The next best thing

 It would be better if they simply sunk the ships, but jailing the treasonous people and organizations that facilitated the invasion of Italy isn’t a bad first step:

After an investigation lasting almost four years, Italian prosecutors have charged dozens of rescuers, from charities including Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières, who were accused of collaborating with people smugglers after saving thousands of people from drowning in the Mediterranean.

Investigators in Trapani, Sicily, formally closed the inquiry on Monday and charged more than 20 people, including boat captains, heads of mission and legal representatives, with crimes carrying sentences of up to 20 years.

As reported by La Repubblica, at least three rescue boats are at the centre of the charges: Iuventa, a former fishing vessel run by the German NGO Jugend Rettet, Vos Hestia, operated by Save the Children, and Vos Prudence, run by MSF.

Prosecutors claim rescuers arranged a direct handover of the refugees and migrants from smugglers’ boats, returning the boats to be reused.

The entire concept of “refugees” needs to be rejected. The fact that you happen to be unfortunate enough to live under a government that hates or mistreats you is not grounds to permit you to invade another country. And, as history has made perfectly clear on many occasions, sometimes people are hated because their evil actions merit the hate. 

K is rising. Perhaps not soon enough to save most of today’s political entities, but it will save the nations.

Hitler and Napoleon must be kicking themselves in Hell. If only they’d simply thought to flood Great Britain with refugees, they could have won their wars without firing another shot after locking down the continent.

The bullies of the library

A Library subscriber mentioned yesterday that he thought the Library editions were every bit as beautiful as the Libraria editions, so I thought it was only fair to give them their moment in the sun. This was our first attempt to utilize red cowhide in the vein of the Franklin Library Shakespeare collection, and although it took a little more tweaking than usual, the end result was very satisfactory. The endpapers, in particular, are fantastic.

The front covers, which feature the hoplite and legionary helmets, are also very striking, and the detail on the two soldiers on the spines turned out better than we were expecting.

I ordered another 630 square feet of Italian goatskin today, which is the largest order we’ve placed to date. The Libraria editions of Arts of Dark and Light, which includes Summa Elvetica, will be dark green. The Libraria edition of Heidi will be the bright red of the Swiss flag. Both colors should look spectacular with the 22k gold.

Both volumes of Plutarch, in both editions, are now available at Arkhaven for non-subscribers. The Libraria edition of Summa Elvetica is also available, but there are only 49 left in stock.

There is a simple solution

It’s time for people to start holding the corpocracy responsible for its incessant attempts to strip all privacy from everyone:

Microsoft has teamed up with a number of tech and media companies to create a system of tracing content around the internet that could destroy online privacy and anonymity, radically transforming the nature of the web.

Against stiff competition, the alliance of tech and media giants has devised a plan that may constitute Big Tech’s most brazen power-grab yet.

According to Microsoft’s press release, it has partnered with several other organizations to form the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA).

Put simply, the purpose of this organization is to devise a system whereby all content on the internet can be traced back to its author.

The press release states that it will develop these specifications for “common asset types and formats,” meaning videos, documents, audio, and images.

Whether it’s a meme, an audio remix, or a written article, the goal is to ensure that when content reaches the internet, it will come attached with a set of signals allowing its provenance — meaning authorship — can be detected.

Consider the companies that have signed on to this initiative. Leading the pack is Microsoft, which operates Word, Paint, Notepad, Edge, and the Office Suite. If you create a .doc or a .jpg, a Microsoft service is probably involved in some capacity. Then there’s Adobe, the company behind Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Premiere Pro, as well as several other market-leading applications for publishing photos, videos, and documents. There’s also Truepic, a company that has developed technology to track the provenance of photos from the very moment they are captured on a smartphone.

Finally, there’s Intel, which dominates the market in laptop and desktop central processing units (CPUs). The CPU is responsible for processing virtually all information on computers. Whether you’re typing a sentence or taking a screenshot, it’s the CPU that is processing that data. Accessing the CPU is the ultimate form of digital surveillance. Even if you’re disconnected from the internet, the CPU still sees what your computer is doing.

The combination of these forces creates the potential to track and de-anonymize information from the moment it is created on a computer. Signals could be attached to information to ensure it is censored and suppressed wherever it travels online. Even if someone else is sharing the information, it could be suppressed simply because of its point of origin. And, of course, the signals could be used to identify the creators of dissident content.

