After federal agent Roland Dane survives the successful assassination of the U.S. Secretary of State in Peru, he makes his way back to the United States in secret with the help of a mysterious organization opposed to the global establishment. But when a famous film star is reported dead just hours after the agent visits his house in the Hollywood Hills, Dane realizes that the reach of the evil that is hunting him extends further than he had ever imagined.
Arkhaven has assembled a first-rate production team to create the Alt★Hero: Q series, which explores the incredible QAnon phenomenon that is sweeping the planet. Set in the superhero world of Alt★Hero, Alt★Hero: Q is an astonishing action tale of everyday heroes taking on corruption and evil on a global scale.
The limited gold logo edition of AH:Q #2 is now available in print for $3.99 from the Arkhaven Direct store (US only) or from Amazon. AH:Q backers will receive their gold logo editions after all six print editions are completed. We expect to release the digital edition of AH:Q #3 later this month.
Category: Uncategorized
An act of self-regicide
I knew l’affaire de Markle was going to end badly. But I never suspected it was going to end in such a spectacularly bad manner:
Senior members of the royal family have gathered at Kensington Palace to celebrate the Duchess of Cambridge’s 38th birthday amid an ongoing crisis after Prince Harry and Meghan’s bombshell announcement last night.
Kate was seen arriving back at the palace today along with other royals such as Prince Eugenie, with birthday celebrations set to be dominated by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s decision to step back from family roles.
There are expected to be crisis talks today among the most senior family members, who are said to be ‘downright furious’ after learning about the announcement minutes before it broke on television news channels last night.
Royal sources today claimed Prince Harry had ignored crystal-clear orders from the Queen on the subject, after she instructed him not to make announcement about his future plans at this time.
It is understood that Harry had requested a meeting with the Queen at Sandringham as soon as he arrived back in the UK with Meghan and their son Archie this weekend, following a six-week Christmas break to Canada.
The Queen offered to meet the Duke – which was blocked by courtiers – but she still made an explicit request to her grandson that he first discuss his future plans in detail with his father, the Prince of Wales.
But the couple defied the order, going ahead with the announcement and ‘pressing the nuclear button’ on their royal careers, with William and Charles allegedly receiving a copy of the statement just 10 minutes beforehand.
I would definitely recommend avoiding boarding any flight that happens to be carrying Harry, Megan, Andrew, and Fergie. Just, you know, as a precaution. Especially when the British government can so easily play the Lockerbie card and blame the Iranians seeking revenge for General Soleimani.
Royal sources today claimed Prince Harry had ignored crystal-clear orders from the Queen on the subject
One almost wonders if he blames the Queen for his mother’s fate. I find it hard to believe that anyone can be that ensorcelled by a third-rate actress.
Paul Krugman’s Eichenwaldian moment
It must have been the Qanons who are surfing for illegal images on Paul Krugman’s computer. What other explanation could there possibly be?
Well, I’m on the phone with my computer security service, and as I understand it someone compromised my IP address and is using it to download child pornography. I might just be a random target. But this could be an attempt to Qanon me.
It’s an ugly world out there.
Ugly indeed. I had no idea that “Krugman” might be spelled with a silent “stein” on the end. Quick, look, Nobel Prize!
I wonder what he expects the Twitter Police to do about it? Anyhow, one must admit that Paul Krugman’s intriguing combination of an OK Boomer grasp of technology with an Eichenwaldian defense is at least as credible as his economic theories.
From SocialGalactic:
“What do you call the emotion that is 50{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} wanting to laugh and 50{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} wishing to impose the death penalty?”
Ausführenfreude.
Wallis Markle
While I’m not into British Royal porn, and I certainly expected Megan Markle to be an epic disaster, I never anticipated that she would actually manage to get Prince Harry exiled to Canada this quickly.
Harry and Meghan have quit as senior royals and revealed they will live between the UK and North America while working to become financially independent.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex made their announcement in a statement on their official Instagram account this evening.
They wrote: ‘After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution. We intend to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen. It is with your encouragement, particularly over the last few years, that we feel prepared to make this adjustment. We now plan to balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America, continuing to honour our duty to The Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages.’
So much for the whole “isn’t it great he married an African” narrative.
Asimov: portrait of a supergamma
The man who set the stage for modern science fiction in so many ways:
If you wanted to construct the most productive writer who ever lived, based solely on first principles, the result would look a lot like Asimov. He emerged in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, which rewarded writers who could generate reams of publishable prose on demand; he eventually learned to produce serviceable material after only two drafts. Asimov was a rapid typist; he was fond of enclosed spaces and hated to travel; he had a prodigious memory; and he specialized in popular science texts that could be researched straight from the dictionary, encyclopedia, or other common reference books.
When the playwright David Mamet was asked about his writing routine by John Lahr in The Paris Review, he said, “I’ve got to do it, anyway. Like beavers, you know. They chop, they eat wood, because, if they don’t, their teeth grow too long and they die. And they hate the sound of running water. Drives them crazy. So, if you put those two ideas together, they are going to build dams.” One could say much the same about Asimov, whose existing tendencies were enlarged—by fame, a receptive audience, and supportive publishers—into a career that bears the same relation to the output of most writers that the Great Wall does to the work of the average beaver.
