Fake news, fake Right

The cucks are really, really desperate to keep the Littlest Chickenhawk viable:

I spend a few weeks every year teaching high-school and college students, and in my interactions with young people in and around universities I have noticed a trend. After class, at meals, and in walks around campus, the politically engaged students invariably ask me the same question: What do I think of Ben Shapiro?

Nor am I alone. Recently Eliza Gray had a similar experience while reporting on young conservatives in the age of President Trump. “Oddly enough,” she wrote in the Washington Post, “the person who appeared to be doing the most to shape the thinking of the new generation of Republican leaders was not the president of the United States—but Ben Shapiro, a 34-year-old anti-Trump conservative pundit who came up unprompted in more than a third of my conversations.” Again and again, students turn exchanges involving politics and ideology into discussions of Shapiro, his media presence, his ideas, and his mode of discourse.

As it turns out, I happen to think well of Shapiro, and admire not only his intelligence but also the way he is modeling political debate for an audience of millions. (We’ve corresponded once or twice but have never met.) More important, though, is what Shapiro’s celebrity tells us about the changing nature of media, the emerging sensibility of conservative youth, and indeed the future of American conservatism itself.

Shapiro owes a lot to social media. His appearances on Fox News Channel are not the cause but the consequence of his fame. It is by searching YouTube that teenagers come across his debates with campus lefties, his speeches, his appearances on like-minded podcasts, and his extended interviews with friends and other members of the so-called intellectual dark web.

The idea that Ben Shapiro is shaping ANYONE'S thinking, let alone the coming Republican leadership, is downright hilarious. The trend is clearly moving well away from his outdated open borders, free trade, Israel-first nonsense. Ben Shapiro may well be "the future of conservatism" because conservatism is dead. The cuckservatives fantasize about Generation Shapiro, but what they will get is Generation Zyklon.

As with the dog that didn't bark in the night, what is significant is the fact that they have literally no one else. All of the genuine intellectual energy is on the nationalist Right. Jordan Peterson is a propped-up fraud. Sam Harris is a recycled, propped-up midwit. Shapiro has been propped up and pushed on conservatives since he was in junior high despite this being the quality of his political analysis.

No gammas

Okrane S. is now banned from commenting here.

Okrane S. August 04, 2018 7:50 AM
You seem weak and angry. Are these some of those nice Christian values you preach?

I neither know nor care who is the target of this comment, but this is exactly the sort of passive-aggressive gamma bullshit that is no longer tolerated here. If you're an emotionally incontinent gamma male, just don't try to comment here. It's not going to go well for you and you will end up being banned sooner or later.

Read and learn, or read and go away and snark about it somewhere else, but either way, your comments are neither wanted nor permitted here.

Everybody's Alt-Right now

I told you it was inevitable. But for the time being, conservatives are still determined to try to hold on to their bowties and good opinion of themselves as fine upstanding individuals who are above getting their hands dirty by actually laying hands on the enemy:

Ask any conservative hate-listed by the SPLC (me, for example) what it’s like to work for decades to achieve a successful career and then be labeled a menace to society based on some left-wing ideologue’s interpretation. The Left has been smearing the Right this way for so long — they did it to Barry Goldwater, they did it Ronald Reagan, they do it to every conservative — that we scarcely even notice it anymore.

What has happened in recent years is that the Right has begun to fight fire with fire, and the Left calls this “harassment.” This was the basic story of #GamerGate: Videogame enthusiasts had grown tired of their hobby being targeted by “social justice warriors” (SJWs) and decided to fight back. Defending themselves against the organized lobby of politically correct censors and critical-theory busybodies (e.g., Anita Sarkeesian), the #GamerGate crew were accused of “misogyny” and “haraassment.” And this exposes the double-standard: When the Left attacks the videogame industry, this is “activism”; when gamers fight back, this is “harassment.” Likewise, when left-wing outfits use the past words of conservatives to brand them racist, this is “research”; when the tables are turned, liberals call it “trolling.”

As John Sexton at Hot Air notes, the Left is defending Sarah Jeong’s anti-white hatred as simply “the way the social justice left talks”:

“White people” is a shorthand in these communities, one that’s used to capture the way that many whites still act in clueless and/or racist ways. It’s typically used satirically and hyperbolically to emphasize how white people continue to benefit (even unknowingly) from their skin color, or to point out the ways in which a power structure that favors white people continues to exist.

Having engaged in a bit of satirical hyperbole myself, I call bulls–t here. It’s a blatant double-standard — one rule for liberals, another rule for everybody else — that permits “the social justice left” to engage in blatant hate-mongering, while conservatives are compelled to tiptoe carefully and watch every word lest they accidentally say something that might somehow be interpreted as “racism.” What conservatives need to do is to start calling the Left’s rhetoric what it is: hate propaganda.

That actually made me laugh out loud. I like Robert Stacey McCain, his intentions are undoubtedly pure, but like most conservatives, he simply has no clue that there isn't a silent majority that is going to gravitate to whichever side can present itself as the least hateful. Calling the Left's rhetoric "hate propaganda" is going to be even less effective than "Dems R the Real Racists" was.

What conservatives need to do, what they will eventually be forced to do whether they want to or not, is to embrace science, history, and reality, and finally accept that blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, Indians, and Jews are NEVER, EVER going to take their side or align with their idiotic, idealistic universalism. What conservatives need to do is accept that for better or for worse, they are the White American party now, and pursue their own interests accordingly. All anyone has to do to understand how any immigrant interest group is reliably going to vote is to look at how that interest group prefers to live in its own country. The dirt is not magic.

This really isn't that hard a concept to grasp. Immigrants don't move to the USA in order to live like White Americans any more than Californians move to Texas in order to live like Texans.

GenCon ignores violent attack on attendee

It's really rather remarkable that the idiot SJWs who now run GenCon think that they can somehow make a violent criminal assault that took place in public disappear from the public awareness:

The story around the assault of The Quartering’s Jeremy Hambly appears to be getting worse. The promoters of the Gen Con are now silencing attendees who are fearful for their safety and are questioning Gencon’s silence over the assault. In fact, they are actively crushing ANY discussion on the manner.

They are specifically using 1984 style tactics on their Twitch channel. They first began giving users short bans if they brought up the assault, but then resorted to completely wiping their stream chat and limited it apparently to people who have been following for three months. Thanks to several Twitter users proof of the bans are clear. One user who was watching the GenCon live feed was told they were banned because “this isn’t the place to discuss this.”

While GenCon appears to be banning people and silencing those asking about the alleged assault against The Quartering, they have remained silent about his alleged assaulter despite their own Ethics & Conduct stating that “Violating any federal, state or local laws, facility rules or convention policies … constitute grounds for explusion from the convention without refund.”

In fact, their policy instructs people to “seek out Gen Con Event Staff or Gen Con Security to report the incident.”

Given they still have not released a statement regarding one of their one exhibitors being accused of assault one has to wonder if Gen Con’s silence means other attendees could be at risk. Are they protecting a client who has a booth over attendees?

Or could their silence be politically motivated? If you happen to think the wrong way, well then it appears Gencon won’t do its due diligence when it comes to any possible violence you might face.

It would appear that The Quartering's mistake was to fail to identify as female. GenCon will leap in with guns blazing if a hapless dork stares at a female cosplayer for two seconds too long, but a violent attack on an attendee by an exhibitor goes unremarked. That's not a viable strategy.

Hillary's SECOND server

This could be significant. Apparently Hillary had TWO mail servers, and the FBI never reported the second one or took it away from her. The more we learn, the more corrupt and illegal the actions of the Clinton campaign appear to be.

And, of course, the more obvious the corruption of the FBI becomes.

Pretty much

It's not his fault. He was provoked.

NEW YORK, NY—Despite withering criticism of The New York Times’ recent decision to hire famed Communist leader and murderer of millions Joseph Stalin to the newspaper’s editorial board, The Times has defended Stalin and the move to allow him a platform to voice his far-left policies.

Upon the announcement of Stalin’s hire, thousands of readers pointed out that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of up to 25 million people. But on Thursday, The Times released a statement saying that editors were aware of Stalin’s sordid past before hiring him, and that it would not be bowing to “right-wing outrage” over “just a few million deaths.”

“His nationality as a Russian and his identity as a Communist have made him the target of much online harassment,” The Times wrote. “For a period of time, he responded to criticism by lashing out, fighting fire with fire by executing dissenters and implementing policies that sent countless people to their deaths. He now sees this only fueled the rage against him and was not entirely appropriate.”

The Times also wrote that Stalin has promised not to continue to kill people while he is employed by the paper. “He is an important part of the voice of our organization,” they wrote.

Fake Conservative commentators Ben Shapiro and David French both defended the new hire, pointing out that "as a private corporation, it is entirely within the rights of The New York Times to employ mass murderers" if the news organization "feels that will enhance their bottom line."

The necessity of trade war

Greg Richards explains why Trump knows the trade war must be fought, and better yet, can easily be won.

Why is this chart important?

It is a death sentence for America.

