Category: Uncategorized

Band or comedy act?

The girls from Band-Maid don’t merely rock, they do a considerably funnier comedy routine than Amy Schumer and most so-called professional comediennes. I can’t believe they aren’t a reality TV show yet.

The contrast between the three cheerful ones and the two killjoys is no doubt played up, but it is consistently funny.

Miku: What is your image of San Francisco, Misa?
Misa: Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.

The interview on Japanese TV was even funnier.

Takahashi: How about a maid-like greeting?
Saiki: Ah, no.
Takahashi: What’s your charm point?
Saiki: I don’t have one.

Did I mention they also rock?

Suicide weekend?

A redditor wondered a week ago if it was coming:

If you believe in Q, you believe that mass arrests are coming. Q mentions suicide weekend twice. I believe that is the weekend before public disclosure. If we suddenly hear of a spate of high level deaths over a weekend, then the boom is a few days later. My money is on June 9 and 10. The cabal will wait till the last moment hoping for a Hail Mary.

Sounds crazy, of course. But then…

Celebrity chef and TV personality Anthony Bourdain committed suicide on Friday at the age of 61, in a shocking death that has stunned the food world. Bourdain hanged himself in his hotel room, while visiting Strasbourg, France to film an upcoming episode of his CNN show Parts Unknown. His close friend Éric Ripert, owner of New York City’s famed Le Bernardin restaurant, found him dead Friday morning.

I’d say if we see more than five celebrity suicides in a single weekend, the proposed signal is likely valid. Two or three are more likely just a statistical artifact.

UPDATE: Okay, perhaps that is more than one already.

Kate Spade worked with the Clinton Foundation in Haiti and also sat on the Board of Directors for the “New York Center for Children.”

UPDATE: Make that more than two already.

UPDATE: CDAN implies Bourdain’s death was supposed to be a “murder-suicide”, presumably with Asia Argento. Which would seem to indicate that this is the usual suspects trying to intimidate her and other witnesses rather than an imminent harbinger of the Storm.

UPDATE: “The Justice Department’s internal watchdog will issue its long-awaited report on the FBI and DOJ’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails during the 2016 presidential campaign on June 14.”

Austria closes mosques

And repatriates foreign-funded imams:

Austria said today it could expel up to 60 Turkish-funded imams and their families and would shut down seven mosques as part of a crackdown on ‘political Islam’ that was described as ‘just the beginning’, triggering fury in Ankara.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said the government is shutting a hardline Turkish nationalist mosque in Vienna and dissolving a group called the Arab Religious Community that runs six mosques.

His coalition government, an alliance of conservatives and the far right, came to power soon after Europe’s migration crisis on promises to prevent another influx and clamp down on benefits for new immigrants and refugees.

In a previous job as minister in charge of integration, Chancellor Kurz oversaw the passing of a tough ‘law on Islam’ in 2015, which banned foreign funding of religious groups and created a duty for Muslim societies to have ‘a positive fundamental view towards (Austria’s) state and society’.

‘Parallel societies, political Islam and radicalisation have no place in our country,’ Kurz told a news conference outlining the government’s decisions, which were based on that law.

‘This is just the beginning,’ far-right Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache added.

It’s a good start. But they are going to need to do the same thing to organizations and individuals funded by George Soros too.

DC to Marvel: “Hold my beer”

If you think the SJW convergence in comics was bad already, just wait and see how DC is rebranding its Vertigo imprint.

“It’s time to rebuild DC Vertigo. We’re returning to our roots by spotlighting the most exciting new voices in comics, as well as bringing new voices to comics. From the corners of television, games, music, activism, podcasting, comics and more, all of our creators are passionate and have something to say. These sophisticated stories have amazing new characters and vast worlds to explore. That’s what it has always been about for me—new stories, new voices, new possibilities. We’re creating a new generation of DC Vertigo classics for readers of all genres.”

