It's not exactly plagiarism

But it's hardly indicative of one a brilliant creative mind either. When I read The Sandman in preparation for writing comics, I occasionally had the strange feeling that I'd read it before, and not simply because Gaiman was mining a lot of stories and characters with which I was familiar from ancient mythology. I've been on a Tanith Lee kick of late, and it suddenly occurred to me why the Endless, and Delirium in particular, were so familiar:

Delirium: The youngest of the Endless, Delirium appears as a young girl whose form changes the most frequently of any of the Endless, based on the random fluctuations of her temperament. She has wild multicolored hair and eccentric, mismatched clothes. Her only permanent physical characteristic is that one of her eyes is emerald green (usually the right side) and the other pale blue with silver flecks (usually the left side), but even those sometimes switch between left and right. Her sigil is an abstract, shapeless blob of colors. Her speech is portrayed in standard graphic novel block-caps, characterized by wavy, unpredictable orientation and a multi-colored gradient background. She was once known as Delight, but some traumatic event (of which even Destiny does not know the particulars) caused her to change into her current role. Her sigil as Delight was a flower.

Note that The Sandman ran for 75 issues from January 1989 to March 1996.

The main character of The Sandman is Dream, also known as Morpheus and other names, who is one of the seven Endless. The other Endless are Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Delirium (formerly Delight), and Destruction (also known as 'The Prodigal'). The series is famous for Gaiman's trademark use of anthropomorphic personification of various metaphysical entities, while also blending mythology and history in its horror setting within the DC Universe.

Now consider this passage from Delirium's Master, the third of Tanith Lee's Flat Earth series, which was published in 1981. I've actually quoted from it here before; it's the novel that contains her excellent tale of how the Snake became the Cat and thereby fooled Man.

There were then five Lords of Darkness. Uhlume, Lord Death, was one, whose citadel stood at the Earth’s core, but who came and went in the world at random. Another was Wickedness, in the person of the Prince of Demons, Azhrarn the Beautiful, whose city of Druhim Vanashta lay also underground, and who came and went in the world only by night, since demonkind abjured the sun (wisely, for it could burn them to smoke or cinders). The earth was flat, and marvelous, and had room then for such beings. But it is not remembered where a certain third Lord of Darkness made his abode, nor perhaps had he much space for private life, for he must be always everywhere.

His name was Chuz, Prince Chuz, and he was this way. To come on him from his right side, he was a handsome man in the splendor of his youth. His hair was a blond mane couthly combed to silk, his eye, being lowered, had long gilded lashes, his lip was chiseled, his tanned skin burnished. On his hand he wore a glove of fine white leather, and on his foot a shoe of the same, and on his tall and slender body the belted robe was rich and purple-dark. “Beauteous noble young man,” said those that came to his right side. But those who approached him from the left side, shrank and hesitated to speak at all. From the left side, Chuz was a male hag on whom age had scratched his boldest signatures, still peculiarly handsome it was true, but gaunt and terrible, a snarling lip, a hollowed cheek, if anything more foul because he was fair. The skin of this man was corpse gray, and the matted hair the shade of drying blood, and his scaly eyelid, being lowered, had lashes of the same color. The left hand lay naked on the damson robe, which this side was tattered and stained, and the left foot poked naked from under it. When Chuz took a step, you saw the sole of that gray-white foot was black, and when he lifted that gray-white hand, the palm was black, and the nails were long and hooked, and red as if painted from a woman’s lacquer-pot. Then again, if Chuz raised his eyes on either side, you saw the balls of them were black, the irises red, the pupils tarnished, like old brass. And if Chuz laughed, which now and then he did, his teeth were made of bronze.

Worst of all, was to come on Chuz from the front and see both aspects of him at once, still worse if then he raised his eyes and opened his mouth. (Though it is believed that all men, at one time or another, had glimpsed Chuz from behind.) And who was Chuz? His other name was Madness.

It's not plagiarism, but it does tend to lend credence to my opinion that Gaiman is overrated as a writer. He certainly doesn't compare to the late Ms Lee.