Although it is a single series of data, the chart is essentially in two parts, split in the year 2000.  There is no manipulation to achieve this effect.  This is how the data lay out, which is why this chart is so significant.

From 1968 into 2000, you see beautiful, real-world steady growth (i.e., "steady" interspersed with recessions).  The red trendline is a trendline of constant percentage growth year to year (i.e., exponential).  When you calculate it, it turns out to be 6% per year.  This is roughly twice GDP annual growth over the same period.  There is no specific significance to that 2X factor except that we would expect capital spending to grow faster than the economy as a whole, as, in fact, it did.

Why is this growth in capital spending important?  Even in our increasingly service-oriented economy, it is capital spending – the stock of capital equipment – that sustains our standard of living.  Healthy capital spending is critical to – really identical with – a thriving economy.  This is why the flat capital spending that America has experienced since 2000 is so grave a condition.

American Thinker readers will be surprised to learn that they are now the only people in the country, aside from this author, who have seen this chart.  I could not be more serious when I say that.

Economists do not think of capital spending in terms of real-world numbers.  They think of it as a concept in their models that self-equilibrates.  There isn't an economist from Harvard to Stanford or anywhere in between who knows this chart.  Believe me: I have worked with these people.  If you as a reader are in business or in academe, try me out.

The only person in public life who understands this chart is Donald Trump.  I cannot say he has literally looked at it, but he understands it.

Note that we are not talking about the "creative destruction of capitalism" here.  We are not talking about no longer making buggy whips.  We are talking about the staples of a modern economy, many of which we no longer have the capital equipment to manufacture.

We were the only country to emerge from World War II stronger than when we went into it, and our relative strength at the end of World War II was immeasurable.  It became our policy, and then our unconscious attitude, to "help other countries get back on their feet."  This attitude became a permanent part of our trade policy-making, wherein we essentially opened our markets to other countries while accepting that their markets were closed to us.

The chart shows that our ability to sustain the Lord Bountiful approach to trade ended forever in 2000, although nobody in power saw it until Donald Trump came along in 2016.

If one looks at debt growth, one will actually achieve a deeper understanding, but this will do for non-economists. The most important part of the article is this section, which I have been trying to explain to people in multiple venues with varying degrees of success:

Economists think mercantilism can never work, thus Trump attacking it as practiced by China is a fool's errand or worse.  This is based on the early 19th-century Theory of Comparative Advantage developed by David Ricardo.  It states that among trading parties, even if one party's production costs are greater in all goods than the other party's, the first party should focus on those goods where it has a comparative advantage – i.e., where its own cost of production is lower.  If the two countries then trade, both will improve their welfare.  If, under these conditions, a country practices mercantilism, it impoverishes itself.  This is a substantial insight.

But it depends on a key assumption: that capital is fixed.  Ricardo's example was that the British should raise sheep and the French should make wine, and they should trade these goods with each other.  The example was based on climate, the ultimate in fixed capital.

With capital mobile, as it is now, mercantilism works.  By forcing a trading partner to move its assets, technology, know-how, intellectual property, and R&D to the mercantilist country in order to participate in its market, a country can build itself up at the expense of its trading partner.  Following its accession to the WTO, China has been strip-mining the U.S. economy of high value-added industries and high-wage jobs by doing this.

The USA can only benefit from a trade war. That, of course, is why everyone around the world is freaking out. The genie is out of the bottle and it is becoming more and more apparent to everyone that the economic foundation for the globalist world order has not only failed, but was built on intellectual sand from the very start.

Evolution evaluated

Fred Reed is among the growing number of evolution skeptics and he answers responses to his recent column on the subject:

Recently I wrote a column about the theory of Intelligent Design, which holds that that life, both in its origins and its changes over time, are the result of design instead of chance. Several hundred comments and emails arrived, more than I could read. This was not surprising as there seems to be considerable public interest in the question, while a virulent political correctness prevents discussion in most forums. In particular the major media prevent mention of Intelligent Design except in derogatory terms.

Interesting to me at any rate was that the tone of response was much more civil and thoughtful than it was say, a decade ago.

A fair few respondents quoted the Bible. I wondered why the Bible and not the Koran or Bhagavad Gita. The Bible seems to me the chaotic literature of a barbaric tribe and characterized by morally unpleasant stories. Why it is thought to have any relevance to abiogenesis is not clear to me.

Some readers, quoting Carl Sagan, said approximately, “Fred, an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence to support it.” I don’t disagree. The claim that ocean water will in time produce Manhattan seems to me sufficiently extraordinary to require extraordinary evidence. So far, there is none. Evolutionists have not shown that sea water can produce any life at all, much less the New York Philharmonic.

Other readers insist that Intelligent Design is not scientific. If not, so what? The question should be not whether it is scientific but whether it is true. What an ideological group calling themselves scientists believe is not a valid test of truth. When I was in the eighth grade, I watched Crusader Rabbit on television. This is not science, yet it is true.

If science deals with the reproducible, then paleontology is not science, as neither is the chance creation of life, which has not proved reproducible. If science must make predictions, then physiology is not science, being entirely descriptive. If science is the study of the quantifiable, then evolution isn’t. What is the unit of selective pressure?

Fred has landed on precisely the aspect of evolutionary theory that made me into a strong TE(p)NSBMGDaGF skeptic. What many people who have not thought seriously about the issue don't realize is that biologists are literally so stupid, and so innumerate, and so illogical, that they don't understand the problems that quantification creates for their many unfounded assumptions.

You may recall that I confused a number of evolution advocates by asking them a very simple question: what is the average rate of evolutionary mutation. The problem was not that they could not provide a precise answer, although the fact that they couldn't even work out a possible range as well as I could was troubling. The problem was that they did not understand that the question was a) entirely legitimate, b) the answer to it can theoretically be worked out, and worst of all, c) there ABSOLUTELY MUST be a precise answer to it.

What their confusion indicated to me, and what I later confirmed by analyzing undergraduate, graduate, and PhD programs, is that biologists are still essentially butterfly collectors. They are the least intelligent of the STEM field graduates and most of them have no ability whatsoever to even begin to grasp the relevant issues involved, let alone successfully address them.

For example, it is particularly amusing to note that I have encountered people who sneer at the idea of intelligent design while simultaneously admitting to being philosophically open to the idea that the world is some sort of digital simulation. I can't even bring myself to point out to them that if the world is a digital simulation, this strongly implies that the intelligent design crowd was correct all along.

False flag averted

I told you the media was going to stick to the GG-Pizzagate narrative and try to stage a "violent" attack by "dangerous Q cultists" in order to disqualify and discredit the Qanon movement. But apparently, it's happening already. NeonRevolt has the details about what happened behind the scenes at the Wilkes-Barre Trump rally:

Intel from 2anon friends at rally tonight.

1. CNN 4 AM talking points stated videos ready of POTUS recognizing Q
2. chatter suggested a disturbance would be recorded victimizing CNN by Q
3. Secret Service noticed Q sign saying just the plan instead of trust the plan
4. Two individuals with large Q signs very visible reference to the plan wrong refused to give up signs when asked

Moved off camera by SS then removed from premises

Anyway, now you know the media’s setup: they’re attempting to frame the #QArmy as violent and dangerous, and then air that footage nonstop across the nation to try to get the normies all riled up.

This won't be their last attempt. The false narrative is all set to push "journalists are victims of the evil Q". It's Fake News in operation.

The ride never ends.

The Public Space

At long last, I am doing as more than a few people have requested and appearing on The Public Space with Jean-François Gariépy. You can watch it here.

Response and Reprisal

I was asked to give a statement about the attack on Alt-Hero by Dynamite Comics's Atari's Centipede #4 by Bounding Into Comics:

Vox Day and Arkhaven Comics, who were insulted in Dynamite Comics and Atari’s Centipede #4 by writer Max Bemis, artist Eion Marron, and letterer Taylor Esposito has issued an exclusive response.

The comic insulted Day and Arkhaven Comics’ ongoing series Alt Hero by calling it “a joke” in an alien language.

Vox Day issued a statement regarding the insult in Centipede #4:

“We’re not even remotely surprised to see that our lesser competitors are frightened of what Arkhaven, Dark Legion, and Alt-Hero represent. Radical change is coming to the comics industry, and it is coming faster than they believe possible.”

He also wanted to share the cover for Alt-Hero #3, which is expected to be released this upcoming Monday, August 6th.

Have a look at it there. Warning, some may find it... triggering. But the attack on Alt-Hero was pretty mild compared to the very nasty, and personal, attack on Arkhaven and Castalia House author Jon Del Arroz.

It's not racist if it's anti-white

Civic nationalists and cuckservatives are reeling at the discovery that Dems R the Real Racists doesn't work:

The New York Times announced Monday it hired left-wing writer Sarah Jeong, who has a long history of racist tweets, to be the lead technology writer for the newspaper’s editorial board. Jeong repeatedly posted racist statements via her Twitter account.

