Monthly Archives: January 2019

Traditional Publishers Dying, Desperate

06 Sunday Jan 2019

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Pulling out SJW stops to even offend SJWs, all in a bid to save a few bucks:

When you see publishers and authors chatting chummily at book parties, you’re likely to think that they’re on the same side — the side of great literature and the free flow of ideas.

In reality, their interests are at odds. Publishers are marketers. They don’t like scandals that might threaten their bottom line — or the bottom lines of the multinational media conglomerates of which most form a small part. Authors are people, often flawed. Sometimes they behave badly. How, for instance, should publishers deal with the #MeToo era, when accusations of sexual impropriety can lead to books being pulled from shelves and syllabuses, as happened last year with the novelists Junot Díaz and Sherman Alexie?

One answer is the increasingly widespread “morality clause.” Over the past few years, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have added such clauses to their standard book contracts. I’ve heard that Hachette Book Group is debating putting one in its trade book contracts, though the publisher wouldn’t confirm it. These clauses release a company from the obligation to publish a book if, in the words of Penguin Random House, “past or future conduct of the author inconsistent with the author’s reputation at the time this agreement is executed comes to light and results in sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author that materially diminishes the sales potential of the work.”

…

This past year, regular contributors to Condé Nast magazines started spotting a new paragraph in their yearly contracts. It’s a doozy. If, in the company’s “sole judgment,” the clause states, the writer “becomes the subject of public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals,” Condé Nast can terminate the agreement. In other words, a writer need not have done anything wrong; she need only become scandalous. In the age of the Twitter mob, that could mean simply writing or saying something that offends some group of strident tweeters.

Agents hate morality clauses because terms like “public condemnation” are vague and open to abuse, especially if a publisher is looking for an excuse to back out of its contractual obligations. When I asked writers about morality clauses, on the other hand, most of them had no idea what I was talking about. You’d be surprised at how many don’t read the small print.

If you’re going with a (for now) big house, then read the contract end-to-end and do not sacrifice intellect nor character for feelz. Better yet, run with a smaller Indie or just self publish.

Undermining Another Theory

06 Sunday Jan 2019

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Forensic scientists and psychologists often repeat that mass murderers want to get caught. I’ve never (fully) believed that. Now, there’s massive evidence to the contrary, that the worst offenders in history are desperate to avoid disclosure.

The case is Jane Does 1-10, et al v. David Daleiden, in which he as an investigative journalist is seeking information about the public employees working in a research lab at the university and what they’ve done, and abortion facility personnel.

They all “want their involvement in research using aborted baby body parts to remain secret,” according to officials with the Thomas More Society, which is representing Daleiden in this case.

They “have gone to court to force heavy redactions to the public documents. However, that is contrary to the law, which says that those documents must be released because they detail their work procuring, processing, and transferring the organs and tissue of aborted babies in connection with the university’s large taxpayer-funded fetal tissue research program,” the organization explains.

“Washington State’s Public Records Act requires full disclosure, but a lower court ordered the redactions, holding that the First Amendment required them. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision, unanimously holding that the district court had not provided the facts and law sufficient to make a ‘clear showing’ that the U.S. Constitution requires the heavy censoring of these public records. The case returned to the district court and is now, again, before the federal appeals court,” the group explained.

A ruling on the concealment demand is expected shortly, but the legal team said Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown called it a “very interesting case.”

This First Amendment claim is as hollow and misplaced as the viability-lump of tissue BS from Roe, et al.

And, how bad and pervasive is the problem? Unimaginable in scope. For the most part, I have tended to concentrate on the 700,000 – 1,000,000+ abortion murders per year in the US. That’s bad. But, it’s only part of the 41 MILLION murders committed worldwide every year – the leading cause of death.

Abortion was the number one cause of death worldwide in 2018, with more than 41 million children killed before birth, Worldometers reports.

As of December 31, 2018, there have been some 41.9 million abortions performed in the course of the year, Worldometers revealed. By contrast, 8.2 million people died from cancer in 2018, 5 million from smoking, and 1.7 million died of HIV/AIDS.

Debased women, associated worthless men, and their profit-seeking enablers commit a World War every single year. Purely satanic.

From Conspiracy Theory to Conspiracy Charges?

