Author: VD

Problem or opportunity?

Allum Bokhari contemplates the corporate culture wars:

From coffee machine manufacturers to social media giants to the NFL, progressive virtue-signalling has infected every inch of global corporate culture. It is now the most dangerous opponent of freedom in the west, threatening both the Trump agenda and freedom of speech. How did it start? How can it end?

This week, the story is coffee machine maker Keurig, which pulled ads from Sean Hannity’s show at the prompting of Media Matters, and is now facing a conservative backlash of NFL-size proportions. But it isn’t just one or two companies engaging in virtue-signalling, it’s practically all of them. It’s Pepsi, which panders to antifa in its ads. Its Heineken, which salutes open borders in their adverts. It’s Twitter. It’s Starbucks. It’s KLM airlines. Despite vast differences in their products, services, and consumers, every industry seems to have the same virtue-signallers.

From the moment of Trump’s inauguration, corporations have been engaged in a frantic struggle to block his agenda. White House globalist-in-chief Gary Cohn, along with the now-disbanded CEO council, did everything they could to blunt the President’s trade policies and prevent him from exiting the Paris Climate Agreement. The same CEO council, along with Cohn, sought to pressure Trump with a series of resignations following his response to a combination of racist white nationalist and Antifa violence in Charlottesville.

And that’s corporations playing nice. When their values are threatened by people who do not sit in the Oval Office, they do far more than simply resign. Earlier this year, after being spooked by mainstream news articles claiming YouTube was a cesspit of terrorism and hate speech, corporations promptly yanked their ads from the platform en masse.

Revenues plummeted overnight, and YouTube quickly added stringent new systems that prevent even remotely controversial content from receiving ad revenue. Once, the platform was a place where bold, independent commentators could develop healthy incomes without answering to any old media gatekeeper. Now, even YouTube’s politest fast food reviewer is having trouble keeping his ad revenue, as the platform introduces ever-stricter language codes. One tantrum from corporations was all it took for free speech on one of the web’s most promising platforms to be all but snuffed out.

What this is doing is creating tremendous opportunities as big corporations intentionally cut themselves off from significant portions of their markets. We’re seeing it play out with Marvel/DC right now! This is not something to mourn, complain about, or fight, this is something to exploit.

More convergence in comics

G.I. JOE IS BACK! In the wake of IDW’s Revolution crossover event, G.I. JOE’s mission has become a global one–they aren’t just Real American Heroes, they’re Real Earth Heroes.

I know the physical standards for the U.S. military have been relaxed, but that’s just ridiculous. GI Joe is now selling less than 5k copies per month. Quelle surprise. And on a not entirely related note:

Yesterday, Bleeding Cool reported that the DC Rebirth ongoing titles would be moving to a plot-art-script production system rather than the more common plot-script-art system, in order to give the lead artists on titles a greater control over storytelling. It is often known as the “Marvel Method” after its adoption by Stan Lee to speed his work in the sixties, even though it is hardly used at Marvel Comics anymore. A Marvel insider tells Bleeding Cool.

The Marvel method can actually be more time-consuming if you are not used to it. And given DC’s penchant for editorial input, makes changes harder as they will be caught later in the pencils.

It means there must be a level of trust between writer, artist and editor. Everyone needs to be on the same page going in. Lots of discussion beforehand. And once you commit to a plot, the editor knows that the artist will, of course, add their own interpretation to things. The editor has to be a little more free-wheeling, knowing there will be less time for corrections.

This was used in the 70s to push through stories they knew would be controversial. Turn it in at the last minute and no one has time to make corrections. They’ll have to publish as it is or miss shipping.

So, DC has not only hired Marvel’s leading SJW, but has switched to a system that is known for its utility in pushing through stories they know will be controversial. This disruption is not only going to be glorious, it is going to be at least an order of magnitude bigger than anyone is currently anticipating.

UPDATE: DC is in disarray and it promises to get worse:

In the wake of the Batman group not having had a group editor for some time now, the DC New Age Of Heroes line being significantly delayed, the Superman group losing its head with no obvious replacement, and the holidays upon us, something at DC Comics is going to give. I am told to expect delays, cancellations, postponements in waves.

I get reports of increased stress, arguments, and an impending sense of doom within the company — tempered somewhat by the belief that DC did the right thing. There was plenty of objection towards Eddie internally within the company, as much as there were people who considered him a friend.

