The Global Moral Compass

Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are putting on their little rhetorical soft-shoe routine in Jerusalem:

Dr. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, and owner of one of the most listened-to podcasts in the world said last night (Thursday), while he tearfully pleaded with those present in the International Convention Center in Jerusalem to protect the holy city.

Peterson said: “As Jews in Israel, are you telling the greatest story ever told? Well, you decide that by how you live. And what you do will affect the world – for one reason or another, it’s not so easy to understand, everyone looks here to see, well, how are you actually doing, under this tremendous assault of adversarial criticism, as this little, tiny people in the middle of no man’s land in some real sense, as a -what would you say – cardinal model of the nation-state and the city on the hill. You have a tremendous moral responsibility, like you have, perhaps, for your entire history, for reasons that are very difficult to understand, and I think it is true, in some real sense, that the fate of the world depends on the decisions of the people of Israel. Just as the fate of the world depends on the decision of every individual, so you make yourself a shining light on the hill, right? You attract people here because of what you’re capable of doing. You show the world what the holy city could look like. Because we need it. We need it, and it’s up to you to do it. Thank you very much.”

Ben Shapiro, the well-known American political commentator, and the owner of the media body The Daily Wire explained that in his eyes, Jerusalem, chosen especially by the two as the place where they will appear when they arrive together in Israel, is a global moral compass. “We have returned to an era in which divine rule does not come from above, not through laws, not through logic and not even through providing a sufficient explanation, but through force alone. When chaos ruled everything.”

You have to love the Petersonian bafflegarble. It just sounds so deeply sincere while simultaneously saying absolutely nothing. But when you’re relying upon a definitely-not-meth addict and a manufactured fast-talking media whore to define the moral compass for the world, you’re most definitely serving Satan in some capacity. As anyone who knows anything at all about the history of modern Israel is aware, despite being a remarkable success story, it provides absolutely no basis whatsoever for a functional stand-alone civilization, let alone a model for the nations.

Imagine the average U.S. Home Owner’s Association Karen, except the entire neighborhood is entirely comprised of male and female Karens. I am reliably informed, by Israelis, that is a reasonable analogy for daily life in Israel. Which is fine, if one happens to enjoy conversations about conversations, but sounds remarkably like Hell to less extroverted personalities. I’m all for the right of Israelis to live in Israel however they see fit, but let’s see it survive for a single decade – or even for a single year – without relying upon any outside funding or support, before holding it up as a successful model worthy of imitation elsewhere.

“We couldn’t think of a better opening for the new year than with an event like this, with the participation of our three greatest minds,” commented Amiad Cohen, CEO of Tikva Israel Fund.

So Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are as good as they’ve got? That sound you hear is Wang Hunin, laughing himself sick, in Chinese.

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The Oathkeepers Glowed

This is not exactly surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to organizations like Unite the Right, the Oathkeepers, and the Patriot Front over the last few years. The FBI is treating the white Right in much the same manner it treated the black Left in the 1960s.

An F.B.I. informant who was embedded for months in the inner circle of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, is likely to testify as a defense witness at the seditious conspiracy trial of Mr. Rhodes in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The informant, Greg McWhirter, served as the Oath Keepers’ vice president but was secretly reporting to the F.B.I. about the group’s activities in the weeks and months leading up to the Capitol attack, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Despite their relationship with Mr. McWhirter, federal prosecutors decided not to call him as a government witness at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and his four co-defendants, which is now unfolding in Federal District Court in Washington. The prosecution rested its case last week without calling other key cooperating witnesses, including three members of the Oath Keepers who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy charges….

Mr. McWhirter is the second known F.B.I. confidential source who was in a position to provide information to federal agents about the Oath Keepers before Jan. 6, raising questions about why investigators did not know more about the attack on the Capitol.

Federal investigators knew everything about the so-called “attack on the Capitol” because they planned it. About the only more patently obvious false flag is the next one, the one that will provide the USA with a casus belli against Russia.

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Twitter Flirts with Bankruptcy

The rapid decline of Twitter is the result of a false foundation on free money and fake advertisers rather than user-subscriptions.

At least six executives have reportedly resigned from Twitter this week. The social media platform’s new owner, Elon Musk, called an all-hands meeting on Thursday, announcing a return to office hours and mentioning the possibility of bankruptcy unless the company can find a way to become profitable.

Among the departures was the head of safety and moderation, Yoel Roth, Bloomberg reported, citing insider sources. Musk had kept Roth on despite complaints from conservatives that he had been responsible for much of the political censorship on the platform – one of the reasons the Tesla and SpaceX CEO cited for buying the company.

“The economic picture ahead is dire,” Musk wrote in an email calling the meeting, according to the New York Times. “Without significant subscription revenue, there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn.”

Unless Twitter can generate profits from its $8 monthly Blue program, bankruptcy is a very real possibility, Musk reportedly said, adding that the platform is currently too dependent on advertising.

All of the social media giants are, to greater and lesser degrees, fraudulent corporate structures. They are not actually real businesses as one learns about business in business school or Econ 101. Their nominal customers are not their customers, but rather, their “advertisers”, who are not actually advertisers as one is taught in Marketing 101, but Clown World conduits for free money provided to ticket-takers. They are totally – and I mean TOTALLY – dependent upon a constant flow of external “investment” money. In most cases, the total “investment” into them far exceeds their actual revenue.

