One-Percent Authors Want To End Destructive Conflict, Bring Order to the Galaxy

Just when I thought Amazon Derangement Syndrome couldn’t get any more acute, I woke up to this “letter to our readers” spearheaded by bestselling writer Douglas Preston and signed by 69 authors.  One day, historians and psychologists might manage to explain how various authors came to fear and revile a company that has sold more books than anyone in history; that pays authors up to nearly six times the royalties the New York “Big Five” lockstep rate; that single-handedly created the ebook and self-publishing markets; that offers more choice and better prices to more readers than anyone ever has before; and that consistently ranks as one of the world’s most admired companies.  But for now, let’s see if we can figure it out ourselves...

A letter to our readers:

Amazon is involved in a commercial dispute with the book publisher Hachette, which owns Little Brown, Grand Central Publishing, and other familiar imprints.

Unmentioned is that Hachette is part of the Lagardère Group, a French conglomerate with sales of something like ten billion dollars a year.  Not exactly David to Amazon’s Goliath.

These sorts of disputes happen all the time between companies and they are usually resolved in a corporate back room.

Indeed, Amazon and Hachette are just a retailer and a supplier having trouble coming to terms.  Something that couldn’t be more common.  Unless, unless...

But in this case, Amazon has done something unusual. It has directly targeted Hachette’s authors in an effort to force their publisher to agree to its terms.

This is misleading.  Not only has Amazon not “targeted Hachette’s authors,” it has offered to compensate them for any damage they suffer by virtue of their publisher’s dispute with Amazon.  Hachette has refused that offer.  Do the authors of this letter not know about Amazon’s offer to help compensate Hachette’s authors, and Hachette’s refusal?  Why don’t they mention it?

For the past month, Amazon has been:

--Boycotting Hachette authors, refusing to accept pre-orders on Hachette’s authors’ books, claiming they are “unavailable.”

Amazon is not boycotting anyone.  All books by all Hachette authors are available in the Amazon store.  In the face of this, to claim there’s a “boycott” is either ignorance or propaganda.

Not including a preorder button for a tiny percentage of titles isn’t a boycott.  It’s a shot across the bow, and a fairly mild one compared to what an actual boycott of all Hachette titles would look like.  As for “unavailable,” if a book isn’t published yet and you can’t preorder it, how else should its status be described?

--Refusing to discount the prices of many of Hachette’s authors’ books.

The prices of Hachette’s books are set by Hachette.  If the authors of this letter think those prices are too high — and apparently, they do — it’s bizarre that they’re blaming Amazon.

--Slowing the delivery of thousands of Hachette’s authors’ books to Amazon customers, indicating that delivery will take as long as several weeks on most titles.

When a retailer and supplier can’t come to terms — something the letter’s writers acknowledge happens “all the time” — what is the retailer supposed to tell its customers?

As writers—some but not all published by Hachette—we feel strongly that no bookseller should block the sale of books or otherwise prevent or discourage customers from ordering or receiving the books they want.

This is a bit rich.  My own Amazon-published titles are boycotted by Barnes & Noble and by many indie bookstores.  Tens of thousands of Indie-published authors face the same widespread boycott.  An actual boycott, as in, outright refusal to stock books written by these authors — not because of price or other contractual terms, but simply because the retailers in question don’t like these authors’ way of publishing.  Yet this is the first I’ve heard any of the letter’s authors express their strong feelings on bookstores preventing or discouraging customers from ordering or receiving the books they want.

What’s really weird, when you stop and think about it, is that if customers being able to read the books they want is really an important value for the letter’s authors, you would think they would love Amazon’s business model and find Hachette’s suspect.  After all, Hachette is a gatekeeper — their whole business model is predicated on excluding from readers probably 99.99% of manuscripts.  Amazon’s model is to let all authors publish and to trust readers make up their own minds.  If customer choice is the real value in play here, you can’t coherently support Hachette and decry Amazon.

Unless, of course, all that happy talk about customer choice is a canard.

It is not right for Amazon to single out a group of authors, who are not involved in the dispute, for selective retaliation.

It wouldn’t be right if Amazon were doing it.  As explained above, they’re not.  What I’d like to know is why the letter’s authors apparently feel it is right when Barnes & Noble and other booksellers really do single out authors for retaliation?  Why are they upset about a fictional Amazon boycott, and sanguine about a real Barnes & Noble one?

Moreover, by inconveniencing and misleading its own customers with unfair pricing and delayed delivery, Amazon is contradicting its own written promise to be “Earth's most customer-centric company.”

