Alarm Bells

The great Martin van Creveld doesn’t like some of the historical patterns he has noticed are starting to play out:

In the Middle East, the alarms bells are ringing. There are several reasons for this, all of them important and all well-able to combine with each other and give birth to the largest conflagration the region has witnessed in decades. The first is the imminent demise of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, alias Abu Maazen. Now 88 years old, his rule started in 2005 when he took over from Yasser Arafat. Unlike Arafat, who began his career as the leader of a terrorist organization, Abu Mazen was and remains primarily a politician and a diplomat. In this capacity he helped negotiate the 1995 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Partly for that reason, partly because he opposed his people’s armed uprising (the so-called Second Intifada of 2000-2003) some Israelis saw him as a more pliant partner than his predecessor had been.

It did not work that way. Whether through his own fault, or that of Israel, or both, during all his eighteen years in office Abu Mazen has failed to move a single step closer to a peace settlement. Israel on its part has never stopped building new settlements and is doing so again right now. As a result, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli retaliatory measures in the West Bank in particular are once again picking up, claiming dead and injured almost every day.

Nor is the West Bank the only region where Israelis and Palestinians keep clashing. Just a few weeks have passed since the death, in an Israeli jail and as a result of a hunger strike, of a prominent Palestinian terrorist. His demise made the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization in Gaza launch no fewer than a thousand rockets at Israel, leading to Israeli air strikes, leading to more rockets, and so on in the kind of cycle that, over the last twenty years or so, has become all too familiar. Fortunately Hezbollah, another Islamic terrorist organization whose base is Lebanon, did not intervene. It is, however, not at all certain that, should hostilities in and around Gaza resume, it won’t follow up on its leader’s threats to do just that. Certainly it has the capability and the plans; all that is needed is a decision.

To his concerns about Jordan and Iran, I would add the following. First, Syria is looking for revenge for the frequent air attacks of the last few years in support of the anti-Assad rebels. Second, and much more importantly, both China and Russia are more closely allied with the Arabs than they have been since the 1950s and the USA has never looked more impotent and less able to impose any sort of peace on the region.

While Israel has wisely held itself apart from the Kiev regime despite its many close connections to it, it is still part of the NATO bloc and therefore an enemy to both Russia and China. It’s not necessarily the best time to be the self-styled “greatest ally” of the United States.

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Monday Arktoons

WARDOGS INC. Episode 30: Cracking Cargo

THE WEIRD AND STRANGE Episode 3: A Not So Lighthearted MCU Rant

GORGO Episode 21: Distressed Roar

TREASURY OF TALES Episode 10: The Little Red Hen

RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 26: Totally Sunk

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BLACK JACK Episode 11: Severe Injury

Arktoons creators will be pleased to know that the Copy Episode feature is now fully functional. This is particularly useful for text episodes, as the various stable elements such as the cover panel, panel formattings, and summary link do not need to be uploaded again.

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Mailvox: Alpha Marriage

A man, presumably Delta or less, asked what he thought was a rhetorical question while erroneously assuming that he knew the answer.

Should the delta guy marry a woman who ran through alphas in college?

Yes. Of course. How clueless, how astonishingly ignorant, does a man have to be to not realize that all the alphas themselves uniformly marry women “who ran through alphas in college”. That has never, ever, been a dealbreaker for any Alpha who isn’t concerned about the unquestionable legitimacy of the heir to his throne.

Do these cretins really believe that Mick Jagger or Tom Brady or [fill-in-the-alpha-here] are marrying pure and virtuous virgin girls? Has anyone even heard of the Alpha CEO who prefers trad girls in long homespun dresses to femme fatales like Melania Trump? Do the rock stars marry sweet milkmaids and shepherds or models and video vamps?

The difference is that the alphas aren’t afraid to marry women with a statistically average amount of experience. To them, that experience is a rounding error by comparison, so it doesn’t even enter into their mind to be concerned about it. Meanwhile, the Deltas and Gammas are all terrified and insecure at the thought of a woman who will make a perfectly reasonable marriage risk.

The statistics are clear. There are three categories of divorce risk based on female sexual history.

  • Low: 0-1
  • Average: 2-14
  • High: 15+

Now, I’m not saying that Average risk is better than Low risk, I’m simply pointing out that Average is not High and most Average-risk first marriages will not end in divorce.

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Amazon in Decline

It’s not just Dem Rangz. Amazon’s other businesses are also in decline:

Here’s the big thing, Amazon is currently in retraction. This a company that bought everything on the internet it could get its tentacles on because they had all the money, and didn’t know what to spend it on, so they went with the Bezos default of, “Just throw some shit at the wall and measure what sticks.”

