#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
No presidential candidate who actually wants to win the election would say anything like this:
“Let’s institute a mask mandate nationwide. Every single American should be wearing a mask when they are outside for the next three months at a minimum.”
– Joe Biden
I’ll be surprised if President Trump doesn’t repeatedly ram this one right down Biden’s throat.
Americans should not despair overmuch about the decline of their nation. As Machiavelli observed in his History of Florence, a society reaching a pinnacle of power is inevitably followed by a subsequent decline.
It may be observed, that provinces amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into confusion, and afterward recur to a state of order again; for the nature of mundane affairs not allowing them to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline. In the same manner, having been reduced by disorder, and sunk to their utmost state of depression, unable to descend lower, they, of necessity, reascend; and thus from good they gradually decline to evil, and from evil again return to good. The reason is that valor produces peace; peace, repose; repose, disorder; disorder, ruin; so from disorder order springs, from order vitue, and from this, glory and good fortune.
Hence, wise men have observed, that the age of literary excellence is subsequent to that of distinction in arms; and that in cities and provinces, great warriors are produced before philosophers. Arms having secured victory, and victory peace, the buoyant vigor of the martial mind cannot be enfeebled by a more excusable indulgence than that of letters; nor can indolence, with any greater or more dangerous deceit, enter a well-regulated community.
Cato was aware of this when the philosophers, Diogenes and Carneades, were sent ambassadors to the Senate by the Athenians; for perceiving with what earnest admiration the Roman youth began to follow them, and knowing the evils that might result to his country from this specious idleness, he enacted that no philosopher should be allowed to enter Rome.
The bad news is that Americans, forgetful of history, were not wise enough to keep out the philosophers. The current disorder that was the inevitable consequence of their wicked influence will be followed by ruin. The good news is that order and virtue will eventually rise up from the ruins.
Having completed The Divine Comedy and The Lives of the Greeks and Romans, Vol. I for Castalia Library, the production team are currently laying out the interiors of Books One, Two, and Three of the 2020 Junior Classics. This is a painstaking process, since it involves the insertion of literally hundreds of images. We’re not simply scanning the old books and putting them out there as is, which is why the process has taken so long. The objective is to ship the first three volumes in ebook and regular hardcover in time for Christmas, then ship the remaining seven in two sets as they are completed. The leather editions, however, will not be shipped until all ten are complete, then they will be bound and shipped together as a single set.
The first step was the editorial decisions concerning what stories stayed in, and what their replacements were. The second step was the collection of over a thousand public domain images, and the third step is the physical layout of the text with the images. We’ve decided to add captions to the full-page images, but not to the partial-page images, which is a minor departure from the haphazard approach of the 1958 edition, which didn’t have a rhyme or reason to the images it captioned or did not caption. The fourth and final step will be the production of the cover, which has to wait until the interior is completed in order to get the size right, and then we can send the volume to the printers.
This process has taken longer than expected thanks to Corona-chan, so we appreciate the great patience that has been shown by the campaign backers. And in answer to an oft-heard question, yes, every volume will be available to non-backers via the usual Castalia channels once they are printed and shipped to the backers, with the exception of the leather editions which will be made periodically available in limited edition sets.
This relaxed response to the US economy hitting historical debt heights tends to remind me of Goldman Sachs telling everyone that the US economy was recession-proof in December, 2019:
Economists and deficit hawks have warned for decades that the United States was borrowing too much money. The federal debt was ballooning so fast, they said, that economic ruin was inevitable: Interest rates would skyrocket, taxes would rise and inflation would probably run wild.
The death spiral could be triggered once the debt surpassed the size of the U.S. economy — a turning point that was probably still years in the future.
It actually happened much sooner: sometime before the end of June.
The problem with debt crisises is that everything is always fine right up until the moment that it isn’t.
The real Vatican conspiracy is considerably more dreadful than anything concocted by Dan Brown:
Father Walsh was a Crown witness in the case against Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson when he met with the pontiff on February 9, 2016. Archbishop Wilson was accused of failing to report to police the allegations of two former altar boys who claimed they had been abused by a priest in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese in the 1970s. At the time he was the highest-ranking Catholic ever to be charged with concealment offences.
Father Walsh later told confidants that the Pope asked him why he was involved in a court case against an archbishop, what he was planning to say in court, and who was walking with him on the journey. Father Walsh said he did not trust the interpreter and offered scant detail.
