Just the first step

Marvel is deeply committed to giving you more of what you don't want:

Marvel Studios executive producer Trinh Tran recently commented about Marvel’s Phase 4 and beyond plans noting “this is the first step to more diverse characters and franchises.”

Tran spoke with Inverse shortly after San Diego Comic-Con to discuss Phase 4 and its “visibility of women and superheroes of color.”

Tran stated, “Female representation, the diversity of it all, is very important because this is the world we live in.” She added, “There’s so many different people out there and in order for us to relate to them, we have to make movies that are different. We can’t always be about one race or gender. That’s not the way to connect with the world.”

Tran would then go on to explain she’s excited about the upcoming Black Widow and Shang-Chi film before noting these Phase 4 films are just the first step for Marvel Studios.

“This is the first step to more diverse characters and franchises. I am hoping for more down the line. We have so many characters in the Marvel Universe, it’s a matter of picking which one makes sense to the MCU.”

She adds:

“In thinking about the future of the MCU and how all those characters are gonna connect, diversity is crucial in our future.”

Tran then states, “I think we’re heading towards the right direction. Ten years ago when we started making these movies, you probably don’t see much of that.”

Arkhaven is going in precisely the opposite direction. Time will tell which was the right choice.

"You should just sue them"

This outcome in the Mignogna lawsuit is precisely why I unmercifully ridicule those morons who jabber about how people should "just sue" everyone who criticizes or crosses them in any way.

Following Friday’s hearing in Tarrant County District Court, Judge John P. Chupp ruled to dismiss the majority of the charges against Funimation, Jamie Marchi, Monica Rial, and Ron Toye in the ongoing defamation lawsuit brought by Dragon Ball Super: Broly voice actor Vic Mignogna.

Friday’s hearing was to rule on the defendants’ respective Motions to Dismiss under the Texas Citizens Participation Act (TCPA). Judge Chupp dismissed the case against Marchi along with the charges of tortious interference of existing contracts and tortious interference of business relations allegations against Rial and Toye and the charges of tortious interference and civil conspiracy against Funimation. Judge Chupp has 30 days to rule on the charges of defamation against Funimation, Rial, and Toye, as well as a charge of conspiracy against Rial and Toye....

As per the TCPA, Chupp’s ruling will require Mignogna to cover the entirety of Marchi’s legal fees, a portion of Funimation, Rial, and Toye’s fees, and pay a fine in amount to be determined by the court.

Lawsuits are very expensive, in both temporal and monetary terms, even when you win. And there is always the risk of being required to cover the other side's legal fees if you lose. This is why it makes no sense to casually threaten lawsuits; in fact, anyone who does so can be safely ignored as a clueless idiot.

And most lawyers, even the very expensive ones, are literally worse than useless. It would shock you to know how ignorant of their very areas of expertise most of them are, and how carelessly they regard unimportant little things like "deadlines" and "documentation".

NFL Coach of the Year

We're only one game - not one week, one game - into the NFL season and it's already clear that Mike Tomlin deserves to be named Coach of the Year for having dealt successfully with Antonio Brown for nine years. This may actually be a more impressive coaching feat than Bill Belichick's six Super Bowl victories, given that even a Super Bowl-winning coach like Jon Gruden couldn't keep him in check for nine weeks.

Antonio Brown asked the Raiders to release him in an Instagram post shared Saturday morning.

The request comes shortly after news broke that Oakland had fined Brown $215,073.53 on Friday night for conduct detrimental to the team on Sept. 4, which Raiders voided the $29.125 million worth of guaranteed money in his deal, according to ESPN's Adam Schefter. In addition to fining Brown for conduct and voiding the guaranteed money in his contract, the Raiders reportedly sent Brown a letter stating that he no longer will be entitled to termination pay if they release him.

Antonio Brown actually makes Terrell Owens look reasonable in retrospect.

UPDATE: After the Raiders wiped out more than $29 million in guaranteed money under Brown’s contract with the team, Brown asked to be released. And the Raiders have released him.

UPDATE: Antonio Brown is now a New England Patriot.

"Mainstream conservatives are traitorous cunts"

And they should never be trusted. Ben Shapiru proves, once more, that GamerGate was right.

Jamie R. Riley, the University of Alabama’s assistant vice president and dean of students, resigned from his position on Thursday after less than seven months on the job, UA officials confirmed.

His resignation comes a day after Breitbart News published an article detailing images of past tweets from Riley, in which he criticized the American flag and made a connection between police and racism.

Jackson Fuentes, press secretary for the UA Student Government Association, confirmed at 4:15 p.m. that Riley is no longer working at the University.

This is a clear-cut win for the Right. And yet somehow, for some reason, (((conservatives))) such as Shapiru and Ekaterina Jung are very, very determined to convince the Right that winning battles is the way to lose the cultural war.

Ben Shapiru@benshapiru
I disagree with this person’s tweets. He shouldn’t lose his job. Also, those on the Left who are livid he lost his job should take a look in the mirror about the world they’ve built, and in which both sides will now play by their ugly rules.