I agree that it’s an inconvenience for customers when a retailer and supplier can’t come to terms.  But it happens, and it’s not that hard to understand why a retailer might feel compelled to hold the line in one discrete area to prevent its supplier from forcing it to charge higher prices across the board.  Think of it as a “lesser of two evils” dynamic a retailer might face with regard to what’s best for its customers.  Regardless, I’m not sure why the letter’s authors reflexively lay blame for the dispute and its consequences at Amazon’s feet while reflexively absolving (and refusing even to question) Hachette.  And I don’t see Amazon doing anything here that I would characterize as “misleading.”

All of us supported Amazon from when it was a struggling start-up. We cheered Amazon on. Our books started Amazon on the road to selling everything and becoming one of the world’s largest corporations. We have made Amazon many millions of dollars and over the years have contributed so much, free of charge, to the company by way of cooperation, joint promotions, reviews and blogs. This is no way to treat a business partner.

Under the circumstances, that last line sounds like projection.

Nor is it the right way to treat your friends.

I’m not sure what this means.  What does friendship have to do with a retailer and supplier negotiating terms?  Are they saying that in a contract dispute, you can’t allow your friends to become collateral damage?  Okay, but why is that message directed at Amazon and not at Hachette?

I know, I know... they really just want to end this destructive conflict, and bring order to the galaxy...

Bear in mind that no one outside of Amazon and Hachette even knows for sure the details or their discussions.  There’s been a lot of informed speculation in the blogosphere, and it seems likely that the essence of the dispute is that Hachette wants to return to “agency” pricing, which enables Hachette to keep the prices of ebooks artificially high, while Amazon wants the flexibility to charge less.  But in the face of no knowledge, or of the likelihood that Hachette is trying to force Amazon to charge higher prices, the knee-jerk anti-Amazon response isn't easy to understand.

Without taking sides on the contractual dispute between Hachette and Amazon, we encourage Amazon in the strongest possible terms to stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business.

Well, that made me smile.  I’m glad no one is taking sides!  In fact, reading their letter, I still have no idea which side the letter’s authors favor… :)

But seriously, I have to ask… do these people really not recognize that they’re taking sides?  Not that I think taking sides is wrong; personally, I think Hachette is a joke and I side with Amazon because I favor lower prices, higher royalties, and more choice.  But to write a letter like this and claim you’re not taking sides… are they disingenuous?  Or are they so psychologically wedded to legacy publishing that they think taking Hachette’s side is just being neutral?

For some reason it reminds me of the joke:  “If we’re not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?"

But anyway… if the value in play here is that a company should "stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business,” I’m gobsmacked that these people aren’t demanding more from Hachette.  Hachette pays its authors 12.5% in digital royalties.  It keeps the lion’s share of increased ebook profits for itself.  It demands life-of-copyright (that is, forever) terms of license.  It inhibits its authors' ability to publish other works by insisting on draconian anti-competition clauses.  It pays its authors only twice a year.  It has innovated precisely nothing, ever, preferring to collude to fix prices with Apple and the other members of the New York “Big Five.”  That’s Hachette’s business record… and these authors, who purport to care so much about a company harming the livelihood of authors, have nothing to say about it?

I guess that’s what they mean by “not taking sides."

None of us, neither readers nor authors, benefit when books are taken hostage.

Then why aren’t they telling Hachette to set their books free?  End agency pricing!  Let retailers discount!  Don’t collude!  Free those books!

(We’re not alone in our plea: the opinion pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which rarely agree on anything, have roundly condemned Amazon’s corporate behavior.)

I always mistrust this kind of assertion in the absence of links or other citations — especially coming from a group that has already made as many misleading claims as this one.  But let’s assume their claim about overlapping op-eds is true.  The New York Times and Wall Street Journal "rarely agree on anything”?  This is possibly the most thoughtless (or misleading) claim the letter’s authors have made yet.  I know it’s a bit discursive, but here’s Noam Chomsky on propaganda:

"One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there's a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate.”

Like the Democratic and Republican branches of America’s single political party, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have far, far more in common than they do in dispute.  Suggesting their concurrence on a topic is meaningful is exactly like suggesting that because majorities of Democrats and of Republicans voted to invade Iraq, the war was a good idea.

We call on Amazon to resolve its dispute with Hachette without hurting authors and without blocking or otherwise delaying the sale of books to its customers.

I know I’m repeating myself, but… it’s fascinating that these people — who are of course not taking sides! — are calling on Amazon this way and saying nothing at all to Hachette.  You’d think Hachette is a wholly pure and innocent child, lacking any autonomy at all in this business dispute.

