#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
THE WISE OF HEART Episode 32: Dr. Lachman Testifies
THE RED TATTOO Episode 43: Be Careful
THE CHRONICLES OF THE ADVENTURE, HUNTING, AND LIQUIDATION COMMITTEE Episode 8: Promotion
FLYING SPARKS Episode 81: Dangerous Allies
NEURAL NETWORK NOVELLAS Episode 21: Abraham the Jew Becomes A Christian
THE SIDEWINDERS Episode 32: Cowboys and Irishmen
Russia abrogated the Black Sea grain deal and reimposed its naval blockade of Ukraine after the West – shockingly and totally unexpectedly – again failed to live up to its responsibilities under the treaty.
The Russian military issued a new navigational warning for the Black Sea on Wednesday, declaring certain areas in its international waters to be “temporarily unsafe” for vessels. Apart from that, the military advised seafarers against attempting to reach Ukraine’s ports, stating that all vessels heading there will be treated as potential carriers of war goods starting from Thursday.
Therefore, the flag state of a ship attempting to reach the Ukrainian Black Sea ports will be deemed as “taking part in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of the Kiev regime,” the Russian Defense ministry said in a statement.
The military said it also declared certain areas in the international waters of the Black Sea to be “temporarily unsafe” for navigation. The areas are located in the north-west and south-east of the waterway, the military noted, adding that all the necessary navigational warnings have already been published as required under existing procedures.
“With the termination of the Black Sea Initiative and the abolition of the maritime humanitarian corridor, from 00:00 Moscow time on July 20, 2023, all ships en route to Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea will be considered potential carriers of military cargo,” the military insisted.
The new restrictions de-facto re-impose the Russian naval blockade on Ukraine, lifted under the so-called Black Sea grain deal in July 2022. The agreement, signed with mediation by the UN and Türkiye, enabled the safe shipment of Ukrainian grain through Black Sea corridors amid the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Moscow withdrew from the deal on Monday, citing the West’s failure to keep any of the promises made to Russia under the agreement, including re-enabling exports of grain and fertilizers from the country.
The Russians followed the announcement with a series of missile strikes on Odessa and other Black Sea port facilities, as well as a warning that ships would no longer be allowed to freely transit the Black Sea.
Footage circulating online shows massive explosions in the vicinity of Odessa, including at its Black Sea ports. Ukrainian officials have claimed the strikes also inflicted damage on civilian infrastructure, with the city’s mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, saying the attack was the largest since the beginning of hostilities. He described last night in the city as “terrible.”
The cancellation of the grain deal is expected to contribute to rising food prices, especially in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, according to the IMF, but will likely have a knock-on impact in Europe and North America as well.
As I mentioned on a recent Darkstream, we appear to be entering a new and more dangerous phase of the NATO-Russian war.
FULLSTRIKE! Episode 14: A Floor of Traitors
BLACK5 Episode 2: The Enemy
THE RUNAWAY PRINCESS Episode 5: Raise the Alarm?
FAIRY DOOR Episode 33: Pangs of Conscience
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 269: Claim to Flame
Never forget that this is what passes for success in Clown World.
Funding History: The Athletic raised $139.5 million via five funding rounds beginning in 2017.
Operating Losses: The Athletic lost $121 million in just four years.
In January 2022, The New York Times paid $550 million for The Athletic.
All “success” in Clown World is manufactured, fake, and usually gay. Don’t chase it. You’d have to be retarded to chase it. Chase the Good, the Beautiful, and the True instead.
Postcards from the Edge of Reason lists seven signs that your saviour du jour is just another gatekeeper:
- Inexplicable popularity with conservatives.
The first time you heard about Big Conservative Thing was probably someone in media telling you how popular it has already become. No one can explain how, and most likely nobody you know could say they knew anything about it when it was small. Their rise is described as miraculous, or a movement, but the growth was very sudden.
- Fleecing massive amounts of money off of conservatives.
