#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
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….
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!
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.
Apparently white US citizens don’t owe anything to their black counterparts anymore:
Black Lives Matter Chicago said early Monday’s looting of stores was a form of ‘reparations’ as the group held a protest Monday night in support of the more than 100 people arrested after an evening of violence.
Downtown Chicago was otherwise quiet after authorities cut off access, with drawbridges leading into the city pulled up and freeway exits blocked after riots sparked by a false rumor of a child shot by police.
At least 13 police officers were injured as the violence claimed an estimated $65 million in property damage.
Ariel Atkins, a BLM organizer, called the looting ‘reparations’.
If looting is reparations, then wouldn’t 155 years of black crime more than suffice to pay off any debt incurred by slavery? The lowest estimate of the annual cost of crime in the United States is $690 billion, and blacks account for 37.6 percent of all robberies and burglaries, so if BLM is to be taken seriously, then reparations to US blacks are being paid at an annual rate of $259.4 billion.
Are myths true? In the third episode of The Forge of Tolkien, MYTHOPOEIA, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown reads Tolkien’s poem “Mythopoeia” as a riddle about the relationship between poetry, sub-creation, and the reality of myth. We explore the structure of the poem and its language for clues as to how Tolkien convinced his friend Jack Lewis to read myths not as “lies,” but as invitations to sub-create in the image and likeness in which human beings are made.
If you’re enjoying the Prof. Brown’s new Unauthorized stream and wish to support it, subscribe here.
PAC-12 and the rest of the NCAA to follow soon, I expect:
The Big Ten has voted to cancel the 2020 college football season in a historic move that stems from concerns related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, multiple people with knowledge of the decision confirmed to the Free Press.
The sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the decision. A formal announcement is expected to Tuesday, the sources said.
The presidents voted, 12-2, Sunday to end the fall sports in the conference. Michigan and Michigan State — which both has physicians as presidents — voted to end the season, sources said. Only Nebraska and Iowa voted to play, Dan Patrick said on his radio show Monday.
And this will help considerably with regards to popping the higher education bubble:
At stake is at least $4.1 billion in fiscal-year revenue for the athletics departments at just the 50-plus public schools in the Power Five conferences — an average of more than $78 million per school — a USA TODAY Sports analysis of schools’ financial reports to the NCAA shows. That’s more than 60{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of these schools’ combined total annual operating revenues, based on amounts reported for the 2019 fiscal year.
Somewhat to our surprise, the arbitrator in Owen’s case ruled that Patreon does have the contractual right it claims to kick anyone off its platform at any time without any reason, regardless of whether the user being kicked off has violated any rules or community guidelines or not. That right to terminate any user at any time at will was the reason he gave for granting Patreon’s request for summary disposition.
The arbitrator also appeared to make the mistake of confusing “terminating the contract” with “deleting the creator page”, but given his very broad grant of permissions to Patreon, I can’t see how that matters. So, this means that Owen’s arbitration is pretty much over.
What does it mean for the metacase and for the hundreds of other ongoing and pending arbitrations? Nothing at all. Arbitrations are arbitrary and they set absolutely no precedent from one proceeding to the next. In fact, even Owen’s arbitrator pointed out in his ruling that Patreon’s attempt to cite other arbitrator’s rulings in his arbitration were not valid and could not be taken into account.
This is not the first tactical loss, and it probably won’t be the last, but neither the tactical wins nor the losses will make any difference as things proceed toward the inevitable end.
Joe Biden is having trouble finding anyone who wants to appear on the Democratic presidential ticket with him. AC chronicles the obvious problems:
Whitmer met with Biden as he nears VP decision. Three things are obvious to all of them. One, he will never win. Two he is up to his ass in criminality over Ukraine. And three, there is a good chance once Trump wins, and Biden is taken down hard, there will be child molestation shit tagged onto his legacy. So the rumors of people turning him down when asked may very well be right, and he cannot find someone willing to sign on to be his VP. If he cannot find a VP, either it is a show designed to make Michelle come out and sign on, out of a sense of duty, before he dies of a stroke and she slides into the Presidential candidacy as part of a show to justify the fraudulently close, or even Democrat-victory results, or it isn’t a show, and this will just be a standard, full on Trumpslide.
