#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
EVIL MONKEY MEMES Episode 86: Fyre Fyre Burning Bright
REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 61: The Devil’s Creatures
RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 15: Fauci’s Free Food
UNITED FORCES Episode 2: I Need My Chainsaw
BOB Episode 129: Follow the Science
CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON Episode 103: Moral Support
BEN GARRISON Episode 101: Ukraine Aid
STONETOSS Episode 181: WE WUZ…
Of course, it has been ever since the end of the semiconductor era.
Faking it is over. That’s the feeling in Silicon Valley, along with some schadenfreude and a pinch of paranoia.
Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning startups over the past year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize startup claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals who has been taking the industry’s “fake it till you make it” ethos too far.
Take what happened in the past two weeks: Charlie Javice, the founder of the financial aid startup Frank, was arrested, accused of falsifying customer data. A jury found Rishi Shah, a co-founder of the advertising software startup Outcome Health, guilty of defrauding customers and investors. And a judge ordered Elizabeth Holmes, the founder who defrauded investors at her blood testing startup Theranos, to begin an 11-year prison sentence April 27.
Those developments follow the February arrests of Carlos Watson, the founder of Ozy Media, and Christopher Kirchner, the founder of software company Slync, both accused of defrauding investors. Still to come is the fraud trial of Manish Lachwani, a co-founder of the software startup HeadSpin, set to begin in May, and that of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who faces 13 fraud charges later this year.
Taken together, the chorus of charges, convictions and sentences have created a feeling that the startup world’s fast and loose fakery actually has consequences. Despite this generation’s many high-profile scandals (Uber, WeWork) and downfalls (Juicero), few startup founders, aside from Holmes, ever faced criminal charges for pushing the boundaries of business puffery as they disrupted us into the future.
It’s not over. It won’t be over as long as venture capitalists can inflate fraudulent businesses living off their angel and VC money long enough to either a) go public or b) get acquired and let the VCs cash in. Because the Patreons and the Substacks of the world are just as fake as the Franks and the FTXs, as were the Bloggers, Twitters, and Pajamas Medias before them.
None of these businesses actually make money. None of them will ever make money.
A French writer introduces the concepts of convergence and corporate cancer to the francophonic world.
“The highest form of the art of war is not to fight but to corrupt everything of value in your enemy’s country until the perception of your enemy is so distorted that he doesn’t even perceive you as an enemy anymore.” – Yuri Bezmenov
In April 2023, the famous American beer brand “Bud Light”, owned by the Anheuser Busch Inbev group, launched an advertising campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. A week later, the company’s market capitalization was down $6 billion as sales plummeted. Between 2005 and 2016, NASCAR, the most popular motor sport in the United States had seen an equally dramatic decline in its spectators after having taken the turn of “inclusiveness”, its president Mike Helton going so far as to declare in 2006 that: “we are convinced that the redneck heritage of the southern United States on which this sport was based no longer exists. But we also realize that we have to make an effort to help other people understand it.”
In his book Corporate Cancer published in 2019, author and editor Vox Day revealed the factors that lead successful, well-established and sometimes growing companies to scuttle themselves by launching communication campaigns. disastrous and alienating their most loyal customers. Day’s explanation of this phenomenon is the gradual takeover and destruction of a company by progressive ideology, a process he called “convergence.” According to Day, the progression of this ideology within a company can be compared to a cancer whose evolution would correspond to the following phases…
This analysis grid helps to understand why the spread of “progressivism” within a company quickly leads to its ruin. In his book, Day gives very concrete examples of the explosion of costs induced by the convergence of a company and estimates that once the process has started the loss of turnover can reach up to 20% in the space of a year. Day nevertheless takes pains to point out that “light” signs of convergence should not lead to overreaction from management and that there is a real difference between a converged company and a mere marketing rhetoric aimed at satisfy a specific market segment.
