Wednesday Arktoons

ALT★HERO Episode 23: The Moral Level of War

SOMETHING BIG Episode 12: The Crew

SAVAGE MEMES Episode 23: Science

THE HAMMER OF FREEDOM Episode 24: Logistical Assault

THE HAMMER OF FREEDOM Episode 24

Meanwhile, there is big news developing in the comics industry, as The Legend Chuck Dixon has gone public with charges that DC Comics has not paid royalties owed to various creators for over ten years. Coming on top of the Marvel lawsuits as it is, it’s becoming clear that the Big Two are in increasing disarray.

In a recent Facebook post, Dixon divulged that DC has not paid international royalties for the overseas reprints of their work in other languages since at least 2009, which was well over a decade ago and before the launch of The New 52.

“Seriously, DC Comics stopped paying freelancers any international royalties in 2009,” Dixon shockingly revealed, adding he and others never received any notice and the DC office acted like it was no big deal. “They never sent out any of their patented ‘friendly’ letters to inform us. They just stopped paying and hoped no one would notice.”

What’s worse than the dishonesty and callous inattention DC showed, Dixon continued, is that the withholding of royalties really hits writers, artists, and industry pros with a lot of noteworthy titles to their name in their wallets, especially when the foreign publishing market continues an upward trajectory.

“Given the fact that foreign publishing (particularly in Europe) is more robust than ever, writers, artists and others are being cheated out of thousands of dollars annually,” he said.

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Convergence Has its Costs

Now that the Boy Scouts of America have been ruined by their astonishingly stupid decision to allow gays into the Scouts, the churches that sponsored them may find themselves on the financial hook for the abuse perpetrated there:

Amid the Boy Scouts of America’s complex bankruptcy case, there is worsening friction between the BSA and the major religious groups that help it run thousands of scout units. At issue: the churches’ fears that an eventual settlement—while protecting the BSA from future sex-abuse lawsuits—could leave many churches unprotected.

In July, the BSA proposed an $850 million deal that would bar further lawsuits against it and its local councils. The deal did not cover the more than 40,000 organizations that have charters with the BSA to sponsor scout units, including many churches from major religious denominations that are now questioning their future involvement in scouting.

The United Methodist Church—which says up to 5,000 of its US congregations could be affected by future lawsuits—recently advised those churches not to extend their charters with the BSA beyond the end of this year. The UMC said these congregations were “disappointed and very concerned” that they weren’t included in the July deal.

Now isn’t that convenient. The BSA, which was actually responsible, would be let off the hook, while the churches who were foolish enough to permit the predators to operate on their premises will remain potentially liable. The whole thing stinks to the heavens of sulfur.

Republicans Play China Police

It’s infuriating how Republicans insist on trying to throw their weight around outside US borders, but don’t lift a single damn finger to prevent US-based companies from abusing, banning, and censoring Americans in the United States:

A top Republican has become the first member of Congress to call out LinkedIn, the only major American social media platform that operates in China, for censoring American users on behalf of the ruling Communist Party.

Rep. Jim Banks, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee in Congress, sent a letter Friday to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, criticizing them for bowing down to the Chinese government by blocking the profiles of Americans who refer to the Asian superpower in a critical fashion.

There are at least 100 Americans whose LinkedIn profiles have anecdotally been found to have been banned by China in the past few months for allegedly anti-China content in the “Education” or “Experience” sections of their LinkedIn profiles.

Who cares about China censoring foreigners? Do something about Google, and Twitter, and Apple, and Facebook censoring Americans in the United States, FFS!

Conservatives are so utterly useless as they smugly preen and posture about abstract freedoms while doing absolutely nothing of any material value, they almost annoy me more than the idiot SJWs.

UPDATE: YouTube is now censoring all anti-vaxx information.

YouTube will ban any video that claims “vaccines are ineffective or dangerous” from now on and has suspended the accounts of prominent vaccination opponents, including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

To which, top Republicans said “well, did you know LinkedIn is censoring criticism of China?”

Tuesday Arktoons

STONETOSS Episode 21: Su Casa es Su Casa

BEN GARRISON Episode 22: Facebook World

CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON Episode 22: Calling All Units

In not-entirely-unrelated news, new Arkhaven illustrator has posted a sample of his current work for WITCHSTALKER, which will be appearing on Arktoons in a few months. It’s not hard to see why Joe Bennett isn’t shedding any tears above leaving Marvel behind. I mean, that much toxic masculinity and virulent femininity is more than a little triggering.

