Category: Uncategorized

Twitter Flirts with Bankruptcy

The rapid decline of Twitter is the result of a false foundation on free money and fake advertisers rather than user-subscriptions.

At least six executives have reportedly resigned from Twitter this week. The social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, called an all-hands meeting on Thursday, announcing a return to office hours and mentioning the possibility of bankruptcy unless the company can find a way to become profitable.

Among the departures was the head of safety and moderation, Yoel Roth, Bloomberg reported, citing insider sources. Musk had kept Roth on despite complaints from conservatives that he had been responsible for much of the political censorship on the platform – one of the reasons the Tesla and SpaceX CEO cited for buying the company.

“The economic picture ahead is dire,” Musk wrote in an email calling the meeting, according to the New York Times. “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn.”

Unless Twitter can generate profits from its $8 monthly Blue program, bankruptcy is a very real possibility, Musk reportedly said, adding that the platform is currently too dependent on advertising.

All of the social media giants are, to greater and lesser degrees, fraudulent corporate structures. They are not actually real businesses as one learns about business in business school or Econ 101. Their nominal customers are not their customers, but rather, their “advertisers”, who are not actually advertisers as one is taught in Marketing 101, but Clown World conduits for free money provided to ticket-takers. They are totally – and I mean TOTALLY – dependent upon a constant flow of external “investment” money. In most cases, the total “investment” into them far exceeds their actual revenue.

For example, Patreon’s peak monthly payout, in July 2022, is $26 million. Since they take an average of 6 percent, this means their average monthly revenue is around $1.6 million. Ergo, their peak annual revenue is around $20 million and their total lifetime revenue from 2013 is around $60 million, while as of one year ago, Patreon had received $413.3 million in funding over 10 rounds. This strongly suggets that Patreon is not, and never will be, a viable business under its current revenue model. The same is true of Twitter and other public companies propped up by various forms of “investment”; rising interest rates and falling stock prices mean that the flow of money these corporations require to operate is beginning to dry up.

This is why UATV and Arktoons have been subscription-based from the start. And this is why it is so important to subscribe to at least one service, because it is the only foundation that is real and capable of keeping things going over an extended period of time.

As a community, we have an amazing opportunity here. The corporate fakes and frauds that have siphoned up all of the public awareness by providing “free” services are beginning to crumble. As with the Great Depression, the giants of the 2060s and beyond will be the agile and determined operations that survived and thrived during the Great Collapse.

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Thursday Arktoons

ALT★HERO: Q Episode 56: Dead End

STONETOSS Episode 138: Ship Sailed

EVIL MONKEY MEMES Episode 62: That Can’t Be Good

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 154: Saint Neri

WARMAN Episode 27: Disgusting Habit

UPDATE: Congratulations to the Arktoons dev team, the production team, the creators, the illustrators, the colorists, and the letterers. And especially, thanks to the backers and subscribers who make it all possible. 10 MILLION VIEWS!

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1918 Finally Ended

Eugyppius suggests an interesting hypothesis about the disappearance of the remnants of the Spanish Flu and the advent of a new seasonal flu virus based on Corona

The flu is gone. This is not an illusion. It’s not down to the wilful or mistaken misdiagnosis of Corona or anything like that. Most countries have long-standing influenza surveillance programs, entire offices of people whose job it is to find and track the flu. These programs are still running, and influenza tests are still widely administered across the world. Despite all of this searching, nobody can find anything but a few outliers. As a seasonal phenomenon in the northern and southern hemispheres, influenza has disappeared….

A lot of basic matters are poorly understood in the field of virology, and one of them is why waves of infection seem to spontaneously collapse, rather than continuing indefinitely until all susceptible have been taken ill. One reason seems to be that some viruses interfere with other viruses, such that the rise of one compels the decline of another. Plainly, not all pathogens are at odds with each other. Co-infections are common among the overlapping deep-winter viruses. Some viruses, however, definitely seem to exclude others, at least some of the time and in certain places. Influenza and Corona are two of these mutually exclusive viruses. Since it has killed the flu, Corona can operate both in the vacant flu season and in its own natively preferred dark winter months.

