DtG goes nationwide

USA Today ran an article on prepping and mentioned Castalia's own David the Good and his survival masterpiece.

Not everyone has the privilege of owning land, but even having a backyard can offer opportunities not available to apartment dwellers, like starting a garden or raising chickens. Many preppers even had remote “bug out” locations in rural areas perfect for social isolation.

If you had a time machine, you might want to go back in time and buy 50 acres, but your best bet now is to use what you have. Our supply chain is being stressed to its limits, and even if barren shelves are more a symptom of panic buying than an actual shortage, anything we can do to relieve stress on the supply chain will help. Spring is almost here, so now is the perfect time. You might need less space than you think: Steven Cornett in San Diego started his own commercial farm on a mere quarter of an acre.

Here are some resources to get gardening fast:

• Steve Solomon’s Gardening When It Counts, which is just what it sounds like.
• Mel Bartholomew’s All New Square Foot Gardening. The late Mel Bartholomew wasn’t what you’d call a survivalist, but his intensive, low-labor method is as close as you can get in terms of a “gardening quick fix,” especially if you have easy access to water.
• David the Good’s Grow or Die: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening, which again, is just what it sounds like. David outlines the best crops to plant for survival, how to fertilize with your own urine, and even how to grow your own tobacco. His YouTube channel is a wealth of information.

You can pick up a paperback copy of Grow or Die at Amazon. Because this is the one book you do NOT want to have only in ebook.

The antisemitic Deep State

Is it really "conspiracy theory" when both the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel echo the warnings of past political leaders concerning a shadowy "deep state" pulling the strings from behind the scenes?

People who met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent months have heard lengthy speeches that seemed to be taken from one of Oliver Stone’s conspiracist screenplays. He told them that even though he has been elected repeatedly, in reality, the country is controlled by a “deep state.”

“There’s no democracy here, but a government of bureaucrats and jurists,” he said. The strings of this shadow government are ostensibly pulled by the prosecution, which Netanyahu views as more dangerous than Hezbollah’s precision missiles. Prosecutors and judges, he believes, have a symbiotic relationship whose goal is ousting him.

IDKA bows out

Unfortunately, our Swedish friends at IDKA were unable to make a go of their social-media-with-privacy service. They sent out this email this morning. It's a reminder that starting a new business is always very difficult, and every genuine success is hard-won.

Dear enthusiast and Idka user

As you know, Idka was started by a small group of inspired, driven and sincere privacy enthusiasts and activists, a group which has since been joined by other similarly driven people, staff, consultants, investors and other supporters. We are all very proud of the idea and the ‘designed bottom up for privacy’ cooperation and social media platform that Idka has become. We sincerely thank all the present and past staff and consultants who have contributed to this fantastic achievement.

We thank you, the enthusiast user, for your support as well. We also thank the contributors to our blog and videocast channel, who have kept the very important dialogue around privacy alive, motivating people to act – to Idka.

However, we have not managed to grow the user bases as fast as we would have hoped for, in spite of the tsunami we are experiencing in terms of interest around privacy. This has led to a need for more growth capital. The board of Idka have for some time been in close contact with funds, either existing or under establishment, which specialize in funding purpose driven companies and business ideas with a particularly focus on privacy. This is a new trend within VC funding that Idka has contributed to and which time now have come.

The board of Idka has planned for, and had gotten positive indications from prospective investors (new and existing), to raise further bridge financing, in order to the company through the Corona-pandemic and then raise growth capital from one or more of these very exciting new funds. However, due in large part to the Corona-pandemic, some of the support for the share issue was withdrawn.

As a result of this, and in spite of our hard work and your support, Idka may not be able to attract necessary short-term funding. We are still working hard at it, but due to the grave financial situation Idka is in and the implications of the pandemic lock-down, the board have taken the decision to inform you that the Idka service may discontinue at any time; and that you as a matter of priority should download any material you have uploaded to the cloud storage.

We are indeed very sorry to have to write this message, and still hope that we would manage to secure future funding. However, no-one should rely on this, so please save your digital assets as soon as possible (see below).

Stay safe, take care of yourself, your family and your friends in these difficult times.

All the best from the Idka team.

Soft biowarfare

It would appear the Chinese have inadvertently discovered how to break the chains of global US hegemony, as both Pat Buchanan and The Saker are both contemplating the same potential consequences of Corona-chan:

Seeing what happened on the carrier Theodore Roosevelt, the coronavirus could have a major impact on U.S. global commitments.

