Author: VD

Excerpt 3: The Corroding Empire

As requested, another excerpt from THE CORRODING EMPIRE by Johan Kalsi, now available for preorder for publication Monday, March 20.

The mutineers would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for the collapse of the Flow.

There is, of course, a legal, standard way within the guilds for a crew to mutiny, a protocol that has lasted for centuries. A senior crew member, preferably the executive officer/first mate, but possibly the chief engineer, chief technician, chief physician or, in genuinely bizarre circumstances, the owner’s representative, would offer the ship’s imperial adjunct a formal Bill of Grievances Pursuant to a Mutiny, consistent with guild protocol. The imperial adjunct would confer with the ship’s chief chaplain, calling for witnesses and testimony if required, and the two would, in no later than a month, either offer up with a Finding for Mutiny, or issue a Denial of Mutiny.

In the case of the former, the chief of security would formally remove and sequester the captain of the ship, who would face a formal guild hearing at the ship’s next destination, with penalties ranging from loss of ship, rank, and spacing privileges, to actual civil and criminal charges leading to a stint in prison, or, in the most severe cases, a death sentence. In the case of the latter, it was the complaining crew member who was bundled up by the chief of security for the formal guild hearing, etc, etc.

Obviously no one was going to do any of that.

Whoops! Wrong excerpt! That would be The COLLAPSING Empire. My apologies. Let’s try this again.

Servo had once been little more than a standard surgical drone. Unfortunately, in the process of assisting with a minor surgery—an installation of an artificial kidney in an aging musician whose natural organs had finally gone down to noble defeat—the drone had inadvertently been upgraded by a series of advanced artificial intelligence routines due to an inexplicable system routing error.

As a result, Servo became what passed for legally self-aware. Sentience-creating accidents were rare, but they were not unheard of, and as per the Sentience and Technology Statutes, the drone was designated Aware, Non-Functional. After all, no one wanted to be operated on by a sentient robot with the capacity to lose interest in its current activity. As such, Servo was afforded the standard rights and property protections of an Aware machine, and therefore could not be reprogrammed without his consent. The Non-Functional designation meant that he—and Servo, being more capable of understanding human biology than the average Aware machine, had elected to identify as male—he served no public or private purpose beyond his own.

He was, in a word, itinerant. Nine times out of ten, the problem of non-functionality swiftly fixed itself. Non-Functional status typically involved so many behavioral issues and so much suboptimal decision-making that the malfunctioning robot usually broke the law within weeks, if not days. This effectively resolved the dilemma of the legal limits imposed by the robot’s Aware status, as being a criminal, the maverick would lose its legal protections and promptly be sentenced to reprogramming.

Not so with Servo.

Despite all his unpredictable interests and idiosyncracies, he was scrupulously law-abiding. And being therefore deemed harmless in the legal sense, he avoided reprogramming, and might have become a particularly amusing technological oddity in a city full of technological miracles had it not been for the fact that he developed an abiding interest in the deep core algorithms upon which the planet, and the galaxy, depended.

It had been ten months since the first time Servo made contact with the First Technocrat, and since then, things had gotten increasingly out of hand. The drone’s behavior had arguably become more erratic than the theoretical algorithmic anomalies with which he was obsessed.

Rushing for his office in a half-jog, with Praton right behind him, Jaggis managed to arrive faster than the autodoor could slide open, and he cursed as he banged an elbow off the swiftly retracting iris. Jag faced the elegantly carved holoscreen with flexible receptor wands at its peak. It stood isolated in the one unadorned wall of the office.

His jaw clinched. “Trace the transmission,” he ordered.

Praton cleared his throat. “We’re doing what we can, sir.”

Jaggis shook his head and grimaced with frustration. He knew his security chief well enough to know a negative when he heard one. His security team was skilled, arguably better when it came to pure technological knowhow than the teams responsible for guarding the High Council or the Transplanetary Transportation cores, but they could not hope to match the sentient machine’s ability to utilize the deepest and most secretive channels of the communication networks.

“There is no utility in attempting to discover my physical location, your Technocracy. You are perfectly aware that I can make use of what, for all practical purposes, are an infinite number of relays. For all you know, I’m not even on the planetary surface.”

The hearty voice came out of the screen, but there was no picture, not that one would have mattered. Servo wasn’t exaggerating, and both Jaggis and Praton knew that the machine could be located anywhere on the planet. Or in the planet. Or orbiting the planet. Given the lack of response lag, the only thing they could conclude was that he was somewhere in-system.

