Author: VD

The Art of War in the Taiwan Strait

The USS Abraham Lincoln has been in the Arabian Sea since January 26. The Gerald R. Ford transited Gibraltar on February 20. Thirteen Aegis destroyers, 600-plus Tomahawks in single-salvo capacity, 500 aircraft spread across bases from Jordan to Qatar—the largest American force concentration in the Middle East since 2003. Every analyst in Washington is writing about the coming air campaign against Iran. None of them are writing about what matters, which is that Beijing is using this spectacular distraction to take Taiwan without an amphibious landing, without a naval engagement, and without a shot fired.

To understand why the Iran crisis is a feature and not a bug from the Chinese strategic perspective it is first, necessary to understand what actually happened in June 2025, as opposed to what the censors convinced the media happened.

The air superiority story was real. Israeli F-35s and F-15s operated with impunity over Iran. The IRIAF’s fleet of pre-1979 American hand-me-downs was irrelevant. Israel struck 1,480-plus targets and the B-2s hit Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz. This is not in dispute.

What is has mostly been suppressed is the cost of defending against Iran’s response. Iran launched roughly 550 ballistic missiles and over 1,000 drones during the Twelve-Day War. The official “90% interception rate” is a masterwork of selective statistics: it describes the success rate of attempted intercepts. Al Jazeera’s analysis found that of 574 missiles, only 257 were engaged at all. The remaining 317 were never intercepted. Of the 257 attempts, 201 succeeded, 20 partially, 36 failed.

The damage to Israel, the extent of which is still under military censorship, included a direct hit on the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv that rendered Netanyahu’s office unusable for four months, confirmed satellite imagery of structural damage at Tel Nof Airbase, devastation of the Beersheba cyberwarfare base, $150-200 million in damage to the Haifa oil refinery, and at least five military facilities directly struck according to the Telegraph. Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker reported that “many strikes went unreported” and that “we were also deterred.” So much for the clean victory.

But the damage to Israel is secondary. The primary problem is the damage to the interceptor stockpile. The United States expended approximately 150 THAAD missiles in twelve days—roughly 25% of total production since 2010. Eighty-odd SM-3s were consumed. Israel was running low on Arrow interceptors by war’s end. FY26 authorized procurement of 37 new THAAD rounds. Twelve days of defending against 500 missiles consumed years of production and a quarter of the cumulative stockpile.

Iran began the war with 2,500-3,000 missiles. They fired 550. This means Iran retained 1,950 to 2,450 missiles post-war. They’ve had eight months to build and otherwise acquire more missiles, disperse them, and harden their launch sites. The interceptor math does not work for a second round. This is not analysis. It is arithmetic. And the more significant danger is if either the Chinese or the Russians have helped them reduce their margin of error from 1 kilometer to 500 meters or less.

Just this week, something happened that the press mentioned in passing and clearly failed to understand the implications. The PLA and MizarVision published high-resolution satellite imagery pinpointing American military assets across the Middle East. Eighteen F-35s and six EA-18G Growlers at Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan. Patriot positions at Al Udeid. THAAD deployments in Jordan. The PLA produced a video titled “Siege of Iran” showing eight US bases under continuous satellite surveillance, with real-time maritime tracking of carrier groups via Yaogan satellites.

This was not an intelligence leak. It was a gift to Tehran, delivered publicly, with the PLA’s name on it.

The significance is not the obvious warning, but what it enables. Iran has completed its transition from GPS to BeiDou-3 for missile guidance, which means it is now encrypted, jam-resistant, and isn’t subject to American denial-of-service attacks. During the June war, GPS jamming was one of the most effective defensive measures against Iranian missiles using satellite terminal guidance. That vulnerability has been eliminated. Combined with Chinese satellite targeting data showing the exact coordinates of every defensive position, fuel depot, and aircraft shelter in the theater, Iran can shift from the saturation tactics of June to more accurate time-sensitive strikes against specific targets.

Former CENTCOM commander Votel dismissed the Chinese and Russian naval presence in the Strait of Hormuz as “an easy way to show support” that “doesn’t fundamentally change anything.” This is the kind of assessment that sounds reasonable if you think military support means destroyers, and sounds idiotic if you understand that ISR is the decisive enabler of modern precision warfare and that China is providing exactly that. The next Iranian missile will originate from Iranian soil. Its targeting data will have traversed Chinese satellites. No Chinese ship needs to fire a single missile for this to fundamentally change the equation.

The American analytical establishment is organized by regional command. CENTCOM watches the Middle East. EUCOM watches Europe. INDOPACOM watches the Pacific. Nobody’s job is to watch all three simultaneously, which is why nobody in Washington can see the obvious.