Gee. With all those resources in one pool, we’ll surely see some positive change, right? Right? Don’t hold your breath, mate. But do expect someone to extol the virtues of “taking stands” and “making statements” and other ways of paying them to tweet things about other famous people.
- Alleviates the pressure of the current situation by saying, “Something is being done.”
Somewhere, out there. You may have had a bee in your bonnet about some issue, and Controlled Opposition may have even gotten you riled up about it, ready to kick names and all that. Even just listening to someone talk about it was cathartic.
- Offers their entertainment value as part of some vague solution.
This is closely tied in with the last two. One way or another, it always comes back to them leading the way forward. They assure you that you’re all part of something big together.
- Leaves the true power of action entirely within the System.
The closest they ever come to offering a solution is to reinforce processes inside the System, or to leave solutions entirely in the hands of System officials.
- Portrays the managers of the system as incompetent, weak, cowardly, clumsy, or even greedy, but never evil and complicit.
This deflects true responsibility from those in power. Worse, it appeals to our natural inclination to say this about leaders we disagree with. But this is all part of the show that starts with politicians saying one thing and doing something else with entirely different results.
- Irregular ties to suspicious folk.
How many CIA agents do you know? How many criminals? How many billionaires? You may know zero, or a handful. But you probably don’t know many, and you probably haven’t received large sums of money from them, or acted as godfather to their kids.
The most reliable sign is the first one, the way that they suddenly pop up out of nowhere and their “incredible rise” is celebrated by the media and accepted unquestioningly by the average conservative. And here are a few additional signs:
It’s not an accident that these signs tend to point to The Sound of Freedom being a gatekeeper operation. That doesn’t make it a bad thing, per se, especially given the comparisons and context. But it does point to the improbability that enthusiastically anointing those involved with the film as conservative leaders will end well.
The lead SJW at IDW – which is struggling to survive, by the way – is terrified of intrepid Bounding Into Comics reporter Jon Del Arroz:
I just got out of the IDW Star Trek Comics panel and you’ll never believe what happened when I got in there. Heather Antos, the editor of the Star Trek line at IDW, went and talked to employees at IDW. They had people flank me in my seat and actually sit next to me, very uncomfortably. They were looking at my laptop, looking at what I was writing, and it was obvious that they were trying to intimidate me at that point. They rushed the panel, they did the whole thing, they did not take any questions whatsoever, and people sat next to me forcing me to stay in inside in an interior seat while Antos ran out of the panel at the end.
Then they had security outside standing there with guns, obviously they called security on me for being a journalist here and doing my job for bounding into Comics, just trying to talk about Comics. I don’t know what these people are afraid of, I don’t know why people within the comic industry act like this, but this is what they’re doing.
It is amusing to think what they would do if Arkhaven showed up there in force one day. Not that we would ever bother to do so, but it’s an entertaining thought. Speaking of Arkhaven, Arktoons just blew past 13 million views so easily that no one even noticed. This, my friends, is progress, the sort of slow and steady progress that wins in the end.
In other comics news, CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON has been ordered for all the backers and will be going out to the shipping centers next week. The 308-page omnibus collects all 12 issues written by The Legend. If you’re a backer whose address has changed in the last three years, be sure to email castaliashipping AT gmail DOT com and let us know. Non-backers resident in the USA can now purchase either the hardcover or the paperback at Arkhaven.
MY SISTER SUPREMA Episode 39: Dangereoux
THE WISE OF HEART Episode 31: The Judge Rules on Expert Testimony
THE DIXON FILES Episode 25: When Creatures Creep!
A MIND PROGRAMMED Episode 28: The Obvious Conclusion
CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: ADVENTURE Episode 84: The Brigand
STONETOSS Episode 208: Cliff Hanger
Note that this comment at AC’s place was not aimed at me, but I chose to take up the gauntlet out of interest in the subject.
For all your internet “brilliance”, you appear to conflate two things: intelligence and IQ.
Intelligence is not IQ; IQ is not intelligence. They are only occasionally and coincidentally correlated.
