Author: VD

Zero cultural power

Appendix N author Jeffro Johnson takes David Brooks to task for a shockingly ignorant statement about the cultural power of conservatives:

Writing in the pages of The New York Times, conservative commentator David Brooks closes out a column with this striking kicker:

Conservatives have zero cultural power, but they have immense political power. Even today, voters trust Republicans on the gun issue more than Democrats. If you exile 40 percent of the country from respectable society they will mount a political backlash that will make Donald Trump look like Adlai Stevenson.

It’s audacious, really. I mean sure, non-leftists have been steadily filtered out of education, academia, journalism, publishing, Hollywood, and the arts for so long that most people can’t even imagine it being any different. But zero? Really?

It takes a special sort of ignorance to embrace such a position. Even the residual power of Tarzan, Cthulhu, Middle Earth, and Conan remains a potent force, even in a marketplace flooded with both bastardized derivatives and hostile critiques. Smarmy elites dismissed the staunchly Catholic Tolkien in his lifetime and declared heroic fantasy bad for us from every platform they could manage to subdue. And yet he outlasted all of his detractors to become Author of the Century. And right at this very moment, Jordan Peterson’s number one international bestselling book is a sensation precisely because it is making the timeless wisdom that infuses the Bible accessible to a generation that is starving for answers and common sense.

The reason the ideological Right has limited cultural power these days is because the Left, with (((David Brooks))) and his nation in the vanguard, have worked very hard for at least four generations at attempting to eradicate everything from the culture that betrays any sign of Christian influence or Western tradition.

And the reason that they are failing despite their near-complete control of the cultural high ground is because they have literally nothing to offer in its place. All they ever had to offer was reaction, negation, ugliness, filth, and snark. Sure, you can adulterate Christmas, and you can substitute Silver Bells, shopping, Santa, and Seasons Greetings for Silent Night, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Scrooge, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas, but at the end of the day, either you come up with a substitute or your efforts will eventually prove futile.

What did they come up with in over a century of frantic effort? Festivus, the Hannukah Aardvark, and horrible movies that are bad even by Seth Rogen’s standards. Hardly an attractive exchange for even the most godless pagan.

We not only can win this cultural war, we cannot lose it so long as we continue to create things that are good, beautiful, and true, and continue to refuse entrance to the infiltrating wormtongues who are always there with their helpful blandishments and seductive offers to sell your creative soul to Mammon.

So let them turn Elsa of the Crowleyesque anthem into a lesbian. Let them transform Superman into an SJW superhero fighting for global migration, one-world government, and AIPAC. Let them continue to preen and posture and sneer and snark in futility. It will avail them nothing. Like their Father the Devil, they cannot create, they can only corrupt. And that is why the greatness of Tolkien, of Howard, of Lovecraft, and of Wright will continue to be recognized over time despite the Left’s best efforts to denigrate and diminish it.

Here are three more shots in the cultural war for the West. Another will be fired tomorrow.

UPDATE: Jeffro responds to a defeatist gamma who took exception to his post, then showed up here to lie about him.

Stop fighting on their ground

YouTube hits Infowars with a third strike preparatory to deleting Alex Jones’s channel:

After one strike was removed earlier in the week, YouTube hit the Alex Jones Channel with a third strike for a video that had already been appealed and restored.

In the video, Jones clearly explains how the victims of the Parkland shooting were not “crisis actors”.

YouTube’s flagging system is clearly being abused in a flagrant effort to shut down Infowars following a public campaign by CNN.

This sets a horrific precedent for free expression and the First Amendment and YouTube is in direct violation of the Communications Decency Act in adopting this approach.

Protest! Shock! Horror! Unfair! Come on, now. The inevitability of these deplatforming actions is why I have been repeatedly and relentlessly advising people to build their own platforms. There is little point in building up a highly fragile operation on your enemy’s turf that they can literally take out at will without warning.

The high-profile men and women of the Right absolutely need to stop thinking about maximizing their short-term benefit and start looking to support the platforms that are not going to a) silence them, b) sell them out, or, c) leave them completely exposed to their enemies. And they also need to stop “fighting for free speech”. Free speech is little more than anti-Christian Enlightenment propaganda, which very few of its self-appointed defenders seem to know.

In case you haven’t noticed, it is utterly useless to appeal to the ideological purists who run these Big Social platforms. No amount of reason is going to sway them. So stop relying upon them! If you notice, I used Freestartr instead of Kickstarter and Bitchute instead of Youtube for Voxiversity. If even 10 percent of the Right would stop bitching and wailing and whining about their inevitable ill-treatment at the hands of the Left and publicly support the alternative platforms instead, we would have a fully functional Alt-Tech ecosystem before the end of 2018.