The rules are what they are, Benny. Ugly or not, they are the rules and if you don't play by them, you cannot win. That's true of everything from backgammon to basketball. So, the obvious question is, why are you so intent on preventing the Right from winning, Benny?

Remember, they assert that the main lesson of GamerGate for conservatives is to never ally yourself with anyone unsavory or unseemly who might actually help you win a battle or two.

The Hu unplugged

It turns out metal doesn't require distorted guitars or electricity. And given where they are playing, the lyrics could hardly be more appropriate.

Medieval History 101 Episode VIII

Prof. Rachel Fulton Brown returns with a look at Charlemagne's elephant.

Where did Charlemagne get his elephant and what does it tell us about the relationship between the Franks and the Mediterranean world that once was Rome? The answer may surprise you—it certainly surprised the Danes!

Medieval History 101 Episode VIII guide.

A fake conservative's fake history of GamerGate

Neoclown Ekaterina Jung is more concerned with attempting to gatekeep conservatives and keep them away from those unsavory nationalists who might actually try to win rather than go down in graceful defeat than she is in actually addressing any of the actual history in an article that purports - mostly falsely - to explain GamerGate four years later:

Was GamerGate a precursor to the alt-right and did it prepare the ground for Trump’s election?

In a literal sense, the answer to the first part is a clear no: The alt-right as a white nationalist fringe existed at least since 2010, when Richard Spencer launched the Alternative Right website. However, it is true that the alt-right’s online presence skyrocketed in 2015 and that a major vehicle for its attempted mainstreaming was Breitbart, the right-wing site which also embraced GamerGate.

In his perceptive Vox article in 2014, Klein noted that despite the left-of-center politics of most GamerGaters, media treatment of the controversy had been sharply divided along left/right lines: Liberal opinion was “in lockstep against Gamergate,” while some conservatives and critics of the social justice left were sympathetic. Breitbart, in particular, made GamerGate its pet cause, starting with a September 1, 2014 article by the soon-to-be-infamous Milo Yiannopoulos titled “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Yiannopoulos also championed GamerGate on Twitter; with his flashy bad-boy persona, he quickly became a hero to many in the movement, even those who otherwise had no affection for Breitbart’s politics.

It is also true that there were alt-right-type elements within GamerGate. As I cautioned in an early article on the movement, any backlash against extremist versions of feminism and “social justice” is likely to be a magnet for actual misogynists, bigots, and far-right extremists. (Ironically, one example I cited was pro-GamerGate lawyer Mike Cernovich, whose past misogynist tweets had been flagged by a GamerGate opponent — and who went on to become a prominent alt-right figure before eventually attempting to distance himself from the extremist fringe.) There were also the “edgy” teens who came in by way of “/pol/,” the 4chan “Politically Incorrect” board notorious for racist and anti-Semitic memes, and who thought it was good fun to post a cartoon of Sarkeesian as a greedy Jew.

“Since GamerGate didn’t have any sort of people controlling its population, and it was nominally against leftists, it attracted /pol/, obviously,” a Jewish GamerGater who wanted to be identified only as David, a politically centrist tech worker in his late twenties, told me in an email. Yet David also stressed that he saw “very little” anti-Semitism in GamerGate-related conversations and made many Jewish friends through the movement.

Far from setting the tone in GamerGate, its far-right members felt sufficiently embattled to start a separate 8chan forum, /ggrevolt/ (GamerGate Revolt); its denizens often disliked “regular” GamerGaters at least as much as they did “social justice warriors.” Video blogger June Lapine (“Shoe0nHead” on YouTube), a 28-year-old New Yorker who was involved with GamerGate from the start, says that /ggrevolt/ was her “first introduction to what [the] ‘alt-right’ was.”

There is strong evidence that as the alt-right began to gather steam in late 2015, Yiannopoulos tried to channel GamerGate — which he often tried to treat as his private army — in its direction. In January 2016, someone leaked chat logs in which pro-GamerGate blogger Ethan Ralph, who was close to Yiannopoulos, and several of his friends from /ggrevolt/ trashed GamerGate, agreed that the culture war needed to move on to the alt-right, and discussed plans to “reappropriate” GamerGate for the alt-right by purging liberals, who were mocked as “SJW-lite.” These revelations, which coincided with intensifying harassment of GamerGaters by /ggrevolt/ types, rocked what remained of GamerGate and got Ralph banned from the Kotaku In Action board (which did not stop The Daily Dot from calling Ralph a “GamerGate leader” when he was arrested several months later for assaulting a police officer).

In the end, the GamerGate-to-Alt-Right pipeline never materialized. However, a number of previously liberal GamerGaters did get on the “Trump Train” in 2016. At present, still-active GamerGaters to whom I have spoken estimate that about half of the posters on Kotaku In Action are pro-Trump. Some may have fallen for the Breitbart lure; others saw Trump as the answer to “political correctness” or shared his hostility to the mainstream media, which they (correctly) felt had been extremely shoddy and biased in its GamerGate coverage.

