Another fake Scalzi “bestseller”

I think we can safely assume, on the basis of this UK cover, that Tor Books is going to be purchasing another dubious one-week appearance for John Scalzi on the New York Times Bestsellers List.

I mean, who could doubt that a book that has been reviewed so positively will fail to meet with anything less than overwhelming enthusiasm from the science fiction book-buying community?

Readers might wonder whether Scalzi can write another space opera that shares the elements that made his Old Man’s War series so popular but be sufficiently different to feel fresh. Both include political plotting, plenty of snark, puzzle-solving, and a healthy dose of action, but there’s just enough here that’s new for this to avoid becoming a retread. There’s nothing groundbreaking, but you’ll still want to find out what happens next.
Kirkus Reviews

Unless you’ve been a professional reviewer, you may not be able to read between the lines well enough to understand what the reviewer is actually saying in his review. You see, when you want to say something positive about a mediocre book, but also want to avoid completely sacrificing your credibility, the trick is to say nice, cute things about the author that he can run off and happily quote, while assiduously avoiding any overly positive statements about the book itself that will come back to haunt you once the readers discover how mediocre it is.

But that’s neither here nor there; the fact that McRapey wrote another snarky mediocrity is hardly a surprise. The real question is: how could Tor Books possibly know, six weeks before the first book in the series is published, that the forthcoming series can be described as “The New York Times Bestselling Series”?

UPDATE: Amazing. Tor Books has somehow known that The Collapsing Empire would be a New York Times Bestselling series since June 27, 2016, 10 months prior to its scheduled release! That must be some killer psychometric prediction software they’ve got there. That, or they’ve already set aside the cost of a one-week “bestseller” in the marketing budget.


The next Fox News

I don’t think NBC understands how Fox News foxnewsed them and the rest of the ABCNNBCBS cabal:

Media insiders are buzzing that Andy Lack wants NBC to become “the next Fox News” after he poached cable stars Greta Van Susteren and Megyn Kelly from the network. “He believes he’s building MSNBC and NBC into the next Fox. It seems the network wants to take a more conservative tone,” a source said.

I know when I think about the forefront of conservative thought, the first thing I think about is OJAY! I SEE… OJAY! and the woman who spent months attacking the victorious Republican candidate for president before cutting off her hair in a fit of frustrated spite.

If Andy Lack seriously wants to take on Fox News, he should hire Milo, Cerno, Glenn Reynolds, Lauren, and Stefan. He can bring in Jonah Goldberg, Mark Steyn, and a few pretty talking redheads for the moderate crowd, and Ms Blaire White for SJW points.

Yeah. That won’t happen.


McRapey responds

John Scalzi has bravely risen to defend his ritual public humiliations of his wife against the Chateau’s speciesist scorn:

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
1. Incidentally, it’s a thing with alt-right types to try to run down my marriage, ie, HOW DARE YOU BE BESOTTED WITH YOUR WIFE YOU BETA CUCK
10:59 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
2. And it really just makes me giggle. Yes, you sad little boys. I’m married to a strong awesome equal partner, for 21 years now. How awful!
11:01 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
3. I mean, honestly. I’m not sure how HA HA LOOK AT THIS LOSER WHO DELIGHTS IN HIS MARRIAGE is supposed to be an insult. To ME, anyway.
11:04 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
4. Mind you, if being happy with my wife sends them into paroxysms of fury, well, I guess that’s a bonus? But otherwise: Silly little boys.
11:06 PM – 17 Jan 2017

 John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
5. In sum: Yeah, being married to my wife is super-fabulous. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, any day of the week. And twice on Sundays.
11:14 PM – 17 Jan 2017

You have to see the wedding day picture to believe it. It’s hilarious. As Heartiste observed: I haven’t seen a “lean out” like that since Sheryl Sandberg’s husband set his treadmill speed to “the sweet relief of marital release”.


John, no one is running down your marriage, much less sent into “paroxysms of fury” over your ongoing experiment in interspecies relations. We think it’s great that you’re so happily married to an orc, or half-troll, or whatever it is. No one begrudges you that. We just think it’s funny. Especially when you brag about how strong your offspring are.

HALF-ORCS
These orc–human crossbreeds can be found in either orc or human society (where their status varies according to local sentiments), or in communities of their own. Half-orcs usually inherit a good blend of the physical characteristics of their parents. They are as tall as humans and a little heavier, thanks to their muscle.
    +2 Strength, –2 Intelligence, –2 Charisma.


