#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
SAVAGE MEMES Episode 159: Market Campaign
THE STRANDED Episode 38: Ambush
CHESTER AND FRIENDS Episode 15: Think You’re Safe
SOMETHING BIG Episode 58: Unwelcome Guests
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 139: Flesh Prints and Bye, Lair
WARDOGS INC. Episode 5: You’re All Invited
Unlike Tha Rangz o’ Powah, which apparently are not being watched anywhere nearly as much as Amazon is trying to claim. The Dark Herald busts the Bezos machine on the Arkhaven blog.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “numbers don’t lie?”
Accountants say that all the time… When they want a good laugh.
Amazon is proudly claiming they have 25 million views for Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, on its very first day of streaming. That is a nice ROUND number, isn’t it?
“25 million people viewed it.” Always be careful with the exact wording.
We can start with I don’t believe it for a second.
Warner Brothers is, for their part, claiming 25 million for the first week of House of the Dragon, and Warner Brothers put the first episode up for free on YouTube. Realistically, House of the Dragon has had way better public reception than Rings of Power. And ain’t it funny that Amazon had the exact same ROUND number?
So, where did this massive overnight number come from?
Well, it came from Amazon.com.
UPDATE: OWWwwww! Samba.TV has released its metrics on Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and they are b-a-a-d. Amazon was claiming a huge number for it’s first day. Samba.TV uses the first three days. On its first three days, the Rings of Power only got 1.8 million US views.
I didn’t buy the 25 million number myself. But an average of 600k/day? I also wasn’t expecting anything that cataclysmic. This looks like it is going to be a downright proverbial failure.
Was talking to [REDACTED] Bear at the festival and he said most conservatives are doing it, but Gavin is the one who was caught. Apparently Tim Pool pulled the same stunt, but years ago, and while he was “being detained” the YouTube livestream was left on for hours and holds some kind of record for the amount of money collected from superchats in one stream.
Just to be clear, the police do not simply respond blindly to calls as if they have no idea that they have ever been there before. Most public figures at genuine risk of being SWATted have already alerted the local police to the possibility, their address is already known to the police and flagged accordingly, and any attempt at SWATting will result in a telephone call, or at most, a visit from a squad car to confirm that everything is all right rather than an emergency response.
Anyone who gets SWATted multiple times is almost certainly faking it.
UPDATE: Apparently Mr. McInnes is on work release from his secret FBI prison.
The numbers are not looking good for Europe.
We got a very shocking sense of the staggering numbers involved in the existential, crippling European crisis earlier today when Norwegian energy giant Equinor echoed what Zoltan Pozsar said in March, warning that “European energy trading risks grinding to a halt unless governments extend liquidity to cover margin calls of at least $1.5 trillion.” As Bloomberg put it, in its best non-Zoltan imitation, “aside from inflating bills and fanning inflation, the biggest energy crisis in decades is sucking up capital to guarantee trades amid wild price swings. That’s putting pressure on European Union officials to intervene to prevent energy markets from stalling.”
“Liquidity support is going to be needed,” Helge Haugane, Equinor’s senior vice president for gas and power, said in an interview. The issue is focused on derivatives trading, while the physical market is functioning, he said, adding that the company’s estimate for $1.5 trillion to prop up so-called paper trading is “conservative.””
In other words, massive amounts of newly-printed funding (because with yields blowing up, Europe’s fiscal stimulus will be over before it started unless central banks step in and backstop the latest energy hyperinflation bailout plans) will be required to avert an energy disaster. Alas, the final number will be even more massive, because overnight Goldman’s research team published a must read note (available to pro subs), in which the bank looked at the scale of the energy bill challenge, potential European government responses and industry implications, and quantified the total damage. The numbers are staggering:
According to Goldman, Italian household energy bills could rise from ~€150 to ~€600 in 2023. Some more details:
“For most families and industrial customers, energy bills are renegotiated every twelve months; on our estimates, energy bills for most consumers will peak this winter. We estimate a c.€500/month cost for power and gas currently, implying a c.200% increase vs. 2021 when average bills were c.€160/month. Energy bills could approach €600/month in a zero flows (from Russia) scenario we believe. “
The trigger for this exponential surge in costs: since January 2020, 1-year forward gas and power prices – usually the reference when signing new energy supply contracts for families or industrial customers – have each increased by more than 13x. The following exhibit shows this evolution, rebased to 100.
