Author: VD

Monday Arktoons

THE WISE OF HEART Episode 17: 17 Sue Morgan Testifies

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 217: Side Trip

INVASION ’55 Episode 39: Storied Past

NEURAL NETWORK NOVELLAS Episode 5: The Bum

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 86: Love Poem

FULL OF EYES Episode 31: Both At Once

BEN GARRISON Episode 100: Happy Easter!

CLASSIC BIBLE TALES Episode 91: The Greatest Commandment

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 225: All Relative

EVIL MONKEY MEMES Episode 85: Donate Life

RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 14: Texas Traffic Stop

REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 60: Out of the Fryingpan

The Decline of the Newspaper

It is not to be mourned, but rather, celebrated, given the complete irresponsibility and outright wickedness of the media institutions:

The country’s largest newspaper company, Gannett, is once again forecasting it will sell off more of its daily newspapers. Since its merge with newspaper company GateHouse Media in 2019, Gannett has closed or sold hundreds of papers and slashed staff by more than half, and that is projected to continue. Joshua Benton has been writing about this for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, and he joins me now. Welcome.

JOSHUA BENTON: Good to be with you.

FLORIDO: Joshua, Gannett had 25,000 employees at the end of 2019, and less than four years later, it has just over 11,000. It slashed staff by more than half. I mean, newspaper revenue has been steadily declining over that time but not by that much, not at that rate. So what’s going on here?

BENTON: The Gannett that we have now is the result of the merger of two very large companies. The idea was an individual newspaper might struggle on its own, but if you buy enough of them, you can extract as much of the cost of producing the newspaper from the local community as possible. You cut down on print days. You have the page layout and editing done elsewhere. The thought was you could achieve these economies of scale and make a profitable business. The problem is, as part of the merger, Gannett took on a lot of debt, and they have to pay off that debt. So they need revenue. And the way that they have been doing that is by cutting costs to the bone. That means cutting staff and cutting the quality of their newspapers.

FLORIDO: I guess it goes without saying that print circulation of newspapers has plummeted in recent years. It’s been on the decline for decades, actually. And today, most people get their news online. Is it just the case that these Gannett newspapers aren’t managing to get people who used to subscribe to their print paper to subscribe to their digital product instead?

BENTON: Yeah. Newspapers have generally given up on the idea of creating new print readers. They’re not really making new print readers anymore. So the idea has been to shift to digital, and Gannett claims some degree of success in doing that. But even when that does happen, newspapers generally make significantly less money off of a digital subscriber than they do from a print subscriber. The other problem is that there are lots of other free alternatives for a lot of local news and information, and people will be happy to consume those without bothering to subscribe to the local daily.

Better uninformed than misinformed and propagandized by the corpocracy. The only real loss is historical, but that was inevitable once paper moved to digital. It will be good when government-funded media institutions like NPR and the BBC eventually fail as well. No one’s lives are enhanced or improved by learning very important information about a deadly hurricane in Bali or a fatal shooting in Chicago, or by being told lies about war, geopolitics, and the economy.

DISCUSS ON SG

Liars Protest Truth

The BBC and the British government are offended by Twitter accurately describing the British Broadcasting Corporation as “government-funded media”:

Elon Musk has risked a row with the BBC by labelling it as ‘government-funded media’ on Twitter.

The Corporation is mainly funded by British taxpayers, who pay a £159-a-year licence fee.

Although the government sets how much the licence fee is, not everyone has to pay it, and households pay directly.

When someone clicks on the BBC’s new label, it brings them to a page about government accounts and state-affiliated media accounts. Twitter described state-affiliated media accounts as: ‘Outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.’

The page does not include a definition for its ‘government-funded media’ label.

A BBC spokesperson said: ‘We are speaking to Twitter to resolve this issue as soon as possible. The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee.’

There is nothing “independent” about the BBC. If a British person does not pay his licence fee, it is a criminal act with a penalty that averages £176 with a legal maximum of £1,000. The fact that the tax is paid directly to the corporation rather than going through the government does not change the fact that the funding for the BBC is imposed on the British public by His Majesty’s Government with the power of the law.

In summary, Twitter is entirely correct to describe the BBC as “government-funded media”, because without the threat of government force, the funding would not be provided to the corporation.

DISCUSS ON SG

US Life Expectancy Declines

So much for the myth of inevitable progress. Even the most-retarded conservatives are beginning to consider the possibility that the dirt may not be not magic.

Years of widening economic inequality, compounded by the pandemic and political storm and stress, have given Americans the impression that the country is on the wrong track. Now there’s empirical data to show just how far the country has run off the rails: Life expectancies have been falling.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last year that life expectancy at birth fell in 2021 to its lowest level since 1996, a decline of nearly a year on average from 2020. That was after a decline by 1.8 years from 2019 to 2020, producing the worst two-year decline since 1921-23….

The factors contributing to America’s decline in life expectancies could point to a decline in its international stature.

Although wealthy countries as a group suffered a fall in longevity during the pandemic, the discrepancy between life expectancies in the U.S. and its closest cohorts has been widening for decades. In 1995, U.S. life expectancy was about six months less than those of high-income countries; by 2020 it was about three years, according to the World Bank.

In 1995, the U.S. had a commanding lead over China, which was about 5 1/2 years behind the U.S.; China then roared ahead, outstripping the U.S. in 2020, when its average life expectancy clocked in at 78.08 years, compared with America’s 77.28.

