Marvel Kills The Punisher

The Punisher has been cancelled and killed by Marvel Comics. But fear not. Because Arkhaven is inevitable and The Legend is inexhaustible.

The Punisher character (Frank Castle), originally created by writer Gerry Conway in 1974 with artists Ross Andru and John Romita, was a product of a chaotic era; a reaction to the rise of war, stagflation, instability and exploding crime rates in the US. The Punisher’s story is a tragedy of a returning military veteran whose family is killed during what seems to be a gangland hit. With federal agencies doing little to arrest the perpetrators, Castle takes matters into his own hands and begins systematically assassinating the criminals.

The concept of citizen crime stopping and vigilantism was becoming popular in the cultural zeitgeist in the 70s, with many people living in metropolitan areas dealing with increasing criminal violence and unreliable government protection. City governments in places like New York were actively restricting gun rights for law abiding people, which only made things easier for criminals.

The same exact conditions are returning to the US today, and debate is boiling once again on vigilantes (just look at the media fury over Kyle Rittenhouse or Daniel Penny). The mainstream left is adamantly opposed to any form of civilian intervention (unless it’s Antifa or BLM), while also being adamantly opposed to any intervention by police. In other words, they want to let criminals run wild and then threaten to prosecute anyone who dares to do anything about it.

The Punisher as an icon has been highly popular among conservatives, military veterans and law enforcement officers in recent years. The trademark skull symbol can be found everywhere, with patches, gear and flags sporting the image, often as a representation of citizens taking matters into their own hands. The symbol was also seen at the January 6th protests.

This has made leftists at Marvel Comics livid. They first attempted to make fundamental changes to the character, including a redesign of his popular skull symbol, as well as taking away his guns and giving him swords in 2021. Instead of fighting against criminal organizations, Frank Castle joins with one, violating his fundamental code of ethics.

This month, though, Marvel officially declared the Punisher persona non grata, eliminating the character as readers know him. Did he go out in a blaze of glory? No, in typical woke fashion Frank Castle is captured by progressive heroes, chained up and forced to go through a struggle session in which he is admonished as a murderer and a terrorist. Marvel even brings the Punisher’s wife back from the dead, only so that she can divorce him and take his money and property, and then inform him that his lifelong crusade against the criminal underworld was all for nothing.

The character then “dies” from apparent suicide but the story is left open to his return, just not as the gun-toting hero people know and love.

Woke Marvel Eliminates The Punisher Due To “Problematic” Conservative Fan Base, Zerohedge, 9 June 2023

It’s a timely article. One commenter at Zerohedge was perspicacious indeed.

This will end up being an opportunity for Arkhaven Comics. They have been capitalizing on Marvel’s and DC’s wokeness for a few years now.

And now, a word from the Legend.

“It’s not exactly a secret that the Punisher is my favorite character to write. For whatever reason I have an affinity for the guy and the stories came easily. But, if we’re being honest, Frank Castle was never a good fit at Marvel Comics. There were always restrictions when writing about him. Editors waved me off for “going too far.” Now I’m working on Black Warrant which is in the same vigilante justice genre except the guardrails, training wheels and safety bumpers have been taken off. I’m allowed to take this genre in places it’s never been taken and having a blast doing it.”

He’s not kidding. I’ve read the first issue and it would not be an exaggeration to describe it as “hard-hitting”. Black Warrant will be the first superhero in a brand new superhero universe from Arkhaven Comics. The first script by the Legend is complete and the illustrating process is already underway. Helix Haze, the excellent illustrator of Alt★Hero: Q, is the illustrator.

Black Warrant will be joined by Red Hornet, created by Vox Day, and another superhero who has been created by a third creator whose name will be very familiar to everyone here. The shared universe will not be part of the Alt★Hero universe, but will harken back to the Silver Age superheroes and will extend in time over a century from the dawn of the 20th Century to today.

