SoylentNews

This editor thinks about things... usually does not reach a conclusion.

Every so often an important story happens, or there are no usable submissions and an editor might elect to circumvent the normal process and set their own story for release. This goes against the normal submissions process, it is not something that happens very often. Site news is the exception to this for obvious reasons.

On the occasions we have released a story as described above -- not waiting for a submission -- there has been no complaints that I am aware of.

Honestly, I do not rush to start releasing my own stories, or to make submissions. Organic and original submissions are far better and what I really want to see more of.

What are your opinions on editors finding and releasing stories this way more often? Especially when it comes to 'breaking news', but more generally also.

[This journal entry is just that, it is not an official SoylentNews RFC or endorsed by any of the staff.]

1. Pierre Omidyar, his wife, and his top Omidyar Network director have logged in over a dozen visits to the Obama White House to visit senior officials and members of Obama’s National Security Council.

2. Between 2011-2013, Omidyar Network co-funded with USAID regime-change groups in Ukraine that organized the 2014 Maidan revolution. In India, the head of Omidyar Network’s operation, Jayant Sinha, concurrently worked for the far-right BJP Party leader Narendra Modi helping him take power in 2014, after which Modi appointed the Omidyar Network partner as his junior finance minister.

3. Pierre Omidyar is a free-market libertarian loon who told Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Younus he refused to donate to the poor unless he could personally profit off of it. A few years later, hundreds of poor rural Indians committed suicide to avoid debt collectors working for one of Omidyar’s for-profit microfinance lenders.

4. Omidyar is the chairman of eBay/PayPal, which boasts of its own private global police force that works “hand in glove with law enforcement agencies,” including the DEA, to whom eBay provides user data “on a silver platter” without subpoenas. Omidyar’s eBay executives boast of arranging thousands of arrests around the world.

5. Although Omidyar allegedly does not interfere in his journalists’ editorial, he does control all hiring and firing, budgets, approval of expenses for taxi rides and cocktails, snuffed months worth of investigative stories from leading investigative journalists, forces editorial staff to attend countless meetings, imposes task-management software on editorial, and “writes more internal messaging than anyone else.” But he does not interfere in editorial.

6. Omidyar believes that journalists should help police arrest sources who leak stolen information from private for-profit companies. Omidyar supported the persecution of the PayPal 14 because he believes that free speech rights should be subordinate to the rights of private enterprise’s mission to maximize profits for shareholders.

7. Omidyar is a committed prepper whose fear of pandemics and epidemics is so great, he has invested large sums into ensuring his own personal food supply, and has buried several months’ worth of food in storage facilities in properties around the world, from Hawaii to Montana, Nevada, and an island off the coast of France. Omidyar keeps a private French jet, and pays a private security detail made up of former Secret Service and State Department officials to help him survive his apocalyptic fantasies.

8. In 2007, Omidyar invested in Maui Land & Pineapple, which was subsequently accused of being part of the largest human trafficking operation ever busted by US federal officials.

9. Omidyar loved Second Life so much he invested in Linden Lab and communicated with its CEO through his Second Life character, “Kitto Mandala,” a tattooed black man who rode a Segway and wore a T-shirt that read “KISS ME I’M LAWFUL EVIL.”

10. Omidyar was investigated by Congress and sued for secretly “spinning stocks” — insider trading on IPOs — with Goldman Sachs. Omidyar was also accused by Craigslist and a Delaware judge of stealing the “secret sauce of Craigslist’s success” and passing those secrets to eBay in violation of contracts, fiduciary duties and securities laws.

Bonus: Pierre Omidyar arranged an interview with two “fiercely independent” journalists on Omidyar’s payroll at The Intercept, in which he revealed to them what tea he drinks in the morning. When asked to list his daily reading habits, The Intercept came in at number five, lower down on his reading list than the New York Times.

Don't give me that do-good, good bullshit.

You can't possibly wrap your mind around how much damage US Defense (sic) and the Pentangle Church of Death is doing to the world and humanity, but you can get a handle on how much it's costing every American taxpayer.

