Convergence kills

The business world is beginning to recognize that more and more corporations have a diversity problem:

Does the world of comic-book superheroes have a diversity problem?

The question matters a lot for investors. Here’s why.

Consumers pay up for good, original content. And comic books come through in spades. They spawn a colorful array of endearing superheroes, followed by profitable movie spinoffs, action figures and collectibles.

Thus superheroes play a significant role in sales trends at Time Warner TWX, +0.26{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee}  and Walt Disney Co. DIS, +0.12{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} home of DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment, respectively. They also impact sales at Netflix NFLX, +0.64{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} which has produced two popular series based on comic-book characters, Cinemark CNK, +1.49{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} Regal Entertainment RGC, +0.04{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} AMC Entertainment AMC, +5.32{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} Hasbro HAS, -0.16{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} and Mattel MAT, -1.79{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee}

So if the new wave of “diverse” superheroes has caused the recent slump in comic-book sales growth, that’s a trend investors need to sit up and notice.

In the past few years, Disney’s Marvel Entertainment has rolled out an Afro-Latino Spider-Man, a Muslim Ms. Marvel, a female Thor, a gay Iceman, a Korean Hulk, an African-American female lead in Iron Man, and a lesbian Latina America Chavez.

Now fans accustomed to more “traditional” characters may have come down with diversity fatigue. And they could be walking away in protest….

Already, the trends don’t look good. Last year, sales growth of comic books, graphic novels and digital offerings cooled off to 5.3{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} as revenue hit $1.08 billion, says ICv2. That was significantly lower than the 9.9{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} annual average growth during 2010-2015.

This year could be even worse. ICv2 President Milton Griepp says comic-book store sales fell 10.5{139dcce145f96af3658d0fca91371b90d108412f7d21b6b2f7ff4f9655f4a3ee} in the first nine months of this year compared with the same time in 2016. He doesn’t yet have hard numbers for digital and regular bookstore sales. But he doubts they will be strong enough to offset the steep decline at comic-book stores, which account for over half of sales.

Convergence represents a problem for some, but tremendous opportunity for others. And as for our foray into comics, we are on track to release at least two 24-pagers in both digital and print format in February, as well as a pair of full-length black-and-white graphic novels.

And the good news is that SJWs always double down, as one perspicacious and hauntingly magnetic observer has noted.

Marvel also pushes back on the theory that diversity hurts sales…. So Marvel is sticking to its guns. “We have had such a great opportunity to create new and interesting characters that are truly representative of the way the world is,” says Sana Amanat, Marvel’s content development director who helped create Kamala Kahn, the popular Muslim Ms. Marvel. “We have made great strides, and we have more to go.”

But the writer has what really promises to be a great idea:

Here’s a suggestion for Cebulski, from the cheap seats. Your company, Marvel, loves to say it reflects the world outside your window. If so, why not step up and launch a series that features alt-right characters battling it out with social justice warriors?  

That would, indeed, be intriguing, would it not? What a brilliant idea!

 

What “democracy in Europe”?

The Neo-Napoleonists continue to ignore cause and effect:

A surge of populist political parties threatens democracy in Europe, Tony Blair’s think tank warns today. A survey by the Institute for Global Change found the share of the vote taken by populist parties from both right and left has almost trebled since 2000. The surge has seen the parties support rising from 8.5 per cent to 24.1 per cent.

Over the same period, it said the number of European countries with populist parties participating in government has doubled from seven to 14 – creating an unprecedented ‘populist belt’ from the Baltic to the Aegean.

They are strongest in Eastern Europe and current hold power in seven countries – Bosnia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia. Populists are the junior coalition partners in two other countries and the main opposition in three more.

The report said: ‘Parties like Poland’s Law and Justice party and Hungary’s Fidesz tend to emphasise a nationalism based on soil, blood or culture; take a hard line against immigration; and have, especially in Poland and Hungary, quickly started to dismantle key democratic institutions like the free media and an independent judiciary.

‘Working largely within the letter of the law, and drawing on widespread popular support, they have destroyed many of the institutions that are needed to safeguard democratic institutions over the long-run.’

In contrast to Eastern Europe, where most populist parties are on the right, those in Southern Europe are predominantly on the left, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain. However, the report said left-wing parties from other parts of the continent – including Labour in Britain – had embraced elements of populism, underlining the impact populist politics was having on the mainstream.

