#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
How many of you read Tolkien’s stories and wish you could find yourself in the tale? Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, introduces her new Unauthorized series, The Forge of Tolkien, with a meditation on Tolkien’s wordsmithing as an invitation to enter into the Greatest Fairy Story Ever Told.
For Unauthorized subscribers only. This will be a weekly series and we will introduce a subscription to it next month.
Left-wing politicians are anticipating martial law:
CNN: Let me ask you, mayor, because some of these images, they’re ugly. I mean, a Starbucks destroyed in the protests, a construction site for a juvenile detention facility set on fire, Seattle police say officers were burned when protesters threw explosive devices at them, and look, a lot of what’s happening here, this is not peaceful. This is just violent and destructive, and the president says he thinks mayors like you are refusing his help and those standby forces because he’s the one offering it. Does he have a point?”
Seattle Mayor: No. Again, the president’s actions clearly have escalated things in Seattle, and across the country. I was just talking to a number of mayors throughout the country who saw a similar thing that — people wanting to act out against the president and his administration coming to the streets. I believe, if you look at what happened yesterday and Sunday, again, it was peaceful. We had a number of peaceful protests. And what we’ve seen is, every time this president promises to sow division, he’s successful at it. And he’s clearly targeted cities run by Democratic mayors. He’s said so himself. He’s using law enforcement as a political tool. I hate to say it, Erin, but I really believe that we are seeing the dry run for martial law. This is a president that is using law enforcement and federal forces for political purposes, and that should be chilling to every American.
The Republic failed. Democracy has failed. Liberalism, in both the proto-SJW and the classical senses, has failed. Conservatism has failed. Socialism has failed. This means that a return to some form of authoritarian government is inevitable, and the only question is precisely what form it will take.
Better the likes of Franco, Duterte, Putin, and Xi than Merkel, Macron, Trudeau, May, and the rest of the Promethean mediocrities. The historical trends are inevitable, but that doesn’t mean one has to suffer Neros and Caligulas when there are Augustuses and Aureliuses available.
Just in case it wasn’t already obvious that the House and Senate Republicans are not going to do anything about the social media monopolies and their abuse of people whose opinions they don’t like:
I obtained the GOP’s confidential antitrust memo for tomorrow’s hearing. It’s a direct betrayal of conservatives.
– Mike Cernovich
I know I’m shocked….
If you don’t want to catch Covid-19, stay out of the hospitals and doctor’s offices:
This virus is not being spread the way we’re told.
Social distancing is close to worthless.
NY’s data makes this quite clear. So does Florida’s.
Both slammed the door; SE Florida and NYC.
The bend should be evident in one viral generation time. The new case rate should collapse in two viral generation times. If Community Transmission via bars, restaurants and “social interaction” was more than 2/3rds of the total the effective R0 would go under 1.0 and community transmission would collapse. If it was half then R0 would be 1.5 and we’d have transmission approximately equal to a bad seasonal flu.
IF you actually bent the curve.
These measures did not bend it to any material degree. Enough time has passed to know this is true; at most they have lengthened a “turn time” by one day (in other words, R3.0 to R2.5.) That’s effectively nothing!
Why not?
It’s being spread in the medical environment — specifically, in the hospitals — not, in the main, on the beach or in the bar.
When Singapore and South Korea figured out that if as a medical provider you wash your damn hands before and after, without exception, every potential contact with an infected person or surface even if you didn’t have a mask on for 30 minutes during casual conversations with others (e.g. neither of you is hacking) transmission to and between their medical providers stopped.
Note — even if you didn’t have a mask on and were not social distancing in the work environment, which of course is impossible if you’re working with others in a hospital, you didn’t get infected.
And guess what immediately happened after that? Their national case rate stabilized and fell.
The hypothesis that fits the facts is that a material part of transmission is actually happening in the hospital with the medical providers spreading it through the community both directly and indirectly.
Keep in mind that this was posted by Denninger back in March. And now, the death rate in Singapore is one in 1,896 cases, compared to one in 29 cases in the USA and one in 25 worldwide.
The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave has become the Land of the Fearful and the Home of the Censored:
A new Cato national survey finds that self‐censorship is on the rise in the United States. Nearly two-thirds—62{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}—of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive. The share of Americans who self‐censor has risen several points since 2017 when 58{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} of Americans agreed with this statement.
These fears cross partisan lines. Majorities of Democrats (52{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}), independents (59{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}) and Republicans (77{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share.
That’s what happens when your rulers criminalize excessive noticing. Or, as is increasingly the case, any noticing of anything. Remember, those who are inverted always fear that which is true, so they demand your assent to their lies for their own protection.
Americans are no longer free and they cannot reasonably be described as a free nation. Not when you can lose your job, be banned from education, fined, and jailed for doing nothing more than simply questioning the Promethean narrative.
How the USA is going to come to an end by 2033:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, from the podium at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, laid out in no uncertain terms what the administration wanted to do and how it planned to go about accomplishing its ambitious aims.
America, the secretary of state said, has effectively ditched five decades of “engagement” policy and is now embracing a policy now out of favor across the American policy establishment: regime change.
Formally, the State Department still “engages” China, Pompeo said, but “simply to demand fairness and reciprocity.” Gone are the days when American diplomats engaged China to support the Communist Party. Too often in the past, U.S. presidents rescued Chinese communism, three times—Nixon in 1972, Bush in 1989, and Clinton in 1999—in particular.
More importantly, Pompeo said there would be a new form of engagement. “We must also engage and empower the Chinese people—a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party,” he said. “That begins with in-person diplomacy.”