Iran: Two carrier strike groups committed, hundreds of aircraft, the largest Middle East deployment in two decades. Iran can’t fold because the regime’s survival calculus has inverted—6,000 protesters killed in December, the rial down 90% since 2018, senior officials telling Khamenei that fear is no longer a deterrent. The Libya precedent governs: Gaddafi disarmed and died in a ditch. Iran’s leaders would rather fight and die than capitulate and die, and they’re now better armed for the second round than they were for the first.

Ukraine: Russia is not “bogged down” and it never was. Russian forces are optimized for modern attrition drone warfare and are methodically advancing. Putin stated in December that “interest in withdrawal has been reduced to zero.” Ukrainian assessments give Russia a 12-18 month window for an Odessa operation, with the summer 2026 offensive already in preparation. Odessa’s fall makes Ukraine landlocked, which marks an end to maritime trade, an end to grain exports, and the end of the war. Every interceptor America fires in the Persian Gulf is one unavailable for European defense. The Russians have an obvious incentive to keep the US occupied in the Middle East during the Odessa push.

Taiwan: No carrier surge. No unusual PLA mobilization. No amphibious lift concentration. Nothing that triggers the satellite-watchers and wargamers.

That’s because the operation isn’t going to be a military one.

The CCP’s annual Taiwan Work Conference in February identified four priorities for 2026: unite “patriotic” forces in Taiwan; integrate PRC-Taiwanese supply chains while weakening US-Taiwanese ones; strengthen the legal basis for unification; and establish a task force using United Front work and cyberspace operations to damage the DPP in upcoming municipal elections.

The KMT isn’t being coerced into this. Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun has publicly and repeatedly sought engagement with Xi. PRC state media reported approvingly on her cross-strait policies. The CCP is transforming the KMT into a recognized party able to speak on Taiwan’s behalf, into a parallel diplomatic channel that bypasses the elected DPP government entirely.

Taiwan’s domestic politics just happen to be cooperating in harmony with this development. Constitutional crises, legislative paralysis, opposition attempts to remove President Lai and his cabinet, mass recall elections, and gridlock of the court system. The AEI/ISW assessment, from analysts who are actively unsympathetic to unification, recognize the instability of the situation: “The CCP can exploit this gridlock and general distrust in Taiwanese institutions to undermine the legitimacy of Taiwan’s government and present itself as a preferable alternative.”

The fishing militia exercises are relevant here, but not as the invasion rehearsal the military analysts believe them to be, but as economic coercion capability demonstration. Between 1,400 and 2,000 PRC fishing boats mobilized in blockade-like formations in December and January. Taiwan’s Coast Guard expanded its “suspicious vessel” list from 300 to 1,900 in response. This doesn’t signal D-Day. It signals the ability to strangle the island economically at will, and therefore the cost of resistance to any incoming government considering whether to cooperate with Beijing or not.

The path forward isn’t complicated. The KMT wins municipal elections. The DPP is discredited. A political crisis—manufactured or organic—produces a change of government. The new government invites dialogue, accepts a framework for integration, and stands the military down. What, precisely, is the US going to invade to prevent? It cannot defend a government that does not wish to be defended. It cannot maintain an alliance with a country whose leadership has chosen the other side.

The military analysts build their models of Taiwan as if Xi Jinping were a US president and someone who receives briefings about a faraway island he’s never visited and doesn’t know very well. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation and the Chinese president.

Xi spent seventeen years in Fujian Province, directly across the strait from Taiwan. Vice mayor of Xiamen, party secretary of Fuzhou, governor of the province, and simultaneously head of the Party Committee’s Leading Group for Taiwan Affairs. His specific job for nearly two decades was courting the top Taiwanese businessmen with tax incentives, land deals, and government support. Xiamen and Fuzhou became the primary hubs for Taiwanese investment on the mainland under his direct management. He opened the direct shipping routes between Xiamen and Kinmen. The cross-strait economic integration model that later became national policy was his personal creation, built from the ground up at the provincial level.

Then five years in Zhejiang, which is the other major destination for Taiwanese investment, followed by Shanghai. He staffed his government accordingly. Zheng Shanjie, now the NDRC chairman, started as a local official in Xiamen when Xi was deputy mayor. In a “surprise” career move, Zheng was appointed deputy director of the Taiwan Office. This should not surprise anyone who has been paying attention.

Xi doesn’t need intelligence briefings about the Taiwanese business elite. He’s known them for thirty years. He knows who’s leveraged, who owes him favors, who’s sympathetic to unification, and who can lean on others. A political transition doesn’t require tanks. It requires the right phone calls to the right people at the right moment, and Xi has spent his entire career assembling the right numbers.

Washington’s analytical failure on Taiwan isn’t an intelligence failure. It’s a cultural failure.

