Author: VD

The Boomers respond

It seems a few Boomers are beginning to chafe at my lack of respect for their g-g-generation. There is no need to address them all at once, but here is one from the blog:

Go pretend that your comic books are important.

I’ve explained, at length and repeatedly, why I, a confirmed elite book snob, who collects old leather-bound books and reads for pleasure in four languages, have been assiduously laboring in the low-status literary ghetto of fumetti, otherwise known as comic books. To no avail, apparently.

So, let me put this the only language a Boomer understands.

Arktoons is on track to pass, in terms of quality, marketability, and traffic, a competing site in about one year. That site just sold for $150 million.

Worse than murder

 

If this claim is true, the not-vaxxes must be banned immediately. Notice that at 25,800 deaths, this would far worse than the 19,141 annual homicides committed in the USA.

Mailvox: No Gamma Zone

A.D. honestly wants to know why his very important comments and questions are spammed on sight.

A.D. commented on “What made the Boomers boom?”
How ’bout you at least explain to me why you refuse to post my honest, well-intentioned follow-up questions to commenters, you incessantly-overcompensating fascist sissy-fags…??!

Certainly. VP has a strong No Gamma Comments Allowed policy. Because your previous comments were not only annoying and self-serving, but confirmed that you are a Gamma, you are no longer permitted to comment here. 

I trust this honest response answers his honest, well-intentioned question. His honest curiosity being satisfied, no doubt he will go away and cease attempting to comment here. Right?

Monday PM Arktoons

COSMIC WARRIOR Episode 7: The Fleet Attacks

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: WAR Episode 7: Outnumbered Ten to One

The Weekly Arktoons roundup is at Bounding Into Comics, where they have posted their perspectives on the five most popular Arktoons series as determined by the readers’ views.

Starting from dead scratch a little over a month ago, with thirty-two titles now available and six more on the way, Arktoons is gaining ground at a breakneck pace. With the narratives now well established and fandoms beginning to make their preferences sharply known, it’s time to take a look at Arktoons five most popular stories (as of this date).

Read the whole thing there. 

What made the Boomers boom?

 The Last Roman asks a pertinent question:

So what made the Boomers different? I mean, why did they fail in such a spectacular manner? 

I’m a firm believer in the concept of the formative years. Who hasn’t observed how the confidence in her youthful beauty sustains the fat, middle-aged housewife who still sees herself as “the pretty one”, or how the certainty of his social superiority shines undiminished in the university Alpha at the gym even when he’s little more than a middle manager going nowhere at the office? Conversely, who has failed to notice the seeming anomaly of the occasional lack of self-confidence in even the most successful late-bloomer? 

So, if we consider the historical situation in which the Boomers found themselves in childhood, the heirs to the literal conquerors of the world, who stood astride a planet in ruins while in possession of the only fully-functioning industrial base, living in the most technologically-advanced society in known human history, it should be no surprise that they behaved with all the circumspection and self-control of a highly indulged princeling who knows he will never have to wear a crown.

It is common for the successful – particularly those to whom success has come with little in the way of cost or effort – to believe they are beyond good and evil. The Boomers didn’t feel they needed the traditions of their forebears that gave them their status, and they rejected those traditions in favor of pursuing short-term pleasures. They became lotus-eaters, soft, fat, and totally unfit for competition and conflict with the rest of a battle-hardened world that was rebuilding from the ashes.

And now, it’s our turn to become hard men capable of embracing and winning the inevitable conflicts to come. This is why it behooves the younger generations in the West to not only reject, but to despise the Baby Boomers, and to refuse to listen to anything they have to say on any subject. They are complete failures, disastrous failures on a scale never before seen in history, and they have absolutely nothing to teach us, except to assiduously avoid following their example.

One Boomer, caught up in emotional projection of his own philosophy, shrieked that the younger generations anticipate the Day of the Pillow in order to acquire their material possessions. This is not only wrong, it completely misses the point. The reason we anticipate the Day of the Pillow is because on that day, the sweet silence of the Boomers will finally arrive.

On a not-unrelated note, an observation from SocialGalactic:

If Boomers were farmers, they would eat all of your seed corn and break every appliance in the kitchen doing so, then lecture with terrible advice on how to avoid the imminent starvation you will soon be facing.

Which, of course, is totally wrong and unfair. I think we all know that if Boomers were farmers, they’d immediately sell the farm, then buy a boat and a condo in Florida. 

The new power pyramid

I don’t put a lot of credence in Sorcha Faal’s dramatic reports, but this analysis of the transformation from a global monopower to a tripartite system in which China plays the leading role strikes me as highly credible:

American efforts to undermine Russia-China partnership are doomed to fail because Washington doesn’t understand Moscow’s concerns.

The US is increasingly worried that Russia and China are forging a strong new strategic partnership. With Moscow and Beijing aligning their foreign policy stances, the relationship now seems to be an alliance in all but name.