The slide toward Trumpism disappointed many GamerGate sympathizers; it also made some left-of-center GamerGaters such as Matt Jarbo — a.k.a. “Mundane Matt,” the YouTuber whose video on the Quinn cronyism allegations helped start the controversy — worry if they’ve helped elect Trump. “I definitely don’t want that on my conscience,” Jarbo joked uneasily in our recent interview. Others, such as fellow YouTuber Lapine, a self-described “proud social democrat,” dismiss the idea as “delusional.” As Lapine puts it, “everyone is always pointing fingers at who is to blame for Trump.”

Jung is just trying to work in a hit piece attacking the nationalist Right that she fears while ostensibly writing about GamerGate. It's highly amusing that she takes shots at both Milo and Cerno, as well as the Alt Right, without ever mentioning the one individual who was, unlike either Mike or Milo, both a pre-Quinnspiracy OGGer and openly Alt-Right.

But mostly it's bad journalism; she doesn't bother to talk to any of the major GamerGate figures or follow-up on what has happened to them since, she has no idea why the backlash to GameJournoPros took place or even mention the exposure of the conspiracy and the mailing list, and she completely fails to make the connection between the tactics successfully utilized by GamerGate and the tactics that are now commonly used for everything from Sad Puppies to consumer lawfare against the SJWs and the social media giants.

Consider what Jung claims to be the moral of the GamerGate story for conservatives:

For critics of the left, the main moral of the story is that it’s important to repudiate unsavory allies.

In other words, please cuck. This is absolutely and entirely false. If you want to understand GamerGate, you'd do far better to simply read chapter 8 of SJWS ALWAYS LIE, Striking Back at the Thought Police, which explained the relationship between GamerGate and Donald Trump back in 2015 at the very start of the chapter.

The reason SJWs have been so successful since the 1990s is that for more than two decades, they simply did not meet with any serious or organized resistance. #GamerGate represented the first serious organized resistance to them, and in only one year, the intrepid warriors of the gamer community have inspired similar resistance movements to surface in science fiction, in comics, and in romance. Echoes of #GamerGate have begun to appear in the popular culture, as Donald Trump not only refused to kowtow before Fox News's Megyn Kelly flashing of the SJWs' Woman card during the U.S. presidential debate but afterwards declared political correctness to be a big problem in the U.S.A. Trump's unexpected popularity in the polls is, to a large extent, a consequence of his willingness to confront the SJW Narrative and speak the truth as he sees it.

#GamerGate tactics are also beginning to be adopted by other groups for unrelated purposes, as there is a distinctly GG tone to the anti-Planned Parenthood memes that have been cropping up on Twitter ever since The Center for Medical Progress began releasing its sting-videos that showed Planned Parenthood employees openly discussing the sale of human organs taken from the infants it aborts. American immigration opponents have also successfully tarred some of the leading Republican candidates as well as their media supporters with the #cuckservative hashtag, much to the dismay of both the G.O.P. elite and the New York Times alike. It is therefore little wonder that SJWs are terrified of #GamerGate and see it as their most fearsome enemy.

An actual GamerGater commenting on Instapundit provides a much better summary.

I was in gamergate and it had several interesting aspects that I personally witnessed.

1. Gamergate was first time I learned that SJWs don't really care who they demonize. We had many Lefty type gamers that were astonished that they too would be declared "bad people" for defending their hobby.

2. Organizations have more money then you could make a dent into with a boycott, but nobody ever has enough time. We learned that you can overwhelm an organization's customer facing department and PR with email and phone call campaigns.

3. Never ever ever make someone a leader. The Media loves to find leaders and smear them to smear the movement by proxy. Lots of people got smeared, lots of people lost their jobs.

4. Mainstream conservatives are traitorous cunts and should never be trusted to guard an outhouse. We tried to get so called conservative journalists interested in what we were doing. Most ignored us as they thought we were just "a bunch of nerds playing games in mom's basement", and of course we had the shitheads that said we were misogynists and games cause violence. In the end one guy gave us a fair shake, Milo Yiannopoulos and started giving us coverage. As per their nature the conservatives tried to deep six his ass and sent him to the fringes of society and the MSM was just giddy with the results.

This. So very much this.

The invaluable Nate explains how Generation X has killed The Beatles for good.

GenZ has never heard the Beatles and likely never will... because GenX hates them and never played them for their kids in GenZ.

He's absolutely right. Neither Spacebunny nor I ever played any of their songs for our kids. Prince, yes. AC|DC, yes. David Sylvian, absolutely. Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, The Eagles, The Beach Boys, and even Duran Duran, yes. But no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, and they are far more familiar with The Hu than The Who.

In the amusingly damning words of one GenZ metal guitar player, "The Beatles will be around about as long as Justin Bieber."

Years late and dollars short

Now media conservatives are beginning to talk about how the Conservative establishment should be doing what we're doing already:

It's time for conservatives and what Kurt Schlicter calls the "Normals" to have an entertainment industry of their own. Hollywood has effectively divorced conservatives (and the Normals). And after a divorce, as they say, "living well is the best revenge."

The question is how. It's not easy and one of the big reasons is the conservative world itself. Conservative financiers abjure the arts — indeed they seem even to fear them — unless it's putting money in their local philharmonic to have their name on a plaque in the lobby. Problem is, we all love Beethoven but he doesn't need our help at this point.

