#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Events appear to be moving forward at last. The God-Emperor has tweeted:
I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!
Let the signed executive orders flow like a mighty river.
If you like military science fiction, or enjoy the world of Quantum Mortis, you really have to start reading Wardogs Incorporated. Book Three will be out before too long, so you should have time to read the first two if you haven’t already.
Our other patrols were back and casualty-free. Jock gathered us quickly. “They tracked the drop, boys. They know we’re here, they know we need this. And they have at least one tank. Open these containers as fast as you can and search for anything we can use to blow it to hell.”
“We’re going to need a crowbar,” Four-eyes said, using the word as if he’d always known it. I was already rifling through the toolbox in my jeep. I came out with a long screwdriver and a hammer. Jock grabbed the same, we raced to the first container and I started working at the thing. It had a lock of some sort that was supposed to be opened by some special tool. After a minute, I realized the hammer/screwdriver combo wasn’t going to cut it.
“Clear out,” I yelled, then fired a round into the lock. Still stuck. Then again. I hated doing that because of the ricochets. The third round cracked the lock and I pried with the screwdriver as Ward and Jones pulled at the door. It let go, almost throwing us on the ground, and we were greeted with a flood of packing peanuts. Brushing them away I got to the cardboard and shrink-wrap covered boxes inside, then cut into the first one with my bayonet. A spurt of red startled me until I smelled tomato. Great. More lasagna.
“Next!” I yelled, and we started on the next container. POW POW—two shots this time, then prying it open, then another flood of packing peanuts. “Come on, Four-eyes,” I said, throwing them away in fistfuls, “you really sure you don’t know what’s in these?”
“No,” he said. “I got weights but not contents. That last one could have been one long gun or ten thousand blankets.”
“Or a restaurant shipment,” I said, as I cut into the first box I could reach. This one opened without damage and I hit something metal, and cut around it and got my hand into the dark box and around a cylinder. I pulled it out. It had a picture on the side. Loquats in syrup.
I threw it down and went to the next container, which was already being opened by Jones and Ward.
“Hey!” yelled Jock. “We got some ammo over here!”
“Great,” I yelled back. “RPGs?”
“Negative,” he said. “Small arms.”
“Then we have to keep–” Four-eyes said, then suddenly fell to the ground as I simultaneously heard the crack of a rifle. I hit the ground hard and heard the rattle of answering fire from behind another container. I didn’t see the sniper—but I saw the pool of blood under Four-eyes and swore—he was already dead. Right in the neck. GODDAMMIT!
Ping-CRACK! I heard another bullet hit the container before the crack of the report. I sent a burst of fire up the field but still saw no-one. More answering fire rattled in my ears. Blood was rushing to my head as I went into the red zone—that madness you get under fire. Things slowed down as I spotted Ace behind the next container, rifle pointed over my head. He waved me in, and I ran in a crouch and hunkered down beside him.
“Ace,” I said, “you good?”
“Yeah,” he said, looking through his sight, rifle propped on his good knee. “I ain’t moving, so they’d better get in sight. Yes… okay… there you go… right–” CRACK! He sent a round and I saw a man jump up in the grass, then fall again.
“That might be it,” he said. “For the moment.”
“Stay here and snipe,” I said. All I could think about was hitting back. “I’m cracking cargo. Where did Leighton go?”
“TOMMY!” yelled Jock, “Over here!”
I ran three containers over to where he was pulling out a large wooden crate with Park’s help. A bullet whizzed overhead. Park sent a burst of fire back as Jock and I ripped off the lid.
“Whoa,” I said, realizing the interior of the box had multiple smaller boxes inside carefully nested in foam. I picked one up—it was really heavy. “What the devil are these?”
“Oh shit,” said Jock. “There are nuke shells. Lead-lined cases—made for a howitzer.”
“What the hell–” I said, then two more bullets hit the ground in front of me.
