Author: VD

Experiments

No blogging today since I’ve been working on some experiments as well as the Replatforming. You can see one of those experiments here, which is the first episode of Chuck Dixon’s Avalon, The Street Rules, Episode 1: Straight-up Cash. We’re still sorting out how some sort of comics-related subscription can be structured, but it increasingly appears that one will be viable in one form or another. Feel free to share any ideas you have about support tiers, rewards, and so forth if this is something you want us to do.

This is a very different approach to comics, but it is a very sensible one that accomodates the new interface realities. And this happens to be a very opportune time for Arkhaven to aggressively move forward in light of the chaos consuming the establishment comics industry.

I also have some good news for the Castalia Library / Junior Classics crowd. The first Library book is now scheduled to be bound next week. Only the Library, however, not the Libraria, as the goatskins are still stuck in Italy courtesy of Corona-chan.

Bernie Sanders states the obvious

It certainly took the old socialist long enough to concede:

Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign, he announced on Wednesday, leaving former Vice President Joe Biden as the apparent Democratic presidential nominee.

“I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful, and so today I am announcing the suspension of my campaign,” Sanders told supporters in a livestream, saying he wished he could provide supporters with “better news” but “I think you know the truth.”

“We are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden and the path to victory is virtually impossible,” he said. Sanders called Biden “a very decent man who I will work with to move our progressive ideas forward.”

So Creepy Joe will be the sacrificial lamb ritually offered up to the God-Emperor. The Trumpslide will be epic.

Blown cover as cover

Ellen Degeneres “jokes” about being in jail at home:

Ellen has been slammed for being tone deaf after cracking a joke that being home all the time during the coronavirus pandemic was akin to being behind bars.

‘This is like being in jail,’ Ellen told her fans during Monday’s show as she sat in a spacious living room with windows opening onto a large plant-filled yard. ‘Mostly because I’ve been wearing the same clothes for 10 days and everyone in here is gay,’ she quipped.

An interesting little quip given the rumors about The Storm. And for those who don’t understand why the confirmed guilty aren’t simply being rounded up and charged, read The Trial of Roger Stone. There is no point in arresting those who will never be charged by corrupt prosecutors, and if charged, will be released by corrupt judges.

We can’t possibly know what’s actually happening now, but we can observe that at least some potentially related arrests are continuing to take place despite the lockdowns.

An Urbana teacher and cross country coach is now facing child pornography charges. Douglas O. Mynatt, 56 of Savoy, was arrested Friday, April 3. Mynatt is employed as a physical education teacher at Urbana’s University High School and is the coach of the girls’ cross country program.

I wonder why they’re desperate?

The Quartering addresses Patreon’s latest thrashing about in a stream entitled “Patreon Is DESPERATE! Sends Ridiculous Tone Deaf Email Begging Creators”:

“They make almost zero good points in this, in one of the most tone-deaf articles I’ve ever read! I can’t describe the existence of this other than a desperate and transparent attempt to get creators to reuse their Patreon because, right now, look what’s happening. We have millions, three, four, five million people are gonna be on unemployment the next couple of weeks. What do you think is the first thing they’re gonna cut?”

THE TRIAL OF ROGER STONE

THE TRIAL OF ROGER STONE by Milo Yiannopoulos.

“Read this book. It’s a warning of what can happen when politics infects our justice system.”
— TUCKER CARLSON

“There’s no better guide through the mistrial of Roger Stone than courtroom jester Milo Yiannopoulos. For once, the only thing he leaves naked is the truth.”
— JACK POSOBIEC

“More than just the trial of Roger Stone, it’s the trial of America’s basic liberties. An incredible tour de force.”
— ALEX JONES

“The Trial of Roger Stone should be an alarm bell for conservatives. What happened to Mr. Stone happens every day to ordinary Americans. We do not have a rule of law. We do not have fair judges. We have jack-booted thugs kicking down doors with the approval of prosecutors in robes.”
— MIKE CERNOVICH

“Roger Stone has never sounded so sympathetic and likable. Will he ever forgive Milo for the portrait?”
— VOX DAY

The Mueller Report was a catastrophe for the malevolent forces desperate to impeach President Donald Trump. It failed to prove any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Since then, many of the President’s former advisors and associates have been subjected to vindictive, political prosecutions for a variety of trivial, unrelated offenses. Roger Stone is one of them.

In this moving, eyewitness account of Stone’s trial and his decades-long career of political chicanery, author and Stone intimate Milo Yiannopoulos introduces America to the man behind the myth–and explains how the biggest stitch-up in modern judicial history unfolded. He offers a plea to President Trump to step in and do the right thing, and finally, he explains how we can prevent such grotesque injustices from happening ever again.

