Dorchester Publishing looks at its bottom line and decides OMG we can’t afford to do this anymore, switches to e-publishing launching the Greek Chorus chanting “death of print, death of print.”

This is premature for a number of reasons. (Not the least of which is the technical reasons I listed in an earlier blog post.)  But the primary one is the fact that this maneuver wasn’t an attempt to make money, it’s a last ditch effort to stop hemorrhaging and keep the doors open.  As such, it probably has a 50/50 chance of staving off bankruptcy.  It has little, if anything, to do with e-publishing vs. print.  It is a desperate attempt to cut costs, which may in fact backfire if the authors who are being screwed (and getting e-pubbed with a print royalty is being screwed) decide to start with the lawsuits.  This is only an indicator of the death of print insofar as it is a marker of the financial health of the publishing industry. . . And I think someone somewhere might have noticed that we’re in a major recession where just about every industry across the board is suffering from sudden overcapacity, red ink, and the need to downsize.  Everything’s readjusting, and everything is volatile.

If you’re a writer my suggestion to weather the economic storm is the following:

1. Grow relationships with as many publishers as possible.
2. Hang on to every subsidy right as you can (foreign sales, audio, e-pub).
3. Avoid committing to projects with deadlines more than 18 months out.
4. Get the option clause as narrow as you can (i.e. strike out “right to see next book,” in favor of “right to see next urban fantasy,” or even better “right to see next series title featuring this particular protagonist.”)
5. Get as much money up front as you can.

Bottom-line: Negotiate every contract as if the company is going into Chapter 11 tomorrow and all your future contact is going to be with a court-appointed lawyer who doesn’t particularly like you or your agent.

What kind of global infrastructure is required to support and maintain your cybernetic transuman warrior chick, and what happens to her when the structure breaks down?

Thanks to an NPR article we have a concept worthy of a Phillip K Dick novel, with Orwellian commentary that should scare the crap out of you if you have any imagination— or remember the CIA’s history dealing with other chemical substances.

The money quote:

Does Biology Affect Our Trust In Government?

Zak first got interested in trust more than a decade ago after co-authoring a study that looked at trust levels in different nations and their economic stability. The study found that the higher the level of trust, the better the economic status of the nation.

The work got Zak thinking more generally about different ways to manipulate trust, and so starting in 2001, Zak began spraying oxytocin up the noses of college students to see if the hormone would change the way they interacted with strangers.

It did. Squirt oxytocin up the nose of a college kid, and he’s 80 percent more likely to distribute his own money to perfect strangers.

Getting a line on real mind-altering conspiracy theories from Newsweek is like watching a sitcom to discover what the kids are listening to these days. Won’t happen.

That is why (speaking of what the kids are listening to) you need to go here, to see what is really going on. And read about the Denver airport if you want to get the willies.

1. The Obama administration has modified a long-standing executive order so now agents of Interpol have full diplomatic immunity.  i.e. We have now a class of law enforcement in this country beyond any rules of search and seizure, Miranda, or any of those annoying due-process concerns.
2. The head of the IPCC (the agency responsible for UN climate change policy) has a cosmically massive conflict of interest, as he stands to make a few billion on carbon trading schemes.
3. If the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement doesn’t scare you, the fact that it’s being negotiated in secret should.
4. Not only are we hemorrhaging money, it’s not even going where it’s supposedly needed.
5. Then there’s the fact we’re giving a blank check to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because they did such a good job before.
6. Apparently the only lessons we learned from 9/11 were the wrong ones.
7. If they slipped this in, what other incompetence awaits us?
8. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
9. Apparently, Predator drones are hackable.
10. This guy is still in control of the economy.

Here’s what ACORN’s all about:

• An organization that lobbies extensively for living-wage legislation fought to exempt itself from minimum wage laws: ACORN argued that paying its workers less than the minimum wage aided its organizing efforts.
• According to the AP they have a history of screwing their own workers (the ones who are black and poor.): According to an NLRB [National labor Relations Board] case accusing ACORN of unfair labor practices, “field organizers were expected to work long hours each week — 54 hours — and were paid at a salary of $16,000 annually until January 2001, when the salary was raised to $18,000.”
• It has financial disclosure more opaque than a CIA-funded meth lab.  And has had a chronic inability to pay taxes.
• Let’s not forget that its leadership covered up the embezzlement of a million dollars, and fought tooth and nail against its own board members who wanted to audit the books.
• Oh, yeah, then there’s that little, “we have no problem giving tax advice on importing underage prostitutes from Central America“
• Oh, and they filed a bunch of fraudulent voter registrations.
• UPDATE: And for those of you who, like I used to, believe that registration fraud doesn’t end with fraudulent voting:  We were soooo wrong.  But not like that would determine an election.

