I’m not saying he got the vaxx

 But I’ve seen hundreds of soccer matches, and I’ve never seen any player, at any level, simply face-plant like the Danish player in the Denmark-Finland match today:

Denmark midfielder Christian Eriksen, who collapsed during the first half of the game against Finland in the Euro 2020 on Saturday, is stable in the hospital.

Danish FA confirmed Eriksen was “awake” and is being further examined at Rigshospitalet, a hospital in Copenhagen.

Around the 43rd minute, Eriksen had played a short pass when he fell face-forward onto the ground and was unconscious.

Spectators inside the stadium in Copenhagen went silent as players from both Denmark and Finland stood around Eriksen as CPR was administered. Eriksen received chest compressions for about 10 minutes after his collapse on the field.

Obviously, everyone hopes the young man is all right. And perhaps it was just an unfortunate coincidence. But let’s just say it would not be a massive surprise to learn he had been vaccinated. 

UPDATE: If it was the vaxx, this could have some very serious long-term implications for Serie A and other sports in Italy:

Dr Scott Murray, a leading NHS consultant cardiologist specialising in prevention of heart problems, claims Italy pride themselves on their record of preventing cardiac arrests in football – so the Danish player’s problems will likely spell the end of his time in Serie A.

He told the MailOnline: ‘It probably is (the end of his career) for him. The Italians stop people participating in sport if they are found to have a significant cardiac abnormality, it’s in law.

‘They’ve been doing that for a long time, beyond 20 years and they’ve reduced the death rates from cardiac arrests in sport from beyond 3 per cent down to below one per cent.’

Mailvox: the beatings will continue

As apparently some of them have proved salutory:

After following your advise on graduating Gamma, namely, shut up, work, and speak the truth. I am making huge strides in social settings.

The alpha is giving me more responsibility and respect, and girls are not repulsed.

I just want to say, without your constant Gamma beating, which are awesome course correction points, I would not have gotten this far this fast imo.

I am still working at it, always will.

Oh and ah, tell those boomers who has done next to nothing to go away.

Inspiration and relentless truth speaking by the capable is how many of us climbs out of the hell they left us with.

Conquering one’s instinctive behavioral patterns is always difficult. They will always be there to be reverted to in times of stress, defeat, and failure. But they can be suppressed and surmounted with sufficient effort. Persistence is the key. Even when you slip – and you will – don’t spend the next six weeks in denial, rationalization, and self-justification. 

Just admit the error, dust yourself off, and force yourself to start treading the right track again.

Silicon Valley belatedly recognizes the cancer

But instead of taking action to excise it, they’re looking for a “third-way” that only guarantees failure.

In Silicon Valley, 17 years later, another kind of revolution is taking shape. A handful of founders and CEOs—Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Jason Fried of Basecamp, Shopify’s Tobias Lütke, Medium’s Ev Williams—have said the unsayable. In the face of shop-floor social-justice activism, they’ve decided, business owners should resolve to stick to business.

No hashtag coders. No message-board threads about anti-racism or neo-pronouns. No open letters meant to get someone fired for a decade-old tweet. No politics. As Armstrong put it in his famous (or infamous) September 27th, 2020 blog post, business should be “mission focused.” A software developer explained that the conciliatory approach has become too costly: “The Slack shit, the company-wide emails, it definitely spills out into real life, and it’s a huge productivity drag.”

In October, a pseudonymous group inspired by Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong came together under the banner “Mission Protocol,” with the aim of getting other companies to start “putting aside activities and conversations” outside the scope of their professional missions. (“Mission focus doesn’t mean being apolitical,” they note. “It means being political about the mission. This mission is what you came together to accomplish, and this mission is what you’re fighting for in your work on the project.”) Paul Graham, a famed venture capitalist and “hacker philosopher,” tweeted his support to 1.3 million followers. Melia Russell, who covers the startup beat for Business Insider, noted that startups were jumping into the Mission Protocol threads “with a hell yes.”

Some founders, venture capitalists, and angel investors are now refusing to speak with legacy-media journalists who infuse their reporting with a social-justice slant. “What’s the point [of talking to reporters]?” a developer said. “They hate us, and we think they know nothing about the way the world works outside their woke, east-coast bubble.” Instead, mission-focused players are embracing alternatives such as Clubhouse and Substack. A software developer, Slava Akhmechet, is building a social-media platform (now in its beta phase) that grants influencers anonymity, with an eye toward encouraging the kind of candid conversation that is mostly verboten on, say, Twitter or Instagram. And then there’s the promise of blockchain—still in its infancy—and “decentralized media,” as Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’s former chief technology officer, calls it.

This Silicon Valley movement overlaps with a growing cadre of politically diverse writers and podcasters—such as Glenn Greenwald, James Poulos, Alex Kaschuta, and Aimee Terese—collectively creating an opening for a more incisive, wider-ranging conversation about technology, politics, and America itself. Default Friend, an After the Orgy podcast co-host and pseudonymous Substacker whose newsletter focuses on the Bay Area, says “this new group is like, ‘Okay, the wokeness thing definitely isn’t right. There must be some third way.’ They’re agreed on what they oppose.”

Between President Trump’s failure to successfully defeat the Deep State and Silicon Valley’s unwillingness to cut out the corporate cancer, it should be obvious to the intelligent observer that half-measures are not enough. You can’t negotiate with SJWs. You can’t lecture them. You can’t wag your finger and issue dire warnings.

If you’re not going to act, and act decisively, you’re simply reducing the rate at which you lose.

Saturday AM Arktoons

SEASONS Episode 7: Parallels

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 7: The Machine-Gun Artist
And, as we get closer to launching the Midnight’s War crowdfund, here is a little reminder that the Legend and I haven’t even begun to reveal the extent of the sheer awesomeness of what is rapidly becoming Arkhaven’s leading series. For example: vampire special forces!
They don’t go down easy, and what’s more, they usually don’t stay down. Of course, they are limited to nighttime operations.

Sanctions cut both ways

China calls the trade bluff of the neo-liberal world order:

There should be little doubt that the timing is intentional: China on Thursday passed its sweeping new law to ‘safeguard’ Chinese businesses and entities from Western and especially US sanctions, just hours ahead of President Joe Biden sitting down with G-7 leaders in Cornwall to argue for a common stance on curtailing China’s influence. AFP observes: “China’s quick rollout of a law against foreign sanctions has left European and American companies shocked and facing ‘irreconcilable’ compliance issues, two top business groups said Friday, despite Beijing saying the move would unlikely impact investment.”
The Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, as we described earlier, is designed shield Chinese entities and institutions from “the unilateral and discriminatory measures imposed by foreign countries” and ultimately the “long arm jurisdiction” of the United States.  
It effectively enables the Chinese government to sanction all who comply with US/EU sanctions by drawing a bright red line, forcing entities to choose whether to comply to Washington’s side or Beijing’s side. Upon its introduction early this week in the National People’s Congress there were few details given, other than vowing that “if Chinese entities are hit with unjustified sanctions, the proposed law is supposed to crystallize actionable countermeasures against the foreign governments and institutions…expecting the legal effort to make up for losses that Chinese entities would suffer.”
With the law’s passage, details have been revealed as follows:
Countermeasures in the Chinese law include “refusal to issue visas, denial of entry, deportation… and sealing, seizing, and freezing property of individuals or businesses that adhere to foreign sanctions against Chinese businesses or officials,” according to the text published by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature.
Thus it “answers” current US tactics in a serious escalation: whereas Washington currently often seeks to punish third party entities or countries for direct or even indirect dealings with a sanctioned regime (the cases of Venezuela and Iran are clear examples, or even European companies which worked on the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 pipeline), Beijing has now given itself the ‘legal authority’ to do the same. 

This is a very smart and timely move by the Chinese government, and counteracts the US ability to put pressure on foreign firms and governments. Comply with a US-imposed sanction and you’re locked out of China.

What part of “unrestricted” is hard to understand? It wouldn’t surprise me if China expands this law to include sanctions against other nations as well, which would go a long way toward convincing countries that normally comply with US sanctions to ignore them.

Avanti Azzurri

Total domination of Turkey by Italy in the first game of the Euros. It was 3-0 and they could have easily scored one or two more. Mancini’s team is fast, aggressive, and really good on the ball. That’s the group won already, because neither Wales nor Switzerland is going to score 3 goals in the group stage, let alone one game.

Toobin back on TV

It’s clear that the media executives believe that if there is one thing the US public simply cannot do without, it is advice from Jews who can’t keep their fat little hands off their own genitals:

Eight months after showing his family jewels to his work family, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin returned to television today. For those who don’t remember, or choose to forget, last fall Toobin exposed himself to co-workers from New Yorker magazine while on a Zoom call.
October’s Zoom incident reportedly took place while the 2020 presidential election was being discussed amongst his New Yorker colleagues. Toobin wasn’t alone in his excitement for the election. Approximately 160 million Americans voted, though they expressed their excitement in more prudish ways.
At the time, Toobin had been working for both New Yorker magazine and CNN where he regularly appeared as a legal analyst. Following the unprompted and unwanted October peep show, New Yorker magazine fired the 61-year-old and CNN suspended him until Thursday.

What. The. Actual….

It’s rather fascinating to contemplate the bizarre reality in which these CNN executives are dwelling. Who, exactly, has even the slightest desire to hear one single thing from Jeffrey “Dude, Turn OFF Your Webcam” Toobin? What do they plan to follow this up with, a dating show hosted by Ghislaine Maxwell as soon as she finishes serving her time for sex trafficking underage girls?

Here’s a concept: if you don’t want the rest of the world to despise your people as a filthy collection of perverted freaks, you may wish to consider the option of not constantly pushing filthy, perverted freaks on everyone.

On the equal opportunity side, it’s now clear why Philip Roth handpicked Blake Bailey to write his biography. There is no question that Bailey was truly able to get inside of Roth’s head.

A celebrated biographer mired in an ongoing sex scandal has now been accused of sexually harassing four other women while working at a university.  

Blake Bailey, 57, was accused of pestering a colleague, two students, and a visiting author while working at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, around a decade ago.

Bailey – handpicked by the late acclaimed novelist Philip Roth to write a biography that has been critically lauded – allegedly groped colleague Bridget Anderson’s crotch while naked in a hot tub with her during an April 2010 writers retreat for college staff.