#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
I’m not saying that the graphic novel of A THRONE OF BONES will be Arkhaven’s best work to date when it launches. If nothing else, I suspect that MIDNIGHT’S WAR and SILENZIOSA will give it a run for its money. But I think you can agree that a) Arkhaven has upped its graphic game, and b) it is coming along rather well.
In case it wasn’t already completely apparent, Alexey Navalny is supposed to be the Juan Guiado or Joe Biden of Russia, but Putin and the Russian government aren’t foolish enough to provide la squadra satana the opportunity to build him up as a serious national figure:
Surveillance footage, recorded in the early 2010s, appears to show a close associate of Alexey Navalny seeking cash and intelligence from an alleged British spy and suggesting his anti-corruption work may benefit firms in London.
The tape, which was first reported by RT television on Monday, is said to have been filmed by the Federal Security Service (FSB) sometime in 2012 and allegedly shows a meeting between Vladimir Ashurkov and an employee of the British Embassy in Moscow. Ashurkov is the executive director of the FBK, Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption organization.
The person he met at a Moscow cafe was identified as James William Thomas Ford, then Second Secretary for political affairs of the UK embassy in Russia. The FSB suspected he was an MI6 agent working under diplomatic cover. The discussion presents problematic optics for Navalny and the FBK team, and appears to support the Russian government’s claim that they deserve to be considered foreign agents.
Part of Ashurkov’s pitch, recorded secretly by the security service, was dedicated to fundraising.
“If we had more money, we would expand our team, of course,” he said, adding that his goal of obtaining “a little money” like “10, 20 million dollars a year” would make a huge difference. “And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake. And that’s the message I am trying to project in my fundraising efforts and talking to people in the business community,” he said.
The FBK’s stated goal is to expose alleged cases of corruption in Russia. While it is essentially a type of journalistic organisation, its work is ultimately tied to Navalny’s aims gaining political power. Ashurkov outlined the organization’s activities as “mass protests, civil initiatives, propaganda, establishing contacts with the elite and explain to them that we are reasonable people and we are not going to demolish everything and take away their assets.”
These foreign-funded “popular” figureheads who suddenly appear at the forefront of various liberalization and anti-corruption movements are nothing of the sort. They’re just meat puppets for the global Demon State.
The Mercers tried to kill Gab early too:
Now that John Matze has been ousted by the Mercers, perhaps it’s time to speak a little more freely about Parler.
Was Parler a GOP establishment attempt to subvert the work Gab has been doing for 5+ years and data mine conservatives? Good question!
When Gab first launched let’s just say we were approached by some “hedge fund people” on the right who wanted to invest on one condition: stop talking about certain topics and people, change the branding, and give up control.
Obviously we didn’t take the deal with the devil.
What happened to John Matze is partially why.
The CEO and Founder ousted from his own company. Should never happen, especially not in an early stage startup.
Castalia got one of those super early offers in its second year of existence. Not only were we not at all interested, we couldn’t understand what their interest could possibly be. It makes considerably more sense now. There might be an amusing business there, selling “dangerous” startups to conservative gatekeepers.
Never forget that the love of money is the root of all evil.
Mike Lindell’s new video on the details of the 2020 election fraud. I haven’t watched it yet so I can’t testify to its accuracy.
UPDATE: If you want to save to your hard drive for whatever reason, you can do so here.
Translation: how the bipartisan ruling party tried to hide their steal of the 2020 election for the Deep State:
In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
This is an outright confession spun for the suckers.
A commenter at AC erroneously imagines that I’m attempting to sweep my past statements under the rug and hoping people will forget anything that I’ve said:
AC… will [n]ever fully admit he got taken for a ride…
They bought into a cult of personality built around Trump, and no matter how many mistakes or obvious errors in judgement Trump made, they continued to believe in the “plan”.
Right now, Governor DeSantis is hitting Big Tech where it hurts, to the best of his limited ability.
Ask yourself, why didn’t Trump do that, and more, back in 2017?
Because he was trying to draw out his enemies, or some other esoteric excuse for Trump’s bad decision making abilities?
AC is still willing to wait months, maybe years, for the impossible day when Trump retakes the throne and the bad guys all go to jail.
Vox has simply stopped talking about it altogether, as if he wasn’t obsessed with Q for 3 years running. Vox hopes no one will remember any of his former positions in 6 months.
AC still has to decompress and get over the shock of Q’s failure.
Yes, nothing adds up about the current admin, and the inauguration did not follow the standard ritual requirements.