It was the pinnacle of what Father Walsh perceived as a sustained campaign by the priesthood to get him to toe the line on child sexual abuse. He was allegedly frozen out of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese after he defied the bishop to report a fellow priest for child sexual abuse in 2004 and was not welcomed back until early 2017.
But on October 24, 2017 – a little over two weeks before the archbishop’s trial was set down – Newcastle-Maitland Bishop Bill Wright told Father Walsh he had no future in the diocese, according to an email Father Walsh sent to a friend. The email didn’t say that this decision was because of his giving evidence.
“[Bishop Wright] will look overseas (Third World) where I can live out my days in the service to Christ and his poor, preferably as a contemplative to a leper colony,” Father Walsh wrote.
Two weeks later, before he could give evidence, Father Walsh took his own life.
It’s not the involvement of Fake Pope Francine that caught my attention here, but rather, the fact that a staunch Catholic’s faith was so demolished by his direct contact with the Roman Catholic hierarchy that he chose to commit what he would have previously believed was a grave sin that would deprive him of the right to a Christian burial.
How can “gig economy” corporations expect to survive if they have to obey the laws? Obviously, they can’t, as Uber and Lyft flee California due to their inability to continue abusing their drivers:
After a California court’s preliminary injunction required Uber and Lyft to reclassify drivers as employees, both companies threatened to shut down their ride-hailing services, with the latter confirming the move.
Lyft will suspend its transportation activity in California at 11:59pm local time on Thursday, the company announced in a blog post. “This is not something we wanted to do, as we know millions of Californians depend on Lyft for daily, essential trips,” the company – valued in the billions of dollars – lamented.
“We’re personally reaching out to riders and drivers to share more about why this is happening, what you can do about it, and to provide some transportation alternatives,” it added.
The drastic move was prompted by a preliminary court decision last week that required Uber and Lyft to stop classifying their drivers as independent contractors.
If your business model is dependent upon breaking either the employment or the consumer laws, it isn’t a sustainable one, no matter how heavily Wall Street may be willing to invest in it.
Gig economy gigs lower the price of labor, which in the USA has remained flat since 1973. It is as deleterious as the doubling of the female workforce and the mass immigration that are the two primary contributors to the low price of labor that has rendered US society unstable and destroyed the middle class.
The important thing to remember is that consent does not define morality. The prostitute consents to sell her body, the debt-slave consents to sell his labor, and the defrauded consents to invest his money, yet we find these practices to be both morally wrong and illegal. California gets many things hopelessly wrong, but its strong legal protections for employees and consumers against the rapacious predators of the financial class is not one of them.
And if you think Uber is a fine capitalist corporation being abused by the socialists in the California legislature, I suggest you look up the documents related to Abadilla et al v. Uber Technologies, Inc. and you will rapidly learn otherwise. I don’t know much about Lyft, but Uber is an abusive, lawless, and hypocritical organization that mandated independent arbitrations for its drivers, then spent FIVE YEARS in a futile attempt to prevent more than 12,000 of those drivers from exercising their only remedy against the corporation’s mistreatment of them.
In fact, this decision to flee California is a consequence of the two corporations’ long-running attempts to avoid the arbitrations they mandated. Sound familiar?
In combatting these individual arbitration claims, the ride-share companies adopted several tactics including: 1) delay the arbitrations by not paying the arbitration initial filing fees, 2) challenging their opposing counsels’ qualifications, and 3) offering incentives for employees to drop their arbitration claims.
Don’t be surprised when Patreon suddenly announces an “unexpected” relocation to Utah.
Netherflix promises to do a better job of hiding the pedo in the future:
Netflix apologized on Thursday for a movie poster it released depicting several pre-teen girls in sexually suggestive poses, claiming the promotion was not “representative” of the film.
The movie streaming movie platform received significant backlash on social mediaTuesday and Wednesday – after copies of the poster circulated. In it, four young girls are shown in crop tops and boy shorts. One girl is bending over, while another is squatting with her legs spread.
In a statement, Netflix said it was “deeply sorry” for the “inappropriate artwork” it used to promote the movie, a French film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. “It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film,” Netflix said. “We’ve now updated the pictures and description.”
The company, on its streaming service, originally described the film as one in which the protagonist, 11-year-old Amy, “becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew.”
Twerking is a form of highly sexualized dancing originally popularized in the 1980s.
