What a very odd thing to do

People lose security clearances for various reasons all the time. Why does it concern so many people that a retired CIA Director lost his clearance, and why would a Navy admiral care so much that he demands his own security clearance be revoked too? An admiral tied to Hillary Clinton, no less….

Navy Admiral William McRaven, a man whose name was once floated as a possible vice-presidential pick for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, issued a direct challenge to President Donald Trump on Thursday: “Revoke my security clearance too, Mr. President.” He made the demand in response to President Trump’s decision to revoke the clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan on Wednesday.

I suspect there are more than a few skeletons rattling around inside Mr. McRaven’s closet.

The enemies of the people unite

The enemies of the American people mass-collude in a futile attempt to convince the people that those who relentlessly attack them and their interests is not their enemy:

US newspapers big and small hit back Thursday at Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on the news media with a coordinated campaign of editorials, triggering a fresh tirade from the president on Twitter.

Leading the charge was The Boston Globe, which had called for the drive highlighting the importance of a free press, accompanied by the hashtag #EnemyOfNone.

More than 300 newspapers around the country joined the effort.

“Today in the United States we have a president who has created a mantra that members of the media who do not blatantly support the policies of the current US administration are the ‘enemy of the people,’” the Globe editorial said.

The press is not free. It is owned by six corporations, none of them owned or controlled by Americans. And the press is most certainly opposed to the interests of the American people, as its monolithic endorsement of Hillary Clinton and the invasion of the United States by foreigners demonstrates.

The media is the enemy of the American people. There is absolutely no question about it.

UPDATE: Apparently the Senate is too. This is not a surprise.

The Senate on Thursday approved a resolution asserting that the press is “not the enemy of the people,” as President Trump has claimed, and condemning Trump’s ongoing attacks against reporters. The Senate quickly considered the resolution from Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and passed it unanimously in a voice vote.

The President should hold a ceremony vetoing their resolution.

Who wants to be Apple’s landlord?

If you’ve got $200, that’s all it takes:

US tech giant Apple became the first company to reach an historic $1 trillion in market capitalization recently, but it still doesn’t like paying more taxes, according to recent reports. Apple has been at odds with California’s Santa Clara County over the value of its property. As the local newspaper San Francisco Chronicle reports, Apple evaluates a cluster of properties around its brand-new Apple Park at just $200. Santa Clara County’s tax assessor says the properties are worth $1 billion.

In California, businesses and individuals pay a property tax. It is calculated according to the value of the land and the buildings on it. Since 2004, Apple has appealed tax assessments in Santa Clara County 489 times. In total, according to the newspaper’s report, the tech giant has disputed taxes on $8.5 billion in property value. Apple is the largest taxpayer in the county, paying $56 million in tax year 2017-18.

It’s a problem that is easily solved with a state law. If a publicly traded corporation values its property at a certain amount, then anyone can purchase it for three times that amount.

Apple really is an awful company.

Darkstream: Two strikes against Stefan

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

What we have to understand is that if Pewdiepie is not important enough to the platform providers,  nobody is. If Alex Jones is not important enough to the platform providers, nobody is, and that means we have to always be ready to build the platform. We have to build our own platforms, and now maybe I made a mistake a couple years ago in focusing first on replacing Wikipedia. You know, I always have a strategic perspective, maybe sometimes it’s an excessively strategic perspective, but we chose to do Infogalactic first because it was one of the more challenging ones. Twitter, one of these will pop up left right and center. YouTube is difficult because of the way that it’s run at such huge losses. Facebook, you know, we figured it’s doable but a lot of people were also attempting to do that

Now if you look at Oneway, you can see how easy it was for them to have a Twitter functionality yeah there was Freez Peach there was all kinds of stuff, so with Infogalactic what was important to us was making sure that people had a non-SJW-controlled information source and now we do. We haven’t started really pushing it yet because our functionality is not yet different, but the important thing is you need to always be ready. The Darkstream is already on BitChute; most of the the archived videos are already on BitChute, we only really bothered with the last two months or so, you know, that’s kind of when we found our our groove as it were, but we’re ready.

