Author: VD

I thought they believed all women?

The New York Times hasn’t decided whether Creepy Joe Biden should be canceled or not. What’s the matter, can’t they get George Soros on the phone in New Zealand or wherever he is hiding out?

A former Senate aide who last year accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of inappropriate touching has made an allegation of sexual assault against the former vice president, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee this fall.

The former aide, Tara Reade, who briefly worked as a staff assistant in Mr. Biden’s Senate office, told The New York Times that in 1993, Mr. Biden pinned her to a wall in a Senate building, reached under her clothing and penetrated her with his fingers. A friend said that Ms. Reade told her the details of the allegation at the time. Another friend and a brother of Ms. Reade’s said she told them over the years about a traumatic sexual incident involving Mr. Biden.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Biden said the allegation was false. In interviews, several people who worked in the Senate office with Ms. Reade said they did not recall any talk of such an incident or similar behavior by Mr. Biden toward her or any women. Two office interns who worked directly with Ms. Reade said they were unaware of the allegation or any treatment that troubled her.

Last year, Ms. Reade and seven other women came forward to accuse Mr. Biden of kissing, hugging or touching them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Ms. Reade told The Times then that Mr. Biden had publicly stroked her neck, wrapped his fingers in her hair and touched her in ways that made her uncomfortable.

Soon after Ms. Reade made the new allegation, in a podcast interview released on March 25, The Times began reporting on her account and seeking corroboration through interviews, documents and other sources. The Times interviewed Ms. Reade on multiple days over hours, as well as those she told about Mr. Biden’s behavior and other friends. The Times has also interviewed lawyers who spoke to Ms. Reade about her allegation; nearly two dozen people who worked with Mr. Biden during the early 1990s, including many who worked with Ms. Reade; and the other seven women who criticized Mr. Biden last year, to discuss their experiences with him.

No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.

Translation: Because it is still possible that Creepy Joe might be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, the New York Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct beyond the sexual misconduct that it couldn’t hope to plausibly deny.

Looks like that worked

One of the things we’ve learned over the last 18 months is how different artists work in very different ways. This tends to pose a range of complications, some trivial, some more challenging, in attempting to assemble the various elements into a complete whole in different formats.

One obvious candidate for Webtoons was Right Ho, Jeeves, but our initial assumption was that it would not be possible to break apart the page files in a manner that permitted reassembly in the vertical format popularized by the Korean manwha comics. However, a little experimentation proved to be unexpectedly fruitful, and has permitted the launch of Arkhaven’s second series there.

So, if you’re interested, have a look at the first episode of Right Ho, Jeeves. We expect to have three weekly series running there on an ongoing basis.

He is not here

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.  Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
– Matthew 28: 1-10

He is risen. Have a Happy Easter.

Mailvox: SSH utility

A reader finds the socio-sexual hierarchy to be of use:

Thanks for discussing the very real phenomenon of the socio-sexual hierarchy on your blog and Voxiversity. I’d seen it in the wild occasionally but was never been really aware of it until now. Now that I know, I can spot the gamma right off, especially on message boards.

I encountered one yesterday on Voat and realized I was reading a live specimen after his second preachy, nagging, know-it-all, condescending, and really bizarre wall of text. Not worth your time for me to summarize it — hell, I wasn’t even interested — but I found it fascinating to see how he reacted like an aggrieved porcupine when I said I wasn’t going to read his comments any further.

This will be a very useful tool for me.

I find it’s a particularly useful tool for the corporate world or anyone who has to run an organization.

Hoist on their own petard

Some US liberals are reconsidering the wisdom of their advocacy of gun control:

My friend’s father owns a gun range near me and she said he’s seen a huge amount of liberals coming in to purchase weapons in recent weeks.

How does he know they’re liberals?

“They’re shocked to discover they can’t just walk out of the store with a gun.”

We’ve all heard about gun sales skyrocketing recently, but I hadn’t considered some of the tangential effects of the phenomenon until I spoke to my friend. Not only are many liberals suddenly learning to love their Second Amendment rights, many of them are finding out that the gun control narrative in this country — as repeated loudly and often by Hollywood and the mainstream media — is a complete lie.