The report’s co-author, Yascha Mounk, said: ‘2016 was the year that populism went prime time, but as our data makes clear: this rise started well before 2016.

‘The huge transformation we are seeing in European politics is long term, driven by issues such as economic insecurity; a rebellion against immigration and the notion of a multi-ethnic society; and the ease with which extreme voices can make themselves heard in an age of social media.

‘This populist wave has not crested and unless politicians managed to identify and counteract the structural drivers, populism will keep garnering strength in the years to come.’

There is nothing – literally nothing – democratic about the European Union. The entire structure is designed to limit and thwart the national will of the European peoples. Notice that the Neo-Napoleonists defend “democratic institutions” and don’t work within the letter of the law as they oppose the actual will of the genuine people who do work within the law.

As for the “structural drivers”, external immigration and internal free movement are the two primary ones. Both need to be not only stopped, but reversed.

FOUR MILLION PAGEVIEWS

The not-at-all-solipsistic John Scalzi is given cause to suspect that blogs are dead:

As I noted in early July, visitorship to Whatever — as in people actually clicking through to the front page of the site — has undergone a collapse this year. I speculated as to why at the link, so if you’re interested in that, check it out there, but the relevant bit now is that I estimated in July I would end up with about 4 million visits to the site in 2017. As of right this minute (6:18 am, 12/28/17), Whatever’s visitorship for the year is: 4,110,902. Right in line with my expectations.

Am I worried? Well, no. One, four million visits in a year to a personal site is still nothing to sneeze at.

I will note that there is a very high correlation between the most visited pieces on the site this year and my linking to it on other social media, most notably Twitter. Twitter and Facebook are also consistently the top non-search-related sites (by far) for referrals to my site. This strongly suggests something I’ve long suspected, which is that Twitter and Facebook have at this point largely consumed and digested the former blogosphere, enough so that at this point, I wonder if I should even call Whatever a “blog” anymore. The name is beginning to get a fusty smell to it.

Sure, that’s possible, I suppose. On the other hand, the decline from 8 million pageviews in 2012 to 4 million in 2017 – I’m sure we’re all shocked to discover Scalzi is being deceptive again, this time by substituting “visits” for “pageviews” – in addition to the 30,953,348 “visitorship for the year” that VP has as of right this minute tends to suggest that intelligent people who like to read commentary simply aren’t all that interested in Whatever anymore. It appears I am far from the only person who once read Whatever back in the day who no longer does so.

But the posturing is informative, as it demonstrates a classic Gamma perspective. You see, the Gamma doesn’t mind at all that he’s observably in deep decline, so long as the decline is right in line with his expectations.

Secret King wins again!

UPDATE: Scalzi realizes he got caught… again.

John Scalzi@scalzi
TFW someone mewls pathetically and at ridiculous length about a terminology error you made on your site, but he has a point, so you correct the error.

If it was anyone else, I would have assumed it was simply a mistake, but in this case, we’re dealing with someone who blatantly lied to both Lightspeed and The New York Times about his site traffic in the past. So, one can’t reasonably give him the benefit of the doubt.

That being said, good for him for correcting his error. Let’s hope this will lead him to correct his previous “errors”.

Even being a woman in tech won’t help

An actual female programmer discovers that actually being a woman who genuinely works in tech doesn’t protect you from Tech SJWs once you violate the Narrative:

To be clear, right from the start: I never actually did anything wrong. I didn’t egregiously violate any codes of conduct. (Quite frankly, even if I had, I have no idea how, why, or when it might have happened, since my “accusers” refuse to tell me.) My only “crime” is being an outspoken, albeit moderate, conservative who doesn’t prescribe to the radical feminist narrative of many women in STEM groups. I’ve questioned some of their talking points and, at times, I’ve vehemently disagreed with some of their views, but I nonetheless support their mission of supporting and advocating for women in technology.

By telling the story of how I got mercilessly smeared and ostracized by the leadership and members of two prominent women in tech groups, Women Who Code and Google’s Women Techmakers, my hope is to encourage other people to speak up and to fight back if they’re the victims of bullying. It’s important to recognize that women can, and do, bully each other, and in the tech industry, it is unfortunately a problem that is all too often ignored and even denied, because other factors like racial bias, sexism, and even sexual harassment are typically blamed for an unfavorable attrition rate of women in tech.

