#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
I uncovered four old videotapes a few weeks ago. Originally there were six, and unfortunately the missing two were of my 1997 interview with Umberto Eco, but what I found contained about two hours of unique footage of interviews and public interactions with the great dottore. I arranged to get them digitized for use in a potential future Voxiversity, or perhaps even a documentary. Here is one screencap from the last tape, which shows Doctor Eco with Spacebunny and me at St. John’s University.
Has it ever occurred to feminists that perhaps there is a very good reason for the glass ceiling?
You have probably heard about the collapse of a pedestrian bridge at FIU in Miami today. I was researching who the builder is, I stumbled across an article from yesterday celebrating the bridge’s construction.
Key quote from the female engineer/project executive, Leonor Flores (speaking about teaching her daughter that women can go into STEM):
“It’s very important for me as a woman and an engineer to be able to promote that to my daughter, because I think women have a different perspective. We’re able to put in an artistic touch and we’re able to build, too.”
Yeah, about that…
FIU pedestrian bridge collapses days after installation; police say multiple deaths, cars trapped.
If you think about it, what is this but an example of Merkel’s Germany or May’s Britain writ small? Or, to put it in even more brutal terms, Carly Fiorina’s Hewlett-Packard….
I can’t say I’m terribly surprised to be informed that the Clinton Foundation accounting appears to be more than a little shady:
The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation filed Its 2016 Annual Report to California on Form RRF-1 seven days past the final deadline on Nov. 22, 2017. This key document was subsequently rejected.
That means the best-known Clinton charity has not been operating in full compliance with California laws for months, an adverse fact that should have been disclosed in other U.S. states where Clinton charities solicit donations, especially including New York.
Another glaring problem with the rejected California filing is that the total revenues of $77 million declared for the whole of the Clinton Foundation are much less than the $217 million in combined grants and contributions claimed on its 2016 external audit, which is available on page 5.
The calculation is: Total contributions of $135,445,489 plus total grants of $81,153,172 equal combined revenues of $216,598,561, which rounds up to $217 million. This large discrepancy is only part of the problems facing the Clinton Foundation in California.
On Feb. 22, 2018, Becerra demanded receipt of information concerning “all government funding, including grants from foreign governments” received by the foundation during 2016. The deadline for receipt is March 24, 2018.
California charity laws are tougher than those in many other U.S. states. In California, for example, charities must disclose particulars concerning all government grants, including those by foreign government entities.
These particulars, including amounts, are available to state regulators because California also requires that charities disclose (confidentially) the names of all donors giving 2 percent or more of total revenues in a given year, as listed on Schedule B of their federal tax filings.
The Clinton Foundation’s 2016 federal filing poses additional problems. Total revenues declared in Part VIII, line 1h, were just $63 million, or $14 million less than the amount declared on the California RRF-1 filing — and a whopping $154 million less than the figure independently confirmed by auditor CohnReznick.
It’s also a little remarkable that the Clintons continue on their rapacious mission to rake in more and more money… and for what? They both look like death mildly reheated these days. Hillary can’t even navigate a simple set of stairs. What on Earth will another million, or ten million, do to improve their quality of life one iota?
Tonight at 8 PM EST we will have an open Brainstorm session to discuss the current status of Arkhaven and Dark Legion, as well as the hypothetical possibility of creating a community-owned movie studio. I realize the latter sounds entirely crazy, but I don’t think it’s necessarily quite as insane as it sounds. It might not be possible yet, but a number of the necessary pieces are at least prospectively in place. And while it’s not even a secondary or tertiary goal of mine, the utility of having a viable visual outlet for the stories we are creating in other formats does not escape me.
There are 500 seats available, and it is first come, first seated.
I have a request in for a feature that would permit reserved seating, but obviously they have not yet had time to implement it. I’m sorry about the double emailing to Brainstorm members, but DST hasn’t changed here yet so I initially got the time there wrong.
The great William Shatner has many accomplishments of note. But this very public spanking of a pseudo-Nobel laureate is indubitably his greatest.
Turned out to be the female Bernie Madoff:
Elizabeth Holmes — the Silicon Valley wunderkind whose blood-testing startup Theranos has collapsed in a slew of scandals — has been charged with “massive fraud” by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC on Wednesday accused Theranos CEO Holmes and a top lieutenant of defrauding investors of more than $700 million through false claims about its technology.
Holmes — a Steve Jobs wannabe who dressed exclusively in black turtlenecks as she talked up her blood-testing unicorn, which at one point boasted a valuation north of $9 billion — settled with the regulators for $500,000 while neither admitting nor denying the accusations.
Theranos disclosed in a 2016 letter to investors it was under a criminal probe. No criminal charges have been filed, and it’s not known if the investigation is ongoing.
Holmes additionally agreed to not be a director or officer of a public company for 10 years, and to forgo profiting from Theranos ownership until $750 million is returned to investors, according to the consent order with the SEC.
