The Fifth Woman

The fifth Tortoise Media podcast features a young woman who had already come forward in another venue with more allegations of being sexually assaulted by Neil Gaiman, but the Tortoise Media investigation and podcast go into considerably more detail, and, for the first time, feature Gaiman’s voice directly discussing the alleged victim’s accusations in a telephone call.

A fifth woman has accused Neil Gaiman of sexually assaulting her. Claire – not her real name – says that while the author was on a book tour in the United States in July 2013 he took her to a room with a bed at the back of a bus, closed the door, then got on top of her and started kissing her and groping her under her dress and over her breasts.

Accounts by other women who have come forward with complaints about Gaiman’s behaviour have raised questions about consent within highly asymmetric relationships.

Gaiman’s account is that he invited Claire onto his tour bus because their previous interactions and correspondence suggested to him that she wanted intimate contact. His account is that he attempted to initiate a kiss with her, while they were lying on a bed at the back of the bus, but he stopped when it became quickly apparent that she didn’t want one.

Nearly ten years later Gaiman and Claire had two phone calls, in response to a letter she sent him detailing her ongoing trauma from the incident. Tortoise has heard recordings of these calls. Neil Gaiman admits that he “fucked up”, calls his behaviour “shitty,” and offers to pay Claire $60,000 to cover the cost of her therapy, and promises to make a “hefty donation” to a rape crisis centre where she once worked.

I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that Gaiman does not appear to have kept his promise to make that “hefty donation” to the rape crisis center. And Tortoise Media journalist Paul Caruana Galiz notes:

Gaiman claims she made the first move on him because “I’d have never made the first move on anybody. I’d be terrified of that.” Even by his own account he made the first move on Scarlett (jumping into a bath with her in Feb 22) and on Julia Hobsbawm (sudden, unwanted kiss in 1986)... Makes her the third woman he sent money to in the space of eight months.

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Permanently Unauthorized

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter and Susan Wojcicki died, the word has been that the unauthorized crimethinkers are being welcomed back to the converged platforms from which they were banished.

Following her death people like Robert F Kennedy Jr. and Judge Andrew Napolitano are back on YouTube which is no longer censoring vaccine truth.

That may be. However, after hearing this, I took advantage of the YouTube account review process. I doubt anyone here will be surprised to learn the result, although I was a bit surprised that the review process was so efficient, as I received YouTube’s decision in less than two minutes.

That was a remarkably fast “careful look”. And, of course, there still has never been any explanation of how it violates that “Community Guidelines” policy. Note that I’m not complaining, I’m just confirming and observing, and it’s good to know that, at least in the opinion of Clown World, I still haven’t lost my fastball.

UPDATE: Ron Unz wonders why Candace Owens is still permitted on YouTube.

Dissident circles frequently use the phrase “controlled opposition,” reflecting Lenin’s alleged strategy of creating a fake opposition movement that he himself could control and manipulate. Having watched a number of Candace Owens’ videos, she seems entirely sincere and I doubt very much that she represents any sort of “controlled opposition.” But I do think another relevant term might be “promoted opposition,” with the powerful establishment using its control over the media and major platforms to decide exactly which individuals will become its most prominent and visible public opponents. And perhaps the continuing survival and success of Candace Owens on YouTube might reflect that sort of decision.

I have what I consider to be a more likely explanation: Candace Owens is black and she’s married to a rich Englishman. YouTube probably doesn’t want to fight that battle on both PR and legal fronts, particularly given the very strong English defamation laws it habitually violates when it falsely claims the violation of its Community Guidelines.

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Clown World “Democracy” in France

French President Emmanuel Macron refuses to accept the Parliament’s choice for Prime Minister.

Following consultations with the main political forces at the Elysée Palace on Friday and Monday, the head of state ruled out the appointment of Lucie Castets as prime minister, as demanded by the left-wing coalition.

According to Emmanuel Macron, “a government based solely on the program and parties” of the NFP “would immediately be censured by all the other groups represented in the National Assembly”. “The institutional stability of our country therefore requires that this option not be retained”, he thundered.
In the same text, the President of the Republic announced the launch of “a new round of consultations” starting on Tuesday with party leaders and “personalities distinguished by their experience in serving the State and the Republic”. A source close to Emmanuel Macron told Agence France-Presse on Monday evening that La France Insoumise, Rassemblement National and Eric Ciotti would not be invited to the new consultations.

