Category: Uncategorized

The Irrelevance of Optics

Nora Hoppe makes some astute observations concerning the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine and the very poor level of analyses on both sides of the conflict, especially in light of the Russian withdrawal from Kherson:

When people speak of the “optics not looking good“… a film set immediately comes to my mind (I have worked in the film world for many years). And that immediately tells me how some people view this operation – as spectators: it has to have a good catchy script, suspense, uninterrupted action and – heaven forbid – no lulls! It has to ultimately supply a dopamine release. It has to have a “Dirty Harry Catharsis”.

This reminds me of similar reactions to the prisoner exchange in mid-September, where some saw it as a sign of weakness to even think of releasing Azov prisoners… or when the Chinese government did not deliver a dramatic retort when Pelosi went to do her skit in Taiwan.

What is at the base of these kinds of reactions? Why such impatience? Why such concern with “appearances”? Why such a need to satiate one’s own personal sense of justice and retribution? Does it have something to do with consuming? Especially in the western world one has become an addicted consumer of not only things but “experiences” that can be lived indirectly… We have become spectators… and our world has become a spectacle.

In his powerful masterpiece, “War and Peace”, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy depicts the Battle of Borodino as the greatest example of Russian patriotism… The collective engagement of all those involved in the Battle of Borodino is what ultimately attained the end result: despite all their losses and the sacrificial need to evacuate Moscow and burn its resources – in order to save the army and Russia, the Russians, achieved a moral victory in this battle… which ultimately led to the comprehensive victory of the Russian army and the entire campaign.

“Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davýdov family and to the crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodinó, Górki, Shevárdino, and Semënovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the dressing stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space of some three acres around. Crowds of men of various arms, wounded and unwounded, with frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozháysk from the one army and back to Valúevo from the other. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry, went forward led by their officers. Others held their ground and continued to fire.” [“War and Peace” – book 10; chapter 39]

General-in-chief Mikhail I. Kutuzov’s motto of “patience and time” allowed the Russian army to be victorious when he was able to embrace, as opposed to trying to know, the contingencies of war and prepare his soldiers as best he could for such battle. He knew that, by fighting the pitched battle and adopting the strategy of attrition warfare, he could now retreat with the Russian army still intact, lead its recovery, and force the weakened French forces to move even further from their bases of supply.

Retreat is not defeat. It can be the result of a defeat, or, as in the case of Kherson, where no significant combat even took place, it can be strategic maneuver. Or, as in the case of Borodino, it can be both.

Optics are an illusion. They are transient, easily manipulated, and are not reflective of the underlying reality. Those who concern themselves first and foremost and solely with optics are inevitably media creatures whose opinions are reliably wrong and assuredly irrelevant.

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Wakanda Never

The Dark Herald steels himself and reviews Wakanda Forever in substantial detail. It’s not an easy job, but someone has to do it.

I feel like such a chump.

I honestly thought Marvel was going to try for once. I have no idea what this unfounded optimism was based on.

Most of the praise for this film was written by shills before it hit the theaters. You can tell.

Although, I have seen legitimate good reviews for this movie, and they were entirely from fat Gamma Males. If you are a Fat Gamma Male or are simply a Gamma male who is fat in spirit, this is absolutely the film for you. You will cry like the bitches you were born to be throughout the whole thing.

If you are a Delta and above, you will curse the goddess of whatever fate that pronounced the doom upon your head that forced you into a theater to endure this impenetrable wall of tedium.

Fortunately, the movie theater I went to serves drastically overpriced beer. Bless you, oh Founder’s Dirty Bastard Scottish ale ABV 8.5%, I couldn’t have made it without you.

I strongly suspect this script was mostly finished before Chadwick Boseman died because he was mad as hell with Disney about something before he clocked out. It feels like it was extensively reworked. Some things just don’t fit like they should. It is possible that this script was originally supposed to take place during The Snap after T’Challa got zilched out for five years. That would make more sense than the complete lack of political adjustments being made when T’Challa was…let’s face facts…dead after Thanos’ little visit.

When T’Challa Blipped back in, he should have seen Gorilla Dude sitting on his throne being unhappy to see him. Although Gorilla Dude was undoubtedly less happy to be in this movie given that he was portrayed as being stupider than a gorilla.

