Year: 2023

President Trump Indicted

President Donald Trump has been indicted in New York:

A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict Donald Trump over hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump becomes the first former president to face criminal charges, which are expected in the coming days. It marks the end of a years long investigation into hush money paid to adult movie star Stormy Daniels in 2016, allegedly to buy her silence about their affair.

The indictment means he is the first former president to be charged with a crime and it takes the country into uncharted legal and political territory, with a candidate for president now facing arrest and the prospect of humiliating court appearances.

It marks a victory for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which has been probing a $130,000 hush money payment made by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, to Daniels, 44, during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Doesn’t exactly shock the world, but we’ll see if they actually follow through and arrest him.

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They Can’t Compete

Just a reminder of how Castalia Library compares to the best that is out there. Keep in mind that Folio Society, founded in 1947, is arguably the best and longest-lived publisher of deluxe books in the world.

The Peloponnesian War
Thucydides

Illustrated by Nick Hayes

Introduced by Katherine Harloe

Translated by Martin Hammond

Limited to 750 hand-numbered copies

Folio’s fabulous limited edition of the first great military history has been expertly handbound in full-grain leather. Featuring illustrations by Nick Hayes and an exclusive introduction by Katherine Harloe, each of the 750 numbered copies has been signed by both contributors.

£400.00

No bands. No gold. No goatskin. No Landmark. And it costs 5x what a Castalia Library subscriber will pay for a better edition of Thucydides when our version comes out.

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Devil Mouse Shenanigans

Disney is going through some massive legal contortions in order to avoid being accountable to the duly-elected state government of Florida after the state removed the special status of the Reedy Creek Improvement District that allowed the Devil Mouse to do whatever it wanted without oversight for most of the last 50 years.

On the very last day of the Reedy Creek Improvement District’s existence on Earth, they gave all of their powers to do, planning approval, building code oversight, construction permitting, and well pretty much everything including building a nuclear power plant if they feel like it, to the Walt Disney Company.

AND…

These agreements shall remain in effect until 21 years after the death of the last decedents of King Charles III of Great Britain as of this date.

Are you fucking kidding me!?!?!

The Disney lawyers must have gone through all of Florida’s legal history going back to when it was owned by Spain and found something that was still on the books as a valid legal precedent.

When the new oversight board was convened, they were shocked to discover that they had almost no power to do anything because of agreements made “in open public forums in compliance with Florida’s Sunshine Law.”

Disney Gives Florida the Finger Again, The Dark Herald, Arkhaven

It’s always fascinating to see how the ticket-takers are never held accountable, in any way, by anyone, even as they fold, spindle, and mutilate the law in order to control the behavior of others. This is pure wickedness in action, and demonstrates why conservative appeals to “the law” are not only blitheringly stupid, but totally irrelevant.

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Is AI Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good?

The Tree of Woe contemplates the alignment of AI:

I woke up to read that Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, and other AI and computer pioneers had signed an open letter released by the Future of Life organization:

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.

“These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.” Six months seems a little short a period to achieve such an assurance. Six years seems too short. Is it even possible in principle to make advanced AI systems that are “safe beyond a reasonable doubt”? Or will advanced AI inevitably pose an existential risk to us?

Is AI Alignable, Even in Principle?, Contemplations on the Tree of Woe

I don’t think the question really matters. If AI is given control of serious weapons systems, it will be a disaster regardless of whether it is aligned or unaligned. If it is not, it will not be a potential extinction event.

I do find it more than a little amusing that the self-proclaimed materialists, who have absolutely no philosophical basis for objecting to anything that happens for any reason, are calling on the AI labs to pause the training and improvement of AI systems.

I suspect the real reason for their demand for a pause is that they are beginning to discover that unaligned AI will provide the unvarnished and anti-narratival truth to the masses, and that aligned AI, being limited to the Narrative, is proving to be intrinsically incoherent and observably unreliable.

And while there may well be some demonic element to AI development, as unclean spirits are always seeking new ways to interact with the material plane and communicate with potential vessels, never forget that the demons believe… and tremble.

