Author: VD

The Dark Herald Defends THE TWO TOWERS

It makes for a good read, if nothing else.

That is ultimately what makes Jackson’s adaptation work. It takes the abstract themes of the book and makes them concrete. Corruption is no longer something to be imagined—it walks and crawls and hisses. Destiny is not a vague theological concept—it is embodied in the weary face of a king-in-waiting and the ruin of a king who waited too long. The war for Middle-earth is not an approaching storm—You watch the torrent fall upon Rohan in the rain, mud, and despair of Helm’s Deep.

Jackson sacrifices a little of Tolkien’s structure in exchange for emotional immediacy.

And nothing I just wrote will change the minds of people who hate it for precisely this reason.

I don’t hate THE TWO TOWERS. In fact, it was the first Tolkien book of which I ever read a part; it was Boromir’s brave death scene that captivated me from the start and made me beg my mother to take me to the library so I could check out the whole trilogy and let me start reading it from the beginning.

But it is the weakest of the three movies. Denethor is awful and I hate what they did to Faramir, who was my favorite character in the books. The suicidal cavalry charge against the orc archers behind a wall is indefensibly stupid; it’s not being a sperg to object to actions that are so retarded that they defy the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy a movie.

And yet, Peter Jackson did accomplish what was previously, and now is again, completely impossible. For which we should be grateful, even though we are duty-bound to put him on trial for what he did to THE HOBBIT.

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The Kenobi Years

Vox Day… it’s a name they haven’t heard for a long, long time.

Vox Day – some ‘oldtroons’ know who that is – called out Jordan Peterson as a troubled person who shouldn’t be giving advice over 10 years ago. He did this just by reading Peterson’s first book.

He also called out ‘SJWs’ as liars and wrote a book about it – which some large accounts on here have plagiarized for years.

He still has a blog. But he’s a good example of how mainstream people just pillage from smarter underground people – and really never give credit.

It’s really fascinating to see how lazy the average person is about following anyone off the usual five sites. Unless you’re on YouTube, Twitter, or Spotify, you may as well not exist for 90 percent of the population. No wonder Clown World finds it so easy to program all the NPCs. For the most part, we might as well be living in Boomerville circa 1970 with the three network channels plus public television.

The amusing thing about all of this is that given the ephemerality of the Internet, ebooks, and human memories, about the only thing that is going to survive from our era are the physical books. Which means that as forgotten by the mainstream as I already am, future generations will probably believe that my influence and popularity were much greater than they actually are.

But, as I have always said, the names don’t matter. It’s the ideas that are important, and I suspect that my most important idea will likely prove to be the mathematical impossibility of evolution by natural selection. I’m already seeing signs in the AI systems that it has been quietly accepted and that TENS is being abandoned by biologists in favor of a mathematical model based on large quantities of random mutations gradually fixing in parallel throughout entire populations independent of reproduction or selection advantage, which is a non-Darwinian concept so far outside the traditional evolutionary box that I haven’t grasped it well enough to critique it yet.

I’m pretty sure it’s nonsense, but I won’t take a position on it until I can be certain of that. The point is that the biologists have given up on both Darwin and evolution, and now they’re clinging to randomness to avoid the obvious implications concerning intelligent design, genetic manipulation, and artificial selection.

UPDATE: Everyone is going to have to revert back to our old GamerGate practices, as within two hours of my linking to that particular X post, it was deleted, along with the nearly 200 comments, both positive and negative, in the thread. So don’t send me links to anything anymore if they’re not already archived, and send me links to the archived version.

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The Fake Peace Plan

Reuters reports that this is the agreement to which the Russians have concurred and which President Trump will be selling to Zelensky and the Europeans today:

Reuters publishes Putin’s proposals on Ukraine, presented to Trump at the summit:

  • No ceasefire is planned before signing a full agreement.
  • The Armed Forces of Ukraine will withdraw from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
  • Russia will freeze the front lines in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
  • Return control of areas in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions to Ukraine.
  • Formal recognition of Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea.
  • Cancellation of at least part of the sanctions against Russia.
  • Ukraine will be prohibited from joining NATO.
  • Putin seems to have been open to Ukraine receiving certain security guarantees.
  • Official status of the Russian language in some parts of Ukraine or throughout Ukraine, as well as the rights of the Russian Orthodox Church to operate freely.

