Author: VD

A Reality Check

Col. Macgregor doesn’t buy into Netanyahu’s chest-thumping about the massive victory of the Battle of Tehran, and points out that if things were going as well as the Israelis have been proclaiming, they wouldn’t be crying about Tel Aviv coming in for a taste of the same medicine or pressuring everyone from Germany to the US military to get involved on their behalf.

In the last 72 hours, Israel launched a preemptive strike against Iran when negotiations between Washington and Tehran were still ongoing. Iran was caught off-guard. But Iran recovered more quickly from its Pearl Harbor moment than Israel expected. In less than 18 hours after Israel’s surprise attack, Iran responded firing hundreds of ballistic missiles including hypersonic missiles into central Tel Aviv and across Israel.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Iron Dome failed. Israeli intelligence failed. Now Netanyahu is pleading with Washington to intervene with American Military Power to rescue Israel from certain defeat; a defeat Netanyahu crafted with encouragement from Washington.

At the same time, Russia, China, Pakistan and most of the Muslim World are rallying to Iran’s defense. Supplies, equipment and technical assistance are pouring into Iran.  

It’s time for a reality check:

Washington burned through $12 trillion in the Middle East since 2003. Result? 7,000 dead Americans. 50,000 wounded, open borders and 100,000 Americans dying yearly from Fentanyl poisoning. Today, the United States is $37 trillion in debt, a sum that does not include so-called “agency debt.”   77 million Americans voted for President Trump because he promised to end the overseas conflicts and halt the march to WW3.

The Middle East is on the brink. Here’s what Washington must do to defuse conflict:  

1. Ask for an Emergency UN Security Council meeting. Ask for an Immediate ceasefire making it clear that Washington opposes the destruction of Iran, Israel and any other state in the Middle East.  

2. Demand that Israel stop the killing of Palestinians in Gaza and withdraw its forces from Gaza and the West Bank.

3. Suspend all military aid to Israel until Israel agrees to remove its troops from Gaza and permit humanitarian assistance to reach the people of Gaza.

4. Propose the commitment of Armed Forces from non-aligned nations to police Gaza and the West Bank.

5. Propose that the United States, Russia, China, India and Brazil convene a peace conference to arbitrate the dispute between Israel, Iran and Israel’s neighbors.

Aside from not getting further involved in the Iran-Israel war, I totally disagree with Col. Macgregor’s recommendations and I don’t see what can be usefully expected from the UN or attempting to reason with the Israelis over Gaza. At best, this is belatedly attempting to put a Band-aid on a gushing artery.

The best thing President Trump can do for the Middle East is to stop all military aid to everyone, then tell both the Israelis and the Iranians to go ahead and fight it out amongst themselves if that’s what they want. If that means a few glass parking lots in the Middle East, so what? Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thriving cities now.

The optimal results are never achieved by putting off the inevitable. And if the USA is too weak to impose its will on the various parties now, things aren’t going to become any easier going forward. The one and only thing that absolutely must be avoided is going to war with Iran on Israel’s behalf, for as even the most ardent Christian Zionist must be able to understand, a collapsed USA can be of zero assistance to anyone.

Indeed, I suspect seeing the US military enmesh itself in a war with Iran is the one course of action that would absolutely delight the long-term thinkers in the Chinese strategy rooms. Because there is obviously a lot going on behind the scenes that isn’t being intentionally advertised.

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The Boomers’ Last Boom

I find it tremendously amusing and absolutely satisfying to watch how the Boomers are struggling to grasp that the world is going to continue on without them. The new Stephen King movie, The Life of Chuck, may well serve as the last will and testament of that most wicked generation.

If there’s a useful rough division of King’s stories, it’s between the ones that describe a world of horrors on one hand, and the ones that consider what to do about being in a world of horrors on the other. This isn’t a clean distinction, certainly, nor does it map cleanly to downbeat versus upbeat — sometimes the straight-up horrors are told with dark humor, as in “Survivor Type,” a gnarly little short story about a doctor who gets marooned on a desert island and starts eating himself. A King story usually has an element of warning. This could happen to you, says Stephen King, as the doctor eats his foot, or as a finger comes up out of a bathroom drain, or as a haunted car or a pandemic or a vampire or a rabid dog appears. This could happen to you.

But many of his stories have a paradox at their cores. He believes in menace and evil, and in the brutality of a world that kills kids, and helpless people, and good people. He is not a horror writer who punishes the foolish above others.