It would also be useful to pass laws requiring artificial persons to be subject to the same responsibilities and penalties as natural persons, considering that they have many of the same rights. If a person who commits a crime that requires jail time cannot earn an income, why are corporations permitted to continue earning revenue if they are guilty of similar felonies and misdemeanors? 

The Devil Mouse killed Star Wars

Now Amazon is murdering The Lord of the Rings. Whatever this is looks like a low-budget, converged version of Eragon. And given the way the corporacy is now targeting actual books for cancelling, eventually there won’t be any real epic fantasy left except Arts of Dark and Light.

Latavious of the High Elves
I believe that is Latavious of the Ñoldor, the kindred of High Elves who initially migrated to Valinor from Middle-earth and lived in Eldamar, the coastal region of Aman, a continent that lay west of Middle-earth, but returned to Middle-earth following the murder of their first leader Finwë, in a drive-by shooting believed to have been committed by orcs that belonged to the Crips gang.
UPDATE: Yes, yes, that isn’t the actual Amazon Lord of the Rings. It’s just a joke based on a converged Netherflix fantasy film. The actual Amazon product will probably look a lot more like this.

They’re just getting started

Ebay is banning accounts that sell Dr. Seuss books:

Dr. Seuss is still getting canceled. In addition to far-Left schools, a useless learning organization, President Joe Biden, and a to-be-determined verdict from Universal Orlando, eBay has set aim toward the — as of last week racist — author.

eBay is going to work overtime to take down all current listings and is “monitoring” anyone who tries to list one of the six racist books in the future. (By the way, what a gig that would be to have.)

“eBay is currently sweeping our marketplace to remove these items,” an eBay spokeswoman said.

“We had to remove your listing because it didn’t follow our Offensive material policy,” one seller was told for listing a Dr. Seuss book. “Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination aren’t allowed.”

It isn’t ever going to end until it is stopped. 

A thing worth doing

Is worth doing for its own sake. Given the expense of producing and shipping these, it would make no sense from a capitalistic perspective to produce monstrous books like these massive goatskin-leatherbound editions of both volumes of PLUTARCH’S LIVES. But if you appreciate books, how could you possibly doubt for one second that it was a thing worth doing?

We’re currently behind schedule on SUMMA ELVETICA for various reasons that mostly relate to trying to get the AODAL series look right, but we expect to get back on track with HEIDI and the current Library subscription book, RHETORIC by Aristotle, featuring a Forward by yours truly. The new system at the bindery permits much better tracking that will go out automatically via email to subscribers when the books are shipped, so we’re anticipating improvement in that regard.

Both volumes of PLUTARCH’S LIVES, Library and Libraria can now be purchased individually until the stock runs out. Please note that the Libraria edition of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND now joins both editions of THE MISSIONARIES, and MEDITATIONS as being officially sold out.

Political breakup or global depopulation

A global forecast site is predicting a 70 percent decline in the US population… by 2025:

As we had reported on ANP back on December 31st of 2017, Deagel was previously forecasting the US population to drop to 54 million people by 2025, down from what was then 324 million people in 2016. Well as we see now in the screenshot above taken from their website page for the United States this morning, Deagel is now forecasting that the 2025 population of the USA will be a nice, round 100 million people – nearly doubling their previous 2025 forecast for America of 54 million.
Yet as it’s easy to see, even a 2025 forecast of 100 million people living here in less than 8 years is STILL DOWN 227 million from the 2017 population of America. How will America LOSE 227 million people by 2025?
We’d love to know why Deagel is forecasting the population of the US to drop from 327 million in 2017 to only 100 million in 2025, with them also forecasting a 2025 US military budget of 32 billion dollars, down from our 2017 military budget of $637 billion, while forecasting our population density to drop from 34 inhabitants per square mile to only 10 inhabitants per square mile in 2025. While our emails to Deagel have gone unreturned, what does Deagel know that we don’t know?

I suppose it is theoretically possible that Deagel is simply anticipating the same political breakup of the United States that I am, especially given that it is forecasting a 78 percent decline in the population of the increasingly not-United Kingdom, versus a 30 percent decline in the aging population of Italy.

But then, given the forecast of a 54 percent decline in the population of Israel and a 1 percent increase in the population of India, it’s considerably more likely that they know something about the not-vaccines that Bill Gates is pushing on the world in order to reduce the global population.

UPDATE: Actually, their core logic isn’t unreasonable. They are looking at pretty much the same thing I’ve been anticipating, which is the catastrophic failure of the neoliberal order beginning with the financial sector. The real question isn’t whether the collapse will happen or not, but if Soviet society was actually much 5x-8x more resilient than the Western societies.