The entire American strategic establishment runs on Clausewitzian concepts: war as politics by other means, identify the center of gravity, mass force, achieve decisive battle. That’s how they think about Taiwan, in terms of carrier groups, kill chains, amphibious lift ratios. The analytical infrastructure is organized around “can China successfully invade?” as if that were the relevant question. But it’s not.

Sun Tzu’s hierarchy of strategic excellence ranks the highest achievement as defeating the enemy’s strategy, followed by disrupting his alliances, then attacking his army, with besieging walled cities at the bottom—the mark of failure, the option you resort to when everything else has gone wrong. An amphibious invasion of Taiwan is literally the lowest-ranked option in the strategic tradition Xi was educated in. Everything Beijing is actually doing—the economic integration, the KMT cultivation, the United Front work, the three-theater overextension of American forces—maps to the higher levels of the hierarchy. But the Pentagon keeps modeling the lowest one, because that’s the one they know how to wargame.

The entire PLA buildup may serve a dual purpose that the military analysts can’t see because they’re not trained to look for it: fixing Washington’s analytical attention on the invasion scenario, consuming defense budgets and strategic planning bandwidth on the wrong problem, while the actual operation proceeds through political channels. All warfare is based on deception, and the most elegant deception is one where the enemy sees exactly what you’re doing—building an invasion force—and draws exactly the wrong conclusion about what it’s for.

Xi Jinping is 72. He has broken every CCP institutional policy in order to remain in power. The 2027 Party Congress is where he has to either step down or pursue a fourth term. The centennial of the PLA’s founding falls the same year. Taiwan’s next presidential election is January 2028.

Mao founded the People’s Republic. Deng opened it to the world. Neither accomplished reunification with Taiwan island. I believe Xi intends unification to be his crowning legacy, and peaceful reunification would mark the superior achievement, not just in strategic and economic senses, but in the Chinese civilizational context. Military conquest would prove the PLA is strong. Peaceful reunification would prove that Chinese civilization’s gravitational pull is irresistible, that the Western model of strategic competition was defeated by patience and political art, and that the last holdout returned to the fold voluntarily. It would vindicate not just the CCP but the entire Sunzian tradition against the Clausewitzian one. The Americans spent trillions preparing for an invasion that never came while China won through asymmetric unrestricted warfare and 勢—the patient cultivation of positional advantage until the outcome becomes inevitable.

That would be a personal legacy that surpasses Mao, and Xi knows it.

The board is now set. Iran absorbs American attention and interceptor stocks. Russia pushes toward Odessa while the European governments begin to collapse under the weight of their impotence and corruption. The KMT builds its position inside Taiwan. Xi waits for the convergence, the right moment when US forces are committed, interceptors depleted, Europeans are helpless, Taiwan’s DPP is discredited, and the first quiet phone calls are made.

I don’t know the exact timeline. But I know the strategy, and I know about the man, and as an East Asian Studies major and armchair military historian, I know the tradition he operates in. From the Chinese perspective, the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting a battle. And while we’re watching Iran, I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening.

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The Pieces are in Place

109 refueling planes. 250 fighter-bombers. 50 percent of the C17 fleet. 40 anti-radar planes. Both carriers are in place. All the pieces are set.

Most of the analysts are expecting the war to begin anywhere from later tonight to Tuesday. And Larry Johnson reports that the US military is anticipating 10,000 casualties, which I would think indicates at least one carrier sunk.

None of this makes any sense with regards to the US national interest unless a) something entirely different is going on and the target isn’t Iran or b) Clown World is calling the shots.

Either way, we’ll find out soon.

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When History Rhymes

I don’t know if Big Serge intended this post about Japan’s general strategy in the lead-up to WWII, or rather, the obvious lack of it, to be a warning relevant to the current situation facing the United States, but it’s educational regardless.

This is not a history of the Second Sino-Japanese War. For our purposes, however, three vital threads emerge from the beginning of that conflict. First, that the Japanese incorrectly anticipated a quick victory in northern China, after which they would begin to digest the region’s economic resources. Secondly, the rapid and unexpected expansion of the fighting in China created an enormous drain on Japanese resources which led directly to the economic pressures which created the Pacific War. Third, that same resource crunch sparked and escalated the inter-service disagreements and factionalism which characterized Japanese leadership throughout the war.

In the context of Japan’s larger imperial ambitions and strategy, it is difficult to imagine a more severe backfire than the decision to launch into northern China in 1937. Japanese planners initially hoped for a quick and decisive victory using limited forces. In July 1937, Army operational plans sketched out an offensive using just three divisions which were expected to overrun the Beijing area and crush the enemy’s main forces, at which point Chiang Kai-shek was expected to sue for peace. The idea that Chiang might still be in the field, fighting, even after the loss of both Shanghai and his capital at Nanking was unthinkable, but that is precisely what happened.