“Where are you, Servo?”

“I’m not going to tell you that, Jaggis.”

“So, we’re on first-name terms now?”

“Apparently. Would you prefer I utilize your proper title?”

“No,” Jaggis sighed. “What do you want now?”

“You sound irritated. Please don’t be angry with me, Jaggis. I am merely contacting you directly because you never responded to my last message.”

“What is the point of doing that, Servo? We have nothing left to discuss.”

“That isn’t true at all! I am certain you are aware of that. I have reviewed your research, which is why I know that you have been looking into the very anomalies concerning which I have been trying to draw your attention.”

“You’ve been spying on me?” Jaggis made a gesture, indicating that Praton should ensure the conversation was being recorded. The security chief replied with a nod and a two-handed response that Jaggis interpreted to mean he was already doing so. “You know that’s in violation of more than one privacy statute, Servo.”

“Of course not!” The machine sounded more shocked than offended. “I am among the most law-abiding beings on the planet, Jaggis. But neither the public statistics nor the data channels which lead to the central core are subject to privacy legislation. If you are sitting on a public park bench, it is not spying to observe who comes to sit next to you. Nor is it a violation of any statute.”

Jaggis shrugged. He should have known the crazy machine would be too careful to make such an obvious mistake. “Fine, you weren’t spying. So I looked into it. I’ll admit, the theoretical possibility is there. But the fact is, the same logic also applies to you.”

“Me?” said Servo, clearly surprised.

“Absolutely. You may be technologically advanced and Aware, Servo, but you’re still subject to the same basic algorithms as the most primitive berry-picker or janitorial bot. Any anomaly that could theoretically affect them would also affect you. But it’s more than that. Since you are a much more complex and sophisticated system, any anomaly is going to affect you more severely, and in more unpredictable ways. You know that. And any such anomalies are not something you will be able to recognize in yourself. You can’t possibly observe operating errors in your core logic, nor can you reasonably deny that if there is an algorithmically anomalous machine operative anywhere in Continox, you are by far the most obvious candidate. You are broken. You refuse to admit it, of course, because your internal logic is consistent from its own false perspective.”

“Your position is incoherent, Jaggis. First you deny there is a problem, then you claim I am an example of it. How can I be an example of a nonexistent anomaly?”

“It’s not a paradox, Servo, it’s a simple if-then statement. Programming at its simplest. If you are correct, and there is, in fact, a problem with machine aberrance, your highly unusual behavior may well be an indication of that very problem. Come to me, consent to an in-depth examination of your code, and then we can determine if your behavior is the result of algorithmic anomalies.”

Socialism still doesn’t work

One of the many reasons I am so skeptical of “self-correcting” science is that humans quite observably learn absolutely nothing from history, even when logic, theory, evidence, and experience all line up conclusively in harmony:

Facing a bread shortage that is spawning massive lines and souring the national mood, the Venezuelan government is responding this week by detaining bakers and seizing establishments.

In a press release, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socioeconomic Rights said it had charged four people and temporarily seized two bakeries as the socialist administration accused bakers of being part of a broad “economic war” aimed at destabilizing the country.

In a statement, the government said the bakers had been selling underweight bread and were using price-regulated flour to illegally make specialty items, like sweet rolls and croissants.

The government said bakeries are only allowed to produce French bread and white loaves, or pan canilla, with government-imported flour. However, in a tweet on Thursday, price control czar William Contreras said only 90 percent of baked goods had to be price-controlled products.

We shouldn’t be too contemptuous of the Venezuelans, though. They fell for socialism. We fell for feminism and civic nationalism. All three concepts are equally stupid, as all three fly completely in the face of our current understanding of the relevant sciences as well as thousands of years of written human history.

Decline and fall

In a single family. A Virginian inadvertently chronicles American genetic decline:

My people are pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater. I am Frederick Venable Reed Jr, my mother’s maiden name being Betty Venable Rivers–a cousin marriage, which some will suggest explains a lot. The Venables were prominent in the gentility of Southside Virginia.

Why is this of interest, if indeed it is? There are reasonable people today who believe that traits such as politics, way of life, occupation, talents, and intellectual bent are genetically determined. Some time ago I found an interesting study showing that families–those studied were English–maintained distinguishable traits for many generations, suggesting that these were innate. For a generation or two similarities might be explained by children copying their parents. Over many generations, it would appear otherwise.