This book is really good; it is more than a good book, it is an important book that will serve future historians well in understanding the state of the present-day USA. As Milo himself told me, it is one thing to conceptually understand the corruption of the U.S. legal system, it is another to observe that corruption in action, day after day, live and in person. Despite being reasonably well-informed and a confirmed skeptic of the U.S. justice system, until reading this book I had no idea that the trial of Roger Stone was such a charade, to such an extent that the shamelessness of the clowns responsible would have embarrassed the average Communist judge conducting Soviet show trials during the Stalinist era.

EXCERPT: As a former senior editor for Breitbart, a New York Times-bestselling author and an international political celebrity and free speech icon, I’ve heard my share of so-called conspiracy theories. I’ve heard conservatives talk endlessly about double standards and unfair treatment. I’ve listened as Republicans have complained about how they’re regarded versus their Democrat peers. Most of the time, the conservatives are right. Almost all of the things they claim are true! Wait long enough and the things you hear on conservative talk radio generally prove to be pretty much spot-on. These revelations have come thick and fast in the past half-decade, because the Trump presidency has exposed collusion, cronyism and entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government at a scale that has stunned most Americans.

But never in my life have I sat in a courtroom and watched a put-up job unfold before my very eyes, and experienced a chill creeping down my spine as I slowly come to realize the terrifying power of a team of government lawyers determined to take someone down, whether they committed a crime or not, and how the full might of the American jurisprudential system kneels to accommodate them.

In November 2019, Roger Stone was found guilty of one count of obstruction—that is, of lying to Congress during an investigation—five counts of making a false statement to the government, and one count of tampering with a witness. Of all these charges, the last is the most preposterous. But none of them should ever have been brought against him.

THE TRIAL OF ROGER STONE is available in Kindle format on Amazon, in paperback at Castalia Direct, and in EPUB and Kindle format at Arkhaven.

Boris to ICU

The British Prime Minister has been moved into the ICU:

Boris Johnson has been moved to intensive care after his coronavirus condition worsened, Downing Street announced tonight. He is conscious and has asked Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab to deputise for him. Mr Johnson, 55, has been transferred to intensive care as a precaution should he require a ventilator.

Not to be pessimistic here, but it is generally not a good sign when one’s consciousness is deemed newsworthy. The more conspiratorial-minded will, I imagine, be tempted to view this as some sort of revenge for Brexit.

UPDATE: Can’t say I’m liking Boris’s odds particularly well based on recent developments concerning his possible successors. Although I can’t imagine the British electorate is particularly impressed by the new Labour Party leader’s top priority in light of the current crisis.

  1. Dominic Raab is now the UK’s de facto prime minister after Boris Johnson was hospitalised, with the running of the country placed in the hands of a man who has just one year of Cabinet experience…. Mr Raab said karate helped him cope with the premature death of his father, Peter, who had fled to the UK from Czechoslovakia at the age of six in 1938 to escape the Nazis. The Foreign Secretary released pictures during his Tory leadership campaign of his Jewish relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust.
  2. New Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has apologised to the Jewish community for anti-Semitism in the party and promised to “tear out this poison by its roots”…. Sir Keir, a QC and former Director of Public Prosecutions, had a surprise for the 750-strong audience. Quizzed on whether he considered himself to be a Zionist — a supporter of the existence of the state of Israel — he answered: “I don’t know how many people know this (but) my wife’s family are Jewish and we have got extended family in Israel.”

She’s onto us!

Somehow, Roseanne Barr figured out the conspiracy behind the Boomer Flu:

Roseanne Barr recently posited a wacky theory that the coronavirus pandemic is an effort to eliminate baby boomers like herself.

“You know what it is, Norm? I think they’re just trying to get rid of all my generation,” Barr told Macdonald during the Sunday interview on his informal YouTube talk show “Quarantined with Norm Macdonald,” in which he calls up his friends to chat. “The boomer ladies that, you know, that inherited their — you know, are widows. They inherited the money so they got to go wherever the money is and figure out a way to get it away from people.”

Macdonald seemed to play along with Barr, commenting that “because there’s so many boomers that have money and do no work, so if you got them out of society — yeah, that would be a good thriller.”

This is a historic moment, though, as it marks the first time that a Baby Boomer has actually contemplated her generational mortality and the possibility of a world without Boomers.

A 75 percent cut

But Diamond promises this three-quarters reduction in payment to the comics publishers is only temporary:

Below is the outline of vendor payments from Diamond Comic Distributors and Diamond Book Distributors. Beginning this week, the week of April 6th, you will receive 25{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of the weekly amount due under your contract term. Each subsequent week, you will receive a 25{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} payment of that week’s balance due. This reduced payment schedule will continue for 6 weeks. With the remaining 75{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} due in each of those weeks being deferred. Following that 6-week period, we will begin payment of the deferred balance in equal payments over a 13-week period.”

And here I was estimating only a 50 percent reduction. I could be wrong, as only IDW publicly reports results, but I don’t think any of the primary players can afford to stay in business at that level for long.

