the science fiction category in 2012, coming in behind at least three other Tor novels and a novel published in 1965.

Science Fiction

1. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Tor. 100,387
2. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Broadway. 50,593
3. Star Wars: Darth Plagueis by James Luceno. Lucas Books. 31,543
4. The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Del Rey. 27,220
5. Star Wars: Apocalypse by Troy Denning. Lucas Books. 26,140
6. Dune by Frank Herbert. Ace. 25,532
7. A Rising Thunder by David Weber. Baen Books. 25,348
8. HALO: The Thursday War by Karen Traviss. Tor. 24,936
9. HALO: Glasslands by Karen Traviss. Tor. 24,932
10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Ballantine. 24,120

That doesn’t denigrate McRapey’s achievement in selling so many copies of a derivative and mediocre novel, but merely points to the varying degrees of what is claimed to be a “bestseller”.  (One can, indeed, one should have contempt for McRapey as an SF author, but he is without question the finest self-marketer and stunt writer in SF/F today, even if he hasn’t reached the mainstream heights of AJ Jacobs.)  On a tangential note, it’s a fascinating snapshot of the sickly state of science fiction to see how many of its current and confirmed bestsellers are either works derived from games and movies or original works first published between 30 and 50 years ago.  Regardless, the fact is that most of Tor’s “New York Times bestsellers” observably fit what we are informed is the profile of the fake bestseller.  They appear on the list for a single week, only to vanish the following week, never to make another appearance there again.

Here is another observable anomaly.  According to John Scalzi himself, Redshirts sold 26,604 copies in 2012.  That’s very good by today’s standards, especially for a hardcover, but it falls considerably short of the 100,047 copies of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde sold, which novel PW reports as being the 115th-bestselling book of 2011.  And yet, Reamde spent only one more week in the top portion of the NYT bestseller list than Redshirts, (ranking 4 and 12 vs 15) despite selling nearly four times more copies.  Is the latter ranking credible, especially in light of what we now know about major publishers gaming the bestseller lists?  And how did Tor/Forge manage to produce “30 New York Times bestselling books” when only one was listed among the top-selling 115 books published that year?

Keep in mind that The War in Heaven sold 35,000 copies and I never thought that it was anything remotely close to a bestseller.  (It probably could have sold more, thanks to the brilliant Rowena cover, but that was the print run, which sold out.  I’m still convinced that what killed that series was Pocket’s foolish decision to do their own imitation Left Behind cover for Shadow rather than leaving it up to Rowena and me.  I still have the sketch somewhere; it was going to be an awesome painting of Mariel and Melusine in combat.) 

None of this conclusively proves that Tor Books is engaging in the questionable marketing tactics mentioned in the Wall Street Journal article, but it certainly raises some serious questions about the legitimacy of its claimed “bestsellers”, just as there are serious questions about the literary legitimacy of its infrequently reviewed, modestly-selling Nebula-nominated novels, such as, for example, its two 2012 nominees: Ironskin (64 reviews, 3.5 rating, #35,470 in Books) and Glamour in Glass (18 reviews, 4.3 rating, #409,451 in Books).

Because, after all, nothing says “science fiction” like tedious derivatives of Jane Eyre and Jane Austen.

More questions at Sandy Hook

Lanza didn’t even have an assault rifle:

After two weeks of media reports that a .223 AR-15
Bushmaster was found in the trunk of Lanza’s car, gun aficionados point
out that the rifle is not a Bushmaster, nor even an AR-class assault
weapon. Gun experts say that the weapon shown in an NBC News report is some kind of shotgun. 
Another interesting aspect of the news report pointed out by law
enforcement commenters is that the officer seems to be completely
mishandling evidence, possibly destroying valuable fingerprints and
other clues. Law enforcement commenters have indicated that proper
procedure might call for the trunk being sealed with evidence tape and
the entire car transported to a main crime lab for examination and
evidence gathering, such as dusting for prints.
This follows a bewildering change of story from the authorities as to what weapons were actually used in the shooting.
At
this point, I think it is perfectly reasonable to question if Lanza had
anything to do with the shootings beyond being one of the victims of
the real shooters.  But what about those grief-stricken parents? 
And why is the media still going on about assault rifles when they have
nothing to do with what supposedly happened at Sandy Hook?