We respectfully ask you, our loyal readers, to email Jeff Bezos, c.e.o and founder of Amazon, atjeff@amazon.com, and tell him what you think. He says he genuinely welcomes hearing from his customers and claims to read all emails from this account. We hope that, writers and readers together, we will be able to change his mind.

It’s sad.  Imagine the good that might be accomplished if mega-bestselling authors like Child, Patterson, and Turow were even fractionally more inclined to leverage their fame and fortune in calling attention to real injustices in publishing.  The pittance the New York “Big Five” (the cartel is right there in the moniker) pay their authors.  The industrial-level scamming of newbie writers by Penguin Random House-owned Author Solutions.  Harlequin setting up subsidiaries solely to screw writers out of their royalties.

Instead, these one-percenters consistently ignore the tremendous good Amazon has done for all authors, and allow misguided self-interest to distort their perceptions and their arguments.  They take full-page ads in the New York Times, they give interviews with an adoring press, they publish letters like this one… all to perpetuate a publishing system that is designed to create a one-percent class of winners and to exclude everyone else.

You want to know something else the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are going to agree on?  They’re going to offer a ton of coverage to this “letter to readers” because it was signed by a few superstars.  And they’re going to ignore a competing petition that in the few hours since it went live is already closing in on a thousand signatures, many of them submitted by the mom-n-pop, small-business, indie authors Amazon has enabled to earn a living from their writing for the first time ever.  This imbalance is the way establishments work, and the authors of the “letter to our readers” are nothing if not part of the publishing establishment they seek to perpetuate.

It’s all right.  The establishment has the names.  Freedom and choice have the numbers.  And the numbers always win in the end.

Oh, and that petition?  You can add your name here.

P.S.  Some further suggested reading on this topic.

If you love books then you should be rooting for Amazon, not Hachette or the Big Five

Authors Behaving Badly and Authors Who Aren’t

Amazon Finally Defends Itself Against Accusations That It's A Bully Pushing Around Hachette

The Last Magazine -- A Subversive, Inventive, Electrifying Debut

When Michael Hastings died at 33, almost exactly a year ago, everyone who followed his work knew the world had lost one of its most fearless, uncompromising journalists.

What we didn’t know was that we had lost an outstanding novelist, as well.

The Last Magazine is so many things:  a horrifying and hilarious parody; a you-are-there corporate thriller; a strange and touching love story.  Most of all, it’s a gripping bildungsroman (always wanted to break that word out in a review, and I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity).  Hastings nails it all:  the confusion and terror of combat; the funhouse-distorted ambivalence of sexual addiction; the grubby machinations of office politics in the corridors of a major weekly news magazine.  The shallowness, the self-centeredness, the soullessness of the crabs-in-a-barrel culture Hastings deftly and scathingly depicts reminded me of the dark comedy In The Loop — these are people whose only care about the world catching fire is whether their profiles will be attractively lit by the flames.

If you've read The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan, you know that part of what always set Hastings apart was his voice (at times in The Operators he almost seems to be channeling James Elroy).  That voice informs everything he does in The Last Magazine, including a wonderful series of breaking-the-fourth-wall “interludes” such as, “Why I Write” (the narrator — or is it the author?  Both are named Michael Hastings — explains that his magazine’s no-outside-reporting policies necessitate that he disguise this true tale as a novel) and “I’m Very Sorry” (an apology to his colleagues, and again you don’t know whether this is coming from the narrator or the author) and “How a Magazine Story Gets Written” (shades of Moby Dick!).  The result is that from the first sentence you’re caught up in the meta and you don’t know where to look for the line between fiction and fact, between Hastings the narrator and Hastings the author.

But I think the location of that line is of secondary importance.  Because wherever the line lies, it animates truth.  Over and over again as I read this story, the thing that struck me most was how searingly honest it is.  Honest in its portrayal of human frailties; honest in its portrayal of what’s rotten and corrupt in journalism; most of all, honest in its portrayal of its young narrator, Michael Hastings, and of the other major character, veteran foreign correspondent A.E. Peoria (some version of an older Hastings?), both of whom suffer from many of the same weaknesses that afflict the characters around them.

This is just a great, great book, and a fitting testament to the talent and drive of an exceptional person who left the world much too soon.  I can’t help but be sad right now at the thought of all the other novels Hastings might have written, but now never will.  But at the same time, damn, I’m just glad he wrote this one.  It’s that good.

Iraq, Vietnam, and Why US Foreign Policy Elites Won't STFU

With Iraq splitting into three (eight years ago, I explained why this was going to happen and why the US should get behind it), I wondered whether any establishment media outlets would refer to a civil war there.  I did a search for the applicable terms, and came up with… not much.  Apparently, if it’s happening in a Designated Enemy Country like Syria it immediately gets called a civil war.  But if it’s happening in a country we ourselves destroyed, we can't bear to be overly accurate and descriptive in our nomenclature, so it’s just "militants."

