#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
In other words, don’t panic or be surprised when it’s down. An update will be posted here when it’s back up again.
UPDATE: The upgrade is complete. UATV is live again.
I know the interest in Veriphysics is limited here, hence the separate site devoted to the philosophy, but since this question has popped up in several places, I thought I should at least mention that it has been answered in substantive detail over there.
I don’t understand why it is necessary for there to be three different elements of the Triveritas. Aren’t L and M basically the same thing, because math is logic?
Here is the abridged version of the complete answer to it.
Each of the three dimensions of the Triveritas has characteristic failure modes that the other two dimensions cannot detect from within their own domain. That is why relying on any one, or even any two, leaves a structural blind spot that historically produces false confidence…
The critical insight from the historical record is that false claims survive by trading on their strong dimensions to deflect scrutiny from their weak one. The defenders of phlogiston pointed to its empirical success and quantitative accounting to avoid the question of logical coherence. The defenders of caloric theory pointed to Fourier’s mathematics and the theory’s logical elegance to deflect Rumford’s empirical challenge. The defenders of Ptolemy pointed to centuries of accurate predictions to deflect the question of explanatory unity.
And in every resolved historical case, the refutation arrived from the specific dimension that was missing. Not from a random direction, but from the precise blind spot the theory’s defenders were trying to hide. Newtonian mechanics, steady-state cosmology, and caloric theory all satisfied L and M but failed E, and all three were killed by empirical observation. Continental drift and the plum pudding model satisfied L and E but failed M, and both were killed by mathematical incoherence. Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, and miasma theory satisfied M and E but failed L, and all three were killed by the arrival of logically coherent replacements.
Also, for those who are interested in applying the Triveritas, the reference scales for L, M, and E are all now complete.
On last night’s Arkhaven Nights, JDA, the Legend, and I were reviewing the script of the cancelled Buffy revival. It was bad. It was very, very bad. To describe it as excruciatingly bad would not be exaggerating.
It was so bad that I don’t think we can rule it out as the culprit in Xander’s untimely death.
‘Buffy’ Actor Nicholas Brendon Dead At 54
RIP Xander.
I’m pretty sure that if the champions of the printing press were given the opportunity to see how their magnificent new device would transform the written word into a means for women to write about their sexual fantasies involving demons, monsters, and the dead, they would have burned every last one of them.
One of its principal attractions was that it had the potential to democratise knowledge. In the past, the high cost of manuscripts had meant that only the well-to-do could afford them. Now that books could be produced in large numbers, however, printed volumes could be sold for much lower prices, making them available to those of lesser means for the first time. As Bussi remarked, it was possible for even the poorest to build a library of his own and for learning to become accessible to all. Excited by the prospect, some of those associated with presses began writing texts explicitly targeted at furthering the spread of knowledge. In 1483, for example, Fra Iacopo Filippo Foresti of Bergamo (1434–1520) published his Supplementum chronicarum. A sort of ‘bluffers’ guide’ to world history, this was expressly designed to make available to the masses knowledge which had previously been restricted only to the few.
As many observers recognised, this had a range of knock-on benefits. For some, the most important of these was permanence. According to the Florentine humanist Bartolomeo della Fonte (1446–1513), printers could ‘confer eternity’ on whatever they produced. Since printing put more books into circulation, he reasoned, it would ensure that ancient texts were less likely to be lost, and it would crown modern authors with certain fame. Others believed that the ‘flood’ of new books would lead to moral enlightenment. There was some justification for this. Recent research into domestic life has revealed that books of hours were by far the most commonly owned texts; and, as Caroline Anderson has argued, the fact that these books were often kept in the camera (bedchamber/dayroom) suggests that they were read on a daily basis, including by women. It was hence only reasonable to assume that, as printing spread, so virtue would also grow. For the Franciscan friar Bernardino da Feltre (1439-94), God had shed ‘so much light on these most wretched and dark times’ through print that there was no longer any excuse for sin at all.
But not everyone was so enthusiastic. Others, for whom novelty and progress were far from synonymous, regarded printing with open hostility. Of these, none was more vehement than Filippo de Strata.