Socialgalactic discourse

@fubear: I have observed that efficient access to the beer cooler is essential enough that masked people will get shoulder to shoulder with their fellow man. The winos still maintain 6’.

@voxday: Of course peasants don’t mind crowding. We civilized people prefer to maintain a civilized - and healthy - distance from the unwashed masses. I generally try to maintain social distancing of at least one kilometer.

Then again 1.5 SD is usually sufficient for all practical social distancing purposes.

Bad news for Biden

In the extremely unlikely event he is ever elected President, Joe Biden will need to avoid visiting The Netherlands:

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands ruled on Tuesday, April 21, that it is lawful for doctors to euthanize patients with severe dementia.... Lower courts had previously ruled that a doctor had not acted improperly when he euthanized a 74-year-old woman with advanced dementia, even though the woman had to be repeatedly sedated and physically restrained during the procedure. 

I don't see Creepy Joe's dementia as necessarily being a serious impediment to his prospective Presidency, though. Let's face it, Obama was a better President than most of us expected because he spent most of the time he wasn't on the golf course stoned and watching ESPN.

If you think the Puppies didn't win

Think again. We said we'd leave a smoking hole behind and that's precisely what we did. Only it's turned out to be a smoking, stinking hole.

Look Upon Their Works... and enjoy a hearty laugh at the incestuous wasteland the once-prestigious Hugo Awards have become.

Best Novel

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
The Light Brigade, by Kameron Hurley (Saga; Angry Robot UK)
A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK)
Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)

There is a reason these "best novels" can't scare up an Amazon rank that's even within amplified shouting distance of the average pulp mil-SF novel. That's because the Hugos are nothing but fake praise for pseudo-SF SJWage strung together by fatties, trannies, and peoplx of colorx, then published by Tor.

It doesn't matter how hard the SJWs try to convince you their SJWage is good, people simply aren't being fooled anymore.

*The Verge's Science Fiction and Fantasy Book We're Looking Forward to in 2019
*Amazon's Best Books February 2019
*Book Riot's Most Anticipated Books of 2019
*Kirkus Reviews's 30 Speculative Fiction Books You Should Read in February 2019
*Bookish's Winter's 10 Hottest Sci-Fi & Fantasy Reads
*Bookbub's Best Science Fiction Books Coming Out in 2019
*YA Books Central's Buzzworthy Books of Winter 2019

Meanwhile, on Amazon: 3.9 out of 5. #71,483 in Books

It’s a sad love story about a woman in love with a terrible person who treats her terribly. Also it’s on an alien planet where it’s always night in one direction, and always day in the other. But if it’s the setting that intrigued you, this book isn’t for you. This is a clumsy slog of a love story, with some themes about doing good in the world.

Imagine that....

One can't "ruin" Star Trek

Nor can it "collapse", as it came into being pre-collapsed from the mind of a proto-SJW who sold it under false pretenses. All one has to know to confirm that an individual's mind is intrinsically off-balance is to learn that he's a fan of Star Trek in any iteration:

Star Trek very much embodied what liberal American white males of the 1980s and 1990s thought the future would (or should) look like: secular, sexually liberated, humanistic, meritocratic, equitable, and technological – a man’s world, basically. In this world, religion plays practically no role in public life. Problems are solved with diplomacy instead of violence. Money doesn’t exist, so there is no capitalism, greed, or want. People spend their lives bettering humanity and doing other such noble things like negotiating peace with aliens or exploring the universe in one of Starfleet’s advanced starships, each equipped with a plethora of miraculous technologies. In their leisure time, the crews of these starships visit a holographic room, the holodeck, which can conjure any fantasy into a photorealistic facsimile of the real thing.

Probably the only place in the Western world where this mentality can still be found is California’s Silicon Valley. As in the fictional world of Star Trek, men do most of the work; they advance through meritocracy; and there is something akin to a fraternal culture, irrespective of the prevailing progressive ideology. Silicon Valley is also still largely free of the odious diversity requirements imposed on the rest of society.