However, it may also be an opportunity for those who can to step up and prove themselves. Rebecca Taylor is now editing Metal rather than co-editing with Berganza, and no one doubts her ability to keep that event on the tracks. Others may seize upon the chance to show exactly what they can do, unburdened with the knowledge that certain creators won’t refuse to work for them.

Of course, if they were capable, they wouldn’t have needed old grabby hands to do the work for them in the first place.

A mercenary military

The Saker’s conclusion that the US military is in no shape to take on the Russian military these days is almost certainly correct:

The military is investigating whether two Navy SEALs strangled an Army Green Beret to death in Mali earlier this year, The New York Times reports. The Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Logan J. Melgar, was found dead on June 4 in his housing unit that he shared with other U.S. Special Operations troops. His death was ruled a homicide by strangulation, and the case was assigned last month to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The two Navy SEALs, members of the elite Team 6, have since been placed on administrative leave.

It will be interesting to learn if these two Navy SEALs are Americans or Fake Americans. A lot of starry-eyed conservatives think that foreigners who serve in the U.S. military deserve citizenship, failing to realize that a nation that turns its military over to foreigners is usually in the late stages of societal decline and fall.

In light of Bergdahl’s unpunished desertion, it will be interesting to see what, if any, consequences befall these SEALs, who as yet remain unidentified.

Let it go to Hell

As I’ve told my children, Let It Go is an expression of pure Crowleyian evil; it doesn’t even rise to the less evil version of W. Somerset Maugham, as there is no due regard for civic mores. Dalrock and his readers have noticed too:

Anonymous Reader notes that Let it go is well loved by modern Christians:

I have not yet encountered a single churchgoing person in my social circle who has a problem with “Frozen” the movie or with “Let it go” the song. Not one. That includes a couple of families that are part of leadership. Pointing out the “no rules” part is like describing the color “purple” to someone who is blind. They literally can’t see anything wrong – perhaps because “It’s DISNEY” or something. I’ve gotten blank stares from people over 40 but also parents under 30. It’s bizarre.

I don’t think the messenger makes the message palatable.  It is the message itself that is loved.  Women and girls learning how to throw off all rules and inhibition is core to our new morality.  The song isn’t loved as a guilty pleasure;  it is loved as a bold moral declaration.  Stop trying to be a good girl and learn to worship yourself is a moral exhortation.  As Vox pointed out in The devil that is Disney:

Disney is run by literal satanists preaching Alastair Crowley’s “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” to children. They are one of the primary engine’s of the West’s degeneracy and decline. It is not an accident that everything they touch, in every industry, turns into morally radioactive slime.

Children, including Christian children, understand this best of all.  They know what their parents worship, what their parents see as righteous (even if their parents fall short of living the ideal).  They know that Frozen and Let It Go is a morality tale that teaches them about our most sacred beliefs.

Perhaps the concept is a little easier to grasp when it isn’t a pretty cartoon character warbling, but Leo Moracchioli doing what is a more aesthetically honest version of the song. The only thing that would really improve upon the song is a video full of tattooed strippers on poles doing drugs that ends with snow falling upon a grave with a woman’s name and dates indicating that she died in her 20s.

Leo is now my favorite band. His covers are awesome. I love his version of Africa. And the six – SIX! – guitar solos in his Californication are simply epic. All six are great and fit perfectly within the song somehow, but Scallon’s solo on the eight-string is my favorite just for how he delivers it, expressionless, on an escalator. It reminded me a little of 808 State playing First Avenue with their backs to the crowd for the entire show. That transcended the very concept of cool.

One thing I will say for YouTube: it has totally transformed the way young guitarists learn to play their instruments. It is ASTONISHING how good they are.

UPDATE: Wow. That is all. Just wow.

Ted Cruz cucks again

I’m still amazed by the naivete of those who supported Ted Cruz in the primary. How they could not see him for the wretched little creature that he is was astonishing. His cucking for the GOPe’s Fake News campaign against Roy Moore, on the other hand, doesn’t surprise me at all:

Sen. Ted Cruz on Monday withdrew his support from Alabama GOP Senate nominee Roy Moore, saying allegations of sexual misconduct should be looked at by prosecutors.

“As it stands, I can’t urge the people of Alabama to support a campaign in the face of these charges without serious, persuasive demonstration that the charges are not true,” the Texas Republican told reporters, according to a Texas Tribune reporter.

“Both last week and this week, there are serious charges of criminal conduct that if true, not only make him unfit to serve in the Senate but merit criminal prosecution,” he added.