It’s not a show. The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate was always going to be a sacrificial lamb, which is the only reason why the Color Party was willing to run a white candidate. They don’t want to permit any of their Color Revolutionaries to go down with the decrepit old guard.
To the extent that one could describe it as a Pax, anyhow. Regardless, for better or for worse, it’s definitely over.
There has long been heated debate over whether the United States should defend Taiwan in the case of a Chinese invasion, but little consideration to whether it successfully can. An unemotional assessment of the military capabilities of both China and the United States reveals the odds are uncomfortably high that the U.S. forces would be defeated in a war with China over Taiwan. What’s worse, even achieving a tactical victory could result in a devastating strategic loss. That’s not to say, however, that there aren’t alternative strategies to effectively preserve U.S. interests and at an affordable cost.
Few leaders in “establishment Washington” have taken the time to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the capabilities of the U.S. Armed Forces and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Instead, decisionmakers routinely engage in seemingly cost-free rhetorical declarations about U.S. political preferences devoid of context. Policymakers have long argued to jettison the idea of “strategic ambiguity” that has underscored decades of America’s Asia policy, and outright declare that the United States would militarily defend Taiwan in the event of an attack.
Former Pentagon official Joseph Bosco reflected the desire of many this summer when he argued that Congress should pass the Taiwan Defense Act because “it will move U.S. policy just one step short of an open defense commitment to Taiwan.”
If signed into law, the act would obligate the U.S. government to “delay, degrade, and ultimately defeat an attempt by the People’s Republic of China to [use military force to seize control of Taiwan].” It would be useful to stop and consider what those confident words would mean for America in practical terms on the ground, on and under the seas, and in the skies of the Asia-Pacific region. It doesn’t take long to realize it would be bad for the United States.
Any act or treaty the United States enters into should unequivocally have the net result of a more secure America, preserving (or expanding) the country’s ability to prosper. It is obviously not in America’s interest to tie itself to another state or entity if America must absorb all the risks and costs while the other party reaps the majority of the benefits. Extending a security guarantee to Taiwan fails in the first requirement and thoroughly meets the second.
Recent wargames jointly conducted by the Pentagon and RAND Corporation have shown that a military clash between the United States and China, especially over the Taiwan issue, would likely result in a U.S. defeat. In simulated wargames between the United States and China, RAND analyst David Ochmanek bluntly said America got “its ass handed to it.”
If China committed all-out to seize Taiwan, Ochmanek explained, then it could accomplish its objective “in a finite time period, measured in days to weeks.” The reason, he said, is because it’s not, “just that they’ll be attacking air bases in the region. They’ll be attacking aircraft carriers at sea . . . They’ll be attacking our sensors in space. They’ll be attacking our communications links that largely run through space.”
As the emailer who sent me the link to this article noted, I’ve been warning of this for years. They say one should choose one’s battles carefully… one should be even more careful in choosing one’s wars. And regardless of how one’s assessment might differ from mine or from the Rand wargamers, it should be impossible to argue with the author’s conclusion that “it doesn’t make sense to risk military defeat or financial ruin when our interests are not directly threatened.”
It’s a GREAT one!
A woman is stirring controversy after calling out her husband’s supposedly “shocking” life decision. The 24-year-old, writing under the username throwra_l8tr asked for help in Reddit’s r/relationship_advice forum. In her post, she shared the extremely unique reason she’s been fighting with her spouse.
The problem? Her husband, who’s 25, has apparently set up an “entire Taco Bell dining booth” in his home office. Many Reddit users found the issue pretty frivolous, but for throwra_l8tr, it’s a serious problem.
“I’m still just absolutely stunned and shocked that anyone, much less my husband, would think it’s a good idea,” she wrote.
She should just be happy that he didn’t arrange for a live-in employee and a microwave to keep him supplied with fresh chilitos and bean-and-cheese burritos on demand. That would take “living the dream” to new heights.