Conservative fat cats also put a ton of money in think tanks that aren't particularly effective. I don't mean to unnecessarily diss those tanks. Some of my best friends are, etc., etc.... but the truth is, one good movie or television series is worth more than a hundred, or even a thousand, position papers when it comes to moving society. Andrew Breitbart couldn't have been more right when he said: "Politics is downstream of culture." (He could have added education, which is in a sense part of the culture, now more than ever working hand-in-hand with entertainment for bad ends.)

What is needed here by investors on the right is a little guts for a change. It shouldn't be so hard, but somehow it is — or has been. It's obviously true that film, theatre, and publishing are risky investments, but the center-to-right audience is huge. Plenty of "proof of concept" exists with films like The Blind Side, Lone Survivor, and American Sniper — just some examples of box office smashes that fit that profile.

Not one word about Alt-Hero, Rebel's Run, or any genuine alternatives, of course. And remember, this guy was given seven (7) million dollars by a billionaire investor back in 2004. Did he make a movie? Did he start a film studio? Did he even publish a single comic book? No, he spent it on a wildly overpriced blog.

On the plus side, however, it must be admitted that Mr. Simon was laudably open about the nature of his operation from the start.

Speaking of supporting the cultural war, you can pick up a copy of the Big Bear's tour special here.

UPDATE: Wow, I had no idea, but apparely Roger Simon is a comically stereotypical shyster.

Some things never change

A Boomer booms about how rock and roll is dying with his generation and nothing will ever be that good or important again:

Jazz died off as a mass genre for two reasons. First, as Mark Gauvreau Judge wrote in his fun 2000 book, If It Ain’t Got That Swing, postwar economics and the rise of bebop as a counterforce in jazz greatly killed off the big bands of the 1930s and ‘40s, but the complexities of bop led many teenagers in the 1950s to seek out rock and roll as a simpler music style to dance along with. Capitol Records putting the full force of their PR team behind The Beatles when they arrived in America in early 1964 cemented rock and roll as the dominant musical genre for teenage whites, as Nat “King” Cole, who helped make Capitol a dominant force in America in the 1950s, discovered to his horror when he called their flagship Los Angeles office that year and the receptionist answered “Capitol Records – home of The Beatles!”

However, by the beginning of the 21st century, rock’s dominance was already on the wane when first Napster and then Apple’s iTunes radically altered how consumers access music. MTV, which gave rock a new lease on life after music industry fears in the early ‘80s that video games would replace their product as teens’ primary consumer spending good, was itself a spent force by the mid-to-late 1990s.

Hence, the nostalgia that many rock fans feel, with little or no new product that’s equal to the material produced during rock and roll’s heyday.

There is some truth concerning the way in which the atomization of culture is preventing the monocultural dominance by whatever the mainstream media corporations decided to push on teenagers. But the idea that there is little or no new music that is equal to that produced during what Boomers consider to be rock's heyday is patently absurd.

Today little Japanese girls wearing maid outfits not only rock harder, they play their instruments much better, than all the rockers of the 1960s and the vast majority of those of the 1970s. And there isn't a single guitarist of that generation who could ever shred as well as the average YouTube guitarist today.

Boomers like the author simply don't understand that the fact music isn't being played on the radio or on the evening television variety shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Withdrawal is a bitch

Apparently Creepy Joe hadn't fed on the flesh of young Haitian children recently enough:

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's left eye filled up with blood while answering a question at CNN's climate town hall Wednesday night. Biden was answering a question about fracking when the blood became noticeable. He then turned to take a question about China's role in carbon emissions, and the blood was difficult to miss.

There is no way the DNC is going to permit him to be the nominee. Not when he might literally dissolve into a puddle of gore on national TV without even being staked.

You're Doing Great Kid tour support

If you're interested in supporting the Big Bear's YOU'RE DOING GREAT KID 2019 fall tour but you can't attend any of the four shows, three of which are already sold out, you can now do so at the tour video page at Arkhaven.

There are three video products available, two of which will be provided for free to Unauthorized subscribers. But you may want to order one anyhow if you want to support the tour. There will also be an official tour t-shirt, which will include the tour special, available soon as well:

- Tour special $10
- Tour documentary $25
- Signed Limited Edition DVD (250) $100

Tickets are still available for the Idaho show.

Winning the war

Nothing causes more headaches, backaches, and heartaches for gardeners than weeds: these many-petaled, many-seeded, and many-rooted fiends. Stealing sunlight, water, and nutrients, they may leave our gardens looking grim and growing poorly. The chemical army is losing. Resistant weeds are spreading. Soil health is suffering. Drift and overspray destroys thousands of adjoining farms, homesteads, and properties each growing season. It is a broken system with bitter results.

WINNING THE WAR ON WEEDS teaches you how to defeat every gardener's worst enemy! Available at a discount for only $16.99 from Castalia Direct.

You might think we're crazy to publish all these gardening books, but trust me, from the business perspective, they're some of the most successful books we publish.