When you consider Asimov’s treatment of women, you find an identical pattern. As a young man, he was shy and romantically inexperienced, which was reflected in the overwhelming absence of female characters in his fiction. He openly stated that his relationship with his first wife was sexually unfulfilling, and it was shortly after his marriage that his fingers began to rove more freely. While working as a chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II, he liked to snap women’s bras through their blouses—“a very bad habit I sometimes can’t resist to this day,” he recalled in 1979—and on at least one occasion, he broke the strap.
After the war, his reputation as a groper became a running joke among science fiction fans. The writer and editor Judith Merril recalled that Asimov was known in the 1940s as “the man with a hundred hands,” and that he “apparently felt obliged to leer, ogle, pat, and proposition as an act of sociability.” Asimov, in turn, described Merril as “the kind of girl who, when her rear end was patted by a man, patted the rear end of the patter,” although she remembered the episode rather differently: “The third or fourth time his hand patted my rear end, I reached out to clutch his crotch.”
It was all framed as nothing but good fun, as were his interactions with women once his success as an author allowed him to proceed with greater impunity. He writes in his memoirs of his custom of “hugging all the young ladies” at his publisher’s office, which was viewed indulgently by such editors as Timothy Seldes of Doubleday, who said, “All you want to do is kiss the girls and make collect calls. You’re welcome to that, Asimov.” In reality, his attentions were often unwanted, and women found excuses to be away from the building whenever he was scheduled to appear.
Given the psychosexual issues and socio-sexual shortcomings of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, it’s not at all hard to understand why the two or three generations of boys who grew up reading them, and were influenced by them, featured so many sexually maladjusted individuals.
I think I was fortunate in that although I read all three of them, I was much more influenced by their contemporary, Jerry Pournelle, who, despite his prodigious IQ, was the only socio-sexually normal one of the four of them. Even as a boy, the two things that most struck me about Asimov was a) his infelicitous names for his characters, and b) his total inability to describe women or intersexual relations.
Mailvox: the view from the field
A military reader shares his take on recent events from the Middle East:
I’m an American field grade officer in [REDACTED], and would like to calm things down a bit, concerning the Iranian missile strike on Al-Assad Air Base, and Erbil. I was in [REDACTED] during the strike. Here’s my take.
1. We received “intelligence reports” that there would be a missile strike that night in two volleys. We didn’t know the hour, or location, but there were in fact two volleys. Field intelligence is never that accurate, in my experience.
2. The first volley launched within minutes of us receiving the “intelligence report”.
3. I watched the rockets impact – mostly ineffectively – on a live feed.
4. Pres Trump tweeted that there were no American casualties, and little damage, before we even received the Battle Damage Assessment, but he was right.
5. Iran, Iraq, and Pres Trump were all talking about de-escalation within hours of the strike.
The whole night, I couldn’t escape the feeling that the whole thing is intended to give Pres Trump a reason to remove troops from Iraq, while giving all three parties (Iran, Iraq, and the USA) reason to claim a win – the USA killed a very bad man, Iran struck The Great Satan, and Iraq gets to reassert their sovereignty.
We’ll see, but that’s the way it looks from [REDACTED]. Finally….
6. I watched the Neo-Clowns on Fox News agitate for war. I just thought, “give it a rest, man!”
If war is politics by other means, military theatrics are diplomacy by other means. And what we’re seeing here looks a lot more indicative of diplomacy-by-missile-barrage than actual war.
Missile Command is not war
I would not advise overreacting to the Iranian response to the recent US missile strikes.
Iran struck back at the United States for the killing of a top Iranian general early Wednesday, firing a series of ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops in a major escalation that brought the two longtime foes closer to war…. Iran has started its “second round” of attacks against bases holding U.S. troops in Iraq, the Tehran-based Tasnim news agency said on Wednesday. The second round of attacks started an hour after the first phase took place, the agency reported.
This is not what countries do when they have any intention of engaging in actual war. The Iranian military has more than 500,000 active troops and there are no reports of them being deployed aggressively in the direction of Iraq or Saudi Arabia.
This is just tit-for-tat. If Iran was serious, they would be deploying divisions and shutting down all naval traffic in the Gulf. Until they start doing that, I wouldn’t even bother paying the whole thing any attention.
They don’t have the right
Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann received reportedly has received a settlement from CNN after suing the far-left network for smearing him last year.
“CNN agreed Tuesday to settle a lawsuit with Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann,” Fox 19 reported. “The amount of the settlement was not made public during a hearing at the federal courthouse in Covington.”
Sandmann also filed lawsuits against The Washington Post and NBC Universal, each for $250 million or over, and is reportedly planning to “sue Gannett, owners of The Enquirer.”
The big social media companies are even more vulnerable than the big media companies. The problem, of course, is that no one ever stands up to them.