Theranos and 34-year-old Holmes ran “an elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance,” according to the SEC.
While Theranos had said it was on track to make $100 million by the end of 2014, the real figure was “a little more than $100,000,” according to the SEC.
The thing you have to understand about Silicon Valley is that for the last 20 years, it has essentially consisted of little more than techno-Ponzi schemes. Very, very few of the companies that are created there are actually intended to make money on the basis of their nominal business. What is remarkable, in many cases, is the way in which many of these startups never have very much revenue, let alone profit, at all.
These “startups” are basically schemes to suck in investors and keep stringing them along until the company can drum up an exit, which can take the form of going public, or in most cases, an acquisition. But the whole game is more akin to gambling than it is to conventional business development. This is the difference between an Infogalactic and a Gab, for example. We’re not Silicon Valley startup artists, we’re not looking for a future exit, we are developing our own new tech on a community-supported shoestring, we aren’t slinging around buzzwords or issuing press releases, and we strongly prefer volunteers and supporters to employees and investors. Only time will tell which Alt-Tech model works better, but if Gab eventually implodes, you cannot say the warning signs were not there.
Anyhow, I always assumed Elizabeth Holmes was a complete fake, so this news of her confirmed con artistry does not surprise me at all. She clearly didn’t know what she was talking about, she always seemed to be more interested in TED Talks and photoshoots than business, and she surrounded herself with the kind of older men who are always complete suckers for any woman who is young and blonde.
Wait, did I say RUSSIA? Oh, sorry, I meant to say that RACISM is the reason that it flopped.
‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Director Ava DuVernay Uses Racism to Explain Away Bad Reviews….
In an interview with Screen Rant, writer Jennifer Lee explained why she took out the Christian themes and Bible references from the book. “It wasn’t removed, it was just opened up in language that wasn’t exclusive, guardian angels versus stars, are they the same thing? Maybe,” Lee said. She emphasized “inclusivity,” saying, “Since we’re not limiting, we’re not picking some religion, but we’re saying we all feel, we can feel that you’re a part of something extraordinary and the messages are the same.”
This helps explain why the film ditched the book’s explicit Christian themes, trading them for vague New Age spirituality that failed to deliver the depth of the original story. Furthermore, it is the exact opposite of “inclusive” to excise all Christian historical references, even to Jesus, Copernicus, or Michelangelo.
As The Federalist’s Ellie Bufkin noted, non-Christian and liberal reviewers agreed that the removal of Christianity from “A Wrinkle in Time” severely weakened the movie.
Sure, it’s not the anti-Christian bigotry, the urinating all over a cherished childhood classic, or the Wakandawashing of the white characters, it’s Vladimir Putin!
I mean, of course, to say that it was RACISM. Specifically, the racism of straight white Christians.
It is absolutely no surprise at all that A Wrinkle in Time flopped. Padre Pio knew that it would flop. Nostradamus knew that it would flop. There is probably a stone buried deep in a South American jungle carved with ancient Mayan hieroglyphics predicting it would flop. Even journalists who are under the vague impression that a tesseract deals with financial regulations knew eight years before it even came out that it was going to flop, because the Hollywood Values crowd hates hates hates Christianity, Christian morality, Christian values, Christians, Jesus Christ, the Bible, and God. There was never any chance that they could produce a movie that would be consistent with the core themes of the book.
What is more interesting is to ponder why Black Panther was successful whereas A Wrinkle in Time was not, given their superficially similar approaches. So, what were the salient differences?
My observation is that the combination of a) a distribution monopoly and b) SJW editors and content are the primary culprits for the ongoing collapse of the comics industry, which is on track to decline as much as 20 PERCENT in units this year. In corporate terms, that’s practically free fall.
However, Arkhaven writer Jon Del Arroz declares at Castalia House there are other content-related problems that merit mention, and lays the blame at the feet of three of the more influential comics writers of the last 30 years.
The industry has three major problems in its storytelling, which each one of these works exemplifies in three ways:
A focus on realism in a medium that by definition is absurd. Alan Moore’s Watchmen is what brought this on. The whole point of the book was to show real heroes growing old, having problems, being corrupt and dealing with real world issues and relationships – and by “real world” of course we mean a debaucherous romp of sex, drugs and violence, which no one relates to. Modern writers want to switch all their characters to this realism feel, which makes no sense when you have Asgardian gods who magically transform at the picking up of a hammer, or a nerd clinging to walls and swinging from rooftops. Realism has no place in such stories, and it’s painful to read boring stories about The Visions sitting at home pretending to eat meals even though they’re robots.