Some months ago, I suggested that Corona’s victory over influenza could well represent a permanent change in the order of respiratory viruses – a revolution, perhaps a very rare one. The only conceivable historical precedent would be the Spanish Flu of 1918. While we have historical reports of influenza-like illness going back centuries, we don’t have any sequenced viruses predating the second wave of this great 1918 pandemic. Before 1918, we can’t be sure that seasonal flu-like illnesses were caused by influenza viruses at all. For all we know, coronaviruses were the dominant scourge prior to 1918, and their centuries-long reign was interrupted by the anomalous and highly destructive avian influenza that entered humans in that year. Perhaps the ensuing century of influenza was an unstable equilibrium, an anomaly, and Corona has restored a prior, more ordinary world.

All that’s speculation, but we do know that the ensuing seasonal flus for decades afterwards were descended, directly or indirectly, from that first 1918 strain. What happened in 1918 was certainly a viral revolution, on the order of the upset Corona achieved in 2019. Much of virology, as a field, grew up in the shadow of 1918, as an attempt to understand the pandemic of that year and the obviously related seasonal infections to which it gave birth.

I thought the reports of the flu vanishing were total nonsense, nothing more than a propagandistic attempt to report flu cases as cases of Covid-19. But if it’s true that the seasonal flu as we’ve known it for the past 100 years didn’t even exist before the Spanish Flu, then it’s conceivable that the coronavirus of 2019 has simply replaced it as the seasonal flu virus.

In which case, the flu vaccines are even more worthless than before, and worse, those vaccinated against Covid-19, whose immune systems have been trained to permit variants of the coronavirus to enter and wreak havoc without meeting much resistance, will likely face regular periodic episodes of new flu without enjoying the benefit of the usual reduction in severity.

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Wednesday Arktoons

THE STRANDED Episode 47: Never Know

SAVAGE MEMES Episode 169: Patterns

SOMETHING BIG Episode 66: How It’s Gonna Be

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 166: Mall Contents

This marks the finale of THE STRANDED, which comes to a nicely satisfying end, so if you’ve never read it, you should give it a whirl. Also, the production team is looking for new volunteers, so if you’ve got Photoshop skills and want to be a part of the conquest of the comics industry, let us know.

THE STRANDED

Mailvox: On Suicide

A reader shares his thoughts:

Things aren’t going well. The hard is getting harder. And out of nowhere your post on “suicide.”

Thank you, Vox.

Not tonight.

Thank you.

Life is too interesting and full of possibilities to end it simply because one particular series of past choices culminated in a disappointing dead end.

Roll the dice. Shake things up. Enjoy the opportunity to make a completely new start. Explore one of the different paths you might have previously taken.

You have literally nothing to lose anymore. You’re entirely free!

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A Limited Steal

Looks like the Lords of Democracy didn’t trust that they could survive two years of a Republican House and Senate, so they put their thumb on the vote counts in a few key races here and there, particularly in the Senate.

Things were looking dicey for a bit, but John Fetterman has pulled off a win for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat over Mehmet Oz, NBC News projects. The lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania’s victory in the battleground state is a critical part of the Democrats’ bid to fight off a GOP takeover of the Senate.

Fetterman’s journey to the Senate was a roller coaster ride. In the Democratic primaries, his history of campaigning for Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and supporting single-payer health care won the ire of the private health insurance sector. After he won, leftists took interest in Fetterman as an attractive model for populist messaging while radiating everyman vibes, exemplified by Fetterman’s hoodies, tattoos and casual conversational style as a campaigner.

Another defining issue was Fetterman’s recovery from a major stroke he suffered in May. The stroke drastically reduced his ability to campaign and interfered with his ability to speak, and auditory processing issues meant he had to use closed captioning to take questions at a debate with Oz. While Oz used Fetterman’s recovery to question his fitness for office, Fetterman was able to maintain the trust of voters.

The Democrats really seem to like brain-damaged puppets who aren’t even capable of speaking coherently on their own. And if we are to believe the electoral Narrative, the voters just love them too!

Anyhow, I was wrong. Since Republicans weren’t going to interfere with either a) propping up the banks, b) Ukraine and Taiwan, or c) Israel, I assumed the Lords of Democracy would permit a big Republican wave in order to make things look legitimate for their next big Presidential steal. But apparently things are a little dicier for them these days than I’d assumed.

GA SENATE RACE 2022

It should be informative to compare the total vote numbers to the previous three elections. But regardless, it’s obvious that what presently passes for “democracy” in the USA is a total sham.

UPDATE: Whatever ARE the odds? NBC reports that the Democrats managed a clean sweep of every single “toss-up” race. That’s even more suspicious than the miraculous last-second touchdown drive by the Buccaneers on the day Tom Brady passed 100,000 yards passing.

