STONETOSS Episode 252: Scrooge
BOB Episode 142: Sanguis Balneum (warning: dark and graphic)
THE GOLDEN AGE Episode 16: Avatar of the Earthmind
TREASURY OF TALES Episode 32: King Winter
BEN GARRISON Episode 125: Joe in the Box
Thursday Arktoons
Category: Uncategorized
They Know They Lost, Right?
It’s no wonder that NATO has been demolished in Ukraine with military leadership of this intellectual calibre and historical knowledge:
The Ukrainian government needs to look at what Germany did in WWII to stand a chance against Russia, according to Ben Hodges, former commander of US Army forces stationed in Europe. Hodges, who retired as a lieutenant-general in 2017, has long been an outspoken supporter of Ukraine. In an interview with the Australian YouTuber Perun, published over the weekend, he repeatedly cited examples from the Second World War to argue that Kiev can defeat Moscow on the battlefield. “They are gonna have to increase production of ammunition and weapons in Ukraine,” Hodges said. “Some of these things are already happening, but it is possible when you are at war to increase production, even with Russian missiles raining down on your cities.” “I mean, think about what Germany did in 1944. Aircraft production for the Luftwaffe peaked in 1944. That’s after more than two years of steady bombing by the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Corps bombing the hell out of German cities. But yet German aircraft production increased. So I think Ukraine can do that with some improving efficiency. Some Western companies are already there helping,” he concluded.
On the one hand, he’s right. Germany did increase its aircraft production in 1944. And so did Japan, which not only increased its shipping tonnage produced in 1944, but even managed to build more aircraft in 1945 than it did in 1942.
- 1942: 8,900
- 1943: 16,700
- 1944: 28,200
- 1945: 11,100
On the other hand—–and I would argue this is the more salient point—–both Germany and Japan were not only defeated militarily, but were defeated so comprehensively that they were forced to surrender unconditionally and are still under military occupation nearly 80 years after their respective surrenders.
Forget the Kiev regime. Forget Ukraine. And forget NATO. Anyone who knows anything about military history recognizes that both of them are already finished, they simply haven’t stopped quivering yet. The USA is now facing global military defeat on every single front, even as it is prostrate before the biggest invasion in all of human history.
At this point there appears to be nothing that can stop the All Nations Alliance from defeating Clown World. And for those who would cite the US and Israeli nuclear arsenals as a possible emergency measure, I repeat: there is nothing. I didn’t understand it when I first read the book as a child, but in retrospect, Jeff Sutton was telling us what the programming was back in 1968.
Paperbacks Unlimited
Just to put it on the record, here is where I think Amazon is headed over the next three years, and the effect its actions will have on the publishing industry over the next decade. I could well be wrong. I very much hope that I will be wrong, but as it stands, please note that I wasn’t pessimistic enough about the long-term effects of Kindle Unlimited when it was introduced in 2014.
2024: Audible Unlimited. Like Kindle Unlimited, but for audio. Authors get paid by the listened hour from a collective pot that is funded by Amazon’s additional $7.99 charge on top of the $11.99 paid by KU subscribers.
2025: Paperbacks Unlimited. Subscribers can pay $19.99 per month and receive any three KDP paperbacks of their choice. Authors are paid $0.99 per paperback shipped. A hardcover option will follow the next year, which will be available at a lower price point, but the subscriber will only receive one book per month, with the ability to pay more to get two or three. Hardcover compensation pays authors $2 per book shipped. It’s essentially the old book club model, writ very, very large.
The introduction of Virtua Voice makes the former viable. The purchase of print-on-demand facilities in the USA and the UK make the latter viable. And most of the bestselling KAP Unlimited authors will either be a) AI-assisted independents cranking out a new series book every month or b) fake authors created by Amazon.
If you’re an author or a publisher, you had better prepare accordingly. Because these programs are coming, and they will have the same effect on audiobook and print sales as KU has had on ebook revenues. I estimate that KAP Unlimited will have the potential to shrink total US consumer books sales from $17.4 billion to under $5 billion by 2035.
UPDATE: Apparently Audible Unlimited already exists, in the form of Audible Plus. What has changed is the ability of Amazon to inexpensively convert all of its KDP ebooks to Audible Plus audiobooks using Virtua Voice.