At the same time, he writes with a deeply humane central thesis, which is that in light of all those monsters, you are blessed to have in your life at least your own resilience and the company of other people. The Stand is not really about the flu, after all; it is about creating a new community and choosing to make sacrifices for it. It is only superficially about the clown. Really, it’s about fear and trauma, and especially about strength in numbers. These are what you might call the “What now?” stories: You know the world is full of pain … what now? The worst has happened … what now? You are fully aware of your own mortality … what now?

An SGer posed the question: Can you guess the “shocking” twist from boomer Stephen King’s latest movie adaptation ? Possibly the most boomer sentiment ever.

That’s a pretty obvious hint. My guess: The world ends with Chuck.

And, of course, I was correct, as I confirmed when I asked Deepseek about the theme of King’s novella.

  • Life as a Universe: Chuck’s existence literally sustains the world; when he dies, reality dies with him.
  • Death’s Inevitability: The reverse structure mirrors how life is understood only in hindsight.
  • Legacy: The billboards (“Thank You, Chuck”) suggest even ordinary lives have cosmic significance.

King blends horror, fantasy, and melancholy in this existential fable, leaving much open to interpretation. The story’s emotional core lies in Chuck’s quiet acceptance of his role—both as a man and as the “engine” of a fleeting world.

Quelle surprise. It’s not an “existential fable”, it’s a quintessential Boomer fable. I genuinely wonder who was more shocked that Jesus Christ didn’t return during their lifetime, the apostles or the average Christian Boomer? I’ve never forgotten the declaration of a female Boomer who admitted that she didn’t know when Jesus would return amidst fire and sword, but was certain it would be during her lifetime.

O say do those fading old Boomers still boom,
As their sunset descends in the fullness of doom?

Isn’t it fascinating to observe that regardless of what their religion or their beliefs happen to be, so many Boomers tend to believe exactly the same thing about reality ending with them?

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America or Israel First?

Simplicius believes the damage to the Iranian nuclear program from the Israeli attacks was insignificant, and that the real goal was what I and many other suspected, which was to trigger an Iranian response that hit hard enough to give AIPAC cause to run crying to President Trump about the need to invade those mean ol’ Nazis in Iran.

The plan all along was obviously to goad Iran into an overwhelming response that would somehow incite the US to enter the war on behalf of Israel, in order to finish off Iran. The nuclear program was likely a false target, the real objective being the total overthrow of Iran’s leadership and the fomenting of civilian uprisings throughout the country to bring Iran to heel under a Western puppet-led government.

Now Trump stands poised on the knife’s edge of one of his most historically critical decisions—whether to betray the mandate of the American people and consign his second term and dwindling legacy to the trash heap of history, or to pull back on the strings of Miriam Adelson and other donors and show a spine in standing up for the real ‘America First’ vision he promised to all. As of this writing, there are reports of urgent meetings in the Pentagon surrounding precisely the issue of Israel’s request for the US to officially enter the war to ‘finish off Iran’.

Yanis Varoufakis writes:

This is Trump’s Waterloo. He posed as the Leviathan who would bring a stealthy Peace, a smart Deal that averts a war with Iran. Then, with one more gross violation of international law, Netanyahu puts him in a little box: For either Trump knew of the attack, in which case he is no more than Netanyahu’s stooge. Or he didn’t know, which begs the question why he didn’t know and how will he react to being treated like a fool by Netanyahu. Either way, Trump’s strongman, dealmaking image is now toast. Either way, he goes down in history as yet another US President that Netanyahu bent to his genocidal will.

The entire non-Western world is now watching this pivotal turning point moment with bated breath: Trump can either make a move to redeem at least some lost hope for America’s global leadership, or instead pound the final nail in its coffin, forever edifying the rising Global South as to the true nature of the immoral, barbarous, and unprincipled West. It is a metaphysical crossroads: Trump will either stay true to his quasi-spiritual mission of world betterment, or he will drown the US in the blood of neocon imperialism… I have it as 70/30 chance that saner heads prevail in the US with Trump electing to not enter the war, but we’ll see how it develops.

At this point, I think it’s important to remember that there are multiple Trumps and it is intrinsically misleading to put too much stock in anything that is said by any of them, but most particularly by the short, fat one controlled by Clown World. All the competing word-spells are irrelevant, all that matters is the courses of action actually taken by the various parties.

Nor should we put too much stock in Israeli crocodile tears about missile strikes on Tel Aviv after the way the IDF has flattened civilian buildings from Gaza to Beirut and Tehran. It is both nonsensical and contemptible to declare “this is war” and hit another party, then whine when the other party hits back.

In war, the enemy always gets a vote. And if the US is foolish enough to get further involved, there is no reason to assume North Korea, Russia, and China won’t follow suit. China probably won’t, but I wouldn’t bet on North Korea and Russia staying out of it.

