Jeremy defeats the Jews

At least we now know who the next Hitler will be. And what country the neocons will demand to see the US invade if the British Labour Party manages to unseat the Tories:

Jeremy Corbyn has been told to 'call off the dogs' and stop centre-left members being driven out of the Labour Party after two MPs lost votes of no confidence this week.

Former frontbencher Chuka Umunna used his speech in north London this morning to leap to defence of Joan Ryan and Gavin Shuker, along with other 'moderates' in the Parliamentary Labour Party, who are being targeted by hard-line socialists.

The Europhile MP highlighted what he sees as a 'clear and present danger' of other moderate left-wing voices being run out of the party - and warned Corbyn to stop using internal divisions as an excuse not to fight against Brexit.

On Thursday, Labour Friends of Israel chairwoman Joan Ryan, a former minister under Tony Blair, and Luton South MP Gavin Shuker, both lost votes of no confidence in their constituencies on Thursday.

And in July this year, Frank Field accused his local party of trying to 'misrepresent' his views after he lost a vote of no confidence against him after he voted with the government on a key piece of Brexit legislation. He resigned from the party earlier this week, after he claimed Labour had become a 'force for anti-Semitism' and allowed a 'culture of nastiness, bullying and intimidation' to develop.

Last week, the founder of the hard-left Momentum pressure group warned up to 30 Labour MPs could be deselected if their attitude towards Corbyn remained 'hostile'.

Translation: the Jews and their allies in the Labour Party tried to stage a coup to unseat its popular leader. Jeremy Corbyn calmly weathered the two-month storm despite the British media's best attempts to whip it up into a convincing facsimile of popular outrage, and is now methodically taking out the Jews and Jewish allies who tried to unseat him.

Corbyn is proving to be a surprisingly formidable politician and an astute tactician. I wondered at his seeming passivity in the face of the utterly ludicrous attacks being launched against him, but now I realize that it was coming from a place of patient self-assurance about his power within the party. When I look at the clueless Tory leaders, from the feckless, cowardly May to the buffoonish, undisciplined Johnson, I wonder who is going to be capable of defeating the man in light of their treachery over Brexit. Now, if there is a general election and Corbyn comes out strongly for Brexit, he will win.

Of course, the very last thing he should do is listen to a mouthpiece like Umunna urging him to stop winning, and I tend to doubt he will. What we're seeing in the UK is the Stalinists taking out the Trotskyites. The British Jews have been threatening to take their ball and go home to Israel, and it appears the British Labour Party is inclined to call their bluff.

What I'm most curious about is why the anti-Corbynites tried to stage the coup in the first place. It's pretty clear that it never had any serious prospects for success. So why now, and what was it that was driving their obvious sense of urgency?

Science is lies

A researcher whose work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation explains how his mathematical paper was not merely rejected post-publication, but intentionally vanished by the New York Journal of Mathematics

Our paper underwent several further revisions until, on April 3, 2017, our manuscript was officially accepted for publication. The paper was typeset in India, and proofread by an assistant editor who is also a mathematics professor in Kansas. It was scheduled to appear in the international journal’s first issue of 2018, with an acknowledgement of funding support to my co-author from the National Science Foundation. All normal academic procedure....

On September 4, Sergei sent me a weary email. “The scandal at our department,” he wrote, “shows no signs of receding.” At a faculty meeting the week before, the Department Head had explained that sometimes values such as academic freedom and free speech come into conflict with other values to which Penn State was committed. A female colleague had then instructed Sergei that he needed to admit and fight bias, adding that the belief that “women have a lesser chance to succeed in mathematics at the very top end is bias.” Sergei said he had spent “endless hours” talking to people who explained that the paper was “bad and harmful” and tried to convince him to “withdraw my name to restore peace at the department and to avoid losing whatever political capital I may still have.” Ominously, “analogies with scientific racism were made by some; I am afraid, we are likely to hear more of it in the future.”

The following day, I wrote to the three organisers of the WIM lunch and offered to address any concrete concerns they might have with our logic or conclusions or any other content. I explained that, since I was the paper’s lead author, it was not fair that my colleague should be expected to take all the heat for our findings. I added that it would still be possible to revise our article before publication. I never received a response.

Instead, on September 8, Sergei and I were ambushed by two unexpected developments.

First, the National Science Foundation wrote to Sergei requesting that acknowledgment of NSF funding be removed from our paper with immediate effect. I was astonished. I had never before heard of the NSF requesting removal of acknowledgement of funding for any reason. On the contrary, they are usually delighted to have public recognition of their support for science.

The ostensible reason for this request was that our paper was unrelated to Sergei’s funded proposal. However, a Freedom of Information request subsequently revealed that Penn State WIM administrator Diane Henderson (“Professor and Chair of the Climate and Diversity Committee”) and Nate Brown (“Professor and Associate Head for Diversity and Equity”) had secretly co-signed a letter to the NSF that same morning. “Our concern,” they explained, “is that [this] paper appears to promote pseudoscientific ideas that are detrimental to the advancement of women in science, and at odds with the values of the NSF.” Unaware of this at the time, and eager to err on the side of compromise, Sergei and I agreed to remove the acknowledgement as requested. At least, we thought, the paper was still on track to be published.

But, that same day, the Mathematical Intelligencer’s editor-in-chief Marjorie Senechal notified us that, with “deep regret,” she was rescinding her previous acceptance of our paper. “Several colleagues,” she wrote, had warned her that publication would provoke “extremely strong reactions” and there existed a “very real possibility that the right-wing media may pick this up and hype it internationally.” For the second time in a single day I was left flabbergasted. Working mathematicians are usually thrilled if even five people in the world read our latest article. Now some progressive faction was worried that a fairly straightforward logical argument about male variability might encourage the conservative press to actually read and cite a science paper?

In my 40 years of publishing research papers I had never heard of the rejection of an already-accepted paper. And so I emailed Professor Senechal. She replied that she had received no criticisms on scientific grounds and that her decision to rescind was entirely about the reaction she feared our paper would elicit. By way of further explanation, Senechal even compared our paper to the Confederate statues that had recently been removed from the courthouse lawn in Lexington, Kentucky. In the interests of setting our arguments in a more responsible context, she proposed instead that Sergei and I participate in a ‘Round Table’ discussion of our hypothesis argument, the proceedings of which the Intelligencer would publish in lieu of our paper. Her decision, we learned, enjoyed the approval of Springer, one of the world’s leading publishers of scientific books and journals. An editorial director of Springer Mathematics later apologized to me twice, in person, but did nothing to reverse the decision or to support us at the time.

So what in the world had happened at the Intelligencer? Unbeknownst to us, Amie Wilkinson, a senior professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, had become aware of our paper and written to the journal to complain. A back-and-forth had ensued. Wilkinson then enlisted the support of her father—a psychometrician and statistician—who wrote to the Intelligencer at his daughter’s request to express his own misgivings, including his belief that “[t]his article oversimplifies the issues to the point of embarrassment.” Invited by Professor Senechal to participate in the proposed Round Table discussion, he declined, admitting to Senechal that “others are more expert on this than he is.” We discovered all this after he gave Senechal permission to forward his letter, inadvertently revealing Wilkinson’s involvement in the process (an indiscretion his daughter would later—incorrectly—blame on the Intelligencer).

I wrote polite emails directly to both Wilkinson and her father, explaining that I planned to revise the paper for resubmission elsewhere and asking for their criticisms or suggestions. (I also sent a more strongly worded, point-by-point rebuttal to her father.) Neither replied. Instead, even long after the Intelligencer rescinded acceptance of the paper, Wilkinson continued to trash both the journal and its editor-in-chief on social media, inciting her Facebook friends with the erroneous allegation that an entirely different (and more contentious) article had been accepted.

At this point, faced with career-threatening reprisals from their own departmental colleagues and the diversity committee at Penn State, as well as displeasure from the NSF, Sergei and his colleague who had done computer simulations for us withdrew their names from the research. Fortunately for me, I am now retired and rather less easily intimidated—one of the benefits of being a Vietnam combat veteran and former U.S. Army Ranger, I guess. So, I continued to revise the paper, and finally posted it on the online mathematics archives.

On October 13, a lifeline appeared. Igor Rivin, an editor at the widely respected online research journal, the New York Journal of Mathematics, got in touch with me. He had learned about the article from my erstwhile co-author, read the archived version, and asked me if I’d like to submit a newly revised draft for publication. Rivin said that Mark Steinberger, the NYJM’s editor-in-chief, was also very positive and that they were confident the paper could be refereed fairly quickly. I duly submitted a new draft (this time as the sole author) and, after a very positive referee’s report and a handful of supervised revisions, Steinberger wrote to confirm publication on November 6, 2017. Relieved that the ordeal was finally over, I forwarded the link to interested colleagues.

Three days later, however, the paper had vanished. And a few days after that, a completely different paper by different authors appeared at exactly the same page of the same volume (NYJM Volume 23, p 1641+) where mine had once been. As it turned out, Amie Wilkinson is married to Benson Farb, a member of the NYJM editorial board. Upon discovering that the journal had published my paper, Professor Farb had written a furious email to Steinberger demanding that it be deleted at once. “Rivin,” he complained, “is well-known as a person with extremist views who likes to pick fights with people via inflammatory statements.” Farb’s “father-in law…a famous statistician,” he went on, had “already poked many holes in the ridiculous paper.” My paper was “politically charged” and “pseudoscience” and “a piece of crap” and, by encouraging the NYJM to accept it, Rivin had “violat[ed] a scientific duty for purely political ends.”

