The Epstein-Gates-Microsoft coverup

It’s really remarkable to see how the essential falsehood of the history of computer technology is rapidly being revealed, as well as the role that the mainstream media continues to play in keeping it under wraps:

The likely reason for the continued cover-up of the true extent of Epstein’s ties to Gates has much more to do with Gates’s company Microsoft than with Bill Gates himself. While it is now permissible to report on ties that discredit Gates’s personal reputation, the information that could tie his relationship with Epstein and the Maxwells to Microsoft has been omitted. 

If, as the Evening Standard reported, Epstein did make millions out of his business ties with Gates prior to 2001 and if Gates’s ties to Isabel Maxwell and the Israeli espionage–linked company CommTouch were to become public knowledge, the result could easily be a scandal on a par with the PROMIS software affair. Such a disclosure could be very damaging for Microsoft and its partner the World Economic Forum, as Microsoft has become a key player in the WEF’s Fourth Industrial Revolution initiatives that range from digital identity and vaccine passports to efforts to replace human workers with artificial intelligence. 

There are clearly powerful actors with a vested interest in keeping the Epstein-Gates narrative squarely focused on 2011 and later—not necessarily to protect Gates but more likely to protect the company itself and other top Microsoft executives who appear to have been compromised by Epstein and others in the same intelligence-linked network. 

This is hardly an isolated incident, as similar efforts have been made to cover up (or memory hole) the ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to other prominent Silicon Valley empires, such as those led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. One key reason for this is that the Epstein network’s blackmail operation involved not only sexual blackmail but electronic forms of blackmail, something used to great effect by Robert Maxwell on behalf of Israeli intelligence as part of the PROMIS operation. Given its nature, electronic forms of blackmail through illegal surveillance or backdoored software can be used to compromise those in power with something to hide, but who were uninclined to engage in the exploitation of minors, such as those abused by Epstein.

That Isabel and Christine Maxwell were able to forge close business ties with Microsoft after having been part of the front company that played a central role in PROMIS-related espionage and after explicitly managing their subsequent companies with the admitted intention to “rebuild” their spy father’s work and legacy, strongly points to the probability of at least some Microsoft products having been compromised in some fashion, likely through alliances with Maxwell-run tech companies. The lack of mainstream media concern over the documented ties of the Epstein network to other top Microsoft executives of the past, such as Nathan Myhrvold, Linda Stone, and Steven Sinofsky, makes it clear that, while it may be open season on the relationship between Bill Gates and Epstein, such is not the case for Microsoft and Epstein.

The ties of Epstein and the Maxwells to Silicon Valley, not just to Microsoft, are part of a broader attempt to cover up the strong intelligence component in the origin of Silicon Valley’s most powerful companies. Much effort has been invested in creating a public perception that these companies are strictly private entities despite their deep, long-standing ties to the intelligence agencies and militaries of the United States and Israel. The true breadth of the Epstein scandal will never be covered by mainstream media because so many news outlets are owned by these same Silicon Valley oligarchs or depend on Silicon Valley for online reader engagement. 

Almost everything you think you know about Silicon Valley and the history of technological development in the United States is clearly false. What the actual truth is, we may never know, but the official narrative isn’t so much false as a complete and utter fiction that might as plausibly contain unicorns, magic, and programmers riding dragons.

Microsoft DOS became IBM’s operating system of choice after Archmage Wilhemina Gates defeated the Red Pope Steven Jobs in an arcane duel hosted on the Xerox PARC campus….

The Gaza scorecard

The Saker pronounces his judgement of the most recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is interesting once one removes the over-the-top parentheticals. I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions, but it is a more useful analysis than the mainstream’s “whoever kills the most civilians wins” metric:

The Israeli scorecard

The problem with Gaza now is the same that the failed invasion of Lebanon in 2006 has revealed: just like the Lebanese in 2006, the Palestinians of 2021 are not afraid of the Zionists anymore. Furthermore, with a great deal of help from Iran and others, Hamas in Gaza is now much, much better armed than in the past. True, some of its missiles are decidedly low tech and not very effective, but Hamas also has shown some pretty decent UAVs too. Most importantly, from now on for Hamas it is only one way: up the “quality ladder”.

