The end of the Avengers

It would appear someone is VERY upset at Disney, as the story for the big wrapup of the current version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has leaked, according to Bounding Into Comics. Don’t read more if you don’t want to know what may, or may not, be the movie.

While creating their own Infinity Gauntlet presents challenges, they face even greater challenges in attempting to duplicate the Infinity Stones. Not only do they travel to some of the major events of the past films including Age of Ultron, Thanos discovers their plans and decides to hunt them down.

However, Doctor Strange saw this possibility and placed spells on the Time Stone that trap Thanos at the time of the first Avengers film during the Invasion of New York.

With Thanos trapped in the past and understanding the consequences of affecting the past, the Avengers continue to seek out the other Infinity Stones. They even visit the Ancient One to get their hands on the Time Stone.

They will also visit Valhalla as they seek out the Valkryie’s legion. Thor will even reunite with Odin and Frigga.

Their time traveling adventures will not be perfect. The Avengers will fail on numerous occasions forcing them to try different times to get their hands on the Infinity Stones.

The Avengers will eventually run into Captain Marvel during the third act, but her power has been significantly reduced to Thanos’ attack earlier in the movie.

Thanos will eventually confront the Avengers on Xandar. Thanos’ power is still near unstoppable. It takes all of the Avengers to hold him back while the Hulk attempts to bring back those who were wiped out by Thanos.

However, Hulk’s arm explodes before they are able to defeat Thanos. Captain America then takes control of the Infinity Gauntlet and uses it to defeat Thanos, but also bring back all of his fallen comrades and those who were wiped out by Thanos’ snap. However, his body can’t handle the power and he ends up disintegrating.

While Captain America brings back the Avengers who were wiped out by the snap, it does not appear he brings back Gamora. She supposedly remains dead.

Captain America’s sacrifice not only defeats Thanos, but it also destroys the Infinity Stones. However, with the destruction of the Infinity Stones, a cosmic entity is freed that will more than likely be the next major threat the Avengers will have to face.

The film ends with Captain America’s funeral and Tony Stark announcing his retirement.

The fact that the story involves killing off Captain America certainly gives it credibility. You know Disney wanted to do that above all else.

Puppies redux: Nebula edition

It was funny to read this in my inbox, as it was the first time I’ve had any reason to give a thought to SFWA in a long, long time. Possibly the most amusing thing about this latest SFWA kerfluffle is that it is a direct consequence of SFWA adopting my original campaign proposal to admit independent authors to the membership. Sad Puppy leader Brad Torgersen observes, with no little irony, the 2019 version of Sad Puppies:

This past week, some indie authors got on the Nebula ballot, and the taste-makers—many of whom are ardently “woke” political activists—began braying about how a “slate” had ramrodded these indie authors onto the sacred SFWA ballot, and how it was high treason against all things Good and Clean in the genre for *any* “slate” to influence the Nebula final selections.

Nevermind that magazines such as Locus have spent decades publishing “recommended” lists designed and published explicitly for the purpose of influencing both Nebula selection, and Hugo award selection, among others. Such “recommended” lists have been with the genre for a long time, and only now—mysteriously!—has it been deemed evil for such lists to exist. Provided those lists don’t originate from Correct™ sources, with Correct™ credentials, Correct™ political affiliation, and so forth.

Well, predictably, the indie authors came in for a caustic drubbing, and many of them—some being overseas, and not at all familiar with the internecine rhetorical warfare of American literary SF/F—were both angered and confused. And I can’t blame them. It’s difficult to properly unearth the many decades of political and elitist cultural battles which have saturated SF/F in America, and the larger Anglosphere SF/F lit scene, since at least the 1920s.

Suffice to say the whole thing is perhaps best explained through the lens of George Orwell’s landmark 1984. Where you have Inner Party, and Outer Party, and Proles.

Inner Party being comprised of long-time Super Fans (aka: “true fans”) and some venerable editors and authors who’ve labored carefully for years to take up positions of influence and prestige within SFWA, and the broader literary SF/F “establishment” as a whole. They are concerned almost
entirely with their own power and influence.

