Month: August 2025

The Marvel Method

The Dark Herald shares an insider’s description of the Marvel method of movie-making at Arkhaven.

Like Matt Shakman and the writers of #FantasticFour, I’ve sat in the ‘creative meetings’ at @MarvelStudios. They’re horrible.

You basically sit in a room with Kevin Feige and Lou D’Esposito and try to pitch your movie while realizing Kevin just wants you to dictate his rushed thoughts. Victoria [Alonso] used to be in these, but Kevin and Lou had so mistreated her that in one of my #Blade meetings she just showed up with sugar cookies she’d baked to improve morale.

You’re told NOT to pitch ideas from the comics because Lou isn’t a big comic guy and it’ll turn him off.

You talk about craft, story, and characters only for Kevin and Lou to say ‘yeah well, all we need to do is make sure it’s fun.’

There’s no spark. There’s no vision. Marvel is a slaughterhouse factory where you watch fresh meat get spoiled as it slowly makes its way through the assembly gears of mediocre thinking — and this weird hatred for their own product.

It’s become increasingly obvious that they only got lucky with the original Iron Man – which really was only a great movie for the first 15 minutes – because Disney wasn’t involved at the time. It’s really remarkable how far they’ve been able to coast on less than 45 minutes total of genuinely good movie-making.

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The Irrelevant EU

It’s really remarkable to see how the European Union is doubling down on its own irrelevance:

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has called for more pressure on Moscow ahead of the summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump.

Foreign ministers of the bloc’s member states held an urgent video-conference on Monday, after it was announced that the Russian and US leaders will meet face-to-face in Alaska on August 15 to discuss the Ukraine conflict and other issues.

Following the discussions, Kallas issued a post on X to offer the bloc’s “support for US steps that will lead to a just peace” between Moscow and Kiev.

“Transatlantic unity, support to Ukraine and pressure on Russia is how we will end this war and prevent future Russian aggression in Europe,” she insisted.

Transatlantic unity, support to Ukraine, and pressure on Russia has been the entire US-UK-EU strategy since February 2022. It has completely and comprehensively failed. How is more of the same going to do anything but ensure the total destruction of Ukraine, which is absolutely unnecessary given that all Russia really wants is the five regions it has already annexed, plus Odessa?

Words. All these people have is words. Why did anyone ever pay any attention to them?

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Crime is a Race Problem

St. George splits from Baton Rouge and within a year no crime, safe streets, budget surplus, working schools, investment coming in, and peace. This is the future.

As I’ve previously demonstrated from FBI statistics, gun crime is also a race problem, not a gun problem. And the advent of widespread AI means that society’s ability to conceal this through rhetoric, equalitarian posturing, and social pressure is being eliminated.

As nations from Britain to Sweden have discovered, immigration means crime, especially violence and rape.

Civil rights, integration, and anti-racism means crime and a dysfunctional society. Segregation means peace and a functional society.

Everywhere around the world, people will choose the latter. It is inevitable. After all, where do you think all those homogeneous societies came from in the first place?

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Ukrainian Defenses Collapse

Hal Turner is reporting news that should show up soon on Simplicius and elsewhere if true:

There is an unexpected development in the Russia-Ukraine Conflict: The Ukrainian Defense has collapsed at the city of Pokrovsk.

Ukraine military is now sending urgent messages to the townspeople telling them they have “less than two days” to pack up and evacuate.

The same is happening in Kupyansk – Seversk and soon in Konstantinovka..

It appears that Russians will take all 4 settlements more or less at the same time; basically merging 4 operational crisis sectors into a strategic disaster for Kiev.

Russia has made a major breakthrough in the Ukrainian defense on the Pokrovsk axis!

Ukraine simply does not have enough people to hold the lines anymore. Russians find a weak spot and can just drive ahead.

In the Dobropillia area, Russian troops have broken through the front to a depth of more than 11 kilometers, finding weak spots in the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ defense. Such huge advances previously were unheard of.

It appears the long-expected breakthrough appears to have taken place, which no doubt accounts for President Trump’s abruptly-compressed timeframe to meet with President Putin later this week.

UPDATE: Looks legit. From a UFA commander’s public tweet addressed to Zelensky.

The front line as a stable line of combat does not actually exist. Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad are almost surrounded. Kostiantynivka is half-surrounded. The enemy is advancing towards Kramatorsk and Druzhkivka.