This is a spectacularly disastrous policy and it is coming straight from the neocon imperialists. (I note that on the same page as the linked article, there is featured a cover of an issue of National Interest entitled “The Case for Kissinger”.) After all, “regime change” has worked so well in Southeast Asia for the last sixty years, right? It’s hard to know where to even start criticizing this policy because no part of it makes any sense at all. Pompeo may have produced the single most idiotic speech related to diplomacy and war of which I’ve ever heard.
First, the Chinese people are no more freedom-loving than the Afghans, the Iraqis, or the Vietnamese. Their dynamism is irrelevant, and as suspect as the purported “natural conservatism” of Hispanics. Second, the Chinese government is not the business of the American people. Third, this is an acknowledgement of a new cold war, not between the United States and China as it appears on the surface, but between the Jewish and Chinese nations. Pompeo is speaking for his neocon masters and the USA, its people, and its military, are being utilized as a weapon against China.
Fourth, there is no shortage of in-person diplomacy available with the four million Han who now reside in the United States. If I had to bet on regime change, I’d bet on the larger country successfully invading the smaller one being the party to impose it.
It will be interesting to see if the President stands by these assertions about his administration or if he begins moving to jettison Pompeo as he has previously ejected other neocon puppets working for him. Because while the USA can win a trade war with China, it is likely to lose any other kind of war with it, and given the neocons’ failure to force regime change on Syria and Venezuela, it is very hard to imagine they will be more successful with China.
And fifth, Pompeo said “It’s time for free nations to act.” But Americans are not a free nation.
Patreon’s new Terms of Use are completely dead on arrival.
Dispute resolution
To summarize: If you have a problem please talk to us, but you are limited in how you can resolve disputes. You waive your right to trial by jury and your right to participate in a class action proceeding.
Except you don’t, because you can’t. Not in Patreon’s legal jurisdiction of California, anyhow. First, you simply cannot waive your right to trial by jury except for a small number of specific reasons, which basically amount to “not showing up for the trial” and “not paying the court’s filing fee”, so any contractual agreement to preemptively waive your right to trial by jury is unenforceable according to both the California legislature and the California Supreme Court.
The California Supreme Court has ruled that a contractual agreement to waive the right to a jury trial, entered into prior to any dispute between the contracting parties, is unenforceable under the California Constitution and Section 631 of the California Code of Civil Procedure (the Code).
– citation summary of Grafton Partners v. Superior Court, 36 Cal.4th 944 (Cal. 2005)“In Grafton Partners L.P. v. Sup.Ct., 36 Cal. 4th 944, 957-61 (2005), the California Supreme Court held that pre-dispute jury waivers are unenforceable as a matter of law under the California Constitution and state contract law.”
– Pallen Martial Arts, LLC v. Shir Martial Arts, LLC, No. 13-cv-05898-JST (N.D. Cal. May 23, 2014)
Nor can you waive your right to participate in a class action proceeding, so long as the class action takes place in court and not in arbitration.
In Discover Bank, the California Supreme Court applied this framework to class-action waivers in arbitration agreements and held as follows:
“[W]hen the waiver is found in a consumer contract of adhesion in a setting in which disputes between the contracting parties predictably involve small amounts of damages, and when it is alleged that the party with the superior bargaining power has carried out a scheme to deliberately cheat large numbers of consumers out of individually small sums of money, then … the waiver becomes in practice the exemption of the party ‘from responsibility for [its] own fraud, or willful injury to the person or property of another.’ Under these circumstances, such waivers are unconscionable under California law and should not be enforced.” Id., at 162, 30 Cal.Rptr.3d 76, 113 P.3d, at 1110 (quoting Cal. Civ.Code Ann. § 1668 ).
California courts have frequently applied this rule to find arbitration agreements unconscionable. See, e.g., Cohen v. DirecTV, Inc ., 142 Cal.App.4th 1442, 1451–1453, 48 Cal.Rptr.3d 813, 819–821 (2006) ; Klussman v. Cross Country
Despite Discover Bank, you can, however, waive your right to a class action arbitration, since the conflict between California law and the Federal Arbitration Act caused the California Supreme Court to distinguish between class action litigation and class action arbitration in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion, 563 U.S. 333 (2011).
Can you spell “deceptive practices”? I knew you could….
UNCW professor Mike Adams died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to a news release from the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office.
Detectives began their investigation in partnership with the medical examiner and it was ascertained that Mr. Adams committed suicide with a single gunshot wound to the head,” the news release stated.
No one else was in the home at the time of the incident and no foul play is suspected, the sheriff’s office says.
Because he was so depressed about being paid more than $500k to go and do whatever he wanted? I am… skeptical.
Laurie Bluedorn, a great champion of homeschooling and the author of the highly influential instructional book Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style, died this morning. She was a model of the defender of Christian civilization that we would all do well to aspire to be.
Requiescat in pace.
A reader emails about Wikipedia’s new code of conduct:
There is a big SJW convergence step happening on Wikipedia right now. They are trying to impose an universal code of conduct on all Wikimedia projects to be more “inclusive” and target “harassment”. Aka the same old bullshit as always. Only this time it would target something as big as all of the Wikipedias in all of their languages (another hilariously hypocritical example of SJW imposing their standards on different peoples and cultures, btw). The new code would be retroactive as well, apparently, so already closed cases could be opened again.
In the meantime they are also setting up an interim “case review committee“, just to be able to start doing this shit as fast as possible:
They are clearly trying to close this process as fast as possible, even doing it during summer when a lot of users are enjoying their holidays. I wonder if something could be done to stop it or limit its effect. Maybe some users that have been on Wikipedia for a while could work on it somehow. I don’t know if you have any ideas about that.
Why would we want to stop it? We’ve already provided everyone with the ideal alternative. People have got to learn to stop crying, stop complaining, and stop trying to fix the enemy and simply start making use of the existing alternatives instead.