That was also once true of Hollywood itself, and it showed in the television they produced — Star Trek, for example. That franchise, spanning hundreds of television hours and a number of theatrical releases, was mostly helmed by men who got their jobs through merit – actors, writers, ship designers, show runners. The main characters of each of the television series were also men. The Original Series (TOS) featured a lead triangle of male actors – Kelley, Shatner, and Nemoy. The sequel, The Next Generation (TNG), featured mostly male characters, certainly all the most popular ones. These characters often featured something educated men are interested in: the second officer is an android; the chief engineer has a technology-supplemented vision; the executive officer is a ladies man and a master strategist who plays games of skill underpinned by mathematical rules; the captain is a wise and cultured authority figure who reads Shakespeare; the security chief is a noble warrior from an alien species whose culture is based around rules of honor.

Meritocracy in Silicon Valley? Silicon Valley is "largely free" of diversity requirements?

This guy is still stuck in 1985. When Star Trek was differently, but equally awful.

Alt★Hero: Meet the Initiative

Episode 3: Meet the Initiative is now live on Webtoons. Don't forget to subscribe! As with Chuck Dixon's Avalon, it's already making regular appearances in the Canvas Top 30 in the Superhero category.

We're anticipating adding Tuesday and Thursday webtoons in May, with a brand new respin of what used to be called Hypergamouse on the former and Quantum Mortis appearing on the latter. The Legend is also developing an entirely new comic specifically for the online platform.

NFL draft discussion

This is an open thread to discuss the draft.

The nature of the conflict

The Saker always has interesting and informative analyses, but the one thing he simply can't seem to grasp is the nature of the struggle between Team Trump and the Deep State. I find this strange, since he clearly grasps the idea that there is no singular and unitary ruling elite in the West, but rather, a class of predatory rivals constantly jockeying for position:

A quick study of history shows that when exploiting elites are doing great, they all faithfully support each other, but when things start to go south, they immediately turn on each other. The best recent example of this phenomenon is the schism in the US ruling elites who, since the election of Trump, have immediately turned on each other and are now viciously fighting like “spiders in a can” (to use a Russian expression). In fact, this is so true that it can even be used as a very reliable diagnostic tool: when your enemies are all united, then they are probably confident in their victory, but as soon as they turn on each other, you *know* that things are looking very bad for your opponents. Likewise, we now see how southern Europeans are getting really angry with their northern “EU allies” (Macron seems to be falling in line behind Trump even if he uses a more careful and diplomatic language). Finally, the way the US CIA has one foreign policy, the Pentagon another and Foggy Bottom one of its own (even if limited to sanctions and finger-pointing) tells you pretty much all you need to know to see how deep the systemic crisis of the Empire has become.

My suspicion is that since the Saker is not a religious man, he does not understand the nature of the vicious fighting is quite literally a battle between good and evil, between those who worship the Christian God the Father and those who serve the god of this world.

It's a war between those who would protect children and those who prey upon them. Which is why we can be confident that the Saker's narrow focus on traditional foreign policy tends to lead him astray; President Trump is the only reason that the USA is not already at war with Russia, China, and Iran.

Why "calling the police" doesn't work

The police, like every other elite institution in the United States, have been corrupted by the Prometheans:

Stow Police Chief Ralph Marino has been relieved of his duties after a meeting with state police over the weekend, according to authorities. As NBC10 Boston reports, Marino met with Massachusetts State Police representatives Saturday at the Stow police department, the town said. After the meeting, he put himself on indefinite administrative leave and named Sgt. Darren Thraen as acting chief.

In a statement, the town said it would cooperate fully in “any investigation of Chief Marino or any other matters.

“There is no reason to believe that the activities being investigated involve or concern the operations of the Stow Police Department,” the statement said.

As the video shows, the ‘Catch a Predator’ style format of the group found the chief waiting outside of a local establishment. The chief had allegedly been exchanging text messages with the undercover vigilantes in the Predator Poachers group, who he thought was a 14-year-old boy.

The chief’s messages were gruesome in nature and illustrated his level of depravity. The chief knew that the person he was communicating with was a child. Despite the fact that he knew the person on the other end of the text was a child, the chief described his sexual desires to him, asked the child about the size of his genitals, and arranged to meet the child in a place “out of the way.”