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Mediocrity Rules

People are noticing that the best and brightest don’t tend to be meaningfully employed these days:

Every smart person I know is failing

My brother who was the valedictorian of our high school is unemployed. My best friend who skipped grades and went to MIT for math is a beach bum now in Florida working at a bar. I’ve personally made enough money to quit society if I moved to a cheap college town and I am seriously considering it, I do not see the point in working and I am totally burned out.

Meanwhile the most mid people I have met throughout my life are rising to director positions at companies, going on crazy vacations, becoming influencers, having families. Truly every really bright person I know who studied something serious at a good school is now unemployed and working on ar; esoteric passion project no one will ever care about.

Has it always been this way or is society especially cooked right now?

It’s not just the communications gap, which was always a problem for those with 130+ IQs. The so-called “meritocracy” was very short-lived, and lasted about as long as it took Clown World to take control of the Ivy League and then bar the doors against the more objectively meritorious whites and Asians who dutifully, but naively, swallowed the rhetoric about an educational meritocracy.

That was more than 30 years ago. Now, the need to protect the favored mediocrities from their intellectual superiors has pervaded every aspect of society, aided by the diversity, equality, and inclusivity directives that ensure no one who is capable of seeing through the nonsensical corporate narratives is in a position to challenge them.

I became aware that I was being banned from things as early as 1994, when I was directly informed that I would never be permitted to have my work appear on the editorial page of a newspaper. That ban proved to be prophetic, as despite being nationally syndicated, precisely three of my articles ever appeared on an editorial page, and one of them was only because I was deemed to be the writer at the newspaper most capable of understanding the Unabomber’s manifesto.

So, subsequent bannings by the SF genre publishers (2005), SFWA and the Hugo Awards (20013-2015), Twitter, Indiegogo, YouTube, and BackerKit have hardly been surprising. It is the fate that will eventually be met by all superior intellects who refuse to take Clown World’s ticket. If they haven’t gotten around to you yet, it’s simply because you are insufficiently threatening to their morass of mediocrities.

But climb a little higher, show a little more potential, enjoy a little more success, and you, too, will suddenly find the doors closing in your face, and watch as those who are obviously less accomplished are turned into manufactured “successes”.

This is not a complaint. The world is the way it is now because the wicked openly rule it. But, as has happened many times before, they have overplayed their hand and their world is collapsing under the weight of their own incompetence. The subversive never seem to understand that they are nothing more than parasites, and that they cannot create, they cannot improve, and worst of all, they cannot even maintain a functional society capable of surviving over time.

The evil has not yet dared to show its true face. The USA has not yet erected its pyramids to their evil gods, and, God willing, it never will. And our promise of victory lies not only in the Word of God, but in the ancient ruins stretching from Africa to South America that show the way in which their doom is certain and absolute even at the moments of their greatest self-proclaimed triumphs.

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The EU is Over

Zerohedge contemplates the recent announcement of a meeting between the Presidents of the USA and Russia:

Following the announcement of a trade deal with the EU at his golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland, peace talks in the Ukraine conflict with Russian President Vladimir Putin are now scheduled in Alaska.

The venue of a negotiation often predefines the balance of power between opponents. In that sense, it must be read as a clear show of force that both European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer — notably without military fanfare — traveled to Trump’s private resort in Turnberry to be politically “placed” by the American president. Judging by the outcome of those talks, one conclusion is unavoidable: the European Union no longer plays in the league of the great powers. Washington’s interest in intra-European affairs has noticeably cooled, focusing essentially on two things: an orderly withdrawal from military entanglements, and the defense of US corporate interests in the EU single market.

We are witnessing a shift of power from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

It’s hardly a secret: China and the United States will be setting the standards of international politics in the future. Russia, the world’s most resource-rich country, may be labeled by Europeans as a pariah state and a malicious hub of all evil — but that does not change the fact that the age of postcolonial European dominance is ending, and Moscow will have no trouble playing its resource-market cards outside the shrinking European sphere of influence.

He’s correct. The EU was established to serve as a counterweight to the economic and military power of the United States, but as events have demonstrated, it’s nothing more than a democratically-illegitimate, militarily-toothless, economically-fragile, and diplomatically-irrelevant non-governmental organization without sovereignty.

The sooner that the unaligned nations realize this and abandon both the EU and the Euro, the better off they will be. And the sooner the member states follow the British lead and extricate themselves from the moribund supranational morass, the better off they will be.

