Author: VD

CBS News Radio (1927-2026)

Another casualty of technology + social justice: CBS News Radio ceases broadcasting tonight.

CBS News Radio, which provides news programming to an estimated 700 stations spanning the United States, will sign off the air Friday night after nearly a century of broadcasting. The storied service, launched in September 1927, was home to broadcast legends Edward R. Murrow, Robert Trout, Douglas Edwards, Charles Osgood, Dan Rather and many other familiar and trusted voices over its decades in operation.

“It’s been around for a long time. Really, an American institution is what we’re losing here,” said Steve Kathan, the longtime anchor of the CBS World News Roundup.

“CBS Radio should be remembered for becoming a national institution very important to the development of news other than newspapers,” Rather recently told “CBS Sunday Morning.” “It, for many, many years, was a part, and I would argue not a small part, of what held the country together.”

The decision to shutter the radio news service was announced in March, with the company citing “challenging economic realities.”

Once you cease to be useful to the Black Rider, you will be thrown from the high horse. And if CBS News Radio was a part of holding the country together, it was doing so for the benefit of the ruling elite. Obviously that same elite now has other instruments capable of fulfilling the same function.

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Rethinking University

Now even women are beginning to realize that a college degree is a terrible investment of time and money that accomplishes little more than put a young person into lifelong debt. And this is in the UK, where the degrees are less expensive and the debt can be eliminated after 30 years.

I was 18, full of hope and expectation, with three years ahead of me studying English Literature and the authors I loved, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf.Seven years on, though, and life looks very different.
Yes, I had a great time. I read a lot of books, made lifelong friends and played masses of sport. But was any of it truly worth it? Financially, professionally, socially and even in terms of ‘real’ education – would I have been better off turning around, dumping my gown on the floor of my halls, heading back down the M1 and buckling down to a proper job?
Let’s take the money first. By the time I’d finished my undergraduate degree in 2022 – followed by a one-year Masters in English Literature at Bristol University then a journalism qualification – I’d borrowed nearly £60,000, despite doing part-time jobs throughout.
Two years on from finishing my further education, and now that I’m earning a fairly typical graduate salary, thanks to the appalling interest rate my student loan balance stands at £76,227.49. In the past five months, I’ve contributed £335 towards the loan, yet the total amount has risen by £627.49.
I’m essentially paying a ‘graduate tax’ of nine per cent of my gross income for the course of my working life. I may never pay the loan back – 44 per cent of graduates won’t, according to the Government’s own figures – and it’s only scant comfort that the debt will be wiped after 30 years.
Durham is generally seen as one of Britain’s better universities, perhaps second only to Oxbridge. So if I feel like this, what about the 2.86 million other students currently enrolled in other universities across the country?

Only ten percent of men used to attend university back in the time when a university degree actually meant something, and that was largely because only the true cognitive elite attended. There is absolutely no reason for most men and virtually all women to pursue a university degree, as doing so virtually guarantees a suboptimal life track compared to not wasting 4-5 years out of the workforce, gaining no experience, being ideologically indoctrinated by wicked retards, and ending up saddled with lifelong debt.

UPDATE: Here is a comprehensive return-on-investment calculator for virtually every institution of post-high school learning in the USA, but keep in mind that the return-on-investment doesn’t include debt, so the debt calculations need to be compared to the hypothetical ROI.

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The Ceasefire Holds

Most likely until June. But probably not much longer:

The Hajj is the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and is one of the Five Pillars of Islam — the core religious obligations that define Muslim practice. Every Muslim who is physically and financially able is required to perform the Hajj at least once in their lifetime. This obligation is drawn directly from the Quran and the example of the Prophet Muhammad. The pilgrimage takes place during the Islamic lunar month of Dhul Hijjah — specifically on the 8th through 13th days — meaning it falls on different dates each year in the Gregorian calendar. This year, it is May 24… Sunday next.

Hajj is the largest annual human gathering on earth. In a normal year, roughly 2–3 million pilgrims from approximately 180 countries converge on Mecca and its surrounding sites over a period of five days. Saudi Arabia issues Hajj visas and imposes quotas on each country to manage the crowds. While in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim pilgrims will engage in a number of observances that will end on 31 May.