The thing is, it’s all nonsense. Very few women actually want to work in tech, and even fewer will want to do so surrounded by foreign H1B Gammas and Omegas imported by the tech giants. But it is a salutary lesson in learning that no one who violates the Narrative is off limits, no matter what victim cards you can play.

If anything, SJWs crack down even harder on women and other victim classes who refuse to accept their victimhood, because no one is more threatening to the SJWs’ right to speak on their behalf.

An interview with Bono

I wish the media would do more significant interviews of this sort with artists, writers, and politicians. It’s a bit of a swan song for both interviewer and interviewee, and it actually provides genuine insight into the man, who is more interesting than one would have imagined from his public posturings:

Performers are very insecure people. Gavin Friday, his line to me years and years ago was “Insecurity is your best security for a performer.” A performer needs to know what is going on in the room and feel the room, and you don’t feel the room if you are normal, if you’re whole. If you have any great sense of self, you wouldn’t be that vulnerable to either the opinions of others or the love and the applause and the approval of others.

The whole event enriched the album, though – talk about an experience.

But isn’t that great? I thought Experience would be more contemplative, and it has got that side, but the heart of the album is the spunk and the punk and the drive of it. There is a sort of youthfulness about it. A lot of the tempos are up. And it has some of the funniest lines, I think. “Dinosaur wonders why he still walks the Earth.” I mean, I started that line about myself.

Being a dinosaur?

Yeah, of course, but then I started to think about it in terms of what is going on around the world. And I thought, “Gosh, democracy, the thing that I have grown up with all my life . . . that’s what’s really facing an extinction event.”

In an interview that you and I did in 2005, you said this: “Our definition of art is breaking open the breastbone, for sure. Just open-heart surgery. I wish there were an easier way, but people want blood, and I am one of them.”

Life and death and art . . . all of them bloody businesses.

How did your faith get you through all of this?

The person who wrote best about love in the Christian era was Paul of Tarsus, who became Saint Paul. He was a tough fucker. He is a superintellectual guy, but he is fierce and he has, of course, the Damascene experience. He goes off and lives as a tentmaker. He starts to preach, and he writes this ode to love, which everybody knows from his letter to the Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind. . . . Love bears all things, love believes all things” – you hear it at a lot of weddings. How do you write these things when you are at your lowest ebb? ‘Cause I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t deepen myself. I am looking to somebody like Paul, who was in prison and writing these love letters and thinking, “How does that happen? It is amazing.”

Now, it doesn’t cure him of all, of what he thinks of women or gay people or whatever else, but within his context he has an amazingly transcendent view of love. And I do believe that the darkness is where we learn to see. That is when we see ourselves clearer – when there is no light.

You asked me about my faith. I had a sense of suffocation. I am a singer, and everything I do comes from air. Stamina, it comes from air. And in this process, I felt I was suffocating. That was the most frightening thing that could happen to me because I am in pain. Ask Ali. She said I wouldn’t notice if I had a knife sticking out of my back. I would be like, “Huh, what is that?” But this time last year, I felt very alone and very frightened and not able to speak and not able to even explain my fear because I was kind of . . .

When you felt like you were suffocating?

Yeah. But, you know, people have had so much worse to deal with, so that is another reason not to talk about it. You demean all the people who, you know, never made it through that or couldn’t get health care!

Do you feel like you lucked out?

Lucked out? I am the fucking luckiest man on Earth. I didn’t think that I had a fear of a fast exit. I thought it would be inconvenient ’cause I have a few albums to make and kids to see grow up and this beautiful woman and my friends and all of that. But I was not that guy. And then suddenly you are that guy. And you think, “I don’t want to leave here. There’s so much more to do.” And I’m blessed. Grace and some really clever people got me through, and my faith is strong.

I read the Psalms of David all the time. They are amazing. He is the first bluesman, shouting at God, “Why did this happen to me?” But there’s honesty in that too. . . . And, of course, he looked like Elvis. If you look at Michelangelo’s sculpture, don’t you think David looks like Elvis?

Never forget that you can always learn from those who are intelligent and successful, even when you disagree with them. In fact, you can often learn more important things from those with whom you disagree, simply because their perspective is so fundamentally different than your own.

No worries, they’ve got immigrants

Surely they will be more than up to the burden of shouldering the tax load:

According to the Daily Caller, three states, in particular, saw a massive departure of Americans to the tune of 450,000, taking their wallets with them as they fled. This is leading to the problem of having no one around to pay the bills in these tax-heavy states.

