It’s kind of creepy, seeing events in real life pattern themselves after thriller novels and Hollywood movies; proof of anything that God – or the Fates – do have an ironic sense of humor. Like certain other bloggers and commenters I am on my knees with gratitude that the asteroid/comet fragment/whatever which detonated upon hitting the atmosphere over the Urals a few days ago did not hit at the height of the Cold War. That would likely have set off a chain of unfortunate events, for which those surviving remnants of the old Soviet high command would have been very sorry afterwards … well, maybe they would have been sorry, but on the other hand, opportunities are not to be wasted. Still – a repeat of Tunguska is fascinating enough, and so is the fact that it was caught on so many dash-cams and CCTV cameras. It’ll be as hard to blame it on global warming as it would be on the US, although some are apparently trying their best. But the wittiest observation on the whole matter simply has to go to a commenter at the Belmont Club, who observed “In Post-Soviet Russia, SPACE EXPLORES YOU!â€
I am not one of those people who thrive on discord – which may be one of the reasons that I gave up posting on Open Salon yea these many months ago. I am at heart a rather peaceful and well-mannered person who does not actively seek out confrontation, on the internet or in real life … no really, stop laughing! I merely present myself as someone who doesn’t suffer fools lightly, and who will not hesitate to squash them, which has the pleasing result of not being very much bothered by fools. It’s called ‘presence’… and has worked out pretty well, actually online and in real life. I can easily count the number of fools I have squashed … only a dozen or so that I remember. And none of them came back for seconds.
I don’t deliberately slow down to gawk at epic highway pileups either … except that in real life, everyone ahead of you has slowed down anyway, and the full spectrum of destruction is spread before you. And as for epic internet crackups … one can go for months without being made particularly aware of them, but this week my attention was caught by news of the mother-in-law-of all internet crack-ups to do with books. This one I must pay some attention to, as books are my vocation. It’s a more appalling spectacle than the Great Books And Pals/Jacqueline Howett Review Crackup of 2011, which should have served as an object lesson in how an author should not respond to a mildly critical review. This fresh slice of internet literary hell is what I am dubbing the Great Stop the Goodreads Bullies Cluster of 2012.
Goodreads, for those who have not had it wander across their ken … is kind of like Facebook for book enthusiasts. More specifically, for readers of books – although I do have an author page there, for all the good it does me. Not much; this is why I am not inclined to spend much time and effort on it. Anyway, it seems that a handful (or maybe more) of the regular Goodreads reviewers have earned a reputation for what is – or could be interpreted – as snark, scathing wit, or just dismissive disinterest. As the fictional food critic, Anton Ego said, “…the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.â€
Yes, it is fun and easy to cut loose with all barrels on some hapless bit of publication – and since the mad and wonderful world of books in this year of our lord offers such a wide array of targets, I can’t really blame various Goodreads reviewers for being rather spiky and judgmental about books. It’s a site for readers, after all. And there are plenty of wallbangers out there. (That is, a book so awful that you throw it across the room hard enough to bang against the opposite wall) But handful of Goodreads reviewers who have have been colorfully blunt in expressing their opinion of particular books now are classed as bullies? And that a handful of aggrieved Goodreads members (who may be writers, or just overly-impassioned fans) have set up a website, specifically dedicated to ‘outing’ those reviewers, terming them ‘bullies’ and tacitly encouraging other people to stalk and harass them online and in their real off-line lives. The irony, it burns. OK then – is the principle being established here is that the cure for bullying is … more bullying? Must be merely one of those interesting coincidences that the intended targets of Stop the Goodreads Bullies are women … oh, and the whole schmezzle of revealing Goodreads members personal information is a violation of the Goodreads policies, anyway.
Say, was there some act of Congress or the current regime passed lately which demanded that all book reviews are slavishly adoring, else the wrath of someone-or-other be excited? Is this the natural outcome of giving trophies for participation? Are certain writers thinking, “I wrote a book so I deserve nothing but glowing reviews for it?†I’ve reviewed books myself, often enough, and now and again administered an unfavorable or a mixed review. Not too many of those lately, as really don’t want to waste valuable hours reading a stinker, and fortunately the ‘Look Inside’ feature pretty much lets me screen out the really awful selections. A review isn’t a advertisement for the book; it is, or ought to be at the very least, a reasoned analysis of why or why not a reader should spend a good few hours of their life reading it. Nothing more, nothing less, although this rule is frequently trampled upon.