Stefan Molyneux clearly gets it. One hopes that others will before it’s already too late.

UPDATE: This again. I had a feeling someone was going to leap in to “call me out” for “hypocrisy” sooner or later. At least this was friendly concern.

This post being made on a Google-owned property, is at best hypocritical (which is fucking horrible to your credibility). Please take a look at platforms like Steemit, Minds, etc. because Goolag can bring the ban-hammer down on Vox Populi in a nanosecond. You’re a sonofabitch, but you’re an excellent sonofabitch, and I do not want to see you banned or discredited.

First, I was reliably informed that my credibility was destroyed back in 2001. So, who cares about that. Second, do you really think I am not prepared for Google to take down the blog without warning for no reason, or that Google does not know that? And third, Blogger is not a critical platform. It is merely a delivery vehicle for text on a screen and literally no one is dependent upon it.

The end of the Bush dynasty

It would have been preferable to see it end sooner, but the main thing is that America’s worst political dynasty is coming to an end:

George P Bush is the young, half-Hispanic, grandson of the 41st president, nephew of the 43rd and son of a former Florida governor. When he was elected Texas land commissioner four years ago, that background gave him a significant advantage as a fledgling Republican candidate seemingly on a fast track to stardom. Now, with conservative politics turned on its head by Trumpism, Bush is facing a tough primary election that threatens to doom his political career – and with it, bring to a close his family’s 70-year political dynasty.

The land commissioner job – which manages state-owned land – was perceived to be a stepping stone to higher office, but the evisceration of his father, Jeb, in the 2016 Republican presidential primary showed that as it lurched to the right and was seduced by sound and fury, the GOP was no longer in the market for a quiet moderate named Bush.

Though he has far more campaign cash than his rivals and has reportedly spent $2m in the past month, Bush has run an anaemic – one might say low-energy – campaign, with scant media availability and no events listed on his website. He is still the favourite, but if he fails to get above 50{659c2545de464f2fcd65f128ea682d8067e3e2248213357d1602012fc3b5a78c} of the vote on 6 March – when Texas holds the country’s first primaries ahead of the 2018 midterms – he will face a potentially dangerous runoff.

“It’s quite possible that the Bush political dynasty, at least for this generation, could end in the spring of 2018 because if George P Bush fails to win the GOP nomination for land commissioner it’s tough to see him coming back from that any time soon,” said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University. The dynasty began with Prescott Bush – George P’s great-grandfather – becoming senator for Connecticut in 1952.

The Bushes have done more than enough harm to the nation. About the last thing that America – what is left of it – needs is a watered-down fourth-generation edition to deal with the damage meted out by his ancestors.

I seldom agree with socialists

But I agree with this one, on this one issue:

Mr. Kühnert, who at 28 runs the youth wing of Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party, has been touring the country to convince fellow party members to vote down a coalition deal that would keep Ms. Merkel in power for another four years — and his own party in place as the junior partner to her Christian Democrats.

Three months ago, few people had heard of Mr. Kühnert. Now, his boyish face with its rebellious cowlick is ubiquitous. He is a regular on prime time talk shows and routinely described as a rising star of German politics.

But he is also an enfant terrible for Europe’s political elites, who breathed a sigh of relief when Ms. Merkel announced last month that she had secured a governing deal, seemingly ending five months of political limbo in Europe’s most important capital.

But that left one major obstacle, and partly because of Mr. Kühnert’s spirited campaign it has been growing taller by the day: The grass roots of the Social Democracts still need to approve the deal.

The result of the vote will be announced Sunday. If the 463,000 members reject the coalition, Germany faces the prospect of an unstable minority government or new elections or both. In any case, it would likely spell the end of the Merkel era.

Merkel müss weg, as they say in Germany. At this point, she’s only the second-worst Reichskanzler the Germans have ever known. But give her more time, and she might manage to accomplish what even Caesar, Stalin, and Hitler failed to do.

No matter what your ideology is, no matter what your political instincts are, stopping a politician who is hell-bent on destroying your nation by turning the country over to immigrants should always be the first political priority.

It was interesting to watch The Godfather II recently, given the way it can be not unreasonably viewed as an extended lesson in the way immigrants, even intelligent, hard-working immigrants who bravely serve their new country’s military, can corrupt a nation from the bottom to the very top.