Regardless, a story about his family adjusting to King T’Challa being gone would only make sense if they hadn’t already just gone through it. They are acting like they are mourning him for the first time and we all know he just spent five years being dead.

I would have to assume that you were hopelessly incompetent as a scriptwriter to have deliberately designed a story like this. This is not an assumption that I can casually dismiss with Marvel in the 2020s.

The oppressed minorities in this movie are constantly snarling about “colonizers.” WHY? Neither Wakanda nor the Sea-Mayans were ever colonized. And if the Wakandans were so morally outraged about the slave trade… Why. Didn’t. They. Do. Anything. About. It?

If Wakanda is three hundred years ahead of everyone else then I am pretty sure, my 18th-century ancestors would not have been willing to pursue the slave trade in face of 20th-century weaponry.

Read the whole thing there. In related news, the Devil Mouse is losing money. A LOT of money.

The Walt Disney Company is expected to make massive layoffs due to their poor financial outlook. As per a memo sent to top company execs last Friday and subsequently viewed by Variety, the House of Mouse will begin taking substantial measures to offset the company’s recent and abysmal Q4 financial losses.

This year, production spending for the Marvel Cinematic Universe hit an all-time high with both both Thor: Love & Thunder as well as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever hitting $250 million in costs before marketing – the highest such budgets for a non-Avengers film in the entire franchise. The massive costs of the film have driven Marvel Studios’ average break-even mark for those films to be an estimated $700-800 million dollars.

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They Never Said He Was Wrong

Isaiah Jackson: Look up the religious affiliation of everyone involved in the FTX collapse. Kanye was right.

CoinDesk: In response to a tweet from Isaiah Jackson that made an anti-Semitic, hurtful statement, CoinDesk is immediately terminating his contract for his weekly Community Crypto show on CoinDesk TV. Isaiah Jackson’s profoundly inflammatory comments are unacceptable and violate our values of mutual respect, diversity and inclusion. CoinDesk does not tolerate antisemitism and any other form of hate speech.

The Great Noticing continues apace. And as with the collapsing Second West’s economic war on the BRICSIA nations, the ADL and its corporate servitors are in the early stages of discovering that all of their sanctions and denunciations and terminations are going to leave them trying to survive alone, left to their own resources, outside of civilized society.

I mean, “since you hurt our feelings, we won’t let you use our fraudulent, worthless electric currency anymore” isn’t exactly an effective threat these days. Go ahead, take your punctured, deflated ball and go home.

It will be incredibly amusing when Kanye comes back strong with a Chinese or Qatari record deal.

UPDATE: As I said, the ADL is beginning to discover that in the post-Boomer era, no one they don’t actively control even pretends to believe anything they say anymore. The tweet is particularly ironic in light of the fact that the ADL was founded in 1913 to frame a black man for a Jewish man’s crimes.

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The Price of Social Justice Sensitivity

This example from Australia isn’t corporate cancer so much as fatal corporate plutonium irradiation.

Cheer Cheese used to be called Coon, named after its founder, Edward William Coon. “Coon” is slang for abo, so for years cultural marxist activists pressured Coon to change its name.

In 2020 Coon caved and changed its name to Cheer. And then for no reason at all, people stopped buying their products:

The Canadian dairy behind Cheers cheese will close one of its Australian factories and sack up to 75 workers after major financial losses and milk supply issues. Saputo has announced it will close its Maffra factory in the Gippsland region of Victoria, less than a decade after it bought back the brand in 2015. The company will also reduce the capacity of its bulk powders production facility in Leongatha, southeast of Melbourne and the cheese packaging facility at Mil-Lel in South Australia.

Saputo Australia reported a $54.4m annual loss for the 12 months to March 31 – a stark difference to the $30.6m net profit in 2021.

$81 million in profit vaporized in one year thanks to corporate convergence. At this point, Corporate Cancer is probably one of the ten most important business books ever published. It might even be top five. And yet, virtually no one in the global corpocracy has read it, so clueless executives will continue to listen to the blandishments of their converged Diversity and Human Resources departments and nuke their own company’s financials as a result.

