Category: Uncategorized

Taking the ticket

PewDiePie serves as the latest demonstration of how those who are not dedicated to God will tend to succumb to the lures of the wicked sooner or later:

Gaming star PewDiePie has signed an exclusive deal to live-stream on YouTube, after switching to a rival platform in 2019. PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, is YouTube’s biggest independent video-maker with more than 104 million subscribers.

But he signed an exclusive deal with rival platform Dlive in 2019.

Mr Kjellberg said returning to YouTube was a “natural fit” as he looked for new ways to connect with fans.

While there is nothing wrong with a video streamer signing a deal with YouTube, this shows that if you hunger after the lollipops and fancy pants, they’ll usually find a way to lure you in to accepting their control, one way or another. Notice that PDP is even flashing the one-eye symbol; he is almost certainly under the impression that it’s just a harmless gesture, even a funny one making fun of celebrities, not unlike the black actor putting on a dress for comedic effect. But what he’s publicly demonstrating is submission to the god of this world.

Always keep both eyes open.

It’s interesting to see that both David Chapelle and PewDiePie have recently succumbed after years of stubbornly going against the stream and maintaining their independence. And it will be even more interesting to see how long it will take before PewDiePie revolts against the SJWs policing his every stream.

She’s not done

Episode 6 of Chuck Dixon’s Avalon is now live on Webtoons.

The good news: Now that Toaster Dude has been promoted to Original, Alt★Hero has moved up to #6 in the Superhero category, with more than 30,000 views and a subscriber/episode ratio over 540. This latter ratio appears to be the most important metric on the platform, as the top Canvas comics average between 1,500 and 3,500 subscribers per episode. The top Originals, which obviously have the benefit of significant algorithm-push behind them, average over 20,000 subscribers per episode.

The bad news: SJWs there have discovered Alt★Hero and driven its rating down from 9.53 to 9.30 in a matter of hours. The ride never ends.

If you want an easy way to take part in the war, download the app, subscribe, and rate. It literally costs you nothing.

UPDATE: Alt★Hero is now #4 and CDA is #9 in the Superhero category.

Falling from the high horse

Ron Unz inadvertently discovers why taking the ticket is a fool’s short-lived game:

Just over a month ago I was riding high and celebrating the steady upward progress of our alternative media webzine. I proudly noted that our traffic had now far surpassed that of the venerable New Republic, a century old publication that had spent decades as America’s most influential opinion magazine.

But pride goeth before the fall. At the end of April we were suddenly purged and banned by Facebook, the world’s leading social network. Not only was our rudimentary Facebook page removed, but every last item of our website content was declared illegal, with all past and future links eliminated. Any attempt to post our material on Facebook now produces an error message reporting that the content is “abusive” and a violation of “community standards.”

Although I personally don’t use Facebook or other social networks, billions of people do, and totally excluding all of our content from that important distribution channel eventually produced a 20{105b5945f2a7891a3dd860d3a09046b26c32f8a07d097b566642738deee8841e} drop in our regular daily traffic, a serious blow that set us back many months.

Whatever they give you, they can – and they will – take away from you. And contra the backwards reasoning of the average conservative, the bigger you are, the more at risk you become. That’s why UATV’s Basic subscribers will all be receiving invitations to the new site today as well as why you will never see a Facebook page for UATV or a Facebook ad for it.

The good news for Mr. Unz is that only 20 percent of his audience was Facebook-based. He’s better off growing organically without it. After all, this blog is still averaging around 100k pageviews per day despite the best efforts of the social media mafia to deny it links.

Integrity

Don Shula was not only the only NFL coach to go undefeated in a season, he was a man of great sporting integrity. Hall of Famer Larry Csonka tells a story about an ethical choice that faced the late Miami coach the season after their undefeated 1972 championship season:

“We went into Oakland on a Friday and we were gonna practice there on Saturday. But because of construction in the stadium, we had to use their training room. They had practiced earlier in the day, they cleared out, and we used their locker room. I picked [defensive lineman] Art Thoms’ locker, because I’d played with him in college at Syracuse. I was gonna leave him a note in his locker—dead fish or something, mess with him a little bit. So I’m sitting in his locker, going through it to find something to write on. I find the Oakland Raiders game plan. Now that can be construed a couple of different ways. Knowing what they’re going to do . . . it’s their fault for leaving it there. Is it the right thing to do? Unquestionably it’s not the right thing to do. Was it cheating? I don’t know. It’s a fine line. I went and handed that report, quite quietly, to [offensive line coach and Shula confidant] Monte Clark. He said, ‘What’s this?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.’ I walked away.

“Here’s the bottom line: We lost the game. Even with the game report, we lost the game. After the game, I’m riding on the bus. Monte Clark sits down next to me on the bus. I said, ‘Monte, what the hell did you do with the game report?’ He said, ‘I took it to Shula and when he asked what it was, I told him. He said, ‘Tear it up. If we can’t beat ‘em straight up, we shouldn’t beat ‘em.’”

That, even more than the man’s undefeated season, is a legacy worth leaving behind.

Pedocrat arrested

At this point, the Democrats might as well just call themselves the Pedocratic Party.

Fmr head of John Kerry’s State Department security detail arrested for child molestation… J. Scott Moretti, a former deputy assistant secretary of the State Department who oversaw diplomatic security training, is accused of assaulting a girl beginning in 2011, between November 2011 & November 2013 … the female victim, who was between 10-11 years of age at the time of the offenses, was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance, identified as the accused, on more than one occasion during the above time frame.

They make it sound as if he was a bodyguard or something. But Deputy Assistant Secretary of the State Department isn’t exactly an outsider. He’s actually the bureaucrat who informed the Benghazi troops they were being left to fend for themselves.