Pity the poor Never Trumpers

Given their inability to grasp the relationship between action and consequence, to say nothing of their inability to predict events, one could argue there is a case for the God-Emperor Ascendant to leave the Never Trumpers Never Employed even if he was inclined to let bygones be bygones.

They are some of the biggest names in the Republican national security firmament, veterans of past GOP administrations who say, if called upon by President-elect Donald Trump, they stand ready to serve their country again.

But their phones aren’t ringing. Their entreaties to Trump Tower in New York have mostly gone unanswered. In Trump world, these establishment all-stars say they are “PNG” — personae non gratae.

Their transgression was signing one or both of two public “Never Trump” letters during the campaign, declaring they would not vote for Trump and calling his candidacy a danger to the nation. One letter, with 122 names, was published by War on the Rocks, a website devoted to national security commentary, during the primary season in March. The other, with 50 names, including some repeat signatories, was published by the New York Times during the general-election campaign in August.

Now, just days before Trump is sworn in as the nation’s 45th president, the letter signers fear they have been added to another document, this one private — a purported blacklist compiled by Trump’s political advisers….

The conflict was exacerbated shortly after the election when Eliot Cohen, a State Department counselor during the Bush administration who had helped organize the War on the Rocks letter, aired new criticism of the Trump transition. In an opinion column for The Washington Post in November, Cohen said that a friend on the transition team had asked him to provide names of potential job candidates — with the stipulation that he include no one who signed either of the letters.

Cohen wrote that he became convinced there were “pent-up resentments” among members of the Trump team, and he warned young policy experts against working for the administration. Cohen has had no further communications with the transition team.

“Believe me — my phone is not ringing,” he said in a recent interview.

Forget not being hired. These jokers should be worried about being renditioned and droned. After all, they have called the President-Elect of the United States of America “a danger to the nation”.

And what nation would that be, exactly?

The fact that they are so utterly clueless as to be surprised that they are not being offered employment by the very man they attacked so viciously and so publicly should alone be enough to prevent anyone from hiring them, not just the Trump administration.

In any event, once more the God-Emperor Ascendant is demonstrating his wisdom by refusing to place his trust in the bureaucratic elite that hates him and will fight him at every opportunity. I don’t think Trump is going to disappoint his supporters, I think he is going to delight them by exceeding their expectations.


This is really not good

The clock is rapidly running out on antibiotics. Indeed, it may have already run out.

A US woman has died from an infection that was resistant to all 26 available antibiotics, health officials said this week, raising new concerns about the rise of dangerous superbugs.

The woman, who was in her 70s, died in Nevada in September, and had recently been hospitalized in India with fractured leg bones, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

The cause of death was sepsis, following infection from a rare bacteria known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), which is resistant to all antibiotics available in the United States.

The specific strain of CRE, known as Klebsiella pneumoniae, was isolated from one of her wounds in August.

Tests were negative for the mcr-1 gene — a great concern to health experts because it makes bacteria resistant to the antibiotic of last resort, colistin.

This is genuinely terrifying. Remember, once a species becomes overpopulated, Nature usually figures out a way to cut it back down to size again. Human intelligence doesn’t eliminate that reaction, it merely raises the bar. Immigration and global travel are creating significant health risks, and may even be putting the future of the species in jeopardy.

“The report highlights international travel and treatment overseas as a feature in the introduction of this pan-resistant isolate into the USA,” he said.

Complicating matters is the fact that lower average intelligence across the West means that humanity is less able to address these concerns should they arise. Sooner or later, the Trump administration will have to look very seriously at denying antibiotics to everyone who cannot, or will not, abide by a strictly observed drug-taking regimen. The potential consequences are that serious.


Can’t imagine how this will backfire

The German Left wants to offer permanent residence to those “beaten up by neo-Nazis”:

Rejected asylum seekers in Germany’s capital Berlin may be allowed to stay if they have been beaten up by neo-Nazis. Politicians see the offer of asylum as a way of way of sending a ‘strong signal’ to hate crime perpetrators. Berlin’s interior minister Andrea Geisel said the city is looking into the legal possibilities of such an exemption after nearby Brandenburg opted for the scheme.

‘I find an exemption, as Brandenburg has introduced, to be a strong political signal to those who believe that “whoever wants to chase refugees out of the country must attack them”,’ Geisel said.

‘To this I say – no. Whoever is a victim of far-right violence will enjoy our double protection and will not be deported.’

Brandenburg became the first state to declare it would give rejected asylum seekers who had been attacked sanctuary after requesting immigration authorities to use their ‘discretion.’