Americans were already coming home from the Middle East, drawing down our 12,000 troops in Afghanistan after a deal with the Taliban, and moving our 5,000 troops in Iraq into fewer bases.

We have disengaged from the Saudi war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen and are drawing down our forces in Syria.

In Libya’s civil war, it is Russians, Turks, Egyptians and Gulf Arabs, not Americans, who are the supporting actors.

American soft power is also in retreat from the world.

Some 10,000 Peace Corps volunteers have been brought home. Scores of thousands of U.S. citizens have been repatriated by the State Department. We have shut the door to Europe, China, the world.

What now becomes of the U.S. geostrategic “pivot,” the shift of planes, troops, ships and bases from the Middle and Near East to the Indo-Pacific theater to contain a rising China?

And contain China with what?

The Roosevelt has been ravaged by the coronavirus. As of Tuesday, 589 cases of COVID-19 were reported from a crew of 4,800. Four thousand sailors in Guam are in various stages of a 14-day isolation period in hotels and spare rooms across the island.

But it is not just the Roosevelt. Every U.S. warship — carriers, cruisers, frigates, destroyers, subs — has cramped quarters conducive to the spread of the coronavirus.

How many of these vessels will soon be doubling as hospital ships?

The same question might also be asked of the U.S. Army and Marine barracks in South Korea, Japan, Australia and Okinawa.

There are allegations that the coronavirus did not originate in the Wuhan “wet market” where bats are sold for food but instead escaped through a horrible blunder in a Chinese bioweapons laboratory a few miles away.

Whatever the truth, the Wuhan virus appears to have become the most effective means of disabling U.S. hard and soft power that we have encountered in many a decade.

The Saker observes that carrier diplomacy is no longer an option when an entire carrier group can be disabled by arranging to infect a single sailor on shore leave.

First, the obvious: USN carriers cannot operate effectively under a bio-attack (a truly weaponized virus would both be much more transmissible than SARS-COV-2 and it would be far more deadly). This also indicates that they would probably do no better under a real chemical warfare attack either.

Considering that in reality USN carriers are a instrument of colonial repression and not ships to be engaged against the USSR (which had real biowarfare capabilities), this makes sense (while most university labs & the like could produce some kind of virus and use it as a weapon, truly weaponized viruses, the kind effectively used in special delivery systems, can only be produced by a limited list of countries). However, in theory, all the formations/units/subunits/ships/aircraft/armor/etc of a military superpower should be trained to operate in case of a nuclear, chemical and biological attack. Clearly, this is not the case with US carriers, most likely because nobody in the USA really expected such an attack, at least not during the Cold War.

For the current situation, however, I think that the lesson is clear: the USN simply does not have an effective capability to operate under NBC attack conditions.

Jury fraud and fake justice

The railroading of Roger Stone continues:

The federal judge overseeing the trial of longtime Trump associate Roger Stone on Thursday denied his motion for a new trial, which was based on a claim of juror bias.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Stone's lawyers failed to demonstrate that a woman selected as a juror was biased against President Donald Trump, that she failed to disclose those views during jury selection and that she should not have been allowed to serve.

"The defendant has not shown that the juror lied; nor has he shown that the supposedly disqualifying evidence could not have been found through the exercise of due diligence at the time the jury was selected," the judge said.

The fact that the defendant showed the juror lied and that she was biased, was, of course irrelevant. This is why The Trial of Roger Stone has to be read in order to be believed. The corruption of the justice system is even worse than you probably imagine.

A fraud and a pedophile?

Nobel Laureate Bob Zimmerman is chock-full of fascinating confessions in his newest release:

I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones
And them British bad boys, the Rolling Stones
I go right to the edge, I go right to the end
I go right where all things lost are made good again.

Step aside Murakami. You may as well put the pen down, David Sylvian. It's just as well that you're long dead, Tolstoy. That's some quality literature right there.

Speaking of music, I'd tell you what we're working on, only you would not believe it. All right, those who know me would probably believe it, but they wouldn't want to do so. Also, apologies in advance, mi muy buen amigo....

Book Review: The Last Emperox

An anonymous book reviewer reviews THE LAST EMPEROX by Tor's Three-Million-Dollar Man, John Scalzi. While I have not read any of the three books in the trilogy myself, it would not appear that Tor made a wise investment.