JOE BENNETT’S WITCHSTALKER

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And which god is that?

I’m fairly confident she’s not talking about the Almighty here:

Individuals who have not received the coronavirus vaccine “aren’t listening to God,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) declared during remarks before Brooklyn’s Christian Cultural Center on Sunday.

“He made the smartest men and women, the scientists, the doctors, the researchers – he made them come up with a vaccine. That is from God to us and we must say, thank you, God. Thank you. And I wear my ‘vaccinated’ necklace all the time to say I’m vaccinated. All of you, yes, I know you’re vaccinated, you’re the smart ones, but you know there’s people out there who aren’t listening to God and what God wants. You know who they are.”

“I need you to be my apostles,” the governor added, saying that receiving the treatment is how New Yorkers can “love one another.”

Well, she’s certainly not listening to the Bible. And she provides an excellent example of why the restrictions are necessary.

“I do not allow a woman to teach or have authority over a man.” 1 Timothy 2:12

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The End of Avoidance

I think we can safely conclude that the Chinese military is no longer being guided by the philosophy of Tao Guang Yang Hui, or “to hide one’s capabilities and bide one’s time.”

The Chinese-made historical war epic The Battle at Lake Changjin, which focuses on a major battle in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-53), will debut in Chinese theaters on Thursday. The film is expected to be China’s highest grossing film of the year.

As the most expensive film in Chinese film history with a budget of over 1.3 billion yuan ($201 million), the film was filmed through the joint effort of four Chinese heavyweight filmmakers, directors Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), Lam Chiu-Yin (Operation Red Sea) and Tsui Hark (The Taking of Tiger Mountain) and executive producer Huang Jianxin (The Founding of a Republic).

As the two directors from Hong Kong, Lam and Tsui pointed out that as Chinese, they needed to understand why “we fought this war and how we won.”

“We put a lot of shots of the US military in the film because this was a battle between China and the US. The US military is not an abstract symbol, but the army of a country. After World War II, the US military was very strong, making them believe they could control the world situation. However, when the war began, they did not expect that the power of China would be so great, and that Chinese power was what they had to learn. In order to maintain the authenticity of the war, we needed to feature the US military’s response,” Tsui told the Global Times.

Subtle. As a general rule, it’s a reliably ominous sign when your potential enemy begins making propagandistic war films that feature you as the bad guy. There is a reason that for decades, every Hollywood movie has featured white Europeans, preferably with English accents, as the bad guys, to the point that they’re still trying to cram Nazis into every film 76 years after the end of National Socialism.

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The Spartacus Letter

It’s already been vanished from its original site, but Zerohedge has the whole thing, sans the endnotes. The summary:

  • COVID-19 is a blood and blood vessel disease. SARS-CoV-2 infects the lining of human blood vessels, causing them to leak into the lungs.
  • Current treatment protocols (e.g. invasive ventilation) are actively harmful to patients, accelerating oxidative stress and causing severe VILI (ventilator-induced lung injuries). The continued use of ventilators in the absence of any proven medical benefit constitutes mass murder.
  • Existing countermeasures are inadequate to slow the spread of what is an aerosolized and potentially wastewater-borne virus, and constitute a form of medical theater.
  • Various non-vaccine interventions have been suppressed by both the media and the medical establishment in favor of vaccines and expensive patented drugs.
  • The authorities have denied the usefulness of natural immunity against COVID-19, despite the fact that natural immunity confers protection against all of the virus’s proteins, and not just one.
  • Vaccines will do more harm than good. The antigen that these vaccines are based on, SARS-CoV- 2 Spike, is a toxic protein. SARS-CoV-2 may have ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement; current antibodies may not neutralize future strains, but instead help them infect immune cells. Also, vaccinating during a pandemic with a leaky vaccine removes the evolutionary pressure for a virus to become less lethal.
  • There is a vast and appalling criminal conspiracy that directly links both Anthony Fauci and Moderna to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
  • COVID-19 vaccine researchers are directly linked to scientists involved in brain-computer interface (“neural lace”) tech, one of whom was indicted for taking grant money from China.
  • Independent researchers have discovered mysterious nanoparticles inside the vaccines that are not supposed to be present.
  • The entire pandemic is being used as an excuse for a vast political and economic transformation of Western society that will enrich the already rich and turn the rest of us into serfs and untouchables.