It was initially expected that the Russian-Chinese partnership would run aground over Beijing’s economic ambitions in Central Asia. China is evidently the more powerful economy in the partnership with Russia, and those kinds of asymmetries create certain limitations.

Moscow accepts Chinese leadership but rejects Chinese dominance.

Thus, if China chooses the “first among equals” principle, the partnership will prove to be durable and Moscow can make its peace with playing second fiddle in economic affairs to the world’s most populous nation.

To date, China has not tried to make use of those asymmetries with Russia.

Unlike Washington’s efforts to peel Russia away from its neighbours in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Beijing has avoided these kinds of schemes and instead worked towards accommodating Russian strategic interests.

Simply put, it is not in China’s interest to abandon its “first among equals” position in favour of unipolar ambitions. Russia is an indispensable partner for China to establish an economic leadership position in the Greater Eurasian region.

In a multipolar world, Moscow can adopt a swing power position and pivot to other centres of power if Beijing starts aspiring to move beyond leadership, in order to try and dominate.

The US domination of Europe is officially over. Despite its best efforts, the US could not convince Europeans to stop the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. And those who have read Corporate Cancer will understand the significance of the fact that one of the leading sponsors of Euro 2020, whose TV ads are running frequently before the matches, is Alipay.

If Russia is content to play second fiddle to China – and there is every sign that it is, due to the way the USA has waged economic war on Russia over the last decade – the USA will not only lose its premier global position, but soon find itself demoted to the number three world power when it loses its Western European economic force multiplier. This is good news, as it will give actual Americans a better chance to take back control in their own country.

Meanwhile, as China courts Russia, the USA continues to ineffectually try to impose its will:

The ban on purchasing Russia’s sovereign debt by US investors introduced by Washington earlier this year came into force on Monday. In April, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order authorizing the imposition of yet more restrictions. The move signaled a further expansion of Washington’s existing sanctions policy on Moscow, which is aimed at cutting off Russia from the global financial markets.

This idiocy is almost certainly going to boomerang on the neo-liberal world order, as the countries of the world will react to Russia’s financial deplatforming in much the same way that consumers concerned about being deplatformed by Paypal are turning to new alternatives with relief and gratitude. 

They should all be fired

Rumors abound that DC is headed for an epic housecleaning of the Augean Stables variety:

One of the first things on David Zaslav’s to-do list as the CEO of newly-formed conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery will surely be to streamline the entire operation, because as things stand the corporate structure could generously be described as shambolic.

As much as many fans would love for him to kick open the doors, boot out the old guard and restore the SnyderVerse, that’s hardly going to be high on his immediate agenda, but we’ll use the DCEU‘s setup as an example, with a recent Reddit leak as the jumping-off point. We should point out that the veracity of the claim is entirely up for debate, with an “insider” post claiming that Discovery want to fire everyone involved with the shared superhero universe.

Obviously, that’s an incredibly sweeping generalization that only reinforces our point about the jumbled hierarchy. If Discovery were to get rid of everyone with a vested stake in the DCEU, then that extends to DC Films president Walter Hamada, WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, HBO Max Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys, WarnerMedia Studios CEO Ann Sarnoff and Warner Bros. Picture Group chairman Toby Emmerich.

Heading further down the ladder to join even more of the DCEU dots, DC Comics, Inc. is a subsidiary of DC Entertainment, which is part of Warner Bros. Global Brands and Experiences, itself part of the Studio & Networks umbrella, under the control of the aforementioned Picture Group, so a whole lot of heads would have to roll were Discovery planning to eliminate anyone who’s got even the slightest bit of skin in the game when it comes to crafting one of the DCEU‘s big budget superhero blockbusters from the ground up.

The only thing that would actually be surprising about Warner-Discovery going Hercules on DC is that it would mark the first time in decades that anyone had done anything sensible there. After all, based on past experience, they’ll hire a transvestite in a wheelchair and put Zer in charge of the entire operation. 

Never trust the science

It’s hard to “trust the science” when the science goes into hiding as soon as it becomes obvious they were completely and utterly wrong. And by “science”, of course, I mean “scientistry”.

The editor of respected medical journal The Lancet has refused to reveal if he still supports a controversial letter debunking claims that COVID-19 started in a Chinese laboratory.
The letter was published in The Lancet last February and was signed by 27 eminent public health experts who described speculation about the origins of the virus from a Wuhan laboratory as ‘rumours’ and ‘misinformation.’
When MailOnline contacted The Lancet’s editor, Dr Richard Horton about the decision to publish and support the letter, both he and his office declined to comment.

It’s informative to see how scientists are perfectly happy to issue authoritative pronouncements right up until the moment that the facts actually begin to arrive. Then they clam up and go into hiding.

Never, ever, “trust the science”. Because scientists are corrupt. Science is just another word for engineering that doesn’t work.