Clown World Finds Out

It’s not as if Russia didn’t warn the clowns what the consequences of imposing sanctions would be.

In a significant escalation of its retaliatory measures against “unfriendly” states amid heightened geopolitical tensions, Russia has seized assets of the agricultural holdings company AgroTerra Group. The move, announced on April 8, 2024, has sent shockwaves through the agricultural sector and raised concerns over food security and international trade relations.

President Vladimir Putin’s decree places Dutch-registered firms AgroTerra Investments B.V. and AgroTerra Holdings B.V. under the “temporary management” of Rosimushchestvo, Russia’s federal property management agency. This action follows a series of similar asset seizures targeting Western companies, including multinational brewer Carlsberg and dairy giant Danone, which have sought to divest their Russian operations in response to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

AgroTerra, founded in 2008, is a major player in the agricultural industry, specializing in the production and supply of commodities such as soybeans, wheat and sugar beet. The company is recognized as one of the top 20 largest owners of agricultural land in Russia, with a cultivated area of approximately 265,000 hectares (654,829 acres).

The decree’s impact on AgroTerra’s operations remains uncertain. A spokesperson for the company stated, “As of now, the Company has not yet received any further details regarding the decree on the transfer of shares within the authorized capital of the AgroTerra Group to the temporary management of Rosimushchestvo.” Despite the lack of clarity, the company has assured that it is continuing its operations as usual, with a primary focus on the ongoing sowing campaign.

This seizure is part of a broader trend of Russia targeting foreign-owned assets in retaliation for sanctions and other measures taken against Russian companies abroad. In April 2023, Putin signed an executive order allowing Russia to take over real estate, securities, property rights and other assets from foreign companies with ties to “unfriendly countries.”

No doubt there will be serious ramifications. And there can be little doubt that Clown World will continue to fail to learn from its failures, and resort to even more huffing, puffing, and foolish gestures, before doubling down by trying to sanction countries like China and Saudi Arabia.

The seeds of failure are planted by past success. It’s very rare for anyone who has had any degree of success to grasp that what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, because the situations are different.

In the meantime, the Russians have completely destroyed the last of Ukraine’s coal-fired electricity plants and Kharkov, the second-largest city in Ukraine, is being evacuated.

“Very soon, the only topic for any international meetings on Ukraine will be the unconditional surrender of the Kiev regime, I advise all of you to prepare for this.” – Russian Representative to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya

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Air Supremacy in Ukraine

After two years of patiently attriting Ukro-NATO air defenses and keeping its resources in reserve, the Russian Air Force appears to have now achieved air supremacy in Ukraine.

Ukraine now lacking air defense, Russian jets freely fly over the front line as they never have, free to accurately hit Ukrainian positions with guided aerial bombs.

There’s nothing Ukraine can do now but lose positions.

The West needs to understand what this soon means.

What this means is that the Russian forces can now engage in the sort of one-sided risk-free turkey-shoots that convinced the US military and the IDF that their capabilities were considerably greater than they actually are. So the casualty differential, already heavily in Russia’s favor, is about to tilt even more against the beleagured NATO forces.

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Economics is Fake

Like everything else about Clown World, mainstream economics, as reported by the financial media, is not only false, but known to be false by the serious professionals. Which is why what passes for the “real numbers” are recorded in a separate set of books by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for release to their fellow clowns.

A little over a month ago, a scandal erupted among the (relatively small( group of economists who keep a close eye on the monthly inflation data reported by the Biden Department of Labor, when they learned that there is an even smaller, and much more exclusive group of economists called “super users” who get preferential treatment from the BLS, including wink-wink-nudge-nudge explanations of where the data may diverge from expectations. That was the case for the January CPI when as Bloomberg first reported, the BLS sent an email to a group of data “super users”, which “explained suggested a surge in a measure of rental inflation — which left analysts puzzled — was caused by an adjustment to how subcomponents of the index are weighted”.

Once it became public knowledge that there was a super secret group of preferential “accounts” receiving economic data, immediately following the Bloomberg report, a recipient of the email said that BLS Statistics “tried to retract it and that they were told to disregard its contents.”

The irony is that even those “real numbers” are also based on an incorrect, outdated, and misleading economics model, but they are sufficiently better than the publicly-released numbers to give the favored group of insiders an advantage vis-a-vis everyone else who is active in the financial markets.

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China is Not the Problem

It seems more than a little strange that we’re supposed to worry about China utilizing the intrusive automotive technologies that are increasingly being mandated, but not the very governments that forced those technologies upon drivers:

Tens of thousands of Chinese cars will be sold in Britain this year. This doesn’t just create an economic bonanza for Beijing, it gives it a geopolitical advantage too. For modern electric cars are computers on wheels. To function properly, they must be constantly connected to the internet, so that they can receive, gather and share data on their performance and surroundings.