It is worth pointing out that, in theory, a market economy should lead to the rapid elimination of a company that is dysfunctional or unable to meet the demands of its customers. However, as the author of “Corporate Cancer” rightly points out, the pursuit of these disastrous strategies or positions both for the image of companies and for their balance sheets prove that what is at stake here goes beyond the simple question economy and demonstrates the reality of a system whose avowed objective is now to “change society and change mentalities”.
In the age of Clown World, convergence is one of the most important concepts for any individual with any responsibility in an organization to understand. Without it, the individual finds himself operating in the dark while beset by invisible enemies whose actions appear insensible and whose motivations he cannot possibly understand.
And so, it’s good to see that people from other cultures are beginning to grasp it, because their societies are under assault too, as the chief aim of Clown World is to converge the entire planet.
Charles Johnson raises some interesting questions about the great technological success story of the 1980s.
You might even consider auditioning for the role of public face because everyone knows that casting a hero is very important.
Casting calls work wonders and work well. The person should be young but presentable and preferable approachable so that media can either love to hate them or hate to love them. They could even be a child star, groomed as it were, over many years. They should be rebellious but in a playful way and maybe even be willing to appear on Saturday Night Live in a pinch.
From Time in 2007: “There’s a great photo of Bill Gates from 1977, the year he would have graduated from Harvard if he hadn’t dropped out. He was 22 at the time and looks all of 16. He’s got a flowered collar, tinted glasses and feathered blond hair, and he looks so happy, you’d swear he knew what the rest of his life was going to be like. He also has a sign around his neck: it’s a mug shot. “I was out driving Paul [Allen]’s car,” Gates says, flashing that same smile 30 years later. “They pulled me over, and I didn’t have my license, and they put me in with all the drunks all night long. And that’s why the rest of my life, I’ve always tried to have a fair amount of cash with me. I like the idea of being able to bail myself out.”
To supervise our young genius — don’t you dare say otherwise! — you might even consider putting a small, insular, smart, mostly trustworthy minority in charge, albeit behind the scenes. Such a community would need to self-police and, if its deep state technology, be able to pass a security clearance. So no drugs, please!You might, in other words, go with the Church of Latter-day Saints. And that’s precisely what was done when the powers that be created Novell, the second largest provider of software for personal computers after Microsoft. It may also be what’s going on with other more modern tech billionaires but we aren’t allowed to talk about that just yet. No, we cannot talk about how Mormons are often assigned to keep an eye on our would-be wayward tech entrepreneurs and how this is for their own good.
How Microsoft defeated Novell with the help of foreign intelligence and organized crime is a subject we shall explore in future posts.
I don’t know anything about the Microsoft story beyond the mainstream narrative, and other than a brief amount of contact with Alex St. John in their initial foray into games, I never had any contact with them except as a consumer. But, I have to admit, nothing Bill Gates has said ever left me with an impression of an exceptional intelligence.
UPDATE: The Miles Mathis Committee also did a deep dive into Mr. Gates.
In my educated opinion, it means that the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, and Microsoft itself are all fronts for the Matrix. Like Apple Computers and Steve Jobs, they don’t exist like we think. Microsoft would appear to be another big government entity, like Google, with a person from the families simply chosen to front it. Gates is sold to us as a genius of some sort, but I have never seen the least evidence of that. He comes across as a big dope who can barely follow the Teleprompter or the earpiece. He is marginally more presentable than George Bush or Donald Trump, but that isn’t saying much. He has all the charisma of a tunafish sandwich left out in the rain. Which indicates he wasn’t chosen for his personal qualities. He was chosen because he had to be chosen.
Peter King revisits the big draft question of 25 years ago, and in doing so, underlines my point about the mainstream media. Which is, namely, never believe anything it tells you.