I also searched for “Iraq Vietnam.”  Because you don’t have to be a historian to remember that this sounds an awful lot like the endgame in Vietnam:

White House officials said the president did not envision any circumstances in which ground troops could return to the country. Air strikes, however, are under active consideration. On Thursday the US began airlifting planeloads of its citizens from Iraq.

Here, I was intrigued to see that my search returned one big hit:  a Daily Beast article by the ultimate foreign policy insider:  Leslie Gelb.  According to the headline, "Iraq Is Vietnam 2.0 And U.S. Drones Won’t Solve The Problem."  I thought, “Huh? That sounds reasonably insightful and even minimally sane.  What’s going on?”

And then I read the article.  Really, it is remarkable.  Not for anything it intended.  But rather as a perfect microcosm of the horrific failings of America’s inbred, immoral, ineducable foreign policy elite.

It starts immediately after the headline, when Gelb explains that “The problem is the Iraqi government.”  I thought, “Holy shit, that is exactly what the foreign policy establishment kept saying about Vietnam, all the way to the bitter end!  Is Gelb channeling Colbert?  Demonstrating why Iraq is like Vietnam by saying the same incredibly stupid and self-serving things insiders once said about Vietnam?  A kind of performance art, maybe?"

And then I read on and realized that no, Gelb really is this blind.  He’s not playing parody.  He is parody.

So what’s the problem? The problem is not that these Iraqis weren’t well trained and equipped, it was they did not have a government worth fighting for. The Maliki government is Shiite, exclusionary and anti-Sunni. It is corrupt and inefficient. In sum, like most of these great freedom-fighting government we’ve backed over the decades—corrupt and inefficient. And certainly non-inclusive in its politics, certainly not welcoming of potential opponents, certainly ill-disposed to give non-Shiites a legitimate share of power. So the Iraqi troops throw down their arms and run away.

Look, Gelb supported the war in Iraq.  He was part of it.  He lent it triple-distilled establishment cred.  So how incredibly psychologically convenient for him that “the problem” isn’t the war he supported, the war that killed up to 500,000 Iraqis and turned another 4,000,000 into refugees (in a population about 20% the size of America’s), the war that destroyed whatever infrastructure was holding the country together.

No, the only problem is the Iraqi government.

And it actually gets worse from there.

The U.S. fights in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Vietnam and other places (maybe next in Syria), provides billions of dollars in arms, trains the friendly soldiers, then begins to pull out—and what happens? Our good allies on whom we’ve squandered our sacred lives and our wealth fall apart.

Our lives are sacred.  But those far-away, brown-skinned lives?  The hundreds of thousands of them in Iraq?  Not only are they not “sacred,” they’re so meaningless they’re not even worthy of mention in a magazine article.

And this notion that when America “squanders” (rare moment of honest nomenclature there) the lives of its soldiers in foreign wars, we’re doing it for the good of the people of the countries we invade, rather than for our own selfish ends?  It’s the psychological gift that keeps on giving, enabling people like Gelb to go on supporting America’s wars because America’s wars really aren’t wars at all, no, America's wars are in fact simply the magnanimous gifting of freedom and democracy to poor benighted peoples overseas, bestowed in beneficence by a generous, loving, enlightened people.  Gelb’s subtext is right there, though it would be considered uncouth in his circles to say it plainly:  You're welcome, Iraq, you fucking ingrates.  Now no more freedom gifts for you until you show us you’re mature enough to use them responsibly.

Actually, I think Lyndon Johnson said it better:  "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”  Another unintentional bit of ironic Gelb performance art, doing his part to cement the parallels between America's premier foreign policy disasters.

Either our super foreign policy elite hasn’t read Reinhold Neibuhr, or they can’t understand him:

Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of the nation is its hypocrisy.  Self-deception and hypocrisy is an unvarying element in the moral life of all human beings.  It is the tribute which immorality pays to morality; or rather the device by which the lesser self gains the consent of the larger self to indulge in impulses and ventures which the rational self can approve only when they are disguised.  One can never be quite certain whether the disguise is meant only for the eye of the external observer or whether, as may usually be the case, it deceives the self.

Also impressive is Gelb’s understanding of the complex motivations of people fighting civil wars in far-off lands.  They are nothing more than "militant, crazy and dangerous jihadis” and "crazed jihadis.”  Not a word beyond that of what might motivate human beings to fight and die.  Is this guy Sun Tzu or what?  With razor-sharp insights like these into the motivations of America’s adversaries, is it any wonder all of America’s wars turn out so splendidly?

