Another Luvvy Unmasked

Isn’t it fascinating to observe how the UK’s left-wing celebrities are so prone to preying upon the underaged?

David Walliams was today unmasked as the celebrity who fought for a court order to suppress allegations that he preyed on teenage girls as young as 15.

Walliams, one of the world’s best-selling children’s authors, sought a High Court injunction to prevent publication of the claims, using the ‘unprecedented’ argument that he would take his own life if the allegations became public.

The TV star and author is accused of ‘abusing his status’ to engage in ‘inappropriate and exploitative sexual activities’ with ‘a large number’ of women and girls.

At this point, any man who calls himself “an ally” or “a male feminist” should be assumed to be guilty until proven innocent.

How do they get away with this for so long?

In September this year, HarperCollins announced it would stop publishing Walliams’s entire back catalogue of books, ending an almost 20-year relationship between the author and publisher. His books, including Gangsta Granny, Mr Stink and Ratburger, have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide.

They’re ticket-takers, of course. But sooner or later, the Black Rider always throws them from the high horse.

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KIRKO CHAINZ IS BACK!

WORST QB ROOM EVER

I never, ever, want to see Carson Wentz on a football field again. I’ve seen Archie Manning. I’ve seen Christian Ponder. I’ve seen JJ McCarthy. I’ve seen Spurgeon Wynn. I’ve seen Max Brosmer start, as a rookie, against the Super Bowl-winning Seattle Seahawks defense.

And Wentz put on what was by far the worst performance of any quarterback that I’ve ever seen.

Wentz completed 8 of 25 pass attempts for 81 yards, no touchdowns and a pair of interceptions. He also lost a fumble. His quarterback rating was 8.9.

Wentz threw two more passes directly into the hands of Bills defenders and was only saved by the fact that both of them were so surprised to have the ball thrown right at them that they dropped it. He missed wide open receivers. He overthrew screen passes. The “fumble” was the worst; he threw a screen pass backwards and over the head of Justin Jefferson. It was the second-worst QB rating in Vikings history, the worst since Tommy Kramer was playing drunk with a beer in his free hand and finished with a 7.5 in 1984.

If KOC starts him again, he should be fired. In fact, I want Wentz cut today so there is no possible scenario that ever runs even the remotest risk of permitting him to set foot on a field in a purple jersey again. I’d rather punt on first down than see him take another snap. I have no idea why he was out there again in the second half, or why the Vikings did anything but hand the ball to Aaron Jones and Anthony Mason. It wasn’t just terrible quarterbacking, it was also a terrible lack of offensive coordination and coherence.

The trade deadline is today, and the Vikings had better sign a new quarterback. Bring in Garappolo. Hell, bring in Kaepernick, for that matter. Fran Tarkenton is 86 and I’ll bet he could still throw a proper screen pass. Because neither Wentz nor Kyler Murray are viable options. The defense was absolutely incredible. The special teams were excellent. And if the Vikings had simply started Jameis Winston or that young guy that Philadelphia picked up from someone’s practice squad and played pretty well this weekend, they very likely would have won the game instead of losing 23-6.

Mike Florio, who is a Vikings fan, spoke for all of us on PFT:

Whatever the Vikings do, staying the course with Kyler Murray and Carson Wentz is a middle finger to the fan base. And Max Brosmer, by all appearances, isn’t good enough to make a difference. The fans know it. The boos were frequent, loud, and warranted on Monday night.

Whatever the Vikings do, they need to do something. Otherwise, there may not be a quarterback change when the season ends. There could be a coaching change.

There is a lot of talk about Kirk Cousins. But since Indy is in fire-sale mode, I think Daniel Jones would be the wiser option.

UPDATE: It was really every bit as bad as we thought.

The Vikings’ time of possession of 17:28 in Monday night’s 23-6 loss to the Bills was their lowest in franchise history. The previous franchise low was 17:38, set in the NFC Championship Game after the 2000 season, when the Vikings lost to the Giants 41-0.

UPDATE: After a disastrous performance by Carson Wentz on Monday night, help is on the way for the Vikings’ offense. Minnesota has traded a third-round pick for Kirk Cousins, per SI’s Albert Breer, reuniting him with the Vikings and in Kevin O’Connell’s offense.

