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The Least Shocking News Ever

Granted, most people probably haven’t even heard of him, but regardless, there isn’t a single person on the planet who is surprised by the dissolution of Neil Gaiman’s marriage.

Best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman and his singer wife Amanda Palmer have announced they are to divorce after their open marriage broke down.

The couple, married for 11 years, have been outspoken about their unusual set-up in the past, insisting that it works for them.

But in a joint statement published on their individual websites and social media, they said they have now made the ‘difficult decision’ to divorce.

If those two literally crazy godless freaks can’t make it, well, that says absolutely nothing about anyone else’s relationship. And no gamma, no matter how famous or successful, is ever going to retain the attention of a famewhore.

To be honest, I was under the impression they’d divorced years ago.

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Monday Arktoons

HYPERGAMOUSE Episode 89: Welcome Back

DEUS VULT Episode 12: A Maze of Horrors

MY SISTER SUPREMA Episode 30: High Places

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 165: Plots To Do

EVIL MONKEY MEMES Episode 61: Smoke ‘Em If You’ve Got ‘Em

SPACEKRAKEN Episode 40: Quantum Caffeination

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: MYSTERY Episode 50: Hit & Run: Miss & Die

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: WAR Episode 72: Knockout Blow

HOW TO SUCCEED LIKE A DARK LORD Episode 19: Where To Start?

It’s a big Monday on Arktoons. Both MY SISTER SUPREMA and HOW TO SUCCEED LIKE A DARK LORD are back, and today also marks the triumphant return of DEUS VULT, an original Arktoons comic from the leading Hispanic voice in comics, Jon Del Arroz.

DEUS VULT

Can Confirm

Max Blumenthal points out something I’d told everyone about 17 years ago, to little avail.

Neocon child actor Ben Shapiro has had his career astroturfed by corporate GOP powerbrokers, granting him notoriety and affluence while he trades on bogus antisemitism victimhood narratives.

He perfectly embodies the phenomenon I described and runs the same hustle as the ADL.

Max Blumenthal, 5 November 2022

Shapiro has never done anything more than read someone else’s talking points, and he’s been doing it since he was in junior high. He’s even more of a fraud than Jordan Peterson.

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USA: 1776 – 2032

Financial analyst Martin Armstrong calculates an even earlier end to the political entity described as the United States of America as a result of all major elections being fraudulent and the collapse of the international dollar system:

Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil is proof that all major elections are now being stolen, according to Armstrong, in a bid to eliminate any world leader who stands against the regime agenda.

“This is a worldwide effort,” he said. “They had to get rid of Trump. The other one who stood in their way is Bolsonaro. Then there is Putin (Russia) and Xi Jinping (China). I think you are going to have historians look back at this 50 years from now, and they will call this period ‘The Climate Change Wars’… They are trying to take down as much oil energy capacity as possible.”

Armstrong says his computer modeling is showing huge domestic unrest in the United States next year, and that conditions are ripe for “a rocket launch for volatility and civil unrest.”

“The United States will not exist after 2032. After 2028 and 2029, we are going to have to redesign a government from scratch. America is being destroyed,” he explicitly warned.

On the financial front, Armstrong asserts, “The whole monetary system as we know it is collapsing. That was what the bond crisis in the UK was about.”

Just to forestall the inevitable question, I’ll stick by my 2033 estimate. But I do think it is informative to note that the perceptions of that 2004 prediction have gone from a) thinking that I’m totally insane to b) thinking that I’m pessimistic, but maybe onto something to c) thinking that I’m optimistic to d) professionals producing concrete estimates of an even earlier timeframe for the collapse.

To paraphrase an old chestnut, the United States of America are no longer united, nor sovereign, nor American.

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The Free Money Stopped

Now Facebook is planning to fire even more workers than Twitter did:

Just over a week ago, Meta CFO Dave Wehner confidently stated that the not-so-giant tech firm will basically freeze headcount and limit new hiring…

With the shares down 36% since then (and is down over 70% this year), something has apparently changed extremely fast.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to people familiar with the matter, Meta is planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week. As of the last earnings, Meta had over 87,000 employees (and has never seen a quarterly decline in headcount in its 18 year history)…

The WSJ sources say that layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, with company officials having already told employees to cancel non-essential travel beginning this week.

Many thousands….

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The Problem Remains

Elon Musk cut Twitter’s staff in half, but didn’t remove the corporate cancer:

Social media platform Twitter has made good on its warnings and slashed 50% of its workforce, the company’s head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth announced in a tweet on Saturday.

“Yesterday’s reduction in force affected approximately 15% of our Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% cuts company-wide), with our front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact,” he tweeted, emphasizing that the team responsible for monitoring and preventing misinformation and harmful content on the platform has remained largely intact.