Outer Party being the newcomer political activist writers from the universities who see all of literary science fiction—and the Hugos and Nebulas, as well as other awards—as a tool for “woke” political activism. All of them aspire to Inner Party status, and are just waiting for the extant Inner Party to literally die off, so that the Outer Party members can graduate to places of Inner Party power and prestige.

And finally the rest of us inhabit the land of the Proles. Fans and authors who were never part of the establishment, and do not attend the so-called “World Science Fiction Convention” (which never was ‘world’ much, even when it went overseas) nor are we active SFWA members. Many of us are indie authors, or hybrids, who often make far more money and have far more readers than any three dozen SFWA trad pub members put together. But we still bear the stigma of self-publishing which is beyond the borders of establishment propriety in the eyes of the Inner Party.

So, when a “slate” created for and by Proles manages to get some Prole selections onto the ballot—which rightfully belongs to both the Inner and the Outer Party!—the Inner and Outer Party take it as an act of ART WAR! And as you know, Bob, nothing is more vicious than ART WAR!

And this meant it was time to launch the social media mobs, Twitter snipers, “woke” punditry, etc. In an effort to get the Proles kicked out of the process, or at least make the world aware of how horrible and evil it is that Proles stood up to be counted. Which Proles are never, EVER supposed to do. Ever. Proles are meant to mind their places in the hierarchy and not cause a fuss. We are to accept what the deciders of “worthy science fiction and fantasy” have declared for us this season, and learn to love Big Brother.

THAT is the state of American literary SF/F, in a nutshell. That is SFWA.

Which doesn’t make it any easier for indie authors or fans, much less indie authors or fans who don’t originate from U.S. soil. The whole thing can seem both ridiculous and conflicted. Which it is. Because any sane outsider looks at it all and does a W-T-F.

Try as they will to style themselves international, the Inner and Outer Party members of American literary SF/F are hopelessly provincial, sharing a painful overlap in ideology, as well as a kind of homogeneous, mushy globalist-liberal outlook. Which, being “woke”, puts a premium on demographics over individualism. Fetishizing ethnicities and sexualities. While remaining borderline-militant about a single-track monochrome political platform.

So, certain Inner and Outer Party folks proceeded to step all over their own unmentionables in an effort to “call out” the “slate” of the indie Proles from the dirty ghettos of indie publishing. And now the Inner and Outer Parties are in damage control mode (yet again!) trying to re-write events, submerge evidence, gaslight the actual victims of the literary pogrom, blame all evils on Emmanuel Goldstein (cough, Sad Puppies, cough) and crown themselves the Good People once more. Who would never, of course, do anything pernicious, because how could they? They are Good! They tell themselves they are Good all the time! They go out of their way to virtue-signal this Goodness on social media! It cannot be possible that they have done anything wrong!

Well, if you’ve seen the ugly carnival long enough, it’s easy to peer through the smog. And I am sorry for all of the Nebula nominees who—being rightfully excited to learn of their nominations—watched that excitement crumble beneath a digital tsunami of accusations and character assassination. I’ve been there. I remember the lies and slander. I know how it happens, and why.

Just shrug it off, and walk away. Neither SFWA, nor Worldcon, nor the Outer nor Inner Parties, have anything for you. They are not the audience, and never were. And the harder they try to enforce their own relevance, the more plain it becomes that this relevance has fatally degraded in the new century.

Meanwhile, no one seems to have noticed that both Tor and Baen are rapidly sliding towards nonexistence. I’ve heard that Macmillan is looking to get rid of Tor from several sources over the last three months. The changes you’ve seen in Castalia’s practices of late are the direct result of Amazon destroying the ebook publishing market, and those changes are hurting the traditional publishers a lot more than a company like Castalia that doesn’t rely as heavily upon the various channels.

The acid test is going to be in April. It’s going to be fascinating to see how well a book that is in very high demand does through the channel versus direct.

Disney to shut down Marvel

That’s the latest rumor to excite the non-stop drama of the comics industry:

A new rumor indicates that Disney might be shutting down Marvel Comics sooner rather than later.