For Europe as a whole, this would be equivalent to a near €2 TRILLION increase in gas and power spending (equivalent to c.15% of GDP)… the math is simple: Europe can’t print more nat gas, oil, coal, etc, so one way or another, it will have to offset the surge in costs, first in commodities and then in all downstream chains, which in the very near future will mean governments will soon be subsidizing Europe’s cost of living as the alternative is a violent revolution.
This is not an exaggeration. I’ve heard of forward contracts with increases as much as 16x from very reliable sources, and that’s in Switzerland, which is in better shape, electricity-wise, than the UK, Germany, or France.
But the choice between inflationary subsidies and violent revolution is a false binary. There is a third and much better option.
It’s time for nationalist leaders to come forward, replace the failed globalists in the various European governments, end their retarded and self-destructive alliances with Ukraine, and make a peace with Russia that will inspire it to turn on both Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2. The Europeans are going to have to surrender to Russia sooner or later, so they might as well do it sooner and minimize the economic consequences to their people and to their economies.
I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to this one.
Hey, if you don’t have a problem with ballpoint pens in 1941 and a teenage girl writing copiously about middle-aged male sexual fetishes on MySpace, then a simple change of skin color shouldn’t be a problem for you either. Also, Mary Beard was the historical consultant, and you know you can trust her. Checkmate, haters.
MIDNIGHT’S WAR Episode 46: Just One Question
STONETOSS Episode 119: Phony
BEN GARRISON Episode 69: Woke Military
VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 132: Crookthorn Forest
EVIL MONKEY MEMES Episode 51: Select All Squares With…
CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON Episode 71: Last Game?
Booster Patrol’s latest recording, THA RANGZ OF POWER, is an epic lesson on why one would do well to avoid watching Amazon’s The Rings of Power. The Dark Herald further explains:
Some things get a little better when you think about them for a little bit.
This ain’t one of them.
Whenever you are surveying the smoldering wreckage of a horrifying man-made disaster, the same questions are always asked. How was this allowed to happen? Wasn’t it someone’s job to prevent this? Was it a deliberate act of sabotage? How is the richest man in the world this fucking stupid?
These are all valid, simple questions with complicated answers. Which I shall endeavor to answer for you…
The secret to the Bad Reboot school’s success is a combination of an established reputation for success, superb salesmanship (I have to give them that), and a mastery of studio politics as well as fashionable politics in general. Additionally, Bad Reboot skillfully manages its relations with the press. Finally, the disciples of Abrams rigidly follow their business model and always get out before the burning building collapses on top of them. If they were trying to make anything good, I could admire the professionalism.
The fundamental problem is that they don’t know how to make anything good. It’s like cotton candy, it looks big and smells great but once you take a bite the only thing you have in your mouth is empty sugary grit. If you are only trying to grind out pablum like summer tentpoles then that is good enough. Honestly, most fandoms really do only want that, just consume product and get excited for the next project.
Problem.
Tolkien fans aren’t remotely like that. The magnitude of this disaster would have been manageable if they had just invented their own IP that kind of looked like Tolkien. But as it is, they put The Lord of the Rings label on this, so that was the standard they would have to meet.
Ha! Ha! Ha! (gasp…wheez…gasp) Ha! Ha! Ha! (wipes eyes)
Expecting Bad Reboot alumni J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay to meet that standard is like expecting Ariana Grande to win the Noble Prize for Physics. Theoretically possible… But not likely.
Tolkien fans have been arguing over the same five books for better than half a century. The body of scholarly work based on it is gigantic. It is the entire bedrock of modern fantasy. Every fantasy writer has to consciously adopt or reject the Lord of the Rings, but you can’t possibly ignore it. There are frequent and violent arguments over what exactly the Valar were. What was the nature of Tom Bombadil? How much of the legendarium was adopted from Celtic myth? This was not the kind of fandom that you can use as a base for a popcorn burner. And there was no way in hell a couple of graduates from the Bad Reboot school of non-writing were going to be able to fake their way through a five-year series. This project was doomed from its inception.
There were several people at Amazon whose jobs it was to prevent something this bad from happening. As near as I can tell, all of them were circumvented. There is no way in hell these scripts looked good.