What could it hurt, they said. No one could possibly mind, they said. It’s just a little name change, they said…

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Weekend Arktoons

CLASSIC BIBLE TALES Episode 81: Zacchaeus the Publican

INVASION ’55 Episode 18: This is Not a Drill

BEN GARRISON CLASSICS Episode 69: Gaslighting

FULL OF EYES Episode 11: Dark Night of the Soul

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 155: The Eald Tree

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 168: De Bait

There is also some major change that has come to the online comics world, as the market leader, Webtoons, has decided to essentially stop compensating its independent creators. Illustrating once more that Arktoons is inevitable.

I noticed there was a ton of screaming coming from the people who publish on Webtoons.com. Okay, there is always a lot of noise from that corner, but this seemed to be genuinely angry for once.

It turns out they had good reason.

Their payment program just went bye-bye.

A notice was sent by Webtoon, notifying its CANVAS Creators that the Creator Rewards Program will end in January 2023. A “tipping system” will replace the program, but the platform did not divulge details as to when they would implement the system or what it would look like, leaving many creators in a state of financial limbo. The announcement was met with anger and frustration by many creators whose income largely comes from the program.

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What Makes Boomers Special

It’s true that not ALL Boomers are like that. So let’s content ourselves with saying that a sufficient quantity of them are to safely predict what will be the average Boomer’s response to any and all subjects. Such as, for example, financial responsibility and debt relief, as Neon Revolt discovered recently when a Boomer explained to him why Boomers are special and nothing is ever their fault.

NEON REVOLT: Live feed of conservative voters voooting hardeeeeer, to make sure no one ever escapes student debt.

BOOMER: I’ve admired your research and papers, but am now a little confused about the attacks today. Are you comparing gambling seniors who have earned a living for 60 or more years with the student population having a right to free student loan payoffs? Boomers did pay off their student debt because we learned the values of responsibility and accountability. Granted, I don’t think enough people have woken up to the horrors that we will face in the near future, but I do know that even in my state, the turn out was beyond what anyone imagined. Boomers are well aware of the negative “social culture” that is being pushed today and are flabbergasted to say the least. Conservative boomers were hoodwinked into voting for the malevolent types like the Bushes. Thanks to people like you, we have done our research and learned many more truths. What makes boomers special is that we grew up in an age to be open to new ideas and to think for ourselves.

VP READER WHO IS PROBABLY GEN-X: I highly recommend doing a “boomer” keyword search of @voxday ‘s blog and reading the results voraciously. Your response, “Boomers did pay off their student debt because we learned the values of responsibility and accountability” is utterly clueless as is all too typical of the boomer mindset.

To be clear, not that it is at all relevant, but I have no student loans. I didn’t pursue some grievance-studies degree. I went to a fourth-tier university because it was affordable. I have no direct dog in this fight. So no ad-homs about me trying to get free gibs or some such nonsense.

To suggest that those who need debt relief somehow lack responsibility and accountability as you insinuate is asinine. The entire system is corrupt from top to bottom and bears little resemblance to the system in which you participated. 18-year olds from broken boomer families were bombarded with pro-college propaganda their entire lives to the point that they were led to believe any tuition cost is worth the benefit of a college “education”.

And this is even more absurd: “What makes boomers special is that we grew up in an age to be open to new ideas and to think for ourselves.” You’ve got to be kidding. What you interpret as thinking for yourself is more akin to discarding tried and true social and moral frameworks because psy-ops told you not to trust anyone over 30. Boomers as a cohort more think about themselves rather than for themselves.

Indeed, look at your comment in which you talk about how special you are as boomers for your openness to new ideas and how you learned responsibility and accountability. Boomers can’t help talking about themselves. I’ll never forget, for example, finding a very special book in a friends-of-the-library sale titled “Hipper Than Our Kids: A Rock and Roll Journal of the Baby Boom Generation”. Good parents don’t measure themselves against their kids; they measure their kids against themselves and strive mightily to raise people who are better, not “hipper” than themselves.

Prove me wrong about boomer self-absorption. Knee-jerk NAXALT responses are inelligible. Every boomer craps their pants when someone suggests ending the Social Security Ponzi scheme because “I paid into it, dammit!” Yeah, you paid into a fraudulent, generational Ponzi scheme, so muster up that legendary boomer accountability and responsibility and accept your losses and sunk costs instead of continuing to siphon from younger workers today.