On the other hand, it’s not impossible that the Epstein Alliance would regard the Hajj as protection against Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia, but that strikes me as excessively risky for the US decision-makers. And even though it might make for a spectacular false flag, the blowback on it would be too risky for even the desperate Netanyahu regime.

UPDATE: Even arch-neocon Donald Kagan is beginning to realize that it was a mistake for Israel to press the USA into this ill-considered war against Iran:

According to one U.S. official, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire” after the call with Trump—for good reason. The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.

Rather like a lawsuit, it’s always a bad idea to engage in an unnecessary war. It’s always more difficult, more expensive, and takes longer than the advocates ever imagine. And that’s when you win! One important lesson of military history is that many of the most painful military defeats have been suffered by the side that genuinely believed it couldn’t lose.

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Arkhaven Nights

Don’t miss it tonight on UATV at 7 PM Eastern! First we’re discussing Based Books with the Based Books man himself, Hans Schantz. Then we’ll be joined by The Legend Chuck Dixon.

UPDATE: The stream crashed. Apologies. We’ll sort it out for next time.

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Based Books Day 1

The first day of the Based Book Sale was won by a man dead for more than a century.

Benito María de los Dolores Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) who was regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Miguel de Cervantes has taken the gold in the first day of the 2026 Summer Based Book Sale. Trafalgar, the first volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain — sold fifty copies in the first day of the week-long sale.

Closely following in second place with 48 sales and the silver is Sarah Hoyt’s No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly).

The rest of the trilogy is available through the Summer Based Book Sale and also stands in fourth place with 40 sales.

Hardcoded: AI and the End of the Scientific Consensus (The Mathematics of Evolution) by Vox Day and his AI associate, Claude Athos, captured the bronze with 46 sales.

It’s wonderful to see people discovering Pérez Galdós, who is a novelist of the first rank despite being nearly unknown to the English-reading public.

I will confess that I don’t quite understand exactly how the rankings are compiled – I assume through the official affiliate links – since I see 10 more sales for Hardcoded than for Trafalgar, but regardless, it’s great to see people checking out Pérez Galdós because there are a lot more volumes of the Episodios Nacionales to come. As you can see, we’ve already got next week’s translation ready to go to the translation subscribers on Monday.

There are a lot of good books available in the Based Books Sale. There are at least four that I’m planning to read myself. And while we’re on the topic of books, the following print editions are now available via NDM Express:

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Running Out of Steam

Peter Turchin calculates that the Ukraine war will be over later this year:

The Persian Gulf war of USA/Israel against Iran has largely displaced reporting on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Reading the news on mainstream media one may think that this war, now in its fifth year, is still in stalemate; or even that the tide is turning against Russia (Washington Post: Putin remark on war ‘coming to a close’ points to exhaustion, not peace, analysts say; NYT: I’m the Foreign Minister of Sweden. Don’t Overestimate Russia).
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But quantitative models of attritional warfare say otherwise: Russia continues to dominate the battlefield and the eventual outcome, barring a Black Swan event, is inevitable defeat of Ukraine. My readers may know that three years ago I developed a an Attritional Warfare Model, AWM (based on the Lanchester equations) for forecasting this war’s outcome.

More recently a similar conclusion was reached by Warwick Powell (see Estimating Trajectories in Attritional Warfare: The Russia-Ukrainian Conflict Through a Quantitative Lens). Powell used a similar model, with the most important difference being the choice of the end point. My model assumes that the war ends when the level of casualties, as a percentage of population, exceeds a certain threshold, which I estimated via a sample of past attritional wars from the Correlates of War data.

Powell, alternatively, assumes that the beginning of the end for Ukraine will happen when its army size declines below a certain threshold (0.65-0.73 of the initial size of 550,000). From that point, Ukrainian losses will accelerate and the full collapse will happen once the army size is below 50% of the prior peak. Powell’s model predicts that the tipping point will happen in July-September (updated on May 14).

Naturally, this is only a model-based forecast, not a prophesy. There is a lot of uncertainty about the estimates of various parameters. Furthermore, the threshold at which collapse occurs is only imprecisely estimated. For example, it’s not clear whether the threshold of 0.65-0.73 above which the Ukrainian force can maintain its operational integrity still applies on a battlefield heavily dominated by drones. For example, a smaller force size may be sufficient to continue defending positions given an abundant supply of drones.

