Following our lead

Maybe, just maybe, we knew what we were doing by setting up Unauthorized the way we did:

At the same time the government launched their probe, the top publishers in the country had gathered for an emergency summit in New York. Advertising dollars from 2015-2018 were slowly declining. 2019 trends were showing an alarming trend with programmatic revenues in freefall industry-wide. Ad revenue across publishing was down over 50{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf}??? There’s gotta be an explanation for this?

Here’s the sticky-fingered culprit. Facebook has decided to sweep the leg on the entire industry, it’s actually happening now. But why now? The reason why is shockingly simple.

Google and Facebook are ad-supported businesses. They want to get you on their pages and keep you there at all costs. This puts them at odds with the publishing community, much of which is ad supported. Google. Facebook, and Amazon control 70{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf} of all online ad dollars spent. The rest of the publishing world fights for scraps of the other 30{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf}. But Google and Facebook got together last year and colluded with each other, asking a simple, shocking question, a question that prompted the anti-trust probe:

“What if we took it all?”

And these clowns actually agreed they should fuckin’ do it. Holy smokes.

The endgame is underway. Last Thursday, Rooster Teeth, a company I admire and have tremendous respect for laid off 50 people. To avoid the same fate publishers have absolutely littered their website with ads; Pop-ups, Auto-sound ads, the kitchen sink, to stay afloat. We haven’t followed suit. Frankly I’d rather die.

Fewer publishers, and the ones left must worship a new god. Sound familiar?

By taking it all, the Duopoly actually wins twice. Not only do they kill publishers and take their money, what’s left of the publishers who hang on will have no choice but to attach their skeleton crew to Facebook and Google for life support. Facebook will actually have the balls to play savior by creating, say, a ‘preferred publisher program’, anointing a handful of publishers as partners who will get traffic from FB and just enough ad revenue to survive. Then Facebook’s algorithm will only show you articles from those publishers that their algorithm thinks you want to see. Your entire internet consumption, as well as how you think and feel, will be dictated to you.

theCHIVE doesn’t have that option nor would we want it. Logically, if the ad-supported model is dying, we must diversify our business model. We must control our own destiny and diversify away from ad-supported to subscription model.

If you’ve noticed, we don’t advertise any of our projects anywhere. Arkhaven, Castalia, Infogalactic, VFM and Unauthorized all refuse to pay-to-play on Amazon, Facebook, Google, or anywhere else. We would rather rely upon our core supporters, focus upon serving them, and gradually grow that strong foundation than try to catch a big wave on Amazon or wherever.

Why? Because the wave belongs to the wave maker and is entirely under its control! We’ve seen, repeatedly, that even million-selling Amazon authors have ZERO support outside of Amazon. Their success is entirely in the hands of potentially hostile parties, which is why we’d rather have a small, but very reliable set of supporters than a large, but entirely unreliable one.

Build your own platform. Build your own market. TheCHIVE has belatedly realized what we knew all along: if people aren’t willing to pay for it directly, it isn’t worth doing in the first place. And if you haven’t subscribed to Unauthorized yet, you can do so here. And speaking of UATV, there is a new Chuck Dixon video on the upcoming Birds of Prey movie up now.  Yes, believe it or not, he wrote that comic too….

A publisher, not a platform

Facebook is trying to spin federal law and be protected by it too:

Facebook has invoked its free speech right as a publisher, insisting its ability to smear users as extremists is protected – but its legal immunity thus far has rested on a law that protects platforms, not publishers. Which is it?

Facebook has declared it has the right, as a publisher, to exercise its own free speech and bar conservative political performance artist Laura Loomer from its platform. Even calling her a dangerous extremist is allowed under the First Amendment, because it’s merely an opinion, Facebook claims in its motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Loomer.

But Facebook has always defined itself as a tech company providing a platform for users’ speech in the past, a definition that has come to appear increasingly ridiculous in the era of widespread politically-motivated censorship. Now, the not-so-neutral content platform has redefined itself as a publisher, equipped with a whole new set of rights – but bereft of the protections that have kept it safe from legal repercussions in the past.