While Arkhaven is 100 percent committed to its flagship comics and the Alt★Hero universe, as well as Midnight’s War and Hypergamouse, the fact that the wheels have completely come off the Big Two and their impending mutual collapse means that the opportunity to provide a more traditional superhero universe was simply too good to pass up. There are also some new developments on the production front which mean that over the course of the next year, we need more content in order to utilize our expanded production capacities, both for Castalia and Arkhaven as well as various independent publishers.

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An Amusing Exchange

A commenter attempted to introduce a noted theologian to Nick Krauser. It did not go well.

bowler hat
might wanna watch jordan peterson’s lectures on the bible, nick 😉

Krauser
He hasn’t even read the Bible.

bowler hat
that’s an ignorant comment, nick. misguided at best

Krauser
No. You’re on JBP’s nuts. He treats the Bible like its just archtype stories and is theologically ignorant. He’s a fake and you’ve been had.

bowler hat
sigh. you’re such a voxday fanboy, nick. he’s your guru

Krauser
You’re posturing. Latest is that JBP just got exposed for lying about his IQ.

There are few things sadder than anyone who is dumb enough to still believe that Jordan Peterson is a serious public intellectual.

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Thursday Arktoons

ALT★HERO Episode 75: The Madame

FAIRY DOOR Episode 24: Up the Bell Tower

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 251: Pressure Luck

FLIP CITY CIRCUS Episode 5: The Woking Dead

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: ADVENTURE Episode 79: The Brigand

STONETOSS Episode 196: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Hearse

BEN GARRISON Episode 108: Elon Musk Bans Grrrgraphics

Stonetoss brings the heat, Dynamique is doing Dynamique things, and then there’s this from Twitter:

@GrrrGraphics
Account suspended
Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules.

It’s more than a bit ironic that Arktoons, which is absolutely not a free speech platform, nevertheless permits more of it than a platform which falsely proclaims itself to be one.

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Syrian Refugee Stabbings

Sink the Damn Ships, Edition 10,593: In which we learn the Swedish dirt is not magic either.

Syrian refugee stabs a child in their pram in front of screaming mother as four kids aged 22 months to three – including British girl – are knifed while holidaying at French resort before cops shoot and arrest him. Four children aged between 22 months and three – including a British girl – and two adults were seriously injured in the attack. Two of the young victims and one of the adults are now in a life-threatening condition at a nearby hospital.

Witnesses said the knifeman, who a local prosecutor said did not appear to have ‘terrorist motives’, had begun attacking the preschool children while they were playing at a small playground in a scene of utter ‘carnage’. They said he had launched his onslaught on the toddlers because they were ‘easy targets’.

Witnesses said they heard the man, who was rejected for asylum in France four days before the attack, shouting before he began attacking the small children in the playground with a blade around four inches long. One of the injured children was in a stroller. Abdalmash H, who was recently divorced, had previously lived for 10 years in Sweden where he was granted refugee status in April, security sources and his ex-wife said.

‘He called me around four months ago. He was living in a church,’ his ex-wife said on condition of anonymity, saying he had left Sweden because he had been unable to get Swedish nationality.

He had applied for asylum in France but was rejected four days before launching his barbaric attack due to him already having refugee status in Sweden.

The media is frantically pointing to claims that the Syrian refugee was “a Christian” in a futile attempt to play the Not All Muslims card. But his purported religion is irrelevant, the salient point is that he wasn’t French and he wasn’t European. He was a “refugee”, and the fact that he’d been taking “refuge” in Europe for more than a decade should suffice to prove that there is no amount of “integration” that is possible across cultures.

Remember, the Jews who ended the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Visigoths who sacked Rome in 411 AD were refugees too.

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Academics, WSJ Confirm Pizzagate

I’m sure you’re all very surprised to learn that the media was protesting just a little too much when it claimed Pizzagate had been “debunked” by virtue of an actor theatrically firing a single shot at a computer in a pizza joint. It turns out that there is a vast network of pedos protected by the technocratic elite and permitted to commit their crimes against with the complicity of the very platforms that ban so-called “hate speech”.

Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by Meta Platforms, helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.

Though out of sight for most on the platform, the sexualized accounts on Instagram are brazen about their interest. The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale. Such accounts often claim to be run by the children themselves and use overtly sexual handles incorporating words such as “little slut for you.”