We’re still contemplating the right way to go about launching an Arkhaven subscription plan. We probably won’t do it very soon, but we have been kicking around some intriguing ideas that I suspect will be of great interest to Arkhaven fans. And speaking of Arkhaven, we expect to release this to the Alt-Hero backers before the end of the month, featuring a new team of superheroes known as The Gods of Peaceful Sleep.

But WHICH god?

This defense of Robespierre is fascinating, illustrating as it does that one of the architects of the French Revolution was very different than he is commonly portrayed today. He was certainly much more sound than the average intellectual today on atheists and atheism. But I am not so certain as the author of the article that the god of which he was speaking was necessarily the Christian God.

Robespierre castigated the irreligion that prevailed in the aristocracy and the high clergy, with bishops like Talleyrand openly boasting of lying every Sunday. A gap had widened between the clerical hierarchy and the country priests. Among the latter, many were responsible for drafting the peasants’ cahiers de doléances. The counter-revolutionary bishop Charles de Coucy, of La Rochelle, said in 1797 that the Revolution was “started by the bad priests.” For Robespierre, they were the “good priests” whom the people of the countryside needed.

Robespierre was inflexible against the priests who submitted to the pope by refusing to take an oath on the Civil Constitution (voted July 12, 1790). But he also opposed, until his last breath, any plan to abolish the funds allocated to Catholic worship under the same Civil Constitution. He also opposed, but in vain, the new Republican calendar, with its ten-day week aimed at “suppressing Sunday,” by the admission of its inventor Charles-Gilbert Romme.

Robespierre’s worst enemies were the militant atheists, the Enragés like Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette or Jacques-René Hébert, who unleashed the movement for dechristianization in November 1793, and started closing the churches in Paris or transforming them into “Temples of Reason”, with the slogan “death is an eternal sleep” posted on the gates of cemeteries. Robespierre condemned “those men who have no other merit than that of adorning themselves with an anti-religious zeal,” and who “throw trouble and discord among us” (Club des Jacobins, November 21 1793). In his speech to the National Convention of December 5, 1793, he accused the dechristianizers of acting secretly for the counter-revolution. Indeed, “hostile foreign powers support the dechristianization of France as a policy pushing rural France into conflict with the Republic for religious reasons and thus recruiting armies against the Republic in Vendée and in Belgium.” By exploiting the violence of militant atheist extremists, these foreign powers have two aims: “the first to recruit the Vendée, to alienate the peoples of the French nation and to use philosophy for the destruction of freedom; the second, to disturb public tranquility in the interior, and to distract all minds, when it is necessary to collect them to lay the unshakable foundations of the Revolution.”

Again in his “Report against Philosophism and for the Freedom of Worship” (November 21, 1793), Robespierre again castigated the grotesque cults of Reason instituted in churches by atheist fanatics:

“By what right do they come to disturb the freedom of worship, in the name of freedom, and attack fanaticism with a new fanaticism? By what right do they degenerate the solemn tributes paid to pure truth, in eternal and ridiculous pranks? Why should they be allowed to play with the dignity of the people in this way, and to tie the bells of madness to the very scepter of philosophy?”

Anyhow, it’s a very good article that is well worth reading in its entirety.

A ferocity and intensity

This crisis is not primarily one of disease. There is a very good reason why the spiritually sensitive around the world have been reporting an increase in demonic activity worldwide:

“A great heaviness has entered into my priesthood. This time has been the biggest test of my priesthood, and I guess of my life,” said the priest, known for his cheerfulness, work ethic and devotion to Our Lady. “I do think the Evil One is hitting the priests hardest now. His number one tool is his spirit of discouragement. His M.O. is to make it seem like we’re accomplishing nothing as a priest. Why pray? Why sit by the window [for outdoor confessions] when no one comes. Why make another [senseless] video on the need for prayer during COVID-19 when no one watches? It’s like his voice says, ‘You’re worthless now as a priest – you’re detached from your people, and they aren’t praying or paying attention anyway’….

I phoned an exorcist in Washington D.C. I asked if demonic activity had increased since the Eucharist had been held back and many church doors had been locked.

“Exorcists and those gifted individuals with insights into the spiritual realm have seen more intense demonic activity now. There has been a definite uptick,” he said, “Satan’s taken advantage of this crisis to meet his own ends, It seems demons have been given a free hand now.”

I called a layperson active in the deliverance ministry, who wished to remain anonymous.

“The intensity of the suffering has increased. It’s the spirit and voice of condescension that speaks loudly now,” the individual said. “At the same time, the call to prayer is like a tsunami now. I feel like I don’t need to sleep. I just want to pray throughout the night – this seems to be the same experience of the priests I’ve been working with. There is a ferocity and intensity about what they are seeing now in the spiritual realm.”

But there is no need for despair. Is it not conflict that confirms our purpose? The more the face of evil is revealed, the more it underlines the reality, indeed, the absolute necessity, for our faith in Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

It is not those who are devoted to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True who are breaking down and crying on air. It is not those who worship at the Cross who are cracking under the strain. The demons are raging because they, their master, and his human slaves are all being defeated.