Author: VD

We’re living in 1Q84

This suddenly explains so much of the weirdness of the last few years.

The boffins at the Catalina Sky Survey have stumbled upon an amazing and slightly goofy discovery, apparently Earth has had a second moon for the past three years and nobody noticed. This ‘mini-moon’ is actually an asteroid, measuring between 1.9 and 3.5 metres (6.2 and 11.5 feet) in diameter, that was temporarily captured by our planet’s gravity. Named 2020 CD3, we picked up our second moon some time in 2017 but, given how vast the sky is and how dark the moon is, it never caught anyone’s attention, until now.

“Ho ho,” says the keeper of the beat.

Awake Library edition

This is not a mockup, this is a photo of the actual stamped and silver-foiled cowhide from the bindery. The interior cases have been printed for weeks, and I’m told that the bindery expects to ship the third book in the Castalia Library series to both US and international subscribers by the end of the month.

However, we’re still very much delayed on the Libraria versions, as the goatskin tannery went from lockdown to August vacation with barely a few weeks in between. I’m told they expect to ship all the goatskins for The Missionaries, Awake, and The Divine Comedy to the bindery during the third week of September, and we will keep you informed on the progress of those books. This is the downside of working with Italian suppliers; the quality is excellent but they work on Italian time.

The cowhide tannery is on vacation too, so the soonest we can reasonably expect to ship the Library version of The Divine Comedy is the end of September. We’re still finalizing the cover design, but, the interiors have already been printed, and we’re sending the first volume of Plutarch to the printer by the end of this weekend.

Please understand that the production disruptions caused by Corona-chan have not come to an end by any means, and that we are not sitting on our hands, but are actively working to keep routing around them. For example, we had originally planned to produce the Plutarchs in a larger size, but 6 x 9 is the largest paper size that the printer can currently obtain in the quality that we require. So, we adjusted our designs and proceeded accordingly. And, obviously, the delay in producing the Library books has pushed back the Junior Classics, but we’re hoping to at least get the ebook and regular hardcovers out before the end of the year.

In other Library news, the two Plutarch volumes are going to be monsters of around 768 pages each. The covers are going to be very cool and reflective of the dual Graeco-Roman nature of the text. We’ve also decided on Books 7 and 8, although we have not yet decided on the order. They will be Summa Elvetica by Vox Day and Politics by Aristotle. If you have a preference as to which you’d like to see released first, please let us know in the comments.

1950s America survives… in Japan

A fascinating phenomenon that William Gibson first noted in his “cool hunter” novels some years ago turns out to not only be real, but a viable business in Japan:

Takashi Tateno keeps an office in a simple studio above his wife’s hairdressing salon on the outskirts of Okayama, a medium-sized city in central Japan. In fashion circles, Okayama is famous for one thing: making the world’s best denim, using looms that date back to the 1950s. But Tateno isn’t a denim head. His brand, called Workers, adapts all sorts of American work wear from the 1900s to the ’60s—railroad jackets, canvas dusters, flannel shirts, double-kneed pants. Moreover, he’s obsessed by the American workers who manufactured these garments in their heyday, and the skills, techniques and tools used to produce such high-quality clothing on an industrial scale.

Before he hatched the idea of his own collection, Tateno spent years making clothes himself and working in a factory. At the same time, he launched a Japanese-language website that was absolutely alone in its single-minded pursuit of knowledge about the plans, patterns and procedures that old American work-wear manufacturers used to make their garments under such labels as Crown, W.M. Finck & Co. and Can’t Bust ’Em. Tateno journeyed to the United States multiple times to sift through archives and contact heirs to now-defunct clothing manufacturers to see if they had information about their ancestors’ businesses, and to buy up examples of the old clothes he loved so he could dissect their construction.

Tateno ushers me into his upstairs space. One room is filled with all kinds of clothing, everything from the work wear he collects to contemporary Italian jackets by Boglioli. There is also machinery, including an ancient riveting machine, plus old sewing-machine accessories that Tateno purchases so the factories he hires to produce his collection can make things to the exact specifications of, say, 1924 or 1942, with the same tools in use back then.

“When I learned to sew and tried to make these garments myself, I began to realize just how intricate the work was, what kind of tremendous skill level was required to turn out such huge quantities of high-quality garments,” Tateno says. “These were produced at a time when American workers were the most knowledgeable and skilled in the world.”