Unaware of any of this, I wrote to Steinberger on November 14, to find out what had happened. I pointed out that if the deletion were permanent, it would leave me in an impossible position. I would not be able to republish anywhere else because I would be unable to sign a copyright form declaring that it had not already been published elsewhere. Steinberger replied later that day. Half his board, he explained unhappily, had told him that unless he pulled the article, they would all resign and “harass the journal” he had founded 25 years earlier “until it died.” Faced with the loss of his own scientific legacy, he had capitulated. “A publication in a dead journal,” he offered, “wouldn’t help you.”

Remember this when you're tempted to cuck or back down because someone is calling you a racist, a Nazi, or a white supremacist. If you submit, if the SJWs eventually succeed in their goal of converging all individuals and institutions towards social justice, not only will your intellectually devolved descendants lack indoor plumbing, they won't even be permitted to perform basic addition if doing so is deemed "harmful" to society.

Social hierarchy and success

The implosion of the once-champion Seattle Seahawks is almost a primer in the masculine hierarchy and how not to manage it:

The dismantling of a great defense dates back to one random 2014 practice, which ESPN first reported last summer as a catalyst for the Seahawks’ rift. That afternoon, Sherman intercepted Wilson, the two traded words and Sherman yelled “you f------ suck” as he flipped the ball back at the quarterback.

The pick itself wasn’t as important as what happened afterward, when several players who spoke to SI said Carroll gathered his offensive and defensive leaders and told them they needed to protect Wilson, to treat him more gently than they would their other teammates. Those same players had been indoctrinated into the NFL the exact way they were trying to teach Wilson, with merciless competition as the way to bring out the best in each other, by never letting a lapse slide, by talking s--- after interceptions, even in practice. In the meeting, they told Carroll exactly that. “This is making him one of our own,” one player said, while several others nodded, according to two who were in the room. “He’s got to go through the process.”

No, Carroll told them. Not Wilson. “He protected him,” one Seahawk says. “And we hated that. Any time he f----- up, Pete would never say anything. Not in a team meeting, not publicly, never. If Russ had a terrible game, he would always talk about how resilient he was. We’re like, what the f--- are you talking about?”

That Seahawk uses a pack of wolves as an analogy to explain his thinking. It’s as if Carroll sent his pack out to hunt but kept one wolf back, and that wolf still ate when the others returned with food. “We talked about that,” says Tony McDaniel, a defensive tackle with Seattle in 2013, ’14 and ’16. “Russell had his f----ups; he never got called out. If I was Pete Carroll, I’d tell Russell, I have to call you out in front of the team so there won’t be any problems.”

One former Seahawk says he and a handful of teammates speculated that Carroll judged Wilson too emotionally fragile to handle the criticism, be it from them or his coaches. That presented Carroll with a difficult choice: between the environment he’d fostered and the franchise quarterback he’d found in the third round. He chose the quarterback, the former player says—a choice many coaches would have made—adding “[Carroll] realized Russ couldn’t handle being part of the dynamic we had.”

Not every teammate felt that way. Some noted that it’s in Carroll’s nature to stress the positive, quarterback or not. But roughly half the locker room had issues, according to its inhabitants. Some complaints were pettier than others: that Wilson had his own space for treatment in the facility, which some thought was off-limits to his teammates and others insist was not; or that he didn’t interact with other players at the team’s annual Christmas party.

All these accusations, though, spoke to the same theme: that Wilson was both treated differently than his teammates and, in some instances, willingly stood apart from them. When McDaniel arrived in Seattle in ’13, he went to dinner with several defensive players and asked them why things seemed off between the defense and the quarterback. He was told by those players to be careful speaking frankly when Wilson was around, because they believed what they said could wind up on Carroll’s desk. The players said that had already happened—subjects that had been discussed in the QB’s presence had come to the attention of Carroll, an assertion four other players who spoke to SI also made. “When guys would talk candidly in front of Russell, somehow all that stuff got up to Pete,” one player said. “And after a while, after a few instances, everyone started noticing that, and everyone made sure not to talk about anything that could be misconstrued near Russell.”

There is a lot to be learned from this brief description of the collapse of what could have been a football dynasty.

1. Keep your actions consistent with your message.
2. The process and the infrastructure is ultimately more important than any one individual, no matter how important he appears to be.
3. A meritocracy must be pure or else it does not exist.
4. The whole is more than the simple sum of the parts.
5. A leader must be more willing and able to take heat than anyone else. Anyone who cannot take the heat cannot lead.
6. Know your place and do your job.
7. Never praise those who are not worthy of it, especially at the expense of those who are.
8. If you are the subject of false praise, always refuse and redirect.
9. Be the kind of player you would want on your team. Be the kind of man you would want beside you in battle.

It's fascinating to consider how the Seahawks defenders appear to actively loathe the 4x Pro Bowler Russell Wilson, whereas the 2000 Baltimore Ravens defenders always spoke highly of Trent Dilfer, a less-accomplished quarterback dismissed as a game manager who could lose a game for you, but never win one on his own. Ray Lewis, the Ravens Hall of Fame linebacker, even went so far as to say that cutting Dilfer after the Super Bowl victory was "the biggest mistake in Ravens history."

Perspective

The "everybody is a proto-American" anti-nationalists simply don't understand how utterly and eminently fake their version of American history is.

298 years after the first English colony, Roanoke Island, was established in the current US…

276 years after the first permanent English settlement in the current US…

107 years after the Declaration of Independence was written…

100 years after we won our independence from the United Kingdom…

95 years after the US Constitution was ratified…

88 years after the Naturalization Act of 1795 (‘naturalization is reserved for free white persons) was passed…

3 years after the 1880 Census found the US to have a population of over 50 million…

And 1 year after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act (passed in the House by a margin of 5.5 to 1, and US law for 61 years)…

…Emma Lazarus comes along to tell us what the United States is *really* about. Thank God we had her instead of 298 years of law and history to draw from.

The irony is that anti-nationalist Christians and conservatives are guaranteeing that the only prospect for American survival is ruthless inquisition. I doubt the Next Americans, as Steve Sailer dubs them, or the Third Americans as we Native Americans consider them to be, are going to be gracious enough to grant them reservations. Despite dispossessing them of their land, the Second Americans retained some regard and respect for their predecessors. The Third Americans observably hate and envy the people they are in the process of dispossessing.

If you want to learn more about the truth of American history, and how conservatives have betrayed America and put its continued existence at risk, read Cuckservative.

Sweden swerves toward sanity

The Swedish election is tomorrow and the mainstream is predicting the Sweden Democrats will win "20 to 25 per cent".

All of it is blamed — however unfairly — on immigrants in a country where 20 per cent of the population were born elsewhere. Now comes fresh data (unearthed last month by state TV) that rape is on the increase, that nearly 60 per cent of all convicted rapists since 2015 have been foreign-born and that 40 per cent had been in Sweden for less than a year.

It helps explain why the Sweden Democrats have gone so swiftly from the fringes to the political mainstream. Just three years ago, they were social outcasts. Now, they could be the largest single party when Sweden goes to the polls on Sunday while the centre-left Social Democrats, who lead the current coalition government, are on track for their worst result since before ABBA were born.

At the last election, they doubled their vote and won 49 of the 349 seats in parliament. In tomorrow’s election, they are expected to win 20 to 25 per cent and could well hold the balance of power in a fractious parliament where no one party will have control.

Dull, worthy, Swedish politics have suddenly got both alarming and interesting.

For they are following the same pattern which we have seen across Europe recently as anti-immigration parties wreak political havoc in Holland, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Poland and elsewhere.

Now it is happening in ultra-liberal Sweden, too, which has accepted more migrants per head of population than any EU nation — 250,000 since 2015.

My prediction this spring was 30+ percent. However, please keep in mind that percentage also includes the votes that go to Alternative for Sweden, who are preferable to the Sweden Democrats and whom I expect to surprise to the upside tomorrow.

Mandatory transgenderism?

A reader wonders about a new trend he's noticed in mainstream science fiction:

I’m a big science fiction fan.  Lately I’ve noticed “non-binary” or transgender characters added to some recent books.  These characters are pretty much just thrown into the story with no mention of how they got this way or what changing societal norms led to this becoming a valid choice for the character.

Some examples:

• Alastair Reynolds – On the Steel Breeze:  Has a “non-gendered” character.  The other characters refer to it using pronouns such as “ver,” as in “Ve rolled ver eyes in disgust.”
• Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck – the Expanse series:  In one of the recent Expanse books I saw a character using the pronoun “they.”
• Peter F . Hamilton – Salvation:  A transgender character appeared by page 15, referred to by “sie.”  “Sie had a pretty face with sharp cheekbones, highlighted by an artfully trimmed beard.”

Of course the Expanse authors have always been pretty SJW, with characters in homo marriages and such, but Reynolds and Hamilton seemed like normal guys up till now.  My guess is that they are being forced to throw this stuff in, just to get their books published.  I can imagine them sending their manuscripts in to Del Rey, and some blue-haired landwhale sends back an email saying, “Needs more diversity/inclusiveness.”

I have no idea, but at this point, nothing would surprise me. After all, Nick Cole was dropped by HarperCollins for a single, throwaway joke about aliens concluding a species that aborts its own young cannot be intelligent.

