Author: VD

Russia Will Abandon SWIFT

Now that they know they don’t need it, there is no reason for Russia to continue to utilize the erstwhile global payment system:

The SWIFT system should be abandoned to avoid information leaks, VTB CEO Andrey Kostin said in an interview that journalist Pavel Zarubin published on his Telegram channel. “SWIFT should be simply killed, in a good sense of the word, abandoned and no longer used. This is a direct leak of information to our enemies and the main thing is that it is so easy to solve — it is a purely administrative decision, an agreement between the two parties and a few technological solutions, that’s all,” Kostin said.

Several years ago, SWIFT was the main system for processing payments — almost all banking transactions in the world went through it. But in 2014, when Western countries first threatened to disconnect Russia from the system, large countries began to create alternatives. The Financial Message Transfer System (SPFS) appeared in Russia.

It’s now only a matter of time before BRICSIA+ announces its own payment processing system, and eventually, currency. This will be a very positive thing for most people, given the way that the current payment processors play thought police and abuse their privileged positions. But it’s going to have a very negative effect on a lot of Western financial institutions.

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Germany Gives Up

Germany has stopped funding Ukraine. Which means every other European state will follow suit, especially when Trump takes office and the US gravy train stops.

Germany has officially stopped funding Ukraine.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has REFUSED to approve a further €3 billion in military aid for Ukraine.

It’s over.

The smartest thing European leaders can do now is drop all sanctions on Russia, return all the frozen funds to Russia, apologize to Vladimir Putin, and beg him to start the gas flowing to Western Europe again. It’s not smart to deny that you’ve lost an argument, a fight, or a war, because it’s an objectively obvious fact that everyone can observe.

The Allies demanded unconditional surrender from Germany. The Russians would be in their rights to do the same, but simply granting them their original demands will probably suffice. The sooner Clown World accepts that and does so, the better it will be for everyone.

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Why the NFL Fixes Games

I find it genuinely amusing that the NFL expects us to believe that the Aaron Glenn-coached defense that supposedly played “lights out” and completely dominated the 14-2 Vikings, who supposedly didn’t show up at all for their biggest game of the year, just happened to be blown off their home field by giving up 45 points to a rookie quarterback playing in his second playoff game.

  • 31 December: The Detroit Lions defensed was gashed throughout their Week 17 tilt with San Francisco. Though they were able to generate a pair of takeaways and ultimately win the game, the porous effort at times raises concerns about how the Lions’ defense will hold up in the postseason.
  • 11 January: Lions’ defense rewrites narrative in domination of Vikings. What more can you say about these Lions, who do not care what you say in the first place. But if you want their honest opinion, “it’s bulls**t,” said Alex Anzalone, the idea that the defense isn’t good enough for the team to win the Super Bowl. That was on Thursday. Three days later, Anzalone returned from a broken forearm and the Lions broke the Vikings, holding them to their fewest points of the season in the biggest game of the year.
  • 18 January: The truth is that what happened to the Lions against Washington was probably going to happen eventually. Their defense was cooked. Starters Aidan Hutchinson, Alim McNeill, Carlton Davis and Derrick Barnes were already out with injuries, and against Washington, cornerback Amik Robertson and safety Ifeatu Melifonwu left with injuries. On one of the last meaningful plays of the game, Commanders tight end Zach Ertz caught a pass for a first down and cornerback Morice Norris tackled him. Norris did not have a single tackle all year. He barely played.

The Vikings and the Redskins (aka Commanders) have similarly high-powered offenses; the reason the Vikings finished with two more wins than Washington is because the Vikings had the #5 defense in the league while the Redskins were #18. But we’re supposed to believe that the heavily-injured Lions defense magically pulled it together for one week, in between poor showings against San Francisco and Washington.

Now compare the reactions of the two NFC North coaches after their big playoff upsets. Or, in the case of the Vikings-Rams game, “upset”. One coach was calm and unfazed in the face of league-dictated defeat, the other was near-distraught after experiencing the real thing.

  • “I’ve got 100 percent confidence in our players, our coaches. We’ve got the right kind of things going on in this organization, but we’ve gotta find a way to play better as a team and complement each other and do the things we need to do to win games against the class of the NFL.”
  • “The whole point of doing what you is to get to the show, man. It’s why you play this game. And we fell. We fell short. It just hurts to lose. I don’t care if you’re the seventh seed, five seed, one seed, cause I’ve lost as all of them. And it stings and it hurts. It hurts.” Campbell was so emotional that his voice cracked as he spoke of his players.