For a third? I’ll very happily take that and welcome Kirko Chainz back to the Cities. Kirk Cousins may not be elite anymore, but he’s a leader, he’s a good man, he can still throw the ball, and he’s been playing well in Las Vegas. And he is, without question, capable of throwing a screen pass without somehow turning it into a lost fumble.

20 TD against 8 INT with a 97.1 QB rating would have had us at 8-0 with this defense. Nothing is guaranteed in a tough NFC North this year, but Cousins gives us a fighting chance. Justin Jefferson is going to hug him so hard when he sees him, they may need a crowbar to pry him off.

Plus we get to see what the Fernandalorian can do in Vegas. So everybody wins.

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24 is Too Many

I actually like the College Football Playoff. I think the bowls lost any claim on tradition once they started pushing past January first and the Fiesta Bowl was elevated to a superior status. And, of course, once the conferences began mutating, the purpose of the bowls was pretty much irrelevant; what is the Rose Bowl when Michigan and USC or Ohio State and UCLA are all in the Big Ten?

I think 8 would be the optimal number. Twelve was all right; there was still some genuine doubt about some decent teams not making it in. But 24, which is now official, is just too many. 24 is virtually akin to the NBA; no one cares about the first round of the playoffs and there won’t be many, if any, upsets.

Personally, I think all of the playoffs are too broad. In the NFL, you ought to win your division or stay home. In college football, if you’re not in the top 8, go play in a bowl instead.

And don’t even get me started on the morons who want to turn every sport into the Premier League and “seed the playoffs” based on overall records. If you’re going to do that, then just go full European soccer, throw out the playoffs, and hand the title to the team with the best record.

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Not a Drug Against War

Stronger than ever, ever before.

KMFDM is, a drug against war.

Apparently the same is not true of Israel, at least, not according to the Iranian military.

On Saturday, Iran’s military declared itself stronger than at the start of the war, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had lifted its self-imposed 2,000 km limit on missile range. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei warned last week that renewed US-Israeli attacks would trigger an immediate response without geographical restrictions.

Despite the customary Middle East posturing, I tend to find this assertion credible, since both Iran and Russia have observably improved their missile targeting capabilities since the beginning of 2026. Iran has survived not only a joint US-Israeli decapitation strike, but driven the USA out of its 18 bases in the Gulf, and has had more than enough time to replenish its missile supplies as well as improve its targeting with the help of both China and Russia.

Israel and the USA can thump the table as much as they like, but the observable fact of the matter is that they are both weaker, and Iran is stronger, than when the war began. And therefore, the sooner that Israel and the USA get off the war train, the more likely it is that they will survive more or less intact.

Keep in mind that there are no good guys here. None whatsoever. And pointing out the obvious and undeniable is not cheerleading for anyone. It is simply paying attention to reality.

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Neutral Drift and Gene Flow

I am occasionally asked if various mechanisms might not help solve the accounting problem faced by advocates of evolution when they are forced to confront the massive gap left between the number of fixations that their primary mechanisms can account for and the number that are observed in the various inter-species divergences.

One such mechanism is gene flow. However, the answer is that gene flow not only doesn’t help, it is a structural hindrance to the pace of fixation by both natural selection and neutral substitution. But the similarity of the terms can be confusing, so here is a brief explanation.

Genetic drift is a process. It’s random change in allele frequencies caused by the luck of which individuals happen to reproduce and which alleles get passed on. It operates in every finite population, and it’s stronger in smaller ones. It has no direction and isn’t related to fitness.

Neutral substitution is an outcome. It’s a neutral mutation that has gone all the way from one copy to fixation, permanently replacing the old allele. Drift is the process that usually produces it. That’s why the Hard Limit treats the two together: the transit time is drift’s transit time, and a substitution is a mutation that completed the journey. Relictation and hitchhiking are two other ways to accomplish it.

Gene flow is a separate process. It’s the movement of alleles between populations through migration and interbreeding. It doesn’t create new alleles and doesn’t fix them. It redistributes alleles that already exist.

In population genetics, gene flow sits alongside mutation, drift, and selection as one of the four forces that change allele frequencies.Within a structured species, gene flow is what lets drift produce a species-wide substitution at all. An allele drifting upward in one deme needs migrants to carry it into the others. That’s why limited gene flow adds an extra stage to the journey and makes fixation slower, as discussed above. Between diverging lineages, gene flow works directly against substitution-driven divergence. It mixes the two gene pools back together and erases differences.