The emotional continence of little girls

If you ever wonder why I’m still around while the various bloggers of yesteryears past have mostly gone by the wayside over time, this shrieking overreaction by the Z-Man to the God-Emperor’s latest apparent blunder should serve as a reasonable explanation.

This jackass has undone generations of hard work by the very people who put him in office. Not even that feckless nitwit George Bush did something this egregiously stupid. Even Barak Obama was unwilling to go this far. This idiocy is right up there with Poppy Bush breaking his tax promise in order to get the Democrats in Washington to like him. It worked. They loved him, which was why he was a one term president. Trump is now setting himself up to follow Bush into the void of stupidity.

Now, the counter argument you will hear is that Trump is just playing more 4-D chess and this will amount to nothing. Well, a smart politicians would know enough to not do that with this issue. This is not a parlor game. The pro-gun voter has no sense of humor on this stuff and they have zero tolerance for limp-wristed politicians too afraid of the girls to do the right thing. Speaking only for myself, I’d vote for a gay black Muslim over Trump right now. That’s right. I’d vote for Obama over Trump, just to send the 2A message.

I think everyone who voted for Trump understood they were getting a guy who would be long on bullshit and short of tangible accomplishments. The point of voting for him was to send a message, but also legitimize populist issues. Trump was the guy who would flip over the tables and discredit the status quo, opening the door for ambitious politicians to run on patriotic issues like immigration reform. Trump would build his wall, end some of the egregious immigration abuses, but the real work would be up to those who come next.

So far, Trump is looking like he is not going to deliver anything other than blowing his own horn every day and maybe dodging prison in the Mueller probe. Worse yet, the trade-off for his vanity will be the undermining of the one cause that truly defines what’s left of old stock America. By legitimizing gun-grabbing and executive fiat, he has just made it possible for the next President Obama to DACA the gun issue, by issuing new gun laws via executive order. Trump is proving to be one step forward and ten steps backward.

The one lesson of the Trump era is to not put too much stock in what Trump says. He is, after all, a bullshitter. He’s also a guy who will wheel on a dime if he senses he is on the wrong side. He is rather shameless in that regard. Still, the damage he has done to the cause of gun rights is incalculable and it will not be forgotten. Unless he eventually signs off on some bold pro-gun laws, lots of his voters will choose to spend the election day at the range come 2020, rather than cast a vote for a duplicitous gun grabber.

And Trump can never break 35 percent, never win the nomination, blah freaking blah. Didn’t we literally just go through this with DACA and the Dreamers? Do the shrieking little girls of the Right never learn that politicians sometimes say things that are not true?

Now, I don’t like Trump’s response to the post-Parkland media campaign either. And I can assure you that the response that I recommend would have been considerably more forthright than anything I’ve seen the Z-man or anyone else advise, which is apparently to do nothing and trust the states.

On an issue like guns, doing nothing is usually the best course. Most states are sensible on guns, so letting the states handle it is good for us.

Not necessarily. In any event, this is what I would advise instead of doing nothing and trusting the states to be sensible.

  1. Arrest Dan Israel, take Nikolas Cruz into custody, stop the demolition of the school, and order an investigation into the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, the Secret Service, and every other federal, state, local agency that had any contact with that school in the last six months. Then publish the results of the investigation and have the DOJ prosecute the various guilty parties.
  2. Criminalize the public advocacy of gun control, using the anti-BDS template. Any television or radio station advocating gun control would lose its broadcasting license. Any corporation advocating gun control would lose its federal contracts.
  3. Announce mandatory carry reciprocity between states on pain of losing federal highway funds.
  4. Stop all federal funding to all universities, colleges, and schools that ban guns on campus.
  5. Announce an executive order suspending all state and local gun control laws.
So, let’s not pretend that I’m not as hard core and absolutist about gun rights as anyone else. That being said, John Derbyshire is right. Who else do we have besides Trump? There is no point in taking your ball and going home, because unless you are actually going to go out and take action to shut down the gun control advocates by yourself, the God-Emperor is literally all we have on the political front.

I’m not saying that we should support him in even speaking soothing words to the insane people who want to kill him and impose a violent dictatorship on a disarmed American people. I’m not saying that I think his actions are wise, well-advised, or even sensible. I’m not saying that one shouldn’t feel discouraged, annoyed, or even angry about what looks very much like a foolish and unnecessarily damaging political blunder.