I
was entirely willing to reserve judgment, but the inexplicable
anomalies are rapidly piling up again.  The pattern is readily apparent
and given the facts at hand, Occam’s Razor increasingly suggests a false
flag.  I don’t understand why anyone finds it hard to believe there are
elements in the US government who don’t hesitate to murder US citizens,
given that the Obama administration openly asserts its legal right to kill citizens at will without due process.

Let’s engage in a little outlandish legal conjecture and assume that the shootings were real.  What, one wonders, would have prevented the administration from legally placing the
children of Sandy Hook elementary school on its secret kill list and then ordering their assassination?

Conspiracy theorists, you disappoint me

For literally years, I’ve been hearing rumors concerning how Obama was going to cancel the presidential election and rule over the subdued nation as a CommunIslamic dictator with an iron fist.  And now, with this so-called “hurricane” meme being pushed on a credulous nation by Obama’s lapdogs in the mainstream, complete with photoshopped pictures of wind, rain, and eroded beaches and cheap Dan Rather-style videos of fake weather-buffeted reporters, giving Obama the perfect excuse to cancel the election next week, absolutely no one has managed to put two and two together?  No one thinks this is the perfectly-timed storm to put an end American democracy?  No one has even suggested that the man of mysterious birth who could make the oceans stop rising, and has now reportedly summoned the ocean’s wrath in a suspiciously timely manner, is not the bastard son of Poseidon?

Conspiracy theorists, you make me sad.  A very poor showing all around, I’m sorry to say.

The assassination of Neil Armstrong

It’s indeed unfortunate that Neil Armstrong should have died, so suspiciously, just when he was on the verge of coming clean about the faked Moon landings. The media is reporting “complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures”, which we all know is merely cover for “Obama sent a drone to silence him.”

Also, if it is later determined that Armstrong was doping during the flight, will NASA strip him of credit for the first Moon landing?

Anklebiters will bite

Requiring real names does not reduce unwanted comments:

YouTube has joined a growing list of social media companies who think that forcing users to use their real names will make comment sections less of a trolling wasteland, but there’s surprisingly good evidence from South Korea that real name policies fail at cleaning up comments. In 2007, South Korea temporarily mandated that all websites with over 100,000 viewers require real names, but scrapped it after it was found to be ineffective at cleaning up abusive and malicious comments (the policy reduced unwanted comments by an estimated .09%).

I think some people fail to understand why I delete anonymous comments. There are two reasons. The first is that it is difficult to keep track of who is saying what when there are multiple anonymous commenters. The second is that if you can’t be bothered to take the three steps required to click Name/URL, enter a name, and click okay, the chances that you are going to say anything that requires notice are nil.

I’m not saying that it is necessary to register with anyone or provide your real name, the point is to maintain a consistent identity so that people can connect one comment with another. But that identity need not be linked to your actual identity. The ineffectivness of requiring real identities in nominal pursuit of civility is useful information, however, because it demonstrates that the real object of the campaign against Internet anonymity is something other than civility.

WND column

The Lone Gunmen

No doubt many Americans believe James Holmes acted alone in shooting up the Denver theater because they were told that was the case, despite at least one witness report that someone else appears to have been involved. While it is a remote possibility that Holmes was the individual seen opening the emergency exit prior to the entrance of the gunman, the fact that he has his hair dyed bright red tends to preclude that possibility as the witness would be expected to have remembered such an unusual attribute. And even if the man taking the phone call was Holmes, that would raise the question of who called him just prior to the attack.