06 Sunday Jan 2019

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The 9/11 Truthers have, in a sense, been vindicated, even 17 years late. Information is not presented to a grand jury without some basis of belief in veracity.

For years, hundreds of thousands of people have been calling upon the US government to investigate 9/11, and now progress is finally being made. On April 10th of this year, the non-profit Lawyers Committee for 9/11 Inquiry filed a petition with the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, Manhattan, requesting that he present to a grand jury the extensive evidence of federal crimes relating to the destruction of three World Trade Center high rises on 9/11. The petition cited conclusive evidence, providing proof of explosives and incendiaries employed at ground zero to bring down the twin towers as well as the WTC building #7.

The Lawyers’ Committee’s April 10th 52-page original Petition was accompanied by 57 exhibits and presented extensive evidence that explosives were used to destroy three WTC buildings. That evidence included independent scientific laboratory analysis of WTC dust samples showing the presence of high-tech explosives and/or incendiaries; numerous first-hand reports by First Responders of explosions at the WTC on 9/11; expert analysis of seismic evidence that explosions occurred at the WTC towers on 9/11 prior to the airplane impacts and prior to the building collapses; and expert analysis by architects, engineers, and scientists concluding that the rapid onset symmetrical near-free-fall acceleration collapse of three WTC high rise buildings on 9/11 exhibited the key characteristics of controlled demolition. The Lawyers’ Committee’s July 30th Amended Petition addresses several additional federal crimes beyond the federal bombing crime addressed in the original Petition. The Lawyers’ Committee concluded in the petitions that explosive and incendiary devices preplaced at the WTC were detonated causing the complete collapse of the WTC Twin Towers on 9/11 and increasing the tragic loss of life. (source)

You can view the original petition HERE, and the amended petition HERE.

The attorney will have assistance from the Lawyers’ Committee with presenting the evidence to the special grand jury, and they requested that Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth provide support in making a joint presentation. They are also calling upon the public and legal community to contact them and support them in their efforts to contribute to this grand jury process.

Attorney William Jacoby, Lawyers’ Committee Board Member, stated: “We call upon the public and legal community to contact us and support our efforts to contribute to this grand jury process and to monitor and ensure compliance by the Justice Department.”

Executive Director and Actor Ed Asner stated: “The U.S. Attorney’s decision to comply with the Special Grand Jury Statute regarding our petitions is an important step towards greater transparency and accountability regarding the tragic events of 9/11.”

A conspiracy theory? Okay. How about conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and conspiracy to commit treason?

Resolutions and the Economic Landscape, Circa 2019 – From TPC

02 Wednesday Jan 2019

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Happy new year, one and all. Anno Domini Two Thousand, Nineteen is upon us!


John Maynard Keynes, as part of his general theory, held that when the economy was down, the government should close the gap via excessive spending, through debt if necessary. He also posited that when the bad times were over, the government should cut back and pay off the incurred debts. This was a theory, not Holy Writ.

 

For their sleazy part, the politicians heard the first step loud and clear. The second part, to Keynes’s dismay, they deemed irrelevant and unnecessary. Their game of reality became constant spending, ever-increasing debts, and deficits as cause celebre. A ministerial Icarus taunted the sun with predictable results.

 

We, the Living, pay the price for this stupidity. Most people drift along, concerned only with immediately proximate affairs, relying on someone of importance to tell them of things like recession. By the time the elites notice a downturn, or speak openly of one, it has usually been in progress for some time.
…

READ IN FULL AT TPC

35 Years Beyond 1984

02 Wednesday Jan 2019

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Paul Craig Roberts has some thoughts (at LRC):

In a few hours it will be another new year, 2019. I can remember when 1984 seemed far in the future, both as a calendar date and George Orwell’s predicted dystopia, to which 9/11 and the digital revolution gave birth in the 21st century. Now I find myself 35 years past 1984 and a stranger in a strange land.

Over these holidays two occurrences brought the strangeness of the present time home to me.

One was the arrival of the memoir, From the Cast-Iron Shore (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) by my friend and onetime colleague, Francis Oakley, an historian of the medieval era and past president of Williams College. The other was the report that a Japanese man had married a hologram.

(Nods).