Speaking of which:

Dr. Elizabeth Sandifer@ElSandifer
"Who should I believe, Ethan van Sciver or Vox Day" is sort of like "how do I get these water moccasins out of my microwave" in that you've made some very major fuckups in getting to this question.

You think, Phil?

AH:Q - Stretch Goal #1 is down

Thanks to all 844 AH:Q backers! The Alt-Hero:Q campaign has just passed its first stretch goal and we have therefore added a new award! This is a variant paperback collecting all six issues and featuring the stunning, full-color cover art of Alan Quah. You can acquire it here.

And speaking of variant covers, we are in the process of preparing the first Alt-Hero Premium edition for the retail stores, as you can see from this first draft of the cover for AH#1: Crackdown. Something tells me Captain Europa will NOT be happy....

 

Boomer humor

Every now and then they crack me up:

OneDrive is a personal cloud service for users of MS Windows 10. It sounded spiffy when I read it up in David Pogue’s book. The Cloud is the way to go, right? The way of the future! You don’t want to be left behind, do you?

I yielded to all the propaganda and signed up for OneDrive. What a blunder! The thing is a total dog. I’m working on a file. Where is it? I mean, where actually is it? Is it on my disk drive in my PC, or is it in the Cloud? I never had a clue.There is a syncing process you can set up, but I never mastered it. When I temporarily switched off OneDrive as an experiment, half the files on my PC were out-of-date versions. Copying big files took forever.

At last I bit the bullet: painstakingly restored from OneDrive all the files I knew to be out of date, then switched the damn thing off and uninstalled it. Good riddance! Now I know where my files are: they’re on my hard drive. For backup, I bought an 8-terabyte external drive with RAID. The hell with the damn Cloud.

Poor old Derb! That could serve as a fitting epitaph for the entire g-g-generation.

"I yielded to all the propaganda. What a blunder!" 

When the whole Cloud thing started being marketed, I wondered who on Earth would fall for it. I mean, it's bad enough to run your programs on someone else's machine, but to actually store your files somewhere else?

And remember, Derb is much smarter than the average bear. He's absolutely correct to worry about the consequences of the dehobbying of computer technology.

The existential war

The Saker considers Paul Craig Roberts's argument that Russia is responding too meekly to imperial US aggression:

The US and Russia have been at war for several years now. Yes, this war is roughly 80% informational, 15% economic and only 5% kinetic. But this can change very rapidly. The main reasons for this war are not just the usual mix of grand power rivalries, economic and financial struggles, the desire to control raw materials or strategic geographical locations. These are all present this time too, but the deeper reason for this war is that Russia and the US represent two mutually exclusive civilizational models. Very succinctly, Russia wants a multi-polar world in which each country is free to develop as its people see fit and in which international law regulates relations between nations. The Empire stands, well, for itself, of course. Meaning that it wants a single world hegemony ruled by the AngloZionists. Furthermore, Russia stands for traditional moral and spiritual values whereas the Empire stands for greed, globalism and the destruction of all traditions and moral values. It is pretty self-evident that these two systems cannot coexist. They present existential threats to each other. Russia will either become sovereign or enslaved. The Empire will either control the planet or crumble. Tertium non datur.

The Russians fully understand that, as do the leaders of the transnational AngloZionist Empire. You think that I am exaggerating? Well, see for yourself what Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had to say on this topic: (emphasis added)

We are witnessing historic changes across the entire threat landscape … The balance of power that has characterized the international system for decades has been corroding. America’s unipolar moment is at risk. Power vacuums are springing up across the globe and are quickly filled by hostile nation-states, terrorists and transnational criminals. They all share a common goal: They want to disrupt our way of life — and many are inciting chaos, instability and violence

Except for the totally hypocritical comment at the end about “chaos, instability and violence” (which are, by far, the biggest US exports), she is spot on. Hence the current tensions.

There is the very real possibility that this war will suddenly become 100% kinetic. The Russians also understand that, and this is why they have been preparing for WWIII for several years now. As I have already stated many times, the US armed forces are in no condition to fight a conventional war against Russia, and the recent Russian advances in military technology have pretty much rendered the US Navy and Air Force more or less useless. The US nuclear triad, however, is still fully functional and is more than sufficient to destroy Russia.

Russia has therefore also dramatically increased her strategic deterrence capabilities and in effect rendered all the US ABM efforts useless. Following the old motto si vis pacem, para bellum, Russia has now developed an entire family of new weapons systems designed to deter the US from any attack (see Andrei Martyanov’s analysis here and my own here). Putin’s plan is quite evident: he hopes that Russia will be able to convince the leaders of the United States that an attack on Russia would be suicidal. Now all Russia can do is try to do everything in her power to avoid such a conflict.

The core problem is that the God-Emperor has not yet been able to defang the aggressive imperialists of the neocon or Pax Americana variety. But the Saker is generally correct, in that Russia's best strategy is to follow China's lead, draw the game out, and wait for the imperialists to implode. Time is on the side of the secondary powers, which is why the imperialists are increasingly agitated despite Trump's obvious lack of genuine enthusiasm for foreign engagements.

UPDATE: This joint Sino-Russian military exercise is almost certainly relevant to the subject:

From September 11-15, Russia's Far East will host Vostok-2018, the largest Russian military exercise since Zapad (West)-1981. According to Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, this latest exercise will engage some 300,000 Russian troops, over 1,000 aircraft, the Pacific and Northern Fleets, the entire Airborne forces, including 30 aircraft and fixed-wing helicopters, and Mongolian and Chinese troops.

These forces will allegedly exercise in something approaching real combat conditions. Observers have naturally focused on the exercise's size and scope, and on China's participation, but there are also other dimensions.

Clearly Russia is rehearsing a large-scale war. But since Russia is not demobilising in the West against NATO and the Ukraine, Vostok-2018 will likely stress and thus test Russia's steadily developing capability for mobilising the entire panoply of reservists and multiple militaries at its disposal, along with the civil administration.

Furthermore, since all exercises invariably parallel or contain sizable nuclear exercises, and Russia's two nuclear fleets are participating, this represents another example of rehearsing conditions for nuclear operations....

Including Chinese forces means more than signalling a lack of hostile intent or suspicion about Chinese capabilities and objectives, as occurred in Vostok-2010. In conjunction with the growing identity of their foreign policies and impending deliveries of Russia's SU-35 fighter, China's presence here tends to confirm Russian analyst Vasily Kashin's remarks that this exercise points to an open declaration of a Russo-Chinese military alliance. Moscow has previously sought such an alliance and it need not be a formal document such as NATO's Washington Treaty to meet Russo-Chinese requirements for an alliance.

I am not Q

And neither is our old friend Microchip. You can read about his encounter with Neon Revolt here. And while I very much like and respect Jack Posobiec - in fact, I just sent him the final edit of his book for review and approval - about the only character less credible as a potential stand-in for Q would be Samuel Q. Heide.

As the Dread Ilk know, Microchip is a longtime friendly acquaintance of this blog. We got off to a rough start on Twitter, but got things sorted out quickly enough. I know Microchip's writing style, and whoever Q, or as is much more likely, the Qs, may be, his writing style simply is not compatible with that.

But since we're on the subject of Q, I should point out that we're less than $800 away from adding the first stretch goal for Alt-Hero: Q, which is a backer's-only variant cover featuring the art of Alan Quah. An example of his most excellent work can be seen to the right.

A lack of integrity

It abounds in Washington:

It’s what Washington is all about. It isn’t treasonous or cowardly, it’s about ambition. You cannot imagine it until you see it unfold. When I worked for then-Secretary of State Haig, I was in a staff meeting one morning where Haig gave an explicit order to an assistant secretary, who of course responded, “Yes, sir.” Whereupon, within hours, he did the opposite. And kept his job! Really.

This is why you should never voluntarily work with anyone you know to be integrity-challenged in any situation you do not completely control. Not out of any sense of moral outrage or personal offense-taking, but rather, because their lack of integrity will always, sooner or later, reduce your ability to accomplish your objectives.

I made the mistake once of knowingly signing with an integrity-challenged company. That was GT Interactive. Sure, I knew they were less than entirely straightforward, but then, they were "the assholes with the money" in the game business at the time. And the large check they ended up having to write us as a result of their lack of integrity was not even close to being worth the complete demolition of our development company and the lost opportunity costs.

The strategerist

The Only Surviving McCain contemplates the remnants of what passes for the Republican establishment's brain trust, CNN's favorite Republican strategerist.

Rick Wilson calls himself a “Republican strategist.” He got his start in the Bush 41 campaign and is associated with the liberal open-borders wing of the GOP. His current job is Trump-Hater-at-Large, the kind of Republican who shows up on CNN telling people how much he hates his fellow Republicans. You know — the ones who win elections?

Six weeks before Donald Trump shocked the world by defeating Hillary Clinton, Wilson went on MSNBC and denounced the Republican candidate as “a guy backed in large measure by a group of white supremacists and neo-nazis and frog meme idiots.” Congratulations, “frog meme idiots” — you not only beat Hillary, you beat Rick Wilson.