“Next container,” Jock yelled as we hit the ground and started crawling. “We can’t launch those things anyhow.”
Just as we got to the next container, there was a massive THUMP! and a crackling explosion of breaking glass and metal. I looked back—NO! MY JEEP!
A tank had crested the hill and blown up my goddamn jeep! Now I was pissed. I opened up with my rifle at the tank.
“Save your damn ammo!” Jock yelled at me.
“My JEEP!” I yelled back. “He blew up my goddam jeep!”
“Shut the hell up,” Jock said, then yelled to the rest of the guys. “Back—get back! Tank incoming!”
THUMP-CRACK! A shell hit one of the containers near me, sending a massive splash of liquid up into the air. I suddenly smelled apples. Apple juice. Great.
“Get to the woods!” Jock yelled. Howland was hauling Ace by one arm. I grabbed the other and we hauled it towards the woods, half carrying our pilot.
The other guys were winging rounds back but I was too encumbered to use my rifle. 50 meters… 40… meters… THUMP! A shell hit near us and threw us on the ground. Ace yelled in pain and I felt the sting of hot metal go into my right arm and neck. My ears were ringing. 35 meters to the woods. I pulled Ace up and Howland started to rise, then fell back to the ground and looked at me with a surprised expression as foam and blood poured from his mouth.
“Howland!” I yelled, letting go of Ace and putting my hand on him. He looked up at me and said something that came out as a bubbling hiss, then his eyes went blank and a final breath rattled from his throat. He was gone—and I saw why, his jacket was soaked with blood. Chest hit.
“Dammit!” Ace yelled. “We gotta move!”
I grabbed his arm but as we got up, THUMP! Another shell hit, knocking me on my ass. I looked back. Two tanks closing in, and at least a squad of guys coming over the top behind them. They’d spotted us and were closing in. “Come on!” I yelled, grabbing Ace and speeding him towards the woods. 20 meters, 10 meters—THUMP—CRACK! A tree in front of us blew into toothpicks, showering us with chips of wood as we closed in—and then were were in the woods. Ward grabbed Ace’s other arm as we went further in. The woods were way too thin for my liking. Mostly regrowth with lots of space in between cover.
“Over here!” Jock yelled. “Another container!”
There, half hung up in a tree was another container. Jock blew the lock off and we started yanking out packaging. Medical supplies and linens. DAMMIT!
Bullets zipped over us and leaves fell from the trees. The tanks had stopped for the moment, but I knew we were going to be joined by Corwistalians in a moment.
Jock nodded at Park and he went up a tree to watch the mottled light at the entrance to the woods. I didn’t see Jones anywhere.
I heard more gunfire behind us and whipped around. I couldn’t see anything, but Jock tagged my arm and I went back to look.
As I tip-toed, I heard a grunt from a little ways ahead, then a “Eureka!”
“Jones!” I yelled.
“Falkland—get over here!”
He’d found another container and busted it open. “Here’s the ticket!” he said, thumping the side of a long case. “120mm mortar!”
“Run,” I said to Jones. “Get the rest of the guys.”
He ran back. I heard the rattling of guns off in the distance as I dug around for a crate of rounds.
A moment later, Jones was back, along with Jock. “Park and Ace are coming,” Jock said, grabbing one end of a crate and throwing it out of the way. A bullet whizzed past us but we didn’t dare shoot back, knowing our guys were still coming. I found a box of rounds and thanked Ares for his provision.
Park and Ace came up and Park dropped Ace next to a tree and lent his shoulder to the effort. As I pushed, I saw blood on the sleeve of my jacket. Shrapnel. Don’t bleed to death now, I told myself as I pulled out rounds. I could hear the tank engines now. Way too close! “How the hell are we supposed to hit guys this close with a mortar?”
“Horizontal fire,” Ace yelled, pain on his face. “Jam the baseplate against a tree or something, then throw the shell down the tube.”’
“I swear, if the bad guys don’t kill us you guys will,” Jock said.