I was a few chapters into The Last Emperox when Scalzi did something he’d never done before in the Interdependency trilogy.  He made me laugh.

It was not a snicker at one of his jokes.  It was not a wry chuckle at the semi-snarky dialogue that passes for humour.  It was a genuine laugh when it hit me that Kiva Lagos is Donald Trump, with breasts!  Intentionally or not, Scalzi’s foul-mouthed rapist mess of a hero has a lot in common with the leftist perception of Trump, from the manners of a bullying braggart to the habit of rolling the dice time and time again until she comes up trumps.  There is a certain irony, in fact, that the titular character is someone who has so much in common with a populist politician Scalzi detests.  I’d apologise for the spoiler, but really there’s little to spoil.

Scalzi’s fans compare him to Heinlein.  A better comparison would be Harry Harrison.  Harrison’s comic novels didn’t take themselves too seriously, making light of everything from planetary invasions to full-scale war with a coalition of alien races.  When Harrison tried to write more serious novels, they were rarely satisfactory.  Scalzi has the same problem.  Old Man’s War was funny, but Scalzi is simply incapable of turning his keyboard to more serious work.  The Collapsing Empire and its two sequels are based on a cool concept, but their author fails to do them justice.  They simply don’t live up to their promise.

Scalzi himself admits, in his afterword, that he has a habit of procrastinating for months before turning in the first draft.  This is a major problem, as he says, because the editors don’t have time to do their job.  The three books would have made a fairly decent story if they’d been written as one volume - and had a good editor, who had the time to fix the problems - but as a trilogy they simply don’t work.  There are entire sections that Scalzi skips over, or hand-waves, or relies on his audience to fill in the gaps.  The story hops from idea to post-idea without showing us the idea being put into effect, dancing through time-skips in the hope we won’t notice.  This is irritating as hell.

The real problem is that he was incapable of developing the concept into a story.  There was ample room for a space opera on the same scale as The Night’s Dawn trilogy, but he chose to skip over the details that would have made it feel real.  The interdependency feels like a very thin universe indeed, without the sense of age or depth that writers such as Hamilton, Sanderson and Jemsin work into their stories.  Instead, he focuses on a tedious political battle and struggle for power that I thought had been resolved in the second book.  The concept of saving the vast majority of the population through flow-manipulation is better than I expected, but it simply isn’t developed.  The story does not end with the salvation of humanity or the preservation of a chunk of human civilisation.  Instead, it feels more like a retread of old ground that solves nothing.  It is, indeed, difficult to summarise the book because so little actually happens (and most of the important events happen off-stage)!

This is best reflected in the endless struggle between Cardenia Wu-Patrick, Kiva Lagos and Nadashe Nohamapetan, a struggle that would have been cut short if either of the three had shown a little more intelligence or ruthlessness.  (Seriously, Nadashe showed a little more cunning than earlier, but she would have won if she’d shot Kiva).  The bickering over who will take power, if anyone can when the writing is firmly on the wall, comes across as more than a little pointless.  More interesting plots - ways to navigate the Flow, developments on End - are hand-waved away, as if Scalzi realised he was running out of words and wrapped things up quickly.  This flows from Scalzi’s limitations.  It’s fairly clear he knows little about how militaries, power brokers and monarchies work.  A comic book empress can afford to be ignorant.  A real-life empress who’s going to inherit real power (even if she’s the spare) will have been trained for the role from birth.  Kiva Lagos is a liability to any real power broker because people like her - “whirling amoral vortexes of chaos” - tend to make enemies, people who will try to knife her in the back out of sheer spite and/or a desire for revenge.  There’s no hope of building a permanent relationship with someone you treat like shit, even if they are petty small-minded gamma males.  That too is something she has in common with Trump.

Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat books featured the beautiful and deadly Angelina, whose comedic sociopathy is funny, as long as you don’t think about it too much.  Harrison gets away with it because he’s writing comic novels, where reality is twisted to accommodate humour; Scalzi does not get away with it because his books are meant to be serious fiction and Kiva’s behaviour is horrible.  Sure, running up behind someone and yanking down their pants can be funny, but it’s also sexual assault.  It’s always fun until someone loses an eye.  I’m not laughing.