Who paid Rick Wilson to say this kind of stuff about Trump? One thing you know about political operatives is, they don’t work for free. So there must be some client who hired this “Republican strategist” to trash Trump on TV. At least that’s the logical deduction, but while campaigns are required by law to disclose their expenditures, a political operative has no such obligation. Unless his name shows up in an FEC disclosure, you’ve got no idea who’s paying Rick Wilson and, for all we know, he could be on the payroll of Tom Steyer or George Soros.

The alternative theory is that Rick Wilson is constantly ranting against Trump for emotional reasons — he’s butthurt because his candidate didn’t win the GOP nomination, or maybe he’s just suffering from a testosterone deficiency that makes him moody and irritable.

Honestly, does Rick Wilson believe that “frog meme idiots” accounted for Trump winning Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states no Republican presidential candidate had won in 28 years? If the “Republican strategist” is such a genius, how does he explain this? Does he think the GOP would have carried those states had they nominated his preferred candidate?

Donald Trump is the “reset” button for the Republican Party. It has been evident for many years that the GOP “brand” was in trouble. To continue running the kind of campaigns “Republican strategists” run would have continued to produce the same results: Defeat.

Even if Trump is not your ideal of a Republican leader, it cannot be denied that he won against overwhelming opposition, including the opposition of “Never Trump” types like Rick Wilson. But it would not be in the interests of people like Rick Wilson to admit they were wrong, to confess they don’t know nothin’ ’bout winnin’ no elections.

This is why we now find Rick Wilson spewing melodramatic nonsense:

I’m still a registered Republican, even if I feel like a stranger in a strange party. There are days I stick around just out of spite, a human middle finger stubbornly reminding members of the Trump GOP that their souls are in hock to a con man, and some of us are going be here to pick up the pieces. By numbers, Never Trump might look like a failure, but it has succeeded in one of its most important missions. As oppressive governments learn over and over, a leaderless resistance on the right side of history is hard to kill. No matter how badly beaten and battered we were by the Russia-and-Fox-powered Trump juggernaut, we are committed to preserving the memory of the conservative movement, some remnant of the faith in the Constitution, limited government, free markets, free trade and individual liberty. Like medieval Irish monks hunched over parchment by the light of a candle flame, we are illuminating the scrolls of conservatism while the storm rages and the tide of ignorance rises. We will be here when it ebbs.

To describe yourself as a “medieval Irish monk” while sitting at your computer in Tallahassee, hustling your next CNN appearance, requires more imagination than most people can muster, and this “leaderless resistance” looks suspiciously like an epidemic of butthurt.

No matter what the field, gammas gonna gamma.

Darkstream: No debate with Two-Face

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

No, I am not going to go in Ethan's stream and talk to him. I will not talk to Ethan at all. I mean, you guys like to talk about lawyers, you know Ethan is threatening us with lawsuits. We're not going to talk to him. We're not going to have anything to do with him. This is like explaining calculus to a cricket.

"If you weren't so pushy with this we might have accepted it."

Fine. It doesn't matter. Like I said, I have an announcement. I already did it. It's already open, and if someone takes it, it's not my problem anymore. You know, you guys can deal with the consequences.

While I appreciate that some of you are concerned about this tempest in a very small tea kettle, I very much doubt any of you are aware of the most important aspect of the entire episode. You see, 2VS and I had talked, repeatedly, about possible creative collaborations in the future. We discussed four specific scenarios. But I became suspicious of his two-faced nature when, after praising how well written the bestselling Alt-Hero #1 was, and asking me if I might be interested in writing with him in the future, he went out and publicly slagged the story in the YouTube review he did with his father the very next day, even pretending that he couldn't figure out what was going on from page to page. He didn't say one single positive word about my writing despite having praised it effusively the day before.

So, I knew to be wary of 2VS and didn't consider him to be a credible partner on the creative side after that. However, even the best creators can be difficult and chaotic in nature, so we were still open to working with him on the publishing side, and I made it clear that he could sign Cyberfrog with Dark Legion if he wanted it to go into general distribution once he met his backer obligations. As we learned yesterday, due to our economies of scale, we can reduce the price of meeting those backer obligations by as much as 50 percent for the average Indie-Go-Go creator, and it appears we will be signing several independent comics creators to Dark Legion on that basis.

However, as a result of his public lies, half-truths, and threats, we no longer have any interest in working with Two-Face van Soyver now or in the future, much less supporting whatever his interpretation of "ComicsGate" may happen to be. I am very relieved to have confirmed 2VS's uglier second face now, instead of discovering it after being tied to him following a successful joint-crowdfunding effort of the sort we were discussing two months ago. Fortunately, we did not go down that route, mostly because he is absolutely convinced that the suckers are going to give him $1 million to create one 48-page issue of a Rainbow Brute comic. "This is going to be big, Vox! You have no idea how big this is going to be! We're just scratching the surface!"

Sure, Ethan. In fact, in light of his known past difficulties in meeting commissions, I will be astonished if 2VS manages to release a single 48-page comic before the end of November, where as we will probably have published more than 1,000 pages at a fraction of the cost by then.

In any event, I have released both the COMICSGATE and COMICSGATE COMICS imprints, and we will be replacing the ComicsGate Comic edition of Gun Ghoul with a Dark Legion Comics edition at the end of the month, which is the soonest that the system allows. If you'd like to pick up a copy or two of a 9/10-rated comic that is guaranteed to be a very limited collector's edition, you can do so at Arkhaven Direct, or if you're in Europe, at Amazon UK.

You shouldn't be on Facebook anyhow

But if you are, FFS, do NOT ever post pictures of your children online!

This week, over half — 53 per cent — of UK parents will plan to share snaps of their youngsters on the doorsteps of their homes as they set off to school, attracting comments like: ‘Aw, so cute’ and ‘How time flies.’

Yet when four-year-old Lucy Lewis starts Reception this week, her mother Nicola won’t be posting any pictures of this milestone moment. When Lucy was just two years old, she was stalked by a stranger who collected all the happy family snapshots Nicola had posted online — and re-posted them on more than ten fake social media accounts, interspersed with shots of a pornographic model of the same name.

Yet despite risks that include attracting the interest of paedophiles (horribly, it’s often photos of children in school uniform that hold most interest for them), fraudsters and even burglars, this week UK parents will add millions more pictures to the 1.3 billion they post on social media every year.

A third of them, often revealing the schools children attend (through badges and logos) and even clues to addresses, such as door numbers, will be shared on accounts which are not private, according to new research released by cyber security firm McAfee.

I've been beating this drum for years now, and it's particularly important to protect your children's privacy now that there is inexpensive software capable of creating moderately credible fake videos. If you want to exchange pictures with your extended family, get on IDKA, where you can limit access to your family members and only your family members.

The problem, of course, is that some of those family members will blithely turn around and post those pictures on Facebook.

Bounding Into Comics: Negativity and ComicsGate

John Trent had some follow-up questions after his previous interview with me:

BIC: You previously expressed interest in working with Ethan Van Sciver, is that still true?

Vox: We aren’t interested in working with anyone who is publicly threatening lawsuits against us and our partners.

BIC: Much of the criticism about your involvement in ComicsGate is centered around your personal politics and the belief that your comics are political. Would you like to address that criticism? Do you believe your comics are hamfisted with political messages?

Vox: That’s a stupid criticism on at least three levels. First, we were only caught up in ComicsGate because we are an independent comics publisher with 22 digital editions and 11 print editions published in 2018. My personal politics have literally nothing to do with anything published by Dark Legion or ComicsGate Comics, and very little to do with most of the comics published by Arkhaven.

Second, comics have always had political and ideological elements to them; the core problem with what the SJWs are doing in comics is less about how they are inserting their lunatic politics into the comics and more about the way in which they are ideologically policing who is permitted to produce and publish comics at Marvel, DC, Image, IDW, and other comics publishers.

Third, anyone who reads the comics I have written knows that I don’t do hamfisted anything. In my opinion, giving the other side a fair and accurate voice actually makes for stronger stories and better characters whether the story is intrinsically political or not. For example, in Alt-Hero #4, which is a highly ideological story, the pro-globalist position being espoused by Captain Europa is a paraphrase of the actual words of French President Emmanuel Macron. It’s more than a fair presentation of a position with which I personally disagree, it is an extremely accurate one. Whereas in Alt-Hero #3, there are no politics or ideology at all. And yet, I wrote both stories.

BIC: Have you had any creators reach out to you to publish under ComicsGate Comics since the new imprint was announced?

Vox: Not under ComicsGate, but under Dark Legion. We reached an agreement to publish an independent, crowd-funded creator who was very pleased to discover that we are able to cut his fulfillment costs to his backers in half due to our economies of scale.

A friend asked me what I thought was an important question today as well. Was it worth it? By which, he meant dealing with the whole eruption of outrage and all of Two-Face's nonsensical posturing.

My answer: Absolutely. This hasn't slowed us down or effected our operations in the slightest. We published two comics already this week and it's only Wednesday. We have also signed three new authors, one of whom may well be the most important one we have ever signed. And, importantly, we have learned that DC was actually right for once and Ethan van Sciver is far more trouble than his talents are worth.

Ethan and I had talked about collaborating on several occasions. He knows he can't write, he knows I am a very good writer, and we'd discussed two or three different story options. Can you imagine what a nightmare dealing with him would have been like had he revealed his two-faced nature AFTER we'd run a crowdfunding campaign together? Considering that he is running around threatening lawsuits now, when there is absolutely no basis for doing so, can you even imagine what a pain in the ass he would be if there were actual financial commitments on the line?