The video starts when the chief is waiting to meet the boy, ‘somewhere out of the way.’ In the video, the man confronts Marino and attempts to identify him as ‘Mark.” Marino looks shocked and the man filming accuses the chief of trying to meet a 14-year-old boy for sex.

Predator Poachers knew that Marino was their man, as he had asked the chief to send a picture of himself to the 14-year-old boy, and the chief complied. The chief appears to be frantically scrolling through his phone in an apparent attempt to delete the conversation with the pretend boy. However, as he reportedly attempts to delete the texts, the man filming tells him that he has them all in screen shots already.

Many of the police chiefs in the USA are similarly corrupted. If you ever wondered why the Hollywood sickos never face any consequences for their crimes, it's because all of the relevant police departments and district attorney positions for the relevant jurisdictions are similarly controlled.

And this is why so many child abuse and other criminal complaints go nowhere. There is no legitimate police or justice system in the USA. They are there to serve globopedo, not the public. Notice that the police chief hasn't even been arrested yet, he's merely on "administrative leave". The only reason he might not get away with it is because the group that exposed him is private and the story has gone national.

Labour Party spied upon its members

And, allegedly, did so by violating the EU's General Data Privacy Regulations in connivance with Twitter and Facebook:

A leaked internal Labour Party report has hit the headlines because of lurid statements allegedly made by staff. What has been missed however, receiving barely any coverage, is an apparent admission that, using a secret deal with Facebook and Twitter, the Labour Party has been running automated surveillance on its own members. If true, this is manifestly unlawful – each member affected would almost certainly have a valid claim in damages under Data Protection legislation.

In the furore about the leaked Labour report, many commentators have focused on the supposedly racist, sexist, and / or ableist remarks. There is also the apparent dishonest treacherous plotting. It is important to remember of course that this report was produced by a bitterly infighting party and its contents are disputed. Former staff who were criticised claim that accusations about their conduct were never put to them.

Labour had automated software that reconciled its privileged access to Twitter and Facebook data with their membership database to identify and monitor member accounts.

It is worth turning to the Data Protection Principles set out in the Data Protection Act 1998, which was in force at the time (replaced by the EU General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protection Act 2018 in May 2018). The principles were set out in section 4 (archive) and Schedule 1 (archive).

Of especial relevance, these principles included processing data, “fairly”, holding data that was “not excessive”. Fairness usually means notifying members of the way their data will be used. A quick glance at Labour’s current terms on its, ‘Join’ page does say that email addresses will be used to contact members. It says nothing about consenting to Orwellian real time monitoring for wrongthink.

Furthermore, on the topic of fairness, it is alleged that the Governance and Legal Unit deliberately hid aspects of the project from the Labour Party’s supreme body, the NEC. It is alleged that Sam Matthews, a Compliance Officer, stated – “we don’t want the NEC to have much of an idea how many there are to review (we’re worried they’ll get scared)”.

Volunteers were used to review the data produced by the automated scan, including 10 Labour Students. Two were from pro-remain group, “Britain Stronger in Europe”. The program would scan for juxtapositions of wrong or abusive terms and the Twitter handles of Labour MPs. That is, for tweets likely to be rude tweets directed at Labour MPs. However, it only included a subset of Labour MPs. Some MPs were not included for protection. Whilst the report alleges that this was factional, the reason does not really matter. Personal data linked to members and MPs was apparently processed in a manifestly unfair way, with oversight and disclosure intentionally thwarted....

This is probably the most sinister thing I have ever seen ever out of Big Tech. A major political Party, conspiring with the world’s two largest social media companies, to scan its members feeds and expel or suspend them for “incorrect” views. I would say it should be against the law but of course it is.

It's long past time for European countries to follow the wise lead of China and Russia by banning systematically lawless technology companies like Twitter and Facebook. And the allegation that Twitter is guilty of violating the GDPR is strongly supported by the fact that it responded almost immediately to the author's email, in contrast to the smug silence with which it greets most emails from its users.

“Twitter disputes the factual characterizations and legal conclusions in your email and your draft blog post. We reserve all rights and defenses.”