The dissonance in Gelb’s psyche produces some contradictory results:

The South Vietnamese had a million and a half men under arms and despite the unconscionable Congressional cutoff of future aid, these armed forces had plenty to fight with. But they gave up too.

But Gelb's whole argument is premised on the notion that the US is right not to “squander” its blood and treasure on governments “not worth fighting for.”  He helpfully explains that South Vietnam was one such government.  So how could a congressional cutoff have been unconscionable?  Isn’t a cutoff exactly what Gelb is proposing in Iraq, and for exactly the same reason…?

I have to ask:  does anyone edit these things?  Subject them to even the most minimal checks for internal consistency?  Or does the Daily Beast think Leslie Gelb is one of those magical people who automatically alchemize gibberish into wisdom?

If our “good guys” can’t supply this motivation for themselves, Americans should have learned by now that we in our goodness and kindness and sacrifice cannot supply it for them. That’s the central lesson of warfare for more than half a century. That’s the essential moral Americans can’t seem to learn.

More pure American beneficence!  More foreign ingrates!

And… I’m sorry, but holy fucking shit, that is "the central lesson of warfare for more than half a century”?  That is "the essential MORAL Americans can’t seem to learn”?  That America is good and kind and sacrifices selfishly, but that’s not enough to supply foreigners with the proper motivation?

That someone can say something like this out loud while maintaining a brand as a Serious Foreign Policy Expert rather than being castigated and shunned as a moral monster is stunning.

But also, for America’s foreign policy elite, entirely routine.

Again, Washington should be prepared to help the “good guys” who are fully willing to help themselves. I’m not against that at all. I am against making these American wars because it simply does not work.

Get it?  To someone like Gelb, war is fundamentally a tool.  That in just a single instance of the use of that tool it ended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people is simply not part of Gelbian math.  It’s irrelevant, a non sequitur.  All that matters is whether we’ll be able to install a stable, pliant government.  If yes, war is good.  If no, war is bad.  That’s the whole equation.  Nothing else enters into it.  Literally nothing else.  If I’m wrong, find me a sentence, even a word, in Gelb’s piece that makes even the barest fig-leaf of a nod to the human costs of his wars.

This is part of what’s amazing about people like Gelb.  It’s not just that they’re moral monsters.  It’s that they’re so blind to their monstrousness they don’t even realize they should try to issue a weak disclaimer, obscure it even a little, inject a little deniability into the mix.

Well, why bother?  They still get published, interviewed, lauded.  Their brands are impervious.  Lacking a conscience or even minimal insight, what else would matter?

It’s fascinating to consider that following his support for the war in Iraq, Gelb admitted this:

My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.

So at some point, in a rare moment of lucidity, Gelb realized he supported something that led to the destruction of a country and the deaths of up to half a million innocent people… all so he could maintain his precious credibility.  But the insight must have been too psychologically uncomfortable to maintain.  Certainly he seems to have learned nothing lasting from it.

Before the United States jumps off another cliff, let’s simply stop and take note of the bloody realities of more than fifty years.

Well, that’s one way of putting it.  Here’s another.  How about if foreign policy “experts” like Leslie Gelb, who have never adequately apologized for or even meaningfully acknowledged their grotesque errors regarding one of the worst foreign policy catastrophes in US history—a catastrophe that destroyed a country, killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and caused immeasurable suffering—how about if people like that take a permanent vow of silence as atonement for what they’ve done?

Martin Luther King said that "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."  Obviously, the notion of spiritual death is not confined to nations, but manifests itself in individuals, too.

Gelb claims to care about "the interest of a great majority of people in these countries who suffer from these wars.”  If that were true, he would recognize that his “expertise” has harmed far, far more people than it has helped, and that the least he could do, the baseline minimally decent and dignified thing, would be to Just. Stop. Offering. His wisdom.

There really ought to be a Hippocratic Oath for Serious Foreign Policy Experts.  But there’s not.  There’s just always the next war.  The next one they’re always going to get right.

TOR-RENTIAL RAIN: A John Rain and Edward Snowden Adventure

A journalist I'm friendly with online sent me this the other day. It was inspired by a series of guest posts I did recently with the Freedom of the Press Foundation -- and, of course, by John Rain. I thought, "An assassination/martial arts/journalism mashup? All my favorite topics in one short piece of fan fic!" It's a little short for Kindle Worlds, but I told the journalist I'd be happy to post it here on deep background. And so here we are...