Cruz joined a number of Republican senators distancing themselves from Moore. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday led several senators in calling for Moore to drop out of the race, and Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), the chairman of the Senate’s GOP campaign arm, said the chamber should expel Moore if he wins election in December.

I hope Texas voters remember what a treacherous little Fake American weasel Ted Cruz is when he is next up for re-election. I still remember one of the best quotes from the entire presidential campaign season: “I saw a video of a Buddhist monk self-immolate, and Ted Cruz still did it better.”

The Mall of Surrender

This is the #MallOfAmerica. I would suggest getting your Christmas shopping done early. Oh, wait…
– James Woods

Read the responses for some truly impressive virtue-signaling. Remember all the “Europe is lost” comments? Well, I have never personally seen anything like that in Rome or Paris. When we visited Rome several years ago with some friends from Minnesota, one of them commented that she was surprised to see fewer Muslims there than in Minnesota.

Isn’t it wonderful that Americans fought them over there so they could occupy America? Invade the world, invite the world, as Steve Sailer described it, may be the single dumbest strategery ever articulated in the written history of Man.

UPDATE: Man, The Observer has it right. Scandinavians really are the human equivalent of the dodo bird.

What do they think will happen?

Karl Lagerfeld knows what is coming. So do tens of thousands of people across Germany, if not an order of magnitude more:

Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld has sparked outrage by evoking the Holocaust as he attacked German Chancellor Angela Merkel for opening the country’s borders to migrants.

“One cannot — even if there are decades between them — kill millions of Jews so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place,” he told a French television show. “I know someone in Germany who took a young Syrian and after four days said, ‘The greatest thing Germany invented was the Holocaust,’” he added.

If humanity is very, very fortunate, Reconquista 2.0 will look more like the Holocaust than the Great Leap Forward. If we’re not merely not fortunate, but downright unlucky, it’s going to look more like the Killing Fields or the Black Death.

You can be as outraged as you like. History is rife with people being outraged at people who tell them the truth. Outrage isn’t going to change anything that is already written into the great historical waves.

America-first immigration

Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas lays down the history to civic nationalists and globalists alike:

For too long, a bipartisan, cosmopolitan elite has dismissed the people’s legitimate concerns about these things and put its own interests above the national interest.

No one captured this sensibility better than President Obama, when he famously called himself “a citizen of the world.”  With that phrase, he revealed a deep misunderstanding of citizenship. After all, “citizen” and “city” share the same Greek root word: citizenship by definition means that you belong to a particular political community. Yet many of our elites share Mr. Obama’s sensibility. They believe that American citizenship—real, actual citizenship—is meaningless, ought not be foreclosed to anyone, and ought not be the basis for distinctions between citizens and foreigners. You might say they think American exceptionalism lies in not making exceptions when it comes to citizenship.

This globalist mindset is not only foreign to most Americans. It’s also foreign to the American political tradition.

Take the Declaration of Independence. Our cosmopolitan elites love to cite its stirring passages about the rights of mankind when they talk about immigration or refugees. They’re not wrong to do so. Unlike any other country, America is an idea—but it is not only an idea. America is a real, particular place with real borders and real, flesh-and-blood people. And the Declaration tells us it was so from the very beginning.

Prior to those stirring passages about “unalienable Rights” and “Nature’s God,” in the Declaration’s very first sentence in fact, the Founders say it has become “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands” that tie them to another—one people, not all people, not citizens of the world, but actual people who make up actual colonies. The Founders frequently use the words we and us throughout the Declaration to describe that people.

Furthermore, on several occasions, the Declaration speaks of “these Colonies” or “these States.” The Founders were concerned about their own circumstances; they owed a duty to their own people who had sent them as representatives to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. They weren’t trying to free South America from Spanish or Portuguese dominion, much as they might have opposed that dominion.

Perhaps most notably, the Founders explain towards the end of the Declaration that they had appealed not only to King George for redress, but also to their fellow British citizens, yet those fellow citizens had been “deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity.” Consanguinity!—blood ties! That’s pretty much the opposite of being a citizen of the world.

So while the Declaration is of course a universal document, it’s also a particular document about one nation and one people. Its signers pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to each other, in English, right here in America—not in Esperanto to mankind in the abstract.

Civic nationalism is globalism lite. It has failed in America, it is failing in Europe, and it is no more viable than communism, libertarianism, or any other utopian social policy.

The senator’s proposed RAISE Act is still woefully insufficient in the present circumstances, but it is a significant improvement on the disastrous current system.