UATV 2.0

All Annual and Premium subscribers have now been invited to the new Unauthorized site, which I am delighted to say is Legion-made from the custom server and database to the front end and the content administrator. Please share your thoughts and experiences here, particularly as related to current performance and desired features for the future. We’ll be inviting the Creator subscribers next, beginning with The Legend and Gardening subscriptions. We currently have about 100 videos there, with more being added every day.

If you’re seeing slow video responses, please be sure to let us know if you are in the USA or not, as slower initial responses from Europe and Asia are anticipated. The bug with the 0:00:00 time on the more recent videos is known and we are in the process of addressing it. UPDATE: The video time display bug is fixed.

Please note that the black circle spinning in the center of the video does NOT necessarily indicate a slow playback issue, but rather, indicates that the buffering of the entire video is still ongoing. We are currently addressing that as well.

UPDATE: Good news from Asia.

Just dropping a note to let you know that the new UATV site works from China. Still a bit slow (probably due to throttling by the Great Firewall), but much, much better than before.


UPDATE: It would appear the audio-stripping function is working properly too.

Listened to an audio only stream today. Worked great. 

Mailvox: Money magic

A reader observes the creation of money ex nihilo in action:

I wanted to share something with you that demonstrates how you are correct that debt and money creation are one and the same.

Recent changes to 401k rules (from the CARES act) allowed me to withdrawn/borrow 90k from my retirement account, with the promise to pay it back over 5 years to avoid the tax penalty. I did this to pay off my mortgage. Even though this doesn’t change the basics of my personal finances, I just like the idea of being the only person with a legal claim on my house. Also, I figured the market is going to go down, so now might be a good time to sell, and buy-back over the next 5 years.

So I apply for the loan. I get the 90k check and deposit it in my bank. I look at my 401k balance and the amount has not changed! The 90k was literally created out of thin air with the understanding that I’m obligated to pay it back over 5 years.

Now that money essentially exist in 2 places; in my house, and in the stock portfolio of my 401k. I naively thought that the 401k was an arrangement between me and the government that I get a tax break on money I put aside for retirement. In reality, the 401k is an arrangement between me on the one side, and the government and the financialized class on the other side. Once I put money in those stocks, I can’t sell it off until I turn 60 without a huge tax penalty. My 401k money is essentially a trust fund for the financial class.

At face value, most would think this is beneficial to me. But in reality, I’m prevented from the opportunity to sell high and buy back low. This protects the financialized racket from any loses today, but it also prevents the opportunity for that money to be redirected toward more profitable endeavors in the future. As losses to the financial market are prevented, so too the opportunity for profits are prevented. And they wonder why the economic recoveries are so feeble or non-existent.

Heads, everybody wins. Tails, they win and you lose. It’s not the worst scam in the history of financial shenanigans. But it will lead to an economy-wide breakdown, in which everyone loses, sooner or later.

Obama is getting nervous

The ex-president is starting to speak out in a very un-ex-presidential manner:

Former President Barack Obama harshly criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as an “absolute chaotic disaster” during a conversation with ex-members of his administration, according to a recording obtained by Yahoo News.

Obama also reacted to the Justice Department dropping its criminal case against Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, saying he worried that the “basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.”

Translation: “I’m worried that the charade is about to be exposed.” He’s also not telling the truth.

President Obama is being quoted on Flynn, saying “There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free.” It is a curious statement. First and foremost, Flynn was not charged with perjury.
— Jonathan Turley

And this might explain Obama’s strange actions:

“Sources are telling Watters’ World that Attorney General Bill Barr was just given a trove of smoking gun documents that could point directly at former President Barack Obama, revealing his powerful connection to ‘Spygate’ and the Russia hoax.

That aged well

Just months after almost everyone on Wall Street worried that a recession was just around the corner, Goldman Sachs said a downturn is unlikely over the next several years. In fact, the firm’s economists stopped just short of saying that the U.S. economy is recession-proof.
– December 31, 2019

The hilarious thing is that the downturn had already begun. This sort of thing is why I meant it very literally when I wrote the chapter entitled “No one knows anything” in RGD.

It is also why destroying your nation simply because the economists tell you that doing so will make everyone rich is a horrifically bad, horrifically stupid idea.

Different directions

As Arkhaven has embraced Webtoons – and if the backers want it, we are even considering our own custom site and app, which would be considerably simpler than SG2, UATV2, or Infogalactic – Marvel is retreating from web-based comics.

Thank you for being a loyal Marvel fan. As a fan of Marvel digital comics, we wanted to let you know that the Marvel Digital Comics Shop at comicstore.marvel.com will be closing on June 2, 2020.

After June 2nd, you will still be able to purchase Marvel digital comics and read your existing Marvel digital comics library via the Marvel Comics app and the comiXology store.

To purchase Marvel digital comics after June 2nd:

Download the Marvel Comics app on the App Store or Google Play Store, and/or Visit comixology.com.

To read your existing Marvel digital comics library after June 2nd:

View your past purchases in “My Books” when you log into your account on the Marvel Comics app, and/or

Sync your current Marvel Digital Comics Shop account with a comiXology account to continue to read your books on a web browser

I can only read digital comics on a web browser, how can I continue to do that?

Marvel won’t support a web reading experience after June 2, 2020.

Translation: Apps or Amazon. Comixology is Amazon’s platform and it is a suboptimal page-based approach. Vertical panels are the future since they display much better on smartphones. All of our comics are now being created and constructed with that in mind, even if they’re not designed specifically as panels for vertical digital display.