Ooh, they reserved their rights and defenses? So intimidating! As if Twitter wants to get within one thousand miles of a European court investigating their GDPR violations and data security practices. And Twitter is very far from the only US-based tech company to be suspected of serially and systematically violating GDPR as well as other data privacy laws.

But they'll have their chance to defend their practices, as they have already been reported to the Information Commissioner by the author.

A man of newts and taste

It being Wednesday, A Binge at Brinkley Episode 3: Sympathy for the Devil is now live at Webtoons. I like to think that Arkhaven is getting the hang of this new medium. And thanks to all the new subscribers, as we're already about one-third of the way towards being able to fully support an entirely new monthly series.

Everyone is lying

But, as Ron Unz has observed, in matters of international import, the Chinese government and media have repeatedly been proven to be more honest than the US government and media:

Few Americans remember our 1999 attack upon the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and if not for the annual waving of a bloody June 4th flag by our ignorant and disingenuous media, the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” would also have long since faded from memory. Neither of these events has much direct importance today, at least for our own citizens. But the broader media implications of these examples do seem quite significant.

These incidents represented two of the most serious flashpoints between the Chinese and American governments during the last thirty-odd years. In both cases the claims of the Chinese government were entirely correct, although they were denied by our own top political leaders and dismissed or ridiculed by virtually our entire mainstream media. Moreover, within a few months or a year the true facts became known to many journalists, even being reported in fully respectable venues. But that reality was still completely ignored and suppressed for decades, so that today almost no American whose information comes from our regular media would even be aware of it. Indeed, since many younger journalists draw their knowledge of the world from these same elite media sources, I suspect that many of them have never learned what their predecessors knew but dared not mention.

Most leading Chinese media outlets are owned or controlled by the Chinese government, and they tend to broadly follow the government line. Leading American media outlets have a corporate ownership structure and often boast of their fierce independence; but on many crucial matters, I think the actual reality is not so very different from that in China.

I tend to doubt that Chinese leaders have any overwhelming commitment to the truth, and the reasons for their greater veracity are probably practical ones. American news and entertainment completely dominate the global media landscape and they face no significant domestic rival. So China recognizes that it is vastly outmatched in any propaganda conflict, and as the far weaker party must necessarily try to stick closer to the truth, lest its lies be immediately exposed. Meanwhile, America’s overwhelming control over global information may inspire considerable hubris, with the government sometimes promoting the most outrageous and ridiculous falsehoods in the confident belief that a supportive American media will cover for any mistakes.

These considerations should be kept in mind as we attempt to sift the accounts of our often unreliable and dishonest media in hopes of extracting the true circumstances of the current coronavirus epidemic. Unlike careful historical studies, we are working in real-time and our analysis is greatly hindered by the ongoing fog of war, so that any conclusions are necessarily very preliminary ones. But given the high stakes, such an attempt seems warranted.

Read the whole thing, as it is a very good analysis of the present situation regarding the coronavirus and some of the vagaries concerning what is believed to be the original outbreak in Wuhan. The big difference today, an important factor that Unz did not include in his analysis, is that the US government and media are no longer in alignment as before, since the Deep State + US media is in direct conflict with both the Trump administration and the Chinese government + Chinese media.

Unz's conclusion is that the virus was a nominally US biological attack on China and Iran that hit the US as an unintended backlash. He notes, significantly:

One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often anonymously authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active information war. The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred, but I do think it tends to support such a theory.

But we cannot and should not rule out evil intent and the possibility that the "unintended backlash" was actually an intended bonus. Because another element that needs to be explained is the bizarre "incompetence" of the CDC, which has repeatedly acted in a manner guaranteed to enhance rather than restrict the spread of the virus, as well as the strange attempts by Democratic governors in New York and Michigan to criminalize medical treatments and reject medical equipment. And it is this purported incompetence, in combination with the strange tangential transmission to the Iranian leadership, that tends to indicate the coronavirus as a coordinated Deep State attack on China, Iran, the Trump administration, and the American people.

The heat is on

Patreon lays off 30 people:

Creative platform Patreon  has laid off 30 employees, which is 13% of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

“It is unclear how long this economic uncertainty will last and therefore, to prepare accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with 13% of Patreon’s workforce,” a Patreon spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones.”