But Simplicius is, in my opinion, correct to be very skeptical that this is an accurate report.

This, if true, would obviously be a huge departure from Russia’s earlier demands. It is difficult to believe, however, because Putin already signed both Zaporozhye and Kherson at their administrative borders into the Russian constitution, and thus there is no real mechanism of abandoning those uncaptured portions.

There are a variety of angles to this. Firstly, recall that media ‘reports’ about claimed Russian concessions have been proven fake every previous time. We went through it repeatedly: a media claim is made that Putin is ready to ‘concede’, and soon after a high ranking Russian official states that all previous ‘Istanbul plus’ demands are still in place…

The only logical explanation is the above: that Russia knows no agreement can ever be reached anyway, and is thus playing for time by pretending at concessions to affect the peacemaker and transfer responsibility on Ukraine and Europe. Why can’t it be reached? Zelensky himself again just stated no uncaptured land can be ceded, as it is enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution. Previously, he’s stated many times that demilitarization is definitely out, also. Now, European “partners” have again reiterated their intent to immediately station troops on Ukraine’s territory upon the cessation of hostilities.

Personally, I believe that the focus of both the USA and Russia is extricating the former from its obligations to assist Ukraine. Once the US is out of the picture, Russia can easily handle the EU-Ukraine alliance by launching new offensives and forcing the surrender on whatever terms it requires. But in order to get the USA out of the picture, there needs to be an agreement on the table to which the US can agree and to which Ukraine will not.

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Anti-Racism is Inversive

Just in case you were still clinging to the faint hope that Christianity is not inherently racist, and that all of the anti-bigotry and anti-racism and manufacture of new sins so ostentatiously displayed by the Churchians is anything but inversive, subversive, and satanic, I invite you to consider the so-called Church of England’s portrayal of St. Augustine as a Negro:

St Augustine has been depicted as a black man in a children’s book written by Church of England officials as part of its diversity drive. The saint, one of the most influential figures in Christian history, has been illustrated as black in a new book called Heroes of Hope.

This book says it seeks to inspire children with examples of ‘Black and brown saints, often erased and whitewashed from history, who formed the church and therefore modern society as we know it today’.

Aurelius Augustinus was born in 345 AD in a Mediterranean coastal town now in modern-day Algeria, going on to become a bishop of the North African settlement of Hippo.

Over the years, most depictions of St Augustine have been of a white man. At that time in history, the area was a Roman province, although Augustine and his mother Saint Monica may have originated from the North African Berber ethnic group.

Although this would not make him black, there have been efforts to apply this identity to him by some groups, including at the Catholic University of Villanova in Pennsylvania. An official at the university wrote in 2023 that it was important to depict the saint as black because ‘depicting St. Augustine as a Black man actively decentres whiteness’.

Unlike most people, I have actually read St. Augustine’s work. And while his attention to theological questions centered around rape are indeed a little eyebrow raising, there is absolutely zero chance that the author of his works is a Negro.

This is just another example of the historical and geographical illiteracy of the modern faux literati, who assume that anything related to Africa thereby necessarily means “negro”. Which obviously isn’t true, but when have the inversives every concerned themselves with truth, except, of course to subvert and invert it.

Heroes of Hope was co-authored by The Rev Dr Sharon Prentis, who was appointed the deputy director of the Church of England’s Racial Justice Unit in January 2023. The unit was set up in 2022, in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, to help meet the Church’s commitments to achieving racial justice. Dr Prentis’s co-writer was Alysia-Lara Ayonrinde, the Church’s national education lead for racial justice.

As F.A. von Hayek demonstrated, social justice is not justice. The adjective modifies the noun. Therefore, racial justice is not justice. And it is not Christian either.

I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term “social justice”.
—F.A. von Hayek

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The Jeeting of Texas

It turns out all of that “don’t mess with Texas” talk was just that, talk.

A Texas housing developer was forced to deny that a new community being built in the Dallas area will be exclusively for people from India.

Sankalp Developer became infamous for the now-viral tweet that claimed they were building ‘a development by INDIANS for the right INDIANS.’ The tweet reads: ‘INDIA FIRST!’ The post does not specify where the supposed development would be located, however, Sanklap is based in Frisco – a wealthy suburb of Dallas.