Though the kind of skilled manufacturing he admired in these garments had largely disappeared in the United States—a consequence of apparel production moving abroad and garment workers no longer finding work—he saw older Japanese people around him in Okayama with high-level sewing skills. And so he realized that if he could unearth the manufacturing secrets behind these old garments, he could make them in Okayama—and perhaps make them even better than the originals.

The cult of the artisan is ensconced in contemporary urban American culture. This is the ideal of a person who can handcraft a pair of jeans or a necktie, conscious of the most minute details of fabric, workmanship and authenticity. The era Tateno’s clothing harks back to is not the age of the lone artisan laboring over a single creation, though; it’s the era of packed factories in Pennsylvania, Virginia and California churning out thousands and thousands of high-quality garments at a reasonable price, all because of the workers’ skill. The irony is that this ideal of the American worker, which sounds like something lifted from old-school union advertising copy, can be hard to find in America today.

If I had nine lives, I like to think that one of them would have been involved staying in Japan and getting fluent in the language. As Spacebunny says, 95 percent of the weirdness in the world comes out of Japan. It’s the one place in the world where the present is as fascinating as the past.

This is what they really fear

In case you ever wondered why so many tech companies impose individual arbitrations on their users, this class action lawsuit filed against Facebook should suffice to explain their reasoning:

A new class-action lawsuit has accused Facebook of illegally harvesting biometric data on its subsidiary platform Instagram with a photo-tagging tool that allegedly stores facial recognition data. The lawsuit, filed on Monday in state court in Redwood City, California, accuses the company of collecting, storing and profiting from the biometric data of more than 100 million Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent.

Facebook does not impose arbitration, and its lawyers are obviously a little more up on California law than Patreon’s, as they do not impose an illegitimate waiver of class action litigation. So, there shouldn’t be any procedural impediments to this lawsuit, although Facebook’s lawyers will almost certainly invent as many as they need in order to delay discovery. But Facebook has a near-infinite supply of financial and legal resources, so it can afford to lose even a very large class-action lawsuit without its operations being disrupted.

I have no idea if the litigants have a claim or not; I don’t use Facebook or Instagram. But I do note that the company’s objection – “Instagram doesn’t use Face Recognition technology” – does not even contradict the lawsuit’s primary claim that the company was “collecting, storing and profiting from the biometric data of more than 100 million Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent.”

You’ll note that “face recognition technology” is a small subset of “biometric data”. Facebook’s non-denial denial is not unlike a company saying they weren’t collecting, storing, and profiting from your DNA because they don’t use fingerprint technology.

That’s why it is so interesting that Patreon is so Hell-bent on avoiding arbitration of the claims concerning their deceptive practices and violations of California law. They genuinely seem to believe that they’d be better off facing the class action litigation they specifically imposed individual arbitration to avoid. Or, at least, their outside lawyers would be.

Crazier than you think

And possibly a little darker too. I refer, of course, to the Jordan Peterson family saga, which, among other things, now involves a Russian man possessed by a demon named Igor.

Mikhaila started “The Lion Diet” which consists of only eating Beef, Salt, & Water. Although this verges on an eating disorder, Mikhaila claimed that it cured many of her health problems. She even announced that she stopped taking her medications, including an anti-herpes drug. She then convinced her father to start her diet. Soon after starting, Jordan reported that he stopped taking his anti-depressants.

It was around this time that Peterson reported not being able to sleep for 25 days straight while experiencing an “overwhelming sense of impending doom” after drinking some apple cider.

I’m still amused that anyone ever thought Jordan Peterson had anything at all to offer anyone. I mean, didn’t any of you Peterson fans ever read anything he wrote? It took me about 30 seconds reading one blog post to know he was a liar, and less than one chapter of his first book to know he was a lunatic.

This time, it’s different

Nate Silver attempts to explain that although Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump is even bigger than Hillary Clinton’s was, he’s giving Creepy Joe a much lower percentage chance of winning the U.S. Presidential election than the 89.2 percent chance he gave Hillary on August 15, 2016.

Joe Biden currently has a robust lead in polls. If the election were held today, he might even win in a landslide, carrying not only traditional swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania but potentially adding new states such as Georgia and Texas to the Democratic coalition.

But the election is not being held today. While the polls have been stable so far this year, it’s still only August. The debates and the conventions have yet to occur. Biden only named his running mate yesterday. And the campaign is being conducted amidst a pandemic the likes of which the United States has not seen in more than 100 years, which is also causing an unprecedented and volatile economy.