Several other factors indeed.... Snicker-snack.

CDC's contaminated coronavirus tests

At a certain point, one has to stop simply attributing to incompetence what was clearly done with evil intent.

As the new coronavirus took root across America, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent states tainted test kits in early February that were themselves seeded with the virus, federal officials have confirmed.

The contamination made the tests uninterpretable, and—because testing is crucial for containment efforts—it lost the country invaluable time to get ahead of the advancing pandemic.

The CDC had been vague about what went wrong with the tests, initially only saying that “a problem in the manufacturing of one of the reagents” had led to the failure. Subsequent reporting suggested that the problem was with a negative control—that is, a part of the test meant to be free of any trace of the coronavirus as a critical reference for confirming that the test was working properly overall.

It's gradually becoming more apparent that neither China nor the USA was to blame for the pandemic, but rather, Deep State elements in academia, media, the DNC, the CDC, and the State Department. It increasingly appears to have been, like impeachment, a desperate attempt to derail the Trump administration.

And I suspect we all know the reason for the desperation.

Why Trump is a GREAT President

The God-Emperor's Silent War continues. As Q has repeatedly reminded us, the enemy is absolutely sick.

Four children, one as young as two-months-old old, have been filmed being raped before the videos were distributed to sick paedophiles all over the world. Sixteen people were charged with 728 sexual abuse and child exploitation offences after a two-year investigation by the Australian Federal Police in conjunction with the US Department of Homeland Security.

The children were reportedly related to their abusers, who used the dark web and encryption technologies to send explicit images and videos around the world before they were finally rescued.

AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw said the coronavirus lockdown had created a surge in activity on the dark web, including grooming and live-streaming, and warned parents to be hyper aware of what their children are doing online at all times. 'It is very hard to explain to a society, to people who don’t see the images,' he told The Australian. 'These involve images like you’ve never seen before.'

Three of the rescued children were from New South Wales and one from Victoria, while the offenders include five people from Queensland, four from Western Australia, three from Victoria and NSW and one in South Australia.

There were 632 charges related to those from Victoria and 70 to those in NSW, with all 16 charged with contact offending and producing and exchanging child sex material through the internet.

Evidence from the arrests led detectives to believe child pornography was being produced in Australia for distribution around the world.

Notice the involvement of Homeland Security. One sincerely hopes they are actively hunting down the customers.

Immigration banned

At this point, one has to admit that President Trump is beginning to exceed expectations:

Donald Trump announced Monday that he plans to ban immigration into the United States amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The president tweeted: 'In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!'

At least 22 million Americans are now out of work as tough measures to control the coronavirus outbreak wiped out 13.5 percent of the workforce and 10 years of job growth.... Trump's administration is currently relying on a seldom-used public health law to set aside decades-old national and international immigration laws. 

The USA does not need mass immigration, it needs mass repatriation. And the economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus is the direct result of globalization, which must also be reversed. However, the measure should be made permanent, in the mode of the 1921 immigration restrictions.

And the more conspiratorial-minded will no doubt have noticed the reference to "the Invisible Enemy".

"I'm going to win in a LANDSLIDE!"
- Donald Trump

He's not wrong. Trumpslide 2020 is coming.

Smells like deflation

Oil prices have gone negative in Canada:

And there it is... May WTI just traded below zero for the first time ever (trading below NEGATIVE $40 per barrel)... There was a small bid right into the settlement at 1430ET leaving the May contract to settle at negative $37.63.

Interesting times, my friends. Very interesting times.

Make them do it

As usual, the big US corporations have learned absolutely nothing from the disruption of the production and supply chains as a result of the coronavirus.

Large US companies operating in China don’t want to move production and supply chains from the country in the near future, even though the coronavirus may force them to adjust their business strategies, a recent survey found.

Around 70 percent of 25 firms with global revenue of over half a billion dollars have no relocation plans, despite the effect the coronavirus outbreak has had on their business, according to a joint poll conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in China and the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. The results of the March survey, published on Friday, also show that around 40 percent of the respondents would rather keep their long-term supply chain strategy for China unchanged.