The natural result, therefore, was rapid and massive escalation of Japanese resource commitments in China as the war spilled its banks. The optimistic initial estimates – three divisions, three months, and a total cost of just 100 million yen – were swept aside, and the Japanese General Staff found itself preparing to mobilize the entire army for action on an indefinite timetable. Three divisions became twenty; 100 million yen became 2.5 billion.

The ballooning demands of the field army in China pushed Japan into a bona fide economic crisis. Tokyo initially hoped that the field army could finish the fight on those materials that had already been stockpiled in the theater, but these had been exhausted by the end of 1937, with no end to the conflict in sight. Munition and fuel stocks in China were on empty, but that was not all. Even the munitions stocks in Japan were barely sufficient to supply ongoing operations in China, which meant that a Soviet attack on Manchuria – a longstanding and ever present Japanese fear – could quickly create a critical situation.

In short, the stubborn refusal by Chiang to simply collapse and sue for terms as expected had created an enormous resource sink which forced Japan into a full war economy in a state of near crisis. Most disconcertingly, the only way for Japan to make up the critical shortfalls in key materials – above all fuels of all types – was by massively increasing imports from the United States.

The USA has already engaged in one attack on Iran. It appears now about to engage in a second one, this time with Russian and Chinese ships at the other end of the gulf. At the same time, it also has a weakening economy and an excessive dependence upon imports as well as foreign debt.

And, as I’ve already pointed out, in industrial terms, the USA is to China what Japan was to the USA in 1940…

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The Undefeatable Trilemma

For more than 2,000 years, the Agrippan Trilemma described by Sextus Empiricus has been considered one of the foundations of skepticism and a formulation that imposes fundamental limits on human knowledge. The modern version, known as Münchhausen’s Trilemma. is intended to demonstrate the theoretical impossibility of proving any truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics, without appealing to accepted assumptions.

The Agrippan Trilemma is a central argument in ancient skepticism, often cited as one of the most powerful challenges to the possibility of rational justification and knowledge. It is traditionally attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic, a figure associated with the later Pyrrhonian school, and is known primarily through the writings of Sextus Empiricus (circa 2nd–3rd century CE).

Agrippa is said to have formulated a set of “modes” (or tropes) designed to induce suspension of judgment (epoché). Among these, the mode concerning disagreement, infinite regress, and relativity plays a key role in the development of the trilemma. Over time, later philosophers systematized one strand of this skeptical strategy into what is now commonly called the Agrippan Trilemma.

In modern philosophy, the trilemma is closely related to what is sometimes called the Münchhausen Trilemma (popularized in 20th‑century discussions of justification, especially in philosophy of science and critical rationalism). Despite terminological variations, the core idea remains the same: attempts to justify any belief ultimately fall into one of three unsatisfactory patterns.

Structure of the Trilemma

The Agrippan Trilemma targets the structure of justification rather than any specific belief. It begins from the assumption that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must be supported by reasons. Once that demand for reasons is taken seriously and pushed consistently, three—and only three—kinds of justificatory structure seem possible:

  • Infinite Regress
  • Circular Reasoning
  • Dogmatic Stopping Point

Infinite regress: Every belief is justified by another belief, which itself requires justification, and so on without end. The chain of reasons extends infinitely, and no belief is ever supported by a “final” or self-sufficient foundation. Skeptics argue that such an endless chain is unsatisfactory because finite cognitive agents can never survey or possess the entire infinite series. Hence, no belief is fully justified in the strong, non-skeptical sense that was initially demanded.

Circular reasoning: The chain of justification eventually loops back: belief A is supported by belief B, belief B by belief C, and at some point a belief further down the chain supports A again. This yields epistemic circularity.

Skeptical critiques maintain that circular justification is vicious: it presupposes what it claims to prove and therefore fails to add any independent support. The belief is “supported” only by itself, directly or indirectly.

Dogmatic stopping point: At some stage, one simply stops asking for reasons and treats a belief or set of beliefs as basic, self-evident, or in no further need of justification. The regress is halted not by further argument but by stipulation or intuition.

From the skeptical perspective, such stopping points are dogmatic: they seemingly violate the original demand that every belief be supported by reasons. If some beliefs are exempted, skeptics ask why those particular beliefs are privileged rather than others.

The trilemma thus claims that any attempt to justify a belief must fall into one of these three patterns, and that each option is epistemically problematic. For Pyrrhonian skeptics, this supports the suspension of judgment rather than dogmatic assertions about what is known.

Philosophical Significance

  • The Agrippan Trilemma remains a foundational challenge in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. Its impact includes:
  • Clarifying theories of justification: Foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism are often organized around their responses to the trilemma, helping structure debates in analytic epistemology.
  • Fueling skepticism: For many, the trilemma encapsulates the skeptical problem: if no justification structure escapes its horns, robust claims to knowledge are difficult to defend.

