Author: VD

The incipient death of DC

Forbes doesn’t see a future for DC Comics in the wake of the AT&T acquisition of WarnerMedia:

Earlier this month at San Diego Comic-Con, returning attendees noticed a major change on the show’s massive exhibit floor. The booth for DC Comics, which had been a massive standalone pavilion in the center of the publishers’ area in the center of the hall, was gone. America’s oldest and second-largest comic book publisher had retreated to the far back corner of the hall, where it was incorporated into the multi-level WarnerMedia exhibit, in the shadow of banks of giant monitors previewing upcoming shows and cast appearances.

The subtext of this move could not have been clearer. AT&T—now the parent company of WarnerMedia and its divisions, including DC Comics (previously known as DC Entertainment), HBO, Turner, and Warner Bros.—does not seem terribly interested in being in the comic book publishing business….

A generation ago, faced with a similar situation, DC’s then co-President and Publisher Jenette Kahn appealed to Time Warner management that wanted to dramatically cut back on DC’s current publishing in favor of reprints, saying that the company’s new material was the lifeblood of the company, a source of new fans and new IP without which the characters and related merchandise would decline into obscurity. She won that argument and DC, under her stewardship, ended up minting many of the golden coins in which it still trades, including The Dark Knight, Watchmen and Sandman, despite never being a gigantic engine of revenue within the Time Warner corporate umbrella.

Today, DC Comics is in a similar situation. Following a demoralizing mid-decade move from its traditional home in New York to Warner Bros’ headquarters in Burbank, CA, the company has stumbled through various events and line reboots, milking assets like Frank Miller’s once-fresh take on Batman and post-Alan Moore Watchmen for the last dregs of fan appeal and relevance, and relying on high priced milestone thousandth issues of long-running titles like Action Comics and Detective Comics to make up in dollar share what they are losing in unit share of an increasingly crowded comics market.

Recently, DC co-President Dan DiDio publicly fumed that reissues of comics 30 and 40 years old were outselling current stories featuring the same characters, calling that a “failure on us.”

The SJW takeover of DC is precisely why AT&T’s best bet is to shut down the publishing business before the current generation of editors and writers start to harm the valuable brands that were created over decades. The world observably neither needs nor wants new Batman and Superman comics, particularly not those that transform Batman into a black transgirl and Superman into a lesbian Hispanic woman. There isn’t enough money in new comics to be worth the risk of moronic SJWs devaluing the brands that are the only real value of DC’s publishing business.

AT&T’s management will almost certainly do the math and realize this, which is why I expect Arkhaven to see off DC, and probably sooner rather than later, just as it has already witnessed the ugly last gasp and mercy killing of Vertigo.

Welcome to the Winestream

No, not mine… Barcelona Life is picking up where I left off.

Also, due to an ongoing SJW campaign aimed at YouTube, please note that I have locked down the Darkstream channel on YouTube, so only the most recent two videos, as well as the audiobooks, are publicly accessible now. If you want to watch an older video, visit UATV or BitChute.

UPDATE: No Winestream tonight, unfortunately, due to technical difficulties.

How to combat nationalism

Indian Prime Minister Modi is attempting a bold political stroke intended to extinguish the spirit of Kashmir’s independence and is utilizing some strategies that might strike the American observer as being more than a little familiar:

Internally, Modi’s bold re-designation of Kashmir as a union territory with a legislature is a dream fulfilled for Indian nationalistic sentiment which never accepted the compromise provisions in the Indian Constitution under Articles 370 and 35A, wherein Muslim-majority Kashmir had been allowed a parallel Constitution with a flag of its own. State governments in Kashmir had powers over law enforcement, residence and property rights. Central laws had no validity in Kashmir unless the local legislature approved them.

In effect, the autonomous status turned Kashmir into a ghetto with a mentality of uniqueness and distinctness from the rest of India. It strengthened the nearly seven million Kashmiri Muslims’ feeling that they are not Indians but a different nationality who deserve to keep Indians out of their paradisiacal enclave except as visiting tourists….

Over time, the halfway house existence of Kashmir as a state within India and yet a nation that does not emotionally belong to India failed to meet both India’s objectives and Kashmiri Muslims’ aspirations. Waves of anti-India uprisings and insurgencies, supported from across the border by Pakistan, kept Kashmir burning. Autonomy had become a slippery slope for separatism, jihadist extremism and alienation of Kashmiri Muslims from the rest of India.

Modi’s bet is that by corralling Kashmir under tighter central government control, he will marginalise the secessionist politicians there, open Kashmir up for the return of Hindu Kashmiri minorities who had been ethnically cleansed by jihadists in the late 1980s, and alter the demographic mix in Kashmir through settlement of Indians of all religious and ethnic backgrounds.