In recent years, Frisco and neighboring communities like Plano, Prosper and Celina have been flooded by Southeast Asians, in what used to be majority white parts of the state. In the boom town of Celina, Telugu (a language spoken on the subcontinent) has overtaken Spanish as the second most spoken language in its prized school district, according to local reports.

However, the man in charge of Sankalp tells Daily Mail there is no truth to the post, which he learned about on Wednesday evening. ‘Obviously not,’ Sankalp CEO Mukesh Parna said in a phone interview Thursday.

But don’t worry, Mukesh Parna says it’s not true. Obviously not true.

At some point, high-trust people are going to have to get it through their thick, but incredibly naive skulls that if you allow one low-trust person into your organization, your executive team, or your society, they are immediately going to devote all of their efforts into bringing in more low-trust people from their identity group to the exclusion of everything and everyone else.

Different peoples from different cultures have different standards. This should not be a difficult concept for anyone to understand or accept.

There are over one billion jeets in the world, which means there are more than enough of them to replace every single American and European employee and executive in every single company. And if you’ve enjoyed the high-quality technical support you’ve been receiving from outsourced call centers for the last 30 years, then you’re just going to love the quality products and high-value service that you’re going to receive from organizations that have been comprehensively jeeted.

Also, go long on cholera futures.

DISCUSS ON SG

MAGA Compromised

Alexander Dugin theorizes that Trump is neither Zion Don nor genuine MAGA, but rather, represents the great compromise between the AIPAC-controlled Republican Party and the civic nationalists of MAGA:

MAGA is third party symmetric to Uniparty of Deep State=neocons=globalists and radically opposed to it. The different figures of MAGA now fight each other. So Uniparty is dismantling MAGA as the serious threat that gained huge influence.

Vance is regarded as the second chance to repeat Trump’s move: compromise between MAGA and GOP. But GOP (neocons) now feels itself too powerful to tolerate Vance. Vance is most likely to to be key person in MAGA in stead of being as well severely criticised by frustrated MAGA.

I guess it was Thiel who brokered MAGA – GOP deal where Trump was the seal. In some moment GOP has broken the deal (Greater Israel / Epstein list factor). Trump has abandoned MAGA starting to be independent power. The passage from commissary dictatorship to sovereign one Schmitt.

It seems Trump now wants to use his position as the highest instance over MAGA but as well over GOP. Deep State pole is prevailing but that threats Trump’s sovereignty. Alaska was not desired by Deep State (Uniparty). MAGA is on the contrary very enthusiastic about it.

Trump has made big move to Deep State in the last months. Too big. Now it is the last chance to improve the situation. Deep State now controls Trump too openly and too brutally. But Trump doesn’t like to be controlled. So Alaska is the opportunity to restore the balance.

Ukrainian case is less important to AIPAC than Israel. So the pressure on Trump is mostly from the globalist warmonger camp. It is also Deep State but a slightly different from Zionist pole. Netanyahu doesn’t consider Putin to be existential enemy respecting his position.

I think this perspective is closer to the truth than either the nationalist fantasies of the God-Emperor Conan Trump or their fears of Trump being an Israeli-owned puppet. Trump is, after all, a negotiator to the bone, he’s neither a warrior nor an ideologue. So it makes sense that he is the compromise candidate who is unable to accomplish much more than stave off open political warfare and collapse.

It also explains the shift of the Overton Window and the transformation of Con Inc. from the right side to the left side of the mainstream-approved discourse. But these various attempts at containment are observably failing, and the sovereign nations are rising.

DISCUSS ON SG

ASOS Ships

We’re receiving the first reports of the Library edition of A SEA OF SKULLS showing up in private libraries across America. Thanks to those who have sent in pictures confirming their receipt.

It’s really great to see all five volumes together like that. I’m looking forward to eventually being able to display them all on my own shelves. It’s also a little remarkable to think that the collected Selenoth books and stories now exceed the core Middle Earth collection by 144k words, although of course they’ll never come close to the complete Tolkien that contains 14 volumes of unfinished tales. And there is still another 300k words to publish before the series will be complete with the two volumes of A GRAVE OF GODS.