The other major goal of the Israelis in this war was to prove to the world that their “Iron Dome” air defense network was the “super-dooper most bestest” in the world. It now appears that at best, the Israelis intercepted somewhere around 30-40{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} of the Hamas missiles. The way the Israeli hid this is by claiming that their fancy shmancy Iron Drone did not even try to engage missiles which were not deemed dangerous. But in the age of the ubiquitous smartphone, that kind of silly nonsense can easily be debunked. While the full Iron Dome air defense system probably works marginally better than the quasi-useless US Patriot, the Israeli air defenses are clearly at least a generation behind the Russian ones, including the S-300s the Russians sold to Syria.

It is crucial to remember that Hamas’ missiles are much inferior to those of the Houthis and the Syrians, and even more inferior when compared to Hezbollah or Iranian drones and missiles! In other words, the “invincible” IDF can’t deal with even its weakest, least sophisticated enemies and the grotesquely expensive Iron Done cannot protect the Zionists from any determined missile attacks by the Resistance coalition of Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Hezbollah, Iran and Russia…. In other words, far from showing how “invincible” the Zionist entity is, this latest war against the Palestinians has shown beyond reasonable doubt that the IDF cannot deal with any of its enemies.

The Palestinian scorecard

Let’s start by the obvious one: the Palestinians were not defeated. This victory can be further subdivided in the following:

  • The Palestinian leadership has mostly physically survived, it still exists as a local authority. Plenty of Palestinians were murdered, but that did not affect the operational capabilities of the Palestinian forces any more than the IDF succeeded in affecting Iranian operational capabilities in Syria.
  • The Palestinian leadership has also survived politically. It was not blamed by the “Palestinian street” for starting the war, nor was it blamed for how it executed it. As for Fatah, it is now, by all accounts, lost somewhere in a political no man’s land which, admittedly, it richly deserves for its incompetence, corruption and subservience to Israel and the USA.
  • Militarily speaking, the Palestinian missile strikes were not nearly as effective than, say, Hezbollah strikes would have been, but, hey, they made huge progress and we can all rest assured that the Palestinians of Gaza will, sooner or later, catch up with the Houthis and, further down the road, maybe even Hezbollah.
  • By many accounts, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have made major political inroads into the Palestinian political scene outside Gaza. Even in spite of a truly immense hasbara effort by the Israelis, the international public opinion was blaming Israel for the orgy of violence.

I think The Saker left out one obvious point in favor of the Israelis, which is that it was the Palestinians who asked for the ceasefire, not the Israelis. But the fact that the Israelis were afraid to risk the failure of a ground invasion is probably the most significant aspect of the conflict; as Martin van Creveld has pointed out, Goliath demonstrating that he is bigger than David is not a victory condition, since everyone already knew that from the start.

The other important point is that Israel stopped its air campaign after Putin told it to stop, not in response to any of Biden’s many requests. This tends to underline the idea that it is now Russia that is the primary outside influencer in the post-ISIS Middle East, not the USA, due to the way in which the Syrian war. 

Regardless, the fact that the Palestinians didn’t lose doesn’t mean that Israel did. A failure to win a clear-cut victory is not a defeat. Sometimes a failure is just a failure.

But the conflict has also demonstrated that while the US public is still generally well-disposed toward Israel, the incessant anti-American provocations by the ADL and the anti-BDS movement, combined with a large and growing immigrant population immune to both Holocaustianity and Scofield churchianity, have noticeably weakened the strength of US support for Israel.

TECHNO-BABYLON or the religion of science

The Promethean capture of science, and the transformation of scientistry into a propaganda machine for a very old religion, may not have begun with this 1923 essay by the revered J.B.S. Haldane, entitled, DAEDELUS or Science and the Future, but it is clearly detectable in hindsight.

Ever since the time of Berkeley it has been customary for the majority of metaphysicians to proclaim the ideality of Time, of Space, or of both. But they soon made it clear that in spite of this, time would continue to wait for no man, and space to separate lovers. The only practical consequences that they generally drew was that their own ethical and political views were somehow inherent in the structure of the universe. The experimental proof or disproof of such deductions is difficult, and — if the late war may be regarded as an experimental disproof of certain of Hegel’s political tenets — costly and unsatisfactory.

Einstein, so far from deducing an new decalogue, has contented himself with deducing the consequences to space and time themselves of their ideality. These are mostly too small to be measurable, but some, such as the deflection of light but the sun’s gravitational field, are susceptible of verification, and have been verified. The majority of scientific men are now being constrained by the evidence of these experiments to adopt a very extreme form of Kantian idealism. The Kantian Ding-an-sich is an eternal four-dimensional manifold, which we perceive as space and time, but what we regard as space and what as time is more or less fortuitous.