UPDATE: As I announced on the Darkstream tonight, I have successfully arranged for the release of the imprint COMICSGATE from the system. Arkhaven Comics is no longer in possession of it and it is now free for the taking by anyone with the necessary access.

Israel arming ISIS

Because the enemy of your friend is your... friend?

IDF has forced the Jerusalem Post to remove its explosive report on the Israeli military giving weapons to the Syrian rebels, the newspaper’s managing editor confirmed to RT.

“We were told by the army’s military censor to remove that part of the story,” David Brinn, the managing editor of the Jerusalem Post told RT as he replied to a request for comment. The report, ‘IDF confirms: Israel provided light-weapons to Syrian rebels,’ which claimed that the Israeli military acknowledged for the first time that it had provided money, weapons and ammunition to the Syrian militants, was removed just hours after being published without any explanation.

According to Brinn, the story was removed “for security reasons evidently.” The IDF told RT that it would not comment on the issue.

The Jerusalem Post article was removed shortly after being published, but a version of the article can still be read using Google cache

It claimed that regular supplies of light weapons and ammunition to the Syrian militants holding the territories near the Israeli border were part of the Operation Good Neighbor, which Israel portrayed as a humanitarian mission, which was focused on providing Syrians with “food, clothes and fuel.” Israel has been arming at least seven different armed groups in Syria’s Golan Heights, the report said.

The USA really needs to stay out of the Middle East and let them all kill each other if they are so inclined. Americans have no national interests there. Even the oil is now unnecessary.

REVIEW: Gun Ghoul: Raising the Dead

Bounding Into Comics reviews Gun Ghoul: Raising the Dead and gives it a 9/10 rating!

Gun Ghoul: Raising the Dead collects Gun Ghoul issues #1-4. I really enjoyed issue #1 when I reviewed it a while back and I was anxiously looking forward to being able to finish the story to see how things panned out. There were some characters I wanted some more backstory on and some events I wanted to see some resolution for. While this first collected graphic novel didn’t explain everything I was hoping for, it’s still a great read and lays the groundwork for what will hopefully become a fully realized universe.

Fans of revenge stories (like me) will have a great time with Gun Ghoul. The story revolves around a supernatural vigilante, the titular Gun Ghoul, who is picking off various mob and crime bosses. The police are pretty much helpless when it comes to tracking him down, which also allows some of them to question whether or not they should even be trying to stop him as he seems to be kind of doing their job for them. Crime bosses are scared, police are baffled, and justice is being meted out in a way that seems VERY familiar, but what keeps this story fresh and engaging is the fun supernatural aspect as well as a host of genuinely great characters.

Read the whole thing there. Then get the 116-page print edition at Dark Legion Direct.

Horatius at the ComicsGate

A Darkstream viewer named Horatius Cocles shared some of his observations concerning Two-Face van Soyver after watching last night's Darkstream.

I've been subbed to DnC for nearly 2 years, found Ethan through him, probably been subbed to EVS since the start of this year but I'm starting to see warning signs and multiple inconsistencies.

1. Ethan NEVER intended to use the CG imprint, he was always planning to publish under his youtube handle CAPS (Comic Artist Pro Secrets), he has stated this MULTIPLE times in streams.

2. Ethan constantly is looking to get signal boosted by Mister Metokur, Sargon and all the other internet muckraisers, however doesn't truly understand Internet culture. He has already started self-censoring and censoring live-chats, he is the literal definition of a cuckservative and has admitted to going to Obama rallies in the past.  Personally as we have seen with Vox, Ethan wants these successful individuals' audiences, even if its at the expense of those individuals themselves.

3. The launch of his variant cover at the expense of all the other CG creators and original backers, some people bought multiple copies of Cyberfrog to put on ebay after the campaign ends. Ethan said multiple times "speculators are welcome in comics, I want to bring speculators back to comicbooks" then turned around and fucked them over hard with this relaunch. Thanks, jackass.

4. The whole Cummings, Tim Lim Trump Space Force affair. Even though I backed EVS during that debacle, it was a pretty ignorant and dumb move to openly shit on a fellow CG's comic book. I guess Alt Hero is the second CG book Chuck Dixon has been on that Ethan has openly bad mouthed. Maybe he is threatened by having a bigger name attached to ComicsGate, because it's funny that this is the second time it's happened.

5. This is the one that really made me starting thinking on shit. Within the past week Ethan, on one of his streams, sung a song like "POC you are welcome with me, we'll treat you right" I'm paraphrasing here but it was the cringiest shit I think I've ever fucking heard in my life. Seriously, Vox, get someone to go back and clip that shit because even Marvel isn't at the point where they are openly singing songs to POC and LGBT groups trying to get them on board. Seriously, go back and find it, the cringe is real.

6. The treatment of Vox by ComicsGate (whether deserved or not) is pretty similar to GamerGate's treatment of Mister Metokur once he fell out of favor with them.

7. The hypocrisy of stating anyone can be ComicsGate, then applying conditions to that statement. Nobody likes hypocrites.

8. Ethan is clearly trying to remain neutral with DC because it is clear he intends to return there someday. After his own audience and friends were hounding DC after Robbie Rectum tweeted his arsehole to him, Ethan turns around and chastises them all.

9. He clearly jumps on trends when they are popular. A year ago he was telling Richard ComicsGate is stupid, next minute it is the greatest thing ever and he is in charge of it. Not only that, he thinks he owns the term? Last time I checked, Cap'n Cummings first used it and even he has stated that he did not come up with the term, yet EVS thinks he owns a hashtag?

10. Every time Ethan is hit up from his own subs about starting a company to get shipping and print costs down, he always dances around the issue. Indigogo is UNSUSTAINABLE. The books are too expensive and the international shipping is killing me. So far Vox and Tim Lim are the only two creators who have offered free international shipping (which is a pretty big gesture of goodwill towards your fans as far as I'm concerned.) Ethan however seems content to use this model until basically everyone is burned out and the whole thing fizzles out, at which point I'm guessing he'll just shrug and return to DC.

11. It felt like Jon Del Arroz was put on blast in that latest stream. Opportunist snakes like Ian Miles Cheong and sycophants are being brought in, while older creators are now being treated like dirt. Jon done more to advertise Cyberfrog and ComicsGate with his Federalist article than Ethan ever did for him. If you check the latest stream, notice EVERY indiegogo link is in the description except for Jon's Flying Sparks. Pretty fucking petty behavior to be quite honest. In fact, in my country, we'd call it a dog act.

12. The original purpose of ComicsGate was to promote INDEPENDENT, NEW and UPCOMING talent and circumvent the big two. Now it seems like every pro is jumping on the bandwagon because they smell the cash. Supporting new indies has been replaced with "adopt a down-and-out pro", the same pros that stood silent shoulder-to-shoulder with Mark Waid and the rest as they burnt the fucking industry to the ground and laughed at the fans while doing it.

I'm surprised I got to 12, I guess there was more there than I was willing to admit.

On a not-unrelated note, a recent email exchange.

Hey Ralph. I accept your invitation to a debate with Ethan Van Sciver.
Vox

Nice. I just now saw this. I'll put it out there and see what happens.
Ethan Ralph 

UPDATE: Oh, Two-Face. What on Earth were you thinking?

A historical aside

Neon Revolt never ceases to ask interesting questions:

Vlachs were Romanians who lived along the Danube in Albania and Northern Greece. You might be more familiar with their other name: Wallachians. This is where one of my favorite Wallachians comes from, Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad “the Impaler,” aka Vlad Dracul.

(Now there was a guy who knew how to remove kebab!)

Of course, this is where the Vampire and Dracula legends come from.

So now, geographically speaking, we’re on both sides of the Black sea, in Eastern Europe.

We’re spanning a time from Byzantine Emperor Justinian the Great (circa 500 AD), to around 1800 AD – so about 1300 years.

And SKBAnon is telling us that this was a major hub for whatever form of this mystery cult had before it migrated to America and became “Skull and Bones.”

I wish I had more details on that; though that area has long been a major hub for Mithraic cults. If I had to guess, he’s talking about stuff in the ancient city of Trapezus… But I would need more information before I said anything definitive, one way or the other.

Now the really weird thing about Justinian is that… he was born a peasant, right in that same Black Sea region.

He gets adopted by an Imperial guard named Justin.

Justin brings him to Constantinople and ensured his education.

When the Byzantine Emperor dies, Justin is proclaimed the new Emperor, with Justinian appointed Consul.

When Justin dies, Justinian is then proclaimed emperor.

Odd, right? Seeing a peasant rise to the rank of Emperor in just a few decades?

Almost like he was being groomed for the job from an early age…

And given Justinian’s role in the creation of the Hagia Sofia… I have to wonder if elevating Mary the mother of Jesus as the Panagia was not influenced by these “Mother Goddess” cults all over the empire…

I have to admit, I never noticed that anomaly before. It is strange. Now, what is it the French say, the more things change, the more they stay the same?

White males need not apply

Chalk up another primary win for the Diversity Party:

Another major upset of a Democratic congressman took place in Massachusetts on Tuesday night. And it wasn't even close. Ayanna Pressley, the 44-year-old Boston City Councilor, triumphed over 20-year incumbent Rep. Michael Capuano (D-MA) by a double-digit margin. It was the primary season’s second stunning ousting of a long-term lawmaker by a female progressive challenger and another indicator that the liberal base is hungering for something new in their representation.