This is a recipe for mayhem. Hackers demonstrated years ago how easy it was to remotely disable a single vehicle. With the full weight of a state cyber-warfare agency behind it, such attacks would be far more devastating and widespread.

If this is a recipe for mayhem, doesn’t it make considerably more sense to simply ban the connection of cars to the Internet rather than trying to ban the import of Chinese cars while assuming that the Chinese won’t be able to figure out how to hack the Internet-connected US- and Japanese-made cars?

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Arktoons 15 Million

In the midst of the chaos surrounding the publishing industry, Castalia and Arkhaven soldier on. And while Arktoons hasn’t been publishing as many episodes as we’d like – mostly for technical reasons rather than lack of creator interest – and Arkhaven hasn’t been publishing much on the print side, that’s not an indication of either infrastructural weakness or a lack of commitment to the cause.

So, first of all, congratulations to the Arkhaven devs, creators, backers, and subscribers, as Arktoons hit 15 million views today. That’s a significant accomplishment and one that merits pointing out.

Second, our lead dev at Arktoons is going to be stepping back for a while for personal reasons, but we have a very capable replacement stepping forward to shoulder the load until his predecessor is able to return. The primary focus is going to shift, however, from the user to the creator, since that is the primary bottleneck at the present.

And third, due to our focus on building our own platforms, rest assured that the panic in the independent publishing industry will have zero effect on our activities, since we have built our own distribution platform and are in no way dependent whatsoever upon the now-defunct SPD Press Distribution or any of its competitors.

An email sent by Ingram Publisher Services to former clients of the shuttered SPD Press Distribution is causing more panic in the independent publishing community. The email directs publishers to fill out a form by April 17, providing Ingram with instructions about where to send their titles—at the presses’ own cost. But what has publishers most anxious is Ingram’s plan to “recycle” any inventory remaining at the Ingram warehouse after 60 days.

Given the current state of confusion and uncertainty about future distribution arrangements, some publishers worry that two months isn’t nearly enough time to complete the process of finding a new home for their titles. Others on social media pointed out that some of the 300,000 books that were at the SPD warehouse likely belong to publishers that are no longer operating, and, without anyone around to claim them, will simply be destroyed.

We’re very fortunate to have so many star performers in the greater community who are willing to contribute their time and their expertise, from programming to shipping, which is why we are not only going to survive, but thrive, as the current chaos continues to expand throughout the economies of the West.

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“It’s Theirs Now”

This is part of the journey toward the estimated 2033 breakup of the political entity known as “the United States”:

A video posted by reliable Fox News reporter Matt Finn shows illegal immigrants ravaging a mountain in Sunland Park, New Mexico, while Border Patrol agents apparently won’t defend it, calling the mountain the Cartel’s. Finn wrote in the video post, “Unbelievable. A Border Patrol agent in Sunland Park, NM just told us a mountain in the United States is ‘not ours’ anymore. ‘It’s theirs.’ Referring to cartels.”

It’s always impossible for the people being replaced to understand what is happening until it is too late to do anything about it. This isn’t a new or unprecedented development. It happened when Europeans invaded North America and displaced the American Indians; due to the divided and dispersed number of the American Indian tribes, it took literal centuries before the tribes even started trying to band together to resist their replacement.

Lombardia, a province in Italy, isn’t named after any of the Italians who lived there, but rather, the Lombard tribe that invaded in the 6th Century AD.

In the spring of 568, the Lombards, led by King Alboin, invaded Italy, breaking the political unity of the Italian Peninsula for the first time since the Roman conquest. The Lombards were joined by numerous Saxons, Heruls, Gepids, Bulgars, Thuringians, and Ostrogoths, and their invasion of Italy was almost unopposed. By late 569, they had conquered all of northern Italy and the principal cities north of the Po River except Pavia, which fell in 572. They established a Lombard Kingdom in north and central Italy, which reached its zenith under the eighth-century ruler Liutprand. The invasion was opposed by the Byzantine Empire, which retained control of much of the peninsula until the mid-8th century.

And no doubt the Arabs living in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th Century had no idea that by the end of it, they would be almost entirely pushed out of their lands by recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Not that the land hadn’t exchanged hands many times, beginning with the great replacement of the Canaanite people by the Hebrew tribes.

Now, this doesn’t mean that Americans are going to end up on reservations of white people in a manner similar to the fate of the American Indian; there are far too many Americans and they are not anywhere nearly so badly outnumbered as the Indians were by the mid-1800s. But it does mean that Americans will lose control of large swaths of territory, both in practical and political terms, on the North American continent. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since homogenous nations always rise from the collapse of heterogenous empires.

But no matter what happens, this is evidence that the Imperial USA is already dead, even if the imperialists in Washington DC and Manhattan haven’t accepted the fact yet.

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Old Games are Best Games

You are not alone in your lack of interest in all the new games, as the WOWmaster himself observes:

60% of gameplay time was spend on games 6 years or older in 2023. Older TV shows dominate streaming networks as well.