The bottom line is that the only response an author should make for a favorable, or even mildly critical review – and even if any response should be made is debatable among the cognoscenti – is, “Thank you for your consideration.†For a critical or scathing review – no response at all is best. There is no crying in baseball, and there should be no whining from authors; especially not to the extent of setting up a website to complain about being bullied. You put your stuff out there for everyone with the interest or the wherewithal to read it. Accept that there will be a number among them who will not like it, miss the point entirely, fail to grasp the whole point … well, grownups and professionals bleed about that silently and move on. Comfort yourself with those reviews and the appreciation of people who did get the point, and who loooooove it.
Frankly, I also comfort myself against unappreciative reviews by going and looking at my vast collection of publisher and agent rejections for Truckee’s Trail and Adelsverein. I think of it as the best kind of plate armor against bad reviews.
(Crossposted at my book blog, and at Chicagoboyz)
Well, no one ever really considered our family or anyone in it as cutting-edge … although it might be fairly argued that we were mosying so slowly along behind everyone else in our practices and preferences that the cutting-edge, tres-up to the minute actually came around full circle in the last half-decade and caught up to us at last. Home-made everything, home vegetable garden, chores for children, no television, tidy small houses and abstention from debt of every sort, from student to credit-card … an enthusiasm for all such things are now apparently trendy and forward-thinking.
I think about the only time that any of us got ahead of the zeitgeist in any way – and it was only for a brief time – was when I got into blogging and indy-publishing. Even then I wasn’t an early-early-Dark-Ages of Blogging adapter, only more of the first flush of the Renaissance, where practically all of us whose sites were honored by being on the Insty blog-roll knew each other – in the on-line sense of commenting on each other’s blogs and being free with personal emails. Fortunately for my family standing, that all passed about the time that comment-spam became a plague upon the earth and various formerly wide-open websites began requiring registration to comment, or at least acquiring some heavy-duty spam-prevention plug-ins. A blog? Now, everybody had a blog.
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It would seem that once there is a TV reality show about something than you can assume that it’s gone mainstream enough that the denizens of the mainstream media world are interested. So it seems to have happened with ‘prepping’ – that is, being prepared for the zombie apocalypse with a garage or a bunker full of shelf-stable and dried foods, a water purification system and a couple of cases of munitions. Meh … a lot of people went nutso over this just before New Years’ Day 2000, and there always has been a lunatic fringe … but then ensuring that you have a plentiful supply of food, drink and supplies on hand used to be pretty mainstream, actually. It was called ‘getting ready for winter’ in the 19th century, especially if you lived on a homestead half a day’s journey from the nearest general store. It certainly has been a requirement for LDS church members, as I discovered when I lived in Utah.
It seemed pretty sensible for me, actually – having an emergency stash of food. I remember my mother telling me of a friend of hers, whose husband was laid off from the Lockheed assembly line. They bought a hundred-pound sack of dried beans, which formed the largest part of their daily meals until he was employed again. We never were forced to that extreme, Dad being regularly employed, but on occasion my mother finished out the last day or two before his paychecks arrived with barely a handful of dollars and change to buy groceries with. The grandparents remembered not just the Depression, but hard times before that. They always – especially Granny Jessie who was raised on a farm – had a stash of foodstuffs on hand. So, it always seemed quite natural to read in the Little House Books, of how Pa and Ma Ingalls planted a garden, harvested from it, stored away potatoes and squash in a root cellar, butchered a pig and smoked the hams and made sausage, made apple butter and wild-berry jam. I don’t remember if Ma made cheese from fresh cow’s milk; but I do remember descriptions of churning butter from it.