The Daily Caller reported that taking the lead is New York:

The exodus of residents was most pronounced in New York, which saw about 190,000 people leave the state between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released last week.

New York’s domestic out-migration during that time period was about the same as it was in the same time 2015 and 2016. Since 2010, the state’s outflow of just over 1 million residents has exceeded that of every other state, both in absolute terms and as a share of population, according to the free-market think tank Empire Center.

Despite the number of people leaving New York, the population did grow due to high immigration from other parts of the world, and a higher birth rate.

California is yet another deep blue state that found itself watching Americans take their money with them as they left:

California was the third deep blue state to experience significant domestic out-migration between July 2016 and July 2017, and it couldn’t blame the outflow on retirees searching for a more agreeable climate. About 138,000 residents left the state during that time period, second only to New York.

But like New York, California’s population only grew due to a heavy flow of international migration to the state:

However, because California was the top receiving state for international migrants, its net migration was actually 27,000. Add to that number a “natural increase” of 214,000 people, and California’s population grew by about just over 240,000, according to the Census Bureau.

Both New York and California’s population growth may or may not help them. The tax status of the immigrants replacing the taxpayers that flee the states may range from completely legitimate, to non-tax paying status depending on the immigrants’ level of income or legality. According to CNN, most new immigrants into the country work lower paying jobs, and with those workers paying little to no taxes, the burden on the high-tax deep blue states could get even worse.

It’s amusing how people suddenly start talking very differently about the tax-paying abilities of immigrants when they realize that the state’s tax revenue is actually going to depend on them.

The problem is that these so-called “blue state” idiots are going to vote for exactly the same thing they’re fleeing now. No state should have ever allowed its new residents to vote on state and local matters for at least two generations, and preferably three.

Beyond improbable

So, as you may recall, the Christmas adverts in the UK were suspiciously interethnic this year. Six of the major retailers, John Lewis, Marks & Spencer, Debenham’s, Sainesbury and Tesco, all just happened to feature interethnic couples who, despite the fairly complex web of interethnic relations tracked by Her Majesty’s Government, all just happened to be of the black man-white woman variety.

Now, I am fully accustomed to the usual excuse-mongering about how interethnicity simply reflects modern society and how anyone who finds this to be suspicious, unlikely, improbable, or indeed, anything less than inspiring is a dirty, double-dyed racist who is unfit to live in any civilized society. Nevertheless, I thought that I would run the numbers to see just how likely it would be for six major commercials to just happen to feature that particular interethnic combination.

There are nine recognized interethnic combinations that are capable of describing the full range of couples shown in the commercials. They are:

  • White and Black Caribbean with White British
  • White and Black Caribbean with Other White
  • White and Black African with White British
  • White and Black African with Other White
  •  African with White British
  • African with Other White
  • Caribbean with White British
  • Caribbean with White Other
  • Other Black with White British

The grand total of individuals on the right column involved in such relationships in the United Kingdom is 156,000. Since the statistics are not divided by sex, but the actors in the commercials are, we must divide that number by two; observe we’re keeping the number of sexes to two rather than, say, 37, in order to keep this reasonably simple. That gives us 78,000.

However, the total number of UK individuals involved in relationships is 25,555,555. Dividing 78k by 25.6M gives us 0.3 percent. So, there is a one in 327 chance that such a BM/WW couple would randomly appear in an advert. However, we are dealing with not one, not two, but SIX commercials.

Multiplied out, my calculator does not display that many zeroes, but to put it another way, there is a one in 1,237,350,745,449,354 chance that these particular adverts just happened to reflect reality. That is one in 1.2 quadrillion.

Which is the mathematical way of saying, “why yes, that is indeed SJW convergence I espy.”

The US model is not inevitable

The Chinese model is looking increasingly desirable to third parties as the USA disappears beneath a tide of debt, immigration, and moral degradation:

Anthony Kpandu took a delegation from his party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), to China last year to train with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Kpandu is in charge of special working groups at the general secretariat for the SPLM, the liberation movement turned government party that helped South Sudan gain independence from Sudan in 2011. Wearing a button that says, “I love SPLM,” a paisley tie, and a loose tan jacket, he reminisces about his trip to China in detail, down to every day’s itinerary.