The Last Emperox has its moments, but it does not live up to its promise.  It does not present a scene of humanity getting around the problem, nor does it present a desperate struggle for survival right out of a disaster movie.  It does not even end with the collapse of the Flow and the dawn of a new era.  The plan to avoid disaster and save millions of lives is workable, but we never get to see it.  Scalzi concentrates on politics and avoids actually coming to grips with his universe.  The interesting characters get shoved aside, or forced to make stupid decisions, while the boring ones carry the show.

The series overall has its issues.  The Interdependency itself doesn’t make much sense.  The idea of End being both the sole inhabitable world in known space and an isolated backwater is bizarre.  You’d think it would be the most valuable piece of real estate in the galaxy.  The Interdependency brought some of its problems on itself, but the way it did that should have prompted it to avoid the problems.  Scalzi tries to justify it, but it isn’t convincing.  He might have been better leaving the collapse of the Flow as a natural event, as unpredictable (to the average person) as a hurricane.

A good series should have a strong beginning, a firm middle and a resounding end.  The Collapsing Empire is a weak beginning, The Consuming Fire isn’t enough to save the series and The Last Emperox ends with a whimper rather than a resounding crescendo.

I stand by my earlier opinion.  As a single book, the series would have worked (with a decent editor). As a trilogy, it’s a waste of money.

Alt★Hero Episode 2

Alt★Hero Episode 2: Job Offer is now live on Webtoons. This series runs every Friday. The comics offensive continues even as the establishment continues to crumble. We're already being contacted by top talent who had previously worked with Marvel and/or DC. This is further evidence that having a relatively small, but disciplined and high-morale legion is more important than numbers, resources, established brand, or infrastructure.

"Hurting your witness"

Any self-professed Christian who uses the term "hurting your witness" in an attempt to police the behavior of Christians is almost certainly worshipping something that is not Jesus Christ.

Sadly, Christians seem to be disproportionately fooled by conspiracy theories. I’ve also said before that when Christians spread lies, they need to repent of those lies. Sharing fake news makes us look foolish and harms our witness.

We saw this in the last election when some of the troll factories focused on conservative, evangelical Christians. Here we go again.

What now?

First, we need to speak up— particularly to those fooled yet again— and lovingly say, "You need to go to trusted sources." Social media news feeds are not a trusted source. That's why we created coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide credible information for pastors. But, there are plenty of credible news sources— generally from outlets that do not have a track record of conspiracy peddling.

Second, God has not called us to be easily fooled. Gullibility is not a Christian virtue. Believing and sharing conspiracies does not honor the Lord. It may make you feel better, like you are in the know, but it can end up harming others and it can hurt your witness. 

I'm not saying this guy actually has small bodies buried in his garden or has visited Epstein's island, but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to learn that he is a massive fan of Star Trek. Christians are supposed to follow the truth, and if there is one thing that we have learned over the years, it is that the truth is one thing in which "credible news sources" absolutely do not traffic. They are, in fact,  the primary factories of fake news.

You can always tell the Churchian because his primary concern is to avoid looking foolish in the eyes of the world.

Shutting down Congress

It is a national emergency, after all. It's interesting to see how the President is continuing to assert his authority while continuing to deny resources and restricting the capabilities of bad actors:

Today President Trump warned congress he may invoke Article II, sec 3, due to the COVID-19 crisis and his need for administration positions that have been delayed by democrats in the Senate for more than two years.

The coronavirus pandemic would seem to qualify as an “unusual circumstance” where recess appointments would be needed, valid and justified. However, senate democrats would likely fight any attempt in court.  The Senate has refused to adjourn session since President Trump was inaugurated, and multiple cabinet officials have been blocked from confirmation.

The disingenuousness of the President's opponents has seldom been more clear than the protests that "this is not the right time" to defund the World Health Organization. But if a time when the organization has been exposed as being corrupt, inept, ineffective, and criminally negligent is not the right time to stop funding it, there will never be a right time.

That being said, if I had one piece of advice to give the President, it would be to stop threatening and posturing. Just do it! The time for negotiations is over. This is a full-blown war and the evil being fought is not reasonable and will not fight fair.

Castalia Library is go

On last night's Darkstream, I was extremely pleased to announce that the first book in the Castalia Library, The Missionaries by Owen Stanley, has been printed and bound. It will begin shipping on Friday. Below are three pictures of the very first book that was completed at the bindery yesterday.