THE HERETICS OF ST. POSSENTI

Bishop Thomas Cranberry finds himself at a loss when he is confronted by a thief and realizes some disturbing truths about himself. The experience sends him in search of the men who are increasingly absent from the Church, who find themselves at a loss in a world that has gone increasingly feral, and who feel that they have nowhere to go and no one to whom they can turn for support. In listening to them and attempting to understand their plight, he finds an unexpected mission.

THE HERETICS OF ST. POSSENTI is for readers who want the backstory of the story and for those who want to know how one inspired man can make a difference in a fallen world. It is a novel for those who need inspiration to get them though the day and those who look for unusual ways to accomplish the mission. It is for people who understand and respect the old ways but know that sometimes a seed cannot grow without splitting the pavement.

Rolf Nelson is the author of BACK FROM THE DEAD, the first book in The Stars Came Back series. This is how Rolf described the connection between the two books.

The first book written in this series of related stories was The Stars Came Back. It had a small but important part played by a somewhat mysterious order of monks, the Order of St. Possenti. It was also said they had a small but significant role in the past as they helped save, metaphorically and physically, the fully self-aware AI aboard the warship Armadillo. It was an unusual order of monks, and it raised more than a few reader questions. It also piqued my own interest: how could such an order of rifle-toting Christian monks come into existence? A fascinating plot device to use as a fully developed entity, but… How?

So I set about exploring the idea. I learned much in the process about Christianity, Catholicism, popes, monks, schisms, and more. I hope you enjoy the results of that labor.

Steve Keen, sell-out

Professor Steve Keen, possibly the greatest economist of our time and Castalia House author-to-be, admits that he is a sold-out member of no less than FOUR grand conspiracies:

How I sold out to the Putin-Soros-Murdoch conspiracy to destroy Western civilization

I was delighted to find myself in the Top Ten (alright; top 15) of the European Values list of 2,326 “Useful Idiots” appearing regularly on RT shows, and thus legitimizing Vladimir Putin’s attempt to destroy Western civilization as we know it.
Why delighted? Because it completes the set of conspiracies to which I can now be accused of belonging. They include:

• The Putin Conspiracy, since I am regularly interviewed on Russia Today (and even worse, I now get paid to write for RT!);

• The Soros Conspiracy, since my research, has been funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) which he established;

• The Murdoch Conspiracy, since I appear every week on Sky News Australia with Carson Scott, and I used to get paid by News Ltd to write a weekly column; and

• The Alt-Right Conspiracy, since I’ve signed a book contract with Vox Day’s publishing firm Castalia House.

I can confirm the latter. We have the privilege to be publishing what Steve describes as his “magnum opus”, a work that I have reason to believe may prove not only significant, but utterly revolutionary. As for the others, I fear we shall have to settle for taking his word on them. Speaking of economics, it might interest you to hear that I am writing a piece addressing free trade and nationalism for a first-rate anthology that will appear next year from another publisher.

I will be doing a Voxiversity variant of it for our third video, after #001 Immigration and War and #002 Comics and Culture War.

But back to Steve:

So not only am I a “useful idiot,” I’m a useful idiot for four contradictory conspiracies. Does that make me a double-double agent?

No, it makes me someone who’s quadruple pissed off with people who attempt to understand the world from the perspective of conspiracy theories in the first place. I don’t deny the existence of conspiracies: in fact, far from it, because they’re everywhere. What I do deny is the implicit assumption that the conspirators understand the system they’re attempting to manipulate.

For example, I’ve heard plenty of conspiracy theorists assert that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by the Federal Reserve/George Soros (Hi George!)/Hedge Funds/Academic-Economists-Who-Peddle-The-Efficient-Markets-Hypothesis, and “they” profited from it.

This implies “they” knew what “they” were doing. Pardon me, but I’ve met many of these protagonists—and in the case of academic economists, I’ve worked with them for 30 years. “They” don’t have a clue (except George). Even those that were actively conspiring—like many hedge funds during the subprime bubble were doing so on the basis of utterly deluded theories about how the system they were trying to game actually worked. Where apparent conspiracies did work, like Soros’s punt against the British Pound decades ago, they did so because a CSP (Clever Sinister Person) bet against the conventional wisdom of others who thought they understood the system (and did not), rather than because the CSP set up the whole thing in the first place.

I used to work out with a guy running a very large global corporation. And by large, I mean annual turnover measured in the billions. He disabused me of any notion that the central bankers were smart; after returning from one meeting with the Bank of England’s Court of Directors, he said something about hoping the directors were somebody’s puppets, because if those bozos were actually running anything, the global economy was doomed.