Boomers shut down the economy and tried to force the clot-shot on everyone in order to protect themselves. Your job, boomers, was to make the necessary personal sacrifices to let the young live their lives and muster again that legendary boomer accountability and responsibility and take the extra precautions yourselves. Even the boomer President Orange Warp-Speed was in on the clot-shot hysteria.

Think for yourselves? If you’d done that, you wouldn’t have mass clot-shotted yourselves and cut yourselves off from supposed loved ones if they were unvaxxed. Responsibility and accountability? You would have quarantined yourselves to let the young get on with their lives.

Look, you’re probably a personable enough guy if we met one-on-one. You probably feel like you want to do the right thing. But that doesn’t negate the absurdities I just pointed out. Seriously, your generation is special in a bad way, not a good way. Just leave it at that, move on, and do your best to make restitution any way you can to the younger generations you let down.

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Castalia Library Clarification

Contra my previous post on the subject, the November-December book, #19 in the Castalia Library subscription, is THE LAWDOG FILES by Lawdog. This is actually two books in one, because it contains both THE LAWDOG FILES and THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES. And consequently, this means THE ARTS OF WAR, featuring an introduction by Alex Macris, will be the January-February book, #20 in the subscription.

I’m sorry for the confusion, but somehow I forgot that we’ve already printed the interiors of LAWDOG and so we can get it shipped sooner than we can ship THE ARTS. The site store has already been updated accordingly. But if, for whatever reason, you a) subscribed in the week between November 5 and November 12, and b) do not want LAWDOG, please email me and let me know which of the previously released books you would like instead.

Also, if you’re on Gab, please note that we’ve established a Library account there which you can follow for regular updates and announcements.

A critter well known to us in our town twisted off one evening and decided to add Attempted Murder to his curriculum vitae by hitting his lady du jour in the head a couple of times with a hatchet. Not one to leave a job half done, he dragged her out to the lake, wired her up to a cinderblock, and shoved her off into the water. Wonder of wonders, she survived. Even bigger wonder, she came into town and filed charges on her homicidal boyfriend. I had been out on a date and wandered back into town about the time that the search was really getting wound up. I’d no sooner walked through the door of the office when the sheriff hit me with three conflicting orders on where to go, one of which would require asbestos underoos. I decided that going back home to change out of my date clothes would be counterproductive, so I was digging through my locker trying to find my spare set of armor when the call came in. One of our local merchants had spotted the critter climbing in the back window of an abandoned building used for storage. Since the other two deputies were on the far side of the county, the sheriff made a posse of me and a luckless Highway Patrol Trooper who had come in for a coffee refill, and we went tear-arsing off to Downtown Bugscuffle. The abandoned building in question had, at one time, been a fairly swanky department store positioned on the prize end of Main Street. However, in the intervening hundred years or so, the entire block had fallen into disuse and disrepair, leaving the once-grand old building standing all alone, used only for storing various and sundry stuff that needed storing by the locals.

For those of you who don’t know how to search a large building with only three people, it’s really quite simple. One officer, whom we’ll call “the sheriff,” stands on one corner watching the front of the building and the west side. The second officer, or “random DPS trooper,” stands at the opposite corner of the building, watching the back of the building and the east side. The third officer, being the bravest and most handsome of the three, goes inside with the idea of flushing the critter out a window where he can be spotted by one of the other two and, hopefully, arrested.

Three guesses who got to go inside, and the first two don’t count. Let me tell you, that place was darker than the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat and stacked floor-to-ceiling with shelves. On those shelves were the collected knick-knacks of 20 years of Main Street stores. And not a lightbulb anywhere.

There I was, with a snubbie .357, a five-cell Maglight, and a Handi-Talkie, and only two hands. About the fourth time I tried to answer the sheriff’s “Have you got him yet?” radio call while trying to cover a suspicious patch of darkness with the .357 and juggling the Mag-Lite, I stopped in the feeble light of the moon shining down through a hole in the ceiling to make a few adjustments.

I was occupied with trying to figure out which I needed more, the Mag-lite or the Handi-talkie, when the SOB decided to jump me. I’m here to tell you, folks, things went rodeo from there. He lunged out of a shadow and tried to grab for my throat, and me, reacting totally out of instinct, I whacked him a good one across the forehead with the Maglight.