Even the most slavish eventually discover the need to defend themselves.

Correcting the Fake Narrative

The Fake News has been attempting to retroactively establish a fake narrative about President Trump’s robust response to Corona-chan:

One of the repeated lies of the anti-Trump media is that the president failed to do what was necessary to prevent the spread of this disease. We are told, by Democrats and the media, that President Trump “wasted” six weeks during which he should have been . . . Well, doing something more than what he did, which was actually quite a lot.

On Jan. 29, Trump announced the formation of his Coronavirus Task Force, headed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, and including the CDC director Dr. Redfield, who retired from the Army medical service with the rank of colonel, and whose medical specialty is viruses. On Jan. 31, Trump announced a ban on travel from China, which was controversial at the time. The same day Trump announced the ban, Joe Biden, campaigning in Iowa, accused the president of “hysterical xenophobia,” saying Trump was leading with “fearmongering . . . instead of science.”

The claim that Trump is “anti-science” has become part of the media’s narrative about the COVID-19 outbreak. Supposedly, a bias against science explains why the president didn’t do whatever it was that his critics, with the benefit of hindsight, say he should have done. What he actually did, however, was entirely in keeping with what the medical experts would have advised, given the circumstances. With only six known coronavirus cases in the U.S., five of them were people who had just returned from Wuhan, and the sixth was a household member of one of these travelers. So the first thing to do, obviously, was stop the arrival of more infected people from China, where the pandemic began and at the time had just been recognized as a “global emergency” by the WHO.

OK, so what happened next? As of Feb. 26 — nearly a month after Trump had created the coronavirus task force — there were still only 15 known cases of the disease in the United States. It was on Feb. 28 that Case No. 16 was identified in Santa Clara County, California:

At that point — where the 16th case had just been identified — there was not a single known COVID-19 case in New York or New Jersey. The only known case on the East Coast up to that point, was a man who had recently arrived in Boston from Wuhan, China, in late January. At that time, Boston Public Health Commission director Rita Nieves said, “The risk to the general public remains low.” And this continued to be the case throughout February, so that if you want to cherry-pick quotes by President Trump during that time saying that he believed we had the problem under control, and that the Wuhan coronavirus posed no serious risk to Americans, so what? This was the consensus of the medical community at the time.

Let’s not forget that when Trump declared the China travel ban nearly a month before the medical community decided that the virus posed a serious risk to Americans, he was castigated for doing this by the very same people who are criticizing him for not having done enough now.

You won’t want to miss this

Unauthorized meets Unauthorized as the Big Bear hosts The Legend Chuck Dixon on his livestream at 9:30 AM Pacific. I am reliably informed they will be discussing Batman, among other things.

In honor of The Legend’s appearance, Arkhaven Comics has published the second episode of Chuck Dixon’s Avalon #1 The Street Rules: Temptation. You can read it on your computer or your mobile device.

Deglobalization begins

It won’t happen overnight, but people are finally beginning to grasp the vital importance of making things in their own nations, with their own people:

Japan has earmarked hundreds of billions of yen of its coronavirus stimulus relief to go toward helping its manufacturing companies move their production plants out of communist China and back to Japan or to other countries.

“The extra budget, compiled to try to offset the devastating effects of the pandemic, includes 220 billion yen (US$2 billion) for companies shifting production back to Japan and 23.5 billion yen for those seeking to move production to other countries, according to details of the plan posted online,” Bloomberg News reported. “That has renewed talk of Japanese firms reducing their reliance on China as a manufacturing base. The government’s panel on future investment last month discussed the need for manufacturing of high-added value products to be shifted back to Japan, and for production of other goods to be diversified across Southeast Asia.”

David Ricardo is finally, at long last, being buried for good.

And what we’ve — what we’re learning from that is that no matter how many treaties you have, no matter how many alliances, no matter how many phone calls, when push comes to shove you run the risk, as a nation, of not having what you need.