The rumor comes from Jude Terror at Bleeding Cool who cites a press release from Marvel Comics indicating that Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski and Joe Quesada are heading down to Austin, Texas to discuss the importance of comics to Disney’s business based off the Marvel intellectual properties.

In fact, Terror speculates that Cebulski and Quesada are heading to Austin, Texas to save Marvel Comics because “comics must continue to be published even if they add little value to the budget on their own simply because they provide the genetic material to make actual profits elsewhere.”

Terror even questions, “If less people are buying comics and the direct market is on the verge of collapse, then why should a megacorp like Disney continue to bother publishing them at all, especially when they can make far more money mining the intellectual properties for other mediums?”

Terror’s speculation isn’t anything new. Thom Pratt at The Kingdom Insider speculated about Disney cutting out Marvel Comics back in 2017.

Pratt notes that Disney’s entire profit on an entire year of Marvel Comics amounts to what they make “off one single Marvel Studios movie.” He bluntly writes, “Comic book sales look absolutely pathetic compared to an MCU release.”

Pratt who has his own sources at Disney even stated that “comic books have about as much value to Disney right now as a T-shirt.” In fact, he states it might even be less because “T-shirts have a higher profit margin.”

Pratt even addresses the idea that the comics are needed to mine for future stories in movies, video games, and other genres.

He quickly refutes this writing, “The MCU has taken characters and concepts in a totally different direction than the comic books, and Disney could easily hire away the best “idea guys” to work directly for Marvel Studios.”

Pratt predicts that Marvel Comics as a publisher will be done away with. He sees it existing in some form but being an “office full of brand managers overseeing licensed deals.” He even believes that Disney will license out the Marvel superheroes to other publishers similar to what they do with their Disney characters to IDW and Dark Horse.

Part of Pratt’s prediction has already come true as Disney has licensed their Marvel superheroes to IDW.

I’m a bit dubious about this, as the continuing decline in comics sales was not quite as bad as I expected in 2018, although the more profitable sales of graphics novels did collapse. According to Comichron, the top 300 graphic novel dollar sales declined 16.5 percent last year, to $73.6 million, but top 300 comic dollars increased $10.7 million despite a three percent decline in units as a result of the rise in the average comic price to $4.19.

The fact that the MCU cycle is coming to an end and Captain Marvel looks to be a complete bust suggests that if 2018 was bad, 2019 will be considerably worse. But Marvel isn’t suffering as much as its lesser competitors, as it actually increased its unit market share from 40.4 percent to 44 percent and is still bringing in revenue of well over $100 million, though it may not be doing so profitably.

It would be amusing if Disney offered Arkhaven the opportunity to license any of its characters, although I can’t imagine we’d be terribly interested in cultural icons such as Lesbian Meth Batgirl, Thorella, She-Wolverine, or Shade, Marvel’s First Superhero Drag Queen. In any event, Arkhaven’s support is continuing to grow steadily and we expect to have a series of exciting new announcements in the coming three months. In related news, the gold logo edition of AH#6 will be available from Castalia Direct next week.

Note: the new standard size introduced with the gold logo edition of Chuck Dixon’s Avalon #3 meant that we did not know exactly how the pricing would translate to the Castalia Direct store. Our first estimate worked out to a price of $3.14 in practice. However, we have since adjusted that, so the $2.99 retail price will return on April 1 and will be maintained across the Arkhaven line for standard size series comics.

This video by the Kingdom Insider, who is very familiar with Disney’s customary practices, is extremely informative. Key phrase: “To the Walt Disney company, the real Marvel universe to them is the Marvel universe they created. The movies. The movies have basically replaced the comic books.”

This article by a comic book retailer is pertinent, especially this statistical truth-bomb:

The January 2019 order form features 1106 solicited periodical comic books. Of those, only 454 of those SKUs are new items – the other 652 are variant covers. That means a staggering fifty-nine percent of all solicited comics are actually variants. That’s completely and entirely absurd! It is deluded, it is dangerous, and it actively works against the best interests of the market.