Since autonomy backfired, Modi is saying ‘enough with appeasement’ and aiming for assimilation and complete integration of Kashmir. Demographically, the idea is to dissolve Kashmiri separatism in a sea of Indian nationalism through the intermixing of populations, blunting the sharp edge of separatism that comes from lack of ethnic heterogeneity in the Kashmir Valley, where 97 percent of the population is Muslim…. Modi’s determined push for total absorption of Indian Kashmir into India proper presents an existential challenge to the long-entrenched Pakistani strategy of fanning alienation of Kashmiri Muslims against India. If Kashmiri Muslims are reorganised and no longer grouped together as an exclusive ethnic entity, Pakistan will find it a lot harder to foment the flame of self-determination.

Modi is redefining the very meaning and identity of ‘self’ in Kashmir, a process that will take years and decades, but whose endpoint will be dilution of pro-independence and pro-Pakistan affiliations in the reshuffled Kashmiri society of the future. Kashmiri Muslims may become further alienated from India as a result of this makeover, but Modi is calculating that, in years to come, they will no longer be numerically so dominant as to stymie Indian sovereignty.

Demographically dissolving a nation through the intermixing of populations and ethnic heterogeniety just sounds so very… 1965?

Anyhow, this strategy will almost certainly lead to war in Kashmir. And elsewhere.

The liberal lust for blood

Projection is why the Left and the neoclowns – but I repeat myself – are so terrified of “hate” and guns and white people. Because they know that the America they envision will always be an fictitious one:

“Did anyone see what our ratfucker-in-chief just did?” one character asks early in the screenplay for The Hunt, a Universal Pictures thriller set to open Sept. 27. Another responds: “At least The Hunt’s coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables.”

In the aftermath of mass shootings within days of one another that shocked and traumatized the nation, Universal is re-evaluating its strategy for the certain-to-be-controversial satire. The violent, R-rated film from producer Jason Blum’s Blumhouse follows a dozen MAGA types who wake up in a clearing and realize they are being stalked for sport by elite liberals.

Over the Aug. 3 weekend, ESPN pulled an ad for the film that it had previously cleared, while AMC ran the spot during the season premiere of its drama The Preacher. It’s unclear whether the ads were identical, but the one yanked by ESPN opened with a sound resembling an emergency broadcast signal. A rep for ESPN parent Disney declined to comment on the move, but an ESPN source says no spots for the film will appear on the network in the coming weeks.

The Hunt stars Betty Gilpin from GLOW and Hilary Swank, representing opposite sides of the political divide. It features guns blazing along with other ultra-violent killings as the elites pick off their prey.

Can you even imagine what the VFM being stalked for sport by elite liberals would look like? There wouldn’t be any elite liberals left afterward.

Police your organization

Or it will be infiltrated by evil and it will be destroyed:

A lawsuit announced Tuesday against the Boy Scouts of America alleges a former Scout was sexually abused as a young boy in the organization for years. The unnamed plaintiff is the latest in a long line of men who say they were raped and assaulted by pedophiles whose actions were ignored or covered up by the Boy Scouts.

More than 800 men have joined a movement called “Abused in Scouting,” started by a group of lawyers who worried that the Boy Scouts of America were planning to file for bankruptcy, cutting short the timeline for victims to bring sex abuse claims against the organization in court. Those attorneys filed a lawsuit Monday on behalf of one ex-Scout identified as “S.D.,” who said he was assaulted hundreds of times as a Boy Scout in Pennsylvania in the 1970s. The suit demands $50,000 in damages from both the Boy Scouts organization and the alleged abuser.

The extent of the Boy Scouts’ sex abuse problem first surfaced in 2010 when a judge ordered the organization to release its so-called “Perversion Files,” which listed complaints of abuse in the Scouts. In January, a child abuse expert hired by the Boy Scouts to analyze the files testified that she found 12,254 boys had reported experiencing sexual abuse at the hands of at least 7,800 alleged assailants between 1944 and 2016.

Now, hundreds more men are claiming they were abused by men who do not appear in the published “Perversion Files.” “It’s the largest pedophile ring on earth,” Tim Kosnoff, one of the lawyers representing alleged victims, said during a press conference on Tuesday. “The numbers we’re talking about now dwarf what we’ve seen in the Catholic Church cases.”

“The recipe is there for an abuser to take advantage of boys alone out in the woods at night, at their homes, at their apartments,” added another of the lawyers, Stewart Eisenberg. “Many of the boys have reported drugs and alcohol being given to them when they were minors. This abuse is baked into the culture.”

The nearly 800 members of the Abused in Scouting campaign, who hail from across the country and range in age from 14 to 88, have given their attorneys the names of 350 men who never appeared in the Boy Scouts’ internal files. The lawyers said they’d done their best to verify each of the alleged victim’s claims, based on records of their participation in the Boy Scouts and other evidence the accusers have been able to provide. But they decided to not make public names of all the newly accused men until law enforcement can confirm the legitimacy of the allegations.

This is why Christian organizations need to keep out those who are unrepentant and take pride in their sins. It’s particularly important for organizations that have child members, because predators always go where the prey is.

