There goes the weekend – I miss it already. Today is the beginning of yet another week of travel and nonsense, but that is what we have to do to put food on the table. I mean, let’s be honest, there is a REASON why you have to pay people to turn up for work – quite apart from the fact that you are exchanging money for a person’s life. (Fortunately for me, my work is – for the most part – actually pretty interesting.)
Of course, if you work at Victoria’s Secret, the fashion brand, you probably are not enjoying your Monday any better than the rest of us.
The story behind that fashion brand is one of unmitigated disaster and stupidity. Basically, the company decided that the best way to combat a bunch of negative headlines and – now discredited – PoundMeToo rumours about a previous CEO, was to go as woke as possible and “get with the times”.
The problem is, by doing so, they alienated their core customer base – WOMEN.
There used to be an old joke about how Victoria’s Secret is that no normal woman can fit into their underwear. There is more than a grain of truth to that one. But the reality is, Victoria’s Secret was always an aspirational luxury brand that brought sexiness into a female staple product.
The rot behind the company set in years ago:
This stupidity manifested itself in the financial results long before its current troubles. I did some analysis on the VS balance sheet earlier this year for a side project, and I saw immediately that its Return on Equity (RoE) came from the company’s EXTREMELY high leverage, NOT asset turnover.
For those who are not finance geeks, this basically means the company was not doing what a fast fashion brand SHOULD be doing – pushing product out the door as fast as possible. VS was not shipping product, but was instead leveraging itself to the gills and beyond by issuing debt to buy back shares, in an attempt to hide its collapsing financial results.
This is what you often see with failing companies. To quote Razorfist‘s take on the oft-repeated maxim, companies do not get woke and then go broke – they actually get broke, go woke, and then CROAK. And that is precisely what is happening with VSCO.
They tried ousting their CEO 9 months ago – the one who brought in all the woke crap – as a way to stop the bleeding. That worked out about as well as you might think:
A few days ago, they changed tack yet again, looking to “bring sexy back”:
That doesn’t seem to be working very well either.
This is what happens when you piss off your customer base and annoy them to the point where they just walk away. It is nearly impossible to recover after a debacle like that.
So, farewell and goodbye, Victoria’s Secret. It was nice knowing you. Now let’s remember what the VS Fashion Show used to be like, back in the day when it was genuinely fun and funny:
The Mighty God-Emperor
His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, the Lion of Midnight, may the Lord bless him and preserve him, perhaps gives himself rather too much credit here, but he does sort of have a point:
As I have written before, at some length, the collapse in Western power and prestige you see here, is a direct function of the illegitimacy of the rulers and governments who pretend to be in charge of things. In the FUSA, the government itself is fake. There was NO “election” in 2020. And now we see what happens when completely unaccountable crazies and ideologues think they have every right to do whatever the hell they want in global politics.
#BasedTucker is Based
Dawn of Battle
The Male Brain has lots of good stuff to keep up our spirits during this very crazy time. We start with an Honest Ads (aka Cracked) take on the realities of modren college life:
The Babylon Bee goes into all the news that’s fit to make up, and tells you how to detect your own toxic masculinity:
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell explain what happens if you cross the streams – i.e. destroy a black hole:
Moon has an EPIC take on Dubai – which, having been there, I ABSOLUTELY agree with:
That said – the ending part about how great Singapore is, has to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt. I have lived in Singapore, and I assure you, migrant labour there is NOT well-treated or well-housed, in the main. There is far too much by way of rose-tinted glasses in the video with respect to Singapore – this is a country that MANDATED the not-vaxx for anyone and everyone visiting the place, and has only now, very belatedly, begun to relax those ridiculous restrictions.
I will always choose Singapore over Dubai, no question about that – I love the greenery and natural beauty that is so carefully preserved in Singapore. But both places are extremely artificial, and they are both the playgrounds of the rich and famous. These are not realistic or sensible places to live for ordinary folk.
Look Well Into Thyself
Here is a solid dose of stoicism and ancient wisdom to get your week off to a good start:
Poli-ticking Off
Mark Dice points out the epic and ongoing manipulation of your mind and thoughts by the whore-media:
The dynamic duo over at Redacted play the world’s smallest violin with respect to Pfizer’s plunging profits:
Jackson Hinkle talks to Maj. Scott Ritter about the extreme, and indiscriminate, violence unleashed by Israel in the Palestinian conflict:
Having visited Israel, and having known and gotten along with many Jews in my life, I will say that I think Israel has every right to exist and to defend itself.