IQ is a ridiculously flawed measure of intelligence. It’s a measure that persuades low-brow, one-dimensional Mensas to think themselves smarter than they really are.
Disagree? Please persuade me to abandon my “maddening denial of reality” with respect to IQ by demonstrating that you “know enough to engage about it” and proving succinctly that IQ is sufficiently correlated to intelligence to “matter”.
A good first step: define intelligence.
Since you are as brilliant as you claim, you should have no difficulty making your case without:
– question begging (assuming the conclusion)
– post hoc ergo propter hoc
– appealing to authorityAfter the proof that I am certain is forthcoming, I shall have no problem accepting my inferior station with respect to my betters. Thanks!
Intelligence is the capacity to reach a correct conclusion on the basis of the information provided. The less information required to reach a correct conclusion, the higher the level of intelligence. This is why we describe minds like Newton or Galileo as high intelligences, because they proved their ability to reach correct conclusions on the basis of the same limited information provided to their intellectual inferiors. Whereas low intelligences are observably unable to reach correct conclusions even when all of the information required to do so is comprehensively provided to them.
While IQ is an imperfect quantified proxy of that capacity, it nevertheless corresponds strongly enough with it to serve as a useful measure to compare the intelligence of individuals. However, intelligence is not the only component of intellectual achievement, as wisdom and experience/information/education also play a role.
The artillery metaphor I coined to illustrate the concept is that intelligence is the diameter of the gun barrel bore, information is the ammunition, and wisdom is the targeting accuracy.
I await the various critiques with interest.
Despite the best efforts of midwits like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to square the circle by declaring science a method of determining truth, science is not only philosophically incapable of being a truth-metric, science is practically and observably unreliable, as evidenced by the untrustworthiness of even its highest practitioners in academia:
Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign effective Aug. 31, according to communications released by the University Wednesday morning. He will also retract or issue lengthy corrections to five widely cited papers for which he was principal author after a Stanford-sponsored investigation found “manipulation of research data.”
According to Jerry Yang, chair of the Stanford Board of Trustees, Tessier-Lavigne will step down “in light of the report and its impact on his ability to lead Stanford.” Former Dean of Humanities Richard Saller will serve as interim president. In a separate statement, Tessier-Lavigne defended his reputation but acknowledged that issues with his research, first raised in a Daily investigation last autumn, meant that Stanford requires a president “whose leadership is not hampered by such discussions.”
“At various times when concerns with Dr. Tessier-Lavigne’s papers emerged—in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-2016, and March 2021—Dr. Tessier-Lavigne failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record,” Stanford’s report said, identifying a number of apparent manipulations in Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscientific research.
The report concluded that the fudging of results under Tessier-Lavigne’s purview “spanned labs at three separate institutions.”
We’re not talking about a minor scientist here. We’re talking about the corruption of the top scientist at the third-best university in the world. This is absolute and conclusive proof of the intrinsic unreliability of science and shows that the reproducibility crisis affects science at every level.
UPDATE: Those who still subscribe to the myth of scientific self-correction should note that even the investigations of scientific corruption are themselves liable to corruption.
The investigation took eight months, with one member stepping off after The Daily revealed that he maintained an $18 million investment in a biotech company Tessier-Lavigne cofounded.
ALT★HERO Episode 81: Amphibious Assault
STONETOSS Episode 207: Director’s Cut
FLIP CITY CIRCUS Episode 13: If Music Legends Sold Out
上嫁小鼠 Episode 13: 我的标准
REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 71: Comin’ Up The Pike
THE GOLDEN AGE Episode 8: The Impossible Thought
RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 29: Changing Suits
THE WISE OF HEART Episode 30: An Empathetic Nudge
THE RUNAWAY PRINCESS Episode 4: A Plan Afoot
FAIRY DOOR Episode 32: The Monks
THE TUNNELS OF WOE Episode 5: Chapter 2: A Veni Man’s Gambit
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 268: Beat the Crowd
THE LOST ERA TRANSCRIPTS Episode 6: Story Two: The Dark Ages