An obsession with rebooting mythology. This is Neil Gaiman’s hallmark. He’s made an entire career out of rebooting. If you look at Sandman, he takes classic mythological figures, imports them into a punk rock/goth 80s world and turns it into a weird horror story. When he worked for Marvel briefly, he rebooted Marvel as if the heroes had been born in the 1600s. American Gods, his novel, is about rebooting mythology again. His formula is obvious. It’s all he does, and it’s all DC and Marvel do now. It’s not selling? Let’s reboot Superman again with an all new #1. That’ll sell for the gimmick collector for a minute, but then when you degrade into the same, tired, unoriginal realism in storytelling, the sales plummet again. No one wants to read the revamped origin story for the umpteenth time, this time it’s the definitive, real version! The original worked just fine and remain in our memories, not the reboots.
Striving to be darker for shock value. This is where Frank Miller changed the game, and for the worse. Everything is gore. Everything is awful, dark, terrible. Characters are dying, whether it be from street thugs or from AIDS, everyone’s life is in the pits and sucks. The streets of New York or Gotham are pure cesspools of no hope, and pure grit. He paved the way for writers like Garth Ennis or Mark Millar to try to one up that grittiness, or Ed Brubaker to turn an optimistic character Captain America into some depressing, dark story with his Winter Soldier storyline. Guess what? You’ve just made sure every parent in America doesn’t buy these books because they know they’re not appropriate images for their kids to see, thereby turning off an entire generation of customers from getting attached to these works.
The three points above all are dangerous paths for lesser writers to tread, and do lead to even greater problems when EVERY story becomes a combination of these tropes, which is what we have in modern comics.
Jon isn’t just a critic, though. He’s putting his pen where his mouth is by translating Richard Fox’s popular Ember War series into comics that will be published later this year by Arkhaven. Check out the first two preview pages at the Arkhaven forums.
I fail to see the point of Britain’s posturing here, unless the neocons are going to try to get their Russian war in an indirect fashion:
Theresa May vowed to expel 23 Russian spies today as she laid out Britain’s retaliation over the Salisbury nerve gas outrage. In the biggest diplomatic swipe for decades, the Prime Minister gave the ‘undeclared intelligence agents’ a week to leave the country and suspended ‘all high level contact’ with the country.
Mrs May also paved the way for a crackdown on Russian oligarch money in London and urged the international community to join sanctions.
As tensions with Moscow reached new lows, the premier also suggested that covert reprisals would be undertaken – in an apparent hint at cyber attacks.
Mrs May said she was determined that the package would ‘fundamentally degrade Russian intelligence’ capability in the UK.
Theresa May won’t stand up to the European Union and she can’t protect British girls from being raped and murdered by third-world invaders, but she’s going to stand up to Vladimir Putin and Russia. Sure she is.
At least she’s been able to defend the British Isles from Brittany Pettibone!
What a global embarrassment May has turned out to be. Even Red Jeremy wouldn’t have been so haplessly incompetent.
UPDATE: Yes, that is what it is. The neocons know they can’t get Trump to start a war with Russia over Ukraine or Syria, so they’re using May to start it, then rely upon the NATO treaty to force the US to go to war with Russia.
May argued that the incident can be characterized as a state-directed chemical weapon attack that occurred on British territory — in other words, an act of war. She mentioned invoking NATO Article 5 as a response to incident. NATO Article 5 — also called The Three Musketeers Clause — commits the alliance to defend an ally when its territory is attacked.
Of course, the God-Emperor is far too canny to be manipulated in this obvious way. In fact, the situation may present a golden opportunity for him to tear up the NATO treaty altogether.
A number of people have asked me for my reaction to the Kirk Cousins signing by the Vikings. My three primary thoughts:
I have zero concerns – zero – about Cousins’s losing record. Teams lose games, not quarterbacks. Cousins is 29, a top-six quarterback over the last three seasons, and he’s now got a much better team around him. Nothing against Keenum, who is very likable and played about as well as he possibly could have in 2017, but is not capable of winning a game on his own the way an elite quarterback occasionally must.
If Cousins just runs the scheme, with our skill players and behind our solid O-line, he’ll have over 4,000 yards and 30 touchdowns. Put that opposite our defense and we’re serious contenders.
– Vikings staffer
I wanted the Vikings to lock Keenum up inexpensively as an top-notch long-term #2 after he won his fourth game of the season. But once that didn’t happen, I did NOT want them to sign him to the kind of big money he got in Denver as their long-term starter, simply because he is not good enough to be an elite starter. If you watch a quarterback for an entire season, you get a pretty good grasp of what their limits are, and Keenum is a tough, smart, low-turnover game manager. If your defense controls the other offense, he will not lose the game for you. And that’s a great thing.
The problem, of course, is that if the defense can’t control the other offense, he will not win the shootout. We saw that against Carolina before we saw it against Philadelphia. We very nearly saw it in the second half against New Orleans. And that’s the $8 million difference between Cousins and Keenum.
Sometimes the obvious move is the smart move. So, the Vikings did the right thing.