The DC Vertigo brand will expand its slate with seven new series: Border Town, Hex Wives, American Carnage, Goddess Mode, High Level,  Safe Sex, and Second Coming.

Okay… so who are these exciting new voices and what are these sophisticated stories?

  • “When a crack in the border between worlds releases an army of monsters from Mexican folklore into the small town of Devil’s Fork, Arizona, the residents blame the ensuing weirdness—the shared nightmares, the otherworldly radio transmissions, the mysterious goat mutilations—on “God-dang illegals.” With racial tensions supernaturally charged, it’s up to new kid in town Frank Dominguez and a motley crew of high school misfits to discover what’s REALLY going on.”
  •  “The women are too powerful. They must be tamed.” A malevolent conspiracy of men brainwashes a coven of witches to be subservient, suburban housewives. But it’s only a matter of time before the women remember their power…
  • “In this thrilling crime saga, disgraced FBI agent Richard Wright, who is biracial but can pass for white, goes undercover in a white supremacist group believed to be responsible for the death of a fellow agent.”
  • “In a near future where all of humanity’s needs are administered by a godlike A.I., it’s one young woman’s horrible job to do tech support on it. But when Cassandra finds herself violently drawn into a hidden and deadly digital world beneath our own, she discovers a group of super-powered women and horrific monsters locked in a secret war for the cheat codes to reality.”
  • “Hundreds of years after the world ended and human society was rebuilt from scratch, a self-interested smuggler with a price on her head is forced to traverse a new continent of danger and mystery to deliver a child messiah to High Level, a mythical city at the top of the world from which no one has ever returned.”
  • “A dystopian sci-fi thriller about a ragtag team of sex workers fighting for the freedom to love in a world where sexual pleasure is monitored, regulated and policed by the government.”
  • “God sends Jesus to Earth in hopes that he will learn the family trade from Sun-Man, an all-powerful superhero, who is like the varsity quarterback son God never had. But, upon his return to Earth, Christ is appalled to discover what has become of his Gospel and vows to set the record right.”

Translation: Anti-American, Feminism, Anti-American, LITERALLY WHO, Feminism, LBGTQWTF, Anti-Christian. And the covers are even worse than the descriptions.

O, the pathos! O, the courage! O, the bigoted cruelty of those faceless white men trying to stand in the way of forbidden multiracial same-sex love because hate!

This continued descent of the comics industry into total SJW degeneracy, both moral and intellectual, is precisely why we created Alt★Hero in the first place. It’s also why Alt★Hero is already generating legitimate interest from film companies, serious enough that we’re going to have a closed Brainstorm next week to discuss it, followed by an open Brainstorm to allow other Arkhaven backers to support what is presently conceived as a live action movie.

In the meantime, single-copy sales are already down 10.12{4f6295af0cad0fe69096a10ccaf8fdcb16394e0084ebb0d54ed184c513254fa3} for the year, picking up steam from last year’s 9.69{4f6295af0cad0fe69096a10ccaf8fdcb16394e0084ebb0d54ed184c513254fa3} decline.

Today will see the release of Diamond’s figures for direct market orders in May 2018. We haven’t had the figures yet but we can speculate. The big shock to many will be the expected poor performance of Man Of Steel #1. Brian Bendis‘ first full-length story for DC Comics with A-List artists Ivan Reis and Joe Prado. And an extra five-figure order from DC Comics itself for their own comics through Diamond, for use at comic shows through the year won’t have saved it from being beaten by Marvel launches and DC Comics rivals. 

Of course, Disney/Marvel isn’t about to take this challenge from DC lying down. Disney Wars “writer” Chuck Wendig promptly took up the gauntlet.

Star Wars Author Chuck Wendig Breaks Down After Calling Star Wars Fans White Supremacists

AUDIOBOOK: The Missionaries

This may very well be the greatest audiobook ever produced. I’m not kidding. It’s right up there with Douglas Adams reading his own The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. Owen Stanley’s satirical novel is brilliant, of course, alternating between darkly and ridiculously funny, but Gabrielle Miller’s narration, in her unique Australian accent, takes it to a new level of hilarity. I guarantee the way she does Roger Fletcher’s sneering laugh will crack you up, and her effortless switching between the roughneck and posh accents is spot-on.

