New comics coming

A preview of one of Arkhaven's forthcoming comics. Thanks to the Arkhaven subscribers, this will be on Webtoons later this summer. You can perhaps think of it as Blade meets the Militi Sancti Sepulcri meets Adam Smith.

Keep your gates

And defend your interests. Inclusivity is just another word for invasion, and diversity is just a synonym for destruction:

This is where the inclusivity experiment must end. Everything cannot be made for everyone, no matter how much some people try. Popular media with decades of history should not be trashed just so individuals who didn’t even like it in the first place can feel at home. And since most companies don’t have the balls to stand up to internet outrage, it’s up to long-term fans to shut down those who want to forcefully enact change. So, for as much backlash as the woke crowd is already receiving, they need to get even more of it. These people don’t deserve to feel welcome in our hobbies. There is no place for them here.

On the same hand, I don’t belong in theirs. If they create a new property built around stopping orc racism and snagging the land back from colonizers using the power of rainbows and hugs, who am I to barge in and demand they include more death and murder? That would be a game that caters to them, and they deserve to have that, just as we deserve to have our D&D with orcs as they have always been.

Gatekeeping. It’s for the best.

Don't be afraid to kick people out of your games, groups, and organizations. No one has a right to be involved, and they certainly don't have a right to demand changes that will suit their preferences or psychological issues.

And different people suit different roles. A perfectly suitable player might make for a terrible DM or guild master just as a first-rate sales manager can turn out to be a horrifically bad director of sales and marketing. The Peter Principle applies to entertainment as well as business.

Exposing the fraudulent "Green" movement

Who would have expected Michael Moore would take on one of the biggest shibboleths of the Left, the so-called Green movement and its massive globo-corporate charade of "renewable energy":

Examples include a zoo that claims to power itself on 'renewable' elephant dung but only produces enough to heat the elephant house.

They film a supposedly solar-powered music festival that quietly plugs into the grid and a similar arrangement at General Motors' HQ at the launch of a hybrid, plug-in car, where the electricity grid powering the vehicle is '95 per cent' fed by coal.

The film also takes issue with solar panels, highlighting their limited shelf-life and that they are made from non-renewable quartz and coal.

In another sequence, joshua trees are chopped down in California so a huge solar facility can be built.

Moore's documentary is particularly damning of 'biomass', the supposedly-renewable energy created by burning organic matter. The film shows huge piles of trees that have been chopped down to feed a power plant, its chimney belching out smoke that appears far from environmentally sound.

Viewers are told biomass is the biggest single source of renewable energy around the world, and — nonsensically given it is supposed to be about energy conservation — has involved wood chips being shipped to Europe from North America, Brazil and Indonesia.

'Our anxiety over [global] warming has panicked us into embracing anything green or alternative without actually looking too closely at what is involved,' the film states. With plans to turn animal fat into biomass fuel, the film asks: 'Is there anything too terrible to qualify as green energy?'

The film suggests that mega-rich businessmen — including Sir Richard Branson and British timber investor Jeremy Grantham — and banks such as Goldman Sachs — are keen to invest in green energy because they want to make a quick buck rather than because they are worried for the planet. According to Moore, Toyota, Citibank and bulldozer giant Caterpillar becoming sponsors of Earth Day provided final confirmation that Big Business has taken over the green movement.

When they had picked their jaws off the floor, the first response from some of the climate scientists and environmental campaigners who have been enthusiasts for renewable energy delighted their opponents — they wanted to ban it.

The truth is always the most powerful rhetoric.

No challenge, no escape

Alt★Hero Episode 4 is now live on Webtoons.

In other project news, we have decided that the fourth book in the Castalia Library series will be Dante's The Divine Comedy, complete with woodcuts from the 1491 Venetian edition by Pietro di Piasi Cremonese. While we had originally intended to do Inferno, upon further contemplation of the task at hand, we decided the Library team was ready to tackle a more substantial project.

Facebook bans The Unz Review

Ron Unz observes, with mild bemusement, the fact that Facebook has belatedly banned The Unz Review:

My morning newspapers had recently mentioned Facebook’s plans to crack down on misinformation related to our ongoing Covid-19 epidemic, and probably like most other readers I just nodded my head. After all, many Americans might die if cranks or pranksters began promoting highly dubious cures to the deadly disease, perhaps even suggesting that people should inject themselves with Lysol to ward off an infection.

