No tax for young workers

Poland is getting serious about shutting down labor mobility:

Polish lawmakers have approved a measure that would exonerate most workers under the age of 26 from income taxes as the country seeks to stem the flow of its young people to other EU nations in search of better paying jobs.

The lower house of parliament approved the measure introduced by the ruling conservatives in a vote late Thursday by an overwhelming majority.

The bill would exonerate workers under the age of 26 from Poland’s 18 percent personal income tax for those whose gross earnings don’t surpass 85,500 zlotys (20,000 euros, $22,500) per year.

That level is higher than Poland’s average income, estimated to be around 60,000 zlotys per year before tax.

The approval of the measure by the upper house of parliament and its signature by the president is widely expected.

Some two million people could benefit from the measure, according to supporters of the legislation, which should enter into force from August 1.

Despite the inevitable whining from the Open Borders crowd, it’s a great idea. Now they should do something similar for married couples with children. Incentivize the behavior that benefits the nation. De-incentivize the behavior that harms the nation.

It’s not a difficult concept.

REBEL’S RUN on BIC

Bounding Into Comics covers our recent announcement of REBEL’S RUN:

“I was contacted by an experienced producer.” He added, “Then I got contacted by first one producer then I got contacted by other people. Which puzzled me because we’ve published over a hundred books and nobody from the movie industry or TV industry has ever contacted us.”

Vox adds, “I was very curious about this and finally the smartest of the producers that had contacted me said, ‘Well, you have to understand, nobody in Hollywood reads.’”

He went on to praise the level of talent that is part of the film, “The level of talent that is taking in part in this, whether its with Chuck Dixon being the lead scriptwriter…we’ve got a great script, you can see from the trailer, the director, Scooter, has a really great visual eye. We are going to bring so many very strong elements to the table that I think that people are going to be really surprised at the final result.” He continues, “We are actually aiming for one of the best movie soundtracks. I want a soundtrack that is going to stand up against the Matrix, Mortal Kombat Annihilation…”

The third soundtrack I couldn’t recall during the stream, and which I consider to be a model along with the others, is Cool World. You might also be interested in last night’s Darkstream on the subject, during which I addressed a number of questions that have been raised, such as if Rebel is just another Strong Independent Woman who Knows Kung-fu and Doesn’t Need a Man to Save Her.

Warmongers against war

Are you beginning to understand how the neoclown gatekeeper strategy works yet?

There’s a new “anti-war” think tank coming to town. It will promote a new US foreign policy — one based on diplomacy instead of sanctions and war. Sounds great, until you hear it’s being funded by Soros and Koch.

The ‘Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’ will oppose Washington’s “endless wars” and will “challenge the basis of American foreign policy in a way that has not been done in at least the last quarter-century,” according to co-founder Trita Parsi.

With financier George Soros coming from the left (though he’s hardly a real leftist) and industrialist Charles Koch coming from the right, everyone is supposed to applaud the bipartisan nature of the initiative. The Boston Globe called it “one of the most remarkable partnerships in modern American political history” as though the two billionaire businessmen come from alternate universes.

Named after John Quincy Adams, who declared in 1821 that the US “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy” but is the “well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” and the “champion and vindicator only of her own,” the think tank will offer a platform to both progressive voices and anti-interventionist conservatives.

The Globe writes that this will mean its writers will “likely” advocate for things like pulling US troops out of Afghanistan and Syria, putting an end to regime change wars and “less confrontational” policies toward China and Russia. The problem here is not the concept. It’s just a question of whether or not the venture can actually be taken seriously when Soros and Koch’s fingerprints are already all over the world’s current endless wars, conflicts and regime changes.

Take some well-known Soros-funded think tanks; the Center for American Progress and the Atlantic Council, for example. They haven’t exactly been the biggest peace-pushers in the think tank world. The AC also received funding from a slew of arms manufacturers, so you’d be hard-pressed to find any anti-war sentiment there. Soros has also been linked to the “pro-democracy” European group Avaaz, which has advocated for no-fly zones in Libya and agitated for regime change in Venezuela and Iran.

