Author: VD

AH:Q #2 on Bounding Into Comics

Bounding Into Comics covers the release of Alt-Hero: Q #2: Not Dead Enough, which is now available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

Arkhaven Comics publisher Vox Day announced Chuck Dixon and Helix Haze’s Alt-Hero: Q #2 is now on sale.

Alt-Hero Q “explores the incredible QAnon phenomenon that is sweeping the planet.” The story takes place in the world of Alt-Hero and stars federal agent Roland Dane.

Dixon described the series to us last September:

“What we’re presenting is an action/thriller hero that I’m really excited to be creating. We’ll be inserting him into stories of global cabals and dark conspiracies that threaten not only world peace but the basic human rights of the individual. Our guy, Roland Dane, is an experienced law enforcement professional who has to drop out of the system to act as an operative for the mysterious organization he knows only as Q. Roland is a little rough around the edges and his methods are often direct but he’s one man trying to make a difference for all of us.”

The series was originally crowdfunded on IndieGoGo and trended #1 on the crowdfunding website when it first launched.

You know Star Wars is dead

When even the guys who managed to ruin A Game of Thrones in the final season are walking away from the Devil Mouse and Star Wars in favor of riding a debt-laden Netflix down into the ground:

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the duo who in 2011 launched the singular screen sensation known as Game of Thrones, have walked away from their much-publicized deal with Disney’s Lucasfilm to launch a feature film trilogy in 2022. Benioff and Weiss were supposed to usher in the post-Skywalkera era of the Star Wars brand with a 2022 new-start story that would stake out a new frontier for the era-defining cinema brand created by George Lucas. 

Think about how much damage the Devil Mouse has done to the Star Wars brand in just a few short years. It’s really astonishing to observe the extent to which the corporate cancer of social justice convergence destroys the value of even the most marketable brands.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Deep State

Except it isn’t winning its war on the God-Emperor:

The New York Times on Thursday published a remarkable piece that essentially acknowledged the existence of an American “deep state” and its implacable hostility to Donald Trump. The Times writers (fully five on the byline: Peter Baker, Lara Jakes, Julian E. Barnes, Sharon LaFraniere, and Edward Wong) certainly don’t decry the existence of this deep state, as so many conservatives and Trump supporters do. Nor do they refrain from the kinds of value-charged digs and asides against Trump that have illuminated the paper’s consistent bias against the president from the beginning.

But they do portray the current impeachment drama as the likely denouement of a struggle between the outsider Trump and the insider administrative forces of government. In so doing, they implicitly give support to those who have argued that American foreign policy has become the almost exclusive domain of unelected bureaucrats impervious to the views of elected officials—even presidents—who may harbor outlooks different from their own.

This is a big deal because, even in today’s highly charged political environment, with a sitting president under constant guerrilla attack, few have been willing to acknowledge any such deep state phenomenon. When in the spring of 2018, The National Interest asked 12 presumed experts—historians, writers, former government officials, and think tank mavens—to weigh in on whether there was in fact such a thing as a deep state, eight said no, two waffled with a “sort of” response, and only two said yes. Former Colorado senator Gary Hart made fun of the whole concept, warning of “sly devils meeting in the furnace room after hours, passing out assignments for subverting the current administration.”

But now the Times’ Baker et al weigh in with an analysis saying that, yes, Trump has been battling something that some see as a deep state, and the deep state is winning. The headline: “Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him.”

The devils wouldn’t be showing themselves if they were winning. The fact that they are doing so is actually a sign of the complete opposite.

900 percent and rising

The Junior Classics campaign is on a roll.

The purpose of The Junior Classics is to provide, in ten volumes containing about five thousand pages, a classified collection of tales, stories, and poems, both ancient and modern, suitable for boys and girls of from six to sixteen years of age. The boy or girl who becomes familiar with the charming tales and poems in this collection will have gained a knowledge of literature and history that will be of high value in other school and home work. Here are the real elements of imaginative narration, poetry, and ethics, which should enter into the education of every child.

This collection, carefully used by parents and teachers with due reference to individual tastes and needs, will help many children enjoy good literature. It will inspire them with a love of good reading, which is the best possible result of any elementary education. The child himself should be encouraged to make his own selections from this large and varied collection, the child’s enjoyment being the object in view. A real and lasting interest in literature or in scholarship is only to be developed through the individual’s enjoyment of his mental occupations.
CHARLES ELIOT
PRESIDENT EMERITUS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
1918

In Alt-Hero news, there are still 50 backers who have not responded to our queries about not receiving the AH Volume One omnibus. If you were a Volume One omnibus backer for either the paperback or the hardcover and you haven’t received it yet or been contacted by service-AT-castaliahouse-DOT-com about it, please email that address with your updated shipping information.

Ridicule is rhetoric

Because apparently the stories told by the McMartin daycare kids were supported by the evidence after all:

If the name McMartin Preschool rings a bell, it’s because the school gained infamy as ground zero for the child abuse case that kicked off the so-called Satanic Panic.

360 children were alleged to have been abused at McMartin daycare. Many of the children claimed that they’d been subjected to sexual and satanic ritual abuse in a system of tunnels under the school. When investigators declared that excavations turned up nothing, the claim of secret tunnels became a byword for spurious ritual abuse claims.

Now, after a generation of ridicule, the FBI has confirmed the tunnels’ existence, vindicating the children’s testimony.

The world is not only more evil than you believe, it is more evil than you probably imagine. We may be IN it, but we most certainly do not want to be OF it.

Cameras in the can

Apparently there are cameras in airplane bathrooms. What is wrong with these people?