The Soviet system was less able to deliver goodies to the people than the Western one. Nevertheless Soviet society was more compact and resilient under an authoritarian regime. That in mind, the collapse of the Soviet system wiped out 10 percent of the population. The stark reality of diverse and multicultural Western societies is that a collapse will have a toll of 50 to 80 percent depending on several factors but in general terms the most diverse, multicultural, indebted and wealthy (highest standard of living) will suffer the highest toll. The only glue that keeps united such aberrant collage from falling apart is overconsumption with heavy doses of bottomless degeneracy disguised as virtue.

Amazon to destroy NFL next

 After destroying both the ebook and audiobook markets, Amazon has set it sights on further reducing NFL viewership:

After steamrolling the bookstore industry, monopolizing online retail, taking a stab at dominating the pharmacy business and not that far from muscling out the competition and becoming the dominant player in cloud, Amazon is set to dominate yet another market: NFL viewership.

The WSJ reports that the National Football League is on the verge of signing new rights deals with media partners that could see Amazon.com carry many games exclusively and TV networks pay as much as double their current rate, plunging NFL viewership notwithstanding.

According to the new agreements, which could be in place as early as next week, TV deals for the league’s Sunday and Monday franchises with Fox, CBS, NBC and ESPN are likely to run for as long as 11 years, they said. ESPN’s deal would go into effect after the 2021-22 season while the Fox, CBS and NBC agreements would kick in after the 2022-23 season.

But it is the NFL’s deal with Amazon that is of most interest: it would result in a significant number of Thursday night games being available exclusively on its Prime Video platform and “represent the league’s deepest foray into streaming”, WSJ sources said. And in order to lock even more Prime Video viewers, those games wouldn’t be available on traditional television outside of the local markets of the two teams playing.

While it hasn’t been confirmed yet that the replacement of the Washington Redskins’ cheerleading squad with a nameless gay men’s Chippendale dance troupe was dictated by Amazon, it appears likely that the Minnesota Vikings and the Kansas City Chiefs will be terminated from the league for racism, while the New England Patriots have already received an email from Amazon informing them that their games will not be televised due to their extremist identitarianism.

Division is good

The good should not be unequally yoked with the wicked. The Christians in the United Methodist Church are on the verge of leaving their converged denomination.

Conservative leaders within the United Methodist Church unveiled plans Monday to form a new denomination, the Global Methodist Church, with a doctrine that does not recognize same-sex marriage.

The move could hasten the long-expected breakup of the UMC over differing approaches to LGBTQ inclusion. For now, the UMC is the largest mainline Protestant church in the U.S. and second only to the Southern Baptist Convention, an evangelical denomination, among all U.S. Protestant churches.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the UMC’s General Conference — at which the schism would be debated — has been postponed for two consecutive years, and is now scheduled to take place in Minneapolis starting in late August of 2022.

The Rev. Keith Boyette, a Methodist elder from Virginia who chairs the Global Methodist initiative, said he and his allies do not want to wait that long to formally leave the UMC. They have asked that the topic of schism be added to the tightly limited agenda of a special one-day General Conference to be conducted online May 8.

The name is, of course, a little ironic…. All the crocodile tears about unity and grace should be ignored.

China vs Prometheans

It is, of course, merely another permutation of the Sino-Jewish War:

No American pro sports league has profited more from its business relationship with China than the NBA, and the NBA has been known to take some serious social justice and political stands in the United States.

So it will be interesting to see if the league will take a stand against its biggest business partner, now that a Chinese court has ruled in favor of a widely circulated Chinese textbook that describes homosexuality as “a psychological disorder.”

Remember, the NBA is the same organization that once pulled its All-Star Game out of Charlotte after a North Carolina law banned transgender people from using bathrooms in accordance with their gender identities.

Now, will the league speak out about the Chinese court ruling that states referring to homosexuality as a mental disorder is a-OK? Will it pull preseason games out of China, stop accepting money from Chinese merchandise sales, vehemently speak out about the communist nation’s decision to promote materials that are clearly anti-LGBT?

The point is not the hypocrisy. The point is that the Chinese response demonstrates it was never necessary to surrender to the neoclowns and SJWs. Unfortunately, the prosperity-weakened Christians of the West lacked the spine and the intelligence to defend their ideals, their nations, or their faith, and succumbed to lies about free speech, equality, posterity, and civic nationalism.

Which is why the 21st Century is much more likely to belong to the East than to the West.