Even before the announcement of Mr. Macron’s decision, the leaders of the Nouveau Front Populaire had announced that from now on they would only go to the Elysée “to work on the modalities of this cohabitation” with Ms. Castets at Matignon. None of the left-wing groups in the NFP coalition is therefore expected to go to the Elysée Palace on Tuesday.

All the left-wing parties have vehemently denounced Mr. Macron’s refusal to allow them to appoint a government, despite finishing top of the legislative elections. The national coordinator of La France Insoumise, Manuel Bompard, denounced on BFM “an anti-democratic coup de force that is being carried out on the basis of an argument that makes no sense”. “Emmanuel Macron’s communiqué is a disgrace”, said Marine Tondelier, National Secretary of the Ecologists. Communist Party national secretary Fabien Roussel felt that members of the presidential camp “don’t want the left and the ecologists to govern, they don’t want to respond to our citizens’ expectations for change”. “The Republic was born of the refusal of personal power,” wrote the Socialist Party’s first secretary, Olivier Faure, for his part, denouncing Mr. Macron’s decision.

In the evening, Manuel Bompard announced that a motion of impeachment against the head of state “will be presented by the Insoumis deputies to the bureau of the National Assembly in accordance with article 68 of the Constitution”, to oppose “an abuse of power”.

So, the Clown World “centrists” manipulated the electoral system to keep the nationalists out, and thereby handed the elections to the French Left. But, of course, they don’t want the Left to actually take power, because the Left is insane and will simply accelerate the process of turning power over to the nationalists.

Remember, this is the “democracy” that is supposed to be in demand all over the world. No wonder all the sovereign nations are looking at China and Russia and deciding that they’d better apply to BRICS.

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Shiny, Sexy, Secutopia

The epic retarderies of modern civilization can, to some extent, be blamed on science fiction:

By the 1960s, progressivism had reached a new ascendancy. Fueled by the unparalleled wealth that came with a modern economy, millions were lifted into new, luxurious lifestyles. Now was the time to put aside the ignorance of religion and finally embrace the freedoms offered by a world liberated from Christianity.

It isn’t hard to understand how so many fell for the deception. Things were getting better and better. Technology was improving, and more importantly, accelerating. The Soviet Union was an existential threat, yes. However, too many had already seen the miracle of science, and it seemed a better horse to back than spiritually weakened priests who were quickly conceding to the liberalism’s demands.

But with any new religion, there has to be a story, and the story science told wasn’t so flattering. Men had gone from sons of God to sons of apes. Salvation was a lie and death was the end. There was no justice in the world, and mercy was just the delusion of fools. Man was a small being in a cold universe. The only thing modern men could be comforted by was his own increasing material comfort.

That’s not a story anyone wants to hear. And it’s certainly not a story anyone wants to tell. While abject nihilism has always had its place in literature, it rightfully has a small audience. Nihilism has nothing that could sustain a city, much less a nation.

Reason and science needed romance. It needed adventure and a destiny. Without these things, it was a boring, uninspiring philosophy. Writers (good ones anyway) instinctively shy away from boring. Better to be dead than boring. If there is a victory, it has to be a glorious triumph. If it is a defeat, it has to be a last stand. And if it is banal, then it has to be the most shuddering and teeth clenching banality of all.

But the Sci-Fi writers of the 1960s and later could do a lot more than banality. They knew how to tell stories, and they (unconsciously or otherwise) slipped that dreaded irrationality and religious ignorance back into their fiction. In doing so, they created the archetypal myths which define the modern world.

The problem was their myths were material, stupid, and false. They always were, but it wasn’t always completely obvious as the technology- and debt-bubbles expanded and made the impossible seem inevitable. Now, of course, people are embarrassed to admit they ever bought into any of it.

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A Dying Outpost

Things are not looking good for Israel, which is reaping the bitter harvest of completely ignoring the sage advice of one of its greatest sons. Though respected by militaries throughout the world, especially the U.S. Marines, the great Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has been utterly ignored by the generals of the IDF and the Likud politicians as they wage precisely the sort of Goliath vs David war that he has observed tends to enervate a military.

Meanwhile, Simplicius contrasts the difference between Russia’s war on NATO and Israel’s war on Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen, and concludes that very different results are likely.