Instagram accounts offering to sell illicit sex material generally don’t publish it openly, instead posting “menus” of content. Certain accounts invite buyers to commission specific acts. Some menus include prices for videos of children harming themselves and “imagery of the minor performing sexual acts with animals,” researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory found. At the right price, children are available for in-person “meet ups.”

Of course, one could hardly blame Facebook or the technocracy for these sordid, carefully-hidden activities, as a company with only 86,482 employees couldn’t be expected to effectively police its own sites, right?

Alex Stamos, the head of the Stanford Internet Observatory and Meta’s chief security officer until 2018, said that getting even obvious abuse under control would likely take a sustained effort. “That a team of three academics with limited access could find such a huge network should set off alarms at Meta,” he said, noting that the company has far more effective tools to map its pedophile network than outsiders do. “I hope the company reinvests in human investigators,” he added.

On the basis of the observable evidence, one might not unreasonably advance the hypothesis that the company doesn’t want to get “even obvious abuse under control”. One wonders what would serve to falsify that hypothesis to the media’s satisfaction, perhaps another out-of-work actor throwing a knife at a copy machine?

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Why the Media Hated the Pick-Up Artists

Because, as it turns out, pick-up artistry proved to be an effective means of penetrating morass of lies in which every young man has been enmeshed for the entirety of his life. Krauser reviews Mere Christianity:

Having followed atheism for a few decades and lived a highly individualist and pleasure-seeking life I became aware of what Christian moral philosophers have warned for hundreds of years: atheism is a dead end. It ends in nihilism. I experienced such nihilism in 2016 and by 2017 I was looking for a better way. So far there’s only been one barrier to my converting to Christianity: my lack of belief in God. Aside from that small obstacle, I agree with the thesis that Christianity is one of the three pillars of Western Civilisation (white nations and the Greco-Roman legacy being the other two) and by removing Christianity from the West we have set ourselves into a rapid decline into nihilism and paganism. It’s a shit show.

Anyway, I give this preamble to explain why I decided to read Mere Christianity. I realised that every single time that I am an expert on a topic and I compare my knowledge to the media’s, I realise the media isn’t simply wrong. They are deceitfully wrong. They are deliberately hiding the truth in order to advance a false narrative. Whether the topic is global finance, mixed martial arts, Game, or anything else the lesson is the same: the media are liars. So, knowing that the media is virulently anti-Christian, I asked myself the obvious question:

Does the media tell the truth about Christianity?

The chances aren’t high, are they? I don’t mean that the media is atheist and therefore do they support Christianity, but rather can they be trusted to speak accurately of what Christianity actually is, of what Christians actually believe?

The logic is impeccable. And his conclusion is correct:

There is no logical inconsistency at all between the God of the Bible, salvation, and the existence of Evil.

I’m rather annoyed that I had to wait until I was 43 years old before learning that. I feel like I’ve been seriously lied to. It would’ve been nice if all those Philosophy Of Religion courses had laid out the arguments and let me make my own mind up.

He was lied to. All of us were lied to, repeatedly. The observable existence of Evil is not a disproof of God or Christianity, for what should be the obvious reason that Evil is a necessary element in Christian theology. This pathway from hedonistic truth to spiritual truth may explain why a commenter at AC’s place observes a surprisingly common pattern.

Manosphere –> Krauser / Heartise / Roosh –> Vox –> AC –> Cabal and Evil Aware –> God right down to the mentions in passing that blown the door open to the next stage could be a common pattern. Might explain why there was a never a hit piece on the likes of Krauser. And now Roosh is Christian I doubt they’d even whisper his name.

Remember, the truth always leads, eventually, to the Truth. And just as liars fear the truth, their masters fear the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

John 14:6.

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Ghost Town San Francisco

The City by the Bay continues to die:

The owner of two of San Francisco’s largest hotels has stopped making mortgage payments on the properties and will let them go into foreclosure as historic crime rates continue to deter tourists.

Park Hotels and Resorts announced on Monday that it stopped making payments on its $725 million loan due in November for the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and Parc 55 — the largest and fourth-largest hotels in the city, respectively.