But I am saying that it accomplishes nothing to throw a tantrum and very publicly withdraw your support from the God-Emperor, especially when we all know that you’re going to be slinking back and hoping that no one notices when you try to quietly clamber back aboard the Trump Train rather than be left behind with Ben Shapiro, Bill Kristol, Mona Charen, Rick Wilson, and all the rest of the Never-Trump losers.

At the very least, wait until Trump actually does something rather than merely makes another of his self-contradictory public statements before you reach any firm conclusions about his actual intentions or the probable consequences.

Gun grab in Minnesota

HF 3022 is not going to pass the state legislature, but the fact that the anti-gunners are even trying is sufficient cause for tarring, feathering, and generally Concord/Lexington-style reaction:

HF 3022 is now in the Legislature

– Permit required to own a gun
– Permit required to buy a gun
– Permit required to sell a gun
– Local law enforcement gets to deny all types of gun permits
– Local law enforcement gets to deny permits to carry
– Personal medical information must be shared with law enforcement
– All firearm transfers must be reported
– All guns must be registered (fees set by local law enforcement)
– Registration must be renewed annually
– Local law enforcement may conduct warrantless “safety inspections” of gun owner’s homes
– Local law enforcement sets “safe storage” policies
– Five day waiting period for all transfers
– Transfers must be done through an FFL (even between private parties)
– Fees may be charged for transfers
– Local law enforcement may conduct background investigation on transfers
– Total ban on any gun which meets broad “assault weapon” definition – banned guns must be destroyed or surrendered
– Ban thumbhole stocks
– Ban adjustable stocks
– Ban pistol grip stocks
– Limit fixed magazine capacity to 7 rounds
– Ban any magazine capable of holding more than 7 rounds
– Suspension of gun rights based on complaints from anonymous parties
– Recriminalization of suppressors
– Bump stock ban
– All ammunition sales will be registered
– Permit required to purchase ammunition

Almost forgot an important thing —

HF 3022 would also make gun owner private data public. This would include:

Number and type of guns you own
Your address

It’s time for 2nd Amendment advocates to get serious and go on the offensive. If advocating the boycott of Israel can be criminalized, then advocating the infringement of American gun rights can damn well be criminalized too.

Gun rights activists should start demanding that their representatives pass laws requiring fines and jail time for anyone who advocates violating the unalienable rights of Americans by calling for gun laws. In case it’s not obvious to you, the 2nd Amendment is considerably more important than the 1st Amendment.

Mailvox: eCONcomics and limited editions

Written by economist Steve Keen, one of the few professional economists to have correctly anticipated the global financial crisis of 2008, eCONcomics is a series of three satires explaining why the science of economics has gone so terribly wrong. In these savagely erudite satires, Keen highlights the lameness of the excuses offered by economists for their failure to predict anything from the financial crisis to the recent stock market highs. From “secular stagnation” to the “non-accelerating inflation rate of employment” and the “full employment real interest rate”, Keen expertly mocks both the myths and the incompetence of his professional colleagues.

After reading eCONcomics, you will understand why no economist ever seems to be able to explain what is going on today, or tell you what will happen tomorrow.

Steve Keen is Professor of Economics at Kingston University in London, and an Honorary Professor at University College London.

I wasn’t planning to announce this until next week, as it’s still not in stock on Amazon, and there are some pricing/discount issues that we have to resolve, but since I know some of you are checking out the Castalia Books Direct store and it’s as cheap to ship five comics as one, I figured I’d go ahead and make the print edition of Steve Keen’s economics comic book available to those who are interested today: eCONcomics: Taking the CON out of Economics.

Which, I will warn you, even in comic book form is challenging. On the other hand, it is indubitably a unique collector’s item from one of the great minds of economics. Imagine owning a first edition of Albert Einstein’s first comic book….

Anyhow, this is a larger 10×7 32-page book that we did not originally plan on selling anywhere but through Amazon and the chain stores – the comic stores are hardly going to carry a highly esoteric educational one-off – so we set a low retail price and a low discount. The problem is that this means the $4.99 price on the Castalia Direct store is actually higher than the $3.99 retail price. We will resolve that somehow, but whether it involves raising the retail price and the discount or something else, I simply don’t know. So, if you very understandably would prefer to wait for the retail price, it should be on Amazon by the end of the next week. While it is being published by Castalia, for the time being I put it in the Arkhaven collection on the store for simplicity’s sake. You can even pick up a copy of Steve’s Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? while you’re there.