Dems Take All 34 Toss-Up Seats

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On Suicide

If your life sucks and you simply can’t see any way out, instead of ending it, why not make that radical change that has always fascinated you but struck you as completely impossible? Why not imagine that your present life is over, so now you’ve got the chance to live one of the other lives that you would have lived if you had nine of them?

It’s far better to leave everyone and everything behind than to seek oblivion while leaving your friends and family with psychological scars that will last a lifetime.

And if for some reason that’s not possible, if life genuinely isn’t worth living, then, at the very least, make your death count!

Samson said to the servant who held his hand, “Put me where I can feel the pillars that support the temple, so that I may lean against them.” Now the temple was crowded with men and women; all the rulers of the Philistines were there, and on the roof were about three thousand men and women watching Samson perform. Then Samson prayed to the Lord, “Sovereign Lord, remember me. Please, God, strengthen me just once more, and let me with one blow get revenge on the Philistines for my two eyes.” Then Samson reached toward the two central pillars on which the temple stood. Bracing himself against them, his right hand on the one and his left hand on the other, Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” Then he pushed with all his might, and down came the temple on the rulers and all the people in it. Thus he killed many more when he died than while he lived.

Judges 16: 26-30

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The Good Immigrants

On last night’s Darkstream, I was asked if I could think of a single group of immigrants who genuinely made their new residence a better place for the previous residents. And the only group of whom I could think that truly fit the description was the Conquistadors:

These men stepped off their wooden sailing vessels, accompanied by warhorses and armoured war mastiffs, clad in steel breastplates, armed with sword, axe, dirk, arquebus, and cannon, and ventured into an unknown land inhabited by an alien people speaking an incomprehensible tongue, whose nobles sported head-dresses of brilliant quetzal feathers, whose warriors clad themselves in jaguar skins and painted skulls on their faces, whose men and women pierced and tattooed the flesh of their faces, elongated their skulls, and whose smiles showed teeth filed to a point and replaced with jade and turquoise.

As they made their way into the heart of this land they found themselves standing beside racks of skulls at the bases of vast stepped pyramids, watching as waterfalls of blood cascaded down the steps from priests wearing the flayed skins of victims offering up beating hearts torn from the chests of butchered men to the stone idols of savage gods whose fangs and claws glared out across the arid landscape. Surrounding them was a city of unparalleled magnificence, larger in scale than anything these men had ever beheld, of smooth white adobe walls shining in the merciless irradiance of the tropical sun, wide canals carrying the canoes of trade and strange tribute from every corner of the empire, its avenues thronged with richly attired citizens.

To be in the midst of such power and beauty, while to be confronted with such an incomprehensible scale of cruelty and bloodlust, led these men to come to the only possible conclusion: where their homeland was the land of God and His people, this, surely, must be the earthly domain of His adversary. The people around them were in thrall to Satan and his demons, and had constructed about them all the terrors and tortures of Hell.

And so those hard men from a hard people responded as such men must respond, when cut off from home, surrounded and outnumbered, exposed and alone in the heart of an evil the depth of which even their darkest nightmares and ugliest legends had never hinted might exist. They did the only thing they knew how to do.

They fought.

For gold, yes. For riches and for land and for glory. These were adventurers seeking fortune, after all.

But they also fought for souls.

They fought, desperately, to kill all they must, in order to save who they could, and wipe an abomination from the face of God’s Earth.

What people tend to forget is that the Conquistadors didn’t defeat the ruling Mexica tribe and wipe out its Aztec Empire by themselves. In fact, they were merely the iron core around which the native tribes who were savagely oppressed for over 100 years by the Mexica used to free themselves. It’s worth noting that the Mexica – a Nahuatl-speaking tribe – were themselves immigrants to the region.

Nahua peoples were not originally indigenous to central Mexico, but are instead descended from Chichimec peoples who migrated into the region from the north in the early 13th century.

Of course, given that most history is written by servants of the very Empire That Never Ended that was defeated at Tenochtitlan, it should not be surprising that they are now regarded as the villains of the piece.

UPDATE: One cannot truly grasp the extent of Aztec evil, or the extent to which the Conquistadors benefitted humanity, without learning about the philosophy and theology that underpinned Aztec society.

The Nahautl Weltanschauung was not a mindless or unreflective cruelty, but a sophisticated body of ideas and axioms, developed over centuries of debate and discord. In this way, we can approach the Aztec ‘mindset’ on its own terms and attempt to understand the metaphysical logic behind their civilisation.

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