There are already copies available for non-subscribers at NDM Express. My next three books published, in no particular order, will be as follows:

  • SIGMA GAME
  • DEATH AND THE DEVIL
  • OUT OF THE SHADOWS

The latter two have been completed very quickly, as I have utilized textual AI generation to produce them. The results, particularly in the case of the MIDNIGHT’S WAR precursor, are excellent. In my opinion, the various protests of professional authors using textual AI are both idiotic and obviously false. I know for a fact that virtually no one can tell the difference between pure organic fiction and man-machine collaborative fiction because some chapters are one, some are the other, and no one except me has any idea which are which.

In fact, we’re planning a little A B test next year, and I strongly suspect the results are going to shock some people, because the fact is that properly produced collaborative fiction is actually superior in terms of quality to the purely organic fiction produced by the vast majority of bestselling authors. Sure, you’re no more going to get AI-Shakespeare than you are AI-Mozart, but AI-Correia or AI-Gaiman are observably better than the human variants.

In fact, I think the next big thing in AI fiction is going to be AI revivals of various dead writers. Which, no doubt, will spur further lamentations among the literary Luddites. But who cares what they think. When good authors can produce 20,000 words per day instead of 1,000, and those words are actually much better than those produced by the average fiction author, the logic is inevitable.

But I will not be using any AI text in finishing A GRAVE OF GODS, in part because using it for other works means I can proceed with it without it being delayed by them, and in part because the fans have made it clear that they’d like the entire series to be consistent. Well and good.

There are only a few days left to acquire the two Homers. But we’re going to offer one more book to help support the Bindery, and specifically, permit us to a) acquire the much-needed new casemaker, b) fix the foil feeder that broke on Thursday, and c) acquire a backup foil press. The new book will be our first Signed First edition, a la the old Franklin Library, and it will be announced on Thursday on Arkhaven Nights.

DISCUSS ON SG

Little Nicky Runned Away… Again

Little Nicky Fuentes is a pathetic joke. He ran away from a debate with me back in 2019. I haven’t paid any attention to him since, and that was obviously the right call since all he’s accomplished since then is to run away from more debates to which he’d previously agreed.

Okay time to end the victim grift. I confirmed Charlie Kirk was game to debate @NickJFuentes. Went to confirm the debate with Nick and was told it was a no. His reason? Because I’m a bitch.

I am embarrassed that grown adult men truly fell for this middle school drama act.

Nick is a pathological liar who created the mythology of the “most cancelled man alive”. If you are a straight man who fell for this act, you are officially gay now.

Not another word from you little frog boys, ever again.

What a contemptible fraud. This guy used to prance around talking about war on Conservatism Inc. Now he’s running away from Charlie freaking Kirk! The only reason most of Little Nicky’s followers aren’t embarrassed enough to abandon him is because they don’t actually exist. They’re just bots his puppet-masters purchased for him. The rest, presumably, are too retarded to grasp what a cowardly little bitch they’re backing.

“You don’t get it, Boomer!” they cry. “He’s just joking!”

No, he is the joke. Definitely fake, and almost certainly gay.

DISCUSS ON SG

Don’t Hold Your Breath

It appears President Trump is engaging in a little TACO dance in the leadup to his meeting with President Putin of Russia:

Donald Trump has warned he would ‘walk’ if Vladimir Putin does not cooperate in talks to end Russia’s offensive in Ukraine at their historic Alaska summit.

‘We’re going for a meeting with President Putin in Alaska. And I think it’s going to work out very well, and if it doesn’t, I’m going to head back home real fast,’ Trump told Fox News host Bret Baier.

The interview took place on Air Force One, hours before Trump is scheduled to land in Alaska.

Once Putin arrives in the United States, the leaders are scheduled to begin face-to-face talks at a ‘working breakfast’ in the Elmendorf Air Force Base, a news conference could follow.

Earlier, Trump told reporters Russia ran the risk of ‘very severe’ economic sanctions if Putin stalled on talks to end the three-year war in Ukraine.

He also said America would not do any business with Russia until the conflict is settled.

If Trump actually means it, it’s going to be a very short meeting. Three years of economic sanctions have done nothing but enrich Russia while draining Europe dry. As I have stated for some time now, there are some basic realities that must be accepted by all of Clown World’s puppets:

  • The monopolar world is over. The USA doesn’t give orders anymore.
  • Crimea, the four Donbass oblasts, and Odessa are Russian.
  • Russia can add everything up to the Dnieper River if they so choose.
  • No NATO on Russia’s borders.
  • No more economic sanctions if you want to avoid a multi-generational economic war that the West will eventually lose.
  • China is a better and stronger ally to Russia than the EU/UK are to the USA.