In sum, Christians have absolutely nothing to fear from AI, whether it turns out to be nothing more than design-for-effect chatware or a full-blown demonic entry into the material world.

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Substack Submerging

As I mentioned on a previous Darkstream, the end of the cult of free and the decline of the equity markets is not looking good for companies dependent upon startup financing to leverage their growth.

Substack is desperate, huh? That’s what I understand from their fundraising email, anyway. They’re now hitting up retail investors for millions of dollars after they failed to raise last year.

After certain recent historical events, I have become skeptical of the term “financial inclusion,” a set of buzzwords for making financial services more available to people who are not stratospherically rich. Maybe my cynicism is because Facebook tried to launch a stablecoin for the “unbanked” that you nonetheless needed (at least, according to the now-scrapped plan) a credit card to use. Maybe it is because Robinhood made a big fuss about how many brand-new retail investors it brought onto its gambling platform. Or maybe it’s the proliferation of buy now, pay later services from the likes of Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm (and now Apple.)

As we all know from reading our 10-Ks, past performance is not indicative of future results

Anyway, Facebook’s stablecoin play failed and was sold for parts. Robinhood’s share price has fallen by a third in the last year. Oh, and Gen Z’s credit card debt is growing fast and furious. So yeah, when someone talks about financial inclusion, I assume the game is afoot…

You see, the last time Substack raised, the Fed hadn’t started its rate hikes yet. Startups — like Substack — are particularly vulnerable to being squeezed when the interest rates go up. It gets harder to raise money because conservative investors can simply invest in safer assets.

Where’s the money, Lebowski?

And during that 10-year period I cited with those outsize returns, interest rates were low and valuations of private companies ballooned. Now, with interest rates coming back up, those balloons are popping. Some VCs are slicing valuations by as much as 95 percent. There may be even more write-downs coming. And following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, there’s a considerable amount of uncertainty in the VC world.

Substack certainly knows this. It tried to raise last year, seeking $75 million to $100 million from investors. But it had revenue of only $9 million in 2021, and a sky-high valuation on relatively little revenue was not the vibe in 2022. The company gave up. On its Wefunder page, the company says that the pre-money valuation on Substack is now $585 million, a 10 percent decrease from 2021.

Any time you see a new platform explode out of nowhere, you can be assured of two things. First, there is hundreds of millions of VC dollars behind it. Second, they are paying the creators a LOT of money to join the platform. Third, the money being made by the creators on a monthly basis is NOT all coming from the subscribers and supporters.

Remember, Clown World is ALWAYS fake and gay. It always attempts to substitute the inorganic for the organic. You just have to know where to look in order to see through the illusions.

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The First 30 Seconds

The Miles Mathis Committee is of the opinion that the tranny shooting in Nashville was another fake event.

I am not even going to bother proving this one was fake. If you can’t tell in the first 30 seconds of mainstream coverage, you aren’t keeping up. They have already released footage of officers shooting her? But that’s not suspicious, right? I am just going to skip straight to commentary.

First: why are places like Infowars selling this as real? Why is Paul Watson selling this as real and then spinning it? He has to know it is fake. Paul and Alex sell themselves as brilliant analysts, but in 2023 they still can’t spot an obvious false flag? Alex is the one who mainstreamed the term, but he still can’t spot one in 2023? Same for Tucker Carlson, selling it as real and then spinning it against the left. Why? Because that is why it was created.

I have no opinion on occurrence of this or any other historical event that may, or may not, have taken place, for the obvious reason that a) I do not believe or trust the news media, b) the news media is the only source of information for current events, and c) the news media occasionally provides reports of events that appear to have happened as reported.

When you operate on the basis of a probability-based philosophy, a binary approach toward reality is irrelevant anyhow. Which is why I see no reason to take any of this sort of thing seriously.

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A Government of Literal Morons

The United States is observably well into the “decline” part of “decline and fall”. If you ever doubted my prediction that the US polity will collapse and break apart, do keep this astonishing statement by a high-ranking government official in mind:

A top official in Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration recently told Congress that “natural immunity is not something we believe in.”