Translation: KOC knew the Vikings weren’t going to be permitted to win either game before kickoff. Campbell knew the divisional playoff was a real game, even if it was one in which the refs were favoring them, and the Lions still couldn’t get it done.

Dante Fowler Jr. nearly had a clutch tackle for loss against running back David Montgomery on third-and-2, but the officials nullified it due to a phantom face mask call.

Note to the NFL refs: we can see that a shoulder pad is not a face mask. This is why it it is so stupid for the NFL to fix the occasional game to try to setup its ideal matchups. Because they will eventually have to go full WWE to reliably get the results they prefer, or stop trying to play puppet master and simply let the games be played. Needless to say, the latter would be preferable, as the declining TV ratings for the playoff games tend to demonstrate.

The game that was fixed last night was the Chiefs-Texans game and everyone knows it. The thumb on the scale is simply getting too heavy to avoid noticing.

  • Sports Illustrated: Patrick Mahomes followed up an absolute joke of a drawn personal foul penalty in Saturday’s 23–14 divisional round win over the Houston Texans—he wandered around the Kansas City Chiefs’ backfield like a lost old man on the beach wielding a metal detector before collapsing to the ground late, causing two defenders who were unable to redirect themselves to fall over him at the last second—with a second attempt to bait Texans defenders into a flag-worthy hit eight plays later… This isn’t just conspiratorial trash can banging by the way. The Associated Press noted that, since the 2022 postseason began, the Chiefs have gotten five roughing the passer calls in critical loser-goes-home games. Their opponents have not gotten one. This is enabling at its finest... After the game was over, Texans coach DeMeco Ryans said his team knew coming into the game that it was them against everybody. 
  • Outkick the Coverage: The Kansas City Chiefs are easy to like for a lot of different reasons, but when NFL officiating gets involved it ruins things for a lot of people. It adds legitimacy to the conspiracy theory that the Chiefs have allies wearing stripes in every game.
  • Will Anderson, Texans: “We knew it was going to be us versus the refs going into this game.”

You know what they say about conspiracy theories: they’re just spoiler alerts from people who pay closer attention than most. The NFL appears to take four approaches to its games:

  1. Let them play. This is how most games appear to go.
  2. Keep it close. When one team gets a big lead, the winning team is informed that the game is de facto over, then both teams put on a display as the losing team comes back, makes it close, but falls short in the end. This is excusable interference due to the unwillingness of about half the viewership to watch games that are not close. It’s a business, after all. Both Vikings-Packers games were good examples of this; after going up 28-0 at halftime, the Vikings did nothing for the last two quarters until their final possession, when they closed out a 31-29 win.
  3. Thumb on the scale. This is the sort of game that we saw with the 49ers and Patriots for years, and now with the Chiefs. One team gets all the calls at all the crucial moments, and while the other team is permitted to try to overcome them, it doesn’t happen very often. Last night’s game was an obvious example of this. The Lions also benefited from the referee’s calls, but it wasn’t enough.
  4. The straight fix. Both the Vikings-Lions and the Vikings-Rams games were clear-cut examples of this; I suspect the complete inability of the Vikings to keep either game close was a passive protest by KOC. The Rams appear to have replaced the Lions as the league’s preference this year due to the LA fires. If the 2009 narrative is any guide, we’ll see a Rams victory in the Super Bowl, presumably over the Chiefs or Ravens.

The NFL is an entertainment product run by a very smart business enterprise. Which is why I have every confidence that the league’s strategists will realize that the optimal level of influence is minimal, and its interference with the organic results should be focused on maximizing viewers on a game-by-game basis, not a seasonal narrative one.

UPDATE: Mike Florio is concerned that the 45-point debacle might cost Aaron Glenn a shot at being hired as a head coach.

Yes, the Lions gave up 481 yards. Yes, Washington’s average gain was 6.6 yards per play. But the Lions’ defense was besieged with injuries, all season long. It was one after another after another, after another. And Glenn did a masterful job in Week 18, holding the Vikings to nine measly points.

Yeah, so, about that “masterful job”…

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Generational Length Update

It was brought to my attention that even the increase from 20 years to 27.5 years was insufficient, given the scientific evidence updating the observed length of a historical human generation:

As early as 1973, archaeologist Kenneth Weiss questioned the accepted 20 and 25-year generational intervals, finding from an analysis of prehistoric burial sites that 27 years was a more appropriate interval, but recognizing that his conclusion could have been affected if community members who died away from the village were buried elsewhere. When assigning dates to anthropologically common ancestors 50 or more generations in the past, using the “accepted” 20 or 25 years as a conversion factor can produce substantial underestimates of the time interval. Nevertheless, those unsupported values continue in use, even in recent scientific papers.

