Fear of a BIC Planet

The lead SJW at IDW – which is struggling to survive, by the way – is terrified of intrepid Bounding Into Comics reporter Jon Del Arroz:

I just got out of the IDW Star Trek Comics panel and you’ll never believe what happened when I got in there. Heather Antos, the editor of the Star Trek line at IDW, went and talked to employees at IDW. They had people flank me in my seat and actually sit next to me, very uncomfortably. They were looking at my laptop, looking at what I was writing, and it was obvious that they were trying to intimidate me at that point. They rushed the panel, they did the whole thing, they did not take any questions whatsoever, and people sat next to me forcing me to stay in inside in an interior seat while Antos ran out of the panel at the end.

Then they had security outside standing there with guns, obviously they called security on me for being a journalist here and doing my job for bounding into Comics, just trying to talk about Comics. I don’t know what these people are afraid of, I don’t know why people within the comic industry act like this, but this is what they’re doing.

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It is amusing to think what they would do if Arkhaven showed up there in force one day. Not that we would ever bother to do so, but it’s an entertaining thought. Speaking of Arkhaven, Arktoons just blew past 13 million views so easily that no one even noticed. This, my friends, is progress, the sort of slow and steady progress that wins in the end.

In other comics news, CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON has been ordered for all the backers and will be going out to the shipping centers next week. The 308-page omnibus collects all 12 issues written by The Legend. If you’re a backer whose address has changed in the last three years, be sure to email castaliashipping AT gmail DOT com and let us know. Non-backers resident in the USA can now purchase either the hardcover or the paperback at Arkhaven.


Better Stick with Cash

Banks are now closing the accounts of people whose “publicly-stated views are at odds with their positions as inclusive organisations” and using spurious excuses to do so.

The 40-page file shows that the bank cited his retweet of a Ricky Gervais joke and his friendship with Novak Djokovic to raise concerns he was ‘xenophobic and racist’.

The extraordinary documents obtained by the former Ukip leader and handed to MailOnline revealed the 331-year-old bank decided to ‘exit’ him after making reference to his friendship with former Wimbledon champion Djokovic.

The tennis player, who lost in the men’s singles final in SW19 on Sunday, made headlines over his decision not to have the Covid-19 vaccine during the pandemic.

The dossier also shows the bank’s discussions considered 13 tweets, including a retweet by Mr Farage of a video of a Ricky Gervais sketch posted by Laurence Fox satirising the transgender movement. In the scene Gervais made a joke about ‘old-fashioned women – the ones with wombs’.

Mr Farage had retweeted the clip in May last year with the phrase ‘this is brilliant’ – but the document described it as a ‘transphobic comedy sketch’.

The officials noted that closing his accounts could not be justified on the basis of his wealth as his ‘economic contribution’ was ‘sufficient to retain on a commercial basis’.

But the minutes state: ‘The Committee did not think continuing to bank NF was compatible with Coutts given his publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.’

This is why all of the liberal “civil rights” and “freedom of speech” has been nonsense all along. As some of the earliest supporters of these fraudulent concepts admitted nearly 100 years ago, they only exist in order to permit those whose evil beliefs had been repressed to take power and begin repressing traditional views, nationalist beliefs, and the Christian faith.

And it is why every effort to create “central bank digital currency” should be opposed, and why you should stop using credit cards and debit cards for every little purchase, because the more you utilize the control system, the easier it is for the control freaks to force everyone else to do so.

Start small. Use cash at the supermarket and the gas station. Delete the financial apps from your smartphone. Wait patiently in the lines instead of using self-checkout. Don’t make it easy for them.

Because if you don’t, you’ll soon find yourself being ejected from the system anyhow, just like Niles Farage and other individuals deemed undesirable by those in control of the banking system due to a joke on social media or something similarly trivial.

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Snow White and the Seven Diversities

Do you think losing tens of billions of dollars is going to slow Disney’s doubling down? Think again, because they’re going to double down even harder. Not only is the new Snow White movie going to feature a Latinx actress, in the place of the seven vertically-challenged people, it’s going to feature the Seven Diversities.

That’s not a joke. That’s really them. It should be good fun naming them all.

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The Problem with Word Spells

Is that the words were originally created for a coherent and consistent reason. Michael Hudson explains that the purpose of the current US military doesn’t actually have much to do with historical military purposes:

Military, for the United States, is different from what the word ‘military’ meant in every other society from the beginning of time. When you say military, you think of an army fighting. You cannot conquer a country without invading it, and to invade it, you obviously need an army, you need troops. But the Americans can’t mount an army, of enough size, to occupy anybody except Grenada, or Panama, because the Vietnam War stopped the military draft. What America does have, what it calls military, is what you quite rightly linked it to: the military industrial complex. It makes arms. And weapons.

But again, these are a funny kind of weapons. Suppose you had a winery that made wine that was so good, that really wasn’t for drinking. It was for wealthy people to buy, and to trade. And as the years go by, the wine would turn to vinegar. It’s not wine for drinking. It’s wine for making a profit, a capital gain.