Vox happens to be exceedingly busy with Project Asteroid and annual Castalia royalties and other things. Moreover, nothing is happening right now, and nothing has happened except that President Trump did not make his move prior to January 20, as I had assumed he would.
I haven’t conceded one single damn thing I’ve said about Q or anything else, nor will I anytime soon. And everyone, critics, skeptics, or fans, are more than welcome to quote me on everything I’ve written on this blog or in my books. I don’t have any “former position” on this matter.
I’m simply done talking to morons about it. They can go ahead and buy the mainstream Narrative if they like. I didn’t, I don’t, and I won’t. If you don’t grasp that Joe Biden is no more calling the shots today than you, me, or the dog you see playing in your neighbor’s yard outside, there is absolutely no point in my attempting to shout across the IQ communications gap at you.
Furthermore, as I have repeatedly pointed out for many months now, Q was about morale. Q was not only a resounding success, it was one of the greatest examples of successful marketing since Coke taught the world to sing in perfect harmony. The point of Q was never to be an oracle predicting future events, but to destroy trust in the media Narrative. How anyone can fail to recognize that, I simply do not understand.
Meanwhile, in totally unrelated news, Jeff Bezos just happened to resign from Amazon….
Then why are Congressional Democrats clearly so terrified of it?
House Democrats are heading into a showdown with Republicans Thursday over GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s past promotion of conspiracies that threatens to provoke an escalating cycle of political retaliation.
The conflict over Greene is one of two that had been festering for House Republicans and reflect tension in the party over its future direction and former President Donald Trump’s continued influence even after he was voted out of office.
GOP lawmakers Wednesday night decided to stand with both Trump loyalists and the old-line establishment. They rejected pressure from Democrats to take steps on their own to punish Greene, who has aligned herself closely with the former president, and voted to keep Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming as one of their leaders despite scathing criticism over her vote to impeach Trump after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“It was a very resounding acknowledgment that we need to go forward together,” Cheney, 54, told reporters after a more than four-hour meeting of House Republicans where she and Greene were the main topics. She did not apologize for the impeachment vote, according to other lawmakers in the room.
Democrats are continuing the battle over Greene. Earlier Wednesday, they set up a vote on the House floor to remove her from the two committees she was assigned by GOP leadership, Education and Labor and Budget.
Just an observation. (whistles innocently)
It’s not terribly difficult to understand why US imperialists find it impossible to learn the vital lesson of sinking the ships and keeping the immigrants and refugees out in light of the fact that the Roman imperialists didn’t learn it a scant six years after the Goths killed the Emperor Valens, who had given them refuge from the Huns, on the battlefield of Adrianople. From The Day of the Barbarians:
The rhetorician Themistius, who a few years earlier had publicly congratulated Valens for making peace with the Goths, was charged with delivering an encomium in honor of Saturninus. In this oration, humanitarian rhetoric encountered before can be heard to vibrate anew, as if nothing had changed. Themistius lauded the government for having found a political solution to the problem, for receiving the Goths in peace instead of trying to annihilate them: “Philanthropy has prevailed over destruction. Would it perhaps have been better to fill Thrace with corpses instead of farmers? The barbarians are already transforming their weapons into hoes and sickles and cultivating the fields.” This was the ideology of the “melting pot,” viewing the barbarians as destined to be integrated into the empire as so many had been admitted in the past. Their descendants, Themistius said, “can’t be called barbarians; for all intents and purposes, they’re Romans. They pay the same taxes we do, they serve with us in the army, they’re governed in the same way and subject to the same laws. And before long, the same thing will happen with the Goths.”
In practice, Theodosius’s solution to the Gothic problem had been in the air for a long time and more than once had been on the point of implementation before going awry. Valens had let the Goths into the empire with the idea of enlisting them in the army, and although the inefficiency and corruption that characterized the military authorities’ treatment of the refugees had driven them to rebellion, Valens had always remained open to the prospect of a negotiated peace; indeed, just a few hours before being killed at Adrianople, the emperor had been involved in discussions with Fritigern’s envoys, trying to find a solution. In 382, Theodosius did exactly what could have been done six years before, though he could not easily cancel out everything that had happened in the interval—the years of pillaging and atrocities, the destruction of an army, the death of an emperor, and the siege of the imperial capital. After Adrianople, enrolling Gothic warriors in the imperial army was much more difficult, as was explaining to the civilian population that the Goths were really just refugees, people who should receive humane treatment, a useful workforce.
