Category Archives: Education

UPDATE II: Publishing Books In The Age Of The Internet, Pathological PC and Unprecedented laziness (Hire Your Own PR)

Education, English, General, Ilana Mercer, Internet, Journalism, Literature, Political Economy

The welcome news comes that Karen De Coster is publishing a book.

A mutual friend, author Rob Stove, has offered Karen some advice and posted it on her heavily trafficked Facebook Wall.

I counseled differently:

“As someone who has done every bit of heavy lifting for my last book—quite successfully, I might add—I have to disagree somewhat with Rob (who advises writing for prestigious publications on the topic, first).

The traditional, stuffy, staid publishing world is dying (yippee). I read the once-brave TLS. All new writers have to be (it would appear) people of color and/or those with no Y chromosome. The only writing worth reading vis-a-vis these new writers is the superb writing by the TLS’s increasingly PC reviewers (who try to be kind to the pig-ignorant, boring, PC writers they have to review).

In any case, you sell books from a platform. Mine was developed over almost 15 years as a weekly columnist.

Karen De Coster writes for a very large site, LRC, with a dedicated, niche readership. She manages social media with skill and has thousands of FB friends (whom she will have to instruct to “Like” her book and display it on their FB pages, if they want to keep her FB company. Here is my Facebook Friendship Policy).

That’s the future of publishing. Who cares if some pompous scribe in a dying publication (check its Alexa rank for stage of rigor) gives one a good review? Rob Stove—he edited The Cannibal; hire a good editor. We all need one—was mentioned by the New Yorker, and other prestigious publications. To this not all of us can aspire. However, were Rob to write a book about politics or culture, he would have to forget about future mention.

Back to my point: Karen can sell lots of books if she publishes the book herself (How much would you rather earn? 17%-50% royalties or 100%, all the more so when you, the writer, do all the work). She can go the CreateSpace route or with her own label. She then uses her platform on LRC to sell to an already interested audience. She also promotes her book on Facebook, via ads and by requiring all friends to “Like” and display book on their Fav. page. Even big names are publishing their own books (see David Frum’s new book. I followed it from CNN).

A small publisher does nothing for a writer except deplete him/her. There are a handful of large publishers worth considering for the TV PR they can generate. This writer (me) manages every aspect of the project—social media, fan page and website designs (I pay the attendant bills too, so…), Amazon page management, all writing, limited PR, etc. That’s the route to getting books read by the public in the age of the Internet (without which the true rebels would be destined for obscurity). Books published by smaller, if respectable, publishers are like the proverbial tree felled in a faraway wood. Almost no one reads them. (Check their profile on Amazon. You’ll see.)

For example, “The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism” is written by a man with the “right” kind of name (non-English/non-Western): Hamid Dabashi. It was published on June 5, 2012 by Zed Books, a print that met the Times Literary Review’s standards.

It’s Amazon rank: #1,614,336 in Books. If you are new to book marketing, that’s abysmal.

(Btw, if you don’t market on Amazon, you’re retarded.)

On the bright side, by the number of reviews “The Arab Spring” got, we can tell that at least one person has read what Dabashi has to say. Conversely, and pessimistically, “0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.” In other words, so far, nobody gives a tinker’s toss what Dabashi’s single reviewer had to say about Dabashi’s latest work.

UPDATE I (10/30): Here’s another TLS “winner,” published (November 1, 2011) by Encounter (who refused the well-motivated proposal that became The Cannibal).

In Money In A Free Society, Tom Congdon touts every form of macroeconomic statism. His approving TLS reviewer mentions the “Austerians” (very bad) but says nothing about the Austrians.

Amazon ranks Money In A Free Society at #560,109 in Books. Zero reviews. Who pays these people?

UPDATE II (Nov. 3): HIRE YOUR OWN PR.

Unless you can get a book deal with one of the major big publishers (try), publish yourself. You’ll be smacking yourself if you don’t. To repeat: 15% royalties (standard industry fare) vs. 100%? Case closed. All the more so since small publishers do nothing for you. Unless your publisher is prepared to invest a few thousand for a few weeks of TV and media blitz. However, you could buy such PR yourself privately. Why hand over your money to a 2nd party to hire a 3rd? If you control the purse strings (as disposable income dictates), hire PR directly, to get on the main shows.

Want to have a frothy a day? Go with a small publisher. They suck. These are dominated by errant youth (or hippie elders who defer to such youth), who don’t have a work ethic or a brain cell to rub between them. No one has taught America’s young how to work professionally; how to conduct themselves with respect to author and contract and execute duties properly: If you want them done to standards, you’ll be inputting info and updating your Amazon page and other Internet displays of your product.

Individuals such as Karen are coming from an accounting career. They work alongside people who have serious degrees. The writing profession, on the other hand, is dominated by individuals who are repositories for postmodern education and values (even when they are libertarian). Don’t go there, unless it’s with a powerful, large publisher.

UPDATE II: A Statistic That Tells A Lot About America’s Youth (Deifying Kids)

Economy, Education, Etiquette, Family, Labor, Technology

I’ve said it often: “The millennial generation will be another nail in the coffin of flailing American productivity.”

Via the senior producer at Varney & Co (Jake Novak) comes this startling statistic: “70 percent of all the jobs filled since Jan. 2010 have been filled by people 55 and older.”