Well, you can say the same thing about America’s military arms, as we’re seeing in Ukraine right now — or as President Biden calls it, Iraq. The arms, basically, are there to create a huge profit for Raytheon, and the other companies in the military industrial complex. They’re for buying, and they’re for giving to the Ukrainians, to let Russia blow them up.

But they’re not for fighting. They’re not for winning a war. They’re for being used up, so you have to replace them now, with yet new buying. And so the United States State Department has asked Germany and other European countries, well, you’d promised to pay 2% of your GDP on military arms to enrich our military industrial complex.

But now that we’ve given all these tanks and missiles away – Russia just blew up 12% of all the tanks in just one week – so we only have a few weeks left to go before they’re all wiped out. Because they really don’t work on the battlefield. They’re not for fighting, they’re for being blown up. Now we want you to actually increase your spending to 4%, to replenish all of the stocks, you’ve just depleted, 10 years, maybe 20 years, of your arms stocks. And you have to now replenish them very rapidly, in order to meet the NATO targets, that we and the State Department, have set. So military today isn’t really how you control other countries. America’s found it much easier to do this by financial mechanisms.

You conquer a country financially, you conquer a country by getting it to submit to austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund, again, to impose austerity, to keep its local wages down. So you use finance as a means of imposing post-industrialization and depression, in order to prevent democracy from developing.

So any country that is seeking to promote a democracy by public spending on basic infrastructure, or banking, like China is doing, is called an autocracy. And every autocracy that has imposed a client oligarchy, to fight against labor, and to prevent these policies that would help enrich and industrialize the economy, is called a democracy, not an autocracy.

So we’re back in the Orwellian logic to describe a situation, that probably even the cynical George Orwell, would not have thought could go quite this far.

Much like the famous aphorism about the Holy Roman Empire, the Military-Industrial Complex can’t wage war, has no industrial capacity, and really isn’t difficult to understand.

Redefine a word all you want, but don’t expect the redefined version to perform its original function.

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Smarter Than You Think

At first, I thought this was just social justice nonsense gone too far. I mean, if a Dutchman can win Miss Holland, Elizabeth Warren can be an Indian, and Godfrey Elfwick can be a black man, then why can’t a goat identify as a rabbit? But then, it occurred to me that Snowflake knows perfectly well just what those books in the library are bound in, and it isn’t rabbitskin.

She knows what she’s doing. Clever little goat… I mean, rabbit.

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Oxygen > Inspiration

In this soft and easy age, it is understandable if people forget that there are more important things than being “inspirational”. Competence, in particular, being one of them.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who went missing aboard his Titan submersible vessel along with four other passengers on Sunday, told an interviewer he didn’t want to hire a bunch of “50-year-old white guys” like other submarine companies because he wanted his team to be “inspirational.”

“When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub-operators out there but they typically have gentleman who are ex-military submariners and you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush told a representative with Teledyne Marine.

“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology but a 25-year-old you know who’s a subpilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” Rush continued. “So we’ve really tried to to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new.”

“We’re taking approaches that are used largely in the aerospace industry, is related to safety and some of the the preponderance of checklists things we do for risk assessments and things like that, that are more aviation related than ocean related and we can train people to do that. We can train someone to pilot the sub, we use a game controller so anybody can drive the sub.”

Setting aside the fact that game controllers use very, very inexpensive plastic parts that have been known to fail, Rush’s preference for youth, inspiration, and color appear to have proven fatal.

Former OceanGate director of marine operations David Lochridge — one of those “50-year-old white guys” Rush wanted to avoid hiring for not being “inspirational” enough — was fired by Rush in 2018 after he reportedly blew the whistle on OceanGate by raising safety concerns over their first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull and other systems.

Personally, I’m finding the entire OceanGate debacle to be absolutely inspiring. But let’s not fail to address the obvious: hadn’t this guy ever heard of either Watergate, Heaven’s Gate, or Pizzagate?

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Reddit vs Reddit Moderators

The moderators of Reddit belatedly come to understand that the Reddit administration is dishonest and its intentions are wicked.

Hello, r/antiwork! As you’re probably aware, r/antiwork has been set to private until recently in solidarity with the sitewide protest against Reddit’s attempt to kill third-party apps. At the start of the protest, we received assurance from Reddit administration that mods have a right to protest and to set their subs private. Today, we received a message from Reddit that our mod team will be replaced if we do not open up the subreddit immediately.

The important takeaway here is Reddit does not care about this community and Reddit does not care about you. They see you as nothing more than a statistic to monetize. They do not care about the quality of this community. They do not care about the desires of the community or the mod team. We set the subreddit private to protect the community from the changes Reddit intends to force through, and Reddit is forcing the subreddit open because a worse user experience for you is more profitable for them.