John Rain had only a few seconds of air left. Former Crossfire host Michael Kinsley was sucking all the oxygen out of the room as he bloviated about Glenn Greenwald's personality defects. Rain couldn't tell if he was going brain-dead from oxygen deprivation or exposure to Kinsley's toxic fatuousness. He'd have to ponder that question from the afterlife.

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5 DAYS EARLIER:

John Rain was a lethal martial artist and a pretty good lover. Or maybe it was vice versa (in the ultra-high-stakes realm of political intrigue and assassination, screwing and killing co-mingle fairly often). Regardless, both skills were in desperate need of honing. Like a sword sitting idly in its scabbard, John felt his edge beginning to dull. He hadn't made sweet sweet love in days and, worse, he hadn't snapped some asshole's neck in weeks.

Violent analogies aside, Rain couldn't afford to be choosy with his next assignment (or his next romantic encounter) if he wanted to stay rust-free. Which is why he ignored his better judgment (the one the CIA spent many years and many dollars augmenting) when he accepted a mission from the world's most shadowy private intelligence organization: the Pulitzer Committee.

The reach of the Pulitzer Committee's suction cup covered tentacles are matched only by the black inky-ness of its secrecy. Metaphorically, it was pretty much an evil squid- with one of the tentacles holding a ninja star, just because. The Pulitzers make the nefarious Military Industrial Complex look like the Breakfast Industrial Complex (the slightly-less nefarious group responsible for fooling Americans into believing Coco Puffs are part of a “balanced” breakfast). If they were ever careless enough to leave fingerprints (assuming squids can leave fingerprints), said tentacleprints would be inking up pretty much every conspiracy pie: Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz (basically everything listed in Billy Joel's “We Didn't Start the Fire)- plus the Pink Panther remake.

What the hell was Steve Martin thinking? thought Rain.

Whenever a journalist with the audacity to express deeply held personal views gets a hold of national security secrets, the Pulitzer People get together and vote on their fate. There are only two choices. Option one is to lock the journalist up and throw away the key. Option two is to award the journalist's organization a gold medal. It was never a simple choice. It wasn't up to Rain to decide- he was just the muscle. The target: Brazilian Porn-Spy Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden's handpicked chronicler of the NSA leaks.

It should have been an easy job; Greenwald was a marginal martial artist at best, though a surprisingly solid tennis player, albeit with a weak serve and no net game. While his debate skills were formidable, Greenwald's words wouldn't offer much resistance to a patented John Rain karate kick to the solar plexus. Plus Glenn was typically quite gracious when receiving accolades. All in all, an honest day's skulduggery. Only Rain didn't count on the Gray Lady getting involved.

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2 DAYS EARLIER THAN THE FIRST SCENE BUT 3 DAYS AFTER THE TIME JUMP:

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was literally a cauldron of hot rage. But literally literally, he was the middle-aged publisher of the New York Times). Word on the street was that The Guardian and The Washington Post were to receive Pulitzer prizes. The hell they were! Sulzberger was assured they were all headed to prison, leaving the Times the only game in town. His top henchperson Jill Abramson had promised him total domination of the news. If Sulzberger was known for one thing, it was his silly nickname, “Pinch.” But if he was known for a second thing, it was probably his extreme intolerance of incompetence. Pinch summoned Abramson before him.

What happened?! he snarled.

I'm sorry, milord! Abramson stammered. The Pulitzer People are so terribly mysterious! No one could have predicted they would decide to give them all prizes instead of draconian prison sentences.

Abramson had failed. Failure was bad, unacceptable even. Sulzberger activated the trap door beneath the very first female Editor-in-Chief of the history of the Times, sending her to a blazing pit of hot death/ unemployment. Good thing we never paid her commensurate with her male peers, he thought.

Sulzberger summoned his groveling third-in-command: Where is my minion, Baquet!?

Dean Baquet slithered into Sulzberger's throne room.

Yes, my liege?

Abramson failed to destroy Glenn Greenwald and to adequately address the challenges of transitioning a legacy print organization to the digital era. You are now Editor-in-Chief. How do you plan to make sure no one ever takes Glenn seriously?

It's already being taken care of. I've retained Michael Kinsley to write a review of his book.

How deliciously vicious! Also, make sure you implement all of my son's recommendations as outlined in this digital innovation report.

Of course. I will not fail you.

I hope you don't. You'll be needing a raise. How's 80 thousand dollars more than whatever Jill made?

Exceedingly generous, sir.

Ok, you twisted my arm. 100 thousand more.