The announcement of Jeong’s hiring comes after The New York Times fired its previous brand new hire for the same technology writer position last February because she “retweeted a racial slur.”

Far from merely retweeting a single offensive post, Jeong likened an entire race of people to “goblins,” compared their conversations to animals urinating, and declared that skin color entirely determined whether an individual was awful or not.

In one tweet from 2014, Jeong wrote that white people are “only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”

“Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” she wrote in another. “The science is indisputable,” she wrote. “Theoretically you can’t be racist against white people,” she wrote in a separate post before claiming that white people smell like dogs.

You go, Asian girl! But Miss Leong will have to admit that even if white people smell like dogs, at least their breath doesn't smell like Baked Labrador.

Attack on Alt-Hero

Or could it be secret support?

Max Bemis, Eoin Marron, and letterer Taylor Esposito referenced your Alt-Hero Comic in Centipede #4 from Dynamite Comics. Using an alien language, they wrote "Alt-Hero is a joke." You can see it in the third panel. It's easier to read if it's inverted.

It's ironic that all of the comics pros are afraid to criticize it for fear of making it more popular, and to support it for fear of coming under SJW attack.

Jeff Bezos's favorite fake conservative

You guessed it, it's the New York Times-endorsed controlled opposition figure, (((Ben Shapiro))).

Alexa Names Her Favorite Conservative Pundit: Ben Shapiro.

The responses by Instapundit readers demonstrate that conservatives are finally seeing through the little fraud. These are all just from the initial page of comments.

Basil Makedon
This endorsement is enough for me to banish Shapiro to the outer-darkness. I don't actually see the fascination with him, honestly. He's not nearly as clever as he (and his fans) believes. I went to Law School with at least a half-dozen short, Jewish guys who were twice as smart, more conservative and talked at least as fast. Most of his "debates" are with half-witted children who have had indoctrination rather than education. The whole "Intellectual Dark Web" thing is such a farce. All of those people -- save Shapiro -- are Leftists, shivved by Blessed Hussein's children. Shapiro is the lone exception, which of course makes me suspicious.

jubadoobai
Alexa likes the chipmunk on helium? Fix her taste buds, Bezos. Sigh. I used to like him, too. Once upon a time.

Carey J
It’s only because Shapiro writes for NeverTrump Review.

 Kyle Smith
The highly politicized Alexa answers mean that someone works full time politicizing Alexa and is paid to to do that. They hate average Americans and cannot help themsevles. Every “power” they get they turn to politics and hate.

Botched_Lobotomy
You could make an argument that Shapiro is a classical liberal based on his defense of free speech as long as he likes the person who's speech is being restricted. You'd be wrong but you could at least make a good faith argument. In no way is he a conservative.

WanderingWonderer
Ben Shapiro has publicly stated that "racists" should be hunted down and hounded from their places of employment. Naturally he's all about Israel staying jewish by any means necessary but 'doesn't care' about America's demographics. Ben Shapiro has also defended James Gunn's "jokes" about pedophilia. It just goes to show who he likes and whose side he is on.

BillyS
Ben is the controlled opposition. They have to have some opposition, but they reign him in very well. He was just defending a pedophile recently after all!

Richard Warren
No surprise that the Approved Opposision (TM) is the approved opposition, except perhaps to that Driscoll guy.

JimboFlex
A member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” is Jeff Bezos favorite conservative? How can this be? We couldn’t possibly have been sold a false bill of goods!

jckluge
Ben is a complete putz who would run conservatism as a completely ineffective opposition if he could. I think Alexa is just following orders here.

willbest
Why would Alexa need to go to reeducation camp for picking one of the NYT approved voices of the conservative movement?

Vizzini
No, Bezos smiles. The Littlest Chickenhawk is the controlled opposition. All is proceeding in accordance with Bezos' plan.

dougf43
Well of course Benny is her favourite. Why would he not be. Seemingly a combative worthy adversary, but in reality, under the surface, nobody to worry about at all. Because what Ben really approves of is Ben Shapiro, and his exquisite better than you morality. All sound and absolutely no fury, signifying ---nothing.

Infogalactic, AH forums down

Maintenance work on the servers. Shouldn't be down too long.

Rebel Dead Revenge #3

REBEL DEAD REVENGE #3: Running From the Devil is now available for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited from Dark Legion Comics.

The Devil is raising an army!

To the horror of his loyal servant, Jim, Confederate general Stonewall Jackson has been summoned back from the grave to lead Satan's army of ravenous undead. But the great general's arm is missing, and the Devil is sending out his undead minions to find scour the land in order to find it.

The South rises again in REBEL DEAD REVENGE!

From the reviews: As much as I enjoy the drawing & coloring I'm hooked by the story this is telling. Great comic book series.

Darkstream: Q is dead

From the transcript of the Darkstream, which is in reference to the coordinated new media narrative aimed at Q that was chronicled by Neon Revolt:

This is exactly what we saw in GamerGate, this is exactly the same sort of thing that we saw with the whole "gamers are dead" thing, and so they are desperate to delegitimize Q and they are going to completely fail. They're going to absolutely fail in this, but here's what's going to happen next. What's going to happen next is there's going to be some bullshit false flag. You know, there's going be some nonsense akin to Anita Sarkeesian claiming that she got death threats and Brianna Wu claiming that he was driven from his house by death threats. In the case of Pizzagate, they hired an actual actor to go into this pizza place with a rifle and shoot one bullet into the floor, which then magically hit the computer and destroyed the hard drive.

I mean this is the system, it's the dumbest narrative, and yet they roll it out again and again and again! I guarantee you there's going to be some stupid false flag about some fake Q supporter, you know, accosting or otherwise endangering or jeopardizing a Hollywood celebrity, and once the story gets dug into a bit, it's going to turn out that the supposed Q supporter is going to be just another left-wing nobody who was brought in to deal with the Q stuff. Yeah, "Tom Hanks was driven to fear for his life from insane Trump fanatics!"  It's going to be like that, except it's not going to be "Trump fanatics" it's going to be "dangerous Q cultists". The thing is that you have to remember what they do, because then you start to recognize the pattern when they do it again and again and again.

You know, this is the same thing as GameJournoPros and you're going to see the same narratives presented in the same order. You know what, with GamerGate they actually had a Law & Order episode, I think was Law & Order SVU, and it was just hilarious to see how they made up a story about how a GamerGater had kidnapped a woman because gamers hate woman players. I mean, it was the most retarded narrative you can imagine, they actually made an entire TV episode about it, and so anyhow, here's how we responded to it, and here's how I would encourage those who are following Q to respond to the media's false narratives.

Postscript: Q recognized it too:

Fake News WW
Fake MAGA supporters
Bandwagon shills
Paid shills (Media Matters)
Intel infiltration (neg dissemination).
MSM infiltration (neg dissemination).
Twitter bot attack (twitter controls dir/fake accts)
(FB/Twitter/etc create massive amounts of fake user accts for SP (fake user growth %)/bot use etc).
All activated past 24hrs.
Full attack mode (brute force).
False ‘violent’ narrative push.
Ask yourself, why?
Enjoy the show!
Q

Mailvox: is Azeroth converging?

A WoW player has concerns about the possible convergence of Azeroth.

I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the latest plot twist Blizzard just served us as a prelude to Battle for Azeroth.

I assume you know what I am talking about but just in case:

After launching the War of the Thorns to fight the Alliance for Azerite, Sylvanas burns Teldrassil under dubious pretenses, falling into Garrosh territory and pretty much ruining the night elves faction and the Horde lore at once. 

So my question is very simple, should we consider that SJW convergence is finally catching up with Blizzard and is now going to proceed with ruining the game for long time fans, bit after bit? The accusation has a pretty strong case here with the night elves' home being destroyed and the Horde reduced to a bunch of brainless brutes blindly following an unhinged zombie after 15 years of effort to build a lore for it that would not reduce it to the evil faction trap.

I am reluctant to abandon that particular ship, but if the cancer is spreading I might have to be prepared to. Or perhaps I am wrong and Blizzard is going to serve us an amazing plotline throughout the extension, but that is not what my gut feeling says.

No, given what we've seen in Overwatch, I think it is safe to say that the cancer affecting Blizzard has finally spread to World of Warcraft. It's too soon to be certain, but there is an all-too-familiar stink of convergence in the air.

Soda Pop Soldier SIGNED

Nick Cole fans and book collectors will be pleased to know that we have figured out how to provide a SIGNED AUTHOR EDITION of the Soda Pop Soldier paperback.

To obtain one, simply place an order at the Castalia House store. Once placed, we will send you an email to confirm a) the mailing address at which you want the book to go, and b) the inscription, if any, that you would like Nick Cole to write. We've already arranged for him to have the books on hand. You can also elect to sign up for the Castalia Book Club to receive notifications of future Signed Author Editions from Nick and other Castalia House authors if you're not already a subscriber.

We will send the relevant information to Nick, who will sign the book accordingly and send it to you by post. The price of the Signed Author Edition includes the shipping price to you; we anticipate that the book will arrive via US post in about one week. Signed Author Editions are only available in the USA right now, and Soda Pop Soldier by Nick Cole is the first book for which we are offering a Signed Author Edition.