The importance of the revelations concerning the Deep State’s involvement in directly manipulating US democracy for the last 38 years is going to have global repercussions, even if absolutely nothing comes of it in the USA itself. I addressed these recent revelations about Stefan Harper’s interference in the presidential elections in a Darkstream.
I’ve always been very cynical about US politics, but the thing that is amazing is that I wasn’t anywhere nearly cynical enough. It was it was just astonishing to me to read these revelations of what Stefan Harper has been doing since the 1980 elections. I mean this is absolutely and utterly remarkable, and you know, a lot of people are pessimistic that anything’s going to happen. A lot of people are saying “oh well what difference does it make now that we know, what is anyone going to do about this?” but the reality is that it is bringing the end of the neo-liberal world order closer.
The neo-liberal world order has already failed. Even people who were part of constructing it, and people who are true believers in it, people like Henry Kissinger, they know this. I mean, when you’ve got people like Francis Fukuyama, who was a firm and strong believer in the neo-liberal world order and he famously pronounced “the End of History”. Not fifteen years later, he’s been desperately trying to walk back his words and claim that that he meant something other than than his actual meaning and so forth because it is so readily apparent to everyone that the neo-liberal world order is failing.
But what we’re seeing here is that in addition to it failing, people are increasingly unable to even believe in the false front that it presents, and so it’s really, really remarkable to see how much this has changed, how much people’s perceptions have changed, not just in the United States, but around the world. Think about what this is doing in Russia, think about what this is doing in China, even more importantly, think about what this is doing in all the countries like Indonesia, in countries like Korea, in countries that are currently making decisions about which way they are going to go.
Jon Del Arroz explains why it is wrong for those on the Right to attack Right-wing creators:
I will not attack fellow creators on the right ever. We’re already under immense pressure from above. We’re being banned from conventions en masse. We’re being blacklisted from publishers by threats from industry professionals. There’s no way you can ever get me to talk smack about someone who’s struggling as an independent to create art and make it against these insurmountable odds.
Every time you do it, you are holding our movement down.
I know it sounds counter intuitive, as the media will lambast Person X and make them look really bad! If only we had respectable creators, well then they couldn’t lambast and that’s what we need, right?
It’s wrong. No one on our side is respectable to their media machine or legion of groupthinkers. No one is even HUMAN on our side according to them. So what if we have some ideological differences? So what if the artistic project isn’t my cup of tea? It’s not like it’s some giant corporate promoted propaganda, it’s an independent person doing it on their time, taking enormous risk.
I’m only here to lift up the movement. I don’t care about disagreeing with someone on minor matters, I don’t even care if I love the product they put out. There’s personal reasons their product is done the way they want — that’s what art is all about. Sometimes there’s financial reasons that it looks or feels a certain way as well.
So I urge you, if you don’t like a book or whatnot or someone on our side, don’t say anything.That’s the best you can do. You’re not obliged to promote everything, but don’t squash this movement in its infancy.
I absolutely agree. Look at how the Left does it. They unstintingly praise even the most shoddy, error-filled nonsense as brilliant works of genius. Look at how the Fake Right does it; you need only read the recent reviews of Jonah Goldberg’s eminently forgettable new book by all the neocons hailing it as “a new conservative classic” and praising it to the skies.
They do this because it works. Hell, look at how most of you genuinely believed – and some of you still believe – that Jordan Peterson is a brilliant and important intellectual on the basis of nothing more than an extensive public relations campaign that began back in 2004 at Wodek Szemberg’s house.
Now, you might ask how I can reasonably endorse Jon Del Arroz’s policy when I have so publicly criticized Richard Spencer, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Anglin, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, and others. The answer is very simple: they are neither creators nor are they genuine men of the Right.