Koch too has been linked to havoc-wreaking policies everywhere from Iraq to Venezuela. Despite supposedly opposing the Iraq war, independent journalist Caitlin Johnstone notes that Koch has been a major donor to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, whose members are considered leading architects of the invasion.

This new think tank is as fake as the Edmund Burke Center for National Conservativism or whatever the neoclowns’ latest charade is called. It’s neoclowns from top to bottom and they’re attempting to subvert the opposition to neoclown warmongering by taking control of the opposition to imperialist warfare. National Review and the modern conservative movement are the model; the plutocrats provide lavish funding for a false front organization that is designed to vacuum up all the minds, money, and media that might otherwise go to the genuine opposition.

“The Quincy Institute opposes wars of no purpose that drag on endlessly.”

Wars of reasonable duration that aim at destroying any nation that the neoclowns don’t like, on the other hand, are just peachy.

She blames Scalzi

And rightly so. A fanzine author realizes who was always to blame for the destruction of the Hugo.

So fuck John Scalzi anyway.

Fuck his sense of entitlement. Fuck his arrogant, unilateral “fix” of things he didn’t understand, which weren’t actually broken to begin with. Fuck his self-promoting crusade to prove that a merely world-famous, best-selling professional author with an international following of devoted groupies, whose “fan writing” blog is devoted to the ideas and concerns of professional SF authors qua pro authors, and whose grasp of what a fan writer is came by way of the modern equivalent of reading it off a cereal box, can still drum up enough ignorant first-time voters to win himself a Best Fan Writer Hugo because gosh darn it, people like him. And the rules didn’t explicitly say he couldn’t. And because he tapes bacon to cats, I guess. Woo….

So as far as I can see, John Scalzi created the blueprint: providing both proof of concept and implicit permission for the Sad and Rabid Puppy ballot stuffing campaigns. The fact that they didn’t also win the rockets suggests to me that they weren’t as good at marketing (and were aiming at some rather tougher nuts to crack, in voting number terms – Scalzi was sharp enough to notice that the fan categories had long been low hanging fruit for wrangling a short list nomination), but what they did wasn’t materially or morally different from what John Scalzi did. Neither one violated the letter of the law, and both dismissed or ignored the spirit. If the actions of the Puppies were blameworthy, so were those of John Scalzi.

If what he did was okay within the rules and therefore okay, then so were the Puppy campaigns. The fact that John Scalzi is a funny, likable guy who tapes bacon to cats doesn’t change the moral quality of his actions, it just distracted a bunch of people from noticing it. Think of him as the Daenerys Targaryen of burning the Hugos to the ground, if you like – the Mother of Dingbats.

She’s correct. John Scalzi was absolutely the inspiration for the Sad Puppies, although he wasn’t the only one. It was the entire Tor Cabal, scheming and plotting to win as many awards as possible, then waving them in the face of better, better-selling authors like Larry Correia, that made it clear that the awards were no longer anything but a popularity contest.

Larry proved his case with the first Sad Puppies campaign; all the subsequent Puppies campaigns were intended to do was to underline for the entire world his original point that the awards no longer had anything to do with literary quality in the science fiction genre. And the Rapid Puppies in particular succeeded in doing that to perfection; literally no one takes the Hugo seriously as a statement on literature anymore now that Space Raptor Butt Invasion, Stix Hiscock, and N.K. Jemisin have permanently stained what was once a substantive award.

Why not a Little Old Mermaid?

Considering that Disney is already making Ariel the Little Black Mermaid:

Halle Bailey, 19, got a flood of online congratulations on her casting as Ariel in a live-action remake of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. But some of the warm feelings were a bit misdirected, as several online commentators hilariously mistook her for Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry, 52.

Berry herself wrote: ‘In case you needed a reminder… Halles get it DONE. Congratulations @chloexhalle on this amazing opportunity, we can’t wait to see what you do! #TheLittleMermaid #HalleBailey’.

They might as well gone with Halle Berry. They’ve gone straight from blackwashing A Wrinkle in Time Bomb to The Little Mermaid, almost certainly with similarly dismal results. The hatred of Disney for all things European is so marked, I’m surprised that they haven’t completely replaced the very Germanic architecture of the Disneyland parks yet. All in due time, I suppose. But all this incessant Hollywood blackwashing just makes me want to remake Roots with a Chinese cast.