However, those bland public statements took on an entirely different meaning yesterday afternoon when I discovered that all material from The Unz Review had suddenly been banned for alleged violations of “community standards” and our own Facebook page eliminated.

I don’t use Social Media much myself, but others obviously due, and blocking all our website content from access to the 1.7 billion Facebook users seems a pretty drastic step. So it’s quite reasonable to wonder why, and especially why now?

From the very first, the motto of our publication has been A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media, and I think we have fulfilled that pledge, publishing many thousands of articles and posts on an enormous range of extraordinarily controversial and even forbidden topics, notably including my own American Pravda series.

Under such circumstances, being banned by Facebook might hardly seem surprising. However, many of our most extremely controversial pieces were published years ago, drawing angry denunciations from various quarters, but received with apparent equanimity from the Lords of the Social Network. Nearly all of the “touchy” pieces we published in the last couple of weeks seem no more “touchy” than the ones from a year or two years or even three years ago. So what suddenly sparked this unprecedented action?

Although I can’t be sure, I strongly suspect that the triggering event was my own most recent American Pravda article, dealing as it did with the Coronavirus epidemic, the supposed focus of Facebook’s current crackdown. And this piece not only accumulated more early readership than any of my previous articles here, but also two or three times as many Facebook Likes, which might have raised serious concerns in certain quarters.

Fortunately, since Unz has long practiced the dark art of building his own platforms, this won't harm the Review in the slightest. But it does serve as a reminder that even in times of extreme difficulty, SJWs won't hesitate to cut off their own nose if they imagine doing so will harm you.

I left Facebook long ago, of my own volition, and I'm confident that my life is the better for it. Don't live in their walled gardens.

Proximity equals possibility

Zeroh Tollrants wonders, in light of the ruin that is now games, why anyone ever wanted more women in gaming:

I need an explanation as to why any man thought it would be awesome to have women involved in their games. No one should trust anyone that dumb.

The gammas and omegas who make up the larger part of the RPG players and wargamers imagined that if women started spending time playing games with them, those women would be willing to date them. So they sacrificed their hobbies to their mostly unsatiated desires and wound up with SJWs policing their games.

It's not hard to tell which of them still believes that price was worth paying.

Be careful whom you hire

It rather looks as if General Flynn's original legal team was working for the other side:

After Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to federal investigators, representatives of multiple congressional committees with oversight responsibility for national security matters asked Flynn’s lawyers if Flynn would testify before Congress in exchange for a congressional grant of immunity. Robert Kelner, Flynn’s attorney at the time, immediately dismissed the overtures, sources told The Federalist. During one conversation, Kelner allegedly responded that in situations like the one facing Flynn, the prosecution essentially “owns” the defendant and added that he would be unlikely to pursue congressional testimony without the approval of former Spygate Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office.

Flynn was not told of these immunity conversations with congressional officials before they were rejected on his behalf.

If you haven't read The Trial of Roger Stone yet, you may not realize what a Potemkin Village the U.S. legal system is. It's no more legitimate than the infamous Stalin-era Soviet show trials. And you can't expect a team that has been paid to throw the game to put up much of a defense.

And then they came for Tolkien

No, the SJWs not intending to police anything. They're not intending to ban anything. They only seek to educate and critique:

I want to preemptively say that wokescolds like me are not coming for your favorite media or going to police your enjoyment. Banning anything is not on the table. I seek to educate and critique. To paraphrase Anita Sarkeesian, we can enjoy media while being critical of its problematic aspects. Orcs are here to stay. Nobody is going to take away your Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance novels.

But understand that colonialism and its tropes are the original sin of the modern age. You can't divorce anything from it. Time marches on and so has fantasy literature. Fantasy literature and its derived role playing games have, like everything, been touched by colonialist narratives. It is important to recognize that. I love fantasy. I even love elves and orcs but to think that race science bullshit isn't part of its DNA is ignorance.

The way Orcs are depicted in fantasy literature mirrors the racist tropes and narratives about indigenous and black people that was used to justify colonialism and slavery. At various times there were ideas like the Curse of Ham, to Mormon views that black people and native americans were once white but cursed by God, to later eugenic and race science views. All of this was in the zeitgeist when Orcs were imagined by the pioneers of the genre like Tolkien. Elves too are evocative of race science mythology about a lost hyperborean master race that Aryans are descended from.