Analysis continues to be churned out heralding the end of the Israeli economy:

The economic indicators speak of nothing less than an economic catastrophe. Over 46,000 businesses have gone bankrupt, tourism has stopped, Israel’s credit rating was lowered, Israeli bonds are sold at the prices of almost “junk bonds” levels, and the foreign investments that have already dropped by 60% in the first quarter of 2023 (as a result of the policies of Israel’s far-right government before October 7) show no prospects of recovery. The majority of the money invested in Israeli investment funds was diverted to investments abroad because Israelis do not want their own pension funds and insurance funds or their own savings to be tied to the fate of the State of Israel. This has caused a surprising stability in the Israeli stock market because funds invested in foreign stocks and bonds generated profit in foreign currency, which was multiplied by the rise in the exchange rate between foreign currencies and the Israeli Shekel. But then Intel scuttled a $25 billion investment plan in Israel, the biggest BDS victory ever.

It’s difficult to guess the future without going overboard with recency bias, but as the article above states, many figures have now proclaimed that the age of Zionism itself has come to an end, and a slow outflow from Israel, a kind of anti-Aliyah, will continue to take place until Israel itself falls apart and dissolves.

I’ve professed before that I can see Israel’s end resembling that of former Rhodesia. I’ve stated before that Netanyahu and Zelensky are two birds of a feather with the same desperate goals: they need to drag the US into a wider global war to save their regimes and their country. But what they don’t know is: they are doomed whether that happens or not. That’s because the US does not have the power to win a wider war against either adversary, and both Ukraine and Israel would be doomed to their fates, with US merely sacrificing itself in the process as well.

There’s good chance that by 2050-2075 Israel goes the way of Rhodesia, or at least won’t exist in its current form.

I wouldn’t give it that long, since Israel is a Clown World outpost that cannot survive support from the USA and its European puppet states, and the USA is unlikely to survive in its current form more than another decade or so. 2033 is rapidly approaching, but the USD will likely be dethroned before that, with the inevitable debt chickens coming home to roost hard.

What the war in Ukraine has revealed is that the entire basis for the Israeli military superiority necessary for its survival in a hostile environment was built on a false foundation of quality over quantity. That concept works in the small-scale series of battles in which Israel engaged during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 through 1983, and it works in the foreign adventurism in which the US has engaged for most of its military history, but it doesn’t work in real war.

Real war is existential and attritional. Doctrine doesn’t matter, elan doesn’t matter, technological advantage doesn’t matter. Four things are relevant: industrial capacity, numbers, societal morale, and leadership. And in both the Middle East conflict and the European one, Israel and the USA are severely deficient in all four aspects.

Which is why any serious observer is bound to conclude that both conflicts – which of course are different fronts of the same war – are going to end in defeat for the Clown World side. And that is why Ukraine, Israel, and the USA should all be attempting to negotiate surrenders to their respective adversaries on the best terms they can still obtain. But who surrenders when they are constantly assuring everyone that they are winning and victory is imminent in just two more weeks?

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Across the Centuries

A commenter at Castalia Library observes the relevance of Athanius to the pagans who call themselves seculars today.

“But though the builder had many of the qualities which go to make a religious reformer — pure in heart and life, full of sincere piety, manly and with a strong sense of duty — the edifice he reared was quite artificial, lacked the living principle of growth, and could not last. Athanasius gave its history in four words when he said ‘It will soon pass.’ The world had outgrown paganism.”

Athanasius speaks across the centuries to the makers of man-crafted religions. Will any one of them listen?

Of course they won’t. They are fools and ignorati, for all that they consider themselves intelligent and educated. They’re not the equals of the noble pagans of the 4th Century, they’re not even the equals of their Enlightenment-misled predecessors who created the Cambridge Medieval History in the early 20th Century.

Whatever faults the Christianity of the time exhibited, whatever ills had come to it from Imperial patronage and conformity with the world, it still retained within it the original simplicity and profundity of its message. Nothing in its environment could take that from it. It proclaimed a living God, Who had made man and all things and for Whom man was made. That God had manifested Himself in Jesus Christ and the centre of the manifestation was the Passion of our Lord — the Cross. Whatever special meanings attach themselves to the intellectual apprehension of this manifestation, it contains two plain thoughts which can be grasped as easily by the simplest as by the most cultured intelligence, and was therefore universal as no previous religion had ever been.

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Incoherence and Identity

It’s always fascinating to see how “who whom” trumps absolutely everything else for the SJW. Not even war or criminal accusations are as important as their identity boundaries are to them. A tale of two tweets from the SJW micro-Twitter to which they’ve retreated in the aftermath of the Musk acquisition.