Mind you, my own parents weren’t that hard-core about do-it-yourself food, but they had the can-do-it-yourself attitude about a lot of things, including landscaping and shade-tree auto repair. I came away from the assignment in Utah with a full-size freezer, a dehydrator with a lot of extra trays, and a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer with a lot of extra attachments … like a sausage stuffer, for instance. It just seemed quite natural to get interested in home brewing, and home cheese-making as well, as the results have been so delicious … and doing this had the added benefit of me being able to write fairly knowledgeably about a 19th century homemaker doing all this. Although – I am not hard-core enough t do it over a wood-burning iron stove. There is something very satisfactory about eating a slice of home-made baguette with a slice of home-made cheese on it, to eating fresh salad greens from your own garden, tomatoes and beans and squash that you picked just that afternoon.
We’ve just started doing jams and pickles and relishes of our own, in addition to all the other things. How much better than the purchased food will they taste? I’m beginning to think the next thing will be keeping hens for eggs, and I just don’t know how the neighbors will feel about that. Keeping a small cow for milk, though – that is definitely out. The yard is just not large enough.
And here comes the next spectacular ruckus regarding indy-writers and the (relatively) non-elected, totally bureaucratic and ham-fisted powers of our universe. This one, for a marvel, does not involve Amazon.com, at whose door can be laid the last couple or three of these shindigs. This one involves Paypal, that pearl of great price … and fairly substantial fees on transactions although not to onerous as these things go, certainly better than pawn shops and payday check cashing establishments without a particle of the stigma and it usually makes up for the convenience of the transaction and who am I to object, actually? More »
Ever since I finished the Adelsverein Trilogy, I’ve wanted to have a German language version out there.
I’ve had emails from fans asking about it, and talked with native German speakers who assured me that Karl May (the German equivalent of Zane Grey) has an enormous and devoted Old West fan-base. This in spite of the fact that he shuffled off the mortal coil in 1912, and only visited the US once: on that occasion, he only went as far west as Buffalo, New York – but in book-world, his characters of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand were in the thick of it.
In any event, movies, television and radio dramas and comic books based on Karl May’s version of the Wild West have continued to be madly popular in Germany ever since. I have made an arrangement with a freelance translator, Chicagoboyz fan and commenter Lukas R., who has provided a sample translation of a chapter. If you are fluent in German, take a look at it (here on my book blog) and tell me what you think. If it works out as I hope, the German-language version of Adelsverein: The Gathering would be available in about a year, as an e-book and print paperback edition.
(Crossposted at my writer’s blog and at Chicagoboyz.)
A Star Wars take on a popular Christmas tune. Very ingenious, I think
Yep … Sgt Mom has had to upgrade to a totally new, just out of the box computer. My semi-sort-of-old one died, after becoming more and more unstable and noisy … plus, it was a Windows XP, which Joe computer guy has been telling me is not going to be supported any more, and that I would have to resign myself to a wholly-new machine … which is kind of an upgrade. My first computer was purchased back when I was in Korea, and cost a bomb, relatively speaking — but I nursed that puppy along for ten years before the hard drive failed utterly. This is when I met my computer genius good friend Dave, who performed the last rites, told me that it had lasted well beyond realistic expectations, and sold me a perfectly well-working rehabbed computer from his collection at a completely reasonable price, and taking the dead one in trade for any functioning parts on it. Several years after that I wound up with another rehab, which Dave had supplied to my then-employer and which I inherited when that employer closed the office. The last machine, and my flat-screen monitor came from Dave, also – his family gave them to me, along with just about all the office supplies I could carry home, as they had no need for them after Dave died. I always thought of them as his bequest, and was terribly grateful for them. I didn’t need to buy paper for nearly three years, or another computer until now.
Last night the old one simply locked up, and wouldn’t reload Windows. This afternoon, on the advice of Joe the computer guy, we opened it up and blew dust out of the innards, and on his advice — “It’s not all dead, it’s only mostly dead!” plugged it in and powered it up again, in an attempt to salvage the last of my documents and favorites. Big pop-flash-fizzle from the power unit … like the Wicked Witch of the West, I fear that it is now most sincerely, completely dead. Joe says he can pop in another power unit, and retrieve all the documents, which will be nice. I had backed up all the super-important-absolutely-key ones, and all of my picture files, but not some of the small things … which are the ones, which aggravatingly, I most miss.
So, I am reconstructing all my favorites lists, reloading software and printer drivers, and trying to sort out the mysteries of Windows-7, which is a pain … but on the other hand, it’s nice to be able to get into a document or a website instanter, and not have to wait about half an hour. No, I exaggerate, it was more like fifteen minutes, sometimes.