Excuses about how Orcs are corrupted elves then, fall flat, because that to is also a trope of racist mythology. Ultimately Orcs aren't real. They are made up. But they were not made up in a vacuum. When they were made up, they mirrored the white man's burden narrative. And the passage above is alarmingly similar to things written about human beings in those times.

I would say Eberron, Warcraft 3, and Elder Scrolls all made strides in reimagining Orcs Elder Scrolls also does a good job not making orcs canon fodder villains that are fair game for anyone to kill. I feel that Eberron got this right. The designer didn't make fantasy counterpart cultures and reimagined the monstrous races. None of them, except for literal demons, are presented as inherently evil and Orcs have a druidic order that protects the world from the plane of madness. But even that is going to be fruit of a poisoned tree to some degree but so is everything.

None of this is to say you can't enjoy DnD or even include Orcs in your game or cosplay as Orcs, but understand that there is a history there and that history might make people uncomfortable.

Translation: #Orcgate has begun. There is literally nothing they will not seek to take away from you.

I have a simple, one-word response: WAAAGH!

Google guilty of defamation

Courts outside the USA are increasingly uninterested in hearing the social media platforms assert that they are above the civil law:

Google has been ordered to pay $40,000 in damages to a Melbourne lawyer after a Supreme Court of Victoria ruling found the internet giant was a publisher, and had defamed the man. In today's ruling, Justice Melinda Richards has determined that Google was a publisher, despite denials by the company.

The case centred on articles and images published by The Age newspaper in 2004, after Mr Defteros was charged with conspiracy over the murder of Carl Williams and other underworld figures.

At the time, Mr Defteros ran a legal firm in Melbourne whose clients included gangland figures.

The charges were dropped the following year, but Mr Defteros had surrendered his practising certificate for three years.

Mr Defteros argued that in 2016 and 2017, searches on Google continued to turn up articles and hyperlinks to web material that defamed him, including an entry in the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

During a trial last year, Google's lawyers had argued it was not the publisher of the material and it had not defamed Mr Defteros.

It submitted that the automation of its search engines meant it was not an intentional communicator of words or images, particularly if a user clicked through to another website.

Justice Richards rejected this in her ruling today.

"The Google search engine … is not a passive tool," she wrote in her 98-page judgement.

"It is designed by humans who work for Google to operate in the way it does, and in such a way that identified objectionable content can be removed, by human intervention.

"I find that Google becomes a publisher of the search results that its search engine returns to a user who enters a search query."

She also found that providing the hyperlink within the search results "amounted to publication of the webpage".

Unfortunately, they can still get away with their curated weaponization with complete impunity in the USA thanks to the federal laws that let them do the publisher-not publisher dance and state laws that let them use anti-SLAAP laws to impose costs on their victims.

Right Ho, Jeeves Episode 04

No Discussion. A little late getting this up, but it's still Wednesday there, right?

A belated convert

Grandpa Lampshade has come around to the idea that there is more to the concept of the gamma behavioral pattern than the mere desire to devalue disagreement:

Just wanted to say that I thought that the whole "gamma" thing came off a bit like "Anyone who doesn't agree with me = gamma"

I was wrong.

The patterns are like the "Well actually" meme; instead of simply pointing out where one could be incorrect about something, it always seems to be some form of semantics and always framed as a "gotcha" from a standpoint of superiority.

This is precisely why I no longer tolerate any mention of me, my motivations, my inclinations, or my objectives in the general discourse here. Because it's not all about me and there isn't a single idea that can be negated by my personal flaws and failings or proven by my positive attributes and accomplishments.

Argument ad hominem isn't merely a logical fallacy, not infrequently it is utilized as a dishonest rhetorical attempt to distract, discredit, and derail.

A government employee who has been responsible for public outreach during the pandemic adds his two cents on how to distinguish between people who are legitimately asking questions and those who are there to argue:

If the questioner refuses to click on a link, call a number, or take any effort at all to read or know the answer, then they are there to argue. Many times they have already read the answer and simply want to gripe. Other times, the answer is irrelevant and they just want to argue. They may have already asked multiple people and are digging for the answer they want to hear in order to pit different groups against each, and once again, argue.

They waste everyone's time and that is their actual goal.

Disrupted transmissions

It's been fairly obvious to most game developers for years that in-game communications are a relatively secure system for communications, simply because they have a sort of code built into them. And since terrorists and other bad actors have been known to use online games as a communications platform, it should not be surprising that the Deep State has too.