Massachusetts’ 7th District, the only majority-minority district in the liberal state, once sent President John F. Kennedy to Congress and was viewed prior to Tuesday’s contest as the kind of area that was ripe for a shakeup. Coupled with Pressley’s compelling candidacy, a late primary the day after Labor Day, and district lines that were redrawn in 2011, Capuano was clearly vulnerable.  

All is proceeding as Steve Sailer and I have predicted. What is more significant about the victories for Diversity is their margins. It's not even close despite the fact that the white liberal incumbents have all of the machinery and money on their side. Identity generally trumps ideology and those who try to play by the ideological rules when they contradict the identity game are not only reliably going to lose, they are going to lose badly.

Key word for the pedants, spergs, Alt-Retards, and other binary thinkers: "generally" and "when".

It's interesting to see there appears to be a pattern to the historical transformation of these districts over time. WASP - Catholic/Jew - Diversity. The game has likely been one of identity all along, it's just that most Americans didn't realize it because they bought into the civic nationalist nonsense made possible due to the insufficient visual distinction between WASPs, Catholics, and Jews.

UPDATE: Steve Sailer usefully points out what is clearly an Diversity tipping point. It might be instructive to see if this pattern holds in other newly Diversity-controlled Congressional districts. The key observation is that even a White plurality isn't sufficient to guarantee control.

33.69% White
26.46% Black
10.71% Asian
21.55% Hispanic
0.39% Native American
7.20% other

UPDATE: The tipping point may be more easily triggered than I'd imagined, especially if you're dealing with the most self-destructive whites of all, Scandihoovians. This is the demographic makeup of the Minnesota 5th District, which is expected to elect Ilhan Omar, the first Somali, to Congress in November. It should be informative to see how much lower her margin of victory is than Keith Ellison's 47 percent, as her identity is much more distinct than Ellison's, his professed Muslim religion notwithstanding.

67.39% White
16.64% Black
6.05% Asian
8.81% Hispanic
1.23% Native American

Darkstream: Two-Face van Soyver

In tonight's Darkstream I talked about the panoply of shameless lies Two-Face van Soyver aka 2VS has been caught telling about ComicsGate in the last 24 hours. I also rejected his invitation to go on his show because I don't tolerate or talk to liars. Sooner or later - and judging by the fact that they are still spazzing out on cue, it will be later - his sad little band of ComicsGatekeepers will realize that he is the scam artist who has been lying to them all along.

You'd think that would be obvious, since I'm not the one performing like a trained seal for Superchat fish for eight hours a day. But, let's face it, we're not dealing with rocket surgeons here.

Anyhow, I have accepted Ralph's invitation to debate 2VS since I trust him to call Two-Face out when he starts talking out of both sides of his mouth, and we'll see if he dares to do the same or if he makes like Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and PZ Myers and runs away.

More importantly, I pointed out how Two-Face's crowd-funded commission model is totally incapable of revamping the industry because his $12.3k cost per page simply cannot be expanded. He's basically just another pinup artist; he's producing 48 pages at 1.87 times the total cost for which we are producing at least 1,148 pages. We are already employing 20 times more working artists than he is. YouTube-based televangelism is a great personal business, whether you're in comics or self-help, but it's not one that will have much relevance for the industry over time, nor is it capable of transforming it.

Remember, amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics.

Financial colonialism

The difference is that China is playing the usury card in the national interest, whereas in the West, it is customarily played against the national interest:

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday pledged $60 billion in financing for projects in Africa in the form of assistance, investment and loans, as China furthers efforts to link the continent's economic prospects to its own.

Speaking to a gathering of African leaders in Beijing, Mr Xi said the figure includes $15 billion in grants, interest-free loans and concessional loans, $20 billion in credit lines, $10 billion for "development financing" and $5 billion to buy imports from Africa. In addition, he said China will encourage companies to invest at least $10 billion in Africa over the next three years.

China's outreach to Africa aims to build trade, investment and political ties with a continent often seen as overlooked by the US and other Western nations. That has provided lucrative opportunities for Chinese businesses, while African nations are often happy to accept China's offers that come without demands for safeguards against corruption, waste and environmental damage.

President Xi told African leaders that China's investments on the continent have "no political strings attached".

They don't. What's going to happen is that when the loans first default, they'll be extended. When the African nations default the second time, China will take the collateral. It's a subtle and inexpensive way to acquire material resources while posing as a benefactor instead of a predator.

James Burnham's 1965 concerns about the retreat of the West are proving to be prophetic.

The secret of the ComicArtistPro

We've played nice with Two-Face van Soyver and his merry band of Comicsgatekeepers to date despite their incessant sniping. But I don't know if it's going to be possible to continue doing so for much longer, in light of the little Kabuki theater he is presently putting on for the crowd.

Everybody's cursing him out in the chat what a tool they're saying what a shit move, ComicsGate, it is, what a shit move, let Ethan have it, please don't be petty!  He won't show his face, he's behind a screen right now. Vox is a piece of shit can you go any lower from here? People are saying this might be the best stream we've ever done nice, a great time, there he is. I see you Vox! You did not start this gangster shit, Vox. The problem, Vox, is that it did belong to everyone and then you stole it for yourself, that's the problem. He's laughing, cuz Vox watches the chat very closely. Oh man, we got our people over there trolling and big-time beautiful. He's smirking, look at him! Vox I do own it, I do own it!  Swallow hard, swallow, Vox. He thought, he was, he's like in one year I'm gonna be more relevant than Ethan Van Sciver. How's that going?

The dark stream? Dude, I mean go get that checked out that's not that a joke. Another scam artist, somebody said, why is that anus talking he said. Way to turn ComicsGate against you. I mean what Vox doesn't understand is that I think a few of our people were actually supporting Alt-Hero and that's gonna go bye-bye. Vox yeah yeah the ratio did I mean dude not even close like if if we say so if ComicsGate says so that's it for Alt-Hero. that's it for Alt-Hero. 34 likes and 304 dislikes right now on the dark stream, 324 dark stream, yeah he's peeing blood right now look you can't, you don't we're not here to be taken, we're not here to be taken Vox, you can't co-opt us, you can't, you can't do it. I know you're trying, it's not working, give up, let it go. Oh, feel it slipping through your fingers that's ComicsGate, bitch! Dude's not going to work out. He's got to stop.

Now, that's a very convincing performance, until you learn that I ran the idea of creating a comics imprint called ComicsGate past a well-known professional comic artist last week and he actually approved of the idea, albeit with a few concerns about how it would play out. But he certainly had no objections, especially after I pointed out that any SJW-converged publisher with access could do exactly the same thing in a manner of seconds. It wasn't until the Bounding Into Comics piece ran and he realized how badly his fans were reacting badly to the idea that "the brand" was being "stolen" that he turned around, pretended not to know anything about it, and feigned being surprised and outraged.

Still, don't take my word about the identity of this professional comic artist. Just ask ol' Uncle Ethan when he first learned about my intention to create a ComicsGate imprint.

In case you don't believe good 'ol Uncle Ethan would lie so shamelessly to his fellow ComicsGatekeepers, consider his revisionist description of last night's Darkstream this morning.

By the way, Vox calls himself the Dark Lord. I took the mantle of Dark Lord from him last night and his live stream just said EVS is the Dark Lord, EVS is the Dark Lord up there, he looked very upset, he looked like he was gonna cry, and he cancelled it early. He left in mid-sentence, he just he bombed his chat out. March, march tower armies on Vox Day, and I believe we conquered him.

Translation: Ethan may be far more upset about this than any of us would have imagined. SJWs aren't the only people who project. It was informative to see how he described our emails in detail last night, but said absolutely nothing about our 30-minute 55-second conversation on August 29th.

And since Two-Face Van Soyver is talking about emails, here are a pair of not-entirely-irrelevant emails I sent out to someone last week.

8/29/2018 7:59 AM

From [REDACTED]:

The imprint [REDACTED] has been added to your account as requested. 


9/2/2018 2:30 PM

Hey [REDACTED],

Congrats on the variant cover killing it. Below is a link to AH#4: The War in Paris in case you're interested. Also, we'll make the [REDACTED] announcement on Tuesday when we publish Gun Ghoul in print.

Obviously, we didn't make the announcement on Tuesday, but moved it up one day when the print edition of Gun Ghoul got through the system and onto our direct store faster than we'd anticipated, because Bounding Into Comics had the story ready to go and was eager to run it.

You wouldn't want to be... unpopular?

The mainstream media tries a new approach to discrediting and disqualifying QAnon:

The QAnon conspiracy theory has surged into mainstream news these past weeks. Several “Q” supporters wore T-shirts and held signs at a recent Trump rally in Florida. Last week, a prominent promoter of the QAnon theory had his photo taken with President Trump in the White House.

If you haven’t heard of the QAnon theory, you’re not alone. We just conducted a new poll of Floridians and found that a large fraction didn’t have any opinion of the QAnon movement. And among those who did, it was strikingly unpopular.

What is QAnon?

“Q” is supposedly a high-ranking official in the Energy Department with a high-level security clearance. “Q,” the theory goes, is working for Trump and against the supposed “deep state.”

“Q” provides clues to online followers who then attempt to piece together those clues to figure out when Hillary Clinton and her ilk will be arrested for sex trafficking and a host of other unspeakable crimes. There are now many versions of the theory, almost as if it were fan fiction, as it has been passed around and expanded upon in social media.