I have absolutely zero sympathy for the Pali-Walis, as I have made clear many times – they have been given every chance for peace, repeatedly, and have always rejected it. They are nothing more than pawns for the entire Arab world – universally scorned, despised, and treated as second- and third-class citizens wherever they go. With, I might add, VERY good reason – they are by and large uneducated, unskilled, and incapable of maintaining anything approaching modern civilisation.
BUT – and this is the important part – levelling Gaza to the ground, when surrounded by neighbours whose entire religion dictates the slaughter and destruction of Jews, strikes me as a very stupid idea.
Even so, I do take strong exception to the constant drumbeat of a Palestinian “state” as the solution to this crisis. Has anyone ever looked at a map? Any Palestinian state would be completely dependent on its neighbours, with zero natural resources and no capability to sustain itself. It would also be a divided state – and we know, from the example of East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh) from the war with India in 1971, that such a divided state simply cannot survive.
The harsh reality, whether we like it or not, is that the Israelis and the Arabs WILL, at some point, have to wipe each other out. The demographics and politics of the region dictate this.
I am NOT saying this is a good thing. It absolutely is not. War is horrible and should be avoided wherever possible. But a genocidal war to the death in that region, is now inevitable. It is just that simple. Whoever “wins”, will be left with ruins and destruction – possibly of the nuclear kind. And if it is the Arabs who “win” – well, anyone who has ever spent any time around Arabs, knows full well they are incapable of maintaining advanced civilisations by themselves.
Lord Razor of the Fist Clan analyses the Kennedy Effect for Indecision 2024:
PJW takes far too long to shill for Raid: Shadow Legends in this video, but he does offer a very good explanation of how Victoria’s Secret got woke and went broke:
Rulings from the Bench
Judge Nap was extremely busy last week with his usual panel of talking heads, which offered superb insights and analysis of the current situation. Col. Douglas Macgregor appeared twice – he seems to be in very high demand these days, and if you listen to him, it is not hard to understand why:
LTC Tony Shaffer is not sanguine about Israel’s prospects for a ground invasion of Gaza, if/when it happens:
Maj. Scott Ritter engages full-on rant mode when talking about Israeli war crimes – and that is what they are – in Gaza:
However, it is important to note, the culprit of the bombing of the hospital in southern Gaza is still not clear to anyone looking at the evidence objectively. Even Maj. Ritter admits that.
Alistair Crooke laments the collapse of Western diplomacy in the context of the ongoing Middle Eastern crisis:
Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern did an outstanding roundtable on the current state of affairs, particularly with respect to the decision to deploy two CVBGs to the eastern Med:
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs explains, from an economic perspective, the extreme dangers which confront us now:
Matthew Hoh looks at the stupidity of American foreign policy which has led the world to the brink of total war:
Дед Сварливый Говорит!
Grandpa Grumpuss grumps, grumpily, about the best way to turn former enemies into good friends, using the example of the Chechens:
The Chechens are indeed a sterling example of how to rebuild relationships with people you nearly destroyed. Today, the Chechens are among the most fervent and skilled fighters for the Russian Federation – they call themselves Russian, they fight under the Russian flag, and they revere President Putin. This comes in no small part from the extremely strong personal relationships between the Neo-Tsar and Akhmat-Khadji Kadyrov, the father of current Chechen Ork Warboss Ramzan Kadyrov, which carried on with the son.
Chechnya today is a vibrant, flourishing, beautiful region of Russia. If you look at photos of Groznyi from the aftermath of the Second Chechen War, when Putin himself basically ordered the Russian Army to raze it to the ground, and you look at it now, the two are unrecognisable as the same place.
Could Israel do the same with Gaza? Probably not. The Pali-Walis are a lot more radical, and a lot stupider, than the Chechens. But, there ARE ways for Israel to regain the moral high ground in the region – if only it would exercise some form of restraint.
Polonium
Ania Konieczek did a great interview with Larry Johnson on the ways and means by which Israel and the FUSA secretly funded Hummus:
It’s All Greek To Us
The good gentlemen of The Duran analyse the failures of Western diplomacy, and the growing moral and economic power of the BRICS nations:
The Bald Truth
Brian Berletic of The New Atlas provides a (rather dry, admittedly) analysis of the total failure of the Khlearly Khatastrophic Khollapsing Khreat Khokholite Khumvee Khounteroffensive:
Bad Medicine
Dr. John Campbell discusses excess deaths in the UK with Andrew Bridgen MP, a man who was YEETED straight out of the so-called “Conservative” Party for his supposedly crazy views on the not-vaxx:
Warriors of Faith
Tha Dizzle shreds, as only he can, a lying Izzlamist dawahgandist:
That one really is a must-watch – David is in RARE form.