This is not a coincidence, as streaming has prioritized wokeness over quality, and AAA have also prioritized profit and the narrative over fun.

This is why we fight.

Nobody wants to play the new stuff if it means being preached at and scolded while they destroy our most memorable IPs and characters.

There has always been a problem with the suits devoting all the resources to graphics while the designers fight, mostly in vain, to place the emphasis on gameplay. One need only compare the difference between the original Fantasy General, which I stil play from time to time, and its 3D successor, to understand why most of the time and money that went into “improving” the original game was not only wasted, but dowright detrimental.

Most, if not all, of the games that feature a substantive focus on gameplay are now in the independent space.

And that doesn’t even begin to get into the way in which convergence not only distracts from character, plot, and story, but downright destroys them, as the Dark Herald has chronicled repeatedly, and in great detail, on the Arkhaven blog. Mary Sue cannot be permitted to be less than strong, independent, and perfect in every way. The Magic Negro cannot be permitted to be less than saintly and beneficient. Saint Gay can never be less than charming, tolerant, and perfectly committed to the love of his gay life, whom he met approximately 5 seconds after coming out.

Convergence requires ideal caricatures, not strong characters. And the plot is always predictable, even more predictable than the pre-social justice Hellmouth plots were, because every episode has a moral that is more explicitly obvious than He-Man lecturing the kids at the end.

And so, we build our own entertainment, one meme, one short story, one RPG module, and one comics episode, at a time.

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Time is Running Out on NATO

Tom Luongo explains why it’s time for the USA to extricate itself from NATO and let it collapse:

NATO cannot and should not survive these stresses if its intended victims, Russia/China/Iran, fight even remotely competently. And they are. They all understand that this is a race against a political and economic clock in the West that is quickly counting down to zero. All Russia has to do is keep grinding out territorial gains in Ukraine, Iran to not over-react to Israel’s provocations, and China to ignore the yapping over tariffs and Taiwan.

And all the Americans who are tired of this have to do is keep the money spigot to NATO and Ukraine closed off as much as is politically possible. The cost/benefit analysis for the US, especially in an election year, just doesn’t add up. And there is zero real leverage Europe can apply to the US other than through their bought and paid-for politicos in D.C. for more money.

The heart simply isn’t willing anymore. Why? For all the reasons I’ve been talking about for six years here, the memories of WWII are fading. The generations of Americans imprinted with the post-WWII Pax Americana lie are dying off (Boomers) or no longer care, if they ever did (Gen X).

The Millennials and ‘Zoomers’ aren’t invested in this mythology. They know their heads are on the chopping block. They can see that none of this is in their best interests.

As we’ve seen in the growing number and intensity of provocations, Clown World is desperate to escalate to direct conflict because it is being systematically defeated by the unrestricted warfare that its opponents are patiently waging against it. Just as Russia is not responding to the terrorist attacks on its civilian population and Iran is not responding to the Israeli attacks on its consulate, China is not going to take the bait on Taiwan.

They have no need to take the risk of engaging in military operations even though they have sound reason to assume that they could comprehensively defeat NATO and the remnants of SEATO; all war involves some degree of risk and there simply isn’t any need to accept any risk when time is quite clearly working in their favor.

Once Ukraine collapses, Clown World will be forced to stop its provocations and focus on retaining as many of its former satrapies and captive allies as it can. And it’s at that point that I expect the diplomatic efforts on the part of the BRICSIA nations to begin in earnest, and we’ll start seeing nations like Hungary, Serbia, Vietnam, and perhaps even Japan and Mexico turning against their current masters.

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Fruits and Vegetables are Literally Poison

It’s exactly as I always suspected. Even as a child, I had grave suspicions that fruits and vegetables were an insidious plot to poison humanity.

Strawberries top a list of fruits and vegetables from UK supermarkets found to contain potentially dangerous pesticide toxins. The man-made substances, called PFAS, are known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they may never leave the body once they are consumed.

They are linked to serious health issues including cancer, high cholesterol, reduced kidney function, thyroid disease, low fertility, repressed immune system and low birth weight in babies. They are also feared to affect growth, learning, and behaviour development in infants and children.

A government testing programme checked fresh produce on sale in the UK, some of which had been imported from overseas. It found 95 per cent of strawberries contained PFAS. Other foods that contained the toxins included grapes (61 per cent), cherries (56 per cent), spinach (42 per cent), tomatoes (38 per cent) and peaches (38 per cent).

It’s very satisfying to learn, all these many years later, that my excellent physical health and superb intellectual development is due, at least in part, to my steadfast refusal to eat that inedible green stuff in my formative years. I also wonder if those who advocate the vegetarian, vegan, and fruitarian lifestyles have even begun to take the dire consequences of ingesting these forever chemicals on a daily basis.

I shall contemplate the implications over a lunch of dried jamon iberico, longanza pimienta, and emmental doux. One can’t be too careful, after all.

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