Many people don’t have an opinion of QAnon

Because Florida is where Q supporters made their presence known at the Trump rally, we surveyed 2,085 Floridians from Aug. 8 to 21 after the news coverage of this rally but before news coverage of the QAnon promoter’s White House visit. Over 40 percent did not rate the QAnon movement at all. Twice as many as skipped rating Fidel Castro or Sen. Bill Nelson, and more than three times as many as skipped rating Trump or Clinton. This shows that despite media coverage of QAnon, a large fraction of people likely have not heard enough about it to have an opinion.

Views of QAnon are very unfavorable

Among those who did have an opinion, most were unfavorable toward the QAnon movement. The average score on the feeling thermometer was just above 20. This is a very negative rating, and about half of what the other political figures in the figure below enjoy. In fact, the only person in our comparison to do worse than the QAnon movement, although not by much, is Fidel Castro.

The Energy Department? Anyhow, I don't think there is even a name for this collection of logical fallacies, but I think the idea is that QAnon doesn't exist, no one has heard of it, and the few who have heard of this thing that doesn't exist wouldn't like it if it did, so if you do happen to hear anything about it, please don't pay any attention. Also, there is no Deep State and Donald Trump is a Russian spy.

Gun Ghoul now in print!

ComicsGate Comics is pleased to announce that Will Caligan's Gun Ghoul: Raising the Dead is now in print.

Someone - or something - is taking out the crime lords of Chicago.

Agent Justice of the FBI is on the case. She is a Meta Prime, with the ability to see into the past. But not even her superhuman abilities allows her to explain the impossible. And the FBI is not the only agency that is interested in learning more about the new player in town. In their search for the mysterious killer who is wreaking havoc on the crime lords of Chicago, Agent Justice and Detective Callahan of the Chicago Police Department team up to recreate a gun battle that took place at a restaurant in Chinatown. What they learn leads them to the killer's next target, where they find themselves face-to-face with the ruthless, relentless, inhuman being.

Gun Ghoul: Raising the Dead is a furiously action-packed graphic novel by military veteran Will Caligan. 116 pages, $14.99. The graphic novel is published in 10x7 format on high-quality 70-pound paper. The four digital editions that are collected here have all been bestsellers in the Horror category on Amazon.

Let the ComicsGatekeepers gnash their teeth all they like. While they have been talking, talking, and talking some more, we have published 22 digital editions and 11 print editions in the last eight months. And based on an author who signed with us last night, it is safe to anticipate that some of the loudest voices raised against us will be publishing with us in less than a year.

"I own the word ComicsGate. It belongs to me and I will fight him in court for it. Nobody will make a line of ComicsGate comics except for me."

Yeah, so, about that... it's a pretty poor prophet who has to eat his words less than 8 hours later. Ethan isn't going to fight anyone in court over ownership of the word ComicsGate. I very much doubt that he is dumb enough to throw all his crowdfunded money away on a hopeless legal case in a foreign jurisdiction when he hasn't even bothered to spend $6k on the URL, which was registered in 2013. It sounds as if someone is going to have to explain the concepts of "dilution", "prior usage", and "jurisdiction" to him.

In not-unrelated news, Alt★Hero #4: The War in Paris continues to meet with great reviews and is now the #1 Best Seller in 45-Minute Comic & Graphic Novel Short Reads and the #1 New Release in the Superheroes category.

Where even SJWs fear to tread

It's truly informative to see that this is the reaction from those charming ComicsGaters to the news that a publishing company supports their publicly expressed goals. The fake news image, which stated that a certain "suicide unites fandom", was posted at Bounding Into Comics by one Brett S aka @seventhbeacon, who we are told is a "lover of sci-fi, comics, books, learning & Enlightenment values. Atheist. Liberalist." VFM, it would certainly be interesting to learn considerably more about him. There is the distinct scent of a ComicsGator trying to play let's you and him fight.

In any event, whatever happened to "I am the leader of ComicsGate and so can you?" Now, if I understand correctly, we're being informed that someone actually owns it? When did that happen?

If it is a genuine CGer, then these guys aren't anywhere near ready for prime time. No discipline whatsoever. Imagine if that was directed at an SJW in the industry. The media SJWs would eat them alive.

The more things change

John Trent interviewed me for Bounding Into Comics concerning our support for ComicsGate.

Bounding Into Comics (BIC): What kind of stories do you plan on featuring under this imprint?

Vox Day (Vox):  We plan on featuring any comics and graphic novels brought to us by ComicsGate-affiliated creators who wish to make public their support for ComicsGate.

BIC: Will this be a shared universe imprint like what you are doing with Arkhaven Comics and Alt-Hero?

Vox: No, this is not a shared universe. We set it up as a means of giving ComicsGaters a means of broad and reliable distribution that cannot be shut down by SJWs in the comics industry.

BIC: Do you have any creators already lined up? Who are they?

Vox: Will Caligan is the first. We do have others lined up, but I prefer not to identify them until their comics or graphic novels are ready for publication. As you know, we don’t talk much about our future products, we prefer to wait until things are ready to go before we announce them, as we have done here.

BIC: What will the first title from Will Caligan be? Can you give us any details on the story?

Vox: The print edition of Gun Ghoul. It has done very well in digital, and we expect the graphic novel will also be successful.

Read the whole thing there. The comments promise to prove amusing. Remember this sort of thing from Kotaku In Action?

Nope. Nope. Fuck Vox Day. He has been trying to worm his way into ComicsGate branding for a long time. VOX DAY IS NOT COMICSGATE.

ComicsGate wants politics OUT of comics. We do NOT want to trade SJW bullshit for his alt-right bullshit. Vox is a snake oil salesman, a demagogue, a cult of personality.

Disavow.

See, that's NOT how you beat the SJWs, kiddies.

Madness is heritable

Jordan Peterson isn't even the craziest one in his family:

Cider and not sleeping for a month is so yesteryear. Peterson's daughter had a meal of soybeans and saw her brother turn into a demon.

Jordan's daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast yesterday. Among other things, she revealed that she ate some soy and saw her brother turn into a demon (literally).

I don't mean that as an insult, it's a serious topic, but if they're not lying, it's becoming obvious that some sort of mental illness is running in the family.

Mikhaila also explained how she felt like she was having problems with acne and other skin issues in addition to 4 different serious health problems. A dermatologist then told her that she's suffering from some sort of anxiety disorder and the skin problems are caused by excessive scratching related to that. Of course, Mrs Peterson concluded that dermatologists don't know what they're talking about because in her mind that diagnosis was obviously wrong.

Becoming obvious? Maps of Meaning has been out there for years! All I can say is that anyone foolish enough to listen to these obvious lunatics eminently merits whatever suboptimal outcome that ensues.

Is 666 a google?

Julian Assange stumbled onto the evil nature of Google earlier than most:

Julian Assange would later reference this article when writing his own: Google is not what it seems: This whole thing is a surprisingly good read – and Assange shows off his skills as a writer. It’s worth your time, so despite its length, don’t skip it.

There was one point I definitely had to laugh at, however – given what we now know about Schmidt:

As the interviewee I was expected to do most of the talking. I sought to guide them into my worldview. To their credit, I consider the interview perhaps the best I have given. I was out of my comfort zone and I liked it. We ate and then took a walk in the grounds, all the while on the record. I asked Eric Schmidt to leak US government information requests to WikiLeaks, and he refused, suddenly nervous, citing the illegality of disclosing Patriot Act requests. And then as the evening came on it was done and they were gone, back to the unreal, remote halls of information empire, and I was left to get back to my work. That was the end of it, or so I thought.

Julian will then go through and document a list to ties between Google Execs and the Deep State – including, what should be for us, an uncomfortable level of familiarity with the NSA. In the end, Julian Assange would conclude by calling Google a “burgeoning digital superstate.”

This was written several years ago, and I think it’s clear now that Assange’s suspicions, while correct, still fall short of the scale of the treason seen manifested in reality. Google – at the bleeding edge of tech – metastasized during this time, courting and assisting #TheCabal in their insidious endeavors.

It wasn’t some spontaneous thing, either. It was an asset funded, supported, and groomed by the Deep State, for Deep State purposes.

And remember, it’s not the only one, and it still hasn’t achieved all its goals. Things would have gotten much worse, but for the election of Trump. They almost succeeded in the creation of their systems of human surveillance and control.

Speaking of which, Google is trying to track all offline purchasing as well.

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for. But most of the two billion Mastercard holders aren’t aware of this behind-the-scenes tracking. That’s because the companies never told the public about the arrangement.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Mastercard Inc. brokered a business partnership during about four years of negotiations, according to four people with knowledge of the deal, three of whom worked on it directly. The alliance gave Google an unprecedented asset for measuring retail spending, part of the search giant’s strategy to fortify its primary business against onslaughts from Amazon.com Inc. and others.

But the deal, which has not been previously reported, could raise broader privacy concerns about how much consumer data technology companies like Google quietly absorb.

 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

A failure to learn

Wil Wheaton demonstrates that he has no ability to recognize irony, justice, or karma:

M. A. Murray 31 AUGUST, 2018 AT 12:08 PM
I do not hate you. But what’s missing from this post of yours, as is true of so many of your tweets, is any sense of self-awareness. Everything is always something someone else has done to you. You refuse to accept any responsibility yourself for anything. You have, over the years, said terrible things about people you disagreed with politically and about people who supported GamerGate, as but two examples. You have not only participated in the climate of hate you now decry, you have helped foster it yourself. You have helped make the world bad for others, and you have expressed not the tiniest bit of self-reflection or remorse about it.

