Gunrunner-new scifi novel by me and john brown- e-arc available now

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https://www.baen.com/gun-runner-earc.html

E-ARC means Electronic Advanced Reader Copy. This is the early version of the manuscript that goes out to reviewers. My publishers make them available to the public early for those of you who just don’t want to wait. (the actual book comes out in February)

People always ask if there are many changes between the ARCs and the final copy. Sometimes yes, but with my manuscripts, no. My manuscripts tend to be pretty clean. I’ve never had a major change between the ARC and the final.

This is a really fun book, and I’m proud of how it turned out. John Brown is a great writer and working with him was a blast.

George orwell would have thought this week’s plot is too far fetched

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I can’t even keep up with the news anymore. Yesterday morning everybody was all stunned to learn that “sexual preference” had suddenly turned into homophobic hate speech because Amy Coney Barrett used it (even though we’ve got clips of democrats and gay rights orgs and publications using it up until now without issue) but within hours of that straw grasping bullshit getting tossed out by the dumbest senator in America, many of my liberal acquaintances were gas lighting everyone that the term had always been hateful AND THEY EVEN HURRIED AND EDITED THE DICTIONARY.

You’d think that the left changing the dictionary definition to make a commonly used term into oppressive hate speech (within 24 hours of the narrative deciding it must be!) would be the most Orwellian thing we’d see that day. But nope. Not even close!

Then some truly heinous shit drops about Crackhead McStripperbang (the artist formerly known as Hunter Biden). October Surprise! From what I’ve seen so far, it looks really really sketchy. And also hilarious, judging by all the crack pipe pics and goofy ass self-incriminating e-mails.

Didn’t anybody ever tell you Rule Number One of Doing Crimes, Joe Biden? NEVER COUNT ON A CRACKHEAD!

But anyways, Joe Biden potentially doing sleazy shit isn’t the point of this post. Because the really Orwellian thing was what came next, when the big soulless social media megacorps tried to squash the story in the most ham fisted way imaginable.

They didn’t just squash the story. They squashed the story and then bragged about it in public. They declared the story to be “harmful” (as in harmful to the election prospects of their chosen candidate). And they cited some bullshit reasons about why they couldn’t share this story, even though they were happy to ignore all those same rules repeatedly whenever it was a breaking story that hurt Trump.

Supposedly they can’t allow the sharing of a story that makes Biden look bad because the information was “leaked”… except they were gleefully sharing Trump’s leaked tax info last week, and before that Russia Collusion nonsense wasn’t so much a leak as a high pressure lawn sprinkler. That was totally okay.

Of course, prog apologists were quick to dismiss the New York Post as fake news, even though it’s the fourth biggest circulating newspaper in America, and these same sites have zero problem sharing painfully obvious fabricated bullshit from crap sites as long as it agrees with lefty orthodoxy. And even then the Post could be total trash, but that’s still Hunter Biden there smoking crack on camera and influence peddling while talking about getting a cut for Pop. (as in Joe Biden, not Corn Pop, gotta clarify because there’s a lot of guys called Pop in this saga).

That would be bad enough, but then it got extra stupid! So while these evil media empires are pretending that they are unbiased and merely trying to “curate the truth”, they banned the White House Press Secretary! They stopped sitting US senators from sharing news articles. Then they banned the president’s reelection campaign nineteen days before an election!

If social media had banned Obama’s press secretary, and then stopped Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer from sharing articles from the New York Times, and then shut down the Obama campaign page nineteen days before his election against Mitt Romney, everyone would have lost their fucking minds. And rightfully so! Because that kind of blatant manipulation of information is evil.

If I put that into a thriller my editor would tell me it was too far fetched. Nobody would buy into such mustache twirling villainy, even if I was writing cyberpunk dystopia.

But Correia, they are private companies and you are usually against meddling in the affairs of private companies, you big hypocrite! Yeah, usually I am, but this is also something new, the likes of which mankind has never seen before, with these entities being the primary exchange of information for BILLIONS of people, so it’s kind of hard to put this thing which didn’t exist before into historical context. Facebook has no real competitors, and it has something like 2.7 billion regular users. With the flick of a switch it can stop a third of the Earth’s population from seeing whatever it doesn’t want them to see. Humanity has never had that before.

That’s real fucking power right there.

Now, unlike most people on the internet, I am not compelled to pretend to be a lawyer who just got my law degree from the University of Internet. Communications law is not my area, and I’m not going to be a Dunning-Krugerand talking about section 230 or whatever.