Also, a reader who is a former comic book store guy had an idea for how we could produce limited collector’s editions to benefit the early supporters. He suggested that we do something to signify the first X number of copies printed, such as a gold Arkhaven logo or whatever, as this would potentially increase their value to collectors down the road. While I’m not interested in playing the variant covers game, or charging people more for mirrored reflective holographic covers, something like this that doesn’t cost the reader any more and simply rewards those who were the first to support our new comics strikes me as a win-win situation.

So, is this of any interest to the collectors in our midst, and if it is, what should X be? Our goal is to eventually hit average issue sales of at least 50,000, so keep in mind that we probably want to establish a limited edition base that we will not change in the future. Also keep in mind that it costs us both time and money to make this change on every single comic, not much, but enough that we don’t want to do it for 50 or 100 comics. My thought is that something in the range between 500 and 5,000 would be about right, but I will defer to the wisdom of the enthusiasts.

And finally, how would you like us to signify these collector’s editions? The aforementioned gold logo, distinctive yet tasteful? A giant garish COLLECTOR’S EDITION stamp? Share your thoughts.

Changing the game

That’s right. It has begun. Single-issue, full-color comics with at least one extra page of story for 24.5 percent less than the average price of the top 300-selling comics… and at your local bookstore.

Or you can buy directly from us. Not the ebook, the print edition. And if you’re just curious, you can even read them free if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited.

It’s just a trickle now, of course. But the deluge is coming. The deluge is definitely coming.

UPDATE: A helpful reader has worked out the US shipping charges. Apparently the best deals are to buy 2 paperbacks + 1-5 comics or 10-16 comics for $3.49 shipping, or 1 paperback + 1-4 comics for $3.99 shipping. We have no idea why it is less expensive to ship 10 comics than 6, but that is not our department. As for outside the USA, we expect to be able to sell directly to Europe and the UK within a month or so. No word on Australia as yet.

1 comic + 1 paperback $3.99 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
1 comic + 2 paperback $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
1 comic + 3 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)
1 comic + 4 paperbacks $5.99 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

2 comics + 1 paperback $3.99 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
2 comics + 2 paperbacks $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
2 comics + 3 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)
2 comics + 4 paperbacks $5.99 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

3 comics + 1 paperback $3.99 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
3 comics + 2 paperbacks $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
3 comics + 3-4 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

4 comics + 1 paperback $3.99 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
4 comics + 2 paperbacks $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
4 comics + 3-4 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)
4 comics + 5 paperbacks $5.99 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

5 comics + 1 paperback $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
5 comics + 2 paperbacks $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
5 comics + 3 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)
5 comics + 4-5 paperbacks $5.99 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

6-9 comics: $3.99 USPS Economy or $4.99 USPS Priority
10-16 comics: $3.49 USPS Economy or $4.99 USPS Priority
17+ comics: $4.49 UPS Ground

You don’t say

A Hillary staffer attends CPAC:

‘Make sure to check in with us!” one friend told me. “Try not to get killed,” another warned. I wasn’t off to a war zone or a spy mission in Moscow. I was riding a bus from New York to Washington to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference.

To be sure, I’m a tiny, talkative South Asian woman who spent four months on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign staff. I wasn’t exactly in my element surrounded by people in “Make America Great Again” hats chanting “Lock her up! Lock her up!“ But there was more to CPAC than that….

I found myself … nodding my head in agreement with parts of Ben Shapiro’s speech.

Imagine that.

Americans don’t need God

At least, not to be good. Or so most of them think.

Americans took God out of public schools. And universities, mostly. And, over the years, government. And social issues. And holiday references. And there even have been attempts to banish God, or belief in Him, from business, including in the fight over abortion funding in Obamacare.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a new Pew Research poll found 56 percent of Americans say it’s not necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values.

That’s up from the 49 percent who expressed that view in 2011.

“This increase reflects the continued growth in the share of the population that has no religious affiliation, but it also is the result of changing attitudes among those who do identify with a religion, including white evangelical Protestants,” Pew said.

After answering the poll question and confirming “her” opinion that “she” did not need God to be moral, the transgender “woman” posted lies on Facebook about a political opponent being a neo-Nazi homophobe, before prostituting “herself” to a gay man, and donating a small portion of the proceeds to Planned Parenthood in order to help murder unborn children.

Then “she” went to the Episcopalian “church” to worship “God the Mother”.

It must be all those “Judeo-Christian” values of which we hear so much about these days. Who needs God when you’ve got Judeo Christ? This should end well. In any event, as Christopher Hallpike amply demonstrates, those Americans are wrong.