Author: VD

Warner merges with Discovery

In which Warner Media acknowledges that their attempts at creating a viable streaming platform have failed:

David Zaslav was officially named Monday to lead a new combination of WarnerMedia and Discovery, propelling him to the top ranks of operators in the industry and offering just the latest example of consolidation among media conglomerates as the rise of video streaming continues to upend the entire sector.

Zaslav’s ascension is part of a surprising move by AT&T and Discovery to pool their media resources and make a bid to compete more directly with large rivals like Netflix, Walt Disney and NBCUniversal. Under terms of the deal, AT&T shareholders will control 71{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} of the new company, while Discovery shareholders would own 29{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6}. The boards of both companies have approved the pact and the transaction is expected to close in mid-2022, subject to approval by regulators and Discovery shareholders. Two key Discovery backers, the media executive John Malone and the media company Advance, will vote in favor of the transaction.

In remarks made Monday morning, the executive vowed to run the combined entity — a new name could be unveiled later this week — with “one culture, one mission,” though it seemed clear he needed time to determine a new executive team and to answer questions about integrating assets. There was no position designated for WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, and Zaslav offered no detail on a potential role for Jeff Zucker, the head of WarnerMedia’s CNN and sports operations, who is slated to leave his current job at the end of 2021. “We will be trying to figure out how do we get the best and brightest to stay,” Zaslav said.

It will be interesting to see what impact this will have with regards to the future growth of Unauthorized and Arktoons. But given the new entity’s commitment to one Satanic culture and one Satanic mission, it shouldn’t be too hard to defeat them every time we find ourselves going head-to-head.

And the cameras were rolling

Given what is now public information about the Promethean Panopticon and the Roman Catholic Church’s lavender mafia, it’s not exactly hard to figure out how the abomination that is Vatican II came into being contra centuries of theology and tradition.

Dr. Robert Moynihan, a veteran journalist and Vatican expert, has published an article in which he relates what a Time magazine journalist revealed to him in 2004. The now-deceased Robert Blair Kaiser told Moynihan that he was sent by Time’s Clare Booth and Henry Luce to the Second Vatican Council in Rome with a budget of $20,000 per month so that he could host parties for the participants of and journalists reporting on the Council.

As Kaiser told Moynihan, he had rented an “intentionally large apartment” in Rome. He also said that he had met with the Luce couple before coming to Rome. They “had hoped,” he said, “the residence would become a place where ideas could be exchanged among Council participants.”

He added, “They gave me a generous Time magazine expense account – $20,000 each month during the (Second Vatican) Council sessions – to hold regular dinner parties in my large apartment.” As he told Moynihan, he and his wife would “often host 50 or 100 journalists and monsignors, priests, and bishops and diplomats, sometimes during the week, sometimes on the weekend.”

The purpose of these gatherings was clear: it was not only to share information, but, as Moynihan reports, “to provide a space where the agenda of a ‘more open Church’ could be freely discussed, Kaiser said.”

That is to say: the U.S. secular Time magazine hosted luxurious gatherings throughout the 1962-1965 Vatican II sessions with numerous influencers in order to push the Council in a more progressivist direction. As Moynihan says, Kaiser quickly became “one of the most influential journalists in the city. His coverage of the Second Vatican Council set a standard and tone and ‘line’ – the ‘line’ was that the Catholic Church was undergoing a revolution which would change the Church profoundly.”

I very much doubt it was “information” that was being shared at the apartment parties. There was almost certainly rather less in the way of “discussion” and rather more in the way of “underage gay discotheque” taking place there.

Capitalists provide the rope

 In which it becomes apparent that Vladimir Lenin wasn’t entirely wrong about capitalism:

One-shot cures for diseases are not great for business—more specifically, they’re bad for longterm profits—Goldman Sachs analysts noted in an April 10 report for biotech clients, first reported by CNBC.

The investment banks’ report, titled “The Genome Revolution,” asks clients the touchy question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” The answer may be “no,” according to follow-up information provided.

Analyst Salveen Richter and colleagues laid it out:

The potential to deliver “one shot cures” is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically engineered cell therapy, and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies… While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.

For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90 percent. In 2015, the company’s hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less than $4 billion this year.

“[Gilead]’s rapid rise and fall of its hepatitis C franchise highlights one of the dynamics of an effective drug that permanently cures a disease, resulting in a gradual exhaustion of the prevalent pool of patients,” the analysts wrote. The report noted that diseases such as common cancers—where the “incident pool remains stable”—are less risky for business.

