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Are they afraid of ghosts?

Isn’t it interesting how buildings that are involved in events of questionable veracity so often need to be torn down afterwards?

The day after a task force unanimously recommended razing and rebuilding Sandy Hook Elementary School, residents expressed relief tinged with sadness on Saturday in the small New England town that became a focal point of the national debate on gun control…. A 28-member task force of elected town officials decided late Friday night to demolish the 56-year-old school and build a new one on the same site.

This seems more than a little strange. I went to a school that was built in 1913 and is still being actively utilized. And how difficult would it be to clean up a few classrooms? But if a school shooting can be reasonably expected to produce $57 million in construction business, conspiracy theorists may have to seriously rethink who has an incentive to be hiring patsies.

The working model

Dan Drezner points it out for anyone who has somehow failed to notice:

So, in all, this has been a pretty crappy week for people who dislike conspiracy theories.

I would go so far as to say that unless you accept the basic concept of conspiracy theory and actively look for conspiracies behind most significant current events, you cannot possibly understand history or reasonably hope to anticipate the future in any meaningful way.

It is better to pick up a few false signals than recognize nothing that takes place around you.

The secret of the Moon water

It came from Earth:

The latest results come from studies on the most extraordinary samples hauled back from the moon, including green-tinged stone collected by Apollo 15 in 1971, and orange material gathered by Apollo 17 in 1972.
The surprise discovery of the green rock, by Commander Dave Scott and lunar module pilot Jim Irwin, sparked a lengthy debate among the astronauts about the boulder’s true colour while Nasa controllers listened in.
Scientists focused on tiny droplets of volcanic glass that were trapped in crystals inside the rocks. The crystals protected the droplets from the violence of eruption, and so preserved in them a snapshot of the moon’s ancient interior.
Researchers found evidence for water inside the glass droplets in earlier work but the latest study goes further, showing that the lunar water is chemically identical to that on ancient Earth.

So, now we know that the water in the Moon rocks came from Earth. And we already knew that the Moon rocks came from Earth. At what point is it going to become sufficiently obvious that the “Moon landings” were filmed on Earth?

What more is required, signed confessions from Stanley Kubrick and Neil Armstrong?

There is no scientific evidence that Man landed on the Moon, after all. Since the scientific evidence points quite clearly to the various “lunar” objects having a terrestrial origin, then must we not, as good rational scientific materialists, conclude that Man never landed on the Moon?

The conspiracy theorists were right

As I have repeatedly written, the Conspiracy Theory of History is the only one that stands up to critical analysis. Not only that, but the closer you look, the more readily apparent the various conspiracies become. Matt Taibbi, who has been doggedly investigating the world of high finance since the 2008 crisis began, finally throws up his hands and admits what was always readily apparent to the sufficiently logical:

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of
the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you
an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but
your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this
out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories
spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest
banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three –
and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have
been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around
with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”)
worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into
public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in
history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of
magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has
leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker
of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities
for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess.
Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at
ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to
manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to
calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations
and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their
use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market,
meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100
times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this
scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks –
including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal
Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global
interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have
already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive
manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were
caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year,
to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial
acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there
may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix
suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and
price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall
Street culture.

Nor should it come as any surprise that the chief role of government in all of this has been to enable and defend the conspirators.

“But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of
March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been
so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against
the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’
incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money
because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever
thinking the banks were competing in the first place.”

The reason all of this information is finally coming out is because the system is breaking down. The scale of the efforts required to attempt salvaging the players precludes any ability to keep everything behind the veil of genteel respectability while the straightforward demands for access to taxpayer funds and bank deposits prevents any attempt to confuse matters by appealing to their complexity.

Ron Paul did not go far enough

Ron Paul is absolutely right to criticize the horrific abuse of American civil liberties in the pursuit of men who killed fewer people than died sitting on toilets the day of the Boston Marathon:

Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.
These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.
What has been sadly forgotten in all the celebration of the capture of one suspect and the killing of his older brother is that the police state tactics in Boston did absolutely nothing to catch them. While the media crowed that the apprehension of the suspects was a triumph of the new surveillance state – and, predictably, many talking heads and Members of Congress called for even more government cameras pointed at the rest of us – the fact is none of this caught the suspect. Actually, it very nearly gave the suspect a chance to make a getaway.

Paul’s criticism is strong, but it could be stronger. The fact is that President Obama should be ordering a federal investigation of the violations of the Constitution by the city and state police, as well as any federal agencies involved. It is depressing to think that we might have had a President Paul responding to this unprecedented attack on the American people by the police forces of the State if only the Republican Party had not insisted that Mitt Romney was “electable”.

Moreover, as Karl Denninger points out, not only were the Boston police not heroic, they were both incompetent and dishonest about their incompetency:

The cops unconstitutionally locked down a 20-block area. This was not a case of “hot pursuit” where a valid exception exists to the 4th Amendment — they had no idea where the bad guy was, other than the general area where they saw him last. That does not give license for what was done in Watertown.
But then to add to that they were both incompetent in that they didn’t search a street inside the perimeter, they lied about the fact that the boat was inside the perimeter and in addition the cops fired without having acquired a target and without having taken fire themselves when they shot up the boat.
The defendant had no weapon; he clearly did not shoot at the cops first.
In addition remember that the cops claimed the boat was outside of the perimeter. That, it turns out, was a lie.

The fact that the police are always full of praise for themselves after an incident such as the Boston Marathon doesn’t mean that they actually merit the praise. In most cases, a closer look will reveal that they are attempting to rewrite history and conceal their customary bumbling.

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.

The War on You

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.

Rod Walker	Nick Cole
Martin van Creveld	Jonathan Moeller
John C. Wright	Rolf Nelson
Mike Cernovich	David the Good
David VanDyke	B.V. Larson
Jerry Pournelle	Cheah Kai Wai
Peter Grant	Sarah Salviander
Ivan Throne	Steve Keen
Robert Beale	LawDog
C.R. Hallpike	Jon Del Arroz

Tag: conspiracy