Douhet Wept

There’s an amount of discussion of the potential ramifications for the Middle East of the Yemeni missile that was used to strike the Gezer power plant from 1,265 miles away.

The Israeli air defense failed to intercept the Yemeni missile primarily because it is capable of changing its course suddenly – Israeli Channel 12. The US Navy failed to intercept the missile in the Red Sea as well. Great possibility that this was hypersonic.

Yemen confirmed that they used a hypersonic ballistic missile in the attack on Tel Aviv Yemeni Armed Forces says it hit an Israeli military target in Yaffa (Tel Aviv) with a new hypersonic ballistic missile that traveled 2,040 kilometers. This is the first time that an Iranian-made hypersonic missile has been used in an attack on Israel.

No doubt this has some ominous implications for the prospective Israel-Iran war. But of far more concern to Americans should be the fact that the military force that just drove the US Navy from the Red Sea has just demonstrated the capacity to hit a target from long range. Which means that both Iran and Yemen, to say nothing of China and Russia, almost certainly possess the ability to sink the US Navy’s carriers at will from longer range than the carriers’ own air assets can reach.

We are rapidly entering the post-airpower age, which has considerable implications for the applicability of seapower. A considerable amount of strategic rethinking is now in order.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Retardery Burns

On Friday, BackerKit’s Trust and Safety informed us of their “final decision” that the Hypergamouse crowdfunding campaign scheduled to start that very day was cancelled, and that their platform was off-limits to us due to some unspecified associations with some unidentified badthinkers. So, naturally, they emailed us today wanting to know why we’d missed our launch date.

Hypergamouse Volume 1’s launch date has passed. How can we help?

Hypergamouse Volume 1 was scheduled to launch on 09/12/24.

Have your plans changed? Did we miss your launch? Let us know so we know how best to support you.

Have any questions? E-mail us at crowdfunding@backerkit.com or just reply to this email.

I sent them what in the circumstances can only be considered a measured response:

You banned our campaign, you morons. Did you somehow forget that? How can you help? It’s a little late for that now. We were reliably informed that your decision is final. We’re going back to our previous crowdfunding partner.

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After Action Report

The Based Book Sale reports a successful campaign:

The latest Based Book Sale completed with Amazon reporting a total of 152 Kindle Free E-books and 1748 Kindle Paid E-Books sold to based readers. That doesn’t include sales authors made themselves or through channels outside Amazon, so the actual totals – judging by the reports authors have been sending me – are significantly higher.

Top authors included Vox Day, John C. Wright, Edward Gibbon, David Herod, Robert Kroese, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Michael F. Kane, M.D. Boncher, Edgar Rice Burroughs, G.K. Chesterton, J. M. Anjewierden, Travis Corcoran, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Hans G. Schantz, David Lindsay, Richard Nichols, Milo James Fowler, Jacob Calta, and Robert E. Howard. That’s quite a remarkable line-up, and highlights the Based Book community’s interest in both modern-day masters and the great creators of old.

I saw many participants’ tweets promoting the sale come across my feed. And we got an excellent boost from Vox Day, Liberty’s Torch, and Anonymous Conservative.

Thanks to all the authors who participated, to Hans for setting it up, and most of all, to those of you who took advantage of the sale to check out new books and new authors. It’s efforts like these that provide the foundations for the alternative platforms that are so desperately needed. I’ll check Amazon later today to determine the delta between books reported to the sale and books actually sold.

Now, let’s get some reviews up there for all those books!

DISCUSS ON SG

SG PSA

From the SG devs:

SocialGalactic is in the process of moving servers, as of now. Service is functional, but may be spotty for the next 24 hours or so, and we do not guarantee that all posts and/or images will be carried over from more than 24 hours PRIOR to this post.

Another Assassination Attempt

It appears Clown World isn’t confident it can execute another election steal:

Former President Trump narrowly survived yet another assassination attempt after a sniper with a scoped AK-47 rifle got within a few hundred yards of him as he played golf at his West Palm Beach, Florida club on Friday.

It is the second time a madman armed with an assault rifle has tried to kill the 45th president in two months.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said the suspect had taken cover near a chain-link fence between 300-500 yards away from Trump, but conceded, “with a rifle and scope like that is not a long distance.”

Law enforcement sources told The Post that the suspect is 58-year-old Ryan Routh of Hawaii.

He had set up a GoPro camera on the fence with the apparent intent of recording the shooting.

A Secret Service agent first spotted the suspect as he stuck the barrel of his rifle through a chain link fence on the outskirts of Trump International Golf Course West Palm Beach South. The agent, who was a golf hole ahead of Trump, opened fire on the suspect — who then fled the scene, Bradshaw told reporters Sunday night.

It’s a very good thing it wasn’t the Secret Service detail from the last attempt on duty. At this point, why not lock it down? Trump doesn’t need to be out exposing himself to the public in order to win.

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He Had it Coming

A horrific case of lethal lutrinaphobia in Washington:

Horror erupted at a Washington marina when a child was dragged off of a dock and into the water by a territorial river otter.  The unnamed child, who was taking a stroll with his mother on the dock, was suddenly dragged off by a river otter in a rare attack at Bremerton Marina in Kitsap County on September 12.