And if you think you recognize the voice, let’s just say that you do and leave it at that.

THE MISSIONARIES is six hours and 41 minutes. You will not want to miss it. It’s that good.

That awkward reality

It always catches up to SJWs, sooner or later.

IN 2015, A black software developer embarrassed Google by tweeting that the company’s Photos service had labeled photos of him with a black friend as “gorillas.” Google declared itself “appalled and genuinely sorry.” An engineer who became the public face of the clean-up operation said the label gorilla would no longer be applied to groups of images, and that Google was “working on longer-term fixes.”

More than two years later, one of those fixes is erasing gorillas, and some other primates, from the service’s lexicon. The awkward workaround illustrates the difficulties Google and other tech companies face in advancing image-recognition technology, which the companies hope to use in self-driving cars, personal assistants, and other products.

WIRED tested Google Photos using a collection of 40,000 images well-stocked with animals. It performed impressively at finding many creatures, including pandas and poodles. But the service reported “no results” for the search terms “gorilla,” “chimp,” “chimpanzee,” and “monkey.”

In a third test attempting to assess Google Photos’ view of people, WIRED also uploaded a collection of more than 10,000 images used in facial-recognition research. The search term “African american” turned up only an image of grazing antelope. Typing “black man,” “black woman,” or “black person,” caused Google’s system to return black-and-white images of people, correctly sorted by gender, but not filtered by race. The only search terms with results that appeared to select for people with darker skin tones were “afro” and “African,” although results were mixed.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that “gorilla” was censored from searches and image tags after the 2015 incident, and that “chimp,” “chimpanzee,” and “monkey” are also blocked today. “Image labeling technology is still early and unfortunately it’s nowhere near perfect,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Google also can’t tell the difference between black people and white people. This is the first image result for “white couple”. The second is literally entitled “Black And White Couple Stock Photo.”

And this is the third. Wowjustwow, Google clearly still has a long way to go!

The Spectator covers Comicsgate

James Delingpole chronicles the decline of the comics industry into diversity:

Iron Man is now a 15-year-old black girl who might be a sociopath; the Incredible Hulk is a 19-year-old Asian hipster guy; Thor is a woman who is dying of cancer; and Captain America is a full-on Nazi — to show readers how evil Donald Trump is — while his duties as a good person have been handed over to Falcon, who is much more to be admired, obviously, because he is black.

No, really, this is not a joke designed to satirise the leftist, identity politics lunacy which has afflicted so much of the US entertainment industry. This is what has actually happened to the superheroes of those two iconic imprints Marvel and DC Comics. Their characters have all been updated to make them relevant in a more diverse, gender–fluid age where, as rebel comic-books publisher Vox Day puts it, ‘all the princesses know kung fu and none of them need rescuing’.

Except, of course, the demographic that mainly buys comics — young white males — isn’t much interested in having its consciousness raised. It wants strong storylines with memorable characters, like Spider-Man (now Latino) and Punisher (now trans-gender) used to be before the social justice warriors took over the comics industry. Sure enough, the drop in sales reflects this. In 2016, the total annual sales of the top 300 selling comics in the USA was nearly 90 million; the next year it had fallen below 80 million; this year it may well drop by ten million more.

‘What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there… anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose against,’ Marvel’s VP of sales made the mistake of admitting last year. In the furore that followed he was then sent out to say the precise opposite —that he was ‘proud and excited’ about all the ‘unique characters that reflect new voices’ in the Marvel universe. Well of course. He had a job to keep.

“Deeply un-PC” rebels. Yeah, I’d say that’s a fair description. Get ready, Rebel fans. Alt★Hero #2 is going to be here sooner than you think.