The mass vaxx campaign is going to contribute to declining life expectancies around the world, but that’s merely one of the significant factors. The fact that the USA is now a minority-European country means that its average quality of life is also going to more closely approximate the global norm.

A society is necessarily either eugenic or dysgenic. And adopting policies that are anti-eugenic is similar to adopting anti-racist policies, since societal degradation is the inevitable, mathematically-guaranteed result in either case for any society that is above average.

The wages of sin are death. And the wages of intellectual inversion are decline.

DISCUSS ON SG

Jesus Christ Is Risen

Now I make known unto you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you have received, and wherein you stand; By which also you are saved, if you hold fast after what manner I preached unto you, unless you have believed in vain.

For I delivered unto you first of all, which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures: And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day, according to the scriptures: And that he was seen by Cephas; and after that by the eleven. Then he was seen by more than five hundred brethren at once: of whom many remain until this present, and some are fallen asleep.

After that, he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. And last of all, he was seen also by me, as by one born out of due time.

— 1 Corinthians 15: 1-8

Happy Easter, everyone.

DISCUSS ON SG

The SDL Replies

From SG:

Larry Correia responds to a 2⭐ review with his signature style. One wonders how the SDL would reply?

What Larry said, the abridged version:

What an incredibly fucking stupid point to make in an incredibly fucking stupid review. You aren’t reviewing my book. You’re reviewing your own fucking hubris and hang ups.

And fuckers like you don’t just post this bullshit to me. You post it to all fantasy authors. Only I’m fine. I make good money off my fans who aren’t entitled little shits. I’ve got shooting Flight Control money. The people who get fucked by people like you are all the up and comer and newbie authors who can’t afford to eat nothing but Ramen Noodle for the years it takes to finish an epic fantasy series before cheap fucks like you gamble on the first book.

That’s the real legacy of Rothfuss and Martin, fucking over an entire generation of up and coming fantasy authors because entitled shit heads like this got their expectations hurt.

MY ACTUAL REPLY: There are a large number of people who don’t read me for a considerable panoply of different reasons. I suppose that’s as good a reason as any. Anyhow, it will be done when it is done. In leather. Glorious, supple Italian goatskin leather.

Let’s face it, Larry is simply more entertaining than I am.

DISCUSS ON SG

Amazon Doubles Down Again

It’s just SJWs doing what SJWs always do. When I wrote SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double Down, which led quite naturally to Corporate Cancer, I wasn’t inventing anything. I was simply observing the obvious.

A new report claims that Amazon Studios scrapped an audience ranking system after data revealed audiences were put off by “queer stories” and themes.

This new report comes from The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters who details that Amazon’s “reliance on testing and data led to a clash late summer” specifically following a marketing meeting regarding the company’s A League of Their Own series.

Masters notes during this meeting an Amazon executive pointed out “that data showed audiences found queer stories off-putting and suggested downplaying those themes in materials promoting the show.”

On top of this, Masters also detailed, “Multiple sources say [Amazon’s system] often ranked broad series featuring straight, white male leads above all others.”

According to the report, the show’s co-creator Will Graham “launched into an interrogation of the system,’ which resulted in Amazon dropping “the system of ranking shows based on audience scores.”

The converged entertainment corporations are never going to stop what they’re doing. Which is why companies like Castalia and Arkhaven are going to outlast even the biggest corporate giants. We’re not competing with them, they’re just waging psychological war on their own customers. And eventually, the wall of reality against which they are battering their heads is going to break them.

It will get worse. It will get a lot worse. It will get worse than you believe is even theoretically possible.

Jesus harrowed Hell. Arkhaven will harrow the Hellmouth.

DISCUSS ON SG

Who’s Isolating Whom?

The countries that have sanctioned Russia may soon find themselves on the wrong side of the exclusion equation.

The India-based Megh Updates platform, one of the world’s largest online informational platforms in terms of views, has stated that BRICS countries have officially overtaken G7 in share of world PPP GDP, and that this trend can be expected to continue.

The BRICS currently include Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, while the G7 includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as the European Union. The BRICS is also expanding – Bangladesh, Egypt and the UAE have all just joined the BRICS New Development Bank, with numerous other countries poised to do the same.

A real shake up is also to be expected these coming days with Mexico, long part of the North American free trade bloc NAFTA (now superseded by the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) agreement) poised to join BRICS. That will be seen as a direct affront to Mexico’s US relations and a sign that global economies, even on America’s border, are having serious doubts about the US ability to trade on fair and equal terms.

The current BRICS five now contribute 31.5% of global GDP, while the G7 share has fallen to 30%. The BRICS is expected to contribute over 50% of global GDP by 2030, with the proposed enlargement almost certainly bringing that forward.

It’s going to be particularly interesting when Mexico and other countries in the Americas agree to host Chinese military bases and Russian missiles. Because, in the aftermath of Ukraine and other imperial engagements, the rest of the world simply isn’t listening to the US narrative anymore.

DISCUSS ON SG

Friday Arktoons

FRIDAY FISH FUNNIES Episode 14: Knock Knock

THE SWORD OF GOD Episode 53: Gratuitous Robocop Reference

BOB Episode 126: Out of Eden

FLYING SPARKS Episode 66: What Could Go Wrong?

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 224: Addictionary

WARNING: Arktoons features a number comics written by The Legend Chuck Dixon. We are reliably informed by Marvel Comics that this means reader discretion is advised, and that if you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, or are worried about a friend or loved one, you should reach out to a counselor or someone you trust.

Chuck is dangerous, Marvel… man. He addresses this, and other recent attacks on him, on UATV.

DISCUSS ON SG