Like many of his contemporaries, he did not have any particular objection to books as physical objects. Although he is almost certain to have preferred manuscripts, he does not seem to have thought that printed works were, in themselves, unworthy of being read. Printers, however, were another matter. Much like his contemporary, the historian Marcantonio Sabellico (1436–1506), he reviled them as much for their ‘plebeian’ ways as for their foreign origins. To his mind, they were beggars and thieves who had no appetite for work but were always hungry for money. They had come to Italy, babbling in that ugly language of theirs, with no other goal than to put scribes out of a job. What was worse, they had no sense of propriety either. Drunk on strong wine and success, they were hawking books to every Tom, Dick and Harry. In doing so, they were not democratising learning — as Bussi and Foresti liked to believe — but debasing it. Whereas, in the past, the expense and scarcity of manuscripts had ensured that great care was always taken over the preparation of texts, the ease with which books could now be printed — coupled with the intense competition between presses — had led to all manner of rubbish being churned out. These days, Filippo argued, you could hardly open a volume without it being festooned with errors. This clearly did immense damage both to classical scholarship and to education. By putting such defective texts into the hands of the masses, he claimed, even those who could barely speak the vernacular would feel qualified to teach Latin. But since printers were interested only in making a quick buck off such ‘unlettered’ fools, they had no incentive to do any better. All that mattered was getting a new edition on the market as quickly as possible, irrespective of its quality.
For much the same reason, Filippo also believed that printing was a threat to public morality. If printers had sold nothing but religious works, it might not have been so bad; but because they were interested only in profit, they were trying to attract new readers by appealing to their baser instincts. All manner of bawdy and unsuitable volumes were being produced: from the torrid love poetry of Tibullus and Ovid, to the worst kind of modern filth. Given how cheaply such books were sold, it was inevitable that vice, rather than virtue, would flourish.
As an avowed champion of textual AI, it is more than a little sobering to observe how the skeptics of past technological innovations have not only been proven right, but proven right beyond their wildest imaginings.
A summary of military historian Victor Davis Hanson’s perspective on Gulf War 2026:
Victor Davis Hanson has spent fifty years studying how wars end. When he says the tide is turning, it’s worth listening to why.
His argument isn’t based on what the Pentagon is saying. It’s based on how everyone else is behaving.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀. VDH’s rule: Europeans never agree to go anywhere near a conflict unless they think the winning side has already been determined. They didn’t help in the early days. Now they’re starting to move. That movement is not idealism. It’s a calculation. They’ve looked at the battlefield and decided which way this ends.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝘂𝗹𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗼-𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. The Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris — these governments have survived for generations by reading the regional climate with precision. When they expel Iranian military attachés, when they intercept Iranian missiles over their own capitals and say nothing about American strikes, when the UAE reaffirms its $1.4 trillion investment commitment to the United States mid-war — they are not making ideological statements. They are placing bets. And they are betting on the United States.
𝗔𝗹 𝗝𝗮𝘇𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗮. This is the one that should stop you cold. Al Jazeera — the Qatari state media network, historically critical of American military action, the network Tucker Carlson and the anti-war right love to cite against Israel — is now calling the U.S. bombing campaign brilliant and effective, and saying it has been underestimated. When the media outlet of a nation that hosts both the largest American air base in the Middle East and a Hamas political office starts praising American military effectiveness, the message is unmistakable: 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘸𝘦’𝘳𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘪𝘯.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹. A-10 Warthogs and Apache helicopter gunships are now flying strike missions in Iranian airspace at will. VDH’s point: you only deploy those aircraft when there is effectively no air defense left to threaten them. They are slow, low-flying, close-support platforms. Their presence confirms what the Pentagon has been claiming — Iran has no meaningful air defense remaining.
Iran’s strategy now is rope-a-dope. Run out the clock. Wait for American public opinion to shift. Hope the midterms create political pressure on Trump to stop. It is the only play they have left.
VDH’s conclusion: if Trump sees it through — and he believes he will — the regime falls. Not in years.
I am deeply skeptical. I will also point out that the track record of military historians has been uncharacteristically poor in recent years. VDH predicted a quick Russian victory in 2022, then predicted a Korean-style long-term standoff. Both Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind predicted Russian defeats in Ukraine. The reason is not because these are not smart, very well-educated men, but because the changing nature of warfare is very difficult for those who are experts in the previous forms to correctly read.
5GW, which is drone warfare, is a very different kettle of fish. So I don’t think these past signals necessarily mean very much at all, although it may explain why the US strategists are confident enough to send a pair of Marine Expeditionary Units to attack Iran on the ground.