Unfortunately, since the first set of goatskins did not pass the rigorous quality standards required by the bindery, the Libraria books are not ready. We do not know when they will be ready because the second set of goatskins are still in Italy. So, we are sending a free Library edition of The Missionaries to all Libraria subscribers now, and will send the elite goatskin editions out as soon as they are ready. Due to the slim nature of the volume, we elected to go with a vertical alignment of the title on the spine, as Franklin Library did with books like Machiavelli's The Prince and Shakespeare's Poems, although we followed the example of the two-line approach of the latter as we felt it was more attractive than the single-line approach of the former.

In the third image, you can see how the endpapers feature a map of the archipelago that contains the fictional Elephant Island, which features a little Easter Egg for those who enjoy maps. You can also see the gilding on the pages as well as the gold ribbon bookmark. A number of people have asked if there will be copies available for purchase; as we are only producing 500, there are a few still available but they will be offered first to Castalia Library subscribers at the subscription price with the exception of two copies that will be offered at the retail price of $150 on Abe Books. If there are any left, they will be offered at the retail price at Arkhaven.

Anonymous is a Red State cuckservative

Never, ever, trust a cuckservative, as the President has now learned:

Victoria Coates, an art history Ph.D. who served as an adviser to Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, has been identified as “Anonymous,” administration sources tell RCP reporter Paul Sperry:

A protégé of Bush administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Coates embedded with the U.S. military to cover the Iraq War for RedState.com, a blog run by Erick Erickson, an early critic of Trump but who has since modulated his opposition. She filed positive reports from Baghdad, while knocking down criticism that the war was a debacle.

NSC investigators put stock in the fact that Coates has a history of concealing her identity in her writings. For years she blogged anonymously for RedState.com. The site eventually revealed that Coates was the blogger writing under the pseudonym “Academic Elephant.”

They found her by one of my favorite means of distinguishing truth from falsehood, textual analysis:

The sources said that to crack the identity of the rogue Trump official,  investigators ran previously published works authored by Coates through forensic author identification programs, and they matched the prose style of Anonymous.

Investigators were able to profile the author of the op-ed and book by sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and syntax. They then compared that writing profile to Coates'. The stylistic traits synced up, sources said.

Researchers have found that authorship recognition tools can identify an author with a high level of accuracy when there are several thousand words of available content to analyze, as was the case with the sample size the White House analyzed. Coates’ own body of written work spans two decades and includes several books and dozens of columns, as well as policy papers, speeches and a doctoral thesis.

In short, the authors share the same punchy but at times breezy writing style, with pithy sentences punctuating a fluid narrative.

What’s more, the same manners of expression and phrases, such as “like-minded” and “clear-eyed,” kept turning up in the writings of both Coates and the secret Trump betrayer. The two also shared distinct vocabulary -- such as the uncommon “sextant” -- another linguistic fingerprint that pointed to the same authorship.

As we've observed here over the years, it is ridiculously easy to identify someone once you are sufficiently familiar with their literary style and habits. For example, I can quite often spot a banned troll on his first anonymous post-ban comment; no two people think or write exactly the same way. And it's very easy to tell when news reports are concocting fake quotes from nonexistent people; if it sounds like it's from a movie, it's reliably fake.

Anyhow, it's good that the treacherous infiltrator was exposed and removed.

Right Ho, Jeeves episode 2

As you may have noticed from the sidebar, Arkhaven is now running weekly episodes from three comic series, Chuck Dixon's Avalon, Right Ho, Jeeves, and Alt★Hero. As today is Wednesday, Right Ho, Jeeves episode 2, Regrettable Events, is now live and readable on PC and mobile.

The ride never ends.

The financialization of the US economy

Encapsulated in a single picture.

The coronavirus death toll in the U.S. — now topping 23,000 — skyrocketed as families continued to huddle in their homes uncertain of what’s next, while an unthinkable number of more than 16 million people have now filed for unemployment amid an economy grappling with the shutdown.

Yet, somehow, the stock market has managed to push higher. In other words, at least those fortunate enough to own stocks had something to smile about. Democratic strategist Justin Horwitz summed up the disconnect with this tweet that went viral across Twitter TWTR, +2.68% :

As you can see, that’s CNBC’s Jim Cramer talking about the rally in the market while the chyron points out the grim reality of the historic job losses.

