Overlord Dicktor Van Doomcock is not happy about the possibility that Queen Kathleen the Krazy will stay on at LucasFilm to continue beating the corpse of STAR WARS:

Gary from Nerdrotic is practically choking on schadenfreude about Joss Whedon’s “unexpected” departure from the latest show that he was supposed to produce:

The Drinker puts out one of those rare videos with which I vehemently disagree:

The Dark Knight Rises wasn’t quite the masterpiece that The Dark Knight was. The plot had some gaping holes in it. But it was still an extraordinary film that incorporated elements from the Knightfall and Cataclysm arcs in the comic books very effectively.

Your “Science is F***ING WEIRD” moment of the week is from The Male Brain and concerns some (potentially) alarming news about how Earth is getting ever closer to a supermassive black hole:

It’s nothing to be concerned about; we’re not actually moving closer to Sgr A*, and we’re in no danger of being slurped up. Rather, our map of the Milky Way has been adjusted, more accurately identifying where we have been all along.

And the survey beautifully demonstrates how tricky it is to map a galaxy in three dimensions from inside it.

It’s a problem that has long devilled our understanding of space phenomena. It’s relatively easy to map the two-dimensional coordinates of stars and other cosmic objects, but the distances to those objects is a lot harder to figure out.

And distances are important – they help us determine the intrinsic brightness of objects. A good recent example of this is the red giant star Betelgeuse, which turned out to be closer to Earth than previous measurements suggested. This means that it’s neither as large nor as bright as we thought.

Yeah, OK, it was clickbait. But who had “Getting Sucked Into the Supermassive Black Hole at the Galaxy’s Centre” in the Doomsday 20,200,000,000 pool?

Your long read of the week is also from The Male Brain, and concerns an article from Brett Stevens (no, not the Israeli war-hawk hack who used to work at the WSJ and now works at the NYFT in the op-ed section) about why Tucker Carlson sold out his base so badly recently:

John McCain, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Charles Krauthammer, and now Tucker Carlson cannot be wrong; they all believe that Trumpian populism is bad, and the living ones think that that Trump should quickly concede this election.

They all descend from William F. Buckley, who looked at the postwar political landscape and decided that the issues promoted by the John Birch society were culturally incompatible with the new way things were going to be done in the post-Hitler West.

Buckley advanced a simple formula: fight the Left where we agree, not where we disagree. This meant that conservatism became effectively another variant of Leftism, arguing only over how much we would pay in entitlements, how many illegal immigrants, and how far Left we could go.

Neoconservatism tied together Christianity and “Christian libertarian” conservatism with the concept of optics, or the idea that we should “get along” for the good of the System, which meant rejecting the core of conservatism and being happy to be a partial conservative.

Since that time, the only way to get along with the mainstream conservative Establishment has been to adopt the position that conservatives are going to lose because Leftism is more popular, that our best position is to maintain our liberty to have our own lifestyles, and that the nation is doomed and we have to wait for the end.

I’m willing to cut Tucker a lot more slack than most. But he’s definitely got some ‘splainin’ to do.

Linkage is good for you:

• The biggest news of the week by far is the fact that a metal monolith has been found in the middle of the Utah badlands – queue Also Sprach Zarathustra from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey;
• The worst-kept secret in healthcare history is the fact that a high-carb, low-fat diet will likely KILL YOU, while doing the exact opposite will make you big, strong, and healthy;
• Faceborg might like to think that it’s completely above the law, but the South Koreans beg to differ and have just slapped them with a big fine for being utter dicks;
• Fred Reed despairs (so what else is new) about the cancer of political correctness now eating away at the vitals of the most highly competitive technical schools in America;
• Pat Buchanan, who created Trumpism about 30 years before Trump ever hit the scene, evaluates the God-Emperor’s Presidency and argues that Trump has forever changed the Republican Party – which is true;
• Before we all start jumping up and down celebrating the creations of various Coof vaccines, let’s all take a step back and ask the questions that the American whorenalists refuse to investigate, about their effectiveness and safety;
• Cheering Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis’s appointment as Secretary of Defence was unquestionably one of the biggest errors in character judgement that I have ever made in my life, as shown by Gen. Mattis’s own words;
• Our friends over at Men of the West have very kindly published the first few chapters from Hillaire Belloc’s superb book, The Jews, and they are well worht reading – Parts I, II, III, and IV;
• Anyone who thinks that the Limey government is both incompetent AND evil in dealing with the Coof has been proven absolutely right by the way that they are gathering personal data of residents and citizens in PommieBastardLande;
• The Sun‘s “Dear Deirdre” section is always a hoot and a half to read when it comes to marveling at human stupidity, and this particular letter from a man who cheated on his girlfriend to bang his ex-wife does not disappoint;
• I’ve run into some rather tired and tiresome arguments online about how Jesus is actually just Buddha in a new skin, which is so laughably stupid that I just can’t resist finding articles that take the idea to pieces;
• If you are confused by the supposed contradictions in the Bible about God telling you NOT to put the Lord to the test – Deut 6:16 vs Mal 3:10 – here’s an interesting article to help you process it and put the latter verse into context;
• If your marriage is struggling, take a look at this article from the Gottmans about the “Four Horsemen of Relationships” – Biblical liberties taken aside, it’s actually very good and the science behind the idea is excellent;

And some more from Dawn Pine:

• Barack Hussein Odumbass was America’s first – and by no means the last – Affirmative Action President, and he proved it thoroughly in his approach to dealing with Israel, since his default argument was, “it’s everyone’s fault except mine”;
• Your “Say WHAAAAAT?!?!?” headline of the week – apparently Dr. Doom thinks that Santa Claus is immune to the Coof, even though St. Nick doesn’t wear a mask and spends a lot of time around reindeer;
• Here’s your unintentional comic relief of the week – a company tried to call itself “HTML”, and unintentionally exposed a MASSIVE hole in another company’s cybersecurity in the process;
• Astronomers have detected a huge number of transmissions coming from an intelligent species – which turns out to be US, and that’s a bit like trying to hold an extended dialogue with a mirror;
• Daemoncrats always claim to be all about the little guy, but they don’t give the minutest quantum of a damn about how shutting down businesses and destroying people’s lives actually affect the little guys;
• Dawn can’t figure out whether to laugh or do a double face-palm with this one – Dr. Dre is getting divorced, his wife claims that he forced her to sign a pre-nup, and his legal strategy is to get his wedding guests to testify that he didn’t;
• The Chinese are claiming that they used microwave weapons to harm Indian soldiers along the Line of Actual Control during their recent brouhaha – India claims that’s nothing more than a Chinese psyop;
• If you’re wondering WTF is up with Bitcoin of late, and why it’s surging so high, here’s an article that kind of sort of explains it all;
• When Maradona died the other day, search traffic for Madonna spiked – as Dawn wryly comments, both have similar names, were/are addicted to attention, were/are talented (yes, really), and both were VERY scandal-prone;
• Despite the non-stop drumbeat of warnings about how CLIMATE CHANGE WILL KILL US ALL!!!!!, real scientists were arguing all the way back in the 1970s that a mild upward trend in temperatures was to be expected and not really feared;
• If anyone had “Burj Khalifa-sized Asteroid Smashing into Earth” in the Doomsday Bingo Pool for December 2020, your odds of collecting this coming month are pretty darn good – FFS, WHEN WILL THIS YEAR END?!?!?!?;

The Neo-Tsar offers up some fascinating thoughts (as usual) about the rise of Turkey as another regional power:

Lots of Westerners are afraid of Putin and think that he’s going to restore some sort of Russian-dominated Soviet empire, simply because he has expressed deep regret over the way that the USSR fell and has called it the greatest geopolitical tragedy in history. This is a foolish and misplaced apprehension, for two reasons.