This demonstrates the unerring ability of the Left to completely fail to foresee the obvious consequences of its actions, which are guaranteed to produce two results:

  1. A huge increase in the number of rejected asylum seekers being beaten up by fake neo-Nazis. What is the price of a little beating at the hands of your fellow immigrants or helpful antifas in exchange for permanent residence?
  2. An increase in the number of dead rejected asylum seekers. This sends a very clear message to the neo-Nazis, and to every other German, that deportation is no longer an option. And if the only choice is between submitting to invasion and killing the invader, the history of Man strongly suggests that people in general, and Germans in particular, will eventually opt for the latter.
I’m sure we’ll all be very impressed when the German Left expresses its customary dismay at its plans going unexpectedly awry.

Metafake news and golden journalism

Apparently it’s not that hard to provoke the mainstream media into eviscerating itself:

The saga over alleged Russian interference in the U.S. elections took another sinister turn Tuesday, as it was claimed that U.S. intelligence officials provided President-elect Donald Trump with a charge that the Russians had obtained dirt on him.

U.S. officials allegedly included a two-page synopsis of ‘kompromat’ – Russian for compromising material – as part of their security briefing of Trump on Friday.

The material was based on memos compiled by a British intelligence operative who was considered ‘credible’ by the U.S. intelligence community, CNN reported. Disclosure FBI sat on damaging allegations will enrage Democrats after Comey went public with Anthony Weiner material just before election

What is believed to be the 35-page document itself was published by Buzzfeed, which pointed out that it contained errors. Little of its contents can be independently verified, while there has been no official confirmation of the details of the briefing and Donald Trump has branded the claims as ‘fake’.

The document claims Russian sources told the operative that they had extensive material on the now president-elect – including a secret film of him in the suite where President Obama stayed in Moscow, watching prostitutes committing degrading sex acts on the bed where the president slept.

Trump himself has already dismissed the claims, tweeting: ‘FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!’

See, now THIS is how you mock the media and take away its credibility and power, not NAZI-Larping. Let’s just say any time you manage to get Rick Wilson, the CIA, and CNN to bite – and inspire a formal denial from the Kremlin – you have achieved MegaTroll status. One simply has to give the media what they desperately want in a multilayer package that sounds sufficiently believable to them.

MILO himself is looking on with appreciation and thinking, “damn, this guy is good! I mean, like ME good!”

It’s really rather remarkable that neither the conservative nor the mainstream media have developed any ability to scent the presence of channers at work yet. This tends to support the notion that they mostly consist of hypersolipsistic women and socially challenged gamma males, neither of whom have any idea how humans actually work.

From Writeup for Cernovich:

On january 10, Buzzfeed posted a story under the byline of Ken Bensinger, Mark Schoofs and Miriam elder titled “these reports Allege Trump Has Deep Ties To Russia” and posted a link to a document alleging, among other things, that russia has been cultivating trump for 5+ years, that trump has been in constant contact with the kremlin for information on his opponents, and perhaps most inflammatory, that there are many recorded instances of blackmail of trump in sexual misconduct. A prominent claim is that trump rented the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in moscow, where he knew that the Obamas had slept in; he them hired a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden shower’ (pissplay) on the bed and in the room.

Noted #nevertrump voice Rick Wilson later commented on twitter, stating that the report “gave a new meaning to Wikileaks” and that the report was the reason everybody was fighting so hard against the election of Trump.

The remarkable thing? It’s all fake. And not only fake; it’s a prank perpetuated by 4chan, on Rick Wilson himself. A post on 4chan on october 26 stated “mfw managed to convince CTR and certain (((journalists))) on Twitter there’ll be an October surprise on Trump this Friday” along with a picture of a smug face with a hash name.


on november 1, a person without a picture but is assumed to be the same person posted “So they took what I told Rick Wilson and added a Russian spy angle to it. They still believe it. Guys, they’re truly fucking desperate – there’s no remaining Trump scandal that’s credible.”

on january 10, moments after the story broke and began to gain traction on social media, a person with the same smug grin face, and the same hash title for the picture, stated “I didn’t think they’d take it so far.”

This story has taken on something of a life of it’s own. Going through Rick Wilson’s twitter, you can find many different stories from the time that he had shown the story to a wide number of anti-trump news sources, trying to find a news organization that would actually publish the story. During that time period, he referred to it often as ‘the thing’, and often playing coy with followers on the content with the story with anybody who was not also a #Nevertrumper. Unconfirmed sources has people as high up as John McCain giving the story to FBI Director James Comey to attempt to verify the story. Given that Rick Wilson runs in Establishment circles, it is not an impossible scenario that long-serving senators are falling for what amounts to a 4chan troll trump supporter creating an ironic October Surprise out of wholecloth to punk a GOPe pundit who derogatorily referred to them as single men who masturbate to anime.