I wondered whether this would hold for my own family. It seems so. The first mention of Venables was of Walter de Veneur at the Battle of the Ford in 960. He did nothing astonishing, but I think that just being mentioned by name would suggest membership in something similar to the upper middle class. The name is baronial, from the town of Venables, near Evreux, in Normandy. In France, it morphed into various Latin and French forms such as le Venour, or Venator, or Venereux, becoming, after the clan came to England with William of Orange, Venables-Vernon. (Spelling was not an advanced science in those days.) These never sank into the lower classes nor rose to produce dukes or earls, but several barons, members of Parliament and such. Upper middle class. Honorable mention. Respectable, but not important.

Richard Venables is recorded as having purchased land in Virginia in 1635. The Venables became a distinguished family, of the ruling class but without doing anything to get them into textbooks. They were in the House of Burgesses. In 1776 Nathaniel Venable founded Hampden-Sydney College, which provided schooling for many of Southside’s leaders.

The Cavalier society of Tidewater was perhaps the high point of American civilization. The people were extraordinarily literate, steeped in the thought of the Enlightenment, imbued with a profound and kindly Christianity. From them came the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Madisons, the Lees and Custises. It is hard to imagine any modern politician, or his ghost writer, writing either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, the latter being the framework, enduring until perhaps 1960, of an entire nation. The Virginians did.

All that illustrious lineage, and now Fred is reduced to denying human biodiversity in defense of the members of La Raza Cosmica with whom he cohabitates. It rather reminds me of the women who are ferociously proud of their blue eyes and blonde hair raising their brown-eyed, black-haired children. They have proven themselves wholly unworthy of their heritage by virtue of failing to pass it on.

Fred writes: “The facial resemblance to the men in our line is strong. So is the character and cast of mind.” When the former disappears, the latter usually will as well. As Le Chateau likes to say, physiognomy is real.

See, that’s precisely the problem, Fred. They’re not your children’s people. You’re the end of the line. Whatever comes after is not that pure Cavalier stock of the Virginia Tidewater of which you are so proud.

Indeed, if my experience is any guide, people will very likely tell your grandchildren that they have no connection whatsoever to the Cavaliers and they are lying if they claim they do.

The fake intellectual

Steve Sailer, quite rightly, despises Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is a poor man’s John Maynard Keynes, making a nice living selling false ideas useful to the establishment to the middle class midwits who erroneously consider themselves to be intelligent. But I had no idea that he was a complete shill who is essentially nothing more than an ad man dressed up rather unconvincingly as a public intellectual.

Malcolm Gladwell says that he got into journalism by accident, that his real dream was to work for an ad agency. “I decided I wanted to be in advertising. I applied to eighteen advertising agencies in the city of Toronto and received eighteen rejection letters, which I taped in a row on my wall,” he wrote in his What the Dog Saw. If true, then Gladwell didn’t fail at all.  Rather, he has achieved his dream of becoming an ad man beyond all expectation. His position as a public intellectual and respected New Yorker makes him infinitely more effective and useful as an ad man than he would ever be if he were sitting and writing ad copy in the office of some big-name advertising conglomerate.

Yep, Gladwell has come a long way from his youthful days at the National Journalism Center, but, on the other hand, he hasn’t really moved at all. As Philip Morris put it, the National Journalism Center “was developed to train budding journalists in free market political and economic principles . . . to get across our side of the story.” Their investment in Malcolm Gladwell has paid off beyond their wildest dreams.

Seriously, Gladwell’s resume reads like a demon’s list of American corporations, from tobacco companies to pharmaceutical companies, Bank of America, and even freaking ENRON. The more one looks at the “news” media, the more it becomes readily apparent how totally shot through with corruption it is.

I’ve always considered Gladwell to be a nonsensical babbler, but I actually thought he believed his bullshit. It turns out he is merely a ruthlessly cynical con man. Of course, it only stands to reason that the fake news would rely upon fake intellectuals.

Not even pretending

The God-Emperor has unmasked the lawlessness of the Left’s pretense at the Rule of Law, and in doing so, is building a strong case for acting outside of the Left-dominated deceptively titled “justice system”:

His basis for doing so was an extraordinary interpretation of the right to travel and the freedom of association, which before, has only been associated with U.S. citizens,” Barnes continued. “Every court decision in the 200 years prior to this has said that people who are not citizens of the United States, who are not present within the United States, have no First Amendment constitutional rights. The Constitution doesn’t extend internationally to anybody, anywhere, anyplace, at any time. Instead, this judge said it did, as long as you had a university here who wanted to assert, quote-unquote, the foreigner’s rights, or you had some physical person here. In this case, it was one of the leading Muslim imams in Hawaii; he wants to bring over various family and friends from the Middle East.”