Dr. Jay Smith from PfanderFilms and Al-Fadi from CIRA International break down the serious problems with Izzlam’s self-professed timeline:
Sam Shamoun shreds through Izzlamist nonsense about the so-called “uncreated” and “incorruptible” Koran:
Dr. Frank Turek provides an elegant explanation for why we Christians go to church on Sundays – well, those of us who can stand to do it, in this era of woke churches:
Manly Men of Manliness
Terrence Popp warns young men about the horrors of catfishing, which is a very real thing:
Joker from Better Bachelor also takes on the furious, and quite hilarious, backpedaling by Victoria’s Secret, now their sales and profits have collapsed:
Burn Paedowood to the Ground
Midnight’s Edge reckon Bob Iger is coming to the end of the road with the House of the Devil Mouse:
Overlord Dicktor Van Doomcock piles on to the bad news for Disney:
Gary from Nerdrotic reckons The Marvels is about to crater:
The Drinker compares the Devil Mouses Snow White live-action adaptation, with the upcoming Daily Wire take on the same story:
Reading Too Much Into Things
Your “Science is F***ING WEIRD” moment of the week is from The Male Brain, and is all about how smells regulate our ability to understand and process colour:
Our brain constantly combines multisensory information from our surrounding environment. Odors for instance are often perceived with visual cues; these sensations interact to form our own subjective experience. This integration process can have a profound impact on the resulting experience and can alter our subjective reality. Crossmodal correspondences are the consistent associations between stimulus features in different sensory modalities. These correspondences are presumed to be bidirectional in nature and have been shown to influence our perception in a variety of different sensory modalities. Vision is dominant in our multisensory perception and can influence how we perceive information in our other senses, including olfaction. We explored the effect that different odors have on human color perception by presenting olfactory stimuli while asking observers to adjust a color patch to be devoid of hue (neutral gray task). We found a shift in the perceived neutral gray point to be biased toward warmer colors. Four out of five of our odors also trend toward their expected crossmodal correspondences. For instance, when asking observers to perform the neutral gray task while presenting the smell of cherry, the perceptually achromatic stimulus was biased toward a red-brown. Using an achromatic adjustment task, we were able to demonstrate a small but systematic effect of the presence of odors on human color perception.
For those who prefer not to read the whole damn paper, AstroHealth breaks it down for us in simple terms:
Your long read of the week is by Michael A. Roberts, and takes a sledgehammer to the extreme hypocrisy and genuinely nasty philosophy of Ayn Rand:
Atlas Shrugged makes it clear that people with the wrong ideas are just not worth much in her world. As the system falls apart, rail service suffers. In one famous scene, an incompetent rail worker makes a mistake which ends in the death of all the passengers on board. Rand painstakingly informs us of each of these passengers “beliefs” or “actions” that she does not approve of before they die in an all consuming sacrifice due to the locomotive’s exhaust in a tunnel. They are all gassed as Rand celebrates their fate – they deserved to die because… they took a government loan or some other moral mistake which wipes out their humanity. The nameless passengers held simplistic or communal beliefs, and deserve no empathy. What she is writing is perhaps revenge for the alleged WW2 holocaust, but set on American soil, where she shows that (ostensibly in 1950’s American train passengers) whites in America, due to their belief deserve to be holocaust-ed.
But alas, revealing one of Rand’s inversions, those that died are not the parasites, they are the host. The parasite has decided to change hosts, and leave the discarded body of the America host behind to move on to something new. Atlas Shrugged is the story of the parasite pushing the host to its absolute limit, literally and symbolically when the lights go out in New York. The myriad of reactions to collapse and laws passed in the fictional world may be mistakes, but are reactions to thieves and criminals, not to successful and productive businessman who are just the victims of a useless and mooching public.