If Q is correct, one game being used for that purpose was Star Wars: Commander. Certainly some of the in-game exchanges there appear to be unrelated to the game nominally being played. So, it may be significant to note that it is being shut down as of June.

GAME CLOSURE ANNOUNCEMENT

We have come to the decision to shut down Star Wars™: Commander on June 12, 2020. As of March 13, 2020, all in-game purchases have been suspended. Star Wars: Commander will remain playable until 11am GMT on June 12, 2020.

I would expect that there is also a considerable amount of money-laundering taking place in the case of some of the more inexplicably successful online games.

Theory vs practice

It's not a good sign that every argument in support of the USA's continued global ascendancy is based on pure theory:

In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China’s ruling elites as “extractive”—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America’s “inclusive” governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.

First, there is no ruling elite as extractive and parasitic, and few as observably corrupt, as the current US ruling elite.. Second, these theoretical strengths are mostly imaginary and based on the historical American posterity rather than actual US demographics. Consider the reality:

Over the last few years one of the most ambitious Chinese projects has been a plan to create the world’s largest and most advanced network of high-speed rail transport, an effort that absorbed a remarkable $200 billion of government investment. The result was the construction of over 6,000 miles of track, a total probably now greater than that of all the world’s other nations combined.

Meanwhile, America has no high-speed rail whatsoever, despite decades of debate and vast amounts of time and money spent on lobbying, hearings, political campaigns, planning efforts, and environmental-impact reports. China’s high-speed rail system may be far from perfect, but it actually exists, while America’s does not. Annual Chinese ridership now totals over 25 million trips per year.

Of course, the most significant development of the last decade is one that has gone almost entirely unnoticed by everyone, which is of course, the Chinese rejection of one faction of the US ruling elite's gracious offer to transfer the benefits of their wise and impartial guidance from the USA to China. It would appear the Chinese elite is content with their extant extractive abilities.

It increasingly appears that Ron Unz had it right back in 2012 when he cast his vote with Richard Lynn:

Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.

I don't know about you, but I, for one, hope that other dark meat tastes a lot better than it looks.

Mailvox: death in Holland

A reader analyzes the death rates in The Netherlands and concludes that corona-chan is not a complete hoax:

I did an analysis of deaths in 2020 in the Netherlands. Long story short, it's not all fake, something is killing people over 65 beyond demographic expectations. The Netherlands collects meticulous population data and has made historical data publicly available. I've combined general population numbers and deaths from the past 25 years to see if 2020 carries an increased risk of death.

Goal: Compare the expected vs actual deaths in 2020 across 3 age groups

• 0-65 years old
• 65-80 years old
• 80+ years old

Method:

• We know how many people died in each age group, every week, for the past 24 years.
• We know the total size of each age group for the past 24 years.
• Thus we can estimate the weekly chance of dying for each age group, for the past 24 years
• We can take the average weekly chance of dying and apply it to current population to estimate the deaths per age group

Observations:

• Morbidity/mortality has decreased the past 24 years, most visible in the 80+ age group (13% yearly mortality in 1995 vs 10.8% in 2019)
• 2019 was a mild year across age groups
• Winter of 2017/2018 had a nasty flu season around week 10
• Winter of 1999/2000 had a nasty flu season around week 1, comparable to the peak in 2020
• Deaths in 0-65 age group was 3% less than compared to past 3 year average, and 14% less than the 24 year average
• Deaths in 65-80 age group was 10% higher than past 3-year average, but still 14% less than 24-year average
• Deaths in 80+ age group was 6% higher than past 3-year average and 2% higher than the 24-year average
• Peak in 2020 is outside of the regular flu season

Translation: the coronavirus was worse than the regular flu, but not massively worse. Certainly not bad enough to justify the global pandemic panic. Which again tends to point us toward the conclusion that there is something else happening here.

Jordanetics happened

A writer at New Republic wonders whatever happened to Jordan Peterson, the erstwhile self-appointed secular saviour of humanity:

The Canadian psychology professor Jordan Peterson has been described as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world.” He is an exponent of the Jungian concept of the hero’s journey, in which an ordinary person heeds a call to adventure and goes out into the world to struggle and suffer, only to return with heightened self-knowledge. (He has described himself, without apparent irony, as being “raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta.”) His stern ethos of self-help and bootstrapping has made him a darling of the so-called intellectual dark web, and a gateway drug for countless budding right-wingers who have stumbled upon one of his lectures on YouTube.