First, once an empire falls, it DOES NOT recover to become what it used to be. That simply doesn’t happen. An empire, once sundered, stays sundered. Even China, with its much-vaunted 5,000-year history, is not immune to this. The Chinese now have a massive Han-dominated empire, held together by the very real threat of force. But their empire is in fact quite weak and is already showing significant signs of strain. By comparison with the old USSR, today’s Russia has a much smaller, leaner, more proportionally lethal military, but – critically – almost all of its doctrines are defensive in nature.

Demographically, economically, politically, and militarily, Russia simply cannot rebuild the old Soviet empire. Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.

Second, as President Putin so lucidly explains, Russia – unlike America or China – actually respects the rights of other nations. That is why he has made clear that, while he regards Azerbaijan as a strong ally, he will not interfere in Azerbaijani foreign affairs.

But does this mean that Turkey and Russia will eventually clash?

I’d say it’s quite likely. And I expect that the Neo-Caliph Erdogan is going to come off looking mighty foolish in the process if he decides to tread on Russian toes.

History lessons of the week:

The Rev. Anthony Rogers and Dr. Shabir Ally recently held two debates on various Scriptural issues, and they were extremely interesting to watch. The first is about whether the Bible reflects the Trinity:

And the second is about whether Islamic monotheism is pure:

The simple version is that Dr. Shabir Ally absolutely got DESTROYED in both debates. I listened to his points at length in the second debate, but the moment that he started bullshitting about John 1:1 in the first debate, I immediately tuned out.

Dr. Shabir Ally is a good and decent person, at least away from a debate stage. He’s a genteel and gentlemanly scholar, and good for him. But he’s absolutely unqualified to discuss much of anything about Christianity. Anthony Rogers simply wiped the floor with him in both debates – the first, through the sheer preponderance of evidence in the Bible, and the second, through clear and straightforward logical syllogisms that Dr. Ally could not refute. So he danced around them instead – and looked very silly in the process.

If this is the best that the Islamic world has to offer, then it’s no wonder that they are losing so many hundreds and thousands every week to the “avalanche of apostasy” that they so fear.

Speaking of which – the Dizzle explains exactly what that is:

This isn’t a joke, my friends. The Islamic world will not admit this to outsiders, but they are absolutely scared shitless right now. Their Dawahgandists like Mohammed Hijab and Ali Dawah and others have been losing their minds over the last few months, desperately corralling gullible Abdools to stop them from leaving their fake religion.

But it’s not working. In fact, the rates of apostasy are shooting through the roof.

The signs have been gathering for some time now showing that millions of Muslims around the world, in some of the most hardcore Islamic nations in the Middle East and elsewhere, are growing disgusted with the perversions, backwardness, stupidity, and nonsense that Islam breeds.

This is especially true of Iran, of all places. Most Americans think that Iran is the land of mad mullahs and asinine ayatollahs, but in fact, the Muslims of Iran are turning hard against their so-called “religion of peace”:

The reason why this is happening is pretty simple. Islam’s standard historical and scriptural narrative simply cannot withstand any halfway decent investigation into its claims. The moment that you actually try to think about what their “holy” books say, is the moment that you realise how much baloney it all is.

Which is richly ironic given the well-known Islamic views on eating pork, if you think about it.

Further legendary work from the Dizzle:

This is why you DO NOT F**K with a psychopath.

And if you actually look at Sh. Dr. Yasir Qadhi’s past words on the rather technical and arcane, but vitally important, points about ahruf and qira’at, you’ll quickly realise that he’s lying his ass off:

Dr. Frank Turek from Cross Examined explains how to avoid twisting Scripture in your own favour:

Your Great Man of the Week is Chiang Kai-Shek, the man behind the Republic of China (aka Taiwan) and a very interesting case study in winning many battles only to lose the war:

And to balance things out a little, let’s also have a DOUCHEBAG of the Week to go along with that.