While more than half of the firms polled say it’s too early to make any decisions on relocation, only four percent of the companies are planning to shift all production outside China, while 12 percent of the respondents intend to move part of their facilities.

It's time for President Trump to start imposing massive penalties on US firms manufacturing anything outside the USA, and for Congress to do the same. And any firm that lobbies against the penalties or opposes them in any way should be deemed ineligible for any bailout money or federal funding for its employees.

David Ricardo is dead. Free trade is the most expensive and destructive kind of trade. There is no comparative advantage. And this is why no nation that plans to survive can afford it.

Prestige Ameritech.  The North Richland Hills company is America’s No. 1 maker of hospital surgical masks.

During this crisis, you’d think the company would be pushing forward on all cylinders, working 24/7 to manufacture the one commodity that Americans and the rest of the world want so badly.

Nope.

When there's an outbreak -- like last time, with Swine Flu -- he gets orders.  He ramps up to fill them.

Then the outbreak passes, and guess where the hospitals go?  Back to China.

This leaves him with capital equipment leases and people. If he doesn't lay them off he goes out of business.  If he does lay them off he get's hammered with much higher unemployment insurance premiums, the leases on the equipment he has no use for, and he goes out of business.

The last time he nearly did.

This time, he's demanding long-term contracts. Good for him.

Guess how many he's gotten?

I'll bet you can figure that out.

Corporatism not only isn't capitalism, it is pure and unadulterated short-term-preferenced evil.

Zero Paperwork

DC Comics goes around Diamond in an email to comic book stores:

A couple of weeks ago we told you we were working on a solution-focused plan to address the current climate and help us all get back to the business of selling DC comic books, graphic novels, and collectibles in these difficult times, including the exploration of a multi-distributor model that would help to mitigate any further disruption to getting product into the hands of readers. We'd now like to share the details of our plan and next steps for its execution - which took into account your feedback, the market outlook, and the resources available at our disposal.

Current Orders

First, because of the global distribution disruption, all orders placed with Diamond Comic Distributors for in-store dates of 4/1, 4/8, and 4/15 have been cancelled with Diamond. You will need to resubmit orders for DC's upcoming titles. To that end, instead of simply "lifting and shifting" the same scheduled titles for each of the missed in-store dates, we've made changes to the publishing schedule. The new schedule is designed to allow each of you to begin ordering a limited amount of DC product at first, and then ease back into the number of books that represents a normal release schedule from DC when your business can accommodate it.

This tends to indicate further disruption in the establishment comics world even when the lockdowns are lifted, as Bleeding Cool reported yesterday.

Right now, even though Diamond will be returning to comics distribution in a month's time, we still don't know if DC Comics will return to Diamond, if other publishers will copy DC's moves, set up their own rival distributors or join with DCBS and Midtown. Most publishers Bleeding Cool contacted last night were blindsided by DC's decision and weren't saying anything right now.

Apparently the comic stores are deeply underwhelmed by DC's new distribution strategy, which does tend to remind one of Marvel's failed experiment with Heroes World that led to the establishment of the Diamond monopoly in 1997.

But all this turmoil is of little concern to Arkhaven, which continues to roll without hitch or hesitation thanks to our much-appreciated backers, and is even creating new series and entering new territories. Speaking of which, it's Monday, so there is a new episode of Chuck Dixon's Avalon #1, The Street Rules Episode 3: Zero Paperwork, up at Webtoons for your perusal, and, one hopes, enjoyment.

We're also pleased to show off some of the work of our new Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted colorist, an experienced industry veteran who just joined the Arkhaven team last week. This is the cover of the forthcoming Issue #6, and he's recoloring the first issue prior to that beginning its appearance on Webtoons. It will appear regularly on Thursdays.