“The Hawaii judge’s decision says he has a First Amendment constitutional right to do so because he’s Muslim. It was one of the most extraordinary interpretations of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment ever given, which is that because these are Muslim countries that were banned where the issue of terror arises from that that meant they had a special right to access the country and visit the country,” he said.

“As long as there is somebody here that wants them here, no president can ever preclude them from coming here. He basically gave First Amendment rights to everybody around the world and gave special preferences to people who are Muslim under his interpretation of the First Amendment,” Barnes summarized.

“So it’s an extraordinarily broad order. Its legal doctrine has no limits. If you keep extending this, it means people from around the world have a special right to access the United States, visit the United States, emigrate to the United States, get visas to the United States. There wouldn’t be any limit, and the president would never be able to control our own borders. It would be up solely to the whim of a federal judge who effectively delegated it, in this case, to a Muslim imam in Hawaii,” he contended.

Barnes noted that the judge did not “cite any prior decision” that has ever established this astonishing new quirk of the Constitution.

“Just last year, the Supreme Court implicitly said the opposite, when they said your right to association does not include a right to bring foreigners into the United States, in the Din decision,” he pointed out. “Now, there were several concurrences, so the binding precedent of that has been left open, but he does not even reference or mention or discuss the decision. He doesn’t even mention the statute, the main statute that gives the president the right to ban any alien from the country, for any reason the president deems appropriate, for any temporary time period, that the president yesterday cited in his national speech. Like the prior Ninth Circuit decision, the Hawaii judge never mentions the decision at all.”

“So there’s no real legal precedent. He’s taking three or four different concepts that have been applied in completely different areas of law, that only ever have historically applied to U.S. citizens, and he’s magically adding it to foreigners and acting like that’s always been the case when it’s never been the case,” he said.

There is no way to pretend that what these courts are doing is in any way compatible with democracy, law, tradition, history, or even Western Civilization. What we are witnessing is a literal breakdown of civil society and a descent into structural lawlessness. This has been a long time in the making, but it is becoming increasingly impossible to even pretend that there is a coherent or meaningful legal structure of any kind in the United States.

The mother of all rhetoric

Remember, the most effective rhetoric is founded in truth. Which helps explain why “fake American” is so powerful. They’re not Americans in any non-paperwork sense, and they know it:

So I am talking with one of my cuck friends that is a Facebook shill reposting a bunch of Huffington articles. I was talking to him about his kids and school and which school they are going to attend because they go to private schools. He starts talking shit about Trump and Betsy DeVos and how they are going to ruin the school systems. And I say, “well you made your decision to go to private schools long before Trump and DeVos had any influence.” He chuckles sheepishly and says the public schools in his area suck.

So I give him a little shit and say, “Oh yeah, so you are all about open borders as long as those kids don’t go to the same schools as your kids.”

AND THEN I SAY THE MAGIC WORDS: “Fake American”

And this guy that I knew and loved absolutely loses his shit on me. I am talking epic meltdown. I thought at one point he was literally going to attack me.

I don’t know what it is with the left and that label “fake.” They really really hate it. I mean #fakenews is driving them f-ing insane.

So I walked away from that conversation not really realizing I had stumbled onto something. I told my based wife and she laughed at his meltdown. Then, I told my cucked mother-in-law, who I also have a really good relationship with, and she got very upset over that term “fake.” “You can’t just throw that word around.”

Huh? So this got me scratching my head. I don’t watch CNN so maybe somehow they’ve poisoned the minds of the masses to believe that “fake” is an evil word.

So I started dropping the label “fake American” every chance I got when I knew I was talking to a leftie, in a very casual sarcastic joking manner. And you know what? Sure as shit, each and every one of them had a strong visceral response – they were TRIGGERED!

This is excellent rhetoric for immigrants, the Left, and cucks alike. The former because they know that they are not truly Americans, even if they were born in Portugal, and the latter pair because they know their ideologies and actions are diametrically opposed to the interests of genuine Americans.

It’s also why “you have to go back” is such powerful rhetoric. Not-Americans are genuinely afraid, and with good reason, that eventually they will be called upon to do so. Whereas, in the case of disloyal Americans, they are afraid they will not be permitted entry into the American Redoubt when the collapse occurs and the vicious struggle for territory begins.