But back to the Little Black Mermaid…. at least this remake should provide some interesting new plot twists if Ariel is illegitimate and doesn’t know who her father is.

I wonder who will prove to be more popular, Little Black Mermaid or Little Black Irongirl? Every day is Wakanda day.

UPDATE: Amazon is not looking any better.

Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series is bringing Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom filmmaker J.A.  Bayona to Middle-earth. Bayona will direct the first two episodes of the fantasy series based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels, and he will serve as an executive producer, alongside partner Belén Atienza.

Ye cats…. Although I suppose it could have been a lot worse. It could have been Spielberg. Or shudder J.J. Abrams. It should be downright fascinating to see the gay black elves and pretty blonde orcs.

UPDATE: In fairness, from the SJW perspective, a remake was absolutely necessary. Because problematic.

I watched the original with my wife literally this week and it was the first time I’d seen it in about 25 or so years and, wow, it is very, very bad. There’s a lot of cleaning up to do.

UPDATE: What positive impact?

On social media, thousands praised the decision and the positive impact 19-year-old Bailey’s casting could have on ‘young black girls’.

A bunch of young black girls thinking they can be mermaids… it’s not exactly a mystery how this could go horribly wrong, given how black Americans are not, on average, what one would tend to describe as famous for their swimming abilities.

Cerno strikes again

Mike Cernovich convinces a federal court to expose some of the secrets of Epstein’s underage sex ring:

A federal appeals court has ordered the release of sealed court records pertaining to billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sex ring—spelling a victory for the victims, whose lawyers said the documents will prove Epstein trafficked underage girls to his famous friends.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled certain records in a defamation lawsuit filed by accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre against Epstein’s alleged madam, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, should be made public record.

In its opinion, the panel vacated a Manhattan federal judge’s decision to keep the records secret and ordered the summary judgment record in the 2017 case to be unsealed—with minimal redactions—after it issues a mandate closing the case. The court also remanded the case to the district court for a review of the remaining sealed materials.

The court stated that “upon reviewing the summary judgment materials in connection with this appeal, we find that there is no countervailing privacy interest sufficient to justify their continued sealing.”

A timeline for when the summary judgment record would be unsealed isn’t immediately clear.

“We applaud the Second Circuit’s decision to unseal the materials in the Guiffre v. Maxwell case,” said Sigrid McCawley, a lawyer for Giuffre, in a statement. “This ruling is a watershed moment that helps victims of sexual abuse. It unequivocally stands for the proposition that information cannot be hidden in court filings and that the public has the right to know about the abuse of victims.”

As The Daily Beast reported, the Miami Herald had asked a federal judge to release all sealed or redacted documents in Giuffre’s case, which was filed in the Southern District of New York.

Epstein’s lawyer and friend, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, and right-wing podcaster Michael Cernovich also asked the court to unseal specific records. (Dershowitz argues the release of such documents will reveal Giuffre fabricated allegations that she was coerced into having sex with him.)

Excellent work by Cerno. Exposing evil is the first step towards defeating it.

REBEL’S RUN

Many of you are aware that we have been working on a larger-scale project than usual over the last few months. So, I suspect that few of you will be surprised to learn that what we have been assiduously working on is putting together a production team for the first Arkhaven film as well as a new film production company, Viral Films Media. This is the Rebel’s Run Teaser Trailer from Galatia Films and VFM. We’re pleased to be able to announce that Scooter Downey, who directed this trailer, will also be directing the film.

UPDATE: Owen and I discuss REBEL’S RUN and another project on his stream.

It’s go time

If you’re an Arkhaven backer of a certain project that has been in the works these past few months, please check your email and respond accordingly. The public announcement will be tomorrow evening.

UPDATE: we’re going to make the initial public announcement in about 8 hours, so if you haven’t been able to follow through yet, you might want to do so before everyone else has the chance to get on board.

UPDATE: No Darkstream tonight, I’ll be appearing on Owen’s livestream instead at 7 PM EST. If you want to know what’s going on with all these cryptic comments and so forth, be sure to tune in.