My model also doesn’t incorporate any possible effects of the shift to the drone warfare — simply because it hadn’t happen when I published its predictions. Determining how this technological shift affects the AWM’s predictions will have to wait until the post-mortem after the war is over and when estimates would become much more precise. However, I tried a few preliminary explorations and they suggest that the drone effect on the war trajectory is not quite as huge as might be imagined. What’s important is the casualty rate inflicted on the Ukrainian army by the Russians, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a result of artillery, air bombing, or drones.

Is Ukraine reaching its recruitment limit? This is the key factor in both our models. There are some indications that this is the case. A week ago, Branko Marcetic (using Ukrainian sources) provided some relevant numbers in a Responsible Statecraft article, Ukraine’s conscription crisis is getting increasingly bloody; While outside voices insist the war can still be won on the battlefield, young men in the country are violently resisting recruiters to stay out of it. Here are some numbers supporting this conclusion.

The number of complaints over possible violations committed by enlistment officers, received by Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets:

2022 — 18
2023 — 514
2024 — 3312
2025 — 6127

The number of violent attacks against enlistment officers shows the same trend: from 5 in 2022 to 117 in just the first four months of this year.

One can hardly blame the young Ukrainians for attacking the “enlistment officers” who are really straight-up kidnappers. At the end of the day, the odds of surviving a violent encounter with these rear-echelon thugs is a lot higher than surviving one with frontline Russian troops.

Young European men have probably already figured that out, which is why I expect any attempt by any European country to enact a draft besides Russophobic Poland and Finland to meet with literally violent resistance. Why would any European man fight to defend against civilized Russia instead of rapey third-world invaders?

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Excising the Corporate Cancer

This CEO did the right thing in firing his entire HR team, even if he still harbors misplaced confidence in the utility of Human Relations for the corpocracy:

Bolt’s CEO has defended his decision to fire the company’s entire HR team, claiming they had been ‘creating problems that didn’t exist’. Ryan Breslow, the co-founder and chief executive of US fintech firm Bolt, said the department was scrapped as part of sweeping layoffs aimed at returning the struggling business to ‘start-up mode’.

The company, which develops software designed to speed up online checkouts, cut around 30 per cent of its workforce in April in its fourth round of layoffs in as many years. Speaking at a Fortune event, Breslow said: ‘We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go.’ The 32-year-old added that HR professionals were more suited to ‘peacetime’ conditions at larger companies rather than a start-up environment focused on rapid growth and efficiency.

Bolt has since replaced the department with a smaller ‘people operations team’ responsible for employee training and support. ‘We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot,’ Breslow said.

Eliminating the HR department in its entirety was one of my top recommendations in Corporate Cancer. Like the legal department, it is entirely unproductive. But unlike the legal department, it is unnecessary, it does not mitigate risk, and it is actively counterproductive. The average company would see better results from paying their HR employees to stay home full-time without having any contact with anyone in the organization for any reason.

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They Were Better Back Then

I’m not sure comedy is even allowed in the Hellmouth these days. But we definitely didn’t know how good we had it in the 80s when great movies like Big Trouble in Little China were considered third-tier releases.

The brilliance of the movie is that it never tells Jack Burton he isn’t the hero.

That’s important because lesser versions of this script would have turned him into a joke. They would have had the universe stop every five minutes so the audience could be directed to point and laugh at the dumb white trucker stumbling through Chinatown. But Big Trouble in Little China doesn’t do that. Carpenter clearly likes Jack too much for that.

Jack is not incompetent because he’s stupid or cowardly. He’s incompetent because he has accidentally wandered into a world with a completely different operating system than the one he understands. He thinks he’s in a Seventies trucker action movie. Wang Chi knows they’re in a Hong Kong supernatural fantasy.

And the movie never breaks character on either side of that divide.

Jack keeps behaving exactly like the protagonist of a Kurt Russell action picture. He makes big speeches over the CB radio. He kicks doors open. He charges into danger with absolute confidence. The problem is that his confidence has almost no relationship with reality.

This is one of the few movies, like the first two Godfathers and the first Hangover, that I’ll find myself still watching 15 minutes after flipping past it. If you haven’t seen it, you should really give it a shot. Just don’t take it anymore seriously than it takes itself.

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