A quarter-century ago this week … A couple of months before the draft in 1998, I took a VHS tape with 30 to 35 plays each of Tennessee QB Peyton Manning and Washington State QB Ryan Leaf, the presumptive top two picks in the draft, around the country to show six people and to ask: Who would you pick among these two players? (VHS qualified as high-tech in 1998.) My panel of experts: Hall of Fame coach/QB guru Sid Gillman, retired Niners coach Bill Walsh, Giants QB Phil Simms, Denver coach Mike Shanahan, Tampa Bay director of player personnel Jerry Angelo and UCLA coach Bob Toledo (who’d faced both players).
There was some debate over who should go first that year. ESPN published a long magazine story opining the easy pick was Leaf. “Come 2018, Ryan Leaf, not Manning, will be strutting up to a podium in Canton,” was one line from that story, one of the great wish-we-had-that-back lines ever. ESPN wasn’t the only one to go all-in on Leaf. But I sat with each expert and asked the question.
The vote: Manning 6, Leaf 0. “Now this is a pro quarterback,” the 86-year-old Gillman said in his Carlsbad, Calif., home. “Is that a beautiful throw, or is that a beautiful throw? I’d draft this kid in a second.” The iconoclastic Walsh favored Manning over Leaf, but also said he’d pick another position first in the draft, then chose Brian Griese in the second round.
When I wrote the story in early April, I remember a few stories like the ESPN one, or ones quoting anonymous scouts or GMs saying they’d pick Leaf. I wondered if I’d picked the wrong guys to poll. But sitting with Gillman, a seminal figure in quarterback history, and Shanahan, and hearing their this-is-no-contest tone, I thought Manning was the guy. “Peyton will handle the inferno of going to a 3-13 team. He’s a sure player,” Angelo said. And he was.
Forget sports. Forget the NFL. Forget the converged reporter concerned. The salient point here is the massive gap between the unanimous position of the proven experts and the expressed conclusion of the media. The experts consulted by Peter King had unparalleled and unquestioned chops. ESPN could have consulted them even more easily than King did.
And yet, the mainstream media organ somehow managed to present a conclusion diametrically opposed to the conclusion of the experts. This is par for the course. Never forget that.
I find it very, very difficult to believe that Elon Musk was genuinely surprised that the US government has full access to private messages on Twitter:
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has claimed the U.S. government had access to users private messages on Twitter.
In a wide-ranging interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, set to be broadcast on Monday and Tuesday night, Musk made the startling claims noting how he was shocked to learn that the government had full access to private communications on the platform.
The billionaire tycoon told Carlson how unaware of the fact until he joined the company and expressed surprise at the degree to which government agencies were able to monitor social media.
‘The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind,’ Musk said. ‘I was not aware of that.’
I was warning people that nothing on the Internet is private back when the NSA was still supposed to be a fictitious agency. If you’ve done it online, it’s in the records of many agencies of multiple governments. Nothing is private anymore, we have been living in the Age of the Panopticon for at least 15 years and probably more, so it is long past time for everyone to understand and accept that.
There is no getting around it. There is no hiding it. So don’t worry about it, just be prepared to answer for anything and everything you have ever done or said online. If nothing else, it should underline one’s need for an Advocate in the afterlife.
AFTER ATLANTIS Episode 1: Meet Jayesh and Kari
THE RED TATTOO Episode 36: See You Soon
VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 220: Precious Old Bones
INVASION ’55 Episode 40: The Townsfolks’ Fate
NEURAL NETWORK NOVELLAS Episode 6: Wanted – Dead Man Episode 1
CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 87: Love Poem Episode 5
THE WISE OF HEART Episode 18: A Disgruntled Superintendent
PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 56: Night on Gold Mountain
FULL OF EYES Episode 32: Preparing Glory
CLASSIC BIBLE TALES Episode 92: Beware the Teachers of the Law
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 228: Tell a Phony
We’re pleased to announce that another new independent series launches today, entitled AFTER ATLANTIS, from NetRaptor.