This may be the best fan comment that has surfaced yet:
I liked the bit where Galadriel said “I’m gonna fight Sauron alone! and then went home instead. And then she said “I’m never going to give up fighting Sauron!” but then decided to go on holiday. But just before she got on holiday she decided to drown herself instead because her brother said something sad to her when she was a child.
And they know it, as demonstrated by a review of Klaus Schwab’s book, The Great Reset:
The Great Reset is not a book that begins with a fully-formed argument, which it seeks to articulate through successive proofs. Nor is it a book that finds its purpose along the way. It is of that still more miserable variety, that is always on the verge of discovering what it means to say, but can never quite get there. I have a vision of Schwab in his study, typing furiously with extended index fingers like a bicephalic chicken, marshalling all his meagre powers to reconstruct the very unexpected pandemic in which he found himself, such that it might better resemble the kind of global ESG stakeholder capitalism woo crisis that Schwab would really prefer to pronounce upon. “We must get back to my pet themes” is what Schwab is trying to tell us in The Great Reset. It is above all a childish book…
An interesting point is how much pessimism Schwab harbours about the future prospects of globalisation. He writes that “hyperglobalization” (whatever that is) “has lost all its political and social capital and defending it is no longer politically tenable” (p. 112f.), and that even normal globalisation is in decline. Thus politicians must strive “to manage” its “retreat” by making it “more inclusive and equitable,” as well as “sustainable, both socially and environmentally” (p. 112). These are curious admissions, and if you take them at face value, you’d begin to think that the Davos set really do feel under threat, especially from the left, and no small part of their political programme represents some kind of confused effort to appease imagined opponents.
Schwab writes that the pandemic happened because of “a vacuum in global governance” and because “international cooperation was non-existent or limited” (p. 115). He reveals a real childish yearning for “global governance” (p. 118), lest we end up “in a world in which nobody is in charge” (p. 114). The undercurrent of fear returns, and the pandemic recedes from view as a mere example of the kinds of disasters that will befall us if the globalist institutions fail:
There is no time to waste. If we do not improve the functioning and legitimacy of our global institutions, the world will soon become unmanageable and very dangerous. There cannot be a lasting recovery without a global strategic framework of governance… The more nationalism and isolationism pervade the global polity, the greater the chance that global governance loses its relevance. (p. 113)
Kissinger, being rather smarter than Schwab, recognized the historical trend years ago. But the vacuity of Schwab and his anti-intellectual cohorts should not be terrifying. Because it’s now manifestly obvious that one has to be more than a little vacuous in order to cling to the retarded idea that centralization and globalization is going to make anything better for the human race.
The globalists have nothing going for them except inertia, credit money, and influence. And history clearly demonstrates that such things will not be sufficient for them to withstand the rising power, both material and intellectual, of the nations.
HYPERGAMOUSE Episode 72: So Superficial
REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 41: Terrible Passions
SPACEKRAKEN Episode 27: Chaos Incorporated
CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: WAR Episode 64: Terror of the Tank Men
HOW TO SUCCEED LIKE A DARK LORD Episode 16: Spring Break
We’ve been warned, repeatedly. Now even the Russians are warning us.
The world is about to experience major turbulence as a result of illogical moves by Western nations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.
“Most likely, a huge global storm is starting,” Peskov warned in an interview with Tass on Monday.
“In many ways, there are objective reasons for that, but there are also subjective reasons for this beginning storm, which are linked to absolutely illogical and often absurd decisions and actions of the authorities in the US, Europe, the EU and individual European countries,” he said.
The sanctions imposed by the US, the EU and some other nations on Russia over its military operation in Ukraine have backfired causing a spike in energy prices and record inflation across the West.
While the rise in electricity prices is still largely speculative, they will be economically catastrophic even if they are only as bad as the politicians are openly discussing in the media. Behind doors, the situation may be considerably worse; whereas price rises of 20 to 40 percent have already been announced, the real range of future contracts is from 10x to 16x.
This is far more than the vast majority of small businesses can afford, which means that many of them are not going to survive the winter. If Britain is any guide, more than a few will not survive the autumn. And the Russians are not about to let the globalist governments of the Were-West off the hook either.
Russia’s gas supplies to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline will not resume in full until the “collective west” lifts sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has said.