In the story, some of the characters have had enough of the public which needs to be genocided, and they move off to a new protected valley where only like minded people are allowed. Rand describes the valley as Galt’s Gulch, named after another main character who is the one going around convincing these captains of industry to strike and give up on the masses. But again, the story makes more sense with a plausible explanation as to the real symbolism. I believe, and I think I am the first to speculate, that Galt’s Gulch is Israel. Not the people of Israel, and maybe not even the Government, but Israel in it’s origin as Zionist Banker project. Rand idealizes a place where only a certain group is allowed and that group is Zionists. I don’t think Rand gave much of a care about her fellow Jews, and might throw them on the train for wrong-think too, but she cared very much about having the correct supremacist views and demonizing the “other” who doesn’t perfectly conform. Her Israel is an escape hatch for anyone who is allowed, to get away from the lowly public and their vile ideas.
Another part of the book dealing with the domestic transcontinental railroad in her fictional America, deals with its CEO, James Taggart. Taggart is symbolic for the upper classes in America and their royal British roots, and Rand has no love for them. Their worst sin is flirting with the lower classes – as symbolized by Taggart’s romance with a young store clerk who is full of ignorance about who is truly great and who isn’t. Taggart’s sister will eventually join the strike as the only “outsider” but in order to do so she must trade running and owning a major American railway for being Galt’s maid in fantasy land, and maybe just maybe they will allow her to borrow money to build and own a three mile track. She is to be subjugated to her new master or else continue to suffer on the outside world as it falls apart.
Loyalty to Rand’s ideals in the book requires a total break with the world of your past culture and identity, and an oath symbolic of your new loyalty. “I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” This sounds great at first, but it is a sneaky trick. All the money in the world created by the money printers like Rand’s real life friend Alan Greenspan, cannot pay back the amount owed, since more is owed than exists by definition. So what you do when you take the oath, is fall for a trap and become a slave. The oath has to be broken by the reality of the contract, but if you do, you are a mooch that asked the money printers to “live for you.” After they go, everything will fall apart and you will beg them to come back. Hence the ending, where the once tortured Galt is begged by the masses to come back and solve their problems. Of course I am skipping vast parts of this over 1100 page book to provide you the thesis, but you hopefully get the idea. Atlas Shrugged is a trick, and one which demands you die in a tunnel should you hold a wrong thought. In Sabbatean Frankist style, Rand takes the feel and work ethic of Protestant America, conflates that virtue onto virtueless characters who mostly destroy to make money, and we are supposed to worship the characters put there by her brilliant slight [sic] of hand.
I have read The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and We the Living. I can say that the first third of Atlas Shrugged is literary brilliance. However, the rest of her books are tedious, repetitive, humourless, and extraordinarily preachy.
There is a lot of interesting philosophy – at least, on the surface – in her books. And her trenchant criticisms of Communism were (mostly) on-point. But she was always fundamentally a hypocrite and an intellectual charlatan, who hated religion with the fiery passion of all ideologues.
And it was her very ideology that blinded her to the reality and truth of the human condition – that Man needs something bigger than himself to sustain and define his life.
Linkage is good for you:
- Thanks to recently unearthed Soviet documents, we now have a pretty good idea of the true evils committed by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists against Jews and other peoples in WWII;
- Kirill Babaev analyses the importance of the Neo-Tsar’s recent visit to Beijing for the 10th anniversary of the Belt-and-Road Initiative;
- Chay Bowes discusses the increasing irrelevance of Bellendsky the Smelly Beggar Crackhead of Queef to the Western world;
- Pepe Escobar writes about the rapid changes in the formerly friendly attitudes of the Russian senior leadership to Israel – much to the latter’s detriment;
- Eldridge Colby says the quiet part out loud about how Ukraine is not, in fact, an American ally – and therefore can be abandoned to its fate without problems;
- India and Russia are committed to de-dollarisation, but this is proving difficult, due to the issues with using yuan as an intermediate currency;
- There is a very great deal wrong with India, but the Supreme Court there refused to legalise gay “marriage” through the back door, which is highly sensible;
- Russian Market asks a very interesting question about whether Apple can avoid Nokia’s fate of failure to innovate and develop against market competition;
- Russia continues its efforts to reach out to the Global South by opening up education centres in Nigeria – thereby cementing a powerful relationship with Africa;