People repeatedly ask me to denounce, disavow, or otherwise attack men like Stefan Molyneaux, Mike Cernovich, John C. Wright, Larry Correia, and other men of the Right on the basis of our various philosophical and ideological disagreements. Don’t even bother. It’s not going to happen. Because I support what they are doing even though I don’t agree with them on everything.
The mysterious professor who spied on the Trump campaign for the FBI is identified:
In mid-July 2016, a retired American professor approached an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.
The professor took the opportunity to strike up a conversation with Carter Page, whom Trump had named a few months earlier as a foreign policy adviser.
But the professor was more than an academic interested in American politics — he was a longtime U.S. intelligence source. And, at some point in 2016, he began working as a secret informant for the FBI as it investigated Russia’s interference in the campaign, according to people familiar with his activities.
The role played by the source is now at the center of a battle that has pitted President Trump against his own Justice Department and fueled the president’s attacks on the special counsel’s investigation. In a Thursday tweet, he called the probe “a disgusting, illegal and unwarranted Witch Hunt.”
In recent days, Trump and his allies have escalated their claims that the FBI source improperly spied on the campaign.
“Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” he tweeted Friday. “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story. If true — all time biggest political scandal!”
There is no evidence to suggest someone was planted with the campaign. The source in question engaged in a months-long pattern of seeking out and meeting three different Trump campaign officials.
The Washington Post — after speaking with people familiar with his role — has confirmed the identity of the FBI source who assisted the investigation, but is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.
The source declined multiple requests for comment. An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment.
Page was one of three Trump advisers whom the FBI informant contacted in the summer and fall of 2016 for brief talks and meetings that largely centered on foreign policy, according to people familiar with the encounters.
“There has been some speculation that he might have tried to reel me in,” Page, who had numerous encounters with the informant, told The Post in an interview. “At the time, I never had any such impression.”
In late summer, the professor met with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis for coffee in Northern Virginia, offering to provide foreign-policy expertise to the Trump effort. In September, he reached out to George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign-policy adviser for the campaign, inviting him to London to work on a research paper.
It wasn’t too hard to work out this “secret FBI source” thanks to a Daily Caller article linked on Drudge directly below the Washington Post piece.
Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered — and he would accept — during the presidential campaign.
The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.
Halper’s September 2016 outreach to Papadopoulos wasn’t his only contact with Trump campaign members. The 73-year-old professor, a veteran of three Republican administrations, met with two other campaign advisers, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned.
The Washington Post’s feeble attempt to spin this is particularly amusing when it goes to the trouble to underline, “There is no evidence to suggest someone was planted with the campaign.” They can’t even name the guy, but they are certain that no evidence concerning the nature of his involvement with the Trump campaign will be found?
Anyhow, Stefan Halper is a card-carrying neocon and Deep State operative. This is a MUCH bigger deal than Watergate ever was, and indicates that a serious fumigation of the FBI and other federal agencies is in order.
UPDATE: Holy cats, there is NO WAY this guy’s actions were even remotely innocent.
Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.
Last year I made an exception to my “do not talk to the media” policy when a journalist who contributes to Rolling Stone and has a history of writing relatively fair and substantive stories contacted me about doing a story on Castalia House. We arranged to meet for lunch, and the interview was a reasonably free-ranging one that was not indicative of the usual “bad person du jour” hit piece. So, I felt that it went pretty well and that it would not be a repeat of the usual “isn’t it terrible that you are such an unrepentant badthinker” narrative.
Spacebunny, of course, knew better. I should have listened to her when she told me to just ignore this request like all the others.
Last week, the same journalist went to visit Chuck Dixon in the company of another journalist, who turned out to be Al Letson, the host of Reveal, a public radio program and podcast showcasing investigative stories. They were not particularly interested in talking to Chuck about Arkhaven, about his books, about the comics industry, about how he “broke the Bat”, or about the fact that he is an industry legend, the most prolific comics writer of all time, who has been openly blackballed by Marvel. Instead, they were primarily interested in playing the “you’re really a bad person, aren’t you” prosecutorial game in support of the usual disqualify-and-discredit narrative for a story that is intended to run jointly in Rolling Stone and National Public Radio.