One commenter captured much of the response on social media by saying, “The Dow is not the economy. It is a giant government sanctioned Ponzi scheme for the wealthy.”

Another pointed to the fact that, according to Federal Reserve data, 84% of stocks owned by U.S. households are held by the wealthiest 10% of Americans — essentially Wall Street vs. Main Street.

The financial industry doesn't lubricate the economy. To the contrary, it is both a huge parasite and a massive anchor that drains more than one-third of ALL corporate profits out of the real economy. To put this in perspective, the total amount of all retail trade profit was $154 billion in 2018. The total amount of all transportation and warehousing profit was $55.6 billion. The total amount of all food, beverage, and tobacco profits was $50.5 billion.

The total amount of financial profit was $448.3 billion, and that almost certainly understates it. If you want to know what is wrong with the economy, the answer is "the transfer of profit to the financial institutions" which is done through ever-expanding debt. This is why either a debt jubilee or mass defaults and the total collapse of the US economy is absolutely inevitable.

Selling with the devil

CDAN isn't letting a certain corporation bury its unholy marketing:

This massive corporation that all of you know and the entire world knows was trying to promote its new mixed reality device. How they chose to do this was to hook up with the "most legendary performance artist working now." In reality, she makes her money putting herself into as many Satanic images as she can and even had 666 in her social media profile for a long time.

The ad that emerged was people wearing the device to witness a ghostly version of the artist appearing out of nowhere while walking around while wearing a symbolic red dress. This was released on Good Friday, which was certainly unusual.

The video was not well received at all. After a flood of negative comments and about 90% thumbs down, the company set the video to private and also removed all traces of the campaign from its official website – although it still appears in Google search results.

In case you still had any doubts about the evil intentions of Bill Gates, that should pretty much do it.

No need for school

Conventional classroom education is expensive, unhealthy, and unethical:

The recent coronavirus pandemic has forced students to take to virtual online classrooms to complete their coursework. Even though it may take time for students to adjust to this new format, their education might not suffer, especially if they are in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.

A new study led by Cornell University researchers shows that STEM students learn just as much in online classrooms as they do in traditional in-person classes. Online courses might be less satisfying than in-person classes, but many more students can access them and they are much cheaper to facilitate.

STEM students in Russia participated in this study in the 2017-18 academic year. Researchers divided 325 students into one of three classroom styles for two of their courses: a fully online class through a program called OpenEdu; an in-person course as their local university or a blended course with online course lectures; and in-person discussion sessions.

Results of the study show that students in all three groups scored pretty similarly on their final exams. Students in the online course scored 7.2% higher on their regular coursework, but this is probably because they were allowed to make up to three attempts on their weekly assignments, allowing them to boost their scores.

The analyses show that there is one drawback to the online classroom style: students in the online group were less-satisfied with their class experience than students in the in-person or blended learning groups.

There really isn't any reason to maintain the conventional school system anymore, except for the global elite's interest in imposing its centralized propaganda.

The Devil Mouse is dying

Corona-chan has hit the Devil Mouse hard:

Media industry analyst Hal Vogel estimated that Disney is losing roughly $30 million a day amid the coronavirus pandemic, The New York Times reported. Disney has closed its theme parks and cruise lines, and has postponed the releases of several films, including Black Widow and Mulan, leading to massive drops in revenue as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread.

Disney’s focus on “experiences” over “on-screen entertainment” was once both coveted and imitated, but is now completely impossible to execute amid a pandemic that forces everyone to socially distance.

Even Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, which is ideal for those staying inside, and reportedly racked up 50 million subscribers in 5 months is financially struggling due to the lack of new content, as all entertainment productions have come to a standstill.

The combination of these losses led Disney to borrow $6 billion last month, and they continue to lose “$30 million or more a day,” according to Vogel.

I really don't see how Marvel stays alive in this scenario. They're getting hit from both ends, by Disney and by Diamond, as the struggles of the former make it difficult to bail them out from the situation created by the non-payments of the latter. The challenges facing the establishment comics is why we are now redoubling our efforts to produce new content and why we are supporting The Legend in his latest endeavor.

An Arkhaven subscription

A number of people have been asking for some form of Arkhaven subscription for over a year now, and as I've mentioned, I've been reluctant to commit to that for various reasons, most of them related to a lack of confidence about our ability to fulfil the necessary commitments involved. And I'm still not willing to commit to a new print comic from the same series being released every month, as there are too many moving parts involved in the process to be certain that we can do that, while the collapse of the retail market obviously further complicates things in that regard.