If you're interested in us providing Signed Author Editions for other authors, please let us know which authors and works are of particular interest to you. However, please don't even bother asking about my books, since this process is not viable in Europe, although we MIGHT be able to do it for Owen Stanley fans in the UK.

The Signed Author Edition of Soda Pop Soldier by Nick Cole is available for $34.99.

At least they have the constitution

Wait a minute...

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said the ruling African National Congress must initiate a parliamentary process to enshrine in the constitution a proposed amendment, paving the way for land grabs without compensation. Ramaphosa, who vowed to return the lands owned by the white farmers since the 1600s to the country's black population after he assumed office in February this year, said on Tuesday that the ANC would introduce a constitutional amendment in parliament.

"The ANC will through the parliamentary process finalize the proposed amendment to the constitution that outlines more clearly the conditions under which expropriation of land without compensation can be effected," Ramaphosa, a prominent trade union leader and a close associate of Nelson Mandela, said in a televised address on Tuesday.

The millionaire ex-businessman argued that "it has become pertinently clear that our people want the constitution to be more explicit" about the proposal, which is viewed by the South African white minority as forceful expulsion that can incite violence against farmers.

There have been growing fears that the planned expropriation will deal a blow to commercial farming in the country and might put it on the verge of a food production crisis, like the one that struck Zimbabwe when it unleashed a similar crackdown on white farmers in 1999-2000.

Promoting his plan to boost land redistribution in March, Ramaphosa sought to assure white citizens, who constitute roughly nine percent of the total population, that the government would handle the controversial matter through "dialog, discussion, engagement, until we find good solutions that take our country forward."

Good solutions... final solutions? Anyhow, remember this when celebrities are crying about all the poor starving South Africans in 2025.

Hollywood's pro-pedo campaign continues

The cast of Guardians of the Galaxy follows orders from Hollywood PR and throws themselves on the funeral pyre in a vain attempt to change the rules again.

The Guardians of the Galaxy cast has called for James Gunn to be reinstated as director of the movie after he was sacked this month over old tweets.

Chris Pratt, Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana and Vin Diesel signed an open letter in support of Gunn.

The stars said they were shocked by his removal 10 days ago.

The Walt Disney Co fired him from the third movie in the series after tweets from 2008-11 resurfaced in which he joked about rape and paedophilia.

Left-leaning Gunn has been an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, and the director's old tweets were identified by conservative critics.

Many of the posts, which include jokes about the Holocaust and Aids, are too offensive to be reprinted by the BBC.

A host of fake conservatives have hastened to follow suit, including David Cole, who manages to project like an award-winning SJW in his fear of a future inability to joke about molesting children.

Kooks like Cernovich are contributing to the cycle of reciprocal accusations and firings. Leftists are not going to respond to the Gunn firing by saying, “Dang, these witch hunts have gotta stop.” Rather, everyone will respond by saying, “Shit, now I really have to watch my words.” So go ahead, cheer James Gunn’s destruction. You want Europe? That’s how you’ll get Europe. People scared to speak freely, people frightened to crack a joke. If that’s what you want, I don’t care if you’re on “my side.” Fuck off.

Yes, because no American is at all afraid to speak freely about women, blacks, gays, Jews, transexuals, or certain historical events that absolutely happened exactly as whatever is supposed to be the current version presently has it.  The thing these idiots never grasp is that gamers instinctively understand what it means when you're taking enemy fire. It means you're going in the right direction.

In fact, just last week some alt-right anti-Jewish conspiracy ninny named “Vox Day” accused me of being an accessory after the fact to the satanic Hollywood pedo ring, because according to him I know the names of those involved but choose to remain silent, because Jew. (“Vox” was butthurt over last week’s column, in which I argued that “edgy” comedians who make kiddie jokes are not necessarily pedophiles.) I looked “Vox” up, and apparently he’s a failed garage-band musician and “elves and ogres” fantasy author (amazingly, this guy couldn’t hack it in two of the least demanding professions known to man), and now he’s supposedly some kind of alt-right honcho. Big deal. Being a VIP on the Pizzagate fringe is like being the most handsome muselmann in the terminal ward. In just two years, the alt-right has gone from “Can we admit that there’s nothing wrong with being white?” to “Our prime directive is to hunt down the secret cabal of satanic ritual abusers that only we can see.”

Welcome to #GamerGate, everyone. All we wanted to do was play video games. But then we learned that monsters are real. The ride never ends.

I note that David Cole is not only defending the pro-pedos, he is also lying about what I wrote just last week. His response is amusingly akin to the inept murderer who, when accused of knowing who robbed the bank, angrily declares, "I didn't rob that bank and I didn't bury that body in my front garden either."

Wait, there's a body in your front garden?

Tommy Robinson freed... temporarily

A Court of Appeal rules that "the judge at Leeds should not have commenced contempt proceedings that day" so Tommy Robinson is now free on bail.

Former English Defence League (EDL) leader Tommy Robinson was freed on bail today after his 13 month jail term for contempt of court was quashed - but his case will be re-heard again.

The far right activist, 35, has been in prison for two months after being locked up in May for filming defendents involved in a criminal trial at Leeds Crown Court and broadcasting the footage to 250,000 people on Facebook.

The activist, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, successfully appealed against his 13-month jail term for contempt of court claiming it was 'excessive' and the hearing was 'rushed'.

Lord Burnett said today the Court of Appeal was allowing his appeal 'in respect of the committal for contempt at Leeds Crown Court' - but said the case would have to be be heard again.

Robinson was not present for the ruling and is expected to be released from prison later today.

Of course, the message has been sent: some of those presently in control of the British legal system will seek to protect Pakistani pedophiles preying on British schoolgirls even at the expense of the law.

Darkstream: How Arkhaven will shake up comics

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

How Arkhaven is going to shake up the comics industry. We've been talking about this a fair amount today on the blog and this was really sparked by discussion of someone saying, "well, you know, what the right-wing needs to do is we need to band together, you know, we need all the creators to team up to create a new Marvel." But the problem is that creators teaming up is not creating a new Marvel, creators teaming up is creating a new Image Comics. And that's not going to work because Image Comics has not been successful overall as a organization. It's not going to work and the reason it's not going to work is three-fold as far as I can tell.

Number one, people on the right are pretty individualistic. They have a tendency to want to pursue what is of maximum interest and value to them at the moment. They don't tend to think in terms of building organizations and institutions, and they definitely don't think in terms of taking over existing organizations and institutions and modifying them to their liking. So that's the first reason. If you look at what is happening already, look at what has happened since we launched the Alt-Hero campaign and set off this whole comics Kickstarter thing, if you look at what has happened, the guy from Diversity & Comics has had a lot of success, Ethan van Sciver has had a tremendous amount of success, you've got folks like Tim Lin and Chuck Dixon doing Trump Space Force, Will Caligan has been doing some other stuff, Jon Del Arroz has done Flying Sparks and he's got another, bigger, project in the works.

If these people were all thinking in terms of institutions and infrastructure, then they would all be working with Arkhaven or Dark Legion, but most of them aren't. Some of them are, yeah, we're going to be publishing Jon Del Arroz's stuff at retail, we're going to be publishing Will Caligan's stuff  too, but everyone else wants to do their own thing.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that! Please understand, I am not criticizing! But what is going to happen is the same thing that has happened in the world of independent publishing, which is that you're going to have a few really big winners, and they're going to do very well, and almost everyone else is going to pretty much go by the wayside and be unable to really do anything at all. And in comics, it's just that more difficult because it's a lot easier to just write a book and put out an ebook on Amazon than it is to put together the various moving pieces that involve the writing, the illustrating, the coloring, the publishing, and the selling. You know, there are people who can do all that - Ethan van Sciver is very clearly one of them - but you're not going to be able to build a publishing company off that. We've already seen this in the world of independent publishing.

Castelli House was supposed to publish Milo's Dangerous. Four times we were told "yeah yeah yeah we want you to publish this," but then they got all excited about the fact that they had a number one Amazon bestseller in pre-order and all that sort of thing, and thought, "well, you know, we will
start a publishing house around it." The problem is that a publishing house involves a considerable amount of infrastructure and a lot of strategic relationships and that sort of thing, and what most people don't understand is that we had this infrastructure assembled since 2014. We did the Alt-Hero
kickstarter in October 2017, so we already had everything in place for more than three years. The kickstarter was just the thing that allowed us to take it to the market, but we already had all the infrastructure in place.

It's also very different publishing other people's stuff than just doing your own thing. Now, I'm not saying that people are not going to be successful. Quite to the contrary, you know some people are going to be very successful, just not most of them. If you look at independent publishing, you look at how well people like Nick Cole and Jason Anspach are doing with Galaxy's Edge, you look at how well a writer like Richard Fox is doing with The Ember War, but that is one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent of all the people who are tempted to play there, and the Amazon marketplace only exacerbates that "win big if you're lucky, most of you lose" situation.