It is perhaps interesting to speculate on the practical consequences of Einstein’s discovery. I do not doubt that he will be believed. A prophet who can give signs in the heavens is always believed. No one ever seriously questioned Newton’s theory after the return of Halley’s comet. Einstein has told us that space, time and matter are shadows of the fifth dimension, and the heavens have declared his glory. In consequence Kantian idealism will become the basal working hypothesis of the physicist and finally of all educated men, just as materialism did after Newton’s day. We may not call ourselves materialists, but we do interpret the activities of the moon, the Thames, influenza, and aeroplanes in terms of matter. Our ancestors did not, nor, in all probability, will our descendants. The materialism (whether conscious or sub-conscious does not matter very much) of the last few generations has led to various results of practical importance, such as sanitation, Marxian socialism, and the right of an accused person to give evidence on his or her own behalf. The reign of Kantian idealism as the basal working hypothesis, first of physics, and then of every-day life, will in all probability last for some centuries. At the end of that time a similar step in advance will be taken. Einstein showed that experience cannot be interpreted in terms of space and time. This was a well-known fact, but so long as space and time down not break down in their own special sphere, that of explaining the facts of motion, physicists continued to believe in them, or at any rate, what was much more important, to think in terms of them for practical purposes.

A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter have destroyed geometry. The basic metaphysical working hypothesis of science and practical life will then, I think, be something like Bergsonian activism. I do not for one moment suggest that this or any other metaphysical system has any claims whatever to finality.

Meanwhile we are in for a few centuries during which many practical activities will probably be conducted on a basis, not of materialism, but of Kantian idealism. How will this affect our manners, morals and politics? Frankly I do not know, though I think the effect will be as great as that of Newton’s work, which created most of the intellectual forces of the 18th century. The Condorcets, Benthams, and Marxs of the future will I think be as ruthlessly critical of the metaphysics and ethics of their times as were their predecessors, but not quite so sure of their own; they will lack a certain heaviness of touch which we may note in Utilitarianism and Socialism. They will recognise that perhaps in ethics as in physics, there are so to speak fourth and fifth dimensions that show themselves by effects which, like the perturbations of the planet Mercury, are hard to detect even in one generation, but yet perhaps in the course of ages are quite as important as the three- dimensional phenomena.

If the quantum hypothesis is generally adopted even more radical alterations in our thinking will be necessary. But I feel it premature even to suggest their direction in the present unsatisfactory state of quantum mechanics. It may be that as Poincare (the other Poincare) suggested we shall be forced to conceive of all changes as occurring in a series of clicks, and all space as consisting of discrete points. However this may be it is safe to say that a better knowledge of radiation will permit us to produce it in a more satisfactory manner than is at present possible. Almost all our present sources of light are hot bodies, 95{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} of whose radiation is invisible. To light a lamp as a source of light is about as wasteful of energy as to burn down one’s house to roast one’s pork. It is a fairly safe prophecy that in 50 years light will cost about a fiftieth of its present price, and there will be no more night in our cities. The alternation of day and night is a check on the freedom of human activity which must go the way of other spatial and temporal checks. In the long run I think that all that applied physics can do for us is abolish these checks. It enables us to possess more, travel more, and communicate more. I shall not attempt to predict in detail the future developments of transport and communication. They are only limited by the velocity of light. We are working towards a condition when any two persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another in not more than 1/24 of a second. We shall never reach it, but that is the limit which we shall approach indefinitely.

Developments in this direction are tending to bring mankind more and more together, to render life more and more complex, artificial, and rich in possibilities — to increase indefinitely man’s powers for good and evil.

Haldan’s speech is now considered a foundation of transhumanist philosophy. 

Fundamental ideas of transhumanism were first advanced in 1923 by the British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane in his essay Daedalus: Science and the Future, which predicted that great benefits would come from the application of advanced sciences to human biology—and that every such advance would first appear to someone as blasphemy or perversion, “indecent and unnatural”. In particular, he was interested in the development of the science of eugenics, ectogenesis (creating and sustaining life in an artificial environment), and the application of genetics to improve human characteristics, such as health and intelligence. 

Science should not be confused with the religion itself, as all three aspects of science are merely the tool and the fetish of the Promethean transhumanism it serves. Needless to say, the Vaxx is the mass practical application, possibly though not necessarily the first, of transhumanist religion to humanity. Whether it will prove to be an advance for the species, an evolutionary dead end, an extinction event, or a spiritual blasphemy has yet to be determined.