As is usually the case, the big two of AI are rapidly taking shape, with the only real question being who will play the role of the number three spoiler, Grok, Gemini, or some as yet unknown player.
Both companies are now building AI that acts inside applications rather than generating text about them, and six launches in eight days confirm that the two labs have arrived at the same conclusions about the future of their products.
But as the capabilities of their tools approach parity, everything else about these rival titans is rapidly diverging. In the span of three weeks, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history and signed a classified-use agreement with the Pentagon. Anthropic simultaneously lost its military contracts and was designated a supply-chain risk, then launched a $100 million enterprise push backed by private equity talks.
In January, this publication argued that OpenAI and Anthropic had chosen fundamentally different financial strategies. What we are seeing now is a concrete expression of those strategies. How each company is financing itself is now shaping its trajectory more than anything it ships…
As ChatGPT and Claude approach functional parity, enterprise customers are gaining the freedom to choose between them based on whom they wish to buy from rather than which tools they need. Upstream cloud infrastructure, vendor commitments, political exposure, and long-term flexibility will become increasingly important factors in any given company’s choice of AI platform.
It’s become obvious that Facebook badly misplayed its hand despite its initial advantages. The $80 billion they sunk into the idiocy of 3D avatars to no avail, including rebranding the company around it, would not only have gone a long way into AI investment, but is likely to go down in business history as one of the all-time corporate catastrophes with Blackberry ceding the mobile phone market to Apple and Bill Gates failing to notice the importance of the Internet in The Road Ahead.
It also underlines the falsity of the idea that Zuckerberg was ever a technological boy genius rather than the CIA catspaw that everyone now understands he and the founders of Google were. Anyhow, read the whole thing there.
In other AI-related news, I’m very pleased to observe that Claude’s one-million-token context window is now available through the web interface as well as through the API. I’m already making excellent use of that, as it should reduce translation time by as much as 50 percent.
It is beginning to dawn upon the Short Fake Trump administration and the AIPAC lobby how disastrous it has been to let finally Israel call the shots for the US military. This is what happens when you hand tribalists who have never in their entire history had any responsibility for actually running a society the keys to the sort of power that is usually in the hands of civilized peoples.
Things really hit the fan earlier today after Iran’s largest natural gas field, the South Pars, was struck by Israel. This field reportedly accounts for 75% of Iran’s natural gas production and 80-85% of its electric grid. This of course came directly after Israel had assassinated Iran’s Secretary of the Supreme National Council Ali Larijani in a strike that was said to have also killed upwards of 100+ civilians in the vicinity, as it leveled the apartment block he was in, and possibly even surrounding buildings.
This led to Iran immediately escalating with strikes against energy targets in both Israel and the Gulf, particularly hitting Qatar’s Ras Laffan gas hub said to be the world’s largest. The strike was successful and was said to have done massive damage to the facility, which took 14 years to build and some experts are writing is irreparable.
But the most significant development from this sudden firestorm is the revelation that the US did not in fact authorize or participate in these unilateral Israeli strikes, despite earliest reports indicating they were done in tandem. Rumors filtered in throughout the day until Trump finally confirmed it himself in a social media rant wherein he appeared to tongue-lash Israel for its impudence, while simultaneously threatening Iran with more barbaric destruction.
Reports continue surging forth about Trump being furious at Israel for igniting this regional firestorm which has wrought economic havoc that continues spiraling out of control. Israel is obviously escalating the conflict deliberately in order to ensure no off-ramp exists, and that US—and preferably its Gulf allies—commit to a total and decisive destruction of Iran.
Israel is doing this via two simultaneous strategies: first by eliminating all the “moderates” and rational people within Iran’s leadership to ensure that only hardliners remain who will push for maximum punishment against the region. And second, by crossing Iran’s “red lines” in hitting its most sensitive economic and energy sites in order to spur Iran’s retaliation against equally critical sites throughout the region to ignite as big a firestorm as possible which can engulf everyone and coerce the entire world into “finishing off” Iran once and for all.
But as even leading neocons like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol have begun to realize, Israel’s actions are at least as likely to inspire the entire world into finishing off Israel once and for all. Especially since everyone knows it is Israel, not Iran, that is the main source of conflict in the region. Even if Iran is defeated, then Israel will immediately proceed to war with Turkey.
The problem is that now that Israel has started this war, neither the USA nor the Israelis can call it off, because no amount of escalation dominance is capable of forcing Iran to stop. And the retardery of Trump threatening Iran for responding to the actions of Israel is astonishing in its pointlessness. If you’re the dog, then you damned well better control your tail.