However, the recent developments concerning the ongoing crash of the mainstream comics industry and the discovery of the massive Webtoons market has caused us to modify our strategic thinking, especially due to the way that the latter is presently tied to a certain company with which Replatformers will be familiar. In light of this recalibration, we have decided to make available an Arkhaven subscription for The Legend Chuck Dixon, beginning with Chuck Dixon's Avalon, which is the first of what we hope will be many of his Arkhaven comics available in episodic format on Webtoons.

There are currently four levels of support for the new comics subscription. Initially, the rewards are focused on utilizing existing content, some of which has never before been released from The Legend's archives, but once we hit certain levels, the rewards will change to reflect our ability to provide new content, including brand new series from The Legend as well as more of his literary adaptations such as Right Ho, Jeeves, The Hobbit, and A Throne of Bones. The image on the upper left is a sketch for the cover of the first issue of the latter. The levels are stackable, so Collector's Only will include the other three.

• $1 Ace's Army
• $3 Lawdog's Legion
• $5 Rebel's Renegades
• $20 Collector's Only

We haven't set any formal goals yet, but we probably need to be around $3k monthly before we can reasonably commit to providing pure subscriber-driven content, which would result in a) weekly digital episodes, b) gold logo single issues for the subscribers, and c) retail omnibuses (with subscriber's discount) of the new comic. In the meantime, we have begun the episodic offensive. Speaking of which, I'm pleased to be able to announce the first weekly episodes of both Right Ho, Jeeves and Alt★Hero. We intend to begin with three weekly series, expanding that to five as soon as the relevant artists are brought up to speed on the new format.

This is a critical moment in the war for the comics industry. And while we're too small to be in a position to win that war yet, this is an excellent opportunity for us to gain ground in preparation for the next round. Even if you're not interested in comics, or in a position to subscribe, I would encourage you to subscribe to the various weekly series at Webtoons, as that is a free and easy way to take part in this. I realize that this isn't exactly what some of you have been asking for, but I believe this is a necessary first step towards that.

On a related note, an illustrator and fan of a certain French superhero sent this excellent portrayal of Dynamique contemplating the ongoing collapse of establishment comics. I think it is fair to say that it is a matter of absolutely no concern to her.

Corona-chan hates fatties

One thing I noticed in all the pictures of the victims of the coronavirus was that those who were not very old tended to be very overweight. Apparently this may not have been just the coincidental result of a pro-body positivity bias on the part of the editors selecting the photos.

For months, scientists have been poring over data about cases and deaths to understand why it is that COVID-19 manifests itself in different ways around the world, with certain factors such as the age of the population repeatedly popping up as among the most significant determinants.

Now, one of the largest studies conducted of COVID-19 infection in the United States has found that obesity of patients was the single biggest factor in whether those with COVID-19 had to be admitted to a hospital.

"The chronic condition with the strongest association with critical illness was obesity, with a substantially higher odds ratio than any cardiovascular or pulmonary disease," write lead author Christopher M. Petrilli of the NYU Grossman School and colleagues in a paper, "Factors associated with hospitalization and critical illness among 4,103 patients with Covid-19 disease in New York City."

Remember, the first element of scientody is observation.

And then they came for anime

There is literally nothing that is safe from SJWs. Not even being part of a foreign industry conducted in a foreign language that they don't understand is enough to protect one from their rapacious and never-ending demands to submit to their narrative:

Fans of Japanese animation are getting increasingly angry at the politically correct reworking of the cartoons when they’re translated into English.

A recent announcement about anime production has alarmed consumers worried about the intrusion of political correctness into their entertainment. Funimation, a company that translates and distributes anime in English and which has a long record of censoring the English-language versions of the original Japanese shows, has joined a key committee overseeing anime production....

‘The Rising of the Shield Hero’ was deemed controversial in the USA because it included a storyline about a false accusation of rape. In the politically correct era of the Me Too movement, the suggestion that a woman might make a false accusation was considered provocative. The listen-and-believe agenda was deemed to apply to fiction. If Western partners – so politicised and vulnerable to social media pressure – were involved in assessing storylines, would such a plot be approved?