A Southwest Airlines flight attendant says two pilots live streamed video from a hidden camera in a commercial airliner’s lavatory to an iPad in the cockpit, a lawsuit says. The alleged incident happened February 27, 2017, while Renee Steinaker was working on Flight 1088 from Pittsburgh to Phoenix, according to the complaint that Steinaker and her husband, David Steinaker, filed against the airline and the pilots.

About two and a half hours into the flight, Capt. Terry Graham asked for a flight attendant to come to the cockpit so that he could leave to use the restroom, the complaint says. Airline policy requires that two crew members are in the cockpit at all times, the complaint says.

After Steinaker arrived and Graham left, Steinaker spotted an iPad in the plane’s cockpit that appeared to be streaming live video of the pilot inside an airplane lavatory, the lawsuit said. When the flight attendant asked the co-pilot, Ryan Russell, if the iPad was streaming video from the lavatory, he said the camera was part of a “new security and top secret security measure that had been installed in the lavatories of all Southwest Airlines’ 737-800 planes,” the document alleges.

“Southwest does not place cameras in the lavatories of our aircraft.” That’s the official Southwest line and it might even be true. But even if it is true, that doesn’t mean that someone else, such as a federal agency, doesn’t put them there.

Professionally inept

One of the reasons why the converged media companies have been running roughshod over those they’ve targeted for deplatforming is that their victims are afraid to fight back. But if you have, or are, or can find, a competent lawyer who doesn’t play the usual lawyer’s game of waiting until the last possible minute to submit some boilerplate that he plans to revise later, you’ll likely be well ahead of the opposition.

Law firm mistakes number of days in the month, so lawyer files notice of appeal one day after actual deadline. Court dismisses appeal and awards fees.

They even have cute professional jargon for it: calendar the deadline. This sort of thing happens all the time. I’ve personally witnessed it and something similar happened in the Vic Mignogna case. Most lawyers, even very highly credentialed lawyers from very expensive law firms, take a disturbingly blase approach to deadlines, mostly because the established case law permits them to redefine clearly fixed time frames as indefinite periods that are entirely at the judge’s discretion.

Of course, the fact that it is reprehensibly stupid to proactively rely upon the judge being lax about deadlines never occurs to them. We are always careful to prepare our filings as soon as possible, and to file them several days ahead of time, in order to not provide a potentially adversarial judge an excuse to rule against us. Never wait until the last minute!

And on a not-unrelated note, the VFM, the Rubble-bouncers, and the Reprehensibles should be prepared to act very quickly when the Legion’s next campaign is announced tonight around 6:30 PM Eastern. I’ll send out emails, put up a post, and do a Darkstream once the link is live. The amount is irrelevant, as the objective is to establish standing for as many of you as possible. Now, don’t play Smart Boy and demonstrate how much you know about what’s going on here in the comments, but do feel free to indicate if you’re in on this one.

I don’t need the attention, Mike

Reality is hard when you’re an SJW. From the comments:

Don’t try to pin him on me. This kind of lede is practically an announcement that — just like Camestros — you pull the name of my blog into your disputes to generate attention. For shame.
– Mike Glyer, File 770

While Mike certainly isn’t to blame for Camestros’s foot-shooting antics, Camestros is part of the File 770 community and that serves as a useful identifier for those who have no idea who he is or why he’s nipping at my ankles. I would think it is readily apparent that I have absolutely zero need to generate attention these days; to the contrary, I methodically refuse every single request for interviews, stories, appearances and “perspective” from the mainstream media, the Internet media, and the YouTubers alike.

Wait, I did answer a few questions from someone connected to the Unz Review the other day, but then, I make exceptions for people with whom I am working….

I don’t blame the SF-SJWs for failing to grasp how much bigger Unauthorized is than their entire community at this point, since it’s outside their area of interest, but sooner or later, they’re going to be confronted with what is almost certainly going to strike them as a very ugly reality. This blog alone is much closer to Tor.com’s traffic than to File 770’s, and that doesn’t include the YouTube viewers or UATV viewers.

The end of asset forfeiture

It’s remarkable that it has taken this long for a court to find it unconstitutional:

Civil asset forfeiture has been in the crosshairs across the country for years now because it allows police and prosecutors to declare that any money or property owned by a suspect is “connected” to a crime, seize it, and then ultimately keep it for themselves. And because this is a civil process, police and prosecutors can do this without having to convict anybody. It’s the assets that are considered the defendants (in this case, the respondent is actually the $20,771 that Horry County wants to seize from a man charged with trafficking cocaine), prosecutors typically have a lower threshold to make their case than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and people who are pulled into these forfeiture cases don’t have access to public defenders and have to fund their own lawyers.

The end result: Police trying to keep whatever they can grab off anybody they arrest, claiming it’s all proceeds or property connected to criminal activities, and using it to line their own pockets. This incentivizes police to look for people who have assets that can be seized. Local newspapers in South Carolina teamed up to investigate the extent of abuses and discovered police agencies across the state had seized more than $17 million in assets across three years. In one-fifth of the cases, nobody was charged or even arrested for a crime.

Judge John notes all of these problems in a decisive ruling that smacks down the practice of civil asset forfeiture. In his 15-page opinion, he writes that South Carolina’s forfeiture practice violate both the U.S. Constitution and the state’s because the statutes “(1) place the burden on the property owner to prove their innocence, (2) unconstitutionally institutionally incentivizes forfeiture officials to prosecute forfeiture actions, and (3) do not mandate judicial review or judicial authorization prior to or subsequent to the seizure.” He also notes that the statutes violate citizens’ Eighth Amendment protections against excessive fines.

It’s a good start. Now let’s get a conclusive Supreme Court decision setting precedent on the topic. And a federal law banning it.