The USA informed Iran that they consider their military objectives achieved and are preparing to exit the conflict soon, noting that Israel still has some operational tasks to complete before its withdrawal from the war. However, Iran completely rejected this message, stating that it is not interested in its content and will continue the war until it achieves its own long-term goals aimed at preventing the recurrence of such conflicts.
I don’t see what could effectively prevent the recurrence of another such conflict without a) the withdrawal of the US military from the region and b) the cessation of US military support for Israel.
By the time the next economic depression bottoms, it will be illegal for women to not have children in many countries:
Underneath all of this, slower than any war and more permanent than any crisis, is something the financial press doesn’t really mention:
People aren’t having any children.
US fertility hit an all-time low in 2024. The general fertility rate is still falling. IMPLAN puts 1.4 million fewer Americans contributing to housing demand, retail spending, and service consumption in 2025 than trends would have predicted. To put that in numbers: $104 billion in GDP. Not exactly gone, not really disappeared. It just never existed in the first place.
It’s a vicious circle: housing is too expensive, so young people delay children. Fewer children means less future housing demand. Which should eventually reduce prices, except the lag is 20-30 years, and in the meantime housing stays expensive, so the people who couldn’t afford a house still can’t, still don’t have children, and the loop tightens at its own pace regardless of what the Fed does or what happens somewhere in the narrow waterways in exotic places.
Added: the boomers are saying bye sayonara.
The generation that inflated every asset class for 40 years through automatic 401k contributions is, somewhere around now, flipping from net buyers to net sellers. Of course it’s impossible to say like “March, 17: boomers start to cash out their 401ks”… Nope, the tide just turns. The same passive machine that provided an inexorable, automatic bid for equities and bonds and real estate – every payday, every year, for four decades – begins to redeem. Quietly. Continuously. For the next twenty-some years. Every asset they inflated on the way up faces a headwind on the way out. Not a crash. A long, grinding, demographically-inevitable ratchet.
That’s why the central planners of the world turned toward mass immigration. You need consumers to keep the GDP growth going, and with fewer children, there were going to be fewer consumers. Of course, the problem is that the macroeconomic models don’t account for quality of consumer, so it’s only very recently that the mainstream economists have begun to realize that lending to immigrants from grasshopper cultures is absolutely guaranteed to crash the banking system because none of those loans will ever be repaid.
And this is just on the consumption side. Imagine what lowering IQ, time preferences, and productivity does on the production side, although you don’t need to imagine it anymore. We already know what a calamity diversity and inclusion have turned out to be for the US corpocracy.
Indeed, based on a 2025 Danish study, it may even be necessary to ban paid female employment. Such a policy would indubitably be sexist, anti-feminist, and currently illegal in most Western countries. But no one living in any society that elects to show up for the future is going to care what the norms of a few long-dead 21st-century societies happened to be.
Egalitarianism is already conceptually dead. It won’t be many more decades before people stop believing in it.
Iran insulates itself against the decapitation strategy and forces attrition war on the Epstein Alliance by announcing detailed succession plans for its major government and military roles, each running between 3 and 7 levels deep depending upon the specific role. This is obviously in response to Clown World’s reliance upon decapitation attacks resulting in cheap and easy initial victories, although such victories don’t tend to persist long as evidenced by the failures of the Afghani and Iraqi occupations.
This should suffice to demonstrate to both the USA and Israel that their basic military strategy and core objectives have been rendered irrelevant, and it is time to abandon the bellicose rhetoric and realize that they are not even capable of winning this war.
I remembered the US-Iran war was only supposed to last four days when it first kicked off, but it’s become very hard to find any references to those statements now that the war is approaching its third week.
The United States government had told Turkey through official channels that the war on Iran would only take four days, Asli Aydintasbas, a Washington-based Turkey expert, said during an interview on Sunday.
“Turkey and some of its allies were told, through official channels, that this operation would take days and be completed in four days,” Aydintasbas, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview with the Serbestiyet news site. “You cannot tell a Nato ally that you have made a four-day plan and then extend the operation to 14 days. In a sense, this was also a betrayal of the regional countries.”
This is why I barely pay any attention to the mainstream media anymore. Not only are you not informed correctly, you’re constantly being gaslit about what the media itself said the day before.