I remember Rick Wilson’s “October Surprise” hints and assuming that they would amount to nothing. But I was wrong. /pol/ rickrolled him. This truly exceeds expectations.

UPDATE: The Kremlin has officially denied the story.

UPDATE: Even a cursory read should have been sufficient to determine the report was fake. From Instapundit: British intelligence describes events surrounding the “World Cup Soccer tournament.” This is a dead giveaway. First, the Brits don’t say “soccer”. Second, as far as the Brits are concerned, there is only one World Cup. “World Cup Soccer tournament” sounds about as credible as “The National Tackle Football Premier Cup”.

UPDATE: Jake Tapper was involved in CNN pushing the story. He must be really desperate to move the focus away from Pizzagate. I wonder why?

UPDATE: Downing Street sought to distance itself from a report – apparently compiled by a former MI6 operative – claiming the Russians have a file of incriminating material on the president-elect.


Latvia should stand up to Russia too

Idiot Hollywood actress calls for the press “to stand up to” the God-Emperor Ascendant:

Donald Trump has slammed Meryl Streep as ‘one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood’ after she used her Golden Globes acceptance speech to publicly slam the President-elect.  The Cecil B. DeMille honoree took aim at Trump, without mentioning him by name, by calling the moment he mocked a disabled reporter the most stunning performance of the year.

But Trump has hit back on Twitter, dismissing the actress as a ‘Hillary flunky’. He tweeted: ‘Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big.”

Trump came under fire in 2015 for mocking New York Times investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski by impersonating the journalist’s physical handicap. It was an incident replayed frequently in campaign advertising.  Streep, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, also called for the press to stand up to Trump and hold him to account going forward.

What on Earth does she think the media was doing throughout the general campaign? The only way the press could have been more all-in for Hillary would have required a deathmatch with Huma first. The God-Emperor Ascendant knows the media are his avowed enemies, and he’s already informed them that they will henceforth be his bitches whether they play along or not, so one wonders what on Earth the washed-up old hag thinks the press is going to accomplish by failing harder.

By the way, it may interest some to note that Serge Kovaleski is not only the aforementioned handicapable journalist, he’s also the incompetent reporter who requested, and then promptly buried, my answers to his questions about the Alt-Right, because they did not suit his preconceived narrative.


I disavow Gab

As I am reliably informed that it is chock full of notorious white supremacists. And I can’t be associated with anyone of whom Vox.com does not approve. I mean, it’s VOX.COM!

Prominent feminist and author Lindy West deactivated her Twitter account this week, and she was blunt about why: The social media platform, she alleged in an essay published by the Guardian, has refused to curb harassment carried out by members of the white nationalist, misogynist alt-right movement, thereby contributing to a global political crisis….

Ironically, Twitter’s November launch of anti-harassment tools and concurrent banning of many alt-right accounts inspired many alt-right Twitter users to leave the site for the white supremacist-friendly, “free speech”–touting social network Gab.

Gab’s logo is an easily identifiable likeness of Pepe the Frog, an image explicitly associated with white supremacy, and Gab’s verified users include known white supremacists. But a Gab spokesperson has stated emphatically to Vox.com that the platform is “not an alt-right or anti-semitic site” and that it “[does] not represent any one particular political ideology or movement.” The same spokesperson also insisted that Gab’s logo is not Pepe the Frog, but rather “drawn from antediluvian and Biblical sources,” and stated that Gab “rejects the notion that we represent ‘white supremacy’ in any shape or form.”

Be that as it may, white supremacists are blatantly flocking to Gab — Heimbach even promoted the site to the Washington Post after he was banned from Twitter on January 3. In essence, though Twitter has attempted to follow the letter rather than the spirit of its harassment policy, even its cursory efforts have made it unpopular with the very users who are driving progressive voices like West away from the platform.

This mass exodus of hateful trolls may sound like a win for those who are still using Twitter — but many people have already given up waiting for the site to change, and progressive “why I left Twitter” pieces like West’s are becoming increasingly frequent.

You have to enjoy the total incoherency of this article.

  1. Twitter is full of Nazis and white supremacists.
  2. Eradicating Nazis should be Twitter’s primary, secondary, and tertiary priority, according to “prominent feminist and author”.
  3. Twitter has set up a Trust & Safety Council to harass, suspend, and ban everyone who tweets anything even remotely right-wing. Seriously, they will suspend your account for nothing more than linking to this blog. (NB: none of my Twitter accounts are suspended, I just don’t use it anymore.)
  4. The Alt-Right and tens of thousands of conservatives have largely abandoned Twitter for Gab in a mass exodus; another 30,000 joined yesterday.
  5. But this abandonment of Twitter isn’t enough for many progressives, who have left Twitter as well in response.
  6. Because Nazis. Or something.