In the first of the three more recent studies of generation length, sociologist Nancy Howell calculated average generational intervals among present-day members of the !Kung. These are a contemporary hunter-gatherer people of Botswana and Namibia whose life style is probably close to that of all our pre-agricultural ancestors in the dim past. The average age of mothers at birth of their first child was 20 and at the last birth 31, giving a mean of 25.5 years per female generation — considerably above the 20 years often attributed to primitive cultures. Husbands were six to 13 years older, giving a male generational interval of 31 to 38 years.

A second study by population geneticists Marc Tremblay and Hélène Vézina was based on 100 ascending Quebec genealogies from 50 randomly selected couples married between 1899 and 1974. The data came from BALSAC, an inter-university computerized research database at the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi, extracted from Quebec parish baptism and marriage registers going back to the 1600s. With an average depth of nine generations, but extending as far back as 12 or 13 generations, their sample included 10,538 generational intervals. They took as the interval the years between parents’ and children’s marriages, which averaged 31.7 years.

They also determined separate father-son and mother-daughter generational intervals, from lines that included at least five consecutive all-male or all-female generations. These averaged 35.0 years for male generations, 28.7 years for female years.

Biological anthropologist Agnar Helagason and colleagues, in the last of the three studies, used the Icelandic DeCODE genetics database, containing lineages of most Icelanders back two centuries, and much longer for many families. They computed separate patrilineal and matrilineal generation intervals over different lengths of time, to see if that produced a difference. The first values included only lines to ancestors who live in the 1848-1892 time frame, including three to five generations. Then they calculated interval lengths back to ancestors born between 1692 and 1742, extending them to a length of seven to nine generations. The results showed the most recent generations were a little shorter in length than more distant ones — the opposite of what the conventional view holds.

The female line intervals were 28.12 years for the most recent generations, 28.72 years for the whole lineage length. Male-line lineages showed a similar difference, 31.13 years for the recent generations, 31.93 overall. Based on their Icelandic findings and those of the Quebec study, they recommended using a female-line interval of 30 years and a male interval of 35 years.

This updated scientific evidence therefore requires a recalibration of the percentage of the known genetic distance for which evolution by natural selection could mathematically account.

CHLCA
Years: 9,000,000
UPDATE: Years per generation: 32.5
Generations per fixed mutation: 64
Years per fixed mutation: 2,080
Maximum fixed mutations: 4,327
Mutations required: 120,000,000
% attributable to evolution by natural selection: 0.000036, 1/27,733rd of the total required.

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Chaos in College Football

The NCAA transfer portal was just rendered irrelevant, all but eliminating the last vestige of that corrupt organization’s attempt to exert control over college football:

Thanks to decades of blatant antitrust violations that limited players to an education that didn’t begin to match the value they brought to their school, the model has collapsed in recent years — thanks to a stream of slam-dunk lawsuits attacking the habit of independent businesses coming together under the umbrella of the NCAA to rig, and to cap, labor expenses.

The latest chunk of chaos comes from the apparent collapse of the transfer portal. After Wisconsin refused to allow cornerback Xavier Lucas to enter the portal, he left the school and transferred to Miami. The NCAA, which apparently has learned the lessons of multiple failed antitrust cases, has thrown the door open for transfers beyond the parameters of the portal.

“NCAA rules do not prevent a student-athlete from unenrolling from an institution, enrolling at a new institution and competing immediately,” the NCAA said in a statement to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo.com.

That’s another way of saying the transfer portal doesn’t mean a thing. That players have the same freedom that students have to switch schools, whenever they want. Taken to its extreme, could an Ohio State player transfer to Notre Dame before Monday night’s championship game, and vice-versa? If “immediately” means immediately, maybe so.

Whether you think the recent changes in college football are positive or not – and despite the loss of some conferences and traditional rivalries to the expanded conferences and the playoff system, it’s very hard to argue that the game isn’t in better shape than it was before – the transformation of the once-regimented NCAA system into full professional free agency for the players is a complete unknown.

While the combination of the NIL payments and transfer portal have expanded the number of competitive teams, I’m not confident that this apparent move to full free agency will be good for the sport. It’s a lesson in the danger of administrative overreach; the NCAA should have been pursuing the players’ interests rather than those of the institutions. If it had, it might not have lost both its control over them as well as any influence with them.