“Under well-established law, neither Facebook nor any other publisher can be liable for failing to publish someone else’s message,” Facebook’s motion to dismiss Loomer’s defamation suit reads, justifying its decision to ban her from the platform. It also points out that terms like “dangerous” or “promoting hate” cannot be factually verified and are thus constitutionally protected opinions for a publisher – while claiming it never applied either term to Loomer, despite banning her from its platform under its “dangerous individuals” policy.

Defining itself as a publisher opens Facebook up to lawsuits for defamation and other liability for the content users publish, something they were previously immunized against. All the lies, personal attacks, and smears launched by users going forward can now be laid at Facebook’s feet. That’s a Pandora’s box they might not want to open, legal analyst and radio host Lionel told RT.

Whatever they say – platform or publisher – their words will haunt them legally from now on.

Platforms like Twitter, Google, and – until now, apparently – Facebook are protected from the legal consequences of their users’ speech by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Facebook even makes reference to section 230 later in its motion, suggesting that it is trying to have its cake and eat it too.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the legal departments of the SJW-converged tech companies are paper tigers. They are not at all accustomed to anyone standing up to them, they are riddled with diversity, and they are prone to flailing about dramatically and incoherently rather than articulating an internally consistent legal narrative.

Facebook cannot be both a platform and a publisher. Either it is a content-neutral platform or a publisher responsible for its content. In the Loomer case, it has clearly chosen to be a publisher and can now be held responsible for all the content it publishes.

On a not-completely-unrelated note, Indiegogo has announced new Terms of Use today.

Alt-Hero Volume 1

A backer requests a discussion thread:

Can we start a thread on the Alt-Hero Volume 1 Omnibus? Got mine in the mail.

They have gone out to US backers and we anticipate they will go out to UK/Europe/ROW next week. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Please to not Epstein

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe really, really, really doesn’t want to be Epsteined in prison:

“Will you take a deal in order to go on with the rest of your life if there is no big criminal attachment — you don’t have to do any time or anything like that?” CNN’s Chris Cuomo asked McCabe in an interview.

“Absolutely not, under any circumstances,” said McCabe, who joined CNN as an analyst Aug. 23.

“No deal?” Cuomo asked.

“Absolutely not, under any circumstances,” McCabe repeated.

Epstein assumed he was either too important or beyond their reach. McCabe obviously knows better.

Conservatives never learn

The British Conservatives are about to learn the lesson that US conservatives learned in the 2016 election.

Voters who back the Brexit Party at the next election would be helping put Jeremy Corbyn in No 10, Jacob Rees-Mogg warned last night.

The Leader of the House of Commons emphatically ruled out an alliance between the Tories and Nigel Farage in a snap poll.

He also issued a clear warning of the consequences for the Tories of Brexit not happening on October 31, saying the Brexit Party would be ‘full steam ahead’.

‘I don’t think a deal works,’ Mr Rees-Mogg told a Daily Telegraph event last night. ‘If we haven’t left by October 31, the Brexit Party won’t want to do a deal with us. If we have failed, the Brexit Party is full steam ahead.’

Urging Brexit Party supporters back to the Tory fold, he warned the audience to ‘think very hard’ before voting for it.

He added: ‘If you vote for the Brexit Party at the next election it is a vote effectively for Jeremy Corbyn.’

People stuck on binary analyses never see the third option coming. They also never seem to grasp that most people prefer open and avowed enemies to unreliable and traitorous allies.

If the leaders of the Conservative Party had any brains and actually valued political power, they would do two things. First, encourage Scottish independence. The only reason Labour ever had any power in Great Britain was due to the strong inclination of the Scots toward the Left. Once the Scottish electorate is excised from the British Parliament, Labour becomes as irrelevant as the Liberal Democrats have been historically.

Second, do a deal with the Brexit Party and build up a powerful Leave majority whether Brexit has taken place or not.

The fact that the Conservative leadership refuses to do either of these perfectly obvious things demonstrates very clearly that they are not serious about any of their professed principles. Like US conservatives, they have failed to conserve anything. They fully merit their future failure.