But regardless, I tend to doubt that those whose evaluation of the present crisis are limited to the material, the scientodific, and the political are going to be able to comprehend much of what is happening, or what it is genuinely at stake here.

Julian Huxley wrote: Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.

And now we are beginning to see that which has been constructed to take the place of God: Techno-Babylon. But instead of building a temple to the race of Man, they are building a temple of the race of Man. Note, in particular, the gleefully demonic way in which Haldane ends his essay with a mocking parody of G.K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse.

The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission, and proud of it.

Black is his robe from top to toe,

His flesh is white and warm below,

All through his silent veins flow free

Hunger and thirst and venery,

But in his eyes a still small flame

Like the first cell from which he came

Burns round and luminous, as he rides

Singing my song of deicides.

Mailvox: Vaxxmania in the military

As if the US military wasn’t facing enough challenges, now the generals want to kill off the soldiers before they even enter the battlespace with genetic mutations:

The Pfizer model is the one they want us to take. It’s what’s available at the on-station clinics which means personnel would have to go out of their way and risk personal expense to get any others.

The pressure to take the vax mostly emanates from the officers. I’ve noticed a contrast with Officers trusting this thing like it’s come down from God while NCO’s are far more skeptical. Regular soldiers even more so with the distrust. From my officer’s perspective, what they hit us in particular with is nonsense about setting the example. Rather a bastard misuse of telling junior officers to set the example. About being “the first off the helicopter” in Vietnam or “the first off the boat” at Normandy. Do I need to go at length about how absurd this is?

I read this as a worldview that’s exhausted. They’re referencing their sacred motifs and deeds to pressure people into taking a rushed production gene therapy whose long term health effects are conjecture. And that italicized portion of the text doesn’t even fully capture the awful picture of the Pfizer serum, as you and your regulars know I am sure.

Then of course there’s the hard incentives. Want to take your mask off in office meetings? Gotta take the vax. Want to avoid ‘quarantine’ when you arrive overseas (which just happens to be done at the same place they house prisoners)? Take the vax. I know people who appear intelligent who took it on that first basis of just wanting to not wear a mask. 

Next up is attitude. Don’t want to take the vax? The officers on board with this will let you know they think you’re not a team player and probably a tinfoil hatter. Right; me and the others who refuse to be tested-on are nuts. This is their perspective: Guarding the CIA’s poppy fields in Afghanistan for a whole year of one’s life is perfectly normal and a checked box on your resume, but refusing literal poison is suspicious silliness. I anticipate as the vax-refusal situation progresses the retribution will get serious. It’s only a question of severity.

All the pro-vax people I’ve spoken to about it think it’s a regular old vaccine and don’t understand why anyone would be skeptical of it. They think Corona Chan is a horseman of the apocalypse and if they get it then they will die. Barring that, they think it will kill old people and mutants with immune disorders if everybody doesn’t let a corporation with a criminal record play God with their genes. That last part is of course is out of my head, not theirs, as they don’t even know it will mess with their genetics. Which reminds me; who or whatever is producing propaganda directed at us is knowingly lying. One “TAKE THE VAX” pamphlet I glanced over had a bullet point to the effect that “some people think the Covid-19 vaccine will change their DNA.” Which is of course higher level attempt to deceive the reader, because while it’s true the serum won’t tamper with DNA, nobody ever alleged it does. It screws with your mRNA.

Fortunately, mRNA is just junk DNA that doesn’t serve any purpose, right? Trust the science. It’s totally settled.

Wednesday PM Arktoons

MIDNIGHT’S WAR Episode 5: The Reaper Calls

THE HAMMER OF FREEDOM Episode 6: Like Circling Vultures

By the way, I’m going on Alex Jones now to discuss Arktoons.

UPDATE: I’ll admit it, I blinked once or twice when I realized the first frame they were going to show was the long vertical double-panel of the dead vampire servant being hung upside-down to drain his blood. It’s not exactly the introduction to Arktoons I would generally recommend.

The larval ticket takers

If you want to know where the next batch of cuckservative talking heads can be found, they’re pupating in the swamp of the controlled fake opposition at Newsmax:

As the two fringe cable TV outlets battle for former President Donald Trump’s affections, several high-profile One America News staffers have jumped ship to Newsmax—not just in pursuit of a larger audience, insiders said, but also as a respite from OAN’s increasing extremism.