So it was something of a surprise to learn, in early February, that Peterson had spent eight days in a medically induced coma at an unnamed clinic in Russia.... If Peterson’s sad story has a moral, it’s that a drug problem is neither a dragon to be slain nor a sin to be ashamed of. It’s a mundane health problem that should be treated scientifically, without heroics.

I tend to disagree. The real moral is this: it is unwise to elevate gammas to positions of leadership, intellectual or otherwise. Peterson always knew he was a fraud, so the psychological shock of being so brutally and publically exposed as an intellectual charlatan was more than he could take without retreating into chemical reinforcement of his delusion bubble, especially when his wife's reported illness deprived him of her maternalesque support.

To say that I was not surprised by Peterson's retreat from the public stage would be an understatement. I fully expected some sort of theatrical dramatics from Peterson, I simply didn't know what form it would take. I was assuming it would probably be some sort of fake overdose on Vitamin C or something equally ridiculous. "Definitely not meth" most certainly exceeded my expectations.

Predictive models. It's all about the predictive models.

Introducing Hypergamouse

Or rather, reintroducing it. This little comic strip about Game features the delightful art of [insert pen name that ISN'T shared with a porn star here Lacey Fairchild] and will run every Tuesday. Readers of the old Alpha Game blog will recognize the first few strips, but we're already writing brand new material that I'm certain you will appreciate.

We will soon be running Webtoons every workday, thanks to the Alt-Hero backers and Arkhaven subscribers.

This is why you don't give up

The fact that some are handed every chance at success doesn't mean they will find it. Just as the fact that some are ignored and given no chance to succeed doesn't mean they won't.

A seven-year-old direct message to a recruiting analyst from the 2019 Heisman Trophy Winner, 2020 NCAA National Champion, and first pick in the NFL draft, who was not only overlooked as a high school player, but had to transfer colleges in order to get the chance to start.

Global rule by devil nerd

Bill Gates is rapidly giving George Soros and Disney Inc. a run for their devil money. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expounds upon the Microsoft billionaire's weird obsession with injecting children with chemicals:

Gates’ obsession with vaccines seems to be fueled by a conviction to save the world with technology.

Promising his share of $450 million of $1.2 billion to eradicate Polio, Gates took control of India’s National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI) which mandated up to 50 doses (Table 1) of polio vaccines through overlapping immunization programs to children before the age of five. Indian doctors blame the Gates campaign for a devastating non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) epidemic that paralyzed 490,000 children beyond expected rates between 2000 and 2017. In 2017, the Indian government dialed back Gates’ vaccine regimen and asked Gates and his vaccine policies to leave India. NPAFP rates dropped precipitously.

The most frightening [polio] epidemics in Congo, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, are all linked to vaccines.

In 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) reluctantly admitted that the global explosion in polio is predominantly vaccine strain. The most frightening epidemics in Congo, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, are all linked to vaccines. In fact, by 2018, 70% of global polio cases were vaccine strain.

My suspicion is that this can all be traced back to Isaac Asimov and Bill Gates reading Foundation at an impressionable age. That book appears to have convinced a certain type of Boomer nerd that they are destined to micromanage the world. Paul Krugman freely admits it was his inspiration.

According to CDAN, Tom Hanks and four professional athletes, presumably NBA stars, will be at the forefront of trying to push Gates's lethal vaccines on the world:

I wrote about the A+ list actor and what he is doing so the general public will get on board when the time comes. Apparently this pro sports organization is not even being shy about why they are going to put four players, front and center. They flat out said it was to get acceptance from the general public when the time comes. They are only identifying one player publicly. The other three will be revealed later by the organization one by one as they keep boosting awareness.

Proto-marks of the Beast pushed by the Gates of Hell.

Take It Back

It is Monday. King Ace and Fazer are taking back the streets from the bad guys. As you do.

CHUCK DIXON'S AVALON Episode 04 Take It Back is now live on Webtoons.

I'm also pleased to be able to observe that both Chuck Dixon's Avalon and Alt★Hero are now appearing regularly in the Top 15 in the Superhero category on Canvas. It's a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll, but thanks to the AH backers, we have months worth of episodes on the way.

Mailvox: yes, they will go down

The big publishers were already in trouble before the corona-chan crisis:

Back when the Greek bail-out was taking place, you wrote about the eventual financial collapse. At the end, you said it will probably be something out of left field, probably China that brings down the house of cards. This was around 2010-11.