The default cycle begins

Which will mark the post-2008 transition from credit disinflation to actual deflation:

We didn't really need any more confirmations. In recent weeks, as the US economy came to a screeching halt because of the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen banks take over $20 billion in reserves  in anticipation of a looming default wave (a five-fold increase if not nearly enough based on historical precedent), Moody's predicting that as many as 30% of Americans with home loans – about 15 million households – could stop paying their mortgages if the U.S. economy remains closed through the summer or beyond, with the number of households that have already stopped paying their loans soaring by 1,496% in just six weeks, and even JPMorgan in the process of shutting down its entire net interest margin origination platform, by getting out of new loans and HELOCs and boosting the standards on new loans.

These are all clear signs that a wave of mass defaults has started and is about to break all across America as tens of millions of household suddenly lose their jobs.

2008 is when the post-war debt system finally broke. Since then, the Federal Reserve has frantically been kicking the can of consequences harder and harder, until now, when the can finally didn't move. All of the various estimates are meaningless, but we can be confident that the current system will be replaced, we simply can't know what the successor system is going to be as it will largely depend upon how the massive pool of existing bad debts are written off.

UPDATE: For those of you who are, apparently, still too stupid to grasp the obvious, THIS IS WHY USURY WAS HISTORICALLY BANNED IN WESTERN SOCIETIES. Because once the debt cycle starts, it ALWAYS ends this way, sooner or later. The only reason it took this long to go terminal is because, for the first time in history, the entire global economy was turned into collateral supporting the credit inflation.

Wet market red herring

BJ Campbell points out the statistical implausibility of the "wet market" theory of the coronavirus, not that anyone with more than half-a-brain ever bought it in the first place:

This thing came from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We don’t need evidence gift wrapped by the Chinese to make this case. We just need simple mathematics, and the case is rock solid.

The “official channels” have maintained for four months that this virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the world’s Mecca of studying emergent SARS coronaviruses that originate in bats. A lot of speculation by the media has gone into supporting this case, as well as the solid support of the Chinese government, but the case is obviously garbage. I grant that wet markets for exotic harvested wild meats are a great vector for something like this, but set that aside for a moment.

There are between a hundred and a thousand wet markets in China. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Vietnam. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Thailand. There are hundreds or thousands of wet markets in Laos, hundreds or thousands more in Cambodia, hundreds or thousands more in Burma and Myanmar and Malaysia. Nobody knows for sure, but it’s completely reasonable to estimate the total number of wet markets in East Asia being at least ten thousand.

But only one of these ten thousand or more wet markets is two blocks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The chance that a brand new never before seen SARS coronavirus variant would emerge at the only wet market two blocks from a laboratory whose primary function is to study never before seen SARS coronavirus variants, specifically from bats, is simply too astronomical to believe. If a brand-new world epidemic virus were to emerge every day from a wet market in east Asia, it would be three years or more on average before one emerged from Wuhan. No honest scientist would believe that coincidence given what we know.

The only real question is who arranged for its release there, as there are only three plausible state parties:  China, the USA, or Israel, and one non-state party, the Deep State. At this point, we have absolutely no way of knowing which of the four are responsible.

Subversion may bankrupt Labour

The recent ascendance of the philosemitic wing of the Labour Party may be very short-lived:

Labour faces multi-millionpound lawsuits over a leaked antisemitism report that could 'bankrupt' the party.

Sources close to whistleblowers and complainants whose identities were revealed by the leak say Labour could face a legal bill as high as £8million – effectively putting it out of business.

They say more than 30 individuals, including general secretary Jennie Formby, may sue the party over breach of privacy and for putting their safety at risk. The dire warning came as Labour officials were hastily forced to delete addresses from party membership databases to protect some people now apparently receiving death threats after their identities were made public....

The threat of massive legal bills has sparked panic among senior party figures that they could be personally liable.

I've read the report. It's very damning, although not necessarily in the way one might think. Basically, the report is a put-up job written to support the false narrative being pushed by the (((Blairites))) who recently unseated the Corbynites and took over the party leadership. It turns out that more than HALF of the anti-semitism complaints were filed by a single invididual; the whole thing is little more than an amplified variant on the rabbi painting swastikas on the synagogue.

It appears that the Corbynites have decided that if they're going to be pushed out of the party, they're going to leave their successors with nothing but scorched earth. To put it in American terms, it's as if the John Birch Society burned down the Republican Party instead of permitting the neocons to take it over.