According to Roth, battling misinformation on the platform will remain a top priority for Twitter. The same goal was emphasized by the company’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, in his own tweet.

Trust not in ticket-taking billionaires. No matter what they say, no matter what they do, they aren’t on your side. An evil that is more efficient is still evil.

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Winds of Change

I don’t think The Scorpions will be writing any ballads if the rumors that Germany is attempting to break free of US hegemony are true:

Solid German business sources completely contradict the “message” delivered by the German Council on Foreign Relations on the trip to China. According to these sources, the Scholz caravan went to Beijing to essentially lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger.

This is – literally – as explosive, geopolitically and geoeconomically, as it gets. As I pointed out in one of my previous columns, Berlin and Moscow were keeping a secret communication back channel – via business interlocutors – right to the minute the usual suspects, in desperation, decided to blow up the Nord Streams.

Cue to the now-notorious SMS from Liz Truss’s iPhone to Tony Blinken, one minute after the explosions: “It’s done.”

There’s more: the Scholz caravan may be trying to start a long and convoluted process of eventually replacing the US with China as a key ally. One should never forget that the top BRI trade/connectivity terminal in the EU is Germany (the Ruhr valley).

According to one of the sources, “if this effort is successful, then Germany, China and Russia can ally themselves together and drive the US out of Europe.”

Another source provided the cherry on the cake: “Olaf Scholz is being accompanied on this trip by German industrialists who actually control Germany and are not going to sit back watching themselves being destroyed.”

The borders of the Great Bifurcation may not be what the rulers of the neo-liberal world order believe they are going to be. They’ve already discovered that 87 percent of the global population are on the other side of the fence, and that 87 percent may be growing as Europeans realize that their US-imposed “freedom and democracy” is actually nothing more than a long-term societal suicide pact.

The remarkable truth of the matter is that it would probably be less economically painful for Europe to cut ties with the USA than with both Russian and China. So, the real question would appear to be how intent is China on undercutting the global dominance of the USA.

I wish it were needless to say that a peaceful transition to a bifurcated global economy would be a much better outcome than Europe needing the Sino-Russian Alliance to militarily defeat the USA in order to remove Europe’s subordination to the globalist elite. But history suggests that at least some amount of direct war between the forces of the Nationalist Alliance and the US military in service to the Neo-Liberal Empire will be necessary before the latter accepts the situation.

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The Arts of War

The November-December January-February book for the Castalia Library subscription is THE ARTS OF WAR, featuring an introduction by Alexander Macris, a game designer who attended West Point. And yes, it will contain Sun Tzu, but more importantly, it will include works of major military history significance with which you are almost certainly unfamiliar, such as Frontinus, Vegetius, Maurice, and others.

As our ace proofreader noted after completing his read-through and cleanup of Sextus Frontinus:

It really bothers me that I was never taught works like this. I read Sun Tzu, Mushashi, and other Asians on the art of war. But Frontinus and these others are our heritage, and I never even heard of them until now, and that’s wrong. Think about how cool history class would have been if we had read even snippets of these books.

Arts of Dark and Light readers may wish to note that it is the works of Frontinus to which Marcus Valerius repeatedly refers throughout the series. In my opinion, THE ARTS OF WAR is about as close to a must-read as the Castalia Library is ever likely to feature, and I highly recommend subscribing to the Library if you have not already done so.

In other Library-related news:

  • The November-December subscription book is THE LAWDOG FILES.
  • The Annual Castalia Library subscription now includes a complimentary edition of DISCOURSES by Machiavelli. Current subscribers who renew their subscription may substitute the Library edition of their choice so long as it is in stock. Subscribers who wish to pay by wire transfer instead of credit card should email me directly for payment information.
  • The Annual Libraria Castalia subscription now includes a copy of THE DIVINE COMEDY by Dante. Current subscribers who renew or upgrade their subscription may substitute the Libraria/Library edition of their choice so long as it is in stock. Subscribers who wish to pay by wire transfer instead of credit card should email me directly for payment information.
  • The next books scheduled to ship are a) Vols. 1-6 of the leather Castalia Library Junior Classics later this month and b) A THRONE OF BONES Vols I and II on December 16. There are still 23 Junior Classic sets available.
  • We are currently in communication with a major European author concerning the production of a leather-bound line of his works. This may or may not be done under the Castalia Library imprint.
  • A major step forward concerning the Swiss bindery was completed yesterday, as we received an important approval from the relevant government authority.
  • The MIDNIGHT’S WAR crowdfund will include a leatherbound edition of the omnibus.
  • We are currently focused on getting all four books of the INCERTO set by NN Taleb into production.

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