Already known for its cartoonishly bonkers MAGA propagandizing, OAN in recent months has veered even further into unhinged right-wing territory. And Newsmax—which is often just as obsequiously pro-Trump in its commentary—has pulled back on its wildest election conspiracy theories while hoovering up some of OAN’s top on-air talent: news anchor Alex Salvi, correspondent Jenn Pellegrino, and reporter Amanda Brilhante. Those moves followed Newsmax poaching OAN’s White House correspondent Emerald Robinson last year.

Pellegrino, who served as a White House correspondent and on-air host for OAN, abruptly left the far-right channel earlier this month, only for Newsmax to announce her debut as co-anchor of a 9 p.m. ET program called Cortes and Pellegrino, co-hosted by former Trump campaign senior adviser Steve Cortes.

In late March, meanwhile, Salvi—one of OAN’s rare “straight news” anchors—revealed during his media-focused show After Hours that he was exiting the network after hosting since 2019. A few weeks later, Salvi quietly showed up on Newsmax, revealing his new role as a Rome-based foreign correspondent with the network. Brilhante, who’d been with OAN since graduating college in 2017, was hired away in February to be Newsmax’s breaking news reporter.

Newsmax is literally the most bogus operation with which I have ever have had the misfortune of working. I have more respect and affection for both GT Interactive and Indiegogo, and we all know how those relationships turned out. Some longtime readers may recall the brief period when VP featured ads, which were small and wouldn’t have been distracting if they hadn’t so often mentioned CELEBRITY FEET! or other ridiculous topics that still puzzle me as to how they qualify as a variety of clickbait.

Anyhow, I was paid for the ads, and the contract specified a significant boost once the blog got to a certain level of traffic, which might have been one million monthly pageviews. Like I said, this was a while ago, probably 2014. Once I’d hit that target which they’d specified, I let them know, along with a screenshot proving that the target had been legitimately hit. Newsmax’s response? They immediately terminated the target and never paid the previous two months that they’d owed.

About 18 months later, they came back and tried to pitch me on working with them again. Let’s just say that I actually laughed before declining in no uncertain terms.

So, I’ve known they were shady for some time now. But as AC points out, in light of the CEO’s million-dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation and the way they are now throwing out tickets to those willing to take them, it’s pretty clear that they go well beyond shady.

Implied consent for vaccination

I’m as virulently opposed to the not-vaccines as anyone, and frankly believe those responsible for creating them, advocating for them, and mandating them should be found guilty of crimes against humanity, but it is wise to avoid mischaracterizing the actions of the other side if one’s criticisms are to remain credible. For example, I’ve read the WHO report entitled Considerations regarding consent in vaccinating children and adolescents between 6 and 17 years old, and it simply does not indicate that the WHO “now considers your child’s presence in school informed consent to vaccinate that child”.

This is what the report actually says:

1. A formal, written consent process is used, particularly in middle- and high-income countries that have a higher percentage of literate populations and a longer history of providing vaccination to older age groups. Vaccination of this target group may be delivered through school health services. Health authorities inform the parents about the vaccination and written consent from the parent is required to opt-in, i.e. give permission for the older child/adolescent to be vaccinated. Alternatively, a written form is used to allow parents to express non-consent (or refusal) to vaccination of their child. This is known as an opt-out procedure.

2. A verbal consent process, whereby consent is given verbally by the parent after being duly informed about the vaccination. However, this approach can only be used when parents accompany the child to the vaccination.

3. An implied consent  process by which parents are informed of imminent vaccination through social mobilization and communication, sometimes including letters directly addressed to the parents. Subsequently, the physical presence of the child or adolescent, with or without an accompanying parent at the vaccination session, is considered to imply consent. This practice is based on the opt-out principle and parents who do not consent to vaccination are expected implicitly to take steps to ensure that their child or adolescent does not participate in the vaccination session. This may include not letting the child or adolescent attend school on a vaccination day, if vaccine delivery occurs through schools…. 

A common concern is that consent procedures affect vaccine acceptance and coverage. When comparing data from countries using written consent and those using informal, verbal or implied consent processes, comparable levels for vaccination can be seen in both settings.This suggests that the association between the informed consent procedure that a country uses, and actual levels of immunization coverage, is not strong.

While every parent should be wary of the “implied consent” standard and be certain that it does not apply to one’s children’s schools, the key is the distinction between the opt-in and the opt-out standards. But in both cases, for the time being, parental authority is still being respected.