Imparted in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” what I’ve gleaned from my sources in the high-tech industry, by way of an example, is that this “workforce—comprised as it is of local and outsourced talent—is manned, generally, by older people with advanced engineering degrees. The hi-tech endeavor is all about (older) Americans and Asians uniting to supply young, twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.”

UPDATE I (9/27): Deifying Kids. Excellent point is made by Tim Malone, on the Facebook thread. How often does one meet upstanding middle-aged parents, and in waltzes The Kid, who bears no resemblance to the parents in terms of manners, work ethic, alertness, etc. Malone makes the best point ever, and that what must be implicated is liberal (and I include most conservatives here, other than hardcore homeschoolers) progressive, child-centered upbringing, in which the parent cowers before the deity, The Child. Moreover, I so often see hardworking parents who seem to think that making the child learn what they do (be it bird-keeping or working on car engines) is below the miserable child’s dignity. Why do you think “your teenager can’t use a hammer”?

UPDATE II: Thanks to his old-school dad, who insisted that he hang out in the garage, doing every single thing the old man did there—from fine wood-work to fixing plumbing and installing window frames—my old man does everything in the house. Saves tons of money; is done to perfection, but it does mean that renovations take years. So what? Check out “the shower that Sean built,” his first tiling job ever:

UPDATED: ‘The Child’ Was Not Born In A Barn & Was No Brainiac (The Belated ‘Scoop’)

Barack Obama, Education, History, Intelligence, Journalism, Media

He was a child of privilege, not of hardship. He lived in Jakarta’s most exclusive suburb. His white grandmother—whom he once tarred with the taint of racism and with whom he lived in Hawaii—was a bank vice president. She sent him to an exclusive private school. Later on he was a shoo-in at Columbia and Harvard Law School. During his 12 years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Law School, his student-approval ratings were low. In fact, he was one of the lowest ranked professors in his last 5 years at the university. As we already know, “The Child,” Barack Obama, left no record of legal scholarly writings.

Four years after his election—and a week since CNN’s Jessica Yellin revealed nothing but her own adoration in “Obama Revealed,” an agonizing hour with the president—the Washington Examiner investigates. The belated report will be out tomorrow.

Via Fox News:

UPDATE (9/20): As promised, The Obama You Don’t Know, a belated ‘scoop’ by The Washington Examiner.

What’s Next? Lobotomy for Asian Overachievers?

Affirmative Action, BAB's A List, Education, Intelligence, Multiculturalism, Political Correctness, Race, Racism

What’s Next? Lobotomy for Asian Overachievers?
By Myron Pauli

Fairfax County, Va., is one of the wealthiest counties in America – naturally, right outside Washington DC (as Ilana would say, home of the “Oink Sector”). Nevertheless, a shocking article exposed rampant racism even in such an elite location! It turns out that a group of conspirators known as “Asians” are taking over the local magnet school, Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology.

The racist youths are engaging in such underhanded techniques as: (1) studying, (2) working hard, (3) getting good grades, (4) learning, and (5) competing. In fact, Thomas Jefferson High School’s mean SAT scores are 65 percent above the Yale University freshman class! The Asian conspirators now take up 64 percent of Jefferson’s freshman class! As a result, blacks are not being admitted to the school which US NEWS called # 1 in the country!

Naturally, the mentality is to view achievement as some zero-sum game, where the more the Asian kids study, the worse off the black kids become! Presumably, giving every Asian kid a lobotomy would make blacks and Hispanics all smarter! As they say, in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is King!

Meanwhile, as I write this, there is a nearby school that is 99.6 percent black – Ballou High School – the nearest high school to the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL):

NRL even has an outreach program with Ballou. In spite of that, no Ballou student has EVER passed an Advanced Placement test. Apparently the Ballou students are suffering because Ballou is “not a good school.” [Don’t you love those circular arguments, Myron?—IM] I guess Jefferson has better teachers, windows, chairs, bathrooms, etc. (actually, it is a very old school building). So I would suggest transferring the Asian racists to Ballou, and the local DC black children to Jefferson and see how those kids do one year later – after all, it is the “school” that is important and not the child (or his culture or home environment).

My speculation is that the result would be shootings at Jefferson, and that Ballou would become the best public school in the Metropolitan DC area (even if the teachers stink, the kids will just look up information online and study on their own).

The NAACP, of course, which is suing, is permanently locked into a mindset that we are still living in the 1920’s when lynching and Jim Crow were rampant. Perhaps the education of the appropriate minorities (as Orwell would put it, all minorities are equal but some minorities are more equal than others) can be improved by Congress – clearly the Civil Rights Acts have not been enough but we could bring back the Chinese Exclusion Act.

There is, naturally, a severe penalty for schools that prefer scholarship over “diversity”. Take Caltech, which admits vast numbers of Asians.

According to the New York Times, “Its baseball team has lost 227 games in a row and its women’s volleyball team has lost all 168 of its conference games. In 2011, the men’s water polo team snapped a seven-year winless drought, and the men’s basketball team ended a 310-game conference losing streak.”

Ironically, the NAACP, while living in the mindset of the 1920’s might have a hard time proving discrimination. In 1924, Virginia passed the “Racial Integrity Act” which, by law, established only two races, white and “colored.”

It turns out that all those Nehrus, Tanakas, Moons, Nguyens, and Wongs are really “coloreds,” and therefore the actual distribution at Thomas Jefferson High School comes out as 74 percent colored and 26 percent white, even though the white school-aged population is nearly 50%. Clearly the school system is discriminating against whites!

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Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism.