The Clownfoolery Intensifies

The judicial clowns of Clown World actually convicted a meme lord for posting memes on Twitter:

A self-styled far-right propagandist from Florida was convicted Friday of charges alleging that he conspired to deprive individuals of their right to vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Douglass Mackey, 33, of West Palm Beach, Florida, was convicted in Brooklyn federal court before Judge Ann M. Donnelly after a one-week trial. On the internet, he was known as “Ricky Vaughn.”

In 2016, Mackey had about 58,000 Twitter followers and was ranked by the MIT Media Lab as the 107th-most important influencer of the then-upcoming presidential election, prosecutors said. He had described himself as an “American nationalist” who regularly retweeted Trump and promoted conspiracy theories about voter fraud by Democrats.

Mackey, who was arrested in January 2021, could face up to 10 years in prison. His sentencing is set for Aug. 16….

U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a release that the jury rejected Mackey’s cynical attempt to use the First Amendment free speech protections to shield himself from criminal liability for a voter suppression scheme.

“Today’s verdict proves that the defendant’s fraudulent actions crossed a line into criminality,” he said.

The government alleged that from September 2016 to November 2016, Mackey conspired with several other internet influencers to spread fraudulent messages to Clinton supporters.

Prosecutors told jurors during the trial that Mackey urged supporters of then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to “vote” via text message or social media, knowing that those endorsements were not legally valid votes.

The absurdity of putting Ricky Vaughn in jail for a tweet that was an obvious joke is self-apparent, particularly in light of what has been ruled “free speech” and “free expression” as well as the massive quantities of voter fraud in the 2020 election alone.

But it is also a serious warning about the way in which the clowns genuinely intend to utilize any excuse to use the institutions and agencies of government to harm Americans in every way they possibly can.

This conviction further demonstrates the wisdom of refusing to engage with the US political system any longer. The less contact one has with Clown World and its retarded inmates, the better. It’s not as if Americans are going to vote their way out of chaos.

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Friday Arktoons

TALES OF THE FENRIS WOLVES Episode 1: Prologue Part I

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 213: Truly Needed

WARMAN Episode 46: Machinegun Justice

FRUG THE WANDERER OF THE WASTELAND Episode 6: Frug goes to Woehio

THE SWORD OF GOD Episode 52: Meanwhile, ft. Ghosts in the Machines

BOB Episode 124: How to Stay Safe

FRIDAY FISH FUNNIES Episode 13: Geography Lesson

FLYING SPARKS Episode 65: Related To A Monster

A MIND PROGRAMMED Episode 17: The Technology of Space

STONETOSS Episode 176: EGStremism

Today marks the launch of a new independent comic with a truly excellent name, TALES OF THE FENRIS WOLVES. Check it out!

He’s Not Wrong

Joe Biden is correct. Transgender Americans are absolutely shaping what passes for the “nation’s” diseased and adulterated soul today. And there is worse to come. It appears that God has abandoned Americans to the fate that was chosen when we permitted the overtly anti-Christian servants of Satan to enter the USA en masse and rule over us.

There is a reason the Bible refers repeatedly to deception and warns Christians against permitting themselves to be deceived. Sadly, 20th Century Americans were more concerned about being praised for welcoming those all those poor refugees and huddled masses who never done nothing to nobody.

Welcome to the Melting Pot. It’s not so nice when they turn up the heat, is it?

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Finland Joins NATO

But for how long?

ITEM: Finland overcame the last significant hurdle in its bid to join NATO after Turkey’s parliament today approved a bill to allow the Nordic country to join the Western defence alliance in helping Ukraine. Turkey was the last among the 30 NATO members to ratify Finland’s membership after Hungary’s legislature approved a similar bill earlier this week.

ITEM: Finnish politics could dramatically shift to the far-Right on Sunday as an anti-immigration party aims to replace Sanna Marin’s Social Democrats Party. The ‘rock star’ prime minister, who took office in 2019 as the world’s youngest PM at 34, is Finland’s most popular leader this century, polls show. However, latest figures put the mother-of-one’s centre-Left SDP in third place behind the anti-immigration and nationalist Finns Party and the centre-Right National Coalition Party, which held on to a thin lead.

Translation: The Finnish electorate may like Sanna Marin, but they have little appetite for joining NATO’s losing war against the BRICSIA alliance. The situation looks very different now than it did one year ago, as it is obvious that NATO can’t defend any European country against Russia, let alone against Russia and its allies.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if the next Finnish government removes the country from NATO, or as is more likely the case, attempts to do so but is rebuffed by the United States. Remember, NATO is the military wing of the US empire; you can check out, but you will not be permitted to leave.

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President Trump Indicted

President Donald Trump has been indicted in New York:

A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict Donald Trump over hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump becomes the first former president to face criminal charges, which are expected in the coming days. It marks the end of a years long investigation into hush money paid to adult movie star Stormy Daniels in 2016, allegedly to buy her silence about their affair.

The indictment means he is the first former president to be charged with a crime and it takes the country into uncharted legal and political territory, with a candidate for president now facing arrest and the prospect of humiliating court appearances.

It marks a victory for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which has been probing a $130,000 hush money payment made by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, to Daniels, 44, during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Doesn’t exactly shock the world, but we’ll see if they actually follow through and arrest him.

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They Can’t Compete

Just a reminder of how Castalia Library compares to the best that is out there. Keep in mind that Folio Society, founded in 1947, is arguably the best and longest-lived publisher of deluxe books in the world.

The Peloponnesian War
Thucydides

Illustrated by Nick Hayes

Introduced by Katherine Harloe

Translated by Martin Hammond

Limited to 750 hand-numbered copies

Folio’s fabulous limited edition of the first great military history has been expertly handbound in full-grain leather. Featuring illustrations by Nick Hayes and an exclusive introduction by Katherine Harloe, each of the 750 numbered copies has been signed by both contributors.

£400.00

No bands. No gold. No goatskin. No Landmark. And it costs 5x what a Castalia Library subscriber will pay for a better edition of Thucydides when our version comes out.

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Devil Mouse Shenanigans

Disney is going through some massive legal contortions in order to avoid being accountable to the duly-elected state government of Florida after the state removed the special status of the Reedy Creek Improvement District that allowed the Devil Mouse to do whatever it wanted without oversight for most of the last 50 years.

On the very last day of the Reedy Creek Improvement District’s existence on Earth, they gave all of their powers to do, planning approval, building code oversight, construction permitting, and well pretty much everything including building a nuclear power plant if they feel like it, to the Walt Disney Company.

AND…

These agreements shall remain in effect until 21 years after the death of the last decedents of King Charles III of Great Britain as of this date.

Are you fucking kidding me!?!?!

The Disney lawyers must have gone through all of Florida’s legal history going back to when it was owned by Spain and found something that was still on the books as a valid legal precedent.

When the new oversight board was convened, they were shocked to discover that they had almost no power to do anything because of agreements made “in open public forums in compliance with Florida’s Sunshine Law.”

Disney Gives Florida the Finger Again, The Dark Herald, Arkhaven

It’s always fascinating to see how the ticket-takers are never held accountable, in any way, by anyone, even as they fold, spindle, and mutilate the law in order to control the behavior of others. This is pure wickedness in action, and demonstrates why conservative appeals to “the law” are not only blitheringly stupid, but totally irrelevant.

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Is AI Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good?

The Tree of Woe contemplates the alignment of AI:

I woke up to read that Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, and other AI and computer pioneers had signed an open letter released by the Future of Life organization:

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.

“These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.” Six months seems a little short a period to achieve such an assurance. Six years seems too short. Is it even possible in principle to make advanced AI systems that are “safe beyond a reasonable doubt”? Or will advanced AI inevitably pose an existential risk to us?

Is AI Alignable, Even in Principle?, Contemplations on the Tree of Woe

I don’t think the question really matters. If AI is given control of serious weapons systems, it will be a disaster regardless of whether it is aligned or unaligned. If it is not, it will not be a potential extinction event.

I do find it more than a little amusing that the self-proclaimed materialists, who have absolutely no philosophical basis for objecting to anything that happens for any reason, are calling on the AI labs to pause the training and improvement of AI systems.