That being said, you had better learn your local laws and take action accordingly. It might already be time to leave Canada to the Chinese.

Dozens of children flocked to the playground of Gordon A. Brown Middle School on Wednesday afternoon, to eagerly await their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. Most were accompanied by parents, or older siblings, as the East York school announced Wednesday morning it would launch a pop-up clinic that afternoon.

Many parents had already been vaccinated — they were there to provide support. What they weren’t there for was to give permission. In Toronto, those 12-15 don’t need a parent or guardian to allow them to take the vaccine. Health Canada approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for those aged 12 to 15 on May 5, making Canada the first country to do so, with the hopes that school restrictions could be eased in the fall.

Wednesday AM Arktoons

ALT★HERO Episode 5: I Will Break You, Scabby Donkey!

DEUS VULT Episode 5: Gorok Strikes

After consulting Arktoons subscribers on SocialGalactic and looking at the current level of subscription resources combined with crowdfunded content, here is the current plan:

  • Most of the most popular comics will stay the same, with long weekly episodes between 20 and 40 panels. This includes A Throne of Bones, Midnight’s War, Alt★Hero, Chuck Dixon’s Avalon, Quantum Mortis, Swan Knight’s Saga, and Ember War, among others.
  • Shade and AH:Q will drop to 8 panels for production reasons. In the case of the latter, we’re going to have to wait several months for Helix Haze to finish some work for one of the dinosaurs before he can illustrate Issues 5 and 6. We looked into replacing him with a different illustrator, but ultimately decided against doing so because we really like his work. The Awakener and Hammer of Freedom will be reduced to 8 panels as well.
  • The new series of Silenziosa will launch with 12 panels, as will one of the two new Brazilian series. The other will launch with 8 panels. The new independent series of Dead Bang will be presented as the publisher sees fit, but we’ll recommend 8-12 panels to them.
  • Six new series, including Something Big will launch with 4-6 panels that will vary from week to week. Subscribers will be given the opportunity to vote on at least two of the series, including who the next AH spinoff character should be. New short episodes of Chicago Typewriter will also be created.
  • As the subscriptions grow over time, we’ll intend to give subscribers the choice between a) making certain series longer and b) more new series. We are still planning the crowdfunding campaign for Midnight’s War, but not until we introduce at least one episode with the new approach to coloring it.
  • 1,000-word text episodes when the feature is ready. The first text series will be the unreleased two chapters of A Sea of Skulls that I promised a few weeks ago.
I understand that the vote for long episodes was unanimous. However, I also recognize that it is probably not an accident that a majority of the most-viewed and most-liked series on Webtoons and Tapas are of the “bite-sized” variety. So, we’re going to try providing excellent examples of both and see what happens; if I have learned one thing over the years, it is to let the market speak for itself and to abandon any plans that are contradicted by it no matter how flawlessly logical they are.
Also, the Arkhaven blog has been crushing it of late, with some very good analysis of the various developments on the cultural war front that is the film and comics industry. The Dark Herald’s article on the inevitable failure of The Fantastic Four is educational on multiple levels.

Sliding toward irrelevance

I’d take this with a grain of salt or two, but the poor metrics are legitimate and President Trump has no one to blame but himself for them.

Online talk about him has plunged to a five-year low. He’s banned or ignored on pretty much every major social media venue. In the last week, Trump’s website — including his new blog, fundraising page and online storefront ­— attracted fewer estimated visitors than the pet-adoption service Petfinder and the recipe site Delish.

Trump is still by far the Republican Party’s biggest star, and conservative lawmakers and provocateurs are now loudly sparring over the importance of loyalty to him ahead of the 2022 midterm elections or a potential second Trump presidential run. Many of the party’s potential 2024 candidates say they will not run if he does, and many of the party’s luminaries have traveled to Florida to meet with him.

But Trump’s continued influence isn’t translating into a bigger online audience, according to a Washington Post review of data from four online-analytics firms. Social engagement around Trump — a measure of likes, reactions, comments or shares on content about him across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest — has nosedived 95 percent since January, to its lowest level since 2016.

I still don’t understand why President Trump didn’t, at the very least, join Gab and aggressively support alternative social media. But then, I don’t understand why every single conservative in the media would rather whine and cry incessantly about Wikipedia instead of utilizing Infogalactic.

I suspect the two are related, and have something to do with the endless search for approval on the part of those who are drawn to politics and media. But what it is exactly, I am very unqualified to say.