The ripple effects of Corona-chan will take on a life of its own. I was reading that AMC Theaters announced they are halting payments on leased property. Many businesses run on a thin margin, which is now gone. There just is not going to be enough money for the Treasury to print to save everything. At some point, the Fed is going to be helpless at trillions of Monopoly money simply disappears.

AMC gone- gone, Barnes & Noble- gone, Sun Your Buns- gone. Las Vegas-gone. Friday's and Applebee's- gone.

Will any of the big publishers go down?

One local hospital is laying workers off, another gave a 20% pay cut to at least nurses. Both are part of large statewide systems. Too big to fail? We could have absorbed 100,000, even 200,000 deaths without flinching much. The system could not survive an economic shutdown.

With the world economy in recession, Will Xi last? Could an imploding China decide to roll the dice with military action?

The Chi-coms shutdown Wu-han but allowed travel to the West. Did they figure out this was an attack? If from the Deep State, why? I thought the Deep State was all for sending manufacturing to China and gutting the U.S. Or a faction within the Deep State fighting with another faction within the Deep State?

Everyone needs to stop conflating the Deep State with a single country or government. There is no "China" or "US government" that can be considered to be wholly Deep State, which consists of individuals and organizations that can be of any nominal nationality.

But in answer to the questions:

Yes, the Big Five will become a Big Three before long. Eventually, a Big Two plus Amazon, which should be considered a publisher at this point.

Yes, Xi will last. Lee Kuan Yew considered him to be the most astute politician of the 21st century. He appears to have already taken the most important step related to China inheriting the mantle of global leader from the USA, which was preventing the Deep State from controlling the Chinese financial and technology sectors.

If my reading between the lines of the mainstream media is correct, the Deep State appears to be at war with both China and Russia, as well as with the Trump administration. It has factions within those countries, but unlike in the USA, they have not recently been the ruling factions.

Forget defunding them

The World Health Organization ought to be abolished. It's actively trying to subvert global health.

"WHO says no evidence of Covid-19 immunity from antibodies."

Also the WHO: "no evidence of Covid-19 human-to-human transmission".

The gamma in literature

One thing that gradually begins to strike the reader of better-quality literature who is familiar with the socio-sexual hierarchy over time is the way the SSH was regularly utilized in implicit form by the more perceptive novelists of the past. It can be observed in everything from Homer's Iliad to Murasaki's The Tale of Genji, so it should not be a surprise that Tanith Lee also picked up on it and used it to great effect in her storytelling.

In Delusion's Master, the Lord of Madness, Chuz, is bitter because the Lord of Evil, Azharn, has rejected him as godfather to Azharn's daughter. So, out of pure spite, Chuz puts events in motion that will destroy the only mortal woman that Azharn has ever loved.

Chuz laughed softly. His awful eyes were fixed on her back. The jawbones spoke to him.

“Azhrarn should not have refused the gift to his child. Azhrarn should not have set himself against me.”

Chuz drew the mantle over the foul side of his face; he gazed at the sand, lowering his eyes. He was now beautiful. He himself murmured: “Sweet Azhrarn, who plays at usurping my title, I have no quarrel with you, I make exchange. Barter is not war. Be then yourself Delusion’s Master. And Chuz shall be the Bringer of Anguish, the Jackal, the Evil One.”

Needless to say, after Dunizel is killed as a result of Chuz's machinations, Azharn is furious with his not-cousin, who is foolish enough to approach Azharn's daughter and attempt to befriend her after the murder of her mother.

At sunset, Chuz entered the temple and crossed the mosaic with a cat’s-paw tread. He came up to the chair where, throughout the day, the blue-eyed child had lain on its belly, staring at him through the doorway.

Chuz was attired somewhat differently. On his left foot he wore a shoe, and on his left hand a glove of smooth purple cloth. The left side of his face was masked by a half-face of the blondest bronze, a face that matched the fleshly handsome side exactly. His hair was concealed. He was now a most beautiful, if quite abnormal sight.

“Pretty child,” said Chuz, to Dunizel’s daughter, Soveh, “I will conduct you from this uninteresting fane.”

The child, Soveh, lowered her eyes, much in the manner of Chuz himself, though not for the same reason.

“Should you not,” said Chuz, “wish to behold your inheritance? Do not be alarmed. I will shield you from the dregs of the sun, though it is almost out. I waited until sunset, from courtesy to you. I regret your mother and father have been called away on business. As your uncle, I propose to adopt you. In token of good faith, here is a gift.”