Mailvox: immigration and Boomers

A Man of the West shares how his attempt to introduce immigration heresy into a proud hyphenated-American family went:

I’ve been a reader of your blog and viewer of your videos for some time now, but I’ll cut to the chase rather than linger in my own backstory. An hour ago I was on the phone with my parents that live on the opposite side of the country (dad is a boomer, mom is early gen-x) and the conversation quickly turned to politics and history as it always does.They are Reagan-era right-wing conservatives. I  wouldn’t consider them neocons, but tomato tomAHto at this point. Gradually the topic transformed into immigration being more detrimental to a nation than warfare. As with any historical discussion with a boomer, the subject quickly returned to exclusively America. So I introduced to him the idea that even the Ellis Island immigrants, legal as they may have been, were a net negative to the American nation and culture.

Now, in an Italian/Irish immigrant family, to say something like this is sacrilege. But that’s when I could tell I was getting somewhere, because my dad started spewing post-modernist, globalist, pro-Babel propaganda like the Littlest Chickenhawk on a week-long soy bender. He even tried to drag out some JBP quotes until I dropped the “he authored a 2015 UN Development Panel report” on him. Then came the stuff I had heard him slip into past conversations, like “culture is always changing” and “no culture remains the same. History shows a constant fluctuation of cultures”. These always seemed like wishy-washy public-education level slogans parroted to give the illusion of sounding like you are well-versed in a wide scope of history. But this time I wasn’t tolerating it.

I’m not going to waste your time with a play-by-play review of the whole argument, but in the end I calmly told him “You are so focused on the microcosm that you cannot see the macrocosmic implications of the Tower-of-Babel agenda that you are supporting, and you are attempting to excuse your fear of the duty and suffering required to fight for Christianity, Western Civilization, Aristotelian rationality, and Truth by capitulating to this idiotic idea that ‘cultures will always change’. It is a lie to cover up a fear, and it is rationalizing surrender.”

Any advice on teaching an old dog new tricks?

Just keep standing calmly, confidently, and respectfully by the truth. Don’t meet anger with anger, just keep calling out the falsehoods and deceptions as they are presented to you. As the reader has already observed, he’s over the target and his father is already in a state of cognitive dissonance. The trick is to avoid making the correct path out of that dissonance more unpleasant than a) it has to be and b) than the alternative of full delusion.

A Reagan conservative is halfway there. But it’s not unknown for them to retreat into liberalism, even SJWism, simply because the pain of the truth is too great for their soft Boomer sensibilities. So, it’s not wise to punch them in the mouth no matter how much nonsense they spew in their intellectual flailing about.

You will know they have been convicted of the truth, even if they haven’t accepted it yet, when they desperately try to change the subject to you, your motivations, and your shortcomings. Don’t take the bait, just calmly ask, “What does that have to do with 20th century immigration and its consequences?” and steer them back to the subject they are now trying to avoid addressing.

Losing the next war

Don’t be surprised if the first naval battle of the 21st century goes unexpectedly poorly for the US Navy:

A three-month internal review conducted by senior U.S. surface fleet leaders found some or significant concerns with the ship handling skills of nearly 85 percent of its junior officers, and that many struggled to react decisively to extricate their ship from danger when there was an immediate risk of collision, according to an internal message obtained by Defense News.

Led by the Surface Warfare Officer School, officer of the deck competency checks were conducted on a random selection of OOD-qualified first-tour division officers (the newest officers in the fleet) in underway bridge navigation simulators fleet-wide between January and March. Of the 164 officers who were evaluated, only 27 passed with “no concerns.” Another 108 completed with “some concerns,” and 29 had “significant concerns,” according to the message, which was released by the Navy’s top surface warfare officer Vice Adm. Richard Brown.

Brown, who leads Naval Surface Force Pacific, termed the results “sobering.”