Charlie Kilo 31 AUGUST, 2018 AT 12:17 PM
You left Twitter because they wouldn’t deplatform someone you think is a hater, and are complaining that you got deplatformed from Mastodon by people who think you’re a hater. Did this experience teach you anything?

Wil 31 AUGUST, 2018 AT 12:23 PM
Yes. It taught me that people will seek out and create false equivalence to feed their narrative.

You see, to the insufficiently enlightened, one deplatforming for being deemed hateful by others is exactly the same as another. But what these social justice-challenged troglodytes fail to take into account is that while one deplatforming happened to Wil Wheaton, the others did not, therefore the equivalence is obviously and necessarily false.

Meanwhile, John Scalzi continues to blithely pretend that he has never heard of this hateful Wil Wheaton unperson....

I’ve made a choice not to say anything publicly, because, quite frankly (and I know you don’t want to hear this) I don’t owe anyone anything, no matter how loudly and persistently they demand it. If someone has decided that they are owed my public comment on this, or anything else, and will hate on me because I’m not giving it to them, that’s entirely their choice and their right. It is also my choice and my right to not engage with or respond to random people on the Internet.

Oh, I'm sorry. That was Wil Wheaton explaining why he wasn't going to say anything about Chris Hardwick, not John Scalzi explaining why he wasn't going to say anything about Wil Wheaton. It's just so hard to keep these chinless gamma males straight.

Alt★Hero #4: The War in Paris

Arkhaven Comics is pleased to announce the publication of the digital edition of Alt★Hero #4: The War in Paris. This marks the fifth of the 24 issues promised in the original Alt★Hero campaign, and we will release the sixth, Chuck Dixon's Avalon #2, next week. The first paperback and hardcover omnibuses are expected to be sent to backers after the first six editions of Alt★Hero are completed in October.

Inspired by the German government's crackdown on nationalists in Berlin, Antifa is now on the march in Paris. And despite being hunted by the police and the Global Justice Initiative, Jean-Michel Durand is determined to stand with his generation against the enemies of France. But how can even the most steadfast nationalists hope to stop Antifa when the riot police, a United Nations Incident Team, and Captain Europa himself stand in their way?

Alt★Hero is the first in an exciting new line of superhero comics from Arkhaven Comics.

From the early reviews:

• The best one yet. I thought this was going to be good, I didn't expect it to be great.
• This story is shaping up to be epic. With the simultaneous events going on in the US and in Europe with its contemporary setting. I am liking everything I see and have been surprised by the story development. The story is developing, the artwork is improving, the coloring looks great and the visualization of the action, especially in Number 4, is striking.
• This has one of the best brouhahas I've seen in comics in quite awhile. Most of the fistfights I've seen lately end with one or two punches, and there isn't any sense of risk or danger to the hero. But this one really gave you a sense like it could go either way. And I like the way Europa is presented as a man willing to take morally questionable actions, rather than a straight-up mustache-twirling villain.
• If this is the standard that Vox Day and his merry band of writers and artists intend to set and exceed with their next release, the future is looking very bright indeed for those of us who love good comics.
• The best yet. With this issue Alt*Hero fully hits its stride. 

Two more issues to go before we send out the first paperback and hardcover omnibuses. It has taken a while, but we're getting there.

UPDATE: #1 New Release in Superhero Comics & Graphic Novels

Fukuyama still doesn't get it

The author of The End of History is losing the debate to his dead mentor, but still refuses to concede:

Since Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations has been contrasted with my own End of History in countless introductory International Relations classes over the past two decades, I might as well begin by tackling at the outset the issue of how we’re doing vis-à-vis one another. At the moment, it looks like Huntington is winning.

The world today is not converging around liberal democratic government, as it seemed to be for more than a generation. The Third Wave of democratization that Huntington himself observed progressed in the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s from about 35 electoral states to perhaps 115 by 2008. But since then the wave has gone into reverse, what Larry Diamond has labeled a democratic recession. Not only has the number of democracies declined somewhat, but important qualitative changes have taken place. Big authoritarian powers like Russia and China have grown self-confident and aggressive. Meanwhile, existing liberal democracies have lost much of their appeal after the financial crises in America and the Eurozone during the 2000s, and are suffering from populist uprisings that threaten the liberal pillar of their political systems.

In place of the Left-Right ideological split defined largely by issues revolving around the relative economic power of capital and labor in an industrialized setting that characterized 20th-century politics, we now have a political spectrum organized increasingly around identity issues, many of which are defined more by culture than by economics narrowly construed. This shift is not good for the health of liberal democracy, and the number one exemplar of this dysfunction is the United States, where the rise of Donald Trump has posed a serious threat to America’s check-and-balance institutions. The phenomenon of rising populist nationalism is one that I have explored previously in this journal, and at much greater length in my most recent book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.

Huntington was very prescient in his depiction of “Davos Man,” the cosmopolitan creature unmoored from strong attachments to any particular place, loyal primarily to his own self-interest. Davos Man has now become the target of populist rage, as the elites who constructed our globalized world are pilloried for being out of touch with the concerns of the working class. Huntington also foresaw the rise of immigration as one of the chief issues driving populism and the fears that mass migration has stoked about cultural change. Indeed, Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post has labeled Huntington as a prophet of the Trump era.

What no one in the current debate can say is whether the current democratic recession will turn into a full-blown depression, marking a more fundamental shift in global politics toward some alternative regime type, or whether it is more like a stock market correction. The causes of the current recession in Western countries are reasonably clear: Populism has been driven by the unequal effects of globalization, as well as a cultural revolt against the large numbers of migrants moving across international borders and challenging traditional notions of national identity.

There are a number of reasons, however, to wonder if these forces will be strong enough to eventually overcome the factors driving the world toward greater convergence in economic and political institutions, or lead to serious geopolitical conflict on a scale matching that of the early 20th century. Neither the China model nor the emerging populist-nationalist one represented by Russia, Turkey, or Hungary will likely be sustainable economically or politically over an extended period. On the other hand, democracies have mechanisms in place for correcting mistakes, and a big test of American democracy will occur in November when Americans get to vote on whether they approve of the presidency of Donald Trump. Moreover, the rural, less-educated parts of the population that are the core of populist support are, in countries experiencing economic growth, in long-term decline. At this point, however, such assertions amount to no more than speculation.

It's an interesting article, but the point that Fukuyama simply refuses to address is the intrinsic falsity of what he calls "socioeconomic modernization" and James Burnham, more straightforwardly, calls liberalism. The observable reality, and one of the core causes of the loss of popular faith in liberalism and the post-WWII neo-liberal world order, is that its claims to be founded on democracy and the will of the people have proven to be every bit as false as the claims of Communism to be founded on the interests of the working class.

Ideologies lose their adherents when their promises are contradicted by the observable reality. How can liberalism credibly claim moral superiority on the basis of the will of the people when from California to Brussels its primary institutions are openly elitist and anti-democratic? Rather like the failed Soviet Union, the rulers of the West pretend to respect the vote and the people of the West pretend to believe their vote matters. But the pretenses are failing, on both sides.

Liberalism also promises increasing societal wealth and rising living standards through openness, but there too it is failing on both counts. The wealth of the West is a debt-based facade; average wealth per capita has been rapidly declining for decades, to the point that only a small percentage of the population actually owns their own home anymore. Not only birth rates and marriage rates, but average life expectancies are actually falling in many Western countries, and the quality of life drops with every low-IQ criminal immigrant who invades the country with the full support of the ruling elites.

And the irony of calling Russia and China "authoritarian powers" when the government of the United States is spying on the entire global population, engaged in the military occupation of over 70 different countries and territories, and claiming the authority to decide who can be legally criticized or not under pain of imprisonment is deep indeed.

Fukuyama has retreated, but his new book demonstrates that his retreat is a fighting withdrawal rather than a concession. But it will avail him little, because Huntington has only begun to win the debate. Identity is indeed significant, but Fukuyama's implication that new identities can be created to compete with the existing cultural and religious ones is as doomed to failure as the European Union, given that he is counting on higher education and a growing middle class to provide them.

Identity, as opposed to Huntington’s concept of culture, is a better descriptor of today’s politics because it is both socially constructed and contestable, as today’s debates over American national identity illustrate. Huntington’s cultures are, by contrast, fixed and nearly impossible to change. Contrary to the views of many nationalists and religious partisans, identities are neither biologically rooted nor of ancient provenance. Nationalism in the modern sense did not exist in Europe prior to the French Revolution; the Islam of Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does not conform to any of the major traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Contemporary identities based on concepts of nation or religion were created by political actors for specific purposes, and can be displaced by other identities as the outcome of a political struggle.

So while culture does matter, Huntington’s theory really does not fit the current reality in many ways. Western democracies are at war with themselves internally over national identity; there is a slipping consensus that they fit into a broad category like “the West.” When Donald Trump spoke of “the West” in a speech in Poland in 2017, his West was a different one from the West of President Obama. Similarly, in other parts of the world, civilizational fractures are just one among many that are dividing people politically. The only countervailing forces are strong states like the ones governing China and Russia, not transnational entities based on shared cultural values.