I was a Boy Scout for a number of years and reached the rank of Star Scout before dropping out at the age of 15, being more interested in sports and chasing girls. It was a very good experience for me and I learned a lot of useful skills; I even first encountered Tolkien in the form of The Two Towers at a Boy Scout overnight. I was fortunate and never experienced or witnessed even the slightest form of abuse myself, but it’s not hard to see how easily an infiltrating predator could have taken advantage of the boys entrusted to him.

Sadly, the BSA is now a fully converged organization, so the sooner it dies, the better. And the more pedos that are exposed and held accountable for their crimes, the better.

Republicans killing the GOP

It’s almost astonishing to witness how determined the Republican politicians are to commit seppuku by embracing gun control:

Congressional Republicans, under intense pressure to respond to this weekend’s massacres, are coalescing around legislation to help law enforcement take guns from those who pose an imminent danger — a measure that, if signed into law, would be the most significant gun control legislation enacted in 20 years.

Now, after back-to-back shootings this weekend left 31 people dead in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, Republicans who have long resisted gun restrictions appear rattled. In Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine was shouted down on Sunday by mourners in Dayton demanding that he “do something.” On Tuesday, he urged his fellow Republicans in the state legislature to pass measures establishing red flag powers and expanding background checks.

“They were absolutely right,” Mr. DeWine said Tuesday morning at a news conference. “We must do something, and that is exactly what we are going to do.”

Gun control is unconstitutional, immoral, unAmerican, and intrinsically dangerous to the citizenry. It’s also electoral suicide for Republicans. If we didn’t already know many of them are cucks hell-bent on surrendering at any cost, it would be hard to understand why they are so quick to embrace the media’s false narrative on the subject.

Why Boris means Brexit

Like me, Mark Steyn we can have confidence in Boris Johnson’s desire to be regarded as a Man of Destiny and a historical figure of note:

Like Boris, Theresa May schemed and maneuvered for decades to reach the top spot …and, by the time she pulled it off, she’d spent so much time and effort on the scheming and maneuvering that she had no idea of what to do once she got there. Boris is likewise invested in himself, but, having reached the finial of Disraeli’s greasy pole, he doesn’t intend to be just the latest seat-filler. Mrs May wanted to be prime minister; Johnson wants to be a great and consequential prime minister.

Does that make him a philosophical Brexiteer? Doubtful. In the 2016 referendum, he considered the Leave and Remain choices in terms of what served his interests. To favor Remain meant supporting David Cameron, the de facto leader of the cause, and consigning himself to being a mere gentleman of the chorus. Whereas, if he chose the other side, his star power would make him the face of the campaign. He expected the Remain guys to win, and himself to have done himself a world of good with the Tory base come the next leadership election. Instead, and at least partly because of him, Leave won, and the chaos of the last three years began.

Something of a similar head fake is going on right now. A threatened “no deal” departure on October 31st is supposedly being touted by Boris just to force the EU into re-negotiating Theresa May’s floppo “withdrawal agreement”. So M Barnier and his backstop boy Leo Varadkar are insisting that’ll never happen, and it’s the May deal or nuthin’. Let them huff on. My view is that the whole re-negotiation thing is a feint, and Boris actually wants to leave with no deal. He wants a clean split – and the UK reborn as a sovereign nation, no ifs or buts. Whether he wants it because that’s his preferred public policy or because it cements his place in history is unimportant if you happen to believe, as I do, that that’s in the best interests of the United Kingdom.

Greatness beckons, Boris.

The great dumbing-down

A regular observes a change at work:

In high school we were told the newspaper was written for a 7-8th grade level.

Last month  in our corporate meeting we were told the new standard is 5th grade.

Next step: crayon.

‘Merica!

I don’t think it’s the Americans who are the problem, for the most part. At least, not Americans of the non-Paper variety.

Heating up all over

It looks increasingly as if the world wants war, despite the social mood metric of the stock market being at an all-time high.

New Delhi has declared it is revoking a decades-old constitutional provision that granted special powers to the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. The move comes amid ongoing flare-ups between India and Pakistan over the region.

The majority-Muslim region that became part of India in the times of decolonization, and has been a point of dispute between India and Pakistan ever since, has enjoyed broad autonomy under the Indian constitution. It is the only Indian state that was allowed to have its own constitution.

All laws passed by the Indian parliament, except for those regarding defense, communications, and foreign policy, had to first be ratified by the local legislature before coming into force in Kashmir. Apart from that, only local residents could purchase land or property in the state or hold office there.

This will no longer be the case starting Monday, New Delhi has announced. A resolution to revoke Kashmir’s special status was introduced on Monday by Home Minister Amit Shah and enshrined in a decree signed by President Ram Nath Kovind, the ceremonial head of India.

Translation: The Hindu nationalists are intending to crack down hard on India’s Muslims. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were large-scale population transfers in the cards. Remember, we’re living at the end of one of the greatest global peacetime expansions in human history. The correction will therefore likely be of similar scale and scope.