The evaluations raise distressing questions about the level of ship handling training junior officers get both prior to their arrival at their first command and when they arrive. In a Tuesday interview with Defense News at the Pentagon, Brown said the checks would be used to inform new training in development for young officers and that changes were already underway that show the Navy is serious about self-assessment and improvement in the wake of the twin disasters that claimed the lives of 17 sailors last summer.

Among the shortfalls identified in the checks:

  • Officers struggled with operating radars and the associated tools at hand, an issue that emerged in the wake of the Fitzgerald accident.
  • Officers had a firm grasp of the international rules of the road for navigating ships at sea, but struggled to apply them practically during watch standing, especially in low-visibility situations.
  • Most officers were able to keep clear of close encounters with other ships in the simulator but those that found themselves in extremis “were often ill-equipped to take immediate action to avoid collisions”

The big advantage of the US Navy in the past – the fact that it was comprised of relatively intelligent American men – no longer exists. The Chinese Navy hasn’t caught up technologically yet, but it already possesses a considerably more intelligent officer corps that will likely prove to be more competent as well.

The US was defeated in the Syrian war-by-proxy by a much smaller, much less well-equipped Russian force, in much the same way the IDF was defeated by Hezbollah in 2006. It is very unlikely that this defeat passed unnoticed by military strategists around the world, or that it will be the last one suffered by the US military.

Quit Crossfit

It will be informative to see how many Christians value their faith more than their body and leave their CrossFit programs as a result of CrossFit’s anti-Christian bigotry.

A high-ranking CrossFit employee was fired after tweeting his support for a CrossFit gym’s cancellation of a Pride event, citing his belief that celebrating LGBT pride is a “sin.”

Russell Berger was the mega-successful fitness company’s chief knowledge officer, often de facto spokesperson, and a co-author of the Russells, a blog about scientific misconduct that he maintained with colleague Russell Greene.

But Berger got into hot water Wednesday afternoon when he tweeted about a CrossFit gym in Indianapolis, Indiana, where owners canceled a workout in honor of Pride Month. Many of the coaches and employees quit in protest, according to WTTV TV in Indianapolis. On Wednesday, the gym posted notices that it was shutting down.

“As someone who personally believes celebrating ‘pride’ is a sin, I’d like to personally encourage #CrossFitInfiltrate for standing by their convictions and refusing to host an @indypride workout,” Berger wrote. “The intolerance of the LGBTQ ideology toward any alternative views is mind-blowing.”

At first, Berger was placed on an unpaid leave of absence. But later on Wednesday, CrossFit announced on Twitter that he had been fired.

“The statements made today by Russell Berger do not reflect the views of CrossFit Inc.,” the company said. “For this reason, his employment with CrossFit has been terminated.” Shortly before Berger was placed on leave, CrossFit founder and CEO Greg Glassman told BuzzFeed News that he did not stand by Berger’s views, which he called “appalling.” CrossFit’s official Twitter account also quoted him as saying, “I am crazy proud of the gay community in CrossFit.”

“He needs to take a big dose of ‘shut the fuck up’ and hide out for awhile. It’s sad,” Glassman said in an interview. “We do so much good work with such pure hearts — to have some zealot in his off-time do something this stupid, we’re all upset. The whole company is upset. This changes his standing with us. What that looks like, I don’t know. It’s so unfortunate.”

In addition to not supporting anti-Christian organizations that celebrate sin, Christians also must stop offering toleration in the workplace that they are no longer shown. Remember, the new standards is whether the statements made by an employee reflect the views of the employer or not. That means it is perfectly acceptable to fire anyone who states that sin is okay, that Jesus Christ never existed, or that Donald Trump should be impeached.

I’ve only visited a CrossFit gym once, and to be honest, I wasn’t impressed. Spacebunny was more interested in the program than I was. But neither of us will ever be trying it now.

This is why it was a massive mistake to stop enforcing the blasphemy laws. Freedom of speech was a Trojan Horse. Its chief proponents never believed in it for a second, they only wanted to use it to undermine Christian culture. And if you don’t defend your culture, you will lose your culture.