The end of air supremacy

The Yemeni attack on Saudi Arabia may mark a turning point in the 100-year history of air war:

Saudi Arabia spent billions to protect a kingdom built on oil but could not stop the suspected Iranian drone and missile attack, exposing gaps that even America’s most advanced weaponry failed to fill.

In addition to deciding whether that firepower should be turned on Iran in retaliation, the Saudis and their American allies must now figure out how to prevent a repeat of last weekend’s attack — or worse, such as an assault on the Saudis’ export facilities in the Persian Gulf or any of the desalination plants that supply drinking water.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked Wednesday on his way to Saudi Arabia how it was possible that the kingdom could have dropped its guard, failing to stop any of the low-flying cruise missiles or armed drones that struck the Abqaiq oil processing center — the largest of its kind in the world — and the Khurais oil field. Even the best air defenses sometimes fail, he replied….

Between 2014 and 2018, the Saudis ranked as the world’s No. 1 arms importer. In that period, they accounted for 22 percent of the United States’ global arms sales, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In recent years they have acquired some of America’s top-shelf weapons, including F-15 fighter aircraft, Apache attack helicopters and the Patriot air defense systems.

None of that made a difference last weekend in the face of an attack that exposed Saudi weaknesses that might seem obvious in retrospect.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that the US is well behind Russia and China with regards to unmanned air war due to its historical supremacy in conventional manned air warfare. Because the US has focused on defending against threats of the sort that it poses to others, neither it nor its allies are prepared for “unconventional” attacks that avoid those defenses.

This is the usual pattern of military history, wherein a long-standing advantage is circumvented by technological and tactical innovations that eliminate the utility of the advantage. Think about the way in which the German U-boat circumvented the British Navy’s control of the oceans or how Wellington’s refusal to give battle at any time and place that was not of his choosing negated the massive numerical advantage of the French forces occupying Spain.

Decades of failed predictions

At this point, “scientific” predictions might as well be coin flips given the way they so readily exchange one form of catastrophe for its opposite.

The conservative-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute has put together a lengthy compilation of apocalyptic predictions dating back decades that did not come to pass, timed as Democratic presidential candidates and climate activists refocus attention on the issue.

The dire predictions, often repeated in the media, warned of a variety of impending disasters – famine, drought, an ice age, and even disappearing nations – if the world failed to act on climate change.

An Associated Press headline from 1989 read “Rising seas could obliterate nations: U.N. officials.” The article detailed a U.N. environmental official warning that entire nations would be eliminated if the world failed to reverse warming by 2000.

Then there were the fears that the world would experience a never-ending “cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere.” That claim came from an “international team of specialists” cited by The New York Times in 1978.

Just years prior, Time magazine echoed other media outlets in suggesting that “another ice age” was imminent. “Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest,” the magazine warned in 1974. The Guardian similarly warned in 1974 that “Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast.”

In 1970, The Boston Globe ran the headline, “Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century.” The Washington Post, for its part, published a Columbia University scientist’s claim that the world could be “as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age.”

One of the great advantages of age is that you can readily spot the liars, having been lied to by them before.

The Great Replacement: comics edition

The conservative media is finally beginning to notice that something is wrong in the state of comics:

Iron Man is dead. Captain America is all but dead, having traveled back in time to live his life out in the America he remembered. Those unhappy events occurred in Avengers Endgame, the film in which Woke Hollywood killed off and retired the two white men—top heroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). And more wokeness is coming, as the producers and directors of these obscenely profitable blockbusters fashion a new non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual MCU. The normal white man will be exiled. Who better than a black bisexual woman or “married” homosexual man, after all, to save the universe!

For Marvel fans to understand what’s coming, they must also understand that Disney will soon have complete control of the MCU, sans Spiderman. Disney and Sony have ended their sui generis partnership to make five films about the webslinger, with Sony retaining total control and Spidey swinging out of the MCU, apparently for good.

That will leave the movie franchise safely in the hands of people of color and those who partake of the Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The heterosexual white man no longer saves the world. He’s an anachronism, a throwback to white-bread world of George Reeves and Noel Neill. The MCU cannot be left out of the The Great Replacement. Whites men will still show up, of course. But the new emphasis will be women, homosexuals, and, of course, people of color.