Those days are now over. The subsidiaries that were “loss leaders” were tolerable in the days of mega-money income for tax purposes but not anymore.

I had a conversation with a European publisher the other day. Their book sales are down 40 percent from 2021. This is remarkable because book sales usually increase during recessions, as it’s one of the most cost-effective forms of entertainment outside of video games that provide hundreds of hours of playtime. They put much of it down to Amazon, on whom they’d placed their bet for both ebooks and print editions, but Amazon’s A9 algorithm has pretty much destroyed the “bookstore” angle and replaced it with “these are the books the SJWs at Amazon think you should read.”

So, not only is it harder for readers to find the authors and publishers of interest to them, they’re being actively dissuaded from shopping on the site.

This is the inevitable outcome of the centralization of book publishing. Convenience kills.

Fortunately, Castalia saw this coming, which is why we’re building up our direct sales model in the aftermath of the Aerio shutdown. Based on the success of our recent experiments, we also anticipate adding a third leatherbound subscription later this year, albeit a low-cost one for pulp novels and comics designed to appeal to those who have not hitherto had any interest in collecting high-end books.

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Sunday Arktoons

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 65: Planbush

BLADE AND STAFF FOR HIRE Episode 1: A stranger arrives

AFTER ATLANTIS Episode 9: Rescue party

FULL OF EYES Episode 42: Rescue Mission

SKETCHBOOK Episode 2: Porta John

AESOP’S FABLES Episode 9: The Kingdom of the Lion

CLASSIC BIBLE TALES Episode 102: The Hour Is Come

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 259: Post Removed

We’re happy to welcome Netraptor and his new series BLADE AND STAFF FOR HIRE. Check out the first episode today!

Of Course They Knew

The US government knew about the Wagner “rebellion” days in advance because the whole thing was most likely orchestrated by the color revolutionaries.

US intelligence officials knew well in advance that Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin was planning to mount an armed rebellion against the Russian military’s top commanders. Congressional leaders were even briefed days prior to Saturday’s events, after US intelligence reportedly observed the mercenary firm mustering forces and amassing weapons in preparation for possibly making a move against the defense ministry.

Any time there is a coup or revolution or color revolution, it’s a certain sign that the neoclowns are waging war by bank transfer again.

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Mandatory Pride

Even if converged corporations attempt to walk back their wickedness to reduce the devastating financial effects of their corporate cancer, the Attorneys General of 15 states will not permit them to do so:

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has co-authored a letter to the CEO of Target that suggests he would use the powers of his office to ensure that Target is not intimidated into “pulling some Pride merchandise from stores.”

In a June 20 letter Ellison and Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell wrote to Brian Cornell, chairman and CEO the Minneapolis-based retail titan, they expressed concern over Target’s “choice to pull Pride merchandise,” which Ellison and Campbell said “demonstrates that intentional violence and intimidation can set back the march for social progress and LGBTQIA+ equality which as we have noted is already under intense attack nationwide.”

Additional attorneys general who signed onto the letter include those from: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

Once you’ve taken the ticket, you are no longer your own master. You will ride on the high horse with the Black Rider until he is done with you.

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Debacle in Rostov

Warren Balogh also observes a few obvious things about the short-lived threat that a mercenary company would change sides in response to a lucrative offer:

So let me get this straight

1. Prigozhin, the leader of the mutiny, is Jewish.

2. Standing ‘directly behind him.’ according to Russian nationalist Igor Clrkn, is Sergey Kiryenko, Putin’s Deputy Chief of Staff, who also happens to be Jewish and the grandson of a highly decorated Jewish Bolshevik Cheka terrorist

3. This comes just as the big offensive is being launched from Ukraine, under the Jewish junta of Vladimir Zelensky

4. All this is happening against the backdrop of Russa building closer ties to Iran, which threatens Israel.

5. The flag of the Wagner mercenary corps Is being hoisted in Ukraine.

6. Anne Applebaum, the biggest Jewish neocon war hawk against Russa at the Atlantic, is calling this Putin’s Tzar Nicholas moment.

The whole thing smacks of desperation on the part of Clown World. I wouldn’t be even remotely surprised if Prigozhin’s disastrous attempt to switch sides was related to that $6 billion in US funds that was recently reported to have gone missing. But, in retrospect, the attempt was always doomed.

There is no force on this Earth that can survive Jim Cramer’s cheerleading. Not even when he spells the name wrong.

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