There is only one possible candidate for the inaugural slot, and he will almost certainly be the top contender forevermore if I decide to keep this going:

Yep. Steven Seagal. The meme that keeps on giving.

Here’s one of my absolute favourite HALO songs:

And fellow HALOniac MrUNIVAC sent over an interesting video from a guy who thinks that 343i has really derailed the HALO series by chasing trends instead of setting them:

His arguments are really oriented toward multiplayer, which I couldn’t care less about – no, seriously, I have NEVER played ONE SINGLE MULTIPLAYER GAME, EVER. I am a pure campaign gamer. So I just don’t care about balance, maps, multiplayer mechanics, armour customisations, loadouts, and so on and so forth.

I disagree with him about almost every point related to the campaigns. Personally I think HALO 4 has THE best story out of all of the games, because it gets the player emotionally invested in a way that the other games just do not and cannot. HALO 3‘s campaign gameplay makes it my favourite FPS of all time, though H4 is a very close second. I think that H5:G‘s gameplay is pretty horrible, though I agree with him that its storyline is incomprehensible and frankly idiotic.

That being said… I do see where he’s coming from with respect to 343i’s incompetence.

He is right about the MCC being almost completely broken upon release. That’s a fact. It was. I never had any problems playing it – see above about “campaign gaming ONLY” – but on release, it was buggy, bloated, and unplayable for most people who aren’t antisocial shut-ins like me.

And he’s right about 343i messing up the sound design and the weapons and so forth in HI. The assault rifle in the demo definitely sounds pretty lame, especially when compared with the deep guttural barks that you get from the same weapon in HALO: Reach or HALO 4. They took a lot of the mistakes that they made with sound and weapons design in H5:G and compounded them – or at least, they did in the 8-minute gameplay demo that they released. We’ll see what happens with the final game.

I think the reason why HALO 5: Guardians really got messed up is indeed because 343i hired a bunch of developers who really had nothing to do with HALO‘s core features. Their DEV team at the time was full of guys who had worked on a lot of other blockbuster franchises, like Metal Gear and Call of Duty and a bunch of others. While those games and franchises have their uses and qualities, none of them are HALO. And that distinction is important. The things that make HALO great, are also quite unique. The campaign gameplay that focused on intense FPS combat with limited weapons and lots of different ways of fighting the same battles, was a winning recipe.

All of that got thrown out the window, more or less, with H5:G.

They also made a huge mistake with the campaign writing. I don’t know WHAT they were thinking giving a hack like Brian Reed a shot at the writing – see what he did to Dark Horse’s Conan the Barbarian graphic novels – but he really did a number on the plot and storyline for H5:G. That is to say, the story behind that game made ABSOLUTELY NO DAMNED SENSE WHATSOEVER.

And that’s AFTER you read all of the Expanded Universe materials that you have to go through simply to comprehend the story. If you didn’t, or couldn’t be arsed (like me), then you’d have to read through the Halopedia wiki pages just to figure it all out.

Ultimately, since I’m a campaign gamer, I am far more tolerant of 343i’s screw-ups in other areas. They literally have no impact upon me. But If they mess up the campaign and the core gameplay like they did with H5:G…

Well, then they’re going to be getting a really scathing review from someone who originally gave H5:G a glowing one, with a number of strongly worded caveats, and has since come to regard that game as by far the weakest in the entire series. I actually consider H5:G to be worse than HALO: Spartan Assault AND HALO: Spartan Strike – i actually think it’s MUCH worse than HALO Wars, which I really like.

And that will probably be the last HALO game that I ever buy. Nor, I wager, will I be alone.

Wazzocks gonna wazzock:

Oh yeah, we have one more from Dawn Pine related to this week’s theme about Evel Knievel:

Kitchen Nightmares with the Angry Scot:

Comedy hour:

Nobody, but NOBODY, does highbrow comedy the way that the Limeys do. The brilliance of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister lay in the fact that the show absolutely refused to insult the intelligence of its audience. The writers were smart, they wrote smart comedy, and they treated their audiences like adults who were just as smart as them. They didn’t pander, they didn’t dumb things down, they didn’t use slapstick. They simply used GREAT acting and incredible delivery and timing to maximise comedic effect.