The other reason, the second reason, is that most illustrators can't write. We had this discussion when we first started Arkhaven and I told people not to worry about the art. We had the writing, we had the stories, we had the characters, and as for the art, we were going to improve. People have already seen how we are improving the art and yet those first issues are still selling very well. Why? Because it's the stories that matter. Art is great, the art attracts a lot of attention, I'm not denigrating the art, I'm simply saying that the art is one part of the puzzle, it's one ingredient in the cake, and it's not the most important one, it's just the most obvious.

I think there might be a way for us to add some value at Dark Legion by putting together writers and illustrators and bringing them together to start you know working on new IP, new creator IP, that Dark Legion could publish. Now, I just started thinking about this today, I haven't figured out exactly how the model is going to work. There's always the problem because the artist has more work and it takes him more time, but the story created by the writer is actually more important in the long run, so how do you balance that? You know, what's a fair division of labor there and so forth? I don't know, maybe some of you will have ideas if you're at all involved in that sort of thing.

And then the third problem is that you have to be willing to follow the leader. You don't have to like the leader, you don't have to agree with everything they do. Do you really think that everybody who joneses to get published by Marvel agrees with everything that Marvel's editor-in-chief thinks? Of course not, you probably don't even know who he is or what he thinks! Oh speak of the devil... Ethan's here!

Run, Bill, run!

Because the French/McMuffin debacle wasn't embarrassing enough, the traitorous Trotskyite is considering the possibility of seeking even more humiliation in 2020:

Bill Kristol, the former editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard, is considering challenging President Donald Trump in the 2020 Republican primary.

Kristol, who is consistently one of the most vocal anti-Trump Republicans, has been considering a run for months, a source familiar with Kristol’s thinking told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Kristol, who remains an editor-at-large for the Standard, said he has no plans to run but declined to rule it out when asked by TheDCNF.

“No plans to run. But I’m randomly in Boston today, and happen to have had lunch with someone who does a lot of work in New Hampshire,” Kristol wrote in an email. “As he’d say, ‘Ya nevah know.'”

The New Hampshire primary, the second electoral contest after the Iowa Caucuses, is a key hurdle in the presidential nominating process.

Kristol previously sparked 2020 rumors in March when he popped up in New Hampshire to speak at “a must-show event for potential presidential contenders,” as Inside Sources noted at the time.

While I would love to see Kristol the Younger repeatedly humiliated on a national stage, trying to argue his Israel First policies in public against the God-Emperor, even he is not quite that stupid. Captain Underoos, on the other hand, just might be.

Simulation and AI

At DevGame, a Devstream on two different types of simulation, for process and for effect.

When you use simulation for process, you almost always have a situation where the results are not going to be realistic. The process is complicated and it is intrinsically inaccurate. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about an AI attempt to replicate human intelligence, whether you're talking about an attempt to replicate an infantry firefight, or whether you're dealing with something like a football or soccer game, in all of those cases you're dealing with multiple layers of abstraction, and every abstraction, every assigned variable is going to be different than the real world

Even if you build a very complicated model using very accurate statistics, the small errors, the small differences, are going to multiply so that by the time that you get to the end result, you're not going to end up with very realistic numbers.

Also on DevGame, a reader raises an interesting question about whether the transformation FPS games is related to r/K selection theory.

Compassion is not a virtue

The Manchester bombings, like the Battle of Adrianople and the unconstitutional anti-BDS laws in the United States, demonstrate why refugees should never be permitted to enter or settle in a civilized country.

The Manchester suicide bomber was rescued by the Navy from war-torn Libya three years before his pop concert atrocity, the Mail reveals today. HMS Enterprise plucked Salman Abedi, then 19, from the Libyan coast and took him to Malta for a flight home to Britain in August 2014.

Last May he set off a bomb in Manchester Arena that killed 22, including seven children.

Abedi’s younger brother, Hashem, who is in jail in Tripoli facing trial over the attack, was also rescued by HMS Enterprise.  The presence of the Abedi brothers among the 110 evacuees from Libya in 2014 was confirmed by family friends in Libya. One said: ‘They were sent together by the Royal Navy to Malta.’

They also demonstrate the utter foolishness of giving citizenship to foreigners practicing alien religions. Even the Muslim countries don't permit their fellow Muslims to settle in their nations, so why should the West do so?

Soda Pop Soldier now in print!

SODA POP SOLDIER by Nick Cole is available in paperback from Castalia Direct for $19.99. It is also available via Kindle and Kindle Unlimited on Amazon.

The war starts at 6 A.M., in-game time. By 6:45 we’re losing Hamburger Hamlet as our entire line begins to disintegrate.

It isn’t a total collapse. Pockets of resistance hold out in key positions, buying ColaCorp time, expensive time, to fall back and reorganize. On my right flank, Kiwi holds a high hill overlooking the Song Hua river basin. We call that hill WonderSoft Garage because of the small power station and vehicle spawn depot located there. WonderSoft had made the capture of that hill and power station a primary objective in the last three battles we’d fought at this end of the basin.

And it looked like they were gonna try for it again today.

Over BattleChat, Kiwi swears as he burns through the ammo that an air resupply Albatross barely managed to get through. In my mind, I can see empty lager cans parading around the workspace that is Kiwi’s keyboard and monitor, as ambient in-game sound resounds in a metallic symphony of ammo brass expended in adult-sized doses. If the sound of auto rifles and explosions is a kind of music, and to some of us it is, then Kiwi is Beethoven.

Through graphically rendered feathery willow trees and the game-supposed heat waves of the day, I can barely make out what’s going on up at the top of the hill in brief glimpses. Three fast-attack WonderSoft Goats, their version of a jeep, and a Thrasher light mech are burning. Thick oily smoke belches from the mech, and a moment later it explodes in a shower of sparks. More WonderSoft Goats and Thrashers climb the road to the bridge that leads to our side of the river.

WonderSoft infantry scramble from cover, racing to other cover, as Kiwi fights hard to keep them from crossing the choke point at the bridge and capturing WonderSoft Garage. It’s about to get real intimate, real quick.

“Command, we’re gettin’ killed up here,” shouts Kiwi over BattleChat. His transmission is broken and distorted by automatic weapons fire in the background. “I’m down to three grunts,” he continues. “Request reinforcements or evac, A-S-A-P! If you’ve got fire support, I’ll take it now, but you’d better drop it right on top of my position, your choice, Command.”

Minutes earlier I’d requested Command point two transports of grunts our way as reinforcements. One of our dropships got jumped by a flight of WonderSoft Vampires as they’d approached the LZ. The other, piloted by RiotGuurl, had gotten away.

I hope.

RiotGuurl is as good a pilot as I’ve ever worked with. Losing the first transport hadn’t been an easy choice for her, but when a WonderSoft Vampire caught your electronic scent, there weren’t many options left for a transport squadron other than to split up and run like hell to get away from that wicked ground attack jet.

Since then RiotGuurl was maintaining radio silence. I know she’s chasing every nook and cranny in the jungle-clad hills that surround the basin on all sides, flying her gunship way too close to the computer’s representation of the ground, looking for a route back into Hamburger Hamlet so we can resupply and reinforce the river crossing. Maybe even help Kiwi.

“Be advised, Command, it’s just me now. All my grunts are KIA.” Kiwi again. “Two ammo packs left and multiple Softs inside the wire.” Kiwi never gives up. Even when he’s being overrun. Maybe it’s an Australian thing. Once this war is over, I plan on taking some of my winnings and heading down under to spend some time in Gigaboo Flats at the Wonky Boomerang, Kiwi’s favorite post-battle watering hole. But hopefully the Cola Wars will never end, or else how will I get paid?

“Kiwi, evac not possible at this time. Sorry about that, son.” It’s RangerSix, ColaCorp’s tactical commander. The fact that he’s overseeing our little firefight reinforces how crucial this battle really is for ColaCorp.

Using my targeting monocular, I scan the sloping hills and tall grass behind and above Hamburger Hamlet for our commander’s avatar. RangerSix is the kind of guy who can change a battle with a basic rifle kit and some explosives. As usual I can’t find his hiding place.

Across the river, WonderSoft artillery begins throwing everything they’ve got at us. Head down inside my command post, I crank my speakers to full ambient in-game sound, cutting off Catherine Wheel’s seminal late-twentieth-century album Ferment. I’m waiting to hear RiotGuurl’s turbines. She’s Kiwi’s only hope now.

“Sixty rounds left. How about fire support, RangerSix?” It’s Kiwi.

“Negative at this time.” I hear the quiet frustration in RangerSix’s smoke-stained voice.

“Die in place again, huh?” grunts Kiwi.

Behind me, in the detailed squat bamboo and stone village that is the game designers’ representation of a fictional Southeast Asian river basin village, a place we call Hamburger Hamlet as a nod to the often bloody struggles for online supremacy that take place there, our armor rolls through, retreating farther to the east. We’ve been holding this side of the river, waiting for our massive Charger IV battle tanks to cross the muddy brown shallows under heavy mortar fire. Now, it’s time to bug out.