The failure of the neo-liberal order

Prof. Stephen Walt observes, contra Fukuyama, that history didn't end in 1989:

As a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Stephen Walt has a front row seat to the discussions, debates, and human types that dominate U.S. foreign policy. His assessment is bleak. With the leading lights of both parties wedded to the consensus that he calls “liberal hegemony,” the world’s predicted embrace of democratic capitalism and peaceful relations has not materialized. Instead, liberal hegemony has yielded long and inconclusive wars in the Middle East, regime change operations that have led to failed states in Libya and Yemen, U.S. military spending that dwarfs that of the rest of the world, resentment and passive resistance from our ostensible allies, along with increasing hostility from Russia and China.

In short, Walt makes a persuasive case that liberal hegemony is not succeeding, even on its own terms....

Walt details the practice of liberal hegemony since the end of the cold war, when the United States found itself in the position of being the “sole superpower.” He explains that “the pursuit of liberal hegemony involved (1) preserving U.S. primacy, especially in the military sphere; (2) expanding the U.S. sphere of influence; and (3) promoting liberal norms of democracy and human rights.” This approach continued through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies, in spite of their superficial differences. Indeed, the bipartisan hostility to Trump shows how much consensus on foreign policy prevailed before his election, in spite of the heated debate over the Iraq War in the mid-2000s.

The early fruits of liberal hegemony include the ill-fated Somalia mission and the later intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. But most infamously, liberal hegemony provided justification for the Iraq War and contributed to the never-ending Afghanistan campaign. In both cases, liberal hegemony did not counsel limited punitive expeditions, nor would it conceive of classifying certain areas of the world as ungovernable “shitholes” that needed to be cordoned off and avoided. Instead, we would stay until these countries were stable democracies—100 years if need be. As George W. Bush ambitiously put the matter in his second inaugural address, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

One legitimate criticism of this strategy, for which we have real time confirmation, is that in addition to not achieving results in places like Iraq, Somalia, and Libya, these expansive aims have left little reserve for dealing with a genuine emerging competitor: China. Indeed, far from being prepared and equipped to counter a rising China, the NATO expansion counseled by liberal hegemony has driven the otherwise-declining power of Russia into China’s arms, while, at the same time, short-sighted free trade policies have expanded China’s economy while deindustrializing our own.

Liberal hegemony has become simply another name for rule by neoclown. And since the neoclown objectives have remained essentially unchanged since Trotsky advocated world revolution, liberal hegemony will never accomplish its stated goals because it's not even working towards them. So, the important conclusion is not that liberal hegemony HAS NOT worked as advertised, it is that it CANNOT POSSIBLY do so.

Incest in the Congress

Minnesota's freshman congresswoman is not only a liar and a bigamist, she's also incestuous:

The scandal has pushed the incredible panoply of scandals we have covered in depth on Power Line into the background: the identity fraud, the marriage fraud, the immigration fraud, the tax fraud.

In the past three weeks I have circled back to interview sources whom I have found to be highly reliable in the Omar saga. They open a window onto the scandals from the perspective of Ahmed Hirsi, her long-time partner and the father of her three children. According to sources, Hirsi is telling friends:

• that he will not go to jail for Omar;

• that while Omar did indeed marry her brother (Ahmed Elmi) for fraudulent purposes, Hirsi did not know at the time that she had married Elmi;

• that Omar is threatening Hirsi he would be in trouble along with her if the truth were to come out;

• that Omar has asked him to state publicly that all is well with their marriage even though it is completely done and finished; and

• that in fact they are living apart and have been divorced under Islamic law (although they remain legally married).

This is the inevitable price of Scandicucking. I guarantee that the good people of the Minnesota DFL party are wondering how on Earth they found themselves in this extraordinarily embarrassing position. And it all traces back to their desperate need to be extra nice to the poor little dark people in order to prove how totally not-racist they are.

The only real question about the first cannibal to be elected to Congress is if he'll be representing Utah or Minnesota.

The No-Deal showdown

Tories are discovering who the fake Conservatives are as they abandon both their party and their nation for the EU:

Boris Johnson saw his Commons majority wiped out today as a former minister dramatically crossed the floor of the Commons to join the Lib Dems.

Phillip Lee walked away from his colleagues in the chamber and went to sit with Jo Swinson's pro-EU group.

The incendiary step came as the Tories descended into civil war ahead of the huge showdown over No Deal Brexit tonight.

It looks as if the General Election that Nigel Farage was hoping for is now in the cards.

Black Batman

I cannot even describe how delighted I am to hear the latest rumors about DC's insistence on ritual self-disembowelment:

The hot gossip coming out of comic book shows this weekend from a number of prominent sources, is that in the summer of 2020 leading into 2021, DC Comics is planning to bring us a black Batman. Not Bruce Wayne, but someone else donning the cowl and cape.

Who this new Batman will be, I don’t know. All I have been told is that it won’t be Duke Thomas, the young man previously teased as taking on the role of Robin and Batman to come.

Marvel Comics has given us a black/Latino Spider-Man with Miles Morales, popularised in the Into The Spider-Verse movie. Sam Wilson took on the role of Captain America, reflected in the Avengers: Endgame movie. And Nick Fury has been replaced in the Marvel Universe by his black son, Nick Fury, Jr, reflecting the casting of Samuel L Jackson in the Marvel movies. While in Doomsday Clock, DC Comics’ unauthorised sequel to Watchmen, the new Rorschach is a black man, and son of the original Rorschach’s psychiatrist. It looks like the mainstream DC Comics Universe may be heading in a similar direction with Batman. Could this also find itself reflected in the DC movies?