They visited the Central Party school in Beijing, toured industrial zones, drank various types of green tea, and walked part of the Great Wall. Kpandu’s favorite part was Shanghai, with its glittery commercial district, Pudong, high-speed Maglev train, and sprawling airport. “It was magnificent. You can’t believe it, but it’s there. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he says from his office in Juba.

In the 1970s, China actively tried to export its communist revolution to Africa, one of Beijing’s few diplomatic engagements at the time. Now, Beijing is promoting a more subtle movement: support for China and and its model of development. Instead of relying on Chinese emissaries in African countries, Beijing is bringing thousands of African leaders, bureaucrats, students, and business people to China.

It’s a campaign that achieves several goals at once. The trips help solidify political and business ties between China and its partners on the continent. Like other development partners, China gets to help build capacity in African countries. Most importantly these exchanges cultivate partners on the continent who are more likely to be sympathetic to China and its way of doing things.

China has been hosting these trainings and exchanges in Africa since as far back as the 1950s when it first established diplomatic ties with Egypt. Over the past decade, the trainings have grown in both volume and profile. Kenya’s Jubilee party, created before the country’s contentious election this year, received trainings from the Chinese Communist Party in China. The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front also takes inspiration from the the CCP while South Africa’s African National Congress regularly attends workshops in China and has modeled some of its party trainings on the CCP.

China is particularly interested in the next generation of African elites. Last year, Beijing announced it would invite 1,000 young African politicians for trainings in China, after hosting more than 200 between 2011 and 2015. Thousands of African students are pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in China on scholarship programs funded by Beijing. As of this year, more Anglophone African students study in China than the United States or the United Kingdom, their traditional destinations of choice.

I have to admit, if I was a young African nationalist looking for a successful model to imitate, it certainly wouldn’t be either the EU or the USA. Like most empires in decline, Americans don’t understand that they are already living in a polity that is well past its peak. They will be lucky if they manage to salvage an American rump state out of it before the 21st century ends.

Imagine that

Elite media figure commits suicide:

The heir to the Washington Post fortune, William W. Graham, committed suicide last week, echoing his publisher father’s death in 1963. Graham, a 69-year-old lawyer, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound last Wednesday, according to an obituary published in the Post. 

Are the hunters closing in? This reminds me of something I wrote back in February:

Anyhow, those who complain that Pizzagate has led to nothing concrete simply haven’t been paying attention. Over one thousand pedophiles have been arrested around the world since November, and you can be certain that most of them are singing like canaries. We’ll know the next stage has begun when the media begins reporting a sudden epidemic of suicides among Congressional staffers. 

Or the media and corporate elite. Of course, it could be that Mr. Graham was simply suffering from a terminal illness or depression, but after the mysterious deaths of the rich Canadian couple last week, well, we have been told there are no coincidences. And for a whole lot of nothing, there are certainly no shortage of Democratic politicians who are deeply concerned about the God-Emperor’s recent actions.

I am concerned that the president of the United States is systematically trying to shut down every possible branch of government but the presidency. So you got him attacking the judiciary, you have him attacking the CIA, you have him attacking the Department of Justice, the FBI. I mean this is the conduct of someone who could become a tyrant if we don’t step in and speak out against him.

But if we go only by the mainstream news reports, President Trump hasn’t really done anything at all. So what are they complaining about?

The sex criminals of Seattle

High-level employees at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are busted for prostitution- and sex trafficking-related crimes:

Several Seattle employees of both Google and Amazon were busted after using their corporate accounts to send emails to local brothels and pimps looking to purchase services from sex workers trafficked from Asia, according to emails obtained by Newsweek.

“[E]mails obtained by Newsweek reveal another sordid corner of the tech sector’s treatment of women: a horny nest of prostitution “hobbyists” at tech giants Microsoft, Amazon and other firms in Seattle’s high tech alley.”

Many of the emails were swept up in a 2015 sting operation which targeted online chat rooms and message boards in which customers rate sex workers – resulting in the arrest of 18 of these “prostitution hobbyists,” including several high level Amazon and Microsoft directors – two of which are currently scheduled for trial in March.

Seattle brothels had been catering to Microsoft employees through several “backpage.com” ads located nearby the company’s Redmond, WA headquarters, in what is becoming a booming business.

No names were mentioned. What do you want to bet that most of them are reflective of New/Not American heritage?

Of course, you have to wonder what the poor employees of these SJW-converged companies are supposed to do. They certainly don’t dare express any interest in their female colleagues or they’ll be denounced and disemployed.