Balance ton porc

That means “denounce your pig”, which is the French equivalent of the #MeToo movement. It occurs to me that at some point in the near future, it’s going to suddenly strike everyone across the West what actually inspired the periodical pogroms of history. Because it’s rapidly becoming apparent what that inspiration was and why we are headed for another round of them.

Gabriel Matzneff never tried to hide what he was. And why should he? In France’s highbrow intellectual circles, sexual deviancy has always tended to be something that ‘right-thinking’ liberals celebrate.

The writer and philosopher, now 83, was therefore elevated to fame in 1974 when he published a highbrow defence of child sex called Les Moins De Seize Ans which argued that ‘sleeping with a girl or a boy is a … baptismal challenge, a sacred adventure’.

His book was widely admired in literary Paris, where it was then fashionable to regard paedophiles as a sort of oppressed minority, seeking to rebel against traditional middle-class values.

Matzneff became a regular on TV, as a studio guest on a famous arts programme and was granted a column in newspaper Le Monde.

He signed lucrative book deals with prestigious publishers Gallimard and built friendships with a host of establishment figures, from designer Yves Saint Laurent to the future President Francois Mitterrand, who declared him a ‘hedonist inspiration’. The nation’s great and good continued to celebrate this self-confessed paedophile after the publication in 1985 of his explicit diaries Un Galop d’Enfer, in which he not only spoke of seducing young schoolgirls but also recalled regular visits to child prostitutes in the Philippines. On these trips, he wrote: ‘Sometimes, I’ll have as many as four boys, from eight to 14 years old, in my bed at the same time.’

Far from being chucked in jail, this candid admission saw Matzneff likened by the country’s intellectual elite to Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita. He was garlanded with major state honours, becoming an Officer of Arts and Letters and Knight of the Order of National Merit.

Already, you can safely assume it’s one of two things. And since Matzneff doesn’t exactly sound like your average Trekkie, one consults Wikipedia….

Matzneff came from a family of Russian émigrés who settled in France after 1917. 

Quelle surprise.

Whatever happened to “America First”

Well, don’t worry. I’m sure the IDF will defend America if the US military is too ravaged by Corona-chan to do so.

The US Department of Defense has reportedly supplied 1 million surgical masks to the Israeli regime in order to be distributed among soldiers, despite the fact that the Pentagon has lately introduced a measure requiring personnel to make their own masks to combat the spread of the new coronavirus.

The Israeli English-language Jerusalem Post reported that the masks were procured from China, and a plane carrying the medical stuff intended for Israeli soldiers landed in Ben Gurion Airport on Tuesday night.

“In the past two weeks, we have purchased and flown to Israel tens of thousands of swabs, masks, protective suits for medical staff and more,” Limor Kolishevsky, head of the New York Purchasing and Logistics Division, said. “A million masks, procured in China, were quickly flown to Israel with the intention that the Israeli military will be using them within the next few days,” he added.

The Jerusalem Post had initially published the article headlined “US Department of Defense give 1 million masks to IDF for coronavirus use,” and this is still visible in the article’s hyperlink on Twitter posts.

The newspaper, however, changed the headline shortly afterwards to read, “Israel brings 1 million masks from China for IDF soldiers,” in a possible attempt at downplaying the role of Washington in spite of shortages in protective equipment, including face masks, in the United States.

Perhaps if the Pentagon paid more attention to its soldiers than engaging in bitching about what Jenny said to Debby about Becky having a cold sore, the USA might stand a chance of surviving… no, it’s too late anyhow. Pay attention, though. This is what a corrupted Empire looks like in its last decade.

An Israeli military reporter even published on his Twitter page images of the shipment of masks as they arrived in the occupied lands.

On April 5, American weekly news magazine Newsweek reported that the US military had told its personnel to make their own masks to fight coronavirus. The protocols, titled “Department of Defense Guidance on the Use of Cloth Face Coverings,” were included in a document released Sunday by the Pentagon and then seen by the magazine.

Protocols? Can you believe that? I think the obvious takeaway from all of this is the reprehensible antisemitism of the Pentagon. The only meaningful atonement for its deplorable choice of words is for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to promptly apologize and promise to send more money to Israel.