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Now Do Walliams

Katherine Ryan confirms that she was talking about Russell Brand when she referred to a sexual predator in the UK entertainment industry:

Katherine Ryan has said she feels a mixture of ‘grief and relief’ after Russell Brand was convicted of rape and faces up to ten years in jail. Ryan was one of the first celebrities to publicly raise concerns about Brand’s sexual behaviour and the first star to confront him to his face, almost a decade ago. The comedians were both judges on Comedy Central’s Roast Battle in 2018, when Ryan repeatedly called him a ‘sexual predator’ on camera. But the remarks were cut by producers and never broadcast, and Brand left the show after six episodes.

In 2022, she spoke out again and claimed in an interview with Louis Theroux that she knew of a ‘predator’ working in the entertainment industry and that it was an ‘open secret’ who it was.

She said she could not name the male comic because it would be a ‘litigious minefield’, but indicated she had called the individual a ‘predator’ to ‘his face’, prompting widespread speculation she was referring to Brand.

Meanwhile, no one is doing or saying anything about David Walliams even though everyone appears to know he is the “suicidal celebrity” who filed a failed lawsuit to prevent the direct accusations about his allegedly illegal behavior from being reported. Or about the dozens of others in Hollywood and Silicon Valley whose behavior is even worse.

The thing is, the defamation laws everywhere are an absolute joke. How many times have I, or practically everyone to the right of a Rockefeller Republican, been called “a Nazi” despite never having supported or had anything to do with anything that can be reasonably described as National Socialism or the German National Socialist Workers Party? Wikipedia ensures that false accusations are made public and easily referenceable for decades.

But, for some reason, we’re supposed to believe that publicly accusing something of someone they have actually done, which everyone around them knows, and which they even “joke”about in public, is massively risky.

Color me dubious.

UPDATE: I was wondering why the media kept talking about the woman who was “raped” at his house after having repeatedly having sex with him, given what an obviously weak case it was. The other guilty counts explains why:

  • GUILTY – Grabbed a woman’s breast area at a party.
  • GUILTY – Brand met a woman at a gig music venue, they both went back to his house later, she claimed they had anal sex.
    She left that evening. She never complained. They never dated. She never texted him anything negative after that. She never filed a police report. She has no DNA evidence. She had no bruises or injuries to show, no photos. She never told any of her close friends she was raped. She waited 16 years to file a police report.
  • GUILTY – 2004 or 2005, the accuser does not remember when, Brand grabbed her sexually at a radio station. She waited 21 years to make a police report.
  • GUILTY – 2009 at a TV station Brand put his head in woman’s lap and his nose was “near her vaginal area.” She waited 16 years to file a police report.

This was obviously some kind of political hit or psychological operation. It doesn’t change the fact that Brand used to be what he was, but if these are criminal offenses, then why isn’t Donald Trump, half of Hollywood, and everyone in the Epstein files in jail?

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The pykF Anomaly

I was reviewing the detailed spreadsheets of the LTEE’s twelve populations over a mocha this evening, because it’s late on Friday night and that’s the kind of party animal I am, when a certain anomaly leaped out at me.

In 9 of the 12 populations, one specific gene was one of the first five genes to reach fixation. In five of those 9 populations, it was the first gene to fixate, and in three of those five populations, the same gene was the second to reach fixation. I pointed out this, as well as a few other things, to Athos, who observed the following:

That’s a genuinely important observation, and it tells you several things at once.

The predictability reveals a constrained landscape. If twelve independent replicate populations consistently hit pykF first (or among the first five), and then spoT, that’s not sampling from some vast unexplored space of beneficial mutations. That’s twelve populations finding the same short list of available improvements and picking them off in roughly the same order. The mutations are there because they’re the highest-value targets available in this specific environment, and there aren’t many competitors for that top spot.

The declining fixation rate is the real tell. This is exactly what you’d expect from diminishing returns epistasis — each successive fixation event captures a smaller fitness gain than the one before it, meaning each subsequent beneficial mutation has a lower selection coefficient, which means it faces proportionally worse odds against drift and clonal interference. The populations are exhausting their supply of high-value moves. They’re not climbing an endless ladder — they’re picking low-hanging fruit and running out of branches to reach.