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Russia Gets Alaska Back

The decisions of the US presidents in the lead-up and progress of the Special Military Operation have been so uniformly retarded and suboptimal that it won’t surprise me in the least if Putin walks away from the upcoming talks in Alaska with Alaska.

Steve Witkoff’s visit to Moscow has marked a striking shift in American rhetoric. Just a couple of months ago, in June and July, Donald Trump was threatening the Kremlin with new sanctions and issuing ultimatums. Now the agenda includes a Putin-Trump summit scheduled for August 15 in Alaska. This 180-degree turn has been accompanied by leaks hinting at possible deals and a return to the “thaw” in relations we last saw in the spring.

If the meeting goes ahead, the Russian president will come to it in a far stronger position than he did a few months ago. Back in the spring, Trump’s push for a peace deal looked like a personal whim, and the so-called ‘party of war’ and globalists still had cards to play: Senator Lindsey Graham’s sanctions package, fresh US arms deliveries to Ukraine, and the proposals floated by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer about sending Western troops to Ukraine.

Now it looks as if Trump is the one coming back to Vladimir Putin – driven by the failure of his oil embargo. On top of that, there’s an appearance – an illusion, perhaps – that Putin is backed by a united BRICS front, something Trump’s own moves have helped bring about. Whether that front actually exists, or can survive for long, is another matter. But at this moment, one of Trump’s key pillars of leverage looks shaky, if not entirely knocked out from under him.

The USA is in the process of failing and it’s only a matter of time before it starts actually losing territory. 2025 would be a little ahead of schedule, but at this point, very little would surprise me, no matter how stupid and unlikely.

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Fifth Time’s the Castastrophe

Now this just might be the USA’s Syracuse Expedition:

Today’s White House ceremony that featured the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan signing an agreement to end their conflict, with Armenia coughing up major territorial concessions, is just an extension of the plan the US tried to execute against Russia using Ukraine as a proxy.

While not included in the agreement, Armenia reportedly plans to withdraw from CSTO by early 2026. (The CSTO is the Russian founded military alliance in Eurasia consisting of six post-Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.) Moreover, the US also reportedly secretly promised NATO membership to Armenia and Azerbaijan for signing on to this deal, which would give NATO access to the Caspian Sea by virtue of the Zangezur corridor.

And here is the kicker (if true): Some telegram channels claim that US troops are set to be deployed in Armenia within the next 48 hours. In other words, rather than ratchet down tensions and reduce the threat of NATO, Trump is signing off on a plan to continue the NATO encirclement of Russia. So yes, Trump is setting the stage for World War 3 if he is serious about adding Armenia and Azerbaijan to NATO.

They tried to add Georgia. Then they tried to add Ukraine. Then they did add Finland and Sweden. And now they’re going to try to add Armenia and Azerbaijan in order to “encircle Russia”?

That sounds like a very good way to ensure that the Russian empire adds a few new oblasts.

Deploying American troops on foreign soil is not the safeguard it once was. After the failed attacks on Iran, I very much doubt that Russia, North Korea, or China regards them as anything but easy and obvious targets.

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Oh, Sweet Nicky

This appeared on CDAN. And while CDAN is not as reliable as /pol/, which, of course, is always right, it is just reliable enough to make this seemingly bizarre rumor a little more credible than one might otherwise assume it to be.

The hateful podcaster just gave us a look into his sexual fantasies and it sure does sound like that when he eventually leaves the public sphere, it’s unlikely that he will choose to remain a male which was very interesting considering his guest for said episode.

The thing about gatekeepers is, they’re picked out and elevated so that they can be taken down at will. This means it is only those who are sufficiently corrupt, or broken, who are chosen for the parts. See: Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro.

Anyhow, I’m not posting it here because I’m interested in the endless drama, I’m posting CDAN’s public prediction here for the record.

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Spain Drops F-35

Spain cancelled their order for F-35s:

Spain has abandoned plans to buy dozens of F-35 fighter jets, Spanish newspaper El Pais says, citing unnamed sources in the Spanish government. The preliminary discussions for a potential order have been suspended indefinitely, the newspaper writes. The F-35 is made by U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin and a number of suppliers including Italy’s Leonardo, Britain’s BAE Systems and hundreds of other U.K. companies.

Switzerland should follow suit. The F-35 is a junk aircraft anyhow, and the era of conventional airpower is already over. National militaries should be spending their budgets on drones, not manned aircraft.

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