Going forward, the mod team is going to lose some very important tools that we’ve relied on to keep you safe from spammers and scammers. This means we’re going to have to reassess our rules and procedures in order to serve you more effectively. The mod team will keep you updated on any developments. We thank you for your understanding.

Reddit has always been a venomous swamp. But remarkably, the venomous creatures that inhabit it have turned out to be less malevolent and disgusting than the swamp itself.

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Officially Outdated

If you’re still not sure it’s worthwhile to subscribe to Castalia Library and/or History, or if you’re still not convinced that the literature you treasure is actually being targeted for eradication by the Zero History crowd, consider the way in which the funniest writer in the English language, PG Woodhouse, is already being bowlderized:

Publishers have issued the works of PG Wodehouse with a blanket trigger warning over concerns that it contains ‘outdated’ social attitudes.

Novels including Leave it to PSmith and Something Fresh have both been reissued by their publisher, Penguin, with a caution, despite the fact that neither have been flagged for potentially offensive or contain racist terminonlogy.

All news editions of Wodehouse’s work will come with warnings saying that his novels depict obsolete attitudes, the Telegraph reported.

The trigger warning issued by Penguin read: ‘Please be aware that this book was published in the 1920s and may contain language, themes, or characterisations which you may find outdated.’

The move comes after publishers rewrote Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster books to remove ‘unacceptable’ prose, in April.

This is why we are actively looking into a variety of ways to preserve the Western literary canon, both physically and digitally.

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Kickstarter Bans “The Wise At Heart”

Fox News covers the banning of the crowdfunding campaign for the illustrated novel by Kickstarter because it was “defying transgenderism”.

Kickstarter abruptly canceled a project that focused on a fictionalized depiction of a biology teacher challenging a law that forbids him to question gender affirmation. According to the project’s author Hans G. Schantz, the illustrated novel “The Wise of Heart” was previously reviewed and approved by Kickstarter and already passed its original $3,000 goal. Schantz then expanded the goal to $6,000 ahead of the deadline on May 31 only for Kickstarter to then remove the project, claiming that it had violated the community rules.

“A thorough review of your project uncovered one or more of the following violations: Inappropriate content, including but not limited to explicit or pornographic material [or] Hateful or offensive content that fails to meet Kickstarter’s spirit of inclusivity by promoting discrimination, bigotry or intolerance towards marginalized groups.” Kickstarter Trust and Safety said in a note to Schantz.

According to Kickstarter Trust and Safety, the company cannot comment on the suspension “beyond what is stated in this message.” The project can no longer resume funding, and backers were no longer charged for their pledges.

Kickstarter has had a history of suspending or rejecting projects that appear to counter a progressive ideology. In 2015, the company rejected a crime movie project surrounding controversial abortionist Kermit Gosnell, claiming it violated community guidelines. In 2022, the platform pulled Mike Barron’s “The Private American” comic after accusations that it promoted “racist propaganda.”

Kickstarter did not immediately respond for a comment.

Kickstarter abruptly suspends comic project for ‘defying transgenderism’, 25

The ride, as previously noted, never ends. However, while it’s good to see Fox News paying attention to the latest SJW offenses in the cultural war, it would be much more useful if they would provide a link to either the illustrated novel’s site or to the replacement crowdfunding page.

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Corporate Cancer Code Red

There isn’t much doubt about what stage of convergence Levi’s has reached now that it has brought the old SNL skit about Woke Jeans to life.

Jennifer Sey was an executive at Levi’s when the brand debuted its gender-neutral campaign. But Sey told Fox News Digital the greatest profit for the company came from traditional gender-focused products. Sometimes men buy women’s clothes. Sometimes women buy men’s clothes.

“It wasn’t a reinvention of the product line,” Sey said. “I still think it’s woke washing. If we want to call it that. And yes, I did it and I would probably do things a little differently now.”

So it seems the gender-fluid line is simply a marketing tactic — pandering to a small portion of the population.

“Levi’s has always been a brand for everyone. Just leave it at that,” Sey said. “Why wade into controversial politics around gender ideology? Now? When the Bud Light backlash caused a more than 20 percent decline in sales in April for their flagship brand?”

Companies are blinded by ideology. And they are pressured by a small minority of employees, consumers and activists. These parties have, in Sey’s opinion, lost sight of the fact that the purpose of business is to deliver profits.

“This approach Levi’s is taking alienates a significant portion of the population who takes this to be the company furthering a controversial ideology that says biological sex isn’t real,” she added. “Not a good move, with the stock price already down more than 20 percent this year and 50 percent from two years ago. Just stick with Levi’s is for everyone.”

But corporations seem to be more interested in furthering their reputations as “do-gooders and altruists,” she said. As evidenced by Dylan Mulvaney’s more than $1 million in sponsorship deals.

Interesting to see how SJWAL, published in 2015, and Corporate Cancer, published in 2019, laid out precisely how this sort of thing would happen, and how a small group of individuals in key positions would make it happen.

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