Wednesday Arktoons
THE SCREAMING VOID Episode 6: The Shropshire Drop
FAIRY DOOR Episode 60: Returning Home+Afterword
HAMMER OF FREEDOM 2 Episode 27: Night Terror
FRANKENSTEIN – THE RETURN Episode 18: The Tomb of Death
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 324: Terrible Blonder
THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL Episode 21: The Market of the Camp Followers
TREASURY OF TALES Episode 31: King Winter
The Empire Enters the Doom Loop
Ahnaf Habib, writing at The Tree of Woe, implicitly contends that that my decades-old prediction of the collapse of the USA as a singular political entity in 2033 is too optimistic:
This is a Doom Loop. All signs presently indicate that The US has entered said Loop. The gravity of the moment we are in cannot be merely dismissed on a whim of ‘hope’.
There was a time when the United States and its peoples could safely hide behind two Oceans, a robust economy, a homogenous society (ethnic, cultural and religious), technological prowess, etc. However, none of those are extant today.
America had its chance. It had an opportunity to pursue Empire in some “benevolent” capacity. It had its shot at leading the rest of world in a manner that could have been dignified, measured and temperate. It had all of that and much more.
But that is all in the past. What remains today is nothing more than “inertia”.
Men; men more clever, wise, and capable than any of the sorry lot of soy-drinking fools who claim to be “men” today in CONUS and the European satrapies; such men have long passed on. With their passing, what they built can only endure for a bit more at most.
Make no mistake: The Empire of Lies will not go down without a fight.
There are however, too many “small brushfires” worldwide to extinguish. Ergo, “Death by a Thousand Cuts” is the name of the game. Defeat is only a matter of time.
Doubts have already arisen in the Empire’s ability to secure World Trade.
This is magnified by a loss of deterrence in West Asia, in spite of the multiple carrier battle groups sent to the region to dissuade regional players.
The de facto blockade of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait by Yemen’s Ansarallah is shaping up to be the “Suez Moment” of American Empire: If the Hegemon cannot lift said blockade and guarantee the safety of global shipping, it is no longer a “Superpower.”
The fate of America was sealed by two things. First, the Civil War that established the empire. Second, the notorious 1883 poem of Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”, that to all intents and purposes replaced the Constitution of the United States.
The Republic belonged to Americans. The Empire belonged to those who adopted the foreign “Melting Pot” ideology that was introduced to denationalize the new empire and sever it from its British roots. Everything that has happened since, including the largest invasion in human history and the concomitant takeover by the same ethnic elite that ruled the Soviet Union, was a direct result of those two fatal events.
This latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended appears to be approaching its end. There is, I think, some comfort in the knowledge that there was essentially nothing that anyone living today could have done about the historical trajectory of the United States. But all empires inevitably come to an end, and it is eminently clear that the bells are tolling for the imperial USA. And while it may not seem to be the case, the collapse of the imperial USA may well turn out to be the best thing to happen for the American nation in decades, if not quite centuries.
Leaving the Cloud
A large tech organization explains why they left the Cloud, and how much they have benefited from doing so:
Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set!
A month later, we placed an order for $600,000 worth of Dell servers to carry our exit, and did the math to conservatively estimate $7 million in savings over the next five years. We also detailed the larger values, beyond just cost, that was driving our cloud exit. Things like independence and loyalty to the original ethos of the internet.
Still in February, we announced the new tool I had bootstrapped in a few weeks to take us out of the cloud – without giving up on all the innovation in containers and operating principles from the cloud. This was the introduction of Kamal.
Shortly thereafter, all the hardware we needed for our cloud exit arrived on pallets in our two geographically-dispersed data centers. All 4,000 vCPUs, 7,680GB of RAM, and 384TB of NVMe storage of it!
And then, in June, it was done. We had left the cloud.
To say this journey was controversial is putting it mildly. Millions of people read the updates on LinkedIn, X, and by following this very mailing list. I got thousands of comments asking for clarification, providing feedback, and expressing incredulity over our nerve to zig when others were still busy catching up to the zag.
But the proof was in the pudding. Not only did we complete our cloud exit quickly, customers scarcely noticed anything, and soon the savings started to mount. Already in September, we’d secured a million dollars in savings on the cloud bill. And as the reserved instances (where you prepay for a whole year in advance to get better pricing) started to expire, the bill just kept collapsing:
I’ve never trusted the Cloud. And I’m very pleased to be able to say that as of last week, we no longer have a single project that is on the Cloud. While it may be useful in the initial stages of a project that isn’t capable of sustaining itself, the sooner one can move off the Cloud and onto one’s own servers, the better off one is likely to be.