The blue jewels came up again, and focused on an amethyst one. It was the die.

Soveh did not take the die, but she regarded it, and as she did so, Chuz regarded her, and it might be noted that both his extraordinary optics were covered by sorcerous lenses of white jade, and black jet, and amber, that precisely mimicked a splendid pair of natural eyes. From a slight distance, one might be deceived entirely. Chuz had come out in his best, and no mistake, to woo the daughter of Azhrarn.

But still she did not take his gift, though she glanced at him occasionally, without mistrust or trepidation, while the day’s last spangles perished on the threshold.

“This is most hurtful,” lamented Chuz eventually. And, perhaps intending to provoke her, he turned his back to her. And found himself face to face with Azhrarn the Prince of Demons, who had that instant come up through the lake and the floor to stand seven paces away.

Chuz did not seem abashed. He smiled delightfully, and the bronze mask smiled with him in complete coordination.

“Well,” said Chuz, “I am not, it transpires, to play uncle after all. And I thought you had forgotten her, despite what it cost you to bring her about.”

Azhrarn’s face was hard to be sure of. Cloud seemed to enfold him. But his eyes smote through the cloud. Few but Chuz would have been ready to meet them.

“You and I,” said Azhrarn, “un-brother, un-cousin, are now also un-friends.”

“Oh, is it so? You sadden me.”

“Oh, it is so. And you shall be saddened, even if I must hunt you over the world’s edges to come at you.”

“I see you condemn me out of hand. You suppose I incited the stone-worshippers deliberately to attack me, that my toys might be scattered and the lethal thing with them. Yet who permitted the whip to cut his palm and the three drops of his blood to fall and change to adamant?”

“Chuz,” said Azhrarn so quietly he was barely to be heard, yet not a mote of dust that did not hear him, “find a deep cave and burrow into it, and there listen for the baying of hounds.”

“Do you think I shake at you?” Chuz said idly. “I am only the world’s servant. I have done my duty. And you, my dear, have known madness. Did you relish it?”

Azhrarn’s face came from the cloud; it was the face of a black leopard, a cobra, a lightning bolt.

“There is a war between us,” Azhrarn said. “And I have done you the kindness of informing you.”

“I admire you too well to wrangle.”

And like a wisp of vapor, Chuz was gone, though somewhere an ass brayed wrackingly, three times.

This conflict between the two Lords of Darkness is a veritable masterclass in the conflict between Alpha and Gamma. Notice in particular the relentless dishonesty of Chuz, both with himself and with others, the sardonic pose of superiority, the denial of responsibility for his own actions, and, when his transparent narrative-spinning fails in the end, the inevitable attempt to avoid direct conflict through flight, complete with a verbal Parthian shot. Even his rejection by the young girl flawlessly fits the model.

And, of course, underlying the entire conflict is the Gamma's rage at the Alpha's refusal to accept him as an equal, even though he knows perfectly well he does not merit it. Remember, this was written in 1981, decades before I first articulated the hierarchy. It has always been there, we simply didn't happen to have the words to describe it.

Corona-chan is killing the college scam

Is there nothing she can't do? Is there no evil she can't expose?

With time growing short and the future uncertain, many high school students are considering skipping college in the fall.

The coronavirus pandemic has left many universities uncertain whether they’ll be able to welcome students to campus after summer, and many students don’t want to pay for top-flight universities if they can’t get the full in-person experience.

Some say they may skip a year. Some may opt for cheaper alternatives like community colleges. Either way, the coronavirus could leave its mark on higher education long after the pandemic fades.

Most colleges haven’t decided yet what to do about the fall, said Brian Eufinger, of Edison Prep, an SAT tutoring service and college admissions expert in Atlanta. “The closer we get to the Fourth of July they’ll have to say yay or nay,” he said.

As some students decline to attend, some schools are combing through their wait lists to fill enrollment vacancies. Eufinger said he has seen students “come off of wait lists at top schools — schools that typically don’t pull from wait lists — so that tells me their overall deposit numbers are lower.”

A university degree is a fraudulent debt-inflated rip-off. The more the demand for these unnecessary pieces of paper falls, the better off society will be. Talk to a recent college graduate. Whatever it is that they are receiving in exchange for their tens of thousands of debt-financed dollars, it isn't an education.