***************************************************

ONE HOUR BEFORE THE INITIAL OPENING PARAGRAPH:

Rain had managed to infiltrate Greenwald's lush jungle fortress in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro. It was like Jurassic Park, only instead of velociraptors it was 12 mutts of varying degrees of manginess. But getting close to Glenn wasn't going to be easy- standing between them and the blogger's husband of nearly a decade, David Miranda. Miranda was a hulking five foot ten (and a half) tall Brazilian braggadocio with muscles and attitude to spare. What he lacked in real-life combat training he more than made up for in Call of Duty skills on the Playstation 4. A direct confrontation would be a risky proposition at best. Fortunately the CIA never taught John Rain how to fight fair. Rain glided down from his perch and knocked Miranda's legs out from under him with a sweeping karate kick. Before the behemoth could mount a counterattack, Rain had already stuffed the Brazilian's pockets with Snausages. The feral dogs piled upon Miranda in an instant. That'll keep him busy for a while.

Glenn glanced up from his computer with annoyance. He was too busy arguing with some random asshole with only 17 followers on Twitter to pay much attention to Rain, let alone the other assassin in the room...

***************************************************

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE EVENTS OF THE OPENING PARAGRAPH:

Just as Rain was losing consciousness due to Kinsley's verbal asphyxiation, a mysterious figure appeared out of the mist holding six full-disc encrypted laptops and a kitana sword.

Why is it so misty in here? John would have thought if he were inclined to point out such an odd but ultimately trivial detail.

The mystery man threw one of the laptops and struck Kinsley on the head with a glancing blow. Suddenly, everyone word out of the pompous shitheel's mouth was just random letters and numbers. The oxygen flowed back into the room and into Rain's ragged lungs.

What the fuck did you just do to him? Rain asked.

I encrypted his communications.

---BEGIN PGP MESSAGE--- hQEMA2R0hT5KocvGAQf+MWcINOqB, said Kinsley.

The mysterious figure stepped out of the mist and revealed himself to be former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Well, not exactly. Technically it was a robot with a computer monitor for a head streaming Snowden live via Google Hangout.

With Kinsley rendered as voiceless and impotent as those unwashed masses who lack the sophistication and savoir faire to read Vanity Fair, Rain was finally within striking distance of Greenwald. Like one of those cool bolos that the Ewoks used in Return of the Jedi, Rain flung the gold Pulitzer medal as hard as he could at Greenwald. Without even looking (and still fully engaged in his Twitter-spat), Glenn snatched the prize out of the air and nonchalantly tossed it to a local capuchin monkey named Fábio in exchange for an overripe banana.

Banana? Glenn offered.

No thanks, Rain replied.

I was talking to Snowden.

But he's a robot.

He's a whistleblower.

There was no upside to arguing with Glenn Greenwald. Rain moved on.

Thanks for saving my life Mr. Snowden.

You can call me Ed. I was put on this earth to kick ass and secure the fundamental right of human privacy, and I'm all out of ass. Say, would you like to learn about the benefits of the Tor browser? I've prepared a 12-minute Youtube tutorial.

I'll take a Rain check, said Rain, winking.

Rain and the Snowden-bot exchanged knowing glances and jazz music recommendations as Glenn and David riffed on their air guitars to the tune of Rage Against The Machine's “Bulls on Parade.”

THE END

Prioritizing Personalities Over a Free Press

I'm honored again to be guest-posting with the Freedom of the Press Foundation:

One of the most fascinating aspects of Glenn Greenwald’s journalism is the way it provokes various people who think of themselves as journalists to reveal their actual priorities. I wrote about this at length last week in a response to Michael Kinsley’s non-review review of Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State, arguing that Kinsley had done the world a service by behaving in exactly the servile, establishment-revering manner Greenwald chronicles in the book.

But even more fascinating and revealing than Kinsley’s own demand — that when it comes to what the press should publish, "that decision must ultimately be made by the government,” and that journalists who don’t toe the government line might need to be “locked up" — has been the reaction of Kinsley’s peers. Here are a few I’ve come across:

Jonathan Alter, MSNBC

If u missed great Kinsley review of Greenwald, one of biggest jerks in journo even if partly right.

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

Michael Kinsley deftly fillets Greenwald

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, Bloomberg

You should also read George Packer's piece on the subject

David Gregory, NBC

An interesting addition to the debate

John Harwood, CNBC and The New York Times

if you're talking about Kinsley's piece, it was a valuable screed

Charles Lane, The Washington Post

Intellectual mismatch of the century: Kinsley v. Greenwald

Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek

A thoroughly refreshing takedown of the self-righteous Greenwald by Michael Kinsley

One notable (and potentially risky) feature of Twitter is how instantly people use it to express themselves. Often there’s little thought, little filtering, between the impulse behind a tweet and the expression in the tweet itself. So it’s fascinating to see how reflexively focused these people are on Greenwald’s personality, and how (at best) unconcerned they are about a fellow “journalist” calling for a blatantly unconstitutional system of prior restraint of the press and imprisonment of journalists. Their diction is remarkably telling: the most important thing to Alter is that he thinks Greenwald is a “jerk.” What Chait finds most relevant is that he thinks Kinsley “fillets Greenwald.” Lane is concerned only with who has the bigger intellect — Greenwald or Kinsley. The piece matters to Nazaryan because it’s a "takedown of the self-righteous Greenwald.”