  • Just deleted a link to an article on the Gaimanbots published on a site that’s comicsgate affiliated. Mea culpa! TL;DR: s’lookin like someone hired a very expensive cyberPR company to flood major social media platforms with cornball “Gaiman! He’s ginchy!” AI-generated bot posts.
  • I have been puzzled by your silence on the serious allegations leveled against Gaiman. Promoting his work without even a mention is shocking to me, given Bleeding Cool’s gossip column origins. Will you cover this story?

It literally never occurs to them that they are actively assisting the media’s wall of silence regarding the Neil Gaiman sexual assault allegations because they are hiding most of what little coverage exists since they don’t like the only journalists who are willing to breach that wall. In fact, many of them even rejected the initial allegations due to an insane theory that Boris Johnson’s sister had manufactured the allegations in order to destroy Neil Gaiman’s reputation due to Gaiman being a public advocate for transexualism.

Meanwhile, no one besides Fandom Pulse has covered the story about the bots and the professional social media campaign being waged on behalf of Neil Gaiman, aside from The Bookseller‘s initial reporting of Gaiman’s engagement of the firm.

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Telegram Founder Arrested

Clown World is beginning to become unsafe for elite members of the corpocracy who don’t toe the current clown line:

Telegram messaging app founder and CEO Pavel Durov has reportedly been arrested at a French airport after stepping off private plane. Police swooped on the billionaire shortly after landing at the Bourget airport, outside Paris, following a flight from Azerbaijan, French outlet TF1 info reported, citing an unnamed source. Durov was travelling aboard his private jet and had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France, the news site added.

Despite being born in Russia, Durov has not lived there since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas area of Ukraine in 2014. Durov now lives in Dubai where Telegram is based and holds dual citizenship of both France and the United Arab Emirates. 

Durov isn’t, and never was, one of the good guys. He already burned his bridges with Russia, having previously founded the top social media site there. It’s interesting that France would suddenly turn on him; presumably the French are acting on someone else’s orders since Durov told Tucker that the CIA had previously demanded the same backdoor into Telegram that all the major social media platforms have given them.

I have no idea what this signifies, since one would tend to assume that losing WWIII would be more than sufficient to keep the clowns occupied. Certainly the Russians are finding some amusement in the arrest, and they believe the US is behind it.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has asked if international human rights groups will pressure France over the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, given the harsh criticism levied at Russia several years ago when it tried to regulate the messaging app’s operations. Zakharova recalled how in 2018 a group of 28 NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders, condemned a Russian court decision to block Telegram in the country.

UPDATE: The Rumble CEO has left Europe in response to the Durov arrest. I can’t imagine this is good news for the European economy.

I’ve just safely departed from Europe. France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech. Rumble will not stand for this behavior and will use every legal means available to fight for freedom of expression, a universal human right. We are currently fighting in the courts of France, and we hope for Pavel Durov’s immediate release.

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Then They Came for Rohan

John Trent reports that Warner is following Amazon’s lead in purposefully destroying the value of its Tolkien IP with its forthcoming animated film.

Some new information has come our way regarding the upcoming animated film Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim. There’s an alleged marketing document detailing how the company Warner Bros. is going to market this movie, and it also provides some new information regarding relationships between the characters and how it is radically different from JRR Tolkien’s original short story that you can find
in Appendix A in the back of The Return of the King.

The document that his Source gave him says this: “finding herself in an increasingly desperate situation the daughter of Helm must summon the will to lead the resistance against a deadly enemy intent on their total destruction.” It also adds this: “This all-new stand-alone cinematic adventure forges the legend of Hera, the rebellious daughter of Helm Hammerhand, as she answers the call to protect her people in a battle for their survival that shapes the destiny of Middle Earth.”

Another rebellious girl-boss self-insert Mary Sue! Another violent rape-and-pillaging of a well-loved story! Will the wonders vomited out of the Hellmouth ever cease?

At this point, if you’re a Tolkien fan, it’s really time to turn to ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT. It’s not Tolkien, nothing is, but it’s considerably closer to Tolkien than anything you’re going to get out of the Hellmouth or the converged publishing houses anymore. And, in fact, the first non-book spinoff from AODAL has been officially produced, and I will play the unofficial Kingsguard anthem on Arkhaven Nights next week. Songs from Selenoth!

In the meantime, if you haven’t picked up A THRONE OF BONES or A SEA OF SKULLS yet, they’re both on Amazon and at NDM Express now.

The Kingsguard ain’t like t’other dwarves…

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