Adidas Endorses Gazacaust

The shoe company drops a Palestinian model because she stands publicly against the genocide and ethnic cleansing of her people.

German sportswear giant Adidas has dropped American model Bella Hadid from their advertising campaign for retro sneakers after facing criticism from Israel. Hadid, whose Palestinian father was born in Nazareth, has been a vocal advocate for the rights of the ethnonational group, calling for an end to the bloodshed in Gaza.

She has repeatedly criticized the Israeli government over the ongoing Gaza conflict, which to date has claimed over 38,000 Palestinian lives. In October 2023, the IDF launched a military operation in the enclave in response to a deadly Hamas raid that had left approximately 1,200 Israelis dead.

Bella and her sister Gigi, also a model with millions of social media followers, have participated in several pro-Palestinian demonstrations, publicly accusing Israel of committing “genocide” in the enclave. The Hadid sisters have also donated $1 million to support multiple Palestinian relief efforts in Gaza, including HEAL Palestine, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, World Central Kitchen, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

“Guess who the face of their campaign is? Bella Hadid, a half-Palestinian model who has a history of spreading anti-Semitism and calling for violence against Israelis and Jews,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry wrote on X on Thursday. Adidas responded that the company would be “revising the remainder of the campaign” with immediate effect without giving further details.

This may not turn out as the positive public relations statement for Adidas that the company assumes. Most of the world is now standing squarely against Israel’s attack on the Palestinian people, and it’s generally not a good idea to outsource your marketing decisions to a foreign government’s spokesman. I very much doubt this decision will end well for Adidas.

The fact is that no amount of crying Holocaust, Hamas, or “Israel has a right to defend itself” can justify either the October 7th green flag or the IDF “response” that was obviously planned well in advance. Everyone knows very well that the Netanyahu regime is attempting to complete the ethnic cleansing that was begun in 1948, which is why everyone around the world, both left and right, now despises it.

Netanyahu might still get away with his gamble, but it was always going to be very difficult trying to sell ethnic cleansing for me, diversity for thee.

In the meantime, Israel’s war with Yemen has now officially gone hot. No doubt the Yemenis will be duly chastened and release their stranglehold on the Red Sea.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has praised the Israel Defense Forces for carrying out a “precise and successful operation” over 1,700 kilometers away from the country’s borders, which he says serves as a clear warning to all enemies of the Jewish state. The Israeli military launched its first-ever direct large-scale air raid against Yemen on Saturday, targeting the port city of Hodeidah. The attack triggered a massive fire at the port’s oil terminal and left at least 80 people injured, according to a preliminary tally by the health ministry in Sanaa.

DISCUSS ON SG

I Think We Know This One

Blind Item #1
In this song released earlier in 2024, the sleep-inducing A+ comic writer’s wife appears to have confirmed everything he’s been accused of and more.
– CDAN

The song is obviously Whakanewha by Amanda Palmer, which makes it pretty clear that she knew all about at least one of her ex-husband’s accusers, and lends credence to that accuser’s statement that Palmer was aware of at least 13 other similar situations. It also tends to suggest that there is a connection between the growing scandal and why she left him in the first place.

It’s actually a pretty good song from an otherwise mediocre artist, which is a reliable indicator that it’s coming from a place of genuine and powerful emotion. And it also appears that the media embargo on the Neil Gaiman sexual assault accusations is beginning to crack.

Another forest metaphor
You’ve heard a million before
The trees know everything, I tried a wedding ring
But you just cringed and said, “What for?”
And now the whole thing’s turned to ash
You try to cover it with cash
Another falling tree no one can hear but me
Another suicidal mass
Landing on my doorstep, thanks a ton
Oh, darling, how can I repay you for what you have done?

And then you lied to me at Whakanewha
And you sealed it with a kiss
I wanted to live with you, but, fuckin’-a, fuck you
No one on Earth could live like this

Another clear-cut load of crap
A few more corpses in the sack
You’ll get away with it, it’s just the same old script
This world is shaped to have your back
You said, “I’m sorry,” then you ran
And went and did it all again
I’m such a fool, I know
Street smart but gullible
I see the good in everything
A pound of flax, a pound of steel
I may be dumb, but I can feel
I wonder when you’ll realize what you had

A frightened bird, a crystal ball
So sad, you could’ve had it all
But you hate yourself too much to want all that
I had so much hope for your broken heart
But you’ve made your choice, and you chose the dark
And so I’ll bury you at Whakanewha
And have a party with my friends
I’ll miss you terribly, but, fuckin’-a, fuck me
It feels so good to love again

DISCUSS ON SG

Speaking of Cancellations

The Japanese are not at all happy with a gaijin who appears to be attempting to reinvent Japanese history by taking a page from the Mary Beard “everyone was Black” school of history. After all, if both England and Sweden can be “nations of immigrants”, why shouldn’t Japan be too? To top it all off, he’s not even a historian at Nihon University, he’s just an English teacher.