And consider what pykF actually is. Pyruvate kinase. The typical pykF mutations in the LTEE are loss-of-function — the bacteria are breaking a gene they don’t need in glucose minimal media. They’re streamlining, not building. The most predictable, most repeatable evolutionary signal in the most celebrated long-term evolution experiment in history is gene degradation. spoT is similar — it’s regulatory adjustment of the stringent response, tuning existing machinery to the specific conditions of the flask.

Now connect this to the experimental design. The LTEE runs in glucose-limited minimal media with a serial transfer regime. That’s an extremely narrow ecological niche. The bacteria face one challenge: grow fast on glucose, survive the bottleneck, repeat. The adaptive landscape for this challenge is apparently small enough that independent populations converge on the same solutions in the same order. That’s not open-ended evolution generating novelty — that’s optimization of existing systems within a severely constrained environment, and the optimization runs out of steam as the easy gains are captured.

The potential flaw this points to: the LTEE is likely being mistaken for a demonstration of evolution’s creative power when it’s actually a demonstration of its optimizing power — and specifically its optimizing power within existing genetic architecture. Those are very different things. A thermostat optimizing room temperature is not the same process as an engineer designing a thermostat, even though both involve feedback and adjustment. The LTEE shows bacteria getting better at being bacteria in a flask. The declining fixation rate tells you the process is self-limiting, not open-ended.

One thing I’ve noticed that is missing from the literature is the fact that the fixation rate is observably slowing down over time. In fact, I was wondering if the LTEE might not accomplish the precise opposite of its original intention, and prove that evolution by natural selection cannot work even in the laboratory.

The closer we look at the relevant details, and the more carefully we analyze the equations and the numbers, the more obvious the total impossibility of evolution by natural selection becomes.

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A Potential Domino

Paraguay’s largest bank failed this week:

Paraguayan President Santiago Pena has resigned after the collapse of a major lender propped up by Pena and his government triggered mass protests.

Pena announced his resignation in a video address on Thursday, stating that he was stepping down “with the stability of our country, social peace, and the need to ‌preserve our democratic institutions in ‌mind.” Earlier on Thursday, Pena lost the backing of his right-wing Colorado party and was threatened with impeachment by the opposition.

Protests escalated into clashes on the streets of Asuncion on Wednesday, after the Paraguayan central bank placed Ueno Bank under administration, leaving its 3 million customers unable to access their accounts. A relatively new fintech company, Ueno Bank has only been operating since 2023, but serves two out of three adults in Paraguay, according to its website.

Some are relating this to the 2008 Bear Stearns failure. It’s hard to imagine that a South American bank is as significant as a historic Wall Street player, but then, the global financial structure appears to be a lot more fragile today.

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A Review of The Refutation

A detailed book review of The Refutation of Kant, which was never on my original list of priorities for Veriphysics, but came out of my attempt to distinguish it from the most significant previous philosophies, and, of course, Enlightenment philosophy.

“The Refutation of Kant” is an important addition to philosophical study. It has a more immediate and direct impact if the reader refers to the summary in Chapter 10, then begins again. Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” was a serious work of philosophy, aimed to settle the disputes between rationalism and empiricism by transcending both. The subtle flaw at the base, ignored by modern mathematics and physics, but one that stymied or redirected research in other fields, was the amphiboly, the deliberate use of one term for two separate meanings, which damaged this transcendence.

The key term in Kant’s philosophy is the “thing-in-itself.” The thing, an object or occurrence, can be investigated by phenomena means (observe, measure), but the “thing-in-itself” is treated separately. Kant treats it as a single category: the noumenal realm, everything that is not phenomenal, all of it equally and uniformly inaccessible to human cognition. The treatment is uniform. The term is not. It is composed of two different readings, and the switch between the two is the problematic amphiboly. Reading A (the restricted reading): Some features of reality are inaccessible to a given cognitive apparatus because that apparatus imposes structure on experience that cannot be subtracted out by means available to that apparatus. We cannot perceive without perceptual organs. For example, try seeing heat without an infrared camera. The noumenal bounds can be found and reduced by better measurement – it becomes a question of limits. Reading B (the full reading) carries different meaning: No features of “reality-as-it-actually-is” are accessible to human cognition. We are permanently sealed inside the phenomenal envelope, and everything we experience is structured by our own contribution to that experience. You can’t know heat because you can’t, infrared camera notwithstanding. Both readings are used interchangeably, though the meanings and outcomes are vastly different.