Yeah, this is one of the things that I am going to give thanks for, tomorrow. That Blondie’s laptop is mostly paid for, and I could afford to put this all on my AAFES Star-Card. Heck, the woman at the Randolph AB BX customer service said that I could have bought ten of them, what with the limit on a card that I only use for emergencies like this anyway.
So, having been in the indy author game since . . . umm, when is it? Since 2004: my, how time does fly when you are having fun. I never had any ‘in’ with the monolith of the literary-industrial complex, no close friends or relations in the professional publishing game; never did a graduate level writing course of study, and I never did writer workshops. I did buy a couple of issues of Writer’s Digest, once upon a time, and made a good try at following their advice, pitching magazine articles and short stories . . . not entirely without result, just not results that made anyone sit up and pay attention. I have been paid often enough for my writing that I can, with a straight face, insist that I am a professional, but generally, the places that paid me were and are not exactly big league. So, when I took it in my head to write long-form fiction, I only took a year to go through the recommended motions of sending out query letters to agents, and submitting manuscripts or the portions thereof to the bare handful of publishers to even consider unagented submissions.
I was fortunate enough to have started off in blogging, which provided a body of readers, and me with practice in turning out a fetching phrase, and even more fortunate to have come around to wanting to do a long-form work in print when it became possible to publish a book in limited print runs through POD, or Print on Demand technology, and distribute/sell through online retailers like Amazon.com. The whole world of writing and publishing was pretty much rocked by those developments, and as much as the old-line publishing establishment will deny it, the cracks in the walls are visible and widening every day. The hows, whys and rationale of all this is enough for a whole ‘nother post, but what I wanted to do here is to distill some of the experience I have had over the since 2004, for the benefit of anyone thinking of doing a book (e- or print) as an indy writer. Holy cow, has it been nearly eight years? Guess it must have been. And I have done seven books in that time? Why, yes, I have.
1. Make your MS good, first off. Write it the best you can, invite other people to review and critique. Frame up the plot, polish the spelling and grammar; even put it away for a while and come back to it after a couple of months. Assure yourself that there is, indeed, a body of people who will want to pay money to read it. In one of Sharyn McCrumb’s books – Bimbos of the Death Sun, I think – one of her characters gave the greatest advice of all time for aspiring writers, to the effect that it’s a bit like taking up hooking: before you start charging money for it, best be sure that you’re pretty good.
2. Get an editor, preferably one strictly trained up in something like the Chicago Manual of Style, and hyper-vigilant, consistent – anal retentive, even – about punctuation and grammar. Hire one, do an exchange of work, call in favors; have someone else do this. It’s axiomatic that you cannot edit yourself. Of course, even with the most exacting editor, there will be some errors. It’s just going to happen, but you want to make the smallest number of them possible.
3. Graphic artist for the cover: again, hire, swap, beg, plead, whatever you have to do – a professional looking, and eye-ball attracting cover is absolutely essential. And it must also look good in thumbnail sized.
4. Formatting – that is, the design of the inside of the book. There a number of templates floating around, and some nice software programs that will give a good result if you do this yourself for a basic all-text interior. Remember, margins should be generous, top and bottom of the pages should likewise be generous also: I have seen some POD published books that were practically unreadable, as the formatter/publisher tried to save money in print costs by squeezing the margins until they were practically non-existent. Readers are accustomed to certain conventions in reading a book. Take account of the font size (10,11,12 pt is usual) and the leading – the space between the lines. Remember also running heads, and page numbers.