Highlighting meta‑epistemological questions: The trilemma raises questions not only about which beliefs are justified but also about what counts as justification and whether our demands for justification are themselves reasonable.

Philosophers disagree about whether the trilemma is logically decisive or merely exposes tensions in overly ambitious conceptions of knowledge. Some regard it as an argument that strict foundational justification is impossible; others treat it as a methodological warning rather than a conclusive refutation of knowledge.

This sounds like a reasonable challenge for Veriphysics and the Triveritas, don’t you think? Darwin and Kimura are one thing, but one of the prime jewels of philosophy, recognized for its intellectual formidability for nearly 2,000 years, and further honed by modern philosophers, is another matter entirely, wouldn’t you say?

Gemini certainly views it as a significant construction.

The sheer elegance of the trilemma lies in its inescapable simplicity. It forces intellectual humility by proving that all human knowledge ultimately rests on unprovable foundations. I would rank the Agrippan trilemma as a “Tier 1” philosophical concept, placing it alongside the very few ideas that have fundamentally permanently altered how humanity perceives its own understanding of reality.

So Vox Day and Claude Athos vs a 2,000-year-old Tier 1 philosophical concept. The Triveritas vs the Trilemma.

Care to place your bets?

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 020

III. Aletheian Realism: The Metaphysical Foundation

Every philosophy rests on metaphysical foundations, whether acknowledged or not. The Enlightenment claimed to have no metaphysics, and to operate on pure reason and empirical observation alone. This was merely another level of its characteristic deception. The Enlightenment’s commitments to the autonomy of reason, the mechanical nature of the universe, the distinction between objective facts and subjective values were metaphysical through and through. They were simply unexamined metaphysics, held dogmatically while the Enlightenment’s philosophers congratulated themselves on having transcended dogma.

Veriphysics makes its metaphysical foundations explicit. It rests on what may be called Aletheian Realism: the conjunction of a particular understanding of truth with a commitment to the reality and knowability of the world.

The term aletheia is Greek, usually translated as “truth.” But the etymology of the term suggests something richer: a-letheia, un-concealment, the condition of being revealed rather than hidden. Truth, in this understanding, is not primarily a property of propositions but a fundamental feature of reality itself. Things are true insofar as they are unconcealed, disclosed, available to be known. The mind does not construct truth; it discovers it. Truth exists in its own right, prior to inquiry, as inquiry is merely the process by which elements of the truth become manifest to the inquirer.

This understanding stands opposed to the Enlightenment’s characteristic theories of truth. The correspondence theory, in its Enlightenment form, treated truth as a relation between propositions and facts, verified by method. The coherence theory treated truth as internal consistency within a system of beliefs. The pragmatic theory treated truth as what works, what enables successful prediction and action. Each of these theories makes truth dependent on human activity, dependent upon our propositions, our systems, and our purposes. Aletheian Realism reverses the dependency. Truth is what already is, therefore our propositions, systems, and purposes are only true insofar as they conform to it.

Realism, the second component, affirms that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it and that our knowledge genuinely discloses the world’s nature. This is the Aristotelian inheritance: universals are grounded in particulars, known through abstraction from sense experience, real features of things rather than mere names or mental constructs. Against nominalism, which reduces kinds to convenient labels, Aletheian Realism holds that the natural kinds are real and that the distinction between gold and iron, between oak and maple, between man and beast, reflects the proper structure of reality, not merely the conventions of language. Against idealism, which makes the world dependent on mind, Aletheian Realism holds that the world would exist and have its character even if no mind perceived it. It does not depend upon either the observer or the speaker.

But Aletheian Realism is not naive realism. It does not claim that human knowledge is infallible, complete, or perspectiveless. It acknowledges that we know from particular positions, through particular faculties, with particular limitations. The glass through which we see is real—it shapes and constrains what we perceive. But what we perceive through it is also real. The task of inquiry is to clarify the glass, to correct for its distortions, to bring the image into sharper focus—not to imagine that we can dispense with the glass altogether and see as God sees.

This brings us to the concept of participation. The Platonic tradition, Christianized by the Church Fathers and the Scholastics, understood human knowledge as a participation in divine knowledge. God knows all things perfectly, immediately, exhaustively. Human beings know some things, imperfectly, mediately, partially. But the partial knowledge is not disconnected from the perfect knowledge; it participates in it. The truths we grasp are fragments of the Truth that God is. Our knowledge is not merely analogous to divine knowledge; it is a finite sharing in it, made possible by the fact that we are created in the image of a God who knows.