Of course, in keeping with conservative tradition, there is no mention whatsoever of legitimate alternative comics, such as Arkhaven and Dark Legion Comics, just complaints about the state of the mainstream. In the event you’re interested in actually doing something about this, you might want to consider supporting Jon Del Arroz’s new Flying Sparks 3 campaign or picking up a copy of Alt-Hero Volume 1.

Speaking of AHv1, the omnibuses have gone out to backers in the USA. They will be going out next week to backers in Europe and elsewhere.

UPDATE: In fairness, Mr. Kersey has written about the alternatives to Marvel before.

Philosophizing in the best possible way

Pope Leo XIII explains why it is important for Christians of an intellectual bent to read The Summa Theologica by St. Thomas Aquinas.

Whoso turns his attention to the bitter strifes of these days and seeks a reason for the troubles that vex public and private life must come to the conclusion that a fruitful cause of the evils which now afflict, as well as those which threaten, us lies in this: that false conclusions concerning divine and human things, which originated in the schools of philosophy, have now crept into all the orders of the State, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses. For, since it is in the very nature of man to follow the guide of reason in his actions, if his intellect sins at all his will soon follows; and thus it happens that false opinions, whose seat is in the understanding, influence human actions and pervert them.

Whereas, on the other hand, if men be of sound mind and take their stand on true and solid principles, there will result a vast amount of benefits for the public and private good. We do not, indeed, attribute such force and authority to philosophy as to esteem it equal to the task of combating and rooting out all errors; for, when the Christian religion was first constituted, it came upon earth to restore it to its primeval dignity by the admirable light of faith, diffused “not by persuasive words of human wisdom, but in the manifestation of spirit and of power,” so also at the present time we look above all things to the powerful help of Almighty God to bring back to a right understanding the minds of man and dispel the darkness of error.

But the natural helps with which the grace of the divine wisdom, strongly and sweetly disposing all things, has supplied the human race are neither to be despised nor neglected, chief among which is evidently the right use of philosophy. For, not in vain did God set the light of reason in the human mind; and so far is the super-added light of faith from extinguishing or lessening the power of the intelligence that it completes it rather, and by adding to its strength renders it capable of greater things.

We know that there are some who, in their overestimate of the human faculties, maintain that as soon as man’s intellect becomes subject to divine authority it falls from its native dignity, and hampered by the yoke of this species of slavery, is much retarded and hindered in its progress toward the supreme truth and excellence. Such an idea is most false and deceptive, and its sole tendency is to induce foolish and ungrateful men wilfully to repudiate the most sublime truths, and reject the divine gift of faith, from which the fountains of all good things flow out upon civil society.

For the human mind, being confined within certain limits, and those narrow enough, is exposed to many errors and is ignorant of many things; whereas the Christian faith, reposing on the authority of God, is the unfailing mistress of truth, whom whoso followeth he will be neither enmeshed in the snares of error nor tossed hither and thither on the waves of fluctuating opinion. Those, therefore, who to the study of philosophy unite obedience to the Christian faith, are philosophizing in the best possible way.

The best way back from the Jesuit Church of Reason that has replaced the traditional Roman Catholic Church is a rejection of its surrender to the world and its prince. And the intellectual foundation for this rejection and subsequent reformation will be found in the Church Fathers.

In La Nuova Chiesa di Karl Rahner, Stefano Fontana soberingly traces the genealogy of Pope Francis’s “open Church” back to Rahner, the towering radical suspected of heterodoxy under Pope Pius XII. As Fontana shows, Rahner negotiated a “surrender to the world” which is being registered in this pontificate’s signature agendas—from Communion for adulterers and the ordination of married men to the enthronement of “conscience” and the rapid abandonment of evangelization.

Historian Roberto de Mattei likewise calls Rahner the Pope’s “grandfather,” arguing that the two Jesuits are linked through a third—Carlo Cardinal Martini, leader of the St. Gallen mafia and Pope Francis’s “father.” “The agenda of Cardinal Martini, which is the same as Rahner’s, offers us the key to understanding the papacy of Pope Francis,” says de Mattei, pointing to the Cardinal’s fiery last interview calling for the autonomy of conscience and Communion for adulterers.