5. Setting the cost of your book: there are a couple of variables to consider, one of them being that the per-unit cost of a POD book will always be slightly more than the same format and size book printed by a traditional litho press. A traditional lithographic press print run will be in hundreds, thousands, or millions even, which will bring the individual per-copy costs down. The usual POD print run will be in the tens, or perhaps hundreds. So, for example, a single copy of a 6x 9 paperback POD book will cost . . . let’s say, $3.50 to print and ship to you. Now, in setting the end retail price, you could sell straight to the public for $5.00 and make $1.50 in profit per copy – but if you want to have your book available in a big box retail store like Barnes & Noble, you will also need to consider pricing to allow for a distributor’s discount of %55 off the end-retail price and your own profit. (And your publisher’s profit margin, if you have worked through one of the POD houses. Setting up as your own publisher is another whole blogpost.) Given a page count of 300-350 pages, a 6×9 paperback will retail in the neighborhood of $15.00. Of that, $8.25 will be discounted, then subtract the print costs per-unit, leaving $3.25 in profit. This is way simplified, of course – but you can see that writers like me really like selling directly to the public. On the other hand, the big-box places might make it profitable by dealing in volume, selling more efficiently. Lots of variables, and preferences to sort out.
6. Reviews: getting them is another consideration. Paying for them is probably not a good practice. Count on a long lead-time to submit reviews to various print and online organs who will have an interest in your book: that is, send out review copies six months ahead of your planned official release date. Realize that sending out review copies is at your expense and know that there is only a 25 percent return: that is, only one in four review copies sent out will result in a review. The old timers tell me this has always been the case. Review outlets are usually swamped with submissions, by the way. Target them carefully, as many of them will not consider POD/Indy published books anyway.
7. Have a plan, from the very beginning – of who the audience is for your book, where they might be found, and what you are going to do to get your book in front of them. This is a plain way to say ‘marketing.’ Like most things to do with publishing, it can be done cheaply or expensively. At a minimum, work up, or have worked up for you, things like flyers, business cards, post cards, and a website. When people ask you casually about what you do, tell them you are a writer, and if they seem interested, tell them a little about your book. Always have business cards with the name of your book and the ISBN, and your website to hand out to those who are really interested.
8. You will have to market the book, regardless if you are an indy or a traditional-published writer. It helps to be good at public speaking, or at least, be comfortable in front of a camera or behind a microphone. Anyplace there are people who want to know about your book, do whatever you can to get yourself in front of them.
9. Finally: save receipts, and keep records of your expenses – a lot of these can be considered business expenses, when it comes time to doing the income tax return.
Any Questions? There will be a quiz next week . . . and there are some interesting discussion threads on this topic here, and here.
Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz
WordPress has been updated, from the original older-than-dirt version, although alas, it still doesn’t look like I can post pictures. All thanks to Brian, who I think must have been tearing out his hair last night. But now the whole website seems to be a little more functional… and somewhat easier for non-programmers like me to play with. The look of the Brief will change in the very near future: I have been increasingly unsatisfied with how very clunky it looks to me in comparison with other blogs I’ve worked with. The Brief is dated, and the pages, archives and links are heinously tangled. The adverts for my books are also totally out of date — but now, hopefully, I can so something about it all.
I like the looks of some of the WordPress templates, and I want more than ever to be able to post my own photographs. I had also been giving some thought, before this upgrade to closing down the Brief entirely, when it comes time to renew the domain name and hosting agreement at the end of the year, or attaching it as blog to my celiahayes.com website, so that I would only pay the hosting fees for one domain instead of two. No, the lights will stay on: this blog is historic, one of the very first and longest running mil-blogs, and there are now almost ten years of archives which I’d like to make more accessible.
So, we’ll be around – but get ready for a bit of a change, appearance-wise.
PS – I like WordPress’s Twenty-Eleven Theme, very much, especially if I can fiddle with a bunch of my own photos to make a custom banner.
Yea these many months ago, I was invited by the organizers to be one of those authors in a fund-raising event to benefit the Clark Library. This is the oldest functioning public library existing in Texas; and since Texas was not generally conducive to the contemplative life and public institutions such as libraries until after the Civil War, generally – this means it is a mere infant of a library in comparison to institutions in other places. But I was thrilled to be invited, and to find out that Stephen Harrigan is one of the other authors. There were two elements in his book, Gates of the Alamo which I enjoyed terrifically when I finally read it. (Well after finishing the Trilogy, since I didn’t want to be unduly influenced in writing about an event by another fiction-writers’ take on it.) First, he took great care in setting up the scene – putting the whole revolt of the Texians in the context of Mexican politics; the soil out of which rebellion sprouted, as it were. (And he also touched on the matter of the Goliad as well.) Secondly, he had a main character who experienced the Texian rebellion against Mexico as a teenaged boy and who then lived into the 20th century. I liked the way that it was made clear that this all happened not that long ago, that it was possible for someone to have been a soldier in Sam Houston’s army, and live to see electrical street lighting, motorcars, and moving pictures.