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The Repatriations Begin

It appears President Trump may actually be serious about repatriating the millions who have invaded the USA to their own nations:

Donald Trump appears set to make good on a promise ‘border czar’ Tom Homan made to start his mass deportation program in Democrat-run Chicago shortly after his inauguration. However, the Windy City isn’t alone, according to a person with knowledge of the plans, as multi-day raids will take place coast-to-coast. ‘We’re going to be doing operations all across the country,’ the person told Reuters on Friday. ‘You’re going to see arrests in New York. You’re going to see arrests in Miami.’

Chicago appears to be first on the list, having seen more than 50,000 migrants flock to the Windy City since August 2022. Following Trump’s election in November, Mayor Brandon Johnson defended the city’s sanctuary status – as he declared that he would not allow cops to help federal ICE agents.

In December, Homan said that Chicago would be the first city set to expel illegal migrants.

The raid is expected to begin on Tuesday morning, less than 24 hours after Trump’s second inauguration. ICE will carry out the operation for an entire week and is sending between 100-200 officers to handle the job, the Wall Street Journal reported.

We’ll see if they actually follow through on this or not. It would make for a good start, although 50,000 is only a drop in the bucket out of the 50-100 million who will need to be repatriated if the USA is to be made American again. But this is the only way that a political collapse in the early 2030s could potentially be avoided.

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Gender Discrepancy in Cancer

British women under 50 are around 70 per cent more likely to develop cancer than men of a similar age, worrying data has revealed. A similar pattern has emerged in the US, with women under 50 now 82 per cent higher than men of the same age — compared to a difference of 51 per cent two decades a go. The gender discrepancy comes amid a soaring rise in disease among young people on both sides of the atlantic, with global cases of cancer in the under 50s rising by 79 per cent since the 1990s.

It’s not a mystery.

  1. Women are more likely to have taken the Vaxx.
  2. Women are more likely to be overweight.
  3. Women take far more medications.

Not all cancers are caused by lifestyle, but an awful lot of them are caused by putting things in your body that you shouldn’t. If it’s not Vitamin C or Vitamin D, don’t put it in your body unless you absolutely have to do so.

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Digging Ever Deeper

A reader who has access to the professional Gemini 1.5 AI was kind enough to ask it several of the questions concerning MITTENS that I requested from its dumbed-down public version; one thing that was interesting was that it included the actual observed distance in DNA between humans and chimpanzees, not just the protein-encoded sections of the genomes. He sent me a link to the results, a portion of which I’ve pasted here:

When you say that there is a 4 percent difference in DNA between humans and chimpanzees, approximately how many genetic fixation events are required to account for that difference?

It’s challenging to give an exact number of fixations corresponding to a 4% genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees. Here’s why:

  • Not just single base changes: The 4% difference encompasses various genetic alterations:
  • Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs): These are single base pair changes.
    Insertions and deletions (indels): Where segments of DNA are added or removed.
    Structural variations: Larger-scale rearrangements, duplications, or losses of DNA segments.
    Varying impact: Each type of change has a different impact. A single SNP in a critical gene might have a large effect, while many SNPs in non-coding regions might have little functional consequence.
  • Unknown ancestral state: Reconstructing the exact genome of the CHLCA is difficult, making it hard to trace the precise number of changes on each lineage.

However, we can make a rough approximation:

  • Genome size: The human genome is roughly 3 billion base pairs.
  • 4% difference: This equates to 0.04 * 3,000,000,000 = 120,000,000 base pair differences.
  • If we assume, for simplicity, that most of these differences are due to single nucleotide fixations, then 120 million fixations would be a crude estimate.

Important caveats:

  • Oversimplification: This ignores indels and structural variations, which contribute significantly to the 4% difference.
  • Non-uniform distribution: Changes aren’t evenly distributed. Some regions have higher variability, while others are highly conserved.
  • Functional impact varies: Not all fixations have the same functional impact.

In conclusion: While a precise number is elusive, the 4% difference likely translates to millions of genetic changes, including fixations, indels, and structural variations. This highlights the complexity of the evolutionary process and the multitude of genetic changes contributing to the differences between humans and chimpanzees.

Given the maximum possible number of fixation events since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor is 204 according to your earlier reply, is it rational to assert that evolution by natural selection has accounted for 120 million fixation events in the last nine million years?