Appalling, of course. But this will serve a useful reference example for explaining to mindless GDP idolaters that higher corporate profits and rising Gross Domestic Product are not the primary objectives of a civilized human society. 

“Dozens of meetings”

Like his very good friend Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates also didn’t kill himself:

Jeffrey Epstein suggested Bill Gates should leave his wife Melinda during dozens of meetings at the convicted pedophile’s $77million Manhattan townhouse, according to a person who attended the ‘men’s club’-style get-togethers.

Gates’ visits to Epstein’s ‘lair’ were an escape from his unhappy marriage, and the pair ‘were very close’, a source told The Daily Beast.

The report alleges the pair’s friendship blurred personal and professional lines, and was much closer than Gates had previously admitted. 

A spokeswoman for Gates said he had never talked in a disparaging way about Melinda.

The Daily Beast revealed Gates sought marriage advice Epstein during dozens of meetings between 2011 and 2014, far more than had previously been reported. 

It appears that the history of the personal computer is going to have to be completely rewritten. If, at this point, you don’t realize that Bill Gates is little more than an actor playing the role of “tech billionaire” and “vaccine pusher”, then you’re simply not paying any attention to how the world works.

Remember when Bill Gates only flew on Epstein’s plane once, and he didn’t even know whose plane it was? Yeah, that was the official line as recently as last week.

It’s interesting to see that Gates is clearly being burned. Which tends to lead to the obvious questions: why and by whom?

UPDATE: Jeffrey Epstein is not the only convicted pedophile with whom Bill Gates has been very closely associated. And by “very closely associated” I mean “literally arrested at Gates’s house”. At this rate, it won’t be long before it comes out that Bill Gates’s real name is William Gatestein.

Dancing around IQ

It’s rather amusing to see one of the sporting world’s most converged organizations, the National Football League, finding itself caught between social justice and its pocketbook:

Race norming is sometimes used in medicine as a rough proxy for socioeconomic factors that can affect someone’s health. Experts in neurology said the way it’s used in the NFL settlement is too simplistic and restrictive, and has the effect of systematically discriminating against Black players.

“Because every Black retired NFL player has to perform lower on the test to qualify for an award than every white player. And that’s essentially systematic racism in determining these payouts,” said Katherine Possin, a neurology professor at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

In other major settlements, including those tied to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the Boston Marathon bombing, all claimants were treated the same.

“We concluded, fairly quickly, that we would take the top compensation for the white male and everyone would get the same, the top dollar,” said lawyer Ken Feinberg, who has overseen many of the largest settlement funds. “We would cure this compensatory discrimination by having a rising tide raise all ships.”

The first lawsuits accusing the NFL of hiding what it knew about the link between concussions and brain damage were filed in 2011. A trickle soon became a deluge, and the NFL, rather than risk a trial, agreed in 2013 to pay $765 million over 65 years for certain diagnoses, including Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. But as the claims poured in, Brody feared the fund would run out early and ordered the cap removed.

The NFL, which foots the bill, began challenging claims by the hundreds, according to the claims website.

In appealing one filed by Najeh Davenport, the NFL complained that his doctor had not used “full demographic norms” in the cognitive scoring. That meant factoring in age, education, gender — and race.

“I remain unsure what you are talking about. He was done using standard norms like everyone else. Using different racial standards is indeed discriminatory and illegal. We stand by our scores,” the physician said in response, according to court records….

The NFL’s dementia testing evaluates a person’s function in two dozen skills that fall under five sections: complex attention/processing speed; executive functioning; language; learning and memory; and visual perception. A player must show a marked decline in at least two of them to get an award.

In an example shared with The Associated Press, one player’s raw score of 19 for “letter-number sequencing” in the processing section was adjusted using “race-norming” and became 42 for whites and 46 for Blacks.

The raw score of 15 for naming animals in the language section became a 35 for whites and 41 for Blacks. And the raw score of 51 for “block design” in the visual perception section became a 53 for whites but 60 for Blacks.

Taking the 24 scores together, either a white or Black player would have scored low enough to reach the settlement’s 1.5-level of early dementia in “processing speed.” However, in the language section, the scores would have qualified a white man for a 2.0-level, or moderate, dementia finding — but shown no impairment for Blacks.

Overall, the scores would result in a 1.5-level dementia award for whites — but nothing for Blacks. Those awards average more than $400,000 but can reach $1.5 million for men under 45, while 2.0-level dementia yields an average payout of more than $600,000 but can reach $3 million.