And boy howdy, did it work.

And now from the sublime to the ridiculous:

You wouldn’t think that a strongman and his very mannish-looking wife would be a great comedy duo, but they really are. They obviously adore each other and have terrific chemistry, and that’s what makes them both so funny.

Pics, guns, girls, starting with a few about Evel Knievel from The Male Brain:

Dawn doesn’t quite see this one working so well:

Dawn says that the woman – that’s not the word he used, it started with a “b” – looks crazy, but gives ol’ Evel a good run for his money:

I’m rather inclined to agree with him about the nutcase. If you’re wondering who she is – here you go.

One more about OnlyFans gone horribly, HORRIBLY wrong:

Onward:

The appropriate response to some asshole in a Toyota Pious is… well, THIS:

God Bless Coal-Rollers.

Back on topic:

His sister was my Drama teacher in middle school. True story. And yes, if Ms Kerry was anything to go by, her brother is a COLOSSAL arse.

Yes.

I mean… we really should give it a shot, at this point.

What, exactly, does that say about Blacks?

Headlines of the week are SO WTFH that I just can’t add anything useful to them:

I DID say that this week’s headlines were insane.

This next one is going to get everyone’s inner Grammar Nazi all riled up:

*HUMOUR.

I studied Mathematics in university, at a place where they also offered degrees in Philosophy. We maths geeks liked to joke that philosophers create problems, and mathematicians solve them.

Your Dog of the Week is the Cairn Terrier:

Your aminules are adorkable moment of the week

And also your animals are NIGHTMARE FUEL moment of the week, to balance things out:

We haven’t done any gym idiots in quite a while, so here are some:

Gym beast props this week go to Yuri Belkin (again):

Buakaw Beatdown of the Week:

Jesus loves knockouts:

The story of the rivalry between Mike Tyson and Donovan Ruddock is something to behold:

Synthwave reminds us of how great (and cheesy) the 80s were:

#ByTheSwordInMyHand

And finally here’s your Instathot to get the week off to the right start. Now, a few of my readers – shout out to Dire Badger and TechieDude here – have a serious case of redheaditis, which is to say, severe addiction to redheads. This is a rather dangerous condition, as redheads are known for being nucking futs, to a degree far beyond most ordinary women. As DB himself very memorably once put it, redheads are basically women on “Hard Mode” – they’re crazier than a sack full of horny honey badgers, but if you know what you’re doing, you can handle them.

And as such, I’ve gone and found a knockout just for you guys. Truly, brothers, I am kind.

Her name is Katerina Soria (Катерина Сория), in her early 20s from Kiev, Ukraine, and currently living in Vienna. She’s a self-made photomodel with her own website, and there’s no question that she is quite a specimen. She appears to speak and write in excellent English – though obviously she likely has a ghostwriter (read: boyfriend) doing that for her.

Don’t be in a big rush to praise her too much, though – she’s got tattoos (yuck), as well as a Patreon account and an OnlyFans page, with a starting price of $65 a month (!!!!!!), and the bumpf on her site makes pretty clear that she’s all about sending nudes to thirsty dudes:

To support my art,to help me in development of my content and of course to get a special access to all my collection of sensual unpubished pictures and videos,which is dedicated ony to a real connoiseurs of feminine beauty, join a list of my satisfied Patrons (main source)

For that kind of cash, you might as well go to Ukraine itself and hire a hooker. I’m not advocating for this, mind you, because – as I’ve said quite memorably before – prostitution may be a necessary evil, but it is still an evil nonetheless.

Be that as it may – she’s your starting Instathot, and in my opinion she’s a cut above the usual quality that goes into this section. NOW do you lot understand why I love Eastern Europe so much?

All right, ye scurvy lubbers, off to swab the decks.