You’re right to question that! It indeed seems contradictory. Here’s why the two numbers don’t match up and what we can learn from it. The 204 fixations figure was a highly simplified calculation. It assumed:

  • A constant rate of fixation (1,600 generations per fixation).
  • Only single gene fixations, ignoring other types of genetic changes.

Why the huge discrepancy?

We underestimated the complexity of genetic change. The 4% difference between humans and chimps includes many types of changes beyond single gene fixations. Structural variations, indels, and changes in gene regulation are crucial and likely account for a large portion of the genetic divergence.

Now, what’s important here is that even as the minimum possible number of generations has been reduced from 1,600 observed for the e. coli bacteria to 64 for the Lambda virus, the genetic difference has been rising from 30 million to 120 million due to the need to account for the fixation of the full range of the observed differences in the DNA, not just those observed in protein-coding DNA.

Furthermore, my estimate of 20 years per generation was apparently too minimal, the professional AI views a standard generation as being 27.5 years. Thus, the original equation needs to be revised as follows:

CHLCA
Years: 9,000,000
Years per generation: 27.5
Generations per fixed mutation: 64
Years per fixed mutation: 1,760
Maximum fixed mutations: 5,114
Mutations required: 120,000,000
% attributable to evolution by natural selection: 0.00004 or four-thousandths of one percent.

All that switching from the bacteria to the simpler structure of the virus accomplishes is to remove one decimal point from the improbability, from one in 240,000 to one in 23,465. However, it is obviously not even possible for a genetic mutation to fix in the entire breeding human population in 27.5 years, or any faster than that. This is the hard place that none of the evolutionists feverishly attempting to find faster mutational fixation rates have realized is there; the number of generations per fixed mutation is almost certainly closer to the 8,170 suggested by the Genghis Khan heritage than the 64 observed for the Lambda virus, although it’s probably even higher than that.

But regardless, even with the faster observed fixation rate, claiming that you believe evolution by natural selection can explain the differences between chimpanzees and humans is mathematically akin to saying that you believe your friend who says he drove the 2,790 miles that separate New York City from Los Angeles in six seconds.

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So Stop the Scripting

The NFL has clearly taken its scripting too far:

It was fitting that the NFL dropped the “Super” from “Wild Card Weekend.” The final audience numbers were less than super. Via the Associated Press, the six games played from Saturday to Monday night averaged 28.3 million per game. That’s a 9.3-percent drop from last year’s 31.2 million average.

It didn’t help that five of the games weren’t close.

My impression is that a) enough serious fans have figured out the NFL scripting process that they’ve lost interest in games where the winner is already decided and b) some of the coaches are protesting the script by refusing to keep the games that they’ve been ordered to lose close.

Both the television crews and the announcers often signal the script beforehand, so when you see it twice in a row, as Vikings fans did with the Lions and the Rams games, it’s hard to miss. And when lifelong fans turn off the game in the first quarter of what is still a close game, because they correctly anticipate the outcome, it’s clear that the NFL has gone too far in the massaging of its entertainment product.

I think the reason the Vikings were so exasperated was that it wasn’t just the second week in a row, but the second time that season against the Rams that the obvious fix was in. And if you watched the faces of KOC and Sam Bradford during the two most recent games, you didn’t see any signs of frustration or disappointment, they’re both borderline expressionless and their postgame comments were almost comically generic.

“Well, we just have to do better next time. Obviously I have to do a better job.”

Harrison Smith wouldn’t be in on it, give his position at safety, but he’s obviously figured it out too. One of the big tells about the Vikings’ comprehensive lack of effort was the way the defensive captain and best tackler on the team, nicknamed Hitman due to how hard he hits, put in an effort that looked like Deion Sanders making a business decision in his Prime Time prime on the running play that led to LA’s first touchdown.

The sad thing is that the NFL is absolutely right to put a thumb on the scale after halftime in order to keep the games close. Another amazing comeback that falls just short is acceptable because too many casual fans simply won’t watch genuine blowouts. But forcing teams to throw the game in order to stick to the script is counterproductive, because it’s becoming apparent that the players are increasingly less willing to keep it close when they have to throw the game. And eventually, someone is going to get frustrated enough to blow the whistle no matter how many tens of millions they’re being paid annually. It might be legal for the NFL to not hold genuine sporting events, but that would definitely upset the gambling applecart that is propping up the league’s advertising revenues.

UPDATE: Roger Goodell Sends Message of Support to Los Angeles Before Rams-Vikings Game. Goodell said playing the game sent a message to Los Angeles that the NFL is there for them.

And how.

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