If there was much doubt about AT&T deciding to shut down the production of new comics at DC, the market's reaction to this should settle that in a... flash? I wonder if we can persuade them to make the black Batman gay too? Isn't it about time? After all, it's CURRENT YEAR!

Meanwhile, Shade of the Global Justice Initiative remains white.

The Trumpslide cometh

There are polls and there are observations. These days, the latter are much more reliable:

Once upon a time, long, long ago, public opinion polls may have reflected, however faintly, some generalization of public opinion.  For a multitude of reasons, that is no longer true.  To demonstrate that point, compare the August 29 Rasmussen poll showing President Trump’s approval rating of 47 percent with the Quinnipiac reported approval rating of 38 percent.  Even more irrational are the Quinnipiac poll result that whatever is left of Joe Biden would beat Trump 54 percent to 38 percent in a general election and the Economist poll number that asserts that 55 percent of the public thinks the country is headed in the wrong direction.  It is a near certainty that none of those numbers reflects reality.

So, discarding the meaningless political polls, I went to the most accurate opinion poll I am aware of for my pre-quadrennial presidential forecast: the Washington County (Pa.) Agricultural Fair.

After my 2016 visit to the fair, I reported that Trump was going to win Washington County big.  Why?  Enthusiasm was enormous.  Trump hats were everywhere.  People were wearing Trump shirts and Trump pins.  These were not all registered Republicans, either.  There was a large booth selling Trump merchandise and doing a land office business.  There was no similar Clinton enterprise.  The parking lot really told the story.  Literally thousands of pickup trucks, gun racks behind the seats, many with Trump stickers and campaign messages on bumpers and tailgates.  Mixed in were Mercedes and Lexus, many with similar stickers.  If Mercedes and Lexus made gun racks, they would have had those, too.

The County Fair Poll was pretty accurate.  Washington County turned out big: nearly 75 percent of its registered voters went to the polls, and they voted for President Trump with 60 percent of the vote.  That means a lot of registered Democrats voted for President Trump.

What does the early forecast for 2020 look like based on the 2019 Washington County Fair?  It looks as if President Trump will do even better than 2016.  I have never seen such enthusiasm, especially so far before an election.  More than 75,000 people attended the fair, and the crowd was a sea of MAGA and KAG hats, Trump shirts, Trump pins, you name it.

Even the New York Times is trying to caution its readers not to take the polls predicting the God-Emperor's electoral demise too seriously:

Millions of Americans who did not like the president in 2016 now say they do. Over all, his personal favorability rating has increased by about 10 percentage points among registered voters since Election Day 2016, to 44 percent from 34 percent, according to Upshot estimates. 

Solving the current crisis

While Babymetal has tried a number of different approaches for replacing the irreplaceable, none of them has come even close to working. I refer, of course, to the absence of Yui; they always had a guitarist to spare, so as much as "the smiley guy" is sorely missed - and who did not notice Ohmura playing his late friend's red guitar instead of Pink-chan at Glastonbury - they have always had more than adequate options on hand.

However, in light of the third iteration of Ladybaby, there are two solid possible replacements. The more obvious one is Fuka, who actually bears some resemblance to Yui and has a similar low-key stage presence. But a more intriguing possibility is Rie, who has become the leader of Ladybaby as it has made a transition similar to the one that Babymetal went through when it ditched the Babybones dancers in favor of the brilliant musicians of the Kami Band.

Speaking of the Kami Band, if that guitar riff from Haten Ni Ramei was any more Onedari Daisuken, they'd have had to put the guitarist in a sheet and paint his face white. Although it is a pity that with the addition of the live band, Ladybaby didn't retain much of the kawai dance.

Anyhow, as this live version of Nippon Manju shows, Rie has the energy and charisma to keep up with Su, and although her voice isn't as strong, it has a nice and identifiable sound to it. And it would be interesting to see Babymetal pair someone up with Su rather than Moa.

Actually, there is a third option that might actually be the best one. What is Rei doing these days? Okay... was really not expecting that.

The hatiest of hate groups

The SPLC finally breaks down, does the right thing, and autodenounces:

MONTGOMERY, AL—In an update Wednesday to its Hatewatch blog, the Southern Poverty Law Center announced the newest addition to its authoritative list of hate groups: the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“We have identified an organization with a clear history of rank intolerance toward faith communities based solely upon their sincerely held religious convictions,” the statement reads. “This organization has encouraged ostracism and threats toward people, politicians, and businesses that do not adhere to its rigid progressive agenda. It has existed and operated right under our noses for years. It is known as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).”

The statement continued, “Now that we have identified our very own organization as a hate group and added the SPLC to the ‘Extremist Files’ section of our website, we will oppose ourselves and our radical agenda with vigor, and we will slander and boycott any person or group that associates with us or cites our intolerant, anti-Christian, identity-politics-driven list of so-called ‘hate groups.’ We will also be opening new litigation against ourselves for defamation, libel, and human rights violations.”