On Thursday, Variety revealed that JoAnn M. Hunter, the choreographer of “School of Rock” and “Bad Cinderella,” has been hired to direct the upcoming musical “Yasuke: The Black Samurai,” which is expected to open in 2026. With few historical documents on Yasuke, the story is likely to be chiefly based on the words of Thomas Lockley. An associate professor at Nihon University, he co-authored the first book in the world about Yasuke in 2019. But how much of what he wrote about the man dubbed the first non-Japanese samurai is true? Not a lot, according to netizens.

The English author has received widespread criticism, particularly in the past few days, and has reportedly deleted his Facebook page. The biggest backlash has been against his claim that several feudal lords in Japan were happy to make use of Black slaves. There have been close to 200,000 posts on the subject. “The rumor that black slaves were popular among Japanese daimyo needs to be properly refuted and stamped out, otherwise it could cause big problems later,” tweeted one user. There have also been allegations that Lockley edited Yasuke’s Wikipedia page under the name Tottoritom.

There are also reports that Lockley has been fired from Nihon University, which are unconfirmed, but a petition to fire him has already been signed by 20,000 Japanese people.

Interestingly enough, the only article about Lockley on Japan Today was marked “expired, no longer available”. He would be well-advised to leave Japan; Meiji-era radicals would literally behead him for this sort of insult to Japanese history and culture.

DISCUSS ON SG

When Puppies Become Wolves

Larry Correia is unimpressed by charges of hypocrisy by those who are upset and frightened by the realization that the pendulum is swinging back in their faces.

You’re the woke right cancel culture. You know, they guy you have pretended to hate this whole time. With a slice of hypocrisy and anger.

Oh these fools really don’t get it. There is no hypocrisy here. But there is anger. And it ain’t no slice. I despise these assholes with a passion.

You don’t know what anger is until Caring Liberals decide to destroy your life for crimes that exist in their fevered imagination, to the point they they run organized slander campaigns against you so vile that it puts the lives of your children in danger. Gleefully they rooted for psychos to try and kill me, because I hurt their feelings once over a meaningless award.

For the last ten years at every turn, petty fucks tried to destroy my livelihood. For ten years they continued to spread nasty shit that they knew to be false, but they did it anyway, just out of spite because I believe wrong.

My continued success galled them. That’s not how this is supposed to work. I was supposed to roll over and cower and beg forgiveness for things I never did. But I refused.

Despite that, there is no doubt their cancel campaign has been effective in that it has cost me millions of dollars. There’s nothing quite like having thousands of total strangers reflexively hate you because everything they’ve ever been told about you is a lie. Super fun.

But my continued success pisses these assholes off, so it’s totally worth it.

For over ten years I tried to warn the few remaining honest people on the left where their reckless destruction of the social contract was going to lead us. Now, I simply no longer give a fuck if their hubris destroys them. I will toast marshmallows over your cremation fire.

I’m no hypocrite. Oh no. I’m far, far past that. I actively root for your utter destruction. I’ve moved into a zen state of watching you honorless dogs pave the road to hell. And I will sit back and gloat as you burn.

For you see, there is no hypocrisy, because I’m not canceling you. I’m merely watching and laughing and commenting upon the obvious, as the puppies you beat and abused until they turned into wolves inevitably devour you.

Larry knows, even if some of the garden-variety SJWs don’t, that the Rabid Puppies of yesterday are the wolves of today. We’re not just watching and laughing, we’re meticulously exercising our right to excise their kind from our personal lives, our families, our professional lives, and our social circles. SJWs are going to SJW, nothing is going to stop that, but they’re going to have to do it at a distance from now on. And it’s very far from hypocrisy to insist that they be held to their own standard: No freedom of consequences.

DISCUSS ON SG

How Cancel Culture Should Work

If you’re a government official seeking to police the political opinions of others, you should lose your job, just as this Argentine minister lost his after attempting to speech police the Argentine national soccer team:

Julio Garro — Argentina’s former undersecretary of sport — lost his job on Thursday after he publicly called for Messi to apologize after the Argentinian national team sang a racially insensitive song after winning the Copa America.

Following a 1-0 win over Colombia in the final, midfielder Enzo Fernandez livestreamed himself and teammates singing the song, which makes fun of Black players on the French national team.

Listen, spread the word / They play in France, but they’re all from Angola / How lovely, they will run / They are trans lovers like that f*ck Mbappe / Your mom is Nigerian, your dad is Cameroonian / But on your ID, it says French nationality.

Garro said that by chanting the derogatory lyrics, the team put Argentina in a bad light. Fernandez has already apologized publicly for sharing the footage via social media, but Messi hasn’t addressed it.

“I think the captain of the national team and the AFA president should come out and apologize for this case,” Garro told Argentinian radio Urbano Play. “It is fitting. It leaves us in a bad light with so much glory.”

Argentina president Javier Milei has since issued a statement via social media and confirmed that Garro is no longer in the position. “The president’s office reports that no government can tell what to comment, what to think or what to do to the Argentina national team, world champion and two-time American champion, or to any other citizen,” it read. “For this reason, Julio Garro ceases to be undersecretary of sports of the nation.”

I’m not a fan of free speech. But I’m even less a fan of subjective and ex post facto public thought policing on the basis of Clown World values. Milei did well to immediately can the guy.