That’s why our only variant covers will be the Premium editions intended for the comic book stores. We’ll do the gold logo limited editions for the collectors, but we’re keeping our price at $2.99 for those. Remember that at 24 pages of story, our comics are not only less expensive and better-constructed, but provide considerably more content than the average Marvel or DC floppy.

Mailvox: dealing with SJWs

A reader writes concerning the outcome of her decision to take action with the family SJW:

I wrote to you a little while ago, detailing some of the pain and agony my SJW sibling had put our family thru in the last year, and you advised us to dump her, saying that it wasn’t worth it.  So we had dumped her locally recently, holding family events just with our adult children and grandchildren, and they’ve been delightful and relaxing.

But I was concerned about when my elderly parents return from [REDACTED] this spring and felt we’d have to go back to the SJW abuse for their sake. I’ve been thinking since your note, and had a talk with my dad this week, and we reviewed the history with sibling, including my family’s behavior (which my dad feels has been pretty exemplary), and he pretty cheerfully agreed that our family should do things separately from sibling at this point.

He’s at a loss, because he says SJW never listens to anything he tries to tell her, and hasn’t for years, but he also doesn’t believe that we should be treated so badly, including our adult children. I wish she could get a different perspective that values family over politics, but she has a history of bad decision making, and I am just really relieved that we can look forward to a summer that is positive and relaxing when my parents return, that we won’t be baited, ambushed, sabotaged or abused at my parents’ home, and that my parents see the situation and appreciate what we’ve been through with her. Anyway, thanks so much for your straightforward advice and encouragement.

I don’t take the idea of excising a family member, or an entire branch of the family, from one’s life lightly. But it is precisely because family is so important that it is vital to excise serial bad actors from the family without regret, because they have a reliably destructive effect on everyone in the family.

If a family member makes it clear that they have no interest in maintaining familial harmony, or simply refuses to behave in a civil manner, then one should not hesitate to leave them to their priorities and exclude them from family activities. They have already made their choice, one is simply honoring it and permitting them to experience its consequences.

The prodigal son would not have learned from his experience had his father not permitted him to reach rock bottom and repent. Enabling an abusive family member is not helping them, to the contrary, it is complicity in their abuse.

Please note that that notwithstanding this singular email exchange, I am not beginning a career as an advice columnist. Since I am not an advice columnist, I simply ignore the vast majority of emails sent to me seeking advice. I do macro, not micro, and to the extent that I ever offer micro advice, it tends to be considerably more brutal and succinct than you are likely to be seeking.

Why the Left is dead

And why Identity has replaced Ideology:

It seems that there is not much left of the Left and what remains has nothing to do with ‘Left.’

Contemporary ‘Left’ politics is detached from its natural constituency, working people. The so called ‘Left’ is basically a symbolic identifier for ‘Guardian readers’ a critical expression attributed to middle class people who, for some reason, claim to know what is good for the working class. How did this happen to the Left? Why was it derailed and by whom?

The British Labour party is a prime example of this. It is deaf to the cry of the lower classes. It claims to care ‘for the many’ but in practice is only attentive to a few voices within the intrusive Israeli Lobby. As Britain is struggling with the crucial debate over Brexit, British Labour has been focused instead on spurious allegations of ‘antisemitsm.’ It is hard to see how any Left political body in the West even plans to bring more work to the people. The Left offers nothing in the way of a vision of a better society for all. It is impossible to find the Left within the contemporary ‘Left.’

Why has this happened to the Left, why has it become irrelevant? Because by now the Left is a non-hierarchical system. It is an amalgam of uniquely ungifted people who made politics into their ‘career.’ Most Left politicians have never worked at a proper job where money is exchanged for merit, achievements or results. The vast majority of Left politicians have never faced the economic challenges associated with the experience of being adults. Tragically such people can’t lead a country, a city, a borough or even a village.

The Left had a mostly positive run for about 150 years. But its role has come to an end as the condition of being in the world has been radically transformed. The Left failed to adapt. It removed itself from the universal ethos.