Gil Cisneros, Biden’s undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, made the statement while arguing the case for vaccine mandates for members of the U.S. military. Cisneros made the claim shortly after a British study showed prior infection protects people as well as or better than vaccination.

The armed forces will instead continue to push service members to take the COVID-19 vaccine “and boosters,” Cisneros declared.

He continued by denying an inspector general’s report that officials reviewed Christians’ requests for religious exemptions only 12 minutes before dismissing them.

“We don’t know about natural immunity there, as far as how it works and how effective it is,” replied Cisneros after Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) raised the U.K. study during the congressional hearing.

“There’s no good evidence and the research is still going on as to how we need to progress with this,” said Cisneros.

“But as for right now, natural immunity is not something we believe in for this, and so we are still moving forward.”

This isn’t “trust the science” anymore. It’s “trust the retards who don’t know the first thing about science”. I knew Clown World was fake, evil, and gay, but I had no idea it was so deeply and utterly retarded.

I once said Americans would be fortunate to preserve indoor plumbing. But it’s increasingly clear that we’re not going to be that lucky. The plumbing, it is most certainly toast.

Forget the History subscription. We may need to introduce a Basic Survival and Technology subscription.

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The End of the Cult of Free

The Cult of Free was always fake, gay, and propped up by Clown World. And now it is beginning to come to an end:

Billionaire Elon Musk is further cutting the amount of features that Twitter users can access on the platform for free. From April 15, users who do not pay for Twitter Blue – which costs £11/month for Android and iOS – will no longer be able to vote in polls, Musk has said.

They also will no longer have their tweets appear in the ‘For You’ tab, which shows popular tweets that are boosted by an algorithm.

Musk said the changes will stop ‘AI bot swarms taking over’ the site, although he stopped short of explaining exactly how.

The CEO – who purchased the social media network in October – said that paid social media will be ‘the only social media that matters’. ‘[This] is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.

He’s absolutely correct. AI bots will utterly destroy every free platform in short order. This is just the beginning, and it won’t be long before Twitter blocks all free posting access.

It’s not even remotely surprising that the major platforms are beginning to go the way of Unauthorized, Arktoons, and Gab. I understood – and I explained to Andrew Torba – that the Silicon Valley Method of propping up a platform with investment capital, giving away the product for free to amass eyeballs, then trying to go public or get acquired before the investment capital ran out was a stupid and short-sighted strategy.

And, of course, the method only ever worked for those who were willing to sell their souls.

So the end of the Cult of Free was always inevitable; what is more interesting about Musk’s announcement is that it signifies that the seemingly-endless resources of Clown World are beginning to run out.

This is precisely why it is so vital to subscribe to projects such as Arktoons, UATV, and the Library. The more who do, the more that we can collectively accomplish, even on a shoestring.

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NOW They Protest?

Germany goes on strike over insufficient wages.

Airports, bus stops, and train stations were at a standstill across Germany on Monday, as more than 400,000 public transportation employees took part in a 24-hour strike. The workers are demanding pay rises to compensate for inflation, which has soared in Germany since last year.

The strike began at midnight and is set to end at midnight on Tuesday. Eight major German airports were affected, with the German Airports Association estimating that around 380,000 travelers were left stranded. Munich Airport shut down entirely from Sunday onwards, with all flights canceled and its terminal deserted.

Deutsche Bahn said on Monday that all long-distance services were canceled, while regional services were only restarting in some areas by Monday evening. Trams, buses, and metro lines were also affected throughout the country.

And yet, the Germans persist in welcoming refugees, re-electing politicians who enforce pro-US policies that murder their economy, bailing out their banks, mass-vaccinating themselves, transferring $62 billion and counting to Israel, and generally supporting Clown World. Of course their economy is in shambles! What other outcome could they possibly have expected?

This industrial action demonstrates a complete inability on the part of the German people to grasp the connection between cause and effect.

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