That just appealed to me, for as another author friend pointed out – we are only a few lifetimes ago from the memories of great events. For instance – my mother, who is now in her eighties; suppose that when she was a child of eight or ten, she talked to the oldest person she knew. Suppose that in 1938, that oldest person was ninety, possibly even a hundred. That oldest person that my mother knew would have been born around 1830 to the late 1840s; such a person would clearly remember the Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, possibly even the California Gold Rush and the emigrant trail, the wars with the Plains Indians. Now, suppose that the oldest person that my mother knew and talked to as a child and supposing that person as a child of eight or ten had then talked to the oldest person they knew – also of the age of eighty to ninety in the 1840s . . . that oldest person would have been born in 1750-1760. That oldest person, if born on these shores would remember the Revolution, the British Army occupying the colonies, Lexington and Concord, General Washington crossing the Delaware. All of that history, all of those memories, in just three lifetimes – three easy jumps back into time! Nothing worked better to establish how close we are to events.
Anyway, I am looking forward to this – and since my daughter and I will drive up to Lockhart around midday Saturday, and the event doesn’t even get started until early evening, we are planning to go to the Kreuz Market and prove to ourselves that it really is one of the five best BBQ places in Texas. And she wants to check out any thrift stores and estate sales going on.
(Reposted to allow comments – that old punctuation in the post title bites again)
Yes, it would appear that the lesbians are actually straight men, the women are women, and the tween-agers are FBI agents, and a certain NY congressman with a slightly risible last name and a penchant for tweeting suggestive pictures of his body or parts thereof – is a bit of a perv. Honestly, I thought everyone had gotten a piece of Wiener last week, and there were absolutely no further possible ways in which the gentleman in question could embarrass his party, his constituents and his spouse, after the pic of him in the gym dressing room, clutching his ding-a-ling through a towel, but my daughter alerted me to this gem, courtesy of the UK Daily Mail. Seriously, I am wondering what possibly could top that for humiliating revelations, although now that he has resigned, perhaps that will stop any more from appearing.
The Gay Girl in Damascus and the Paula Brooks thing – honestly, it seems like the plot for a movie – something titled The Gay Deceivers just suggests itself right off the bat. Seldom in real life do we have such a delicious confluence of pretense . . . what is real, what is the real identity behind those pixels on a screen, and how much of what you put out there is really, really, really real. And I speak as someone who has been blogging under a not-terribly opaque nom du-blog since 2002, mostly because I didn’t want to put my real name out there. My daughter was still on active duty, my parents and brothers are listed in the phone book, and I had enough of demented devotion from eccentric fans when I was on radio, here and there among military radio stations. Yes, you have a million fans, if you are in the public eye in some manner, and a half-dozen really sick f**ks as enemies, all of whom have never met you, don’t really know any more about you than what you put out about yourself . . . and I didn’t really want to deal with it, or have my family deal with it.
There were often discussions, early on – about blogging under a real name, or under a nom-du-blog; questions of credibility, of standing behind what you wrote. I took the line that yes, for piece of mind or actual physical safety, there were excellent reasons for someone to blog under another name. One could establish a reputation for verity, and honesty, no matter what name you called yourself. Over time, your on-line reputation could be as solid as it was in real-space, congruent with your real-life experience.
And there are bloggers who have been doing that – under cover or by their real names in various countries, and some of them in physical danger: Salam Pax is one that comes to mind at first, mostly because of the blogosphere controversy over whether he was a real and credible person, reporting from inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hossein Derakhshan, the godfather of Iranian blogging may or may not still be imprisoned by the Iranian authorities. The Egyptian blogger who goes by the nom du blog Sandmonkey was briefly arrested in the recent past. They took – and still are taking risks by writing, and blogging. Creating a whole other persona and identity, at odds with real life, and claiming to bear first-hand witness in a blog to extraordinary current events, when you are actually hundreds or thousands of miles away?