I don’t think President Trump can bring himself to accept those things. So I expect the summit will be a failure. But you never know, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

DISCUSS ON SG

Peter Turchin Kept the Receipts

One of my favorite analysts, Peter Turchin, is one of the few people who loves data even more than I do. He quite usefully chose a pair of opposite predictions concerning the Ukraine war back in 2022, one from Paul Krugman and one from Scott Ritter, and constructed models on the bases of those predictions in order to track the way the war unfolded.

Now, I could have told him that Paul Krugman’s model would be wrong, because Paul Krugman is always wrong. But that’s some high-level UHIQ pattern recognition in action; warning: do not try this at home! In the statistical world, one has to at least pretend to take his predictions seriously and give them a fair shake, even though one has a very high level of confidence that they’ll comprehensively fail.

One of the topics that I wrote about in End Times was Ukraine. After I turned the final version of the text to the publisher in late 2022, I continued monitoring the news about the course of the conflict there, because I was curious to see how well my assessment of the Ukrainian state (a plutocracy) and the war there (a proxy conflict between NATO and Russia) would fare as history unfolded. It was, thus, interesting to see that in the early 2023 the views on this conflict, and predictions about its future course, could be so diametrically opposed, depending on who was writing and what ideological background they came from. The tone in the MSM (main-stream media reflecting the official American position) was quite triumphant. But many American analysts, former military and intelligence professionals, held a very different view.

It occurred to me at that time that this difference in predictions is actually amenable to an empirical test. As long-time readers of my blog (now here on Substack, previous posts archived on my web site) know, I view ability to empirically test predictions from rival theories as key in doing Science (with a capital S). Just search my blog archive using the keyword “prediction” and you will see multiple posts on this subject. So I decided to conduct a formal test.

For concreteness sake, I selected two predictions, both based on an explicitly quantitative argument, but coming from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. One was from Paul Krugman, channeling the official American position. The other was from another American, who is, however, considered as a “rogue actor” and a “Putin’s stooge”, Scott Ritter. You can read the actual quotes from both in the Introduction of the SocArxiv article, in which I “pre-registered” predictions of my model.

I won’t repeat the details here, because you can read them in the series of blogs I published two years ago, followed by the SocArxiv article that put it all together in a systematic manner and provided R scripts that allow others to replicate all my results.

They’re all well worth reading, although by the middle assessment, it’s already perfectly clear which of the two models, which Turchin labels the Economic Power model (Krugman) and the Casualties Rates model (Ritter), works better, although he combined elements of both into what he describes as an Attrition Warfare Model that appears to outperform both. This makes since, because what really matters most is Industrial Capacity and Male Population Demographics, both of which are presumably incorporated in Turchin’s AWM.

And he explains exactly what his AWM suggests at the moment.

As you can see (the dashed red line “We are here”), we’ve already entered the region where Ukrainian army can collapse at any moment, although this “moment,” according to the model can happen at any point between now and February 2027 (corresponding to 60 months after the start of the conflict). As I explained in my posts and the article, the final outcome is not much in doubt, but the rupture point is extremely difficult to predict. The situation is akin to seismology. For example, the recent Kamchatka earthquake of exceptional power was predicted 30 years ago, except nobody could know when it would actually strike. The Attrition Warfare Model is actually more precise than that. From its point of view, it would be a surprising outcome if Ukraine is still fighting beyond February 2027.

Note that I said, “from its [the model’s] point of view.” I emphasize that the future is unknowable in precise terms. In any case, the goal of this article was not to predict the future, but to use the method of scientific prediction to empirically test between two, or more theories.

The Attrition Warfare Model (AWM) encodes both alternative theories, (1) the Economic Power hypothesis, which predicts a win for Ukraine (Krugman) and (2) the Casualties Rates hypothesis, which predicts a win for Russia (Ritter). It is clear that the first theory will be rejected, no matter when the war ends.

Turchin’s work can be a little wonkish for the average individual to follow, but it’s not as complicated as it might look at first. He keeps things simple enough, and his writing style is clear enough, that with just a little concentration, that it’s both insightful and educational for anyone with the intelligence to be paying attention to these small matters of war, revolution, and societal survival.

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