There are 100,000 bank branches in the USA, more or less, and the average bank robbery is $10,000. So if every branch of every bank across the USA was robbed, every day, that would be $1 BILLION a day, or $260 BILLION a year, if every bank branch in every State across the US was robbed, every single work day.

$260 BILLION, keep that in your head.

Don Rumsfeld 'lost track of' $2,300 BILLION during his two terms at Defense (sic) and Panetta 'went missing' $1,000 BILLION during his one term, or about $250 BILLION a year goes running out the bank vault doors of the Pentagon, AWOL, over the razor wire, every single year since the Hanging Chad Coup of 2000!

The equivalent of every bank branch across the US being robbed, every work day, forever.

I don't spend much money, and I seldom give any to online people. But - yeah, I'm aware that Soylent is in need of money. Then I saw it - an UNOBTAINIUM KEY CHAIN!! I'll be the first kid on my block to acquire unobtainium! I'll save my pennies and nickles, and discretely order a few more of these over the next months - and I can then build my UNOBTAINIUM BOMB!

Ooooh, I haven't been this excited since I ordered that little battery powered submarine when I was six or seven years old!

Someone nicely gifted me a subscription to Soylent, in the last day or so. I just noticed, so sorry if there's a delay in ack.

Thanks!

I'm just going to leave this here ...

Server: Apache/2.2.29 (Unix) DAV/2 mod_apreq2-20090110/2.8.0 mod_perl/2.0.8 Perl/v5.20.1
X-Powered-By: slashcode 15.01
X-Fry: I'm never gonna get used to the thirty-first century. Caffeinated bacon?

and just say I'm a certifiable madman.

I've uploaded a new book to mcgrewbooks.com. Edgar E. Smith was a well known science fiction writer known as "the father of space opera", and Doctor Smith was a food engineer in his other life. The novel I've uploaded is Triplanetary, first published in serial form in Amazing Stories in 1934.

Some of the dialogue is a bit juvenile, but it would make a great movie.

A CSX train carrying crude oil has derailed and is on fire. At least one house has been burned and it's been reported a railcar fell into the Kanawha River.

I've started work (and nearing completion) on a new Linux distro for i586 and up with 64MB of RAM. It's called Night Linux. The origin of the name is a topic for another day.

Night Linux is a small, ~20MB CLI only distro intended for system rescue/utility purposes.
It's the kind of thing you make bootable on your MP3 player to keep with you in a pinch.

Among its features are: Epoch Init System, elinks browser, ircii IRC client, support for mounting and creating/repairing EXT2/3/4, BTRFS, NTFS, and FAT12/16/32 filesystems, ms-sys to repair Windows boot records, GNU parted, syslinux/extlinux along with MBRs in /usr/lib/syslinux for bootloaders, Bricktick brick breaker game, busybox userland, bash 4.3.x, nano editor, OpenSSH, squashfs tools, and more.

Night Linux is based on bleeding edge code with a 3.19 kernel and glibc 2.21.
I haven't published source yet, (waiting to create a project page) but if you want it, I'll provide it upon request.

Get the first alpha here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9h3wa5ylczjrrt7/NightLinux-Alpha1.i586.iso?dl=1

Feedback welcome.

I've read books accidentally, meaning to read a single chapter and winding up reading it in one setting, but I've never started writing one accidentally.

Until now.

Tired of editing Random Scribblings and Voyage to Earth and Other Stories (Formerly titled "Mars Bars"), I thought I'd look for another science fiction novel in the public domain a little less ancient than The Time Machine to add to my web site.

I didn't find one, so decided to just make a book of public domain short stories by the 20th century greats. I found a LOT, and started assembling a book. Somehow, I wound up adding commentary and thought "Hey! New book!"

Then I discovered that one of the short stories wasn't so short -- in fact, it was a full blown novel. So for the last several days I've been formatting it to put on my web site. E.E. "Doc" Smith's Triplanetary will be posted in a few days.

I'll let you know when it's there. I guess I'm working on three books again. The collection I'm working on is tentatively titled "Yesterday's Tomorrow".