- Alistair Crooke explains how the previous paradigms of diplomacy are rapidly being destroyed by the current crises;
- OBADSDL(PBUH) Voxemort the Most Malevolent and Terrible is amused by the belated realisation of Jews that they were idiotic to piss off their goyim hosts;
- The Turducken Plane continues to be totally useless at anything approaching regular availability and reliability;
- Boffins at Tohoku University have created something called “pseudogravity” using really cool sci-fi techniques;
- Gen-Z has seen, all too well, what happened to the Millennials, and has no interest in being exploited by greedy corporations who just want their souls;
And some more from Dawn Pine:
- The failure of the woke policies at Victoria’s Secret are the worst-kept secret in the entire fashion industry, at this point;
- The Abos (yes, that’s a racist term, but it’s also funny) are all pissy about losing their referendum to have a voice separate to the rest of Australia in parliament;
- easyJet had to cancel a flight from Tenerife to London, after a customer literally crapped on the floor – my guess is, it was an Indian;
- An artist is getting plaudits for using food to create landscape art – and then donating that same art to hungry people, which is both brilliant and a waste of good food on art;
- The BritGov wants PommieBastardLande to move to useless and wasteful heat pumps in 12 years as a way to combat Global Climate Warming Change Cooling, which is stupid;
- Apparently, the aliens presented to Mexico’s Congress recently are both biological and non-human – so, there you go, alien life PROVED!!!, or whatever;
- Violent crimes, like carjackings, are declining in the FUSA – but home invasions are rising, and you don’t get any prizes for guessing which race is responsible for most of them;
- The Russian Parliament is thinking of putting in a minimum beer price, which probably will not affect overall sales – though, believe it or not, Russians are drinking LESS nowadays;
- Let’s all play the world’s smallest violin for the Wall Street banksters who will NOT be vacationing in their winter homes, thanks to back-to-office mandates;
- Your “shit happens” headline of the week has something for everyone – poop, giraffes, crazy women, airports, Minnesota, and the desire to make a necklace out of literal shit;
- Krautland’s hapless and cowardly Chancellor has FINALLY realised it might be a good idea to deport rejected asylum-seekers – though of course he won’t actually DO it;
MUH RUSHIAN KAHLOOOOOZHUN!!!
The Neo-Tsar was the absolute picture of calmly composed diplomatic good sense when he commented from Beijing on the decision by the FUSA to supply ATACMS missiles to the Banderites:
HALO Nation
Nikos explains why the original HALO is actually bloody scary:
Bring on the Grimdark
Attenborough Lore got YEETED, because some dumbass (probably Attenborough himself) put in copyright strikes against the channel. So now they have started reposting their old stuff, using a new voice, which is very good, but nowhere near as awesome:
Whichever humourless shithead did that to the channel, deserves a chainsword to the groin. Or EXTERMINATUS.
Also, PancreasNoWork takes a pause from taking insulin shots, and pushing… uh… adult playthings, to explain the coolness of Fulgrim’s back-story:
That’s Not Gone Well…
Wazzocks gonna wazzock:
Comedy Hour
Meme Warfare
We start with some dank memes from The Male Brain:
[I do too – Didact]
Onward:
The other one I wear on Sundays, is black with the Hebrew letters for “YAHWEH” on the front in yellow.
Animal Planet
Your aminules are adorkable moment of the week:
And also your animals are absolute DICKS moment of the week, to balance things out:
The Lords of Steel
Gym beast props for the week go to Tyson Ridenour:
Ass-Kicking of the Eight Limbs
And also your Buakaw Beatdown of the week to go with that:
They See Me Rollin’…
Palate Cleansers
Axe-Kicks
Drumlines
I love that song.
Jump-Starts
Gingervitis Injections
Russian Samovar
Livin’ in the Land of the Metal Gods
You see what I did there?
This one has to be the best mashup I’ve heard in years:
Classic NIGHTWISH moment:
Rock Out With Your Glock Out
Hot Totty
Right, here we are at the Instathot to get the week started. This here is Natalia Pinzon, who does… well, I have no idea what, but she looks good, and that is what matters.
OK, that’s all, chaps, back to work now.
3 Comments
George floyd did not die of a fentanyl overdose
https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/george-floyd-did-not-die-of-a-fentanyl?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=645524&post_id=138191050&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2mnul&utm_medium=email
Ace of Spades HQ had a great rant the other day about how this strategy of dissolving your fanbase and electing another is idiotic because it is ten times harder for a business to get a new customer than keep the existing customers happy. The woke and enlightened audience they desire never comes, so they end up destroying their brand or company for nothing.
I might have to fire up Infinite again. I got tired of it around the middle of the second battle pass, but I keep hearing good things from various sources.
“There is a very great deal wrong with India, but the Supreme Court there refused to legalise gay “marriage” through the back door, ”
I see what you did there. I laughed.
Excellent video on the terrors of Halo: Combat Evolved, thank you.