Also, the Argentine players are entirely correct. Far too many players on the European “national” teams are foreign nationals. They are called “national” teams, not “paper citizenship” or even “legal resident” teams, after all.

DISCUSS ON SG

Two Strikes

I may be wrong about my initial diagnosis of JD Vance as being a Gamma male.

  • CDAN: The payment billionaire finally got what he wanted. He has the possible #2 in his pocket who could very well be the A++ lister in the future. It is amazing what can occur in “meetings” back in the day that leave you vulnerable to being exploited.
  • Charles Johnson: I pointed out that Vance, who would ban all abortions, has no real women around him on his staff. I even went into detail about there are similar comparisons between Vance and Obama on the closeted gay stuff… One of the oddly consistently parts of Vance’s politics has been an opposition to gay marriage, The Nation notes. Why? Is this like Senator Joseph McCarthy — another Republican closet case — being leveraged?

CDAN is referring to Peter Thiel and JD Vance. If true, this certainly would explain why the Republican Party’s longstanding opposition to LGBT rights has suddenly vanished from the platform. And why Mawmaw felt the need to ask young JD if he harbored any particular proclivities.

I’m not saying Vance is a closet case. There isn’t enough information to conclude anything one way or the other. But there is observably a certain buzz about him in Republican insider circles that might not unreasonably be described as a William F. Buckley vibe.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Tale of Two Crowdfunds

There are two Arkhaven-related crowdfunding campaigns that kicked off just yesterday. The first is the second volume of Ascendant: Star-Spangled Squadron from our friends at Autarch. We’re relaunching the entire series on Arktoons in two weeks, so this is a good way to support our partners in the comics industry.

The second campaign is, of course, THE HIDDEN EMPEROR by Jon Del Arroz. Arkhaven will be publishing the retail edition of this graphic novel, and it will be featured on Arktoons as well, as part of the OVERMIND series that will be launching there soon. Mike Murphy, Razorfist, the illustrator, and I were all on Arkhaven Nights with Jon last night to launch the crowdfund, which by the end of the stream had already passed its initial objective.

Ayla Rin, Agent Of The Terran Imperium, returns to face a new sinister plot against the Imperium! Something is amiss with the Emperor of Mankind. Ayla Rin discovers he’s been replaced by a clone who’s intentionally sabotaging the Imperium on behalf of the evil Scorpio Alliance! But worse, the Scorpio Alliance knows she knows. And that means blackmail. Ayla is forced to find a secret superweapon that could unleash devastation on the Imperium. Fans of Valerian, The Incal, and Saga epic science fiction comics will love THE HIDDEN EMPEROR! 

DISCUSS ON SG

User Experience: Enhanced

It must be hard to be a Chinese or Russian strategist these days. I imagine their superiors in the military and government are tired of always hearing the same advice. “Just wait, don’t do anything, Clown World will destroy itself. It’s inevitable.”

The ‘most serious IT outage the world has ever seen’ sparked global chaos today – with planes and trains grounded, the NHS disrupted, shops closed, football teams unable to sell tickets and banks and TV channels knocked offline.

The devastating technical fault caused Windows computers to suddenly shut down, prompting departure boards to immediately turn off at airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Edinburgh on the busiest day for British airports since Covid.

NHS England said patients should not to attend GP appointments unless informed otherwise due to problems with the system used to schedule appointments, while train passengers have been told to expect delays due to ‘widespread IT issues across the entire network’. In a sign of the global impact of the IT failure, passengers were seen sleeping in passageways at Los Angeles International Airport, huge queues formed at terminals across Spain, and in Delhi staff set up a makeshift whiteboard to record departures.

Shops in Australia shut down or went cashless after digital checkouts stopped working, while in the US emergency services lines went down in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Ohio.

Cyber security company CrowdStrike has admitted to being responsible for the error that hit Microsoft 365 apps and operating systems and said a ‘fix has been deployed’. The American firm said it was caused by a ‘defect found in a single content update’ and insisted the issue ‘was not a security incident or cyberattack’.

DISCUSS ON SG

RIP Bob Newhart

The Dark Herald provides the eulogy:

It was easily the greatest ending to a television comedy in history. I never even heard the lines I was laughing so hard. It was without question a “you had to be there” to understand moment. There had been all kinds of rumors going around about how Newhart would end. Mostly they’d promised something really intolerable. That Bob, who had been a fixture in our lives throughout the 1980s was going to be killed by a golfball in the series finale.

That final scene transporting Bob Newhart back to his bedroom and wife from his previous TV series left the country howling.

It was the perfect way to end a TV show that had been in the background of our lives for eight years. It kind of understated but it was always reliable for a good laugh. You could say the exact same thing about the Bob Newhart show (1972-1978), for that matter you could say the same thing about Bob Newhart himself.

Napoleonic Wars

We’ve finished the interior of the fourth book in the History series, STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS. For a look at the endpapers and the title page, visit the Castalia Library substack. There are 50 copies remaining, so if you’d like to acquire one, you can do so at the Arkhaven store. A significant discount from the retail price is available to all History, Library, and Libraria subscribers, but it is not the usual discount code, so please visit the substack for details.

DISCUSS ON SG