In the same way the Left no longer represents the native working class, the “conservatives” of the West no longer conserve. We now live in a post-ideological multinational societies where competing interest groups struggle for the reins of imperial power in order to best benefit their self-perceived interests.

This is nothing new. This is the way that Man has lived for most of his history. The sooner the Right accepts the new/old reality and adapts to it, the more successful it will be. Because there are a lot of people practicing identity politics who are working very hard at trying to steer the Right away from defending national interests.

The Republican Party and I think conservatism in general is also going through a lot of internal debates about what — what it should be, right, what it should be—the sort of position of the party. And I think that’s one that we should be involved in because we, I think, probably want to steer conservatives and Republicans more towards a message of liberty and freedom and away from the more nationalistic incendiary nativist comments and things like that.
—Adam Kovacevic, Head of U.S. public policy, Google

The cockroach media

The cuckservative media is rather like cockroaches. It doesn’t matter how much they fail, it doesn’t matter how often they are wrong, it doesn’t matter that no one reads them and they have no influence, they just don’t die off and disappear. The Week celebrates the news of Jonah Goldbergs new and entirely redundant publication as more of what people already don’t want.

What if we had a center-right publication, broadly in favor of globalized free trade and deregulation and hawkish on foreign policy, whose columnists really hated President Trump, even when he does things they otherwise agree with, like spit in Vladimir Putin’s face?

But The Washington Post already exists, you say. Exactly. Which is why I cannot figure who the audience for Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg’s new journalism project is supposed to be. According to Axios, the former editor of The Weekly Standard and the founder of National Review Online are “seeking investors” for “a reporting-driven, Trump-skeptical” conservative periodical.

Of course they are. “Generic white #NeverTrump conservative” is already the most overrepresented type in American media. There are approximately 200 of these people in the United States, and every single one of them has a column in a major newspaper and a book about why Drumpf is the logical and polar opposite of certain ideals supposedly embodied in whatever Tocqueville quotes their research assistants have just pulled up for them. They are the same people who have spent the last two decades insisting that all the things that actually keep people voting for the GOP against their own economics interests — opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage — are yucky. They are often referred to as “neocons,” but this appellation is insulting to the legacy of Irving Kristol and Christopher Lasch. A better one is “metro-conservatives,” i.e., think-tank grifters.

#NeverTrump types are desperate to convince readers that clichés about “entrepreneurship,” endless war, and moaning about the Founding Fathers are still cool. But nobody listens. They had their shot with roughly 15 other candidates in 2016, and the American people rejected all of them, one by one. If your ideas are so bad that social conservatives would rather vote for a twice-divorced serial philanderer than pull the lever for any of the indistinguishable blue-blazered frat boys who are mouthpieces for them, maybe you should rethink what you’re doing. If the Never Trumpers had gotten the candidate they wanted, Hillary Clinton would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

They know this. They also couldn’t care less. Why should they, when the paychecks continue to cash? They have been insulated from the badness of their ideas for decades; this isn’t going to change, probably ever.

The reason these cockroach media publications keep popping up as fast as they fail is that they are funded by corpocracy in order to gatekeep the Right. The Intellectual Dark Web, The Daily Wire, Bulwark, and Jonah Goldberg’s Nameless Project are all designed to keep conservatives and Christians on the globalist reservation.

No conspiracy! No conspiracy!

One accused Jewish pedophile is trying to help a convicted Jewish pedophile keep the legal contemplations of his confirmed sex trafficking crimes under wraps. Also, if you believe that Jews have ever conspired at anything for their self-perceived mutual benefit, you are a hater and an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist manifestly guilty of the crime of Noticing. You’re probably Hitler too.

A court hearing on whether to unseal sensitive documents involving the alleged sex trafficking of underage girls by Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein — and the possible involvement of his influential friends — will play out in a New York City courtroom next week.

But it may happen behind closed doors, with the news media and public barred — at least in part.

An attorney for lawyer Alan Dershowitz wrote a letter to the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Tuesday, asking whether the media should be excluded from the proceeding because his oral arguments on behalf of his client could contain sensitive information that has been under seal.