Western companies, staffed by individuals with assertive political and social outlooks, will attempt to influence Japanese studios, imposing their own beliefs. When progressives have the ability to meddle in the creative process they will not hold back, even if it leads to disastrous financial consequences. We already have evidence of this in the collapse of American superhero comics.

If you are not a fan of anime or manga, why should you care? Evidence shows that incremental expansion of control within culture affects us all. Political correctness in pop culture has already distorted production and reception of card games, video games, comics, movies and other areas. In high culture, moralising authoritarians exert powerful domination over fiction publication, theatre, ballet and museums, even leaving aside academia. Suppression of creativity and diversity of thought will continue and expand unless we actively expose and oppose it.

This is why we fight back every single time, in every single industry, no matter how seemingly insignificant. And as will be announced later today, we're taking the opportunity of the SJW-inspired collapse in establishment superhero comics mentioned in the article to take back the ground that has been conceded to them.

Sometimes people ask me why I bother with comics when it obviously is not an area of particular interest to me. And it's not, to be sure, as I have previously pointed out on the Darkstream, unless you read Eco and Dante in the original Italian, Goethe and Nietzsche in the original German, and Balzac in the original French, and your favorite authors are Eco, Hesse, and Murakami, you can't possibly even hope to aspire to my level of literary snobdom. You need not remind me of the comic genre's dearth of intellectual value; the fact that Neil Gaiman's Sandman is considered the creme de la creme of comics should be a major point of embarrassment rather than pride.

But if you consider the level of influence Hollywood has had over Western culture for the last sixty years, then simply consider the list of movies that performed best at the box office, it is patently obvious that comics is one battleground that must not be conceded to the enemies of Western civilization.

I thought they believed all women?

The New York Times hasn't decided whether Creepy Joe Biden should be canceled or not. What's the matter, can't they get George Soros on the phone in New Zealand or wherever he is hiding out?

A former Senate aide who last year accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of inappropriate touching has made an allegation of sexual assault against the former vice president, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee this fall.

The former aide, Tara Reade, who briefly worked as a staff assistant in Mr. Biden’s Senate office, told The New York Times that in 1993, Mr. Biden pinned her to a wall in a Senate building, reached under her clothing and penetrated her with his fingers. A friend said that Ms. Reade told her the details of the allegation at the time. Another friend and a brother of Ms. Reade’s said she told them over the years about a traumatic sexual incident involving Mr. Biden.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Biden said the allegation was false. In interviews, several people who worked in the Senate office with Ms. Reade said they did not recall any talk of such an incident or similar behavior by Mr. Biden toward her or any women. Two office interns who worked directly with Ms. Reade said they were unaware of the allegation or any treatment that troubled her.

Last year, Ms. Reade and seven other women came forward to accuse Mr. Biden of kissing, hugging or touching them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Ms. Reade told The Times then that Mr. Biden had publicly stroked her neck, wrapped his fingers in her hair and touched her in ways that made her uncomfortable.

Soon after Ms. Reade made the new allegation, in a podcast interview released on March 25, The Times began reporting on her account and seeking corroboration through interviews, documents and other sources. The Times interviewed Ms. Reade on multiple days over hours, as well as those she told about Mr. Biden’s behavior and other friends. The Times has also interviewed lawyers who spoke to Ms. Reade about her allegation; nearly two dozen people who worked with Mr. Biden during the early 1990s, including many who worked with Ms. Reade; and the other seven women who criticized Mr. Biden last year, to discuss their experiences with him.

No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.

Translation: Because it is still possible that Creepy Joe might be the Democratic Party's presidential candidate, the New York Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct beyond the sexual misconduct that it couldn't hope to plausibly deny.

Looks like that worked

One of the things we've learned over the last 18 months is how different artists work in very different ways. This tends to pose a range of complications, some trivial, some more challenging, in attempting to assemble the various elements into a complete whole in different formats.

One obvious candidate for Webtoons was Right Ho, Jeeves, but our initial assumption was that it would not be possible to break apart the page files in a manner that permitted reassembly in the vertical format popularized by the Korean manwha comics. However, a little experimentation proved to be unexpectedly fruitful, and has permitted the launch of Arkhaven's second series there.

So, if you're interested, have a look at the first episode of Right Ho, Jeeves. We expect to have three weekly series running there on an ongoing basis.

He is not here

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.  Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
- Matthew 28: 1-10

He is risen. Have a Happy Easter.