 If you’re listening to this and you’re not subscribed to the BitChute Darkstream channel I would encourage you to do so, because we don’t know how long YouTube is going to permit me to stream. They might leave me indefinitely, you know, I have a small audience and it’s quite possible that they’ve decided the press attention that it would give me would actually be worse than just letting me continue with my three, six, ten thousand whatever subscribers. It’s very clear that they are primarily concerned about the people with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, for the most part, but this thought policing is not going to stop!

There are some who are theorizing that this is only taking place in preparation for the midterm elections, and that once the midterm elections are done and it’s not possible for the big social media influencers to affect the election in any way that they’ll ease up and that sort of thing, but the reality is that they’re not going to ease up. Because they’re going to be very disappointed when the long-prophesied Blue Wave does not arrive, when they realize that the 2018 elections indicate that Trump has overperformed and is almost certain to be reelected in 2020. I believe that we are  going to see the SJW-controlled Left go completely berserk after their  disappointment from the 2018 midterms, and so this isn’t going to stop, and it’s important – I stress again, it’s important – for the Right to be thinking actively in terms of building and supporting infrastructure.

Mailvox: Saint Gamma

The email I received this morning was truly astonishing. It’s not the only one like this I’ve ever received, but I thought it was remarkable for its combination of clueless narcissism and Christian virtue-signaling.

Hello Vox. I found your utube channel and find you very interesting. I like what you have been saying in your podcasts. I will tell you more about me but first I have two questions I must ask you. Please give at least a paragraph long answers to each of my questions.

 1. Who do you say Jesus Christ is?
 2. What did he do at the Cross of Calvary and why?

I think If you don’t get Jesus right, then nothing you say about any other subject matter can be trusted.  I guess that is my litmus test of truth and trust. I will reply after your answer.

My response: I’m not a performing monkey. I’m not looking for a reply from you nor do I want to hear any more from you. 

Let’s just say that was neither the first nor the second nor the third response that immediately sprang to mind, none of which were printable. Seriously, what is wrong with some people? If my responses, public or private, occasionally strike you as curt or even rude, I hope you will keep in mind that you don’t see even one-twentieth of the emails I receive.

Needless to say, he completely ignored my explicit lack of interest in hearing from him and sent a subsequent email:

I think you just answered my question. You are not a Christain, because any true believer in Christ would not hesitate to answer, or not know the answers to my simple questions. You are super smart, yes, but you are lost my friend. You may have been burned by Religion, that is man made and sucks, but you do not have a relationship with the son of God, Jesus Christ. If your soul has not already been corrupted by the evil one, I challenge you to go some place alone in the wild for days, like your American Indian ancestors did on their vision quest, and pray, scream and challenge the God of the Holy Bible to use his Holy Spirit to reveal the truth of the saving grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Are you man enough to do that? My message has been passed to you. My work done. You will not hear from me again.

Anyone want to take that bet?

Swan Knight Saga decision

The vote of the Swan Knight Saga backers went as follows:

  • 198: Publish the comics however you think best
  • 168: Publish the black-and-white comics
  • 058: Publish the stylized color comics
  • 004: Cancel the project and return as much of the money as possible

So, we are going to publish them in black-and-white inkwash, which may actually turn out to be a variegated color wash that should look really great. An example of the selected artist’s work in this format can be seen below, and I’m pleased to be able to announce that he enthusiastically agreed to come on board for the project after reading the script for the first issue. This option will also permit us to get the covers properly colored within the original budget.

I very much appreciate those who offered to increase their backing in order to expand our options, but we would definitely prefer that support go to the upcoming AH:Q campaign. We have already offered refunds to the four backers who voted to cancel the project. Will Caligan is quite pleased with the solution to the situation; he very much appreciates your support and Dark Legion will soon be publishing several of his projects.