At this point, they should be indicted for racketeering as well.

Il Gattopardo

A very thorough review of the classic Italian film - and novel - The Leopard:

Luchino Visconti’s masterpiece is his 1963 historical epic The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, which actually refers to a smaller spotted wild cat, the serval, which is the heraldic animal of the Princes of Salina in Sicily). Visconti’s film is a remarkably faithful adaptation of the 1958 novel of the same name by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The Leopard became the best-selling Italian novel of all time, carrying off many critical laurels as well. In its beauty of language, philosophical depth, and emotional power, The Leopard is one of the greatest novels I have ever read, and Visconti’s film does it full justice. Both are works of genius.

Set during the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy into a modern nation-state, The Leopard is sometimes called “the Italian Gone with the Wind,” which is an apt comparison, although The Leopard is better both as a book and a film. Like Gone with the Wind, The Leopard is a historical romance set against the backdrop of a war of national unification in which a modern, bourgeois-liberal industrial society (the Northern Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia, ruled from Turin by the House of Savoy), triumphs over a feudal, agrarian aristocracy (the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, encompassing Sicily and Southern Italy and ruled from Naples by the house of Bourbon). Even the time period is basically the same. The novel The Leopard is set primarily in 1860–62, and the film takes place entirely in this time frame.

The story begins in May of 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi, a charismatic nationalist general, raised an insurgent force of 1000 volunteers and landed in Sicily to overthrow the Bourbons. The Garibaldini fought for no king or parliament. They fought for the nationalist idea. They fought for a unified Italy that did not yet exist.

Garibaldi fought his way to Palermo, declared himself dictator, then raised new troops to take the fight to the mainland, where he overthrew the last Bourbon king, Francis II. Then Garibaldi handed the kingdom over to king Victor Emanuel of Piedmont and Sardinia and retired into private life. Plebiscites were held throughout Italy, except in Venice, which was under Austrian rule. All of Italy, save the Papal States, agreed to unification under the House of Savoy. In 1862, Garibaldi raised an army to march on Rome and forcibly incorporate the Papal States, but he was stopped by troops loyal to the new unified kingdom.

Lampedusa was a Sicilian aristocrat and a partisan of aristocracy. As a study of classical aristocratic virtues, The Leopard can be placed alongside Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. As a meditation on the decline of aristocracy into oligarchy, it can be placed alongside Plato’s Republic. Visconti, however, was both an aristocrat and a self-professed Communist. Thus his adaptation also highlights other aspects of the novel, dramatizing how the revolutionary energies unleashed by the ideas of the sovereign people and a unified national state were coopted by the old Italian aristocracy and corrupted by the rising middle classes.

The Leopard is very much the Italian Gone With the Wind. I've read it twice, and I highly recommend the novel to anyone. I haven't seen the film yet, but I intend to do so soon. Read the whole review there.

The burning butthurt of Boomers

The self-obsession and butthurt of Boomers who feel their generation is insufficiently lionized for their world-changing accomplishments is downright comical. From a comment on the Z-man's site:

There is another site on the net where they are all “high IQ” fellows who blame boomers for everything bad that ever happened. (boomers can time-travel apparently) and don’t like out host the Z-man much. Yet, I find the Z-man and the people who comment here very perceptive.

Yes, Marc Stoval's Boomer butthurt is such that he's actually whining about it on other sites. Just go away, Boomer Stoval. Go away and stay away. Perhaps the Z-folk will find you more tolerable.

It's astonishing that these people genuinely don't grasp how their behavior is perceived by the younger generations.

Nationalism rising

AfD is relentlessly marching towards power in Germany:

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came up short of victory in eastern state elections in Saxony and Brandenburg on Sunday, but still finished with its highest vote share ever, Politico reports.

Why it matters: The anti-immigrant, nationalist AfD is one of several far-right parties across Europe that have made significant gains at the expense of the political establishment, including in May's European Parliament elections. Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) remained the strongest party in Saxony with about 32%, while the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) held onto first place in Brandenburg with 27.2%, according to initial results.

Worth noting: The results are being viewed as a victory for AfD, but all parties have sworn not to work with the far right in a coalition government. That could be a difficult promise to keep, however, with vote share dispersed across a number of smaller parties.

The so-called "mainstream" parties will refuse to work with them, but they won't be able to function effectively together because they have nothing in common beyond not being nationalists. For example, some of the obvious fracture points in the rossoverde alliance of PD and M5 in Italy are already beginning to expose themselves.

Gammas destroy society

This is why methodically banishing gammas from your organizations and social circles is an absolute imperative. Mama's Boys and Smart Boys are inevitably a serious challenge for any organization, because virtue-signaling on behalf of women is always their first and foremost priority.

On August 26, Women's Equality Day honors the hard-fought victory of the women's suffrage movement. But the holiday might not exist if one representative's mother hadn't convinced him to cast the deciding vote to pass the 19th amendment.

Women's suffrage took nearly one century to fully realize, but time never moved as slowly as it did between the amendment's passage in Congress in 1919 and its introduction as a federal law in 1920. It all came down to a single vote in the Tennessee legislature on August 18, 1920.