And that doesn’t even begin to get into the peril of relying upon a corporation filled with SJWs who enjoy nothing more than playing thought police and denying corporate services to anyone they don’t like or of whom they don’t approve.
On a not-unrelated note, the Arktoons devs have successfully defeated a DDOS attack on the site. It’s good to be able to handle these things on our own, and not be dependent upon the security of the Cloud services company. If you were having problems accessing the site last night, it should be fine today.
Tuesday Arktoons
GIVE MY REGARDS TO BLACK JACK Episode 36: Whoever is Ready
GORGO Episode 37: The Return of Gorgo
RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 41: Boston Low-T Party
THE LOST ERA TRANSCRIPTS Episode 28: Story Six: The Anise Fields
THE SIDEWINDERS Episode 50: All Damnation Riding
REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 93: The Devil’s Work
A MIND PROGRAMMED Episode 46: Three Ways to Hide
STONETOSS Episode 251: Tournament of Power
COSMIC HORRORS Episode 8: The Temple
TREASURY OF TALES Episode 31: King Winter
Gunning for the Dollar
Russia is openly advocating for other nations to follow the lead of itself and China in abandoning the dollar standard for international trade:
Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in a statement, that it is very important for all the BRICS member states that they develop sustainable financial relations and settlements within the organization. He made the statement while speaking on Monday at the Russia-China Financial Dialog in Beijing, where he was conducting meetings with Lan Foan, his Chinese counterpart.
The BRICS alliance of developing nations, made up currently of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has been hashing out ways for member countries to make payments in local currencies. The bloc wants to accelerate its growth by reducing its reliance on the US dollar and the euro.
Siluanov said, “We need to further develop financial cooperation within the BRICS countries. Here we see opportunities … to develop a payments system that would be independent of the infrastructure, which does not always fully fulfill the goals of individual countries. Therefore, the sustainable development of financial relations and settlements on the BRICS platform is important for us, and we believe that it is necessary to work out such issues, and today we will consider a number of them.”
We have the rare historical privilege to witness the decline and fall of an empire. While we tend to think of such things as being sudden and catastrophic events, they actually tend to take place over such an extended period of time that most of the empire’s inhabitants don’t even realize anything is changing until well after the changes have taken place and they have become accustomed to the consequences.
The events of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire take place over century. The decline of the US empire is only measured in decades at this point, but even at this accelerated rate, it is taking place too slowly for the average individual to comprehend, even if he is sufficiently acute to notice some of the changes.
Clown World is ALWAYS Fake
This is why you will seldom see me reacting to a CURRENT NEWS story anymore. Some of the reported items are legit, some of them are accurate in part, and a substantial percentage of them are little more than public theatre performed for the benefit of the masses, as Lara Logan observes:
Rep. Clay Higgins tells reporter that he has SEEN VIDEO EVIDENCE of POLICE walking into rooms, and then RE-EMERGING, dressed as TRUMP SUPPORTERS and CONSTRUCTION WORKERS. Also, GROUPS of what appear to be TRUMP SUPPORTERS roaming the HALLS OF THE CAPITAL well before the BREACH!
This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Everything in January 2020 was orchestrated and stage-managed. Very little of it was organic or real. While we don’t know what the actual truth is, we can be 100-percent confident that the official version is substantially, if not entirely, false.
“Conspiracy Theory” is just another name for what actually happened.
Adverse Effects in Switzerland
An insurance company reveals the consequences of Switzerland’s vaxx campaign:
According to Helsana, a major Swiss health insurance company, since 2016 the number of patients receiving cancer treatments has decreased. However, something changed in 2021 and 2022.
In 2021, Helsana’s data shows there was a dramatic increase of 73% compared to 2020 in the number of patients receiving cancer treatments. And the high number of cancer patients continued in 2022 with an increase of 74% compared to 2020. Switzerland began its mass covid vaccination campaign on 23 December 2020.
- 2017: 33,339 heart attacks, 27,584 strokes and 116,603 cases of cancer.
- 2022: 170,000 heart attacks, 124,515 strokes and 460,771 cases of cancer.
So, that’s a 410 percent increase in heart attacks, 351 percent increase in strokes, and 295 percent increase in cancer. All of which are directly attributable to the Covid vaccines.
Never, ever, trust the science or the experts. It will literally kill you.