The sad thing is, when you lie to a kid (and yeah, some of the assertions in this film are pretty much the moral and factual equivalent of lies) you discredit yourself.  Once the kids seeing this film come across a credible source that says the U.S. has had a pretty constant area of forestation since the early 20th century, and that area is considerably more than 4% of the original, they’re likely to shitcan the entire argument, including the valid points about consumerism.  By that point, it ain’t going to do much good to explain “no we meant only 4% of the original old-growth forest is still untouched.”  That rationale is good for campaign ads, not so much educational videos.

Also, it might have been a little more honest to mention that the happy little government asked the evil fat corporations to dip the pillows the fire retardant neurotoxin.  After all, fire retardant neurotoxins cost money, and we know that the evil fat corporations would let your head burn if they could make a buck, right?  Come on, can’t your strawmen be consistently malevolent?

Anyway, here are the original video weaved in with some rebuttal.  Not on board will all the rebuttals, but it does a good job of highlighting all the places where there are arguable assertions.

Where has this been all my life? To someone who cut their literary teeth on the The Illuminatus! Trilogy (read five times) this show is like manna from heaven! If Shea and Wilson had an AM morning show in the 70s, this is what it would have been like.

Little did they know that their deliberate vanishing which they thought would lead them into a safer life in the UK had meant they had played into the hands of human organ traders who were harvesting the organs of illegal immigrants who would be unlikely to be missed, not officially being in Britain.

When police raided the village butcher shop, one of the few in Britain to have an attached slaughterhouse, they found freezers full of human remains, though all missing vital organs that could be recycled into the organ trade.

Just, um, wow. . .

Bonus points for the following:

A representative of the Royal College of Surgeons commented that he was happy to see such an establishment closed down, but was concerned that the recent increase in availability of organs for transplant might show a significant decrease.

First off, she manages to take credit for Godwinizing the Health Care debate, snatching it firmly from the fringe of the opposition who’d been raising Hitler analogies since before the election.  Apparently, she missed the fact that wingnuts raising wingnut arguments <> news, speaker of house implying her opposition are Nazis = News.  Enough news that her advocates have to defend her comments rather than her health care plan.  Smooth.

Then, we find out that not only are the people protesting the Health Care legistaltion Nazis, but in USA Today, they are Un-American.  This is not really subject to interpretation, as her op-ed is entitled, “‘Un-American’ attacks can’t derail health care debate.” And pretty much states flat out that the kind of protest that’s emerging in the face of this legislation is the kind of vile anti-Americanism that Liberals were always paranoid of being accused of during the reign of George W. Hitler. (See what I did there?)

These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.

Oh, I’m afraid of differing views. Uh, no. And the primary fact I’m afraid of is the 1.6 Trillion dollars of mob-inducing fear-mongering that came out of that Right-Wing think tank called the Congressional Budget Office, and the fact that every time the government gets involved in health care it results in steaming piles of fail. Calling me a fearful un-American Nazi doesn’t encourage me to change my mind. Or is that actually the point? Maybe the point is drowning out opposing views by fear mongering? (The un-American Insurance Nazis will get you!)

By the way, about “facts,” despite decrying the “factless” fearfulness of the evil nasty loathsome opposition, there are precious few “facts” in her op-ed. In fact, I only found two paragraphs worth:

Our plan’s cost-lowering measures include a public health insurance option to bring competitive pressure to bear on rapidly consolidating private insurers, research on health outcomes to better inform the decisions of patients and doctors, and electronic medical records to help doctors save money by working together. For seniors, the plan closes the notorious Medicare Part D “doughnut hole” that denies drug coverage to those with between $2,700 and $6,100 per year in prescriptions.

Reform will also mean higher-quality care by promoting preventive care so health problems can be addressed before they become crises. This, too, will save money. We’ll be a much healthier country if all patients can receive regular checkups and tests, such as mammograms and diabetes exams, without paying a dime out-of-pocket.

The problem is, of course, none of these “cost cutting” measures save money. The “public option” itself is a massive new entitlement cost, and the “competitive” cost pressure it might have had is already served by Medicare and Medicaid. It saves the Government zero, saves the industry zero, and any downward pressure on the cost of insurance premiums will be offset by the taxes required to pay for it. Let me also say that the electronic record itself is a massive across the board cost to the entire industry, and is in fact already a federal requirement under HIPPA so has no bearing on the “cost” of this bill. And somehow she manages to claim that increasing prescription drug coverage will save money. Also, while preventative care is a good thing, it isn’t some sort of magic bullet to save money. In fact, in many cases it increases health-care expenditures; put bluntly, you live an extra 10 to 15 years because of good preventative care, that’s an extra 10 to 15 years you drain the resources of the system, and those are the years where you consume the most health care resources. That’s not an argument against improving preventative care, but it is an argument against claiming it saves you money.

But then I’m an un-American fact-fearing Nazi.

I bet you thought I was kidding.

I bet you thought such things would never see any practical use.

I bet you believe them when they say that their mission is not to build “futuristic robots” to “feed on the human population”

Will you feel that way when they start building themselves?

(Props to Elizabeth Bear and Patrick Nielsen Hayden)