The mother bravely fought back to get her child out of the water once they resurfaced. But the otter was unrelenting and bit the child in the arm as they were lifted into the air. The otter continued to chase them down the dock until they were out of harm’s way.

I think we all know that the “unnamed child” was obviously to blame. No otter would ever attack anyone without severe provocation that absolutely required action. It was clearly a case of justifiable assault, and what a tragedy that a noble otter should be hunted down and executed for merely defending himself and his territory. #TeamOtter

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The Slow Death of Suburbia

As a Generation X suburbanite, I was given the opportunity to grow up with one of the more idyllic childhoods ever known to human history. But the unique factors that made the American suburb possible in the first place have been systematically eliminated, thereby rendering them, like the USA itself, unsustainable.

Visit old neighborhood for the first time since 2009. 30% of the houses have been on the market for 5 years. Average age has doubled, nobody who grew up there can afford to live there. Aunt gets emotional talking about the lack of kids in the neighborhood on Halloween. House across the street is a revolving door of Indian immigrants with vehicles and garbage on the lawn. Was my hometown just unlucky, or has the upper middle class suburb died a slow painful death in the past 15 years?

Unfortunately, the Boomers who raised their children in the suburbs were never committed to those communities the way people who grew up in small towns and city neighborhoods were. The suburb was populated by transients; the homes were never designed or intended to be handed down over the course of generations, nor, for the most part, were they. Everything from property and inheritance taxes to reverse mortgages and Boomer consumption patterns militate against the survival of the suburb in America.

Contra the lies of the Hellmouth’s urbanites, Suburbia was a wonderful place to live, even if it was a consequence of American atomism and the geographic dispersion of the American family. But it’s hard to imagine much of it lasting another 70 years.

DISCUSS ON SG

Vaxx-Cancer Link Confirmed

We’d already figured this out due to observing the huge increase in turbo cancers, but now it’s been proven beyond any possible shadow of a doubt.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based vaccine maker Moderna has confirmed that its mRNA Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) injections could cause cancer. The company made this admission in patent filings disclosed by Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, during a hearing led by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). According to Malone, Moderna’s patent shows that its vaccine contains billions of DNA fragments and other contaminants linked to birth defects and cancer.

So now we know that both Modern and Pfizer knew their products could do what they have been observed to do. If you’ve been vaxxed with either a Moderna or Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, be sure to stay up-to-date on your various health checks, and if you’re in remission from any sort of cancer, get checked early and often. While the two vaxxes don’t appear to cause new cancers, at least not yet, they do appear to be causing any existing cancer cells to wake up and aggressively multiply.

The several oncologists who have written to me about this uniformly report that they’ve never before witnessed their patients in remission succumbing so rapidly to cancers that had, prior to the vaxx, not been showing any signs of returning.

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Authors Sue ChatGPT

I’m not privy to the technical details, but based upon what I understand of how AIs are trained and how they work, I suspect the authors have a very strong case against the defendants.

John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin are among 17 authors suing OpenAI for “systematic theft on a mass scale,” the latest in a wave of legal action by writers concerned that artificial intelligence programs are using their copyrighted works without permission.

In papers filed Tuesday in federal court in New York, the authors alleged “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights” and called the ChatGPT program a “massive commercial enterprise” that is reliant upon “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

The suit was organized by the Authors Guild and also includes David Baldacci, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand among others.

“It is imperative that we stop this theft in its tracks or we will destroy our incredible literary culture, which feeds many other creative industries in the U.S.,” Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said in a statement. “Great books are generally written by those who spend their careers and, indeed, their lives, learning and perfecting their crafts. To preserve our literature, authors must have the ability to control if and how their works are used by generative AI.”

The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorized, and detailed outline for a prequel” to “A Game of Thrones” that was titled “A Dawn of Direwolves” and used “the same characters from Martin’s existing books in the series “A Song of Ice and Fire.”

AI is a fantastic tool, but just because it allows the less creative and the less talented to better exploit their imaginations, that doesn’t give anyone the right or the permission to tread upon the legal rights of others.

I’m a strong skeptic of copyright, particularly beyond the life of the author, but the fact is that it exists and while neither a title nor a style can be protected, the characters and existing works are. There really isn’t any difference between a human writing a pastiche – like Scalzi did with Old Man’s War or I did with “The Deported” – and an AI-written text that imitates an author’s style. That is, and should be, permissible.

The problem, of course, is that most people aren’t content with that, and they want to cross the line into the theft of the author’s actual characters and storylines. And if the AI manufacturer’s aren’t preventing their tools from being used in that manner, they are clearly complicit in the violations.

Regardless, AI is going to destroy the popular book market for the vast majority of writers. Because no author can compete with an automated book factories of the sort that AI now permits. In fact, we will probably explore creating one ourselves; some incredible and innovate sagas are going to be produced with these new tools.

Amazon is also limiting authors to three new self-published books on Kindle Direct per day, an effort to restrict the proliferation of AI texts.

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