Of course, as we all know, the real reason those progressives are leaving is that they can’t play the victim and get the attention they are seeking in an SJW echo chamber, as there is nothing left for them to do but play the game of oneupvictimship and see who can out-virtue signal and out-hoax the other. That is why some of the very progressives who have been most publicly whining about Nazis and white supremacists on Twitter are now clamoring to join Gab.

Also, since when did “prominent” become a synonym for “obese”? I like it though. It’s usefully subtle. “Have you SEEN Lindy?” “Yeah, she’s increasingly prominent these days.”

Of course, what is particularly interesting about this article is this little note: Updated by Aja Romano@ajaromano Jan 6, 2017, 1:10pm EST. You see, the original article said “Gab’s verified users include notorious white supremacists like Vox Day”, which is both false and defamatory, as I am not a white supremacist, much less a notorious one, despite the efforts of Jeet Heer and Olivia Nuzzi to create that false Narrative.

It would appear the lesson of Gawker is beginning to percolate through the SJW media. What a shame it did not register with Amazing Stories or Foz Meadows.


The 2nd Law of SJW in action

They always double down, even if it requires eating one of their own. Glenn Greenwald appears to be somewhat surprised that they would turn on him, of all people.

I’ve done some, you know, pretty controversial and polarizing reporting in the past decade when I’ve been writing about politics. And when you do that, you obviously get attacked in lots of different ways. It’s not just me; it’s everybody who engages. It’s just sort of the rough and tumble of politics and journalism. But I really haven’t experienced anything even remotely like the smear campaign that has been launched by Democrats in this really coordinated way ever since I began just expressing skepticism about the prevailing narrative over Russia and its role that it allegedly played in the election and, in particular, in helping to defeat Hillary Clinton. I mean, not even the reporting I did based on the Edward Snowden archive, which was extremely controversial in multiple countries around the world, not even that compared to the attacks now.

And the reason is very, very obvious, which is that it has become exceptionally important to Democratic partisans to believe that the reason they lost this election is not because they chose a candidate who was corrupt and who was extremely disliked and who symbolized all of the worst failings of the Democratic Party. It’s extremely important to them not to face what is really a systemic collapse on the part of the Democratic Party as a political force in the United States, in the House, in the Senate, in state houses and governorships all over the country. And so, in order not to face any of that and have to confront their own failings, they instead want to focus everything on Vladimir Putin and Russia and insist that the reason they lost was because this big, bad dictator interfered in the election. And anyone who challenges or anyone who questions that instantly becomes not just their enemy, but now, according to their framework, someone who’s actually unpatriotic, that if you question the evidence, the sufficiency of the evidence to support this theory, that somehow your loyalties are suspect, that you’re not just a critic of the Democratic Party, you’re actually a stooge of or an agent of the Kremlin.

And obviously we’ve seen this rhetoric for decades during the Cold War, although back then it was the far right using it against Democrats for wanting to have better relations with Russia. We saw it in 2002, when people who questioned the sufficiency of the evidence about Saddam’s WMDs were accused of being apologists for Saddam or agents of Iraq. We’ve seen it repeatedly through the war on terror. Whenever anyone questions the policies of the U.S. government, you get accused of being pro-terrorist or on the side of al-Qaeda. These are the kinds of bullying smear tactics that have become very common.

But because Democrats are so desperate to put the blame on everybody but themselves for the complete collapse of their party, they’re particularly furious at anybody who vocally challenges this narrative. And since I’ve been one of the people most vocally doing so, the smear campaign has been like none that I have ever encountered. I have been accused of being a member of the alt-right, of being an admirer of Breitbart, of being supportive of Donald Trump, of helping him get elected and, of course, of being a Kremlin operative. And it’s just this constant flow, not from fringe accounts online, but from the Democratic operatives and pundits with the greatest influence. In fact, Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, went on Twitter three weeks ago and said, “I think it would be really interesting to find out whether The Intercept is receiving money from Russia or Iran”—something that he obviously has zero evidence or basis for suggesting, but this is what the Democratic Party has become.

Welcome to the Alt-Right Neo-KKK, Mr. Greenwald!

This, and not dancing for the media, is how people are converted. They speak what they know to be truth, and are attacked for it. That is why we need to resolutely stand by the truth in every dialectic encounter.