SocialGalactic 2.0 update
The second iteration of SocialGalactic is in active Beta. All Annual, Premium, and Basic UATV subscribers have been invited. If you are a current subscriber and have not received an invite, please email me with SG2 INVITE in the subject from the email you used to subscribe to Unauthorized and the level of your current subscription.
Burn Unit members will be invited soon, after which we will invite the creator-specific subscribers. Following that, we will invite Castalia Deluxe subscribers. Those involved in other projects that do not involve those subscriptions, such as Rebel’s Run investors, Replatforming patrons, and the AHQ Rubble Bouncers, will receive special badges they can use if they wish.
Only after all of the various contributors have been invited will we prepare to offer actual SG2 subscriptions and open up the site to free users.
And if you’re already on SocialGalactic, feel free to comment upon how it’s working for you and what improvements you would like to see.
“A terrible comedown”
But it’s not a comedown, it’s merely the inevitable result of taking the ticket, and the price that one must pay to Das Losmeister for the worldly success one is so fortuitously granted:
In any event, this latest round of interviews made for a sad spectacle. A great entertainer was disowning the best part of his oeuvre; a former rebel leader was bowing to the king to win favor at court; a master at skewering high-level hypocrisy had gone over to the other side. “You’ve gone from filth merchant to talk of the town,” Jimmy Kimmel told him in October. Stern’s opening commentaries on the interviews in his new book seem designed to make old fans wince: he considers Madonna “a kindred spirit,” calls Stephen Colbert “very evolved and emotionally connected,” praises Rosie O’Donnell for her “wisdom and graciousness,” applauds Lena Dunham for her “wisdom” and “understanding,” and touts Gwyneth Paltrow’s “humanity.” When Amy Schumer recalls the time her boyfriend touched her without explicit permission and hesitates to call it rape, Stern insists that it was, and concludes by saying, “I want to apologize for all men.” He even manages to work in a sympathetic word for Christine Blasey Ford. And the references to his own “personal growth” keep on coming. After a while, he sounds like someone who’s joined a cult.
Stern’s transformation reached its apotheosis when, on December 4, he welcomed Hillary Clinton into his studio for more than two hours. Even for a longtime fan who’d watched Stern’s persona shift over the years, I found the man who interviewed Hillary barely recognizable. Finally he was the shock jock he had always been accused of being—because his relentless flattery of the former First Lady was truly shocking. It was as if he were determined to prove that he could fawn over Hillary more fervently than her most ardent supporter. “My fantasy,” he told her, “was not only to meet you but to tell you what a hero you are to me. . . . You had the expertise I wanted in a president. . . . I wanted you to be president so bad.” He’d thought that hers would be “a spectacular presidency” because “she cares,” because she knew everything and everyone, and because she had “devoted her life to public service.” He agreed with her that Trump’s presidency has been a disaster and that Trump represents an existential threat to America. Once a hero of free speech, Stern criticized Facebook for not censoring Trump fans enough; one of Hillary’s problems in 2016, Stern told her, was that she had been “too truthful.”
Listening to this balderdash, you’d have thought that Clinton had led a saintly life, that she had been constantly set upon by jealous, corrupt inferiors, and that her career had been a spotless series of legislative and diplomatic triumphs. Buying into the notion of Hillary as a lifelong victim of the patriarchy, Stern seemed to be out to make up, in one interview, for every time he’d ever gotten a stripper to remove her top. One illuminating moment came when Stern praised Howard Zinn, the Communist author of A People’s History of the United States, a shoddy work of propaganda that has, alas, become a perennial best-seller and college text. Every Stern fan knows that Howard’s not big on books, so if he’s actually read Zinn’s opus, it’s likely his chief source of information on American history—a scary thought.
It was a stunning listening experience. When Hillary blamed James Comey (along with “the Russians and Wikileaks”) for her election loss, Stern went along with her, even though Comey had done Hillary a service by choosing not to prosecute her for clear violations of the Espionage Act. When she mentioned her emails, Stern didn’t bring up her private server or her destruction of the emails with BleachBit but instead agreed readily with her baffling claim that the emails had been “misinterpret[ed]”; when she criticized Trump’s “trade battles” and tax breaks, said that Trump was in Putin’s “camp,” and accused Trump fans (and not Antifa) of committing acts of violence around the country—and when she even knocked the booming Trump economy—Stern nodded along. He made no mention of Fusion GPS, the Clinton Foundation, her contorted version of the Benghazi episode, her dubious story about coming under fire in Bosnia, or anything else remotely scandalous in her (or her husband’s) past. Both Hillary and Stern took Joe Biden’s side in the Ukraine controversy and agreed that Trump’s famous phone call with the Ukrainian president had amounted to an “abuse of power.”
The entire interview was a case of kowtowing on an epic scale. Howard Stern, who rose to fame, in considerable part, by zapping fraudulent politicians, had now given one of the most sycophantic interviews of all time to a woman regarded by many as the most duplicitous pol of our era. It was a terrible comedown for a guy who’d earned a reputation for fearless honesty.
Howard Stern was never honest. His reputation was just another media construction, as false as the purported voice of the next big auto-tuned singer. If you are more devoted to success than you are to the truth, eventually you will be forced to dwell within the world of lies.