Apparently the straight story on Castalia House didn’t sell, because I received a request for a second interview from them yesterday. I declined the request, and informed them that if they require further support for their tedious narrative, they are certainly welcome to report that I literally feed SJWs to my Vile Faceless Minions and drink SJW blood while sitting on a pile of silvered SJW skulls and watching old newsreels of Mussolini. Let’s face it, that’s more accurate than anything they are likely to “report” now.
So, I will be returning to my previous policy of simply not talking to anyone in the mainstream media. Forget the nonexistent upside, there simply isn’t any point in doing so. One can get the same narrative, more or less, from Wikipedia and RationalWiki, if one so desires. And there is no shortage of books, blog posts, and videos from which one can ascertain my views and quote-mine my words.
Now, here is what may be a useful observation in case you do happen to make the mistake of talking to the media. The journalistic responsibility of a reporter or interviewer is to give you the opportunity to speak for yourself, in your own words. Contrary to what many of them appear to believe, they are not prosecutors or debate antagonists, so the moment that they start “pushing back”, cross-examining, or attempting to argue with you in any way, end the pseudo-interview and send them packing.
If a reporter wishes to publicly debate me as an equal on a level playing field, that’s fine. If a journalist wants review copies of a Castalia House book or an Arkhaven comic book, I’ll be happy to send a digital edition. I can’t prevent them from playing the “bad person du jour” game, but I will not participate in it.
More evidence that a college degree is literally worse than useless:
I am an instructor at a [university you would immediately recognize]. The director of the program is encouraging the entire faculty to alter their own teaching methods, based on an article that discusses how a professor at [another well-known university] found that she could improve the grades of her minority students through “inclusive teaching.” By this she meant creating mandatory worksheets for students to fill out during each lecture (to “teach students how to take notes”), guided reading assignments, required class participation, online quizzes to check their progress,etc. Basically all the busy work that everyone with an IQ over 95 hated in high school. The article was about implementing this regime in an undergraduate program, which is pathetic enough. My [spouse] is being encouraged to use it in graduate level courses. This is in a program that is considered to be extremely selective.
I always find it amusing when people expect me to show deference on the basis of someone’s academic credentials. As far as I’m concerned, a PhD is a reliable indicator that you’re dealing with a midwit.
Paul Gottfried points out that the title of Jonah Goldberg’s recent book could be more accurately named, in his review of Suicide of the West:
For his newest venture into deep thought, Goldberg has crassly stolen the title of James Burnham’s great work, Suicide of the West, published in 1964 at the height of the Cold War.
That is where the similarity ends. Unlike Burnham’s scalding indictment of liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide,” Goldberg’s random opinions represent the very pathology that Burnham railed against. Goldberg hates national identities (although he makes an exception for Israel), opponents of the Deep State, immigration patriots, and those who imagine that democracy has something to do with the popular will. Rather his “conservative” view of democracy privileges public administration, the operation of multinational corporations, and socially sophisticated journalists such as like himself.
One need only cite this passage from Burnham’s work to grasp the extent to which Burnham might have been thinking of someone like Goldberg when he described the quintessential liberal:
“Liberalism has always stressed change, reform, the break with encrusted habit whether in the form of old ideas, old customs or old institutions. Thus liberalism has been and continues to be primarily negative in its impact on society: and in point of fact it is through its negative and destructive achievements that liberalism makes its best claim to historical justification.”
By now, however, Burnham’s Leftist hallmarks are “conservative” positions. After all, Goldberg’s book, which abounds in the Leftist virtue-signaling mandatory for Main Stream Media Token Conservatives, is being sold by “conservative” book clubs. It is also featured in a Crown Forum Series devoted to conservative thought. For those who may doubt whether the author is an authorized “conservative,” one need only turn to National Review, a publication at which Goldberg still holds an editorship, or else watch him jaw with other Fox News Allstars as a designated Man Of The Right.