However, what I do know is that this is some seriously dangerous bullshit, and if we keep going down this road it is going to lead to some very bad ends. Freedom of speech functionally ceases to exist when both sides speak, but only one side is heard. If social media is a forum, then it needs to be an actual forum. If it is functionally a propaganda arm of the DNC, then so be it, but it can’t keep pretending to be something its not, while mindfucking the populace.

They are subpoenaing the Twitter CEO to come testify before congress but I expect that to be another utterly useless clown show where dummies ask dumb questions about something they don’t understand to some clever asshole who is just going to lie.

Like most liberty minded people, I have a reflexive dislike for government regulation of the free market. If the government can screw something up, it will. However I doubt I’ll feel that strongly about the sanctity of the free market as I’m being starved to death in a re-education gulag, after conservatives were stupid enough to let a tiny group of control freak statists have absolute power over the whole country’s speech and information.

What we’ve got right now with a handful of organizations having a monopoly over news and knowledge is stupid, getting stupider, and going to end extremely badly.

I don’t give a shit if you are liberal or conservative, the idea of some entity like Google determining what mankind is allowed to know or not know should terrify the shit out of you. Free speech becomes a meaningless concept if only approved speech is ever seen. And if you are cheering this shit on because right now it is helping your team score points against the other team, you are fool. Because once they have that power it is only a matter of time until one of your beliefs ends up on the naughty list too.

(note, that’s not an issue for Kool Aid drinking progs, because they don’t actually have any beliefs beyond GET POWER. It took them less than 24 hours to change “sexual preference” to a bad thing in the dictionary)

The only good thing about this situation is that even though Facebook and Twitter are trying to monopolize the flow of information, they are still bad at it. This week’s attempt at shutting down the New York Post’s expose will probably go down as the biggest Streisand Effect in history. Their painfully obvious censorship will make far more people pay attention and lend credence to the report. Because after all, they wouldn’t try this hard to squish it, if there wasn’t some meat to it.

However, just because they are currently bad at being evil, doesn’t mean that what they are doing isn’t evil. They’re going to get better and better at controlling what you do and do not see. They will learn from their failures and be craftier next time.They are clearly trying to manipulate all of us, and though they sucked at shutting down this story, how many other times have they gotten away with it? How many times have these people hidden something important from you and you don’t even know it?

They decide what the narrative is. They decide what you learn and what you don’t. What do most of us do when we want to learn about a topic? We plug it into a search engine and read the results. Only they control the search engines. They write the wikis. They determine the truth, and then slide those fish hooks into your brain. Reality becomes whatever they say it is, and if you disagree and say that wasn’t how it was, they’ll just pretend that you’re crazy and it’s always been that way.

Information is power, and this tiny insular group holds power over the minds of the people so great that it would make emperors and god-kings weep with envy.

And if you find yourself thinking that I’m exaggerating the danger here, these fuckers just changed the DICTIONARY twenty four hours after it became convenient just to smear a judge. They are downright fucking brazen about it.

back in facebook jail

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Whoops. 😀 Apparently we’re not allowed to talk about the wild and crazy adventures of Crackhead McStripperbang and his dad, Uncle BadTouch.

That’s okay. It’s only a 24 hour ban. I’ve been in the Facebook Gulag so many times that I’ve got a membership in the Dollar Shiv Club. I’m comfy here in GenPop. Plus, since Facebook and Twitter are basically just extensions of the DNC now, I’m sure I’ll have lots of good company for my gang.

Officially, the reason Facebook banned me was for a post on Oct 2 where I said “I try not to comment on violence or crime until all the facts are in… But in this case, whoever sucker punched Rick Moranis should be slowly fed feet first into a wood chipper.” EXCEPT Facebook already banned me for that last week for “inciting violence”, I hit the protest button and Facebook REVERSED the ban a couple hours later. (because it is obviously a stupid joke)

But then yesterday, right after I posted a couple of links to the forbidden New York Post articles about Hunter Biden’s goofy misdeeds (and me being me, the posts were super active, with lots of comments and shares), Facebook banned me for the Rick Moranis post AGAIN. Only this time, I’m not allowed to protest.

So… is Facebook just inept? Or is the algorithm set so that when somebody popular with a lot of followers shares the Forbidden Articles and they’re getting too much attention, it goes back and finds the first bullshit (non-Joe Biden related) reason to ban them to shut them up for a bit? Only with plausible deniability? (because the soulless megacorp that is in the bag for the DNC would NEVER meddle with what people are allowed to see, HOW DARE YOU INSINUATE SUCH SLANDER?!)

Normally I would just assume Facebook is inept. But the timing on this one is pretty fucking suspicious. I’ll be curious to see how many other people with tens of thousands of readers get temporarily silenced for unrelated bullshit reasons after they link to the New York Post.