WonderSoft Garage has always been the key to control of the river crossing at Hamburger Hamlet. There’s no bridge, but the river’s shallow enough to get most vehicles across. Now that the overwatch Kiwi was providing at the garage is on the verge of being taken, the battle, at least here alongside the river, is lost for ColaCorp. Any of our units on the far side of the river aren’t getting back to our lines without an airlift. The game day still promises more fighting. It’s Saturday, and the network goes big on coverage for the weekend. But to lose good armor this early would spell disaster for whatever Command has in mind for us to do next. We’ve gotten the Chargers back to this side of the river. That’s enough for now. We’ll have to fight another battle somewhere else.

“Afraid so, son,” says RangerSix to Kiwi over BattleChat regarding any kind of assistance. Or to be more specific, the complete lack thereof. “Sorry.”

Kiwi doesn’t reply.

The League of Creeps

In case you ever wondered what SPLC stands for. From "a recently-uncovered court document from the divorce proceedings of a prominent Sexually Perverted League of Creeps figure", co-founder Morris Dees:

“She went to her room and then went into the bathroom,” the document says. “Looking out the window, she saw Morris in the bushes beside the bathroom window looking in. She said ‘Morris, is that you’, but he said nothing and ran away.”

Two months later, things got worse.

“[M]orris entered [Holly’s] room from [Morris and Maureene’s daughter Ellie’s] room, through the bathroom, the document says. “He was in his underwear and he sat on the bed where Holly was lying on her stomach facing away from the door. He touched her on the back and woke her up. He told her that he had brough [sic] her a present, and he presented her with a vibrator. He plugged it in and said he had brought it to her. He proceeded to rub it on her back and said ‘Let me show you how to use it.'”

According to Holly’s testimony, she declined, but Morris proceeded anyway.

“[H]e started to place it between he [sic] legs when she raised her voice and said no loudly,” according to the brief.

He was wearing only a pair of bikini underwear shorts during the incident, according to Holly.

“About two hours later, she had fallen back asleep and he came back in,” the brief says. “He brought the vibrator with him, plugged it in and said again, ‘Let me show you how to use it.’ He tried to show her again by putting it between her legs, but she raised her voice again and he stopped.

It's amazing how so many of these self-appointed thought police turn out to be deviants and sex criminals. Being attacked by these creeps should be viewed as a badge of honor. No wonder they're so terrified of "hate". Any decent individual of any race, creed, or color is bound to hate them.

Those excellent Minnesota schools

Minneapolis Southwest struggles with its vibrant diversity:

Safety concerns arise as violence continues to escalate at Southwest High School.

On top of an already failing administration, Southwest High School staff are struggling to maintain peace between students. Last Friday, March 2, multiple fights broke out during the school’s second lunch period. Despite attempts to sweep the issue under the rug and downplay the violence, persistent students and parents forced the administration to address the situation.

Videos of the fight posted online forced the administration to hold an emergency meeting.

The highly anticipated fight between two students who have been off-and-on friends for years became physical during lunch last Friday. According to school officials, they knew of the impending conflict at least a week prior. The day of the incident, the administration claims that they reached out to the students “every hour” before the fight broke out. Unfortunately, the efforts were not successful and the violence erupted anyway.

The fight was not limited to the two students, who were reported by classmates to be a Somali-American and an African American. Over 20 students joined the chaos soon after the first punches were thrown and the original videos that surfaced were titled “Somalis vs. Blacks.” The original videos have been taken down due to pressure from school administration. The school’s resource officer was present in the cafeteria. In an attempt to control the situation, school officials put the cafeteria into lockdown for 15 minutes after the allotted 30-minute lunch period, keeping any students from leaving or entering, including the ones not involved. All staff members that were not otherwise occupied were called to action.

The police were not called, but 15 student resource officers from other schools were called for backup. In an eyewitness video taken by a student, the administration’s inability to diffuse the skirmish in a timely, appropriate, and safe manner was made clear.

So much for the idea that an absence of whites would lead to peace on Earth. All they need is to throw some Aztecs in there and things will get really... vibrant.

The name is Arkhaven

As I've pointed out before, the Right has no idea how to cooperate or play follow-the-leader:

I'm in Chuck's comics circle online. I really feel like ALL OF US trying to do our Right Wing comics need to band together to form our own "Marvel" because it's EXTREMELY hard to make comics without having any name. Here's my AltRight web comic.

The alternative to Marvel and DC has already been created. We are well into the process of building the necessary infrastructure at Arkhaven. While we're getting excellent support from both comics fans as well as culture warriors, and while we're building key strategic relationships with a variety of partners, we still have relatively little support from a) the conservative media, b) the social media stars, or c) the aforementioned comics circle.

Now, just to be clear, that's absolutely fine. I'm not complaining about it. We never counted on it. We have always been of the Gideon mindset; it's better to have 300 warriors at your back than 10,000 counter-signaling moderates.

There are a number of obstacles to what this gentleman wants to accomplish. First, the attention-seekers can't stand for anyone else to be the leader, no matter who it is. See: Comicsgate. Second, right-wingers are individualists who tend to focus on maximizing their personal situation at the expense of building institutions and organizations capable of supporting them. See: Milo Inc's abortive attempt to create a publishing house. Third, moderates will not accept radical leadership for fear of rejection by the Left whose approval they still seek. See: Diversity & Comics and many indy authors.

Imagine where we would be if all those indy authors and social media stars and Baen authors had been willing to work out mutually beneficial deals with Castalia House. We'd already be in a much stronger position to defend the interests of everyone on the Right. Instead, it's just more dog-eat-dog competition in a negative-sum game as Amazon methodically drains the pool of available ebook money. It will almost certainly be the same thing in comics, with one or two big winners and everyone else scrambling for the scraps. Again, not complaining, merely observing and analyzing.

Now, there are those who have recognized the situation, bought into the vision, and gotten on board. As for the others, a few will do great on their own, although they will fail to build any lasting institutions, and the rest will muddle along in obscurity. And while not everyone will acknowledge it now, eventually it will become obvious that the right-wing alternative was born on the very first day of the Alt-Hero campaign.

Winning: Arkhaven edition

An Arkhaven reader emails:

My son was recently punished, not allowed to play on his computer. I offered him some comics, because he is always allowed to read, no matter what; I offered him my World War Hulk, Dark Phoenix, House Of M, Decimation, X-Cutioner's Song (w/ Stryfe), Age Of Apocalypse, etc.

His response: But I Like Fazer!

From Avalon #1: The Street Rules.

That's winning.

That is indeed. And now it's time to call upon the Arkhaven fans in the UK. Ingram and Arkhaven are about to launch our mailing campaign to all the comic book stores in the UK, which will put the first two Alt-Hero comics, plus Chuck Dixon's Avalon #1, in the hands of the comic book store owners so they can see the quality for themselves. The idea is to a) convince all the stores to sign up with Ingram, and, b) convince them to carry Arkhaven's comics.

If you are a UK resident and you're willing to call upon a few stores, either by phone or in person, to help follow up on the mailing, please email me with ARKHAVEN UK in the subject and include the name of your local comic book store, if any, in in the body of the email.

I can also confirm that Castalia/Arkhaven Direct will begin shipping in the UK before December.

SODA POP SOLDIER by Nick Cole

Call of Duty meets Diablo in this fast-paced, action-packed LitRPG novel from the author of GALAXY'S EDGE.

Gamer PerfectQuestion fights for ColaCorp in WarWorld, an online combat sport arena where mega-corporations field entire armies in the battle for real world global advertising-space dominance. Within the immense virtual battlefield, players and bots are high-tech grunts, using drop-ships and state-of-the-art weaponry to wipe each other out.

But times are tough and the rent is due, and when players need extra dough, there's always the Black, an illegal open source tournament where the sick and twisted desires of the future are given free rein in the Wastehavens, a gothic dungeon fantasy world.

And all too soon, the real and virtual worlds collide when PerfectQuestion refuses to become the tool of a mad man intent on hacking the global economy for himself.

Soda Pop Soldier is available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. A Castalia House paperback will be available from Castalia Books Direct later today.