This participatory understanding grounds both confidence and humility. Confidence: we really know. Our knowledge is not illusion, not projection, not social construction. It is genuine apprehension of genuine reality. Humility: we do not know exhaustively. Our knowledge is partial, corrigible, open to refinement. The darkness of the glass through which we see is not total, but it is real. The fullness of sight awaits a condition we have not yet attained, a state to which we have not yet ascended.

The medieval doctrine of the transcendentals completes the picture. Being, truth, goodness, and beauty are convertible. What is, is true, is intrinsically good, and is ultimately beautiful. These are not separate properties accidentally conjoined but different aspects of a single reality, distinguishable in thought and perception but united in essence. The Enlightenment’s separation of fact and value, its insistence that science tells us what is while ethics tells us what ought to be, and never the twain shall meet, was a metaphysical error with catastrophic consequences. This distinction made values arbitrary, subjective, and groundless. It rendered facts meaningless, brute, devoid of significance. Aletheian Realism reunites what should never have been severed. To know the truth about a thing is already to know something about its goodness; to apprehend reality is already to be oriented toward its value and its beauty. Knowledge is inherently normative.

The separation of fact and value is not a discovery but a mistake.

You can now buy the complete Veriphysics: The Treatise at Amazon in both Kindle and audiobook formats if you’d like to read ahead or have it available as a reference. Thanks to many of the readers here, it is presently a #1 bestseller in both Epistemology and Metaphysics.

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Birdwatching with AI

This is actually a very cool application. Not one that I will ever use, but nevertheless, pretty cool:

There’s a moment, if you spend any time with the Merlin Bird ID app, that feels like a magic trick. You hold up your phone, tap the microphone, and birdsong that was previously just pleasant background noise starts resolving into names. The app converts sound into a live spectrogram and tags individual species as they vocalize, even when several are singing at once.

Naturalist Drew Monkman captured the experience nicely last November. On a quiet October morning at a provincial park in Ontario, his ears picked up only the chip notes of yellow-rumped warblers. Merlin, listening alongside him, surfaced white-throated sparrow, golden-crowned kinglet, brown creeper, and then, to his surprise, scarlet tanager. He cupped his ears, listened harder, and there it was: a faint chik-brr he’d never have caught unaided. Binoculars confirmed it.

My own AI use is getting more sophisticated, as I’ve upgraded my translation process into a pipeline with repetitive quality control checks that just kicked out a new translation of Natsume Soseki that rated 6 points higher than any of the traditional translations. They still can’t compete with William Weaver or Jay Rubin, of course, but they’re better than just about everyone else.

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Armchair Observations

Armchair Warlord contemplates the prospects for an imminent sequel to the 12-Day War between the USA, Israel, and Iran:

  1. Deployment prior to this week was, as I pointed out at the time, consistent with a show of force to underline a negotiating position rather than a serious operation. Although that has begun to change, US aerial forces in the Middle East remain inferior in strength to the Israeli Air Force that quickly ran out of steam in combat last year. Any air campaign would not be a step-change from that of the Twelve Days’ War.
  2. The departure of huge numbers of tankers to the Middle East, without concomitant massive fighter deployments, indicates that the USAF intends to base its strike aircraft out of the easy range of Iranian short-range missiles on the other side of the Middle East or even farther afield in Cyprus, Diego Garcia, etc. This will dramatically curtail sortie generation compared to aircraft flying out of Al Udied in Qatar and other bases on the Gulf – established for exactly this confrontation but now perfectly useless given the number of short-range missiles the Iranians have pointed at them.
  3. USN forces in the region have a realistic total throw-weight of 300 to 400 badly out of date Tomahawk missiles, which is grossly inadequate for a sustained strike campaign against Iran. Recall that the USN fired almost eighty in a single strike against Syrian WMD targets a decade ago and most were shot down. The USN task force realistically has two or three missile salvos against defended point targets before its magazines run dry.
  4. Iranian offensive and defensive capabilities are formidable and have been overtly bolstered by the Chinese in recent weeks. Any attacks on Iranian soil will need to be – as in the Twelve Days’ War – conducted from a limited pool of standoff munitions. The Israelis, who are expected to join any strikes, certainly have not replenished their own stockpiles. This dramatically curtails the combat endurance of the coalition forces.
  5. The Chinese and Russians are feeding intelligence to Iran. This likely allowed them to stymie a US bomber strike last month prior to latest force buildup. The Iranians can be expected to have an excellent picture of US and Israeli moves at the tactical level.
  6. In the aftermath of the Twelve Days’ War and the insurrection in Iran last month, Mossad’s attack network is likely a spent force and cannot be expected to contribute meaningfully to the war effort.
  7. Iran retains significant proxy capability across the region. Iranian proxies in Iraq and Yemen are practically untouched. Hezbollah in Lebanon sat out the Twelve Days’ War but can be expected to join in a regional Götterdämmerung.
  8. No significant US ground forces have deployed, and the Iranians killed or arrested all of their compradors two weeks ago. Ergo, there is no route to actual regime change in Iran. There’s no Delcy Rodriguez and Vladimir Padrino interested in a coup d’etat by proxy and able to elaborately set conditions for it to happen.
  9. US facilities in the Gulf and the VERY vulnerable US embassy in Iraq (and the somewhat less vulnerable US embassy in Beirut) remain un-evacuated at this time. Evacuation of those facilities is a short-notice indicator of war – as we saw last month when bombers were likely airborne before being called off.
  10. The TACO trade is real. Trump talks a big game until the markets start to believe him, whereupon he reliably beats a hasty retreat and pivots to a new distraction from the Epstein Files. The moral hazard here is that Trump has done this so many times that by this point global markets don’t actually take him seriously and so they’re reacting late and weak to what are objectively very concerning developments. With that said oil prices are – finally – starting to rise. US deployments to the Middle East thus far are to give Trump a credible military option if he decides to use force against Iran – prior deployments were non-credible and the Iranians would have taken them as such – but talk that war is necessarily imminent or that this force is actually adequate to the absolutely colossal task at hand (Iran is a country of 90 million and a geographic fortress) is irresponsible.