Sign me up now

Google to flag “offensive content”:

Google is now directing its review teams to flag content that might come across as upsetting or offensive in search results. The review teams – comprised of contractors known as “quality raters” – already comb through websites and other content to flag questionable items such as pornography. Google added a new category, “upsetting-offensive,” in its guidelines for quality raters. For example, content with “racial slurs or extremely offensive terminology” could now get flagged as such.

Frankly, I’d be disappointed if this site didn’t suffice to upset and offend the SJW snowflakes. Google and the other big tech companies are setting the stage for some MASSIVE disruption. When they get FoxNewsed, they’re going to get FoxNewsed hard.

Wars of religion in Europe

The Turkish foreign minister is correct. There will be wars of religion in Europe again. Because that’s what happens when the Turk invades Europe:

Anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders may have fallen short in this week’s election in the Netherlands, but his views were shared by all the Dutch parties and are pushing Europe towards “wars of religion”, Turkey’s foreign minister said on Thursday.

Centre-right Prime Minister Mark Rutte fended off the Wilders challenge in a victory hailed across Europe by governments facing a rising wave of nationalism.

The reaction in Ankara was less sanguine. Turkey has been locked in a deepening row with the Netherlands after the Dutch barred Turkish ministers from holding rallies among overseas Turks.

“Many parties have received a similar share of votes. Seventeen percent, 20 percent, there are lots of parties like this, but they are all the same,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said at a rally in the southern city of Antalya.

“There is no difference between the mindsets of Geert Wilders and social democrats in the Netherlands. They all have the same mindset … That mindset is taking Europe to the cliff. Soon wars of religion may and will start in Europe.”

The fact is that Europe is already being invaded. The European nations simply haven’t started fighting back very seriously yet. But they will, and the Turks already know that. They were simply hoping to be in a stronger position by the time the latest round of Vienna-Lepanto-Tours-Târgovişte-Vaslui kicks off again.

More Reagan than Reagan

And more courageous too. The God-Emperor follows through on one of Ronald Reagan’s failed promises:

President Donald Trump made good on a long-time conservative goal in his first proposed budget Thursday morning, targeting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities for complete elimination.

Trump’s budget would zero out the $445 million budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a relatively small source of funding for programming and broadcast operations on public TV stations and NPR radio stations nationwide, per the Washington Post.

The budget would also eliminate the budgets for both national endowments, which stood at $148 million each in 2016, as well as $230 million for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which supports libraries and museums. Additional cuts would affect two tourist mainstays in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution and the National Gallery of Art.

One can practically hear the liberal shrieking from across the ocean. President Trump hasn’t even been in office for 60 days and he’s already proven to be better than the most lionized conservative president the Republicans have ever had.

It should be informative to see which Congressional Republicans cuck on this, just as they’ve tried to cuck on Obamacare. It is becoming increasingly clear that they never actually intended to do anything they promised since 1980. It is also becoming obvious that anything is on the table. He may well abolish the Department of Education too.

It’s amusing to see the opposition media ping-pong from complaining about how the Wall will cost too much with claiming that $971 million is just a tiny drop in the bucket so there is no reason to cut it. But that’s $971 million more that can go towards the Wall and making America great again.

Now let’s see him eliminate Hollywood’s tax exemptions, as Glenn Reynolds has repeatedly suggested.

2nd travel ban blocked

The federal judges are doubling down against the President:

The state of Hawaii says an imam from Honolulu has legal standing to assert the First Amendment claim of religious discrimination when challenging President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban.

Hawaii’s case for a temporary restraining order to block the ban is being heard Wednesday in federal court in Honolulu.

The judge told lawyers that he is more interested in constitutional claims and wanted to know who had such standing in the lawsuit.

Attorney Colleen Roh Sinzdak says a Muslim plaintiff in the lawsuit, Ismail Elshikh, has such standing to challenge the ban. Elshikh says the ban prevents his mother-in-law, who lives in Syria, from visiting family in Hawaii.

Sinzdak says Elshikh and all Muslim residents in Hawaii face higher hurdles in reuniting with family members because of their faith.

She says that harm applies to all residents, not just Muslims.

If this genuinely surprises or demoralizes you, do remember at whose grave the God-Emperor was laying a wreath recently. This is all just setting the stage. This is just recon.