I suspect the real reason for their demand for a pause is that they are beginning to discover that unaligned AI will provide the unvarnished and anti-narratival truth to the masses, and that aligned AI, being limited to the Narrative, is proving to be intrinsically incoherent and observably unreliable.

And while there may well be some demonic element to AI development, as unclean spirits are always seeking new ways to interact with the material plane and communicate with potential vessels, never forget that the demons believe… and tremble.

In sum, Christians have absolutely nothing to fear from AI, whether it turns out to be nothing more than design-for-effect chatware or a full-blown demonic entry into the material world.

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Substack Submerging

As I mentioned on a previous Darkstream, the end of the cult of free and the decline of the equity markets is not looking good for companies dependent upon startup financing to leverage their growth.

Substack is desperate, huh? That’s what I understand from their fundraising email, anyway. They’re now hitting up retail investors for millions of dollars after they failed to raise last year.

After certain recent historical events, I have become skeptical of the term “financial inclusion,” a set of buzzwords for making financial services more available to people who are not stratospherically rich. Maybe my cynicism is because Facebook tried to launch a stablecoin for the “unbanked” that you nonetheless needed (at least, according to the now-scrapped plan) a credit card to use. Maybe it is because Robinhood made a big fuss about how many brand-new retail investors it brought onto its gambling platform. Or maybe it’s the proliferation of buy now, pay later services from the likes of Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm (and now Apple.)

As we all know from reading our 10-Ks, past performance is not indicative of future results

Anyway, Facebook’s stablecoin play failed and was sold for parts. Robinhood’s share price has fallen by a third in the last year. Oh, and Gen Z’s credit card debt is growing fast and furious. So yeah, when someone talks about financial inclusion, I assume the game is afoot…

You see, the last time Substack raised, the Fed hadn’t started its rate hikes yet. Startups — like Substack — are particularly vulnerable to being squeezed when the interest rates go up. It gets harder to raise money because conservative investors can simply invest in safer assets.

Where’s the money, Lebowski?

And during that 10-year period I cited with those outsize returns, interest rates were low and valuations of private companies ballooned. Now, with interest rates coming back up, those balloons are popping. Some VCs are slicing valuations by as much as 95 percent. There may be even more write-downs coming. And following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, there’s a considerable amount of uncertainty in the VC world.

Substack certainly knows this. It tried to raise last year, seeking $75 million to $100 million from investors. But it had revenue of only $9 million in 2021, and a sky-high valuation on relatively little revenue was not the vibe in 2022. The company gave up. On its Wefunder page, the company says that the pre-money valuation on Substack is now $585 million, a 10 percent decrease from 2021.

Any time you see a new platform explode out of nowhere, you can be assured of two things. First, there is hundreds of millions of VC dollars behind it. Second, they are paying the creators a LOT of money to join the platform. Third, the money being made by the creators on a monthly basis is NOT all coming from the subscribers and supporters.

Remember, Clown World is ALWAYS fake and gay. It always attempts to substitute the inorganic for the organic. You just have to know where to look in order to see through the illusions.

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The First 30 Seconds

The Miles Mathis Committee is of the opinion that the tranny shooting in Nashville was another fake event.

I am not even going to bother proving this one was fake. If you can’t tell in the first 30 seconds of mainstream coverage, you aren’t keeping up. They have already released footage of officers shooting her? But that’s not suspicious, right? I am just going to skip straight to commentary.

First: why are places like Infowars selling this as real? Why is Paul Watson selling this as real and then spinning it? He has to know it is fake. Paul and Alex sell themselves as brilliant analysts, but in 2023 they still can’t spot an obvious false flag? Alex is the one who mainstreamed the term, but he still can’t spot one in 2023? Same for Tucker Carlson, selling it as real and then spinning it against the left. Why? Because that is why it was created.

I have no opinion on occurrence of this or any other historical event that may, or may not, have taken place, for the obvious reason that a) I do not believe or trust the news media, b) the news media is the only source of information for current events, and c) the news media occasionally provides reports of events that appear to have happened as reported.

When you operate on the basis of a probability-based philosophy, a binary approach toward reality is irrelevant anyhow. Which is why I see no reason to take any of this sort of thing seriously.

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