Alter, by the way, is the person who suggested in a Newsweek column that it was “Time to Think About Torture.” According to Alter's values, it seems, advocating torture isn’t something that makes someone a jerk. Or, whatever it means to be a jerk, in Alter’s mind it’s a significantly more reprehensible thing than a call for America to start torturing people.

So here’s the situation. A fellow journalist — in the newspaper that once published the Pentagon Papers — calls for the government to assume ultimate decision-making authority over what the media is allowed to publish, describes another journalist as a “go-between” and “perpetrator” for his reporting, and wonders aloud whether journalists who do such reporting ought to be “locked up”… and not one of these journalists finds any of it even worthy of mention. What they do find worthy of mention is...

Read the rest here and do what you can to support this excellent organization.

Servility and Sourpusses

Once again, I'm honored to be guest posting at the awesome Freedom of the Press Foundation:

Glenn Greenwald spends the last third of his excellent new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State, exposing the mentality and function of pseudo-journalists like David Gregory who are in fact better understood as courtiers to power. So it was kind of Michael Kinsley to offer himself up today as living proof of Greenwald's arguments.

In a New York Times book review, Kinsley says:

The question is who decides [what to publish]. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government.

Pause for a moment to let that sink in. How can the government have ultimate decision-making power consistent with the First Amendment with regard to the publication of leaks? As Kinsley himself goes on to say, "You can't square this circle." Indeed. Unless you believe the government should be able to impose prior restraint on the publication of anything it deems secret. Unless you want to argue that the Constitution should be amended accordingly. Unless you believe the government should have been able to prevent the publication of, say, the Pentagon Papers (it certainly tried).

By the way, that "in a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are)" is worth pausing to consider. Not just for the pretentious use of pace, which I admit is amusing, but more for the childlike notion that America is a democracy and there's nothing more to be said about it. It's almost like Kinsley has never heard of gerrymandering, or doesn't understand that when voters are no longer choosing their politicians and politicians are now choosing their voters, democracy isn't what's at work. It's almost like he's never heard of former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson's argument that modern America is best understood as an oligarchy (pro tip for Kinsley: oligarchies and democracies are not the same thing). It's almost like he's never even heard of Noam Chomsky (more on whom below — for now, suffice to say that Chomsky is great at explaining people like Kinsley, who are simultaneously sophisticated about irrelevancies and simple-minded about fundamentals).

Anyway, never fear, "No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay."

“Whatever it turns out to be”? Kinsley has already explained the “decision must ultimately be made by the government." By comparison, does it really matter what specific mechanism the government then decides on? This is a lot like conceding that the government should have the power to execute American citizens without any recognizable due process, then confining the argument merely to mechanics (Terror Tuesdays, anyone? Due Process just means there is a process that you do?). In both cases, the government’s arguments and those of its media flunkies are indistinguishable.

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(Again, see Chomsky below on the propagandistic technique of narrowing the range of acceptable debate, and then permitting vigorous discussion only within that narrow range.)

And here's a bit of the current reality of what Kinsley breezily refers to as a government "usually overprotective of its secrets..."

Read the rest at Freedom of the Press, an organization deserving of your support.

Motive, Means, and Opportunity: Why NSA Secrecy Should Worry Us All

Honored to be guest posting today at Freedom of the Press Foundation:

Even if you haven’t studied criminal law, you’ll immediately understand the concept of motive, means, and opportunity.  Motive is you wanted to kill the victim.  Means is you were holding a loaded gun. Opportunity is the victim was standing right in front of you. Without all three, you can’t have a motive-based crime.

When it comes to domestic dissent, the government always has a motive. It’s just human nature to see ourselves as noble and good and our detractors as malignant.  And indeed, the historical evidence for the proposition that governments tend to view dissenters as the enemy is overwhelming: see Cointelpro; Project Minaret; and Project Shamrock for just a few recent historical examples, or the Obama administration’s unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers for something more contemporary. Glenn Greenwald has more in an excerpt from his new book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State (#6 in the Amazon store so far, and it’s only been on sale for a few hours).

So the government will always by virtue of human nature itself have a motive to...

Read the rest here, and support this great organization anyway you can.