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真善美

Those who are mystified as to why I have a very high opinion of Xi Jinping tend to amuse me, mostly because they are some of the same people who bought into the previous “Putin is Hitler” theme between 2007 and 2014. As for the Boomer-tier “don’t you know they is CHICOMS” nonsense, I would merely point out that the Chinese Communist Party is presently less communist than the Democratic Party is democratic or the Republican Party is republican. Things tend to change over the course of 100 years; the CCP of Xi is not the CCP of Deng, let alone the CCP of Mao.

Anyhow, Xi and Putin are the two great nationalist leaders who successfully stand against Babel, the failing neoliberal world order also known as globohomo. Xi and Putin had the courage to succeed that Donald Trump lacked; it’s worth noting that none of the three leaders were supposed to succeed their predecessors.

And just as it’s finally beginning to be known that Putin has been methodically rebuilding the Russian Orthodox churches, Xi’s nine-year campaign to improve Chinese culture through literature and entertainment is gradually starting to bear fruit. The three Chinese ideographs above are zhen shan mei, which means True, Good, and Beautiful, and they are the conceptual centerpiece of Xi’s cultural revolution.

Xi Jinping stressed that pursuing the true, the good and the beautiful is the eternal value of literature and art. The highest boundary of literature and art is moving people, letting the spirits of people experience baptisms, letting the people discover the beauty of nature, the beauty of life and the beauty of the spirit. We must, through literature and art works, spread the true, the good and the beautiful, spread upward and charitable value views, guide the people in strengthening their powers of moral judgment and their sense of moral honour, yearn for and pursue a life of stressing morals, respecting morals and abiding morals. As long as the Chinese nation pursues the moral plane of the true, the good and the beautiful generation by generation, our nation will be eternally healthy and upward, and will for always be full of hope.

Xi Jinping pointed out that China’s excellent traditional culture is the spiritual lifeline of the Chinese nation, is an important source nourishing the Socialist core value system, and is a firm basis for us to get a firm foothold within the global cultural surge. We must integrate the conditions of new times with inheriting and carrying forward China’s excellent traditional culture, and inheriting and carrying forward a Chinese aesthetic spirit. For our Socialist literature and art to flourish and develop, we must earnestly study and learn from the excellent literature and art created by people in all countries worldwide. Only if we persist in using the foreign to serve the Chinese, exploration and innovation, ensuring combinations of the Chinese and the Western, and mastery through comprehensive study, will our country’s literature and art be able to flourish and develop better.

Xi Jinping’s Talks at the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art, 16 October 2014

Compare the Chinese program with the unmitigated filth and appalling celebration of the False, the Wicked, and the Ugly of the last 100 years of Western art and literature. When is the last time any Western leader dared to stand firmly against the degradation of Western culture, or to even lift a finger in an attempt to raise the cultural standards of the West? And Xi’s culture campaign is not a communist program, it is an intrinsically Chinese nationalist one, one that has its roots in the consciousness of the consequences of past decadence and was almost certainly inspired by the cultural campaign instituted by the great Lee Kuan Yew when he first came to power in Singapore in 1959.

There were, in addition, several easy, popular points to be scored that required no planning, including a series of “anti-yellow culture” prohibitions imposed by Pang Boon as minister for home affairs. “Yellow culture” was a literal translation of the Mandarin phrase for the decadent and degenerate behaviour that had brought China to its knees in the 19th century: gambling, opium-smoking, pornography, multiple wives and concubines, the selling of daughters into prostitution, corruption and nepotism. This aversion to “yellow culture” had been imported by schoolteachers from China, who infused into our students and their parents the spirit of national revival that was evident in every chapter of the textbooks they brought with them, whether on literature, history or geography.

The Singapore Story, Lee Kuan Yew, 1998

We are not the Chinese and they are not us. But the enemy of our mutual enemy is our friend, and there is a long and positive history of Christians showing respect for the noble and virtuous pagans.

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The Perfect Wife

I don’t talk much about my marriage, in part to maintain some modicum of privacy, but mostly because it simply isn’t anyone else’s business. That being said, I don’t mind pointing out that you know a woman is worth far more than rubies when people can’t believe she exists because she is obviously too ideal to be real.

25 years ago today

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