While Castalia House has repeatedly demonstrated excellence with regards to the content and manufacturing quality of our books, our customer service has been essentially nonexistent. What people may not understand is that this was not simply the result of indifference, but was more to the fact that we had absolutely no control over when a book was shipped out to a buyer.
One of the reasons I have been so reluctant to provide dates, and why I have been so unapologetic about missing those dates that we did provide, is because until now, there was never anything at all that we could do about them. For example, I was told by the bindery that THE JUNGLE BOOKS would be shipped to our newly-established shipping center on March first. However, we did not receive them until April 7th.
Fortunately, we are now in physical possession of our entire stock of leather books, and future books will be shipped from the bindery to the shipping center as soon as they are bound and boxed. We also will not consider any books “ready to ship” until we have received them and are ready to send them out. We have a new email address that anyone who has not received a book of any kind can contact (1), as well as an email address (2) for those who want to check on the status of their Library/Libraria/History subscription.
We have also recently discovered a bug in the WooCommerce system that has permitted a few people to order books that were officially out of stock, but still had books listed in the inventory. Apparently, it’s not enough to declare a book out of stock, but the inventory also has to be set to zero or the system overrides the out-of-stock status. So, for example, eleven customers have not yet received their leather Junior Classics set because we did not realize they’d been able to buy them since we’d declared the set to be out-of-stock more than a year ago.
Fortunately, we always keep a reserve to cover shipments that go awry, so we have enough books to send everyone. But in at least some cases, if you haven’t received a leather book yet, it may be because we didn’t know you’d bought it due to this WooCommerce bug. Now that we know about it, we will get the books sent out to the appropriate addresses.
And yes, we will permit new orders of the Junior Classics leather sets once books 7 through 10 are printed and being bound. We printed 500 copies of Vols 1 through 6, but only bound 250, so we can produce another 250 sets whenever we decide to pull the trigger.
Peter Hitchens asks why the UK is following the fanatically stupid lead of the neocons into war with Russia:
First of all, what interest does the United Kingdom have in continuing and sustaining this war? A powerful faction in Washington DC, with supporters in the West Wing of the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA, have long wanted a proxy war with Russia. They believe passionately that Russia must never be allowed to rise again. This faction, whose founding document is known as The Wolfowitz Doctrine, have been hard at work since 1992, when The New York Times leaked their plans. They are almost exactly the same people who created the Iraq War out of nothing, who got the West into the Afghanistan quagmire, and who backed Islamist fanatics in Syria – who were the sort of people they would have arrested in Chicago.
They have an unparalleled record of fanatical stupidity, and everywhere they intervene ends up in corpse-strewn ruins, with everyone who can get out fleeing from the fire and screams… towards Europe and the Channel coast.
If every dollar these zealots have spent on war had been spent instead on building prosperous free countries in places such as Russia, the world would be a startlingly better place. That, fundamentally, is America’s problem. If nobody in the USA will stand up to them, they will get their repeated stupid wars and the rest of us will have to watch, weep and receive the fleeing multitudes.
But we do not have to take part. Why are we in this? How does Britain benefit from war between Russia and Ukraine? How, for that matter, has poor Ukraine benefited from it, its cities wrecked, its economy half-dead, untold numbers of its young men gone to graveyards? Why should any British soldiers be there at all? If Parliament does not debate this, then we are not a democracy. And if any critical voices are drowned out with slander and abuse, then we are not a free country.
Just as the secular commentators can’t make sense of all the evil in the world today due to their refusal to accept the reality of the spiritual world, Christian commentators like Peter Hitchens can’t understand Clown World due to their refusal to accept the fact that they are ruled over by foreigners practicing a foreign religion.
Conservatism is the art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s astonishing how every time conservatives start winning even the smallest battles in the cultural war, their intrepid leaders immediately call upon them to lay down their arms and refrain from actually defeating the enemy.
Apparently the Younger Trump is not the warrior that we’d hoped he would become. Regardless, my lifelong boycott of Bud Light will continue.