I regard Goldberg as a prime example of the near-total ideological primacy of the Cultural Marxist Left. We are living in a time and place in which what would be crazy-Left up until about two generations ago is assigned a “Right-Wing” label, in order to keep alive a dialectic that is transparently phony.
In about a ten-page digression into the nature of conservatism—his entire book is really nothing more than a series of digressions—Goldberg identifies “conservatism” with resisting Donald Trump. The U.S. President, whom Goldberg with other Never-Trumpers has inflexibly opposed, is described as a vulgar throwback to the 1930s “on both sides of the Atlantic.” People back then believed “decadent Western capitalism and ‘Manchester liberalism’ were inadequate to the challenges of the day.”
All of this coming from Goldberg is utter chutzpah, considering that he now happily accepts massive social engineering in order to overcome “discrimination” against certain groups.
This false dialectic is precisely why The New York Times anointed the Brothers Weinstein, the Littlest Chickenhawk, and Dr. Jordanetics as the Approved Opposition. They are selected as the anti-narrative to the mainstream media’s narrative, which is intended to produce a leftward-trending synthesis.
Peter Grant hammers the Catholic hierarchy for its latest massive moral failing:
Every Chilean bishop offered to resign Friday over a sex abuse and cover-up scandal, in the biggest shakeup ever in the Catholic Church’s long-running abuse saga. It marked the first known time in history that an entire national bishops conference had offered to resign en masse over scandal, and laid bare the devastation that the abuse crisis has caused the Catholic Church in Chile and beyond… The whole report hasn’t been made public, but even the highlights Francis included in his footnotes were astonishing. The gravity of the accusations appeared to lay the foundation for a full-scale Vatican investigation of Chilean dioceses, seminaries and religious orders. Such an investigation was ordered up after a similar 2010 summit that Pope Benedict XVI called for Irish bishops over their dismal record dealing with abuse.
Let me be absolutely blunt about this. The Catholic Church, as an institution, and its bishops acting as a collective, have lied, are lying, and will continue to lie to the people of God about this problem. They have no interest whatsoever in resolving it – only in protecting their own power, and the institution of the Church as a whole, and its power and prestige in society. They do not care about the individuals involved, or the victims . . . or the good clergy who have been tainted with the stench of this scandal.
How can I say that? It’s very simple. Actions speak louder than words – and lack of action is, in itself, an action. The Church, in the United States, in Chile, in the Vatican, and elsewhere, has taken little or no effective, meaningful action against those who were ultimately responsible for this scandal – namely, its bishops and administrators, who routinely concealed the extent of the problem, shuffled offenders around among themselves, and allowed them to continue to offend, rather than deal with the matter. Even after the scandal blew up, many leaders of the Church continued to try to defend their offices and the institution of the Church, rather than admit that the situation was absolutely indefensible. Many of the worst offenders were whisked off to Rome and given sheltered employment there, safe from extradition or any legal consequences of their neglect. Many are still there.
The Church has also failed to act against the breeding-grounds for so many of these problems – its seminaries.
Let this be a lesson to you. No organization is safe, no matter what is professed intentions are. If you do not actively seek to eradicate evil from creeping in, it will do so. There are worse things than SJWs.
Do not seek to defend the Roman Catholic Church. It has manifestly become an institution utterly riddled by evil. Pray for it, demand its reformation, work to restore it, as you see fit, but do not think to defend it. There is no defense of what it has become since the cancer of Vatican II.
As many as eight people have been killed Friday in a shooting at Santa Fe High School, according to a source close to the investigation. Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trouchesset said authorities have arrested one person and are still trying to determine if there is more than one shooter. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said in a tweet that two people have been taken into custody and that an officer is being treated for injuries.
No word on David Hogg’s whereabouts, but I’m sure he’ll be on TV soon. A lot.