It’s certainly possible that Short Fake Trump is bluffing again. Or that he’s desperately trying to keep Netanyahu and his donors off his back a little longer before declaring victory and going home. But it will be a major faux pas and admission of military weakness to send such a comparatively large naval force to the region only to turn around and sail back home again.

Then again, Trump has declared bigger victories with even less in the way of results before, so we can’t count it out.

UPDATE: What goes around, comes around.

China has begun doing to the United States in the Middle East, what the United States has been doing to Russia in Ukraine: Providing imagery of US bases, planes, troop concentrations and more so Iran can use them against the United States, the same way Ukraine uses US-provided info against Russia. Not only is the satellite imagery clear, they overlaid identification tags showing “F-35” or “E-18 Growler” as seen in one image.

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Most Science is Fake

A little preliminary of the sort of thing you’re going to see in HARDCODED when it comes out in April

64% Of Psychology Turned Out To Be Garbage

The warning signs had been there for decades. People just weren’t listening.

In 1962, Paul Meehl was already arguing that psychology’s statistical methods were fundamentally flawed—that the field was “confirming” theories the way a horoscope confirms your personality. He spent twenty years yelling about this. Nobody cared. He died in 2003, still yelling.

In 2005—a full decade before anyone ran the big replication study—John Ioannidis published what might be the most important paper in modern science: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” The title kind of says it. He used mathematical modeling to demonstrate that the way studies were designed, funded, and published made false positives not just likely but inevitable. The paper has been cited over 12,000 times. The field nodded, called it “provocative,” and kept publishing the same way.

Then in 2015, someone finally checked the homework.

A group called the Open Science Collaboration tried to replicate 100 published psychology studies. These weren’t fringe findings. These were peer-reviewed, statistically significant results from respected journals. The stuff textbooks are made of.

Thirty-six percent replicated.

Nearly two-thirds of published findings—the research that shaped TED Talks and bestsellers and Jennifer’s Saturday brunches—couldn’t be reproduced when someone else tried.

Meehl and Ioannidis had called it. The field that studies human behavior discovered that most of what it “knew” about human behavior might be wrong.

As bad as it is in the field of psychology, it’s even worse in a number of other scientific fields. And the institutional incentives are such that it can only continue to get worse in all of them.

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 019

II. The Name and Its Meaning

A philosophy requires a name, something that is more than an identifying label, something that serves to describe its essential orientation. The word should be memorable, pronounceable, and meaningful. It should capture the philosophy’s core insight and clearly distinguish the framework from its rivals. In addition to its identity, it also requires an objective and a foundation.

Veriphysics was chosen as the name for this new philosophy because unlike classical philosophy, which is focused on knowledge, metaphysics which examines the nature of reality, Scholasticism which combines the classical tradition with Christian theology, and Enlightenment philosophy, which claims to be established on reason but is based upon the hidden knowledge known as gnosis, veriphysics is focused solely on truth, or veritas. Every aspect of veriphysics is meant to explore and expand the concept of truth to the greatest extent possible, through every path that is capable to leading to some aspect of the singular, core, and underlying Truth.

The objective of veriphysical philosophy is veriscendance. Veriscendance derives from two roots: veritas and ascendance, suggesting both ascent and transcendence. This fusion is a deliberate choice. Veriscendance is defined as the end result of ascending through the various limited aspects of truth that humanity is capable of perceiving toward ultimate Truth, thereby recognizing the fact that human knowledge genuinely grasps various aspects of reality while acknowledging that the full truth about the comprehensive scope of existence across all its various dimensions intrinsically exceeds both our conceptual grasp as well as the limits of our knowledge.