The problem is that since blacks who play in the NFL have lower average IQs than whites who play in the NFL – which is clearly established through the league’s use of the Wonderlic test for all of its draftees – they don’t need to show as much cognitive decline to register as impaired. Indeed, there are probably a few very low-IQ players who would have registered as impaired before they played a single NFL game.

So, the average white player has to take more damage in order to reach the same level of “impairment” as the average black player, but proving this on a case-by-case basis is impossible without having an initial baseline for each player. Hence the need to race-norm, which of course flies in the face of the league’s official position on equality and therefore renders the NFL unable to utilize science or reason to defend itself.

It’s always nice to see the converged hoist on their own petard, and if there is an organization that deserves to be, it is the NFL.

I would LOVE to vote for a Hispanic president

I started to write “who falls for these ludicrous stories” when it struck me, I know perfectly well who falls for them and why.

It goes like this: He was working as a janitor at Frito-Lay’s Rancho Cucamonga plant when he dreamed up a chile-covered Cheeto and believed in himself enough to call up the chief executive to pitch his spicy idea.
Corporate backstabbers tried to sabotage Montañez for stepping out of line, but he out-hustled them, driven by a hunger to succeed. Flamin’ Hots became a runaway hit, and Montañez rose through the ranks and became an icon.
Watching his many recorded speaking engagements, it’s easy to see why his story has taken off.
Montañez is a charismatic speaker, and his tale of a Mexican American underdog whose ingenuity conquered the corporate world is a rags-to-riches fable baked into the origin of a wildly popular snack.
With their spicy kick and neon-red flavor dust, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos have inspired viral rap videos, Instagram-worthy menu items and streetwear designs. Schools have banned the snack altogether over concerns about its popularity with children. Clear revenue numbers are hard to come by, but nearly every major Frito-Lay line, from Smartfood popcorn to Funyuns, now has a Flamin’ Hot variety on the market.
Montañez has built a lucrative second career out of telling and selling this story, appearing at events for Target, Walmart, Harvard and USC, among others, and commanding fees of $10,000 to $50,000 per appearance.

It’s no wonder the Richard Montañezs, the Ben Shapiros, the Candace Owens harbor such contempt for white conservatives. White conservatives will believe literally anything a minority tells them, because it makes them feel good about themselves.

If NASA ever finds itself in serious danger of being exposed, all they need to do is whip up a mission to send a black astronaut, a Hispanic astronaut, and a gay astronaut to the Moon. No white conservative would ever doubt anything NASA said ever again.

Here is the metric. If hearing about a story makes you not only feel good, but feel good about yourself for feeling good, be very skeptical.

MUST HAZ MOAR NEGROZE!

It doesn’t matter if it’s the Oscars, television advertising, NFL head coaching positions, or books about historians. The social justice prescription is always the same: MUST HAZ MOAR NEGROZE!

It has taken nearly a decade to research and write, and runs to more than 750 pages. But The History Makers, described as “an epic exploration of those who write about the past”, has itself been rewritten after its author failed to take into account enough black historians, academics and writers.

Richard Cohen was told by his publisher to produce new chapters and expand others after failing to sufficiently acknowledge the roles of black people and African Americans.

“It was to do with the publisher’s sensitivities,” says Cohen, who previously wrote the highly praised Chasing The Sun and How to Write Like Tolstoy. “I was then asked to write more, and have done about another 18,000 words.”

Now, despite the rewrite, publication of the book in the US has been cancelled, according to sources in New York. Cohen’s contract with Random House in America was signed some years ago and was said by sources to be for about $350,000. Yet, after seeking the changes on black history and historians, the publisher dramatically pulled out of the deal last Wednesday.

The crazy thing is that neither Booker T. Washington nor Frederick Douglass, for all their virtues, were historians! Why not throw in George Washington Carver, Michael Jordan, and Doctor Dre, while you’re at it? If this historians of the future learn anything, anything at all, from the decline and fall of the United States of America, it is this: 1) sink the ships, and, 2) always pick your own damn cotton.

It’s strange, but in all my days, I have never, ever, heard anyone ever say that what is required is more American Indians. It’s also strange how the one-drop rule is sufficient to make a man black, but not even a substantial amount of American Indian blood will prevent people from aggressively denying that a man is red.

UPDATE: NOT ENOUGH NEGROZE! MUST HAZ MOAR!

Producers of the much anticipated Friends comeback show are at the centre of a race row after failing to cast any black actors. While the one-off return of the much loved US sitcom will feature all six members of the original line-up, the list of celebrity guests stars announced by broadcaster HBO has been criticised for a lack of diversity. 

I think they have no choice but to go their critics one better and replace Ross and Monica with Rakeem and Monique. Diversity demands it!