Since we’re talking comics, there is some reason to suspect that the smaller form factor which has proved popular with readers since it allows us to hit the $2.99 mark may be difficult for comic book stores to carry. While the readers love the lower price, the comic book stores actually tend to prefer higher prices since it increases their margin. We are therefore considering adding 7×10 premium versions with alternate covers for the Alt-Hero line. If you’re an Arkhaven reader, would you prefer a) $3.99 premium with the same 50-lb paper or b) $4.99 premium with 70-lb paper? The $2.99 versions will still be produced either way.

Also, FYI, the gold logo print edition of Alt-Hero #3 will be available from Arkhaven Direct later today.

Pizza and the Pope

Speaking of pedophilia scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, thanks to Q, the Infinite Intelligence Agency has finally managed to make the connection between the notorious Podesta paintings from Pizzagate and the Vanderbilt family, as well as a very strange sartorial connection to the Pope. There is also a political angle:

Now we know, thanks to WikiLeaks. Two batches of documents — one leaked this month, one in August — show that top-level Democrats and their allies have successfully infiltrated the Catholic Church in order to advance their social agenda. The two key players are John Podesta, chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign, who is an extremely liberal Catholic, and George Soros, the left-wing billionaire philanthropist, who is an atheist.

In August, WikiLeaks published a report by Soros’s US Opportunities Fund on the $650,000 it spent on Pope Francis’s 2015 visit to the United States. Working through left-wing faith groups, the Fund planned a ‘buy-in of individual bishops to more publicly voice support of economic and racial justice messages in order to begin to create a critical mass of bishops who are aligned with the Pope’. For ‘aligned with the Pope’, read ‘Democrat-friendly’. The Fund wants to tilt the balance of power against conservative prelates such as Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia. Chaput is indeed out of favour with Francis — but he’s even more disliked by Democrats, having just denounced Hillary Clinton as a ‘scheming, robotic liar’ and Podesta’s Catholics United as ‘creatures of a political machine’.

It’s apparently weirder and worse than that, though. Much weirder. And much worse. It certainly explains the uncharacteristic implacability of the God-Emperor and the entire team around him as well as the bizarre determination of the media to claim Pizzagate was “debunked” from the very start, though.

I wonder how many of those bishops “aligned with the Pope” are going to turn up in reports similar to the one recently released by the state grand jury in Pennsylvania? Meanwhile, silence reigns at the Vatican:

The Vatican has declined to respond to an explosive grand jury report detailing decades of sexual abuse and cover-ups by priests and bishops in Pennsylvania, refusing even to say whether church officials in Rome have read the damaging documents.

“We have no comment at this time,” Paloma Ovejero, deputy director of the Vatican’s press office, said Wednesday.

But in the United States and elsewhere, pressure is mounting on Pope Francis to address a rapidly escalating crisis that has spread across several continents, from Australia to Latin America. In the United States, both liberal and conservative Catholics displayed a rare unity in pressing the Pope to respond to the Pennsylvania grand jury report.

Strike one, strike two…

I’m sorry, but I simply can’t find the energy to pretend to be either surprised or outraged when SJWs do what SJWs do whenever they have amenable authorities to whom they can appeal. It isn’t as if we haven’t been amply warned, after all. Stefan Molyneux is the latest target:

Within 24 hours, my @YouTube channel has received two community guidelines strikes – likely as a result of a mass flagging campaign – and is now on the verge of total deletion. Please respectfully contact @TeamYouTube and alert them to this injustice.

Team YouTube is not concerned with justice. Team YouTube is concerned with victory. This is why the Right has to build its own platforms. The bigger and more successful you are, the more the Left wants you off their platforms, regardless of what you have done or not done. No amount of rhetoric and emotional pleading is going to dissuade them.

Almost immediately after returning from a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand, and after getting my final all-clear cancer checkup, the YouTube strikes against Freedomain Radio – the world’s most popular philosophy show – began.

Apparently, I had “violated community standards” by publishing a short video last year entitled “The Death of White Males,” which discussed the decline in life expectancy for white males, in part due to the opioid crisis.