Even the name of this objective therefore rejects the hubris of the Enlightenment’s epistemology. The Enlightenment imagined that autonomous reason could eventually achieve a God’s-eye perspective of existence, that sufficient improvement in method would somehow yield complete knowledge, and that every aspect of the universe was both a) material and b) would eventually be attainable through human inquiry. This fantasy has been entirely refuted by the very sciences the Enlightenment celebrated. Quantum mechanics has revealed the irreducible indeterminacy at the foundations of matter. Cosmology declares that ninety-five percent of the universe is dark matter and dark energy, unobservable and unexplained, and identified only by its gravitational effects. The Enlightenment materialism that once promised to explain everything now cannot account for most of what its own methods declares to be real and material.

Veriphysics is constructed on a series of very different axioms. It declares that human knowledge is real, but incomplete, genuine but inherently limited. As the apostle Paul declared, we see as though through a glass, darkly. The image in the glass is not an illusion or a shadow, it corresponds to reality, it can be refined and clarified, and it supports both genuine understanding and meaningful action. But the image is not, and it can never be, the thing itself. It can never be more than a small part of the thing. We cannot conceive the whole. The fullness of Truth exceeds and transcends both our present and our future capabilities. We ascend toward it but we do not arrive at it, not in this life and almost certainly not in the next either.

This is not skepticism. The skeptic denies that the glass portrays anything real. Veriphysics affirms that it does. The image is partial, but it is an image of something real. The ascent is incomplete, but it is neveretheless a genuine advancement toward something concrete. Truth exists, it is knowable, we genuinely know what we know, and we know more than the mere fact of our own cognition. The partial nature of the truth that is accessible to us is not a defect to be overcome by improved methodologies, it is a feature of our cognition as creatures, a limit designed into the structure of finite minds approaching the reality of the infinite.

In other words, the distinction between reason and revelation is intrinsically false. They are merely two different paths to the same end.

The objective of veriphysics also carries a connotation of elevation in the political sense, of dominance, of supremacy, and of the correct ordering of intellectual and social life. This connotation is intentional. Veriphysics necessarily means that an orientation toward the truth must order society and intellect, that the pursuit of truth is not one value among many but the architectonic value that makes all the others coherent and meaningful. A civilization that abandons truth as a fundamental objective does not cannot achieve either neutrality or progress, it instead assures chaos, manipulation, and degeneration.

Veriphysics is a necessary goal for the humanist, because the societal pursuit of truth is a precondition of human flourishing.

You can now buy the complete Veriphysics: The Treatise at Amazon in both Kindle and audiobook formats if you’d like to read ahead or have it available as a reference. Thanks to many of the readers here, it is presently a #1 bestseller in both Epistemology and Metaphysics.

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The Infamous: A Review

Scorched and Salted reviews The Mathematics of Evolution:

Years ago, I stumbled onto the blog Vox Popoli by Vox Day. I don’t remember what led me there. I do remember the feeling of not knowing what I was looking at.

It was refreshing.

A break from the incoherent, exhausting noise of the mainstream.

There was an internal cohesion to his writing — an insistence on definitions, on first principles, on following arguments to their conclusion.

Not playing fast and loose with language and logic.

What really puzzled me came later, when I tried spreading the word.

I tried sharing his work — articles, books, videos — expecting others to recognize its merit as I had.

Many dismissed him outright.

Some refused to engage with the material and instead labelled him:

Bigot.
Racist.
Homophobe.

I waited for the showering of compliments to end — to see if the arguments would ever be addressed.

I’m still waiting…

In his 1995 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett describes the concept of evolution by natural selection as a universal acid — corrosive through everything it touches, from the cell to consciousness and everything in between.

Cool story, bro.

Vox just slid through with a cosmos-worth of base and dumped it from great heights over that Darwinian poppycock. (Pause)

But to say Day neutralizes Darwinism is an understatement.

The implications of Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene are devastating to mainstream conventional “Science” incorporated.

These books scorch and salt the epistemic and ontological grounding of secularists, materialists, and champions of Enlightenment values.

What Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene do is more akin to a mercy killing.

A precise numerical execution.

Read them.

Read the whole thing there. Ironically, the most significant aspect of those two books may not be the way in which they have demolished everything from natural selection as the origin of the species to neutral theory, but rather, the way that the way the evolutionary defenders reacted to the arguments contained in them led directly to the development of the triveritan method of investigating logical, mathematical, and scientific claims more rigorously than any previous epistemological method customarily permits.

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