For example, Patreon’s peak monthly payout, in July 2022, is $26 million. Since they take an average of 6 percent, this means their average monthly revenue is around $1.6 million. Ergo, their peak annual revenue is around $20 million and their total lifetime revenue from 2013 is around $60 million, while as of one year ago, Patreon had received $413.3 million in funding over 10 rounds. This strongly suggets that Patreon is not, and never will be, a viable business under its current revenue model. The same is true of Twitter and other public companies propped up by various forms of “investment”; rising interest rates and falling stock prices mean that the flow of money these corporations require to operate is beginning to dry up.

This is why UATV and Arktoons have been subscription-based from the start. And this is why it is so important to subscribe to at least one service, because it is the only foundation that is real and capable of keeping things going over an extended period of time.

As a community, we have an amazing opportunity here. The corporate fakes and frauds that have siphoned up all of the public awareness by providing “free” services are beginning to crumble. As with the Great Depression, the giants of the 2060s and beyond will be the agile and determined operations that survived and thrived during the Great Collapse.

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Thursday Arktoons

ALT★HERO: Q Episode 56: Dead End

STONETOSS Episode 138: Ship Sailed

EVIL MONKEY MEMES Episode 62: That Can’t Be Good

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 154: Saint Neri

WARMAN Episode 27: Disgusting Habit

UPDATE: Congratulations to the Arktoons dev team, the production team, the creators, the illustrators, the colorists, and the letterers. And especially, thanks to the backers and subscribers who make it all possible. 10 MILLION VIEWS!

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1918 Finally Ended

Eugyppius suggests an interesting hypothesis about the disappearance of the remnants of the Spanish Flu and the advent of a new seasonal flu virus based on Corona

The flu is gone. This is not an illusion. It’s not down to the wilful or mistaken misdiagnosis of Corona or anything like that. Most countries have long-standing influenza surveillance programs, entire offices of people whose job it is to find and track the flu. These programs are still running, and influenza tests are still widely administered across the world. Despite all of this searching, nobody can find anything but a few outliers. As a seasonal phenomenon in the northern and southern hemispheres, influenza has disappeared….

A lot of basic matters are poorly understood in the field of virology, and one of them is why waves of infection seem to spontaneously collapse, rather than continuing indefinitely until all susceptible have been taken ill. One reason seems to be that some viruses interfere with other viruses, such that the rise of one compels the decline of another. Plainly, not all pathogens are at odds with each other. Co-infections are common among the overlapping deep-winter viruses. Some viruses, however, definitely seem to exclude others, at least some of the time and in certain places. Influenza and Corona are two of these mutually exclusive viruses. Since it has killed the flu, Corona can operate both in the vacant flu season and in its own natively preferred dark winter months.

Some months ago, I suggested that Corona’s victory over influenza could well represent a permanent change in the order of respiratory viruses – a revolution, perhaps a very rare one. The only conceivable historical precedent would be the Spanish Flu of 1918. While we have historical reports of influenza-like illness going back centuries, we don’t have any sequenced viruses predating the second wave of this great 1918 pandemic. Before 1918, we can’t be sure that seasonal flu-like illnesses were caused by influenza viruses at all. For all we know, coronaviruses were the dominant scourge prior to 1918, and their centuries-long reign was interrupted by the anomalous and highly destructive avian influenza that entered humans in that year. Perhaps the ensuing century of influenza was an unstable equilibrium, an anomaly, and Corona has restored a prior, more ordinary world.

All that’s speculation, but we do know that the ensuing seasonal flus for decades afterwards were descended, directly or indirectly, from that first 1918 strain. What happened in 1918 was certainly a viral revolution, on the order of the upset Corona achieved in 2019. Much of virology, as a field, grew up in the shadow of 1918, as an attempt to understand the pandemic of that year and the obviously related seasonal infections to which it gave birth.

I thought the reports of the flu vanishing were total nonsense, nothing more than a propagandistic attempt to report flu cases as cases of Covid-19. But if it’s true that the seasonal flu as we’ve known it for the past 100 years didn’t even exist before the Spanish Flu, then it’s conceivable that the coronavirus of 2019 has simply replaced it as the seasonal flu virus.

In which case, the flu vaccines are even more worthless than before, and worse, those vaccinated against Covid-19, whose immune systems have been trained to permit variants of the coronavirus to enter and wreak havoc without meeting much resistance, will likely face regular periodic episodes of new flu without enjoying the benefit of the usual reduction in severity.

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Wednesday Arktoons

THE STRANDED Episode 47: Never Know

SAVAGE MEMES Episode 169: Patterns

SOMETHING BIG Episode 66: How It’s Gonna Be

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 166: Mall Contents

This marks the finale of THE STRANDED, which comes to a nicely satisfying end, so if you’ve never read it, you should give it a whirl. Also, the production team is looking for new volunteers, so if you’ve got Photoshop skills and want to be a part of the conquest of the comics industry, let us know.

THE STRANDED

Mailvox: On Suicide

A reader shares his thoughts:

Things aren’t going well. The hard is getting harder. And out of nowhere your post on “suicide.”

Thank you, Vox.

Not tonight.

Thank you.

Life is too interesting and full of possibilities to end it simply because one particular series of past choices culminated in a disappointing dead end.

Roll the dice. Shake things up. Enjoy the opportunity to make a completely new start. Explore one of the different paths you might have previously taken.

You have literally nothing to lose anymore. You’re entirely free!

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