Nor has it been that uncommon, historically, for polls to shift fairly radically from mid-August until Election Day. Furthermore, there are some reasons to think the election will tighten, and President Trump is likely to have an advantage in a close election because of the Electoral College.

That, in a nutshell, is why the FiveThirtyEight presidential election forecast, which we launched today, still has Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, despite his current deficit in the polls. This is considerably higher than some other forecasts, which put Trump’s chances at around 10 percent. Biden’s chances are 71 percent in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, conversely.

Except, of course, the difference is that Biden is going to be beaten even more decisively than Clinton was. Let’s just enjoy this little meltdown from Election Night 2016. “Look, this election is over. Trump cannot win! I think Hillary will have 320 electoral votes when all is said and done.”

Q 1, Republican Establishment 0

The Republican Establishment’s control of the grass roots is being broken by nothing more than a rhetorical message of hope:

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a GOP candidate with a track record of incendiary rhetoric and ties to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, prevailed in a Georgia primary runoff, CNN projected Tuesday, a victory that puts her in a strong position to win a congressional seat in the fall representing a solidly Republican district.

The victory will also put national Republicans in the difficult position of how to respond to a conspiracy theory touting nominee who’s also made comments using Islamophobic and anti-Semitic tropes.

Greene faced off against GOP opponent John Cowan in the runoff. The two candidates previously competed against one another in a June primary election where Greene won roughly 40{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of the vote, while Cowan received only 21{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}. A runoff was triggered after none of the candidates received over 50{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of the vote in the initial primary.

The primary runoff for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, which is situated in the northwest corner of the state, drew national attention as a major flashpoint in the race has been Greene’s promotion of the wild and unsubstantiated conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

The Republican Establishment is desperate to preserve “racist” and “anti-semitic” as rhetorical disqualifiers for those who see and stand up for the observable truth. But more and more people are beginning to see through the lies, and realize that “anti-semitic” is merely a synonym for “anti-satanic”.

Christian conservatives are going to discover that they will soon have to choose between their professed love for Jesus Christ and their professed love for the Pharisees. Because both the Pharisees and their fellow Prometheans are working very hard to ban both Christianity and the New Testament as “hate speech”.

Jewish people running the world or controlling major institutions such as media networks, the economy or the government

This means any reference to Israel, AIPAC, or Facebook itself is now a bannable offense on Facebook. Interesting. And remember, John of Patmos warned Christians that they would be subject to a deception that would be considered widely credible. So, ask yourself, what is the greatest deception to which Christians today are currently subject?

A brave choice

I think it was courageous of Joe Biden to pick a Spanish actor as his running mate. That, or the dementia. But constitutionality be damned, it’s not as if Javier Barden has any less pull in the swing states than Pocahontas or that weird Michigan governor.

Trumpslide 2020 confirmed….

Bloodbath at DC

Employmentwise, that is, not a literal one. DC Comics is downsizing in a big way, with around one-third of its staff being eliminated, and presumably, a similar percentage of its comics.

Earlier today, Bleeding Cool posted the news that DC Comics staffers, along with the rest of Warner Bros were undergoing a downsizing of staff. At the time, we were lead to believe that the brunt would be felt by DC Universe, as part of an alignment of streaming services being offered. But instead, it became rapidly clear that DC Comics editorial was being targeted in a major way for such changes. With everyone describing this as the DC Bloodbath – or New DC Implosion – and on a Monday as well.

I am told that these layoffs will have an immediate effect on the publication of DC Comics monthly titles, and I am to expect a rapid reduction of titles. If you thought DC Comics published an unhealthy percentage of Batman books, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The Batbooks, most of the Justice League books and some of the Superman books will stay safe, as will the digital line, the original graphic novel line. But a lot of comics will have to disappear as there simply aren’t enough people to work on them.

Meanwhile, Arkhaven marches on. Slower than we’d like, but stronger than we’d expected. One of the first new projects is the Webtoon that Chuck Dixon is creating for the Patreon backers, GO MONSTER GO!

Cleaning house at the USPS

I’m sure this “sweeping overhaul of the agency” has nothing with Democrats’ plans to subvert the election through mail fraud:

Government watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and pro-democracy advocates declared it a “Friday Night Massacre” for the U.S. Postal Service after news broke in a classic end-of-the-week dump that Louis DeJoy—a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump and the recently appointed Postmaster General—had issued a sweeping overhaul of the agency, including the ouster of top executives from key posts and the reshuffling of more than two dozen other officials and operational managers.

The Trumpslide beckons.