From the reviews:

• I half-expected a light-hearted romp through modern video games. What I got was something completely different. Something telling about how many of us live our lives online and the anonymity that we expect.... Throughout it all, we see the real world, but in many ways Cole presents this as almost more fantastic and ridiculous than the online worlds that PerfectQuestion plays in. There are scientific advancements that take humans to other planets and planes that seemingly traverse around the world without stopping, but most of that is unavailable to the average person. The more the book explores those areas – the areas inhabited by the rich and powerful – the more the reader finds themselves in foreign territory. In many ways PerfectQuestion is more at home in the war and fantasy of his online games than in the real world.
• This is a seriously well-crafted book, full of twists, loads of pop culture references, and a remarkable treatise on integrity, conviction, good versus evil, hero versus villain and several other themes. He picks up on everything that was (and is) fun about gaming, problem-solving and the creativity and story-telling that great games AND books have in common, and lectures in a good way about the joy of reading. This is a great story. If you played Pong and other games up to the current genre of first-person shooters, and enjoy a good story, with characters that you can identify with, buy this book. Read it. Share it. If you aren't a gamer, but rather a well read bookworm, buy this book. Lose yourself in it, and enjoy something that is exceptional.
• This book blew me away. I went into it expecting little, because it's from an indie publisher. Big mistake. It feels like a blend between Catcher In The Rye, Blade Runner, and Warhammer 40K. It started off a bit slow and I wasn't sure where it was going, but it morphs into a compelling story that I could not get enough of. I'd think about this book while I was working, waiting to get home. I went out and bought three more of his books just so I'd have some ready when I finished this one.
• I love Cole's work and SPS is probably my favorite one to date. 
• It's in my top ten favorite novels of all time, and it's just wonderfully good.

This book is an absolute must-read for any gamer. People not unreasonably tend to think of Nick Cole as a pulp author due to the success of Galaxy's Edge, but he is actually one of the better science fiction authors around, and there is no one currently writing who is more adept at playing on the emotions of the reader.

LitRPG has been around since Joel Rosenberg created it in Guardians of the Flame; my abortive first attempt at a novel was a Guardians imitation that very cleverly utilized Traveller instead of D&D. But the invention of the MMO and subsequent blurring of reality and game reality in the real world has transformed and popularized the genre, and Soda Pop Soldier represents the very best of it. If you haven't read it, I would highly recommend that you pick up a copy and do so.

Castalia House will also be publishing the next two books in the Soda Pop Soldier series.

The globalist war on America

The attack on American nationalism long predates George Soros and Jordan Peterson. From page 143 of the book The Killing of Uncle Sam:

A SUBVERSIVE PURPOSE

In 1957, a congressional investigative committee revealed the following finding: “In the international field, foundations, and an interlock among some of them and certain intermediary organizations, have exercised a strong effect upon our foreign policy and upon public education in things international. This has been accomplished by vast propaganda, by supplying executives and advisers to government and by controlling much research in this area through the power of the purse. The net result of these combined efforts has been to promote ‘internationalism’ in a particular sense—a form directed toward ‘world government’ and a derogation of American ‘nationalism.’ The CFR has become in essence an agency of the United States Government [and its] productions are not objective but are directed overwhelmingly at promoting the globalist concept.”

This subversive purpose has been verified by Foreign Affairs, the Council’s own publication, which has been called “the most influential periodical in print” by Time magazine. In its inaugural issue (September 1922), the journal condemned “the dubious doctrines expressed by such phrases of ‘safety first’ and ‘America first.’” In its second issue, Philip Kerr, a member of the British Round Table, declared: “Obviously there is going to be no peace or prosperity for mankind so long as it remains divided into fifty or sixty independent states. Equally obviously there is going to be no steady progress in civilization or self-government among the more backward peoples until some kind of international system is created which will put an end to the diplomatic struggles of every nation to make itself secure. The real problem today is that of world government.”

Notice that the attacks on the concept of ‘America first’ predate Donald Trump's slogan and trade policy by nearly 100 years. This has been a very long secret war waged against America. Ideology is now secondary, the only real struggle that matters is the conflict between globalist and nationalist.

It doesn't matter if a globalist happens to say things that sound good about open societies or cleaning your room. If you love America, if you love the country in which you live, the globalists are your sworn enemies.

Darkstream: destroying a converged institution

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

Basically, what we succeeded in doing is turning Worldcon into WisCon. Now, here's an interesting observation: isn't that what is happening to the DNC? Absolutely it is, and who caused that? Donald Trump is doing the same thing on a larger scale in the political world, what Rabid Puppies did to the
science-fiction world. It's the same thing. If you apply sufficient force, if you apply a sufficiently strong action and provoke a strong enough reaction, then you can withdraw and allow the SJWs that have been stirred up to devour everything else that's still there.

Think about this way. Imagine that SJWs are like piranhas, and so you've got these piranhas in a fish tank, and there's the SJWs and then there's the regular lefty fish. They're all the enemy, but some of them are a little bit worse than others. So what you do, you know, is you stick your hand in there and then shake your hand around right? Now, the key is got to pull your hand out! Yeah, so you stick your hand in, you stir them all up, you pull your hand out, and then the piranhas are going to attack everything that's in there. They don't realize that the other fish in there aren't your hand, they're not discerning, they have their agenda and these other people stand in the way of that agenda just like you do, and so, you know, by going in and stirring things up, and then withdrawing, then the whole thing ends up a massive mutually destructive activity.

Merkel's CDU falling

More Germans have had enough of the worst Kanzler since Mr. Hitler.

Support for German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc, trying to move beyond a bitter dispute over migrant policy that threatened the coalition, has fallen to its lowest level since 2006, a poll showed on Sunday.

The Emnid poll published in Bild am Sonntag showed Merkel's Christian Democrats and their sister party, Bavaria's Christian Social Union (CSU), down one percentage point at 29 percent. That compares with 33 percent in the September election.

The CSU faces a tough regional election in October with polls showing it could lose its absolute majority in Bavaria.

The Social Democrats (SPD), who share power with the conservatives in Merkel's coalition, failed to capitalise on those losses, also falling one point to 18 percent.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was unchanged at 15 percent while the Greens rose 2 points to 14 percent, their best showing this year, according to Bild am Sonntag.

Translation: AfD is probably at 20 percent already. Of course, the way in which the parties of Right and Left are willing to work together against the nationalists just serves to demonstrate that ideology does not run as deep as identity.

Once identity enters the picture, all politics is identity politics.

Interview with Chuck Dixon

I don't know how I somehow managed to miss this interview with The Legend Chuck Dixon - that is how he is addressed in the Arkhaven offices, you understand - by Bounding Into Comics:

BIC: Along with Levon’s War, you are also working on a number of projects with Vox Day’s Castalia House publishing. You’ve got Avalon which is expected to come out this March. The book will feature the crime fighting duo of King Ace and Fazer, what can you tell us about these two?

Chuck: King and Fazer are just a part of a larger ensemble cast of super-powered heroes and outlaws. To say King and Fazer’s relationship is complicated is an understatement. King Ace is a kind of Superman type, a big beefcake who’s bullet-resistant, super-strong and can leap long distances. Fazer has the ability to pass through solid objects. They’re powers complement one another even though their personalities are very much at odds.

We also have Cash, a mercenary crimefighter who battles evil for tips and Vendetta, a female vigilante, whose motives and mission provide much of the core story for the first six issues of the book.

But the true star of the book is the city of Avalon itself. It’s an east coast town that’s seen better days and getting rather tired of being ground zero for super-fights between good guys and bad guys.

BIC: You will also be working with Will Caligan. Have you figured out which novels you will adapt into graphic novels?

Chuck: We’re adapting Swan Knight’s Son by John C. Wright. The novel really lends itself to comics. Loads of great eye candy and a story that gets off the blocks on page one and never slows down.

BIC: Will also lost his job because of his very personal Christian and conservative beliefs. There have been a number of people who hold similar conservative and Christian beliefs who have also had their careers threatened or lost. Do you see this as a serious problem in the comic book industry?

Chuck: Damn right. A lot of great talent is either unemployed or underemployed because of either their personal religious or political beliefs. Their personal beliefs. The blacklists are very real and a lot of careers have been damaged. And as bad as this kind of discrimination is, the effect of silencing other creators who fear for their livelihoods is even more far-reaching. It’s intimidation, pure and simple; a radical core of far-left editors and publishers forcing their ideologies on the creator community as well as the readership.

Most damaging, in the long term, is the hiring of staff and assigning of freelancers based on their political beliefs rather than any kind of merit. The result is the current crop of, frankly, mediocre efforts from companies that used to be the industry leaders. It’s hard to find even a competently written and drawn comic let alone anything that could be called exemplary examples of the medium.

We’re all paying for this with depressed sales overall and the loss of readers who may never come back.

BIC: Blacklists seem to be a pretty hot topic right now. One Twitter user even created a pretty lengthy list for customers to boycott certain professionals. He labeled these professionals as the “main contributors… to the declining quality” of comic books. What are your thoughts on this list?

Chuck: I don’t like lists of any kind. Blacklists, redlists, enemies lists or ****lists. While it’s true that a number of people on the list I saw are guilty of writing agenda-driven comics, a few on that list are vocal personally on political matters, but not in their work. The declining quality of comics is due to creators who prioritize their ideology above their professional standards. So much of the stuff I’ve seen is simply poorly crafted comics. They call attention to themselves by doing crap work. No lists needed.

BIC: I also read Marvel has had you on a blacklist for over 15 years. Is that true? How do you go from writing one of their best-selling comics with Punisher: War Zone to completely blacklisted?

Chuck: When you don’t fall in lockstep with everything Axel Alonso believes. Of course, which of us is still working in comics today?

BIC: Where do you see the comic book industry in the future. Do you see it sticking with the tried and true DC and Marvel or will we start to see it fracture along political lines?