In the revised description, Netflix states that Amy in the film “starts to rebel against her conservative family’s traditions when she becomes fascinated with a free-spirited dance crew.”
Oh, great, so the pictures and the description have been updated. That changes everything! Carry on, gentlemen….
Meanwhile, over at the Hellmouth, Devil Mouse executives expressed their fiendish amusement at the clumsiness of the new guys. “You don’t rub all that overt pedo-propaganda right in their faces,” said Maury Baalstein, Executive Vice-President of Surreptitious Sexuality. “The whole point is to slide it all right past the parents, so they don’t even realize what you’re doing or how you’re warping their children’s minds.”
“Look at Monsters Inc,” added David Belphegorian, Senior Assistant Executive Vice-President of Rituals and Programming. “Pixar put out a whole freaking movie series about abusing children and everyone thinks it’s just a cute, furry inversion of the monster-under-the-bed theme. That’s not going to fly if you show the little kids being felt up by creepy adults or chained upside-down in a pentagram being sacrificed to Our Infernal Master right on the movie poster!”
“For example, parents all think “prom” in Prom Queen means the high school prom, right? Wrong! See, it’s actually an anagram for Perennial Ritual Offering Maiden,” Belphegorian explained, before beginning to twitch, drool, and express his excitement in a wildly inappropriate manner at the idea of an annual virgin sacrifice at the local public school. “I can tell you we’ve never been faster to approve a pitch!”
If you’re subscribed to Netherflix or the Devil Mouse, you really need to stop and think about what side you’re actually on.
Or is the arrest of Steve Bannon just the Deep State attempting to apply pressure on President Trump?
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was arrested on Thursday after being charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors through his “We Build the Wall” fundraising campaign.
Bannon, along with three of his associates were indicted by investigators for the Southern District of New York on Thursday. They allege that the group of conservative leaders defrauded donors and that led to raising “more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States,” according to the press release.
Starting in approximately December 2018, BRIAN KOLFAGE, STEPHEN BANNON, ANDREW BADOLATO, and TIMOTHY SHEA, and others, orchestrated a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors, including donors in the Southern District of New York, in connection with an online crowdfunding campaign ultimately known as “We Build The Wall” that raised more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States. In particular, to induce donors to donate to the campaign, KOLFAGE repeatedly and falsely assured the public that he would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that “100{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of the funds raised . . . will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose” because, as BANNON publicly stated, “we’re a volunteer organization.”
Those representations were false. In truth, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations. In particular, KOLFAGE covertly took for his personal use more than $350,000 in funds that donors had given to We Build the Wall, while BANNON, through a non-profit organization under his control (“Non-Profit-1”), received over $1 million from We Build the Wall, at least some of which BANNON used to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in BANNON’s personal expenses. To conceal the payments to KOLFAGE from We Build the Wall, KOLFAGE, BANNON, BADOLATO, and SHEA devised a scheme to route those payments from We Build the Wall to KOLFAGE indirectly through Non-Profit-1 and a shell company under SHEA’s control, among other avenues. They did so by using fake invoices and sham “vendor” arrangements, among other ways, to ensure, as KOLFAGE noted in a text message to BADOLATO, that his pay arrangement remained “confidential” and kept on a “need to know”
It does sound more than a little bit shady.
REPORTER: Mr. Zuckerberg, QAnon believes President Trump is secretly saving the world from a cult of satanic pedophiles. What’s your response to that?
FACEBOOK: Today we are taking action against Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts tied to offline anarchist groups that support QAnon. As a result of some of the actions we’ve already taken, we’ve removed over 790 groups, 100 Pages and 1,500 ads tied to QAnon from Facebook, blocked over 300 hashtags across Facebook and Instagram, and additionally imposed restrictions on over 1,950 Groups and 440 Pages on Facebook and over 10,000 accounts on Instagram.
Not much question what cult Zuckerbitch belongs to, or whom he serves. Can you even imagine what a complete nonentity like him must have had to do to be put in the position that he has now? His inevitable fall from the high horse promises to be spectacular indeed. No wonder he’s constantly trying to reinvent himself, like Lady Macbeth desperately trying to wash hands that will never be clean.
It doesn’t get much more clear than this:
REPORTER: QAnon believes you are secretly saving the world from this cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Are you behind that?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Is that supposed to be a bad thing? We are, actually. We are saving the world.