And yet the ruling classes of the empire gave this a try, and one can either admire their goodwill or be astonished by their cynicism. To the politicians who collaborated with Theodosius, the acceptance of the Goths, despite everything that had happened, posed no problem at all; official speeches and the verses of the court poets all harped on the same string. A Gaulish rhetorician, Pacatus, enthused over all the new Roman soldiers, barbarians, yes, but so willing to learn: “O wonderful and memorable! Those who once had been enemies of Rome, now marching under Roman commanders and Roman banners, following the standards they used to fight against, filling as soldiers the cities they had formerly emptied and devastated as enemies. The Goth, the Hun, and the Alan, learning to express themselves according to the rules and taking their turn on guard duty and fearful of being criticized in their officers’ reports.” The tale of the barbarian who throws away his animal skins and learns to dress like a civilized person and obey orders and observe discipline was told again and again by the authors of Theodosius’s time, and the implication was clear: Exchanging those bestial clothes for garb befitting a citizen and learning to live according to the rules made one a Roman. All the rhetoric about the universality of the empire, about its capacity for assimilation, was trotted out to demonstrate that Theodosius had made the right choice.
The Italian author, the historian Alessandro Barbero, observes that “it wasn’t all empty rhetoric; to a certain degree, that capacity for assimilation genuinely existed. The empire really was absorbing the barbarians, even though, as it did so, it inevitably changed.”
Of course, the wisdom and success of that absorption can be questioned by the fact that a Goth named Flavius Alaricus was named magister militum and given command of all the Roman troops in lllyricum. You probably know him better as Alaric the Goth, as ten years later, he sacked Rome.
This is literally music to my ears:
Back in 1959, on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties, I was posted to Germany as part of my National Service and quickly found myself a new niche. In those days, the Forces radio station played an endless diet of Bing Crosby and Peggy Lee — both wonderful singers, but their music was the sort of thing we young servicemen associated with our parents.
We wanted something different, something to call our own — and we’d found it in rock ‘n’ roll.
Powerful and energetic, these new songs had exploded on to the music scene to become the anthems for our changing times…. This was the dawn of two decades which would usher in some of the greatest music ever made and the greatest lyrics ever penned — written and performed by bands and solo artists whose names are now etched in the music hall of fame.
From Elvis and the Beatles to the Rolling Stones and The Who, Bob Dylan and the Kinks, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Queen — the music that emerged from that era has more than stood the test of time and is loved by baby boomers and their grandchildren alike.
Yet not, it seems, by the bigwigs at Radio 2.
As the Mail reported yesterday, it appears that they have quietly asked their DJs to ‘scale back’ on playing songs from the Sixties and Seventies in favour of music from the Eighties onwards.
I’m sure I can’t be the only one who is baffled. Yes, the Eighties and Nineties produced some terrific music, but it seems sheer folly to deprive the Radio 2 audience of some of the hits from the decades before — whatever their age.
I’ve hated Boomer music for literally decades. To me, the main difference between classic rock and punk rock is that at least the punk rockers knew they didn’t know how to play their instruments very well. There are ten-year-old girls now who play better guitar than the average classic rock guitarist. And it’s hilarious to see the characteristic complete lack of self-consciousness inherent in the Boomer braggadacio about their lack of interest in their parents’ music combined with their bafflement that their grandchildren have no interest in their music.
The greatest music ever recorded? I think Beethoven and Mozart and Wagner might have a little something to say about that. No one even listens to the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and the Kinks anymore and they’re still alive. I think… I don’t actually know or care. Generation Z thinks The Who comes from Mongolia.
Just go gently into that endless night, Boomer, to the comforting sounds of Hotel California if you please.
The Mercers force out the founder of Parler:
Parler CEO John Matze has been terminated from the company after a decision by its board, the now-former chief executive said, noting that he played no part in the move, which comes after the site was booted from Amazon’s servers.
“On January 29, 2021, the Parler board controlled by Rebekah Mercer decided to immediately terminate my position as CEO of Parler. I did not participate in this decision,” Matze wrote in a memo to employees obtained by Fox News on Wednesday.
They did something similar to Milo. They “invest” in projects, but in a manner that retains the ability to pull their money out at any time. Which, of course, gives them the ability to disrupt, if not kill outright, any project in which they’ve nominally invested.
Not that I’m any fan of Matze or Parler, but it’s interesting to see how even the cucks are having the rug pulled out from under them now. This is why organic growth is the only viable strategy. None of the money creatures, whatever their claimed politics happen to be, can be trusted one iota.