The next day, Wednesday, I awoke to another strike, this time for a discussion I had with UK journalist Katie Hopkins. Now, as I write this, two other Freedomain Radio videos have been set to ‘Private’ by YouTube and locked. One was called “What Pisses Me Off About the YouTube Child Sex Scandal,” and the other was a chat I had with Tom Golden, a psychotherapist and the author of “Helping Mothers be Closer to Their Sons: Understanding the Unique World of Boys” and “The Way Men Heal.”

I have poured 12 years of my life into my YouTube channel, with thousands of videos, hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and hundreds of millions of views. In particular, I am proud of promoting Peaceful Parenting, convincing countless parents to stop hitting their children, and start negotiating instead.

As it stands, I am unable to publish to YouTube for two weeks. Today my channel hangs by a thread and could be destroyed at any moment. Whether it survives is not up to me, since I have always striven to tell the truth. The future of philosophy is now up to YouTube, and it is up to you.

You can help me, Freedomain Radio, philosophy and the world by letting YouTube know what you think. Please do so firmly, politely and respectfully by contacting @TeamYouTube.

This is a time for community action. YouTube is making a terrible mistake, but it’s not too late to save philosophy. Please act now – tomorrow may be too late.

If the future of philosophy is up to YouTube, then philosophy is dead. Cerno is right.

Big channels with massive videos are under target. It never stops with Alex and it won’t stop with Stefan. People are going to start flagging left wing channels, too. The new form of communication in America isn’t sharing ideas, it’s spending time shutting down others.

Warning the Left about consequences never being the same has never worked. The answer is the same as it was in 2015: build your own platforms and keep the SJWs out. That’s why the Darkstream and Voxiversity are both available on BitChute.

This is why the big guns of the Right should have been participating in building up the alternative institutions rather than focusing on expanding their reach on compromised platforms.

A historic moment

Minnesota functionally elects the first-ever Somali bigamist to Congress:

MINNEAPOLIS — The nation’s first Somali-American state legislator is poised to set the same historic mark in Congress after winning a crowded Democratic primary in Minnesota to replace Rep. Keith Ellison.

State Rep. Ilhan Omar captured the Democratic nomination for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District on Tuesday, defeating a former Minnesota House Speaker and longtime state senator. It puts another notch in the meteoric political rise of a woman who spent her childhood in a Kenyan refugee camp and immigrated to the United States at age 12 before winning her seat in the state House in 2016.

A Republican has not won the heavily liberal Minneapolis-area congressional seat in many decades, making Tuesday’s primary the de facto election. The seat opened when Ellison launched a last-minute bid for attorney general, leaving the seat after six terms.

Well, it’s not like all those nice Scandinavians ever grasped the essence of any of those English concepts of the Common Law and limited government anyhow. Perhaps a perjury-prone Somali will do better?

On the plus side, a Trumpist candidate defeated useless cuckservative Tim Pawlenty for the Republican nomination for governor:

Jeff Johnson shocked the Minnesota political world Tuesday with a commanding victory in the Republican primary for governor, while U.S. Rep. Tim Walz won a three-way race in the DFL primary, setting up a clash of starkly different visions for the state’s future. Johnson, a Hennepin County commissioner, derailed former Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s bid to win back his old job. Pawlenty had been widely seen as the front-runner thanks to much higher name recognition from his two previous terms in office, and Johnson overcame a vast fundraising disadvantage with a message of change and by courting supporters of President Donald Trump.

Swan Knight Saga poll

An email has gone out to all the Arkhaven backers that concerns the Will Caligan campaign. If you are one of the Swan Knight Saga backers, please read the email and respond to the poll, as we have to make some decisions about how we are going to meet our obligations to you despite a few curve balls that have been thrown our way.

We believe we have several good options that will work out well for everyone involved, but we do not wish to proceed without informed input from the backers. If you have any questions about the various options, you can ask them here, but please do not mention any names. If you have any concerns related to this that you do not feel are appropriate in a public forum, please feel free to email me directly about them.