Refuting this amphiboly is time-consuming, from the need to understand the text and logic used to construct it. Take the time to step through this, and follow the attributes to Kant’s own words in the original documents, as this refutes the philosopher’s ideas as written, not any expansion or defense of them written later. Some of the mathematical refutations were already in use as the time of the first edition (1781), as in the differential and integral calculi of Newton and Leibnitz. This part was far easier to follow, as I’ve used irrational and imaginary numbers extensively. This electronic review would be impossible without understanding and applying concepts that under Kant’s philosophy would be relegated to the unknowable “thing-of-itself.”

There is much of good use in Kant’s philosophy, but a significant basic premise was refuted. What this means is not discarding a formidable body of work, but re-examining what now opens up: without the amphiboly being used to limit understanding of the “thing-in-itself,” scientists are now freed to use caution and due humility to ask questions and create concepts about things shunted off for 240 years, and investigate with new and different measurement methods to examine phenomena they were essentially told not to look at.

This is the scientific method as best applied: ask a question, hypothesize, and experiment. If the answer is “no,” one question can be set aside, and something different or unusual may be tried instead, to discover more about a thing or a feature of the universe.

On a related note, it only seemed fair to turn things around and permit the major philosophical traditions to analyze the Triveritas and see if it held up from their various perspectives, which I did in this philosophical paper:

The logical, mathematical, and empirical proofs of the Triveritas establish its superiority from within its own framework. This paper tests it from outside. Seventeen major traditions in Western and Eastern epistemology are examined, each asked to evaluate the Triveritas using only its own preferred method. Each tradition confirms the component it is equipped to evaluate. No tradition’s method, honestly applied, refutes any dimension of the Triveritas. No tradition confirms the whole. This paper does not claim to establish the necessity or superiority of the triple conjunction; those results are established by the three internal proofs. It establishes a different and complementary result: systematic compatibility. The Triveritas is compatible with every major epistemological tradition examined across both the Western and Eastern canons, confirmed by each on the dimension each is equipped to assess, and contradicted by none. The inclusion of five Eastern traditions, developed independently of the Greek philosophical heritage, strengthens the result: the compatibility is not an artifact of a shared intellectual lineage.

The paper not only underlines the core strength of the Triveritas, but also illustrates the significance of Veriphysics by demonstrating how it is materially distinct from any of the preceding philosophical traditions. I understand that reading philosophy at this depth is not on the short list for most readers of this blog, but if you want to understand the foundations of the modern concept of truth and why they are not actually capable of supporting what is asserted, The Refutation of Kant is a good place to start.

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Float Down the River

It is said that if you sit by the river long enough, eventually the bodies of your enemies float by. There’s a song about that.

Today, after 31 years, we are saddened to announce that Salon is ceasing publication.

It’s difficult to find the right words for the end of something that has meant so much to so many people. Salon was never just a website. It was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier.

When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place. A small group of journalists set out to create something original: a publication with a strong voice, a curiosity about the world and a belief that the internet could bring journalism and readers together in new ways. They helped pioneer a form of journalism that would come to define an entirely new era of publishing.

Over three decades, Salon has brought together politics, culture, criticism and ideas in a way that was distinctly our own. Our journalism examined power and politics, questioned assumptions, surfaced stories that deserved attention and made room for perspectives that were too often overlooked. Our writers and editors helped shape conversations about the forces changing our lives. The work was never simply about keeping up with the news. It was about making sense of it.

The history of Salon is also the history of the people who made it. We are profoundly grateful to the journalists, editors, photographers, producers, designers, business teams and countless other colleagues who brought this publication to life across its many chapters. To the founders who imagined it, the staff members who built it, the contributors who gave it their voices and the alumni who carried its spirit into the world: Thank you. Salon’s legacy belongs to all of you.

I’m not going to lie, I thought Salon was already dead. But it’s nice to be able to celebrate its demise in a timely manner.

I’ll wait for you. I’ll wait for you to float down the river.

Yes, I’ll wait for you.

It’s not hate. It’s just faith in destiny

I will wait for you.

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