Chuck: I think it will become like the music industry. Garage band kinds of comics that will find their own audience. The big comic book publishers have never really known, or tried to really market their product. Now that, for all intents, the major publishers have skipped a generation of readers, they’re going to have to work to get them back. And I don’t think they have the first clue as to how to do that.

We’ll be looking at more and more creator-owned, creator-marketed comics that don’t do huge numbers but are financially rewarding enough for the creators to keep doing what they love.

Nice little shiv there, with a twist. This is just an excerpt, read the whole thing there. Believe it or not, the machine that is known as The Legend Chuck Dixon has already scripted the first EIGHT issues of Chuck Dixon's Avalon. #2 is being colored now, and we're bringing on a second illustrator in order to get the entire 12-issue series out in a reasonably timely manner.

And yes, Vendetta is back and doing her thing.

Mailvox: an open letter to Vox Day

Spencer Quinn writes an open letter to me, to which some Darkstream viewers have asked me to respond. I'll address the relevant sections:

Here is your position, as far as I can tell: White nationalism is unworkable, but the two main kinds of white nationalism are not the same thing and are therefore unworkable for different reasons. European white nationalism is a “non-starter” because Europeans are too ethnically disparate to make a pan-European country work without empire. Indeed, you believe that the indigenous French, Finns, Irish, et cetera are all separate nations in and of themselves, and so wouldn’t be interested in homogenizing Europe in any case.

As for American white nationalism, you seem to allow for white nationalism in theory but you question the timing. You believe it would take a thousand years or so for all the whites in America to interbreed well enough to form a real nation, one that would have a genuinely unique identity apart from the European nations from which it sprang. You also believe that the United States has between fifteen and thirty years before it breaks apart due non-white immigration and racial strife. Therefore any effort to stuff a thousand years of change into thirty is doomed to fail. Does this sum it up more or less accurately?

More or less, although the actual trigger for the political breakup is going to be economic in nature, so the effects of mass immigration and the increased racial and religious strife are merely going to multiply the consequences of the inevitable economic breakdown and ensure the shattering of the single polity into what could be anything from five to several hundred pieces.

So if American whites are completely incapable of functioning as a nation, then what were they doing between 1790 and 1965? Were they failing when they enjoyed a ninety percent majority of the country? Did they consider themselves ‘deracinated’ as well? Were the tiny proportions of non-whites in the United States the glue that held it all together? Is there anything in the American literature from that time period that tells us the American identity is a “false identity,” as you put it? What sources can you produce to back up such an uncompromising position? And can you explain why sources that don’t are unreliable?

Between 1790 and 1965, they were mostly spreading out across a mostly empty continent and fighting a brutal civil war. These other questions strike me as disingenuous and I will not bother to answer them, nor do I have any interest in playing the source game. But I will point out a few relevant facts: the USA is not a nation, it is an empire held together by the threat of military force. The American identity from 1790 through 1920 was British, hence the bits about "British brethren" from the Declaration of Independence; it was the British Crown from which the American Revolutionaries were declaring independence, after all, not the European nations in general. It was generally believed that non-British whites from Germany and other European nations would be able to become ersatz Anglo-Americans over time, although there were skeptics such as Ben Franklin from the start. In my opinion, the skeptics were correct and the optimists, such as George Washington, were wrong. It is clear that, for the most part, the descendants of the Spanish-Americans, German-Americans, Irish-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, Italian-Americans, and various other European-Americans have never truly understood or supported limited government or the traditions of the English Common Law.

But according to your logic, white America would have broken off into ethnic enclaves before 1930. According to your logic, white Americans would have felt enough allegiance to the European powers they fought against in the world wars to rise up against American power. 

This is an inept and incorrect attempt to apply my logic to American history. That being said, many European-Americans most certainly did feel an allegiance to their European homelands, particularly during World War I.

When news of the war reached the United States in August 1914, immigrants from all over Europe reacted with sympathy and concern for the citizens of their home countries. Among those immigrants were thousands of German reservists who rushed to German consulates in the U.S. in an effort to return home and join the fight. German-Americans also held patriotic meetings in cities such as New York and Chicago and collected for war relief funds. Such enthusiastic “war fever” was prevalent among all immigrant groups, but since people of German origin made up a high percentage of the American population, they came under heightened public scrutiny....

In the fall of 1917, the fight against Germans in Europe was extended to their Kultur in the United States. This battle against all things German included a ban on the use of the German language in schools, universities, libraries, and religious services. Additionally, German societies, musical organizations, and theaters were shuttered and the German-language press in America was forced to shut down.

Note that this was a classic imperial reaction by a ruling nation to a restive subject one, even if it was a subject nation that had been voluntarily subjugated. To the extent German-Americans have been assimilated, it was through the ruthless suppression of their language, culture, and identity in the 20th century. But their genetic inclinations remain intact. Remember, even mass interbreeding will favor the dominant genetics.

One attempt you make is to point to tradition. When a reader asked you, “Why can’t the mixed whites in America band together as white and form a new nation and a new identity?” you answered “Because they all have different traditions.” As an example of such divisive traditions, you then how describe different Scandinavian peoples open Christmas presents on different days.

I believe that sound you’re hearing right now is the sound of everyone’s jaws dropping to the floor.

Not to offend you, Vox, but such an absurd objection to American white nationalism invites mockery.

Spencer can mock away if he likes. His inability to understand the obvious implications is not my problem. It is the multiplication of a thousand such seemingly small differences that irretrievably divide one identity from another. Few outside the Balkans can tell the difference between a Croat and a Serb, but that did not prevent them from fighting a war in the 1990s; the differences between a Prussian German and a Bavarian German or a Veneziano and a Napolitano are considerably less than the breadth of the "mixed whites in America" and yet they continue to have profound implications for the political instability of those modern states.

Spencer is welcome to imagine that blue-haired SJWs and Swedish-American DFLers and Italian-American mafiosi are going to join forces with him against the rising tide of La Raza Cosmica and the expanding global empire of the Han Chinese due solely to the color of their skin, but I wouldn't bet on it. The mistake he and other pan-white nationalists are making is to believe that most people are capable of making an identity shift on the basis of abstract information, which is directly contrary to everything we have learned about human nature since Aristotle. For example, most German Jews did not abandon their German self-identity until after they were personally arrested by their "fellow Germans". In like manner, the vast majority of white Americans will not identify themselves as part of as an intrinsically white nation until they are personally and explicitly and physically attacked for being American by non-whites who reject an American identity. Even then, some will not be emotionally capable of making the conceptual shift, not even if they are rejected by members of their own identity-complicated family.

How can someone believe in the fourteen words and not be a white nationalist?

Because, again, pan-white "nationalism" is not nationalism. There is no pan-white nation and there never will be a pan-white nation anymore than there will ever be a pan-Arab nation, a pan-Asian nation, or a pan-Red nation. Every historical attempt at pan-national supranationalism has eventually failed, from the American Indian alliances to the United Arab Republic. Destroying the European nations in order to save the white race is an epically stupid and historically ignorant strategy. Even if a "mixed-white nation" were to somehow come into existence over time, it would identify itself separately from other white nations. All there has ever been, all there will ever be, are empires where one identity rules over the others by force and/or numbers.

I do believe most white nationalists would agree with you that the civic nationalist option you seem to favor is still a pretty good option, especially if it could come without the price of a war.

I don't favor the civic nationalist option. That too has proven to be a false and failing form of nationalism. Spencer quite simply hasn't understood my position at all. There will be war. War is inevitable, and it will probably take place on a global scale. There has never been any movement of people of human history even one-tenth as large as the post-1965 invasion of the United States that has not either a) led to war, or b) been imposed by lethal force as the result of war. I believe the die is already cast, as do more than a few military historians of my acquaintance.

Like many people, Spencer does not understand that I am not an activist. I am not a politician nor am I part of any movement. I am an observer, a chronicler, and perhaps one day, a historian. I seek primarily to understand the patterns and trends of history, I do not seek to alter them nor do I really believe that is even possible. And I am far from the only one who expects the next American civil war to be worse than its predecessor.

The difference between the America of today and the America of what seems like just yesterday is that we once had a common culture. As recently as 1990, Ken Burns could make a Civil War documentary for PBS and let historian Shelby Foote wax eloquent on the martial prowess of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest —  something that now would likely get them both tarred, feathered, and Twitter-banned.

Yes, there were big differences between North and South a century and a half ago. The South was a slave-holding, free-trading, libertarian-leaning, conservative Christian, agricultural, aristocratic Sparta, while the North was a commercial, industrial, protectionist, Transcendentalist, social gospel, democratic Athens. But they held far more in common than separated them — beginning with the fact that, as Lincoln observed, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God.”

In the end, the war was fought over a single legal issue: whether the states that had freely ratified the Constitution to form the Union could freely leave the Union if they felt it no longer served their interests.... Today, however, our divisions are so deep and fundamental that Americans cannot even agree on what marriage is or what a man or a woman is (which is pretty darn fundamental).