The appeals court had not responded to his concern as of Friday, but if the hearing is closed during his lawyer’s argument, it would represent the latest in a long history of successful efforts to keep details of Epstein’s sex crimes sealed.

Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard, constitutional law expert and criminal defense attorney, represented Epstein, who in 2008 received what many consider an unusually light sentence for sexually abusing dozens of girls at his Palm Beach mansion. Two women — one of whom was underage — have said Epstein and his partner, British socialite and environmentalist Ghislaine Maxwell, directed them to have sex with Dershowitz, 80, and other wealthy, powerful men. Dershowitz and Maxwell have denied the claims.

The (((Chief Judge))) of the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Second Court could not be reached for comment, as his office reported that he had a meeting scheduled with (((Robert Kraft))), the winner of the $1 million 2019 Genesis Prize for having made a significant contribution to improving the world, being proud of his Jewish heritage, and inspiring young Jews through his dedication to philanthropy and social justice, at the Young Blossoms of Asia Day Spa.

South Africa in Atlanta

To be honest, I don’t feel the least bit of sympathy for the upscale white citizens of Buckhead, Georgia. Outside of Silicon Valley, it would be hard to find a more self-satisfied group of anti-racist virtue signalers anywhere in the United States:

Black crime in Atlanta is protected by the black-run government of Atlanta, who allow black criminals to prey upon the upscale white citizens of Buckhead.

Law and order is dead in America, and in Buckhead, black criminals are allowed to engage in criminality against white citizens because the Atlanta Police Department no longer prioritizes keeping their commercial or private property safe.

A glimpse of the future for all of white Americans once they capitulate power to black elected officials.

I don’t see what they’re complaining about. The most important thing is that no one can call them racists, and what is the cost of a little theft, burglary, and armed robbery in comparison with such an undeniably unmitigated benefit? After all, crime in the historically low-crime district is now only 31.6 percent higher than in downtown Atlanta.

The future for the United States of Diversity is looking more vibrant than ever!

No Venezuelan Spring

The neocons have met with their first setback in South America, according to the Saker:

The standoff between Venezuela and the AngloZionist Empire last week-end has clearly ended in what can only be called a total defeat for Elliott Abrams. While we will never know what was initially planned by the demented minds of the Neocons, what we do know is that nothing critical happened: no invasion, not even any major false flag operation. The most remarkable facet of the standoff is how little effect all the AngloZionist propaganda has had inside Venezuela. There were clashes, including some rather violent ones, across the border, but nothing much happened in the rest of the country. Furthermore, while a few senior officers and a few soldiers did commit treason and join forces with the enemy, the overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan military remained faithful to the Constitution. Finally, it appears that Maduro and his ministers were successful in devising a strategy combining roadblocks, a concert on the Venezuelan side, and the minimal but effective use of riot police to keep the border closed. Most remarkably, “unidentified snipers” did not appear to shoot at both sides (a favorite tactic of the Empire to justify its interventions). I give the credit for this to whatever Venezuelan (or allied) units were in charge of counter-sniper operations along the border.

Outside Venezuela this first confrontation has also been a defeat for the Empire. Not only did most countries worldwide not recognize the AngloZionist puppet, but the level of protest and opposition to what appeared to be the preparations for a possible invasion (or, at least, a military operation of some kind) was remarkably high. While the legacy corporate Ziomedia did what it always does (that is whatever the Empire wants it to do), the Internet and the blogosphere were overwhelmingly opposed to a direct US intervention. This situation also created a great deal of internal political tensions in various Latin American countries whose public opinion remains strongly opposed to any form of US imperial control over Latin America.

In this respect, the situation with Brazil is particularly interesting. While the Brazilian government fully backed the US coup attempt, the Brazilian military was most uncomfortable with this. My contacts in Brazil had correctly predicted that the Brazilian military would refuse to attack Venezuela and, eventually, the Brazilians even issued a statement to that effect.

Meanwhile, the American public is almost entirely indifferent to Venezuela.