‘After much thought and consideration, we believe it is in the best interest for Park’s stockholders to materially reduce our current exposure to the San Francisco market,’ CEO Thomas Baltimore Jr said in a statement.

‘Now, more than ever we believe San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges — both old and new’ as the city becomes a ghost town with empty storefronts.

Out of 203 retailers open in 2019 in the city’s Union Square area, just 107 are still operating, a drop of 47 percent in just a few pandemic-ravaged years.

Among the heavy hitters, Brooks Brothers, Ray Ban, Christian Louboutin, Lululemon and Marmot have all packed it in.

Another 12 new retailers have opened in the area since the pandemic began in 2020 but already two have them have either closed or plan to shut down.

Williams-Sonoma also announced it will shut down in 2024.

San Francisco is a harbinger of the urban US future. Few US cities combine extremes of ideology, diversity, and immigration in as perfect a mixture as San Francisco. Just as Detroit is the poster city for pure vibrancy, San Francisco is the poster city for left-wing ideals. And it is demonstrating, in real-time, the inevitable consequences of those ideals.

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It’s Not the Taxes

Norway’s wealthiest are fleeing the country:

A record number of super-rich Norwegians are abandoning Norway for low-tax countries after the centre-left government increased wealth taxes to 1.1%.

More than 30 Norwegian billionaires and multimillionaires left Norway in 2022, according to research by the newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv. This was more than the total number of super-rich people who left the country during the previous 13 years, it added. Even more super-rich individuals are expected to leave this year because of the increase in wealth tax in November, costing the government tens of millions in lost tax receipts.

Many have moved to Switzerland, where taxes are much lower. They include billionaire fisher turned industrial tycoon Kjell Inge Røkke who moved to the Italian-speaking city of Lugano, just over the border from his favoured hangout Lake Como and the fashion capital Milan.

Røkke, 64, is the fourth-richest Norwegian, with an estimated fortune of about NOK 19.6bn (£1.5bn). In an open letter, he said: “I’ve chosen Lugano as my new residence – it is neither the cheapest nor has the lowest taxes – but in return, it is a great place with a central location in Europe … For those close to the company and to me, I am just a click away.”

His relocation will cost Norway about NOK 175m in lost tax revenue a year. Last year, Røkke was the country’s highest taxed individual. Dagens Næringsliv calculated that he has paid about NOK 1.5bn in tax since 2008.

His move to Switzerland follows a relatively small increase in tax aimed at the country’s super-rich, who face wealth taxes at both the local and state level. That includes a municipal tax of 0.7% on assets in excess of NOK 1.7m for individuals, or NOK 3.4m for couples. There is also a state wealth tax rate of 0.3% on assets above NOK 1.7m. In November, the government raised the state rate to 0.4% for assets above NOK 20m for individuals, and NOK 40m couples, taking the maximum wealth tax rate to 1.1%.

Ole Gjems-Onstad, a professor emeritus at the Norwegian Business School, said he estimated that those who had left the country had a combined fortune of at least NOK 600bn.

This is a fascinating article, because for decades, the media has aggressively denied that wealthy people adjust their behavior in response to tax increases. I remember, in particular, a three-part series published by the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the late 1990s that lamented the fact that new corporations were not growing up to replace the great Minnesota companies of the 1950s through 1970s, the Honeywells, the 3Ms, and the Control Datas, but didn’t once mention the fact that Minnesota then had some of the highest income taxes in the country.

The omission was rather remarkable, given the way in which the vast majority of the members of the Minnesota corporate boards at the time were erstwhile Minnesotans who were Florida residents.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Especially considering that the Norwegians are disproportionately opting to move to Switzerland, where the wealth taxes are even higher. For once, I don’t think these decisions are being driven by tax rates. Instead, I strongly suspect that the wealthy Norwegians are electing to move to a country that is going to remain neutral in the Russian-NATO war, knowing that when the proxy war goes direct, Norway and its oil supplies are almost certainly going to be a target for occupation by NATO and invasion by Russia.

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