Bulb, batteries, and assorted electronic parts arced gracefully into the darkness. The critter took one step back and jumped at me again.

Things were not looking good in Dogville.

I held the snubbie back with my right hand, trying to keep it away from the critter’s grasp, and I tried to stiff-arm him away with my left when I stepped onto what was later found to be a D-cell battery from my Maglight.

Down I went. And the alleged aspiring axe murderer landed on top of me. Hoo boy. The gloves really came off then. We rolled around on the cold cement. I was hitting him in the head with the butt of my revolver and giving him elbow smashes to the jaw and brachial plexus, knee strikes, you name it, the whole enchilada. And he kept grabbing at my throat.

Finally, we rolled into a patch of moonlight, and I saw the bastard had a knife!

Folks, I hate knives. No, I really hate knives. He was on top of me, and he had to weigh three-hundred pounds, and that damn knife was coming down at me in slow motion at just about the same time the barrel of my snubbie rammed up under his chin.

I squeezed off two rounds.

The .357 magnum is a powerful round. Two of them, fired in quick succession, sufficed to blow the electronic brains and assorted stuffing of the Animatronic Life-Like Talking Santa Claus that formerly belonged to the local Thriftway halfway to Dodge City.

You don’t want to know what a couple of .357 rounds will do to hydraulics.

sigh

“The Good Shoot”, THE LAWDOG FILES, Castalia Library #19

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The Global Moral Compass

Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are putting on their little rhetorical soft-shoe routine in Jerusalem:

Dr. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, and owner of one of the most listened-to podcasts in the world said last night (Thursday), while he tearfully pleaded with those present in the International Convention Center in Jerusalem to protect the holy city.

Peterson said: “As Jews in Israel, are you telling the greatest story ever told? Well, you decide that by how you live. And what you do will affect the world – for one reason or another, it’s not so easy to understand, everyone looks here to see, well, how are you actually doing, under this tremendous assault of adversarial criticism, as this little, tiny people in the middle of no man’s land in some real sense, as a -what would you say – cardinal model of the nation-state and the city on the hill. You have a tremendous moral responsibility, like you have, perhaps, for your entire history, for reasons that are very difficult to understand, and I think it is true, in some real sense, that the fate of the world depends on the decisions of the people of Israel. Just as the fate of the world depends on the decision of every individual, so you make yourself a shining light on the hill, right? You attract people here because of what you’re capable of doing. You show the world what the holy city could look like. Because we need it. We need it, and it’s up to you to do it. Thank you very much.”

Ben Shapiro, the well-known American political commentator, and the owner of the media body The Daily Wire explained that in his eyes, Jerusalem, chosen especially by the two as the place where they will appear when they arrive together in Israel, is a global moral compass. “We have returned to an era in which divine rule does not come from above, not through laws, not through logic and not even through providing a sufficient explanation, but through force alone. When chaos ruled everything.”

You have to love the Petersonian bafflegarble. It just sounds so deeply sincere while simultaneously saying absolutely nothing. But when you’re relying upon a definitely-not-meth addict and a manufactured fast-talking media whore to define the moral compass for the world, you’re most definitely serving Satan in some capacity. As anyone who knows anything at all about the history of modern Israel is aware, despite being a remarkable success story, it provides absolutely no basis whatsoever for a functional stand-alone civilization, let alone a model for the nations.

Imagine the average U.S. Home Owner’s Association Karen, except the entire neighborhood is entirely comprised of male and female Karens. I am reliably informed, by Israelis, that is a reasonable analogy for daily life in Israel. Which is fine, if one happens to enjoy conversations about conversations, but sounds remarkably like Hell to less extroverted personalities. I’m all for the right of Israelis to live in Israel however they see fit, but let’s see it survive for a single decade – or even for a single year – without relying upon any outside funding or support, before holding it up as a successful model worthy of imitation elsewhere.

“We couldn’t think of a better opening for the new year than with an event like this, with the participation of our three greatest minds,” commented Amiad Cohen, CEO of Tikva Israel Fund.

So Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are as good as they’ve got? That sound you hear is Wang Hunin, laughing himself sick, in Chinese.

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