When I do that, I call it a bit of historical fiction, and clearly label it such. Dunno why “Amina†and “Paula†didn’t think of doing it that way. Would have saved a bit of embarrassment, all the way around.
When in the Course of media events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political shilling which has connected propaganda diretly to one ideological party with the information stream and to assume among the powers of the communications system, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Truth and Objectivity entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of non-radical leftists requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation from that source of propaganda, slander and lies.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all TRUTH is created equal, that it is endowed by its creators with certain unalienable properties, that among these are non-distortion, non-coverup, and the pursuit of facts and evidence.
That to secure the right to the truth, media outlets are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the recipients, — That whenever any Form of MEDIA becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute New Media, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect the obtaining of truth, through facts and evidence.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that media outlets long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Media Outlets, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these blogs; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of newsgathering. The history of the present mass media is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over the information stream. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
They have refused his Assent to ethics, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
They have forbidden their minions and lackeys to pass along information of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in leftism; and when so traversed, they have utterly neglected to attend to them.
They have refused to pass along other information for the accommodation of “flyover countryâ€, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the information stream, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
They have called together stringers, wire services and freelancing bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of actual information, for the sole purpose of fatiguing those in search of truth and into forced acceptance of slanders, lies and distortions.
They have dissolved Representative opinions repeatedly, for opposing with steadfast firmness their invasions on the rights of the people to obtain the truth.
They have refused for a long time, after such dissolutions of ANY opposing opinion, thought, ideology or concept, to cause others to be blackballed, isolated, removed, wherein the vile propaganda, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the information stream remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
They have endeavoured to prevent the control of the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to assist this land of ours to pass laws and to protect our borders and to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new invasions of Lands.
They have obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing to report upon the breaking of Laws and usurpation of rules, regulations and our very Constitution.
They have made radical and unaccountable Judges dependent on their Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount of interference with the adherence to the will of the people.
They have supported and assisted in the erection of a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of officious intermeddlers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
They have kept among us, in times of peace or war, standing orders to distort the reportage as being deflating when the “enemy†party is in power and wholly absent of facts when a leftist is in power, to the complete detriment of the People.
They have effectively assisted in rendering the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
They have combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving their assent to the usurpation of the rights to self-govern this land of ours, by and through the wholesale distortion of our communications systems, and the rape of our information stream.
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any violence which they should commit on the TRUTH in this land of ours:
For cutting off our loyalty to Israel and with other allies of the world:
For advancing class warfare and hoaxes for the purpose of imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of fair access to the Court of public opinion:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences, through slander, distortion and the promotion of anti-free market libel:
For abolishing the free System of truth and objectivity in neighbouring outlets of academia, entertainment and new media, establishing therein an Arbitrary “truthinessâ€, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute falsehoods into these outlets
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable public forums for the gathering of facts, evidence and objectivity and replacing them with lockstep propaganda.
For suspending our own system of debate, and declaring themselves invested with power to make issues “settled†for us in all cases whatsoever, without the benefit of inspection.
They have abdicated honor and loyalty here, by declaring us out of their Protection and waging War against us if we dare to oppose rampant and unchecked leftism as our religion.
They have plundered our farms, ravaged our energy resources, burnt our flag, and destroyed the information gathering of our people.
They are at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of treason, treachery and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Slander & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the “papers of recordâ€.
They have constrained the voices of our fellow Citizens taken Captive in the U.N. and for the purpose of creating a “world body†of opinion to bear ill will against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends’ beliefs, loyalties and opinions and our allied Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
They have excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and have endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless anarchists, small communists and tear down the system Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A fourth estate, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the supplier of information of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our meda brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their ilk to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Recipients of information in these United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these lands, solemnly publish and declare, That these united peoples are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent readers and viewers, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the Old Media, and that all political connection between them and the mass media empire, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent readers and viewers, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent readers and viewers may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
— commenter cfbleachers, in this PJ Media comment thread
I’m gonna say it: I’d rather see another Batman, Iron Man, or even Superman movie that go see Thor or The Avengers. I just don’t care.
I’m gonna say it: I’d rather see another Batman, Iron Man, or even Superman movie that go see Thor or The Avengers. I just don’t care.