For amendments to pass then, three-fourths of the 48 states at the time needed to ratify it within their own governments. Tennessee, which would've been the 36th state to pass it, was gridlocked.

Harry T. Burn, a 24-year-old state representative, had planned to vote against the amendment. But in his pocket, he kept a letter from his mother Febb, who'd asked him to "be a good boy" and vote for the amendment that would grant her the right to vote for legislators like her son, according to the National Constitution Center.

So he did. And with his "Aye," the 19th Amendment passed nationwide.

Their second priority, of course, is to prove they are a Smart Boy at all costs. One ignores these things at one's peril.

This is why if one picks up even the faintest scent of gamma from someone with whom one is working on any project, one should immediately take action to move them away from any points of weakness and anything one considers to be mission critical. And one would also do well to be henceforth alert for any signs of rage-quitting, in order to eject them right away once they begin moving into their signature self-destructive burning-down-the-house stage.

The Z-Man guarantees Warren 2020

It's always wise to put these predictions on the record well ahead of time, before the predictors start performing the Scott Adams two-step. The Z-Man contemplates the upcoming 2020 US Presidential election and confidently makes his call:

The 2020 presidential campaign will be two sides of the 60’s Boomer culture, facing off against one another in one final battle. The male side, represented by Donald Trump, is nostalgic for an America that no longer exists. Trump sees himself as this generation’s Ronald Reagan. Instead of morning in American, though, it is dusk in America. His tenure is a cargo cult of sorts. He and his supporters seem to think if they carry on like it is 1985, it will suddenly become 1985. Trump is pure nostalgia.

Warren is the feminine side of this battle. Unlike Trump, she is not pining for a return to Reagan’s America. She is all of the liberal Boomers in the 80’s and 90’s, who talked about the terribleness of Reaganism, while enjoying the benefits. Just as Boomer feminists talked like Betty Friedan, but lived like June Cleaver, this side of the Boomer political culture publicly hated Reagan and the 80’s economic boom, but privately benefited from it. The conscience of the 60’s was always forgiving....

I guarantee you she will run as the person who wrote the book, The Two Income Trap. And she will win. Trump, for all his stupidity, has known Warren was his big problem all along. That’s why he went after her two years ago.

I disagree, of course. I remain quite confident that President Trump will win in 2020, and by a bigger Electoral College margin than he did in 2016. And while I agree that Warren currently looks like the most likely Democratic nominee, I think it is too soon to declare that she will be the nominee, much less the eventual winner, let alone guarantee it. I've seen far too many media-anointed frontrunners wilt under the pressure of the actual caucuses and primaries to express any opinion on the matter yet.

Godless primitivism is not the answer

But it's certainly to be preferred to the defenders of Tolerance, Equality, Progress, Inclusiveness, and Diversity, or TEPID as I have occasionally referred to the satanic veil of Social Justice. And conservatives are understandably alarmed that their incessant irrelevance and defeatist equalitarianism is being rejected by the increasingly nationalist young men of the West:

The reason this book is important is because it speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males) with equality as propagandized and imposed in our day: a hectoring, vindictive, resentful, levelling, hypocritical equality that punishes excellence and publicly denies all difference while at the same time elevating and enriching a decadent, incompetent, and corrupt elite.

BAP would say—indeed does say—that this is where the logic of equality inherently and inevitably leads. He even goes so far as to deny that the American Founders meant a word of their rhetoric. I think this is impossible to sustain as a historical matter, but on the larger philosophical question it is possible that the founders meant every word but were still wrong. It’s fair to say, however, that BAP’s followers take for granted that the idea of equality is false. They even have a derisive term for it: “equalism.” They dismiss the language of the founders, of rights, of the American political tradition as “Enlightenment,” which—rest assured—they don’t mean as a compliment.

And I have more bad news for my fellow conservatives: the talented kids who’ve found this book aren’t listening to us. It doesn’t matter whether they aren’t listening because they found the book, or they found the book because they aren’t listening. The fact remains that all our earnest explanations of the true meaning of equality, how it comports with nature, how it can answer their dissatisfactions, and how it’s been corrupted—none of that has made a dent.

Bronze Age Pervert is correct to say this is where the logic of equality inherently and inevitably leads. The historian Martin van Creveld has laid that out quite clearly in Equality: The Impossible Quest. And the Founding Fathers quite clearly didn't mean their high-flying rhetoric. All men are most certainly not created equal, by God or by Nature, and Thomas Jefferson's reference to "British Brethren", "foreign Mercenaries" and "merciless Indian Savages" conclusively prove that the conservative fetish for equality is based on nothing more solid than their imaginations.

But the godless neo-platonic ur-fascism advocated by Bronze Age Pervert is not a viable solution to a very real problem. Lacking as it does any basis in philosophy or objective morality, it is absolutely bound to fail. The Bronze Age Mindset is just that, a mindless primitivist reaction on which it is impossible to build or sustain a functional civilization.

Without Christianity, without the European nations, without the Graeco-Roman legal and philosophic traditions, there is no Western civilization. Which, of course, is why the only solution to the undermining and subversion of the West is to return to the three core pillars of the West.