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Vietnam Becomes BRICS Partner

The global restructuring continues even as Clown World does its best to start WWIII:

Vietnam has joined BRICS as its tenth partner country, marking a significant step in the bloc’s expansion, Brazil’s foreign ministry announced on Saturday.

BRICS was established in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with South Africa joining in 2010. The bloc later expanded to include Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Iran. BRICS accounts for around 40% of global GDP in terms of purchasing power parity — surpassing the combined economic weight of the G7, according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The primary utility of BRICS right now is to hamstring the ability of the USA and the EU to accomplish anything with sanctions. And since economics is the primary weapon of the G7, that’s not an insignificant accomplishment.

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A Test of Three Tales

Just to give people here an idea of what sort of thing they’ll be able to find at AI CENTRAL, I posed three different AI text engines the same very specific challenge: a 2,500-word story in the style of a brilliant author. Bonus points if you can guess which author it was from this excerpt from one of the three entrants:

The Scarlet Visitor

The city of Paradyse rose from the sea like a dream of gold and shadow, its towers clawing at the sky, its streets winding in serpentine coils. Ships from distant lands brought spices, silks, and secrets to its harbors, but none so strange as the vessel that came on the eve of the Festival of Masks.

It was a ship without a name, its sails the color of dried blood, its hull black as a starless night. The dockmaster, a wizened man named Orlan, squinted at it through the salt-haze and crossed himself—though he could not say why. When the gangplank descended, only one figure emerged: a woman wrapped in a scarlet cloak, her face hidden behind a veil of silver lace.

She moved through the city like a whisper, her steps soundless, her presence drawing eyes yet leaving no impression. The people of Paradyse were accustomed to strangeness—this was a city where nobles wore living jewels that whispered secrets, where the dead sometimes walked the markets at dusk—but there was something about her that unsettled even the most jaded souls.

The woman took lodging at the Inn of the Twisted Serpent, a place frequented by those who did not wish to be found. The innkeeper, Madame Vex, was a creature of sharp angles and sharper wits, her fingers adorned with rings that could sting like scorpions. She offered the stranger a room without asking for coin, sensing that some debts were best left unspoken.

“How long will you stay in our fair city?” Madame Vex inquired, her voice like honeyed poison.

The woman lifted her veil just enough to sip her wine. Her lips were the same crimson as her cloak. “Until my business is concluded.”

“And what business is that?”

A smile, fleeting as a knife’s gleam. “The oldest kind.”

And there is a very clear and obvious winner, which may be of interest to some of the writers here. Visit AI CENTRAL to read all three entrants and see the verdict.

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Delta Narcissism Confirmed

The narcissism of the Delta tends to strike most people as counterintuitive… until they stop and think about the actual behavioral pattern:

The more I work with the public, the more I understand Vox Day’s principle of Delta Narcissism and the average Joe’s undying urge to offer unsolicited advice and needless “improvements.”

Every week where I work, supplies arrive and I stock the storerooms with them. I open the cardboard boxes with an old key on my keyring, slicing through the tape. Sometimes the tape is tough or the box is crooked and you have to struggle a bit. Every week, there are other workers who see me opening boxes and rip my keys out of my hands so they can show me the “right way” to do it. Their “right way” always ends up being the exact same thing I’m already doing, and they soon encounter just as much difficulty as I did. They don’t ask permission, but they just can’t help themselves from dropping everything they’re doing just so they can show me how much more competent and helpful they are. These are nice people, I like my coworkers, but damn if it doesn’t irritate me.

One of the most important social lessons I’ve learned is to STOP. FUCKING. HELPING.

Things are what we observe them to be, not what we think they should be. By all means, be ready to help others. But, as a general rule, respect them enough to wait for them to ask for it.

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Introducing AI Central

As I did some years ago with Alpha Game, and as I have done with Sigma Game and Castalia Library, I have created a new site to host posts and discussions related to artificial intelligence and its use in producing music, illustrations, text, and video in order to avoid monopolizing the discourse here where most of the readership really isn’t that interested in it. In looking around, I saw that most of the sites that discuss AI regularly do so from a skeptic’s perspective or a programming perspective, and I wanted a site that can focus instead on AI as it is actually used by creative people today and going forward into the future.

So, if it’s a subject that is of interest to you, or if you are an AI creator yourself, please consider subscribing to AI CENTRAL and perhaps even contemplate providing an occasional guest post showing off your work and explaining what you used to produce it. My plan is to post once daily, which given my current music backlog will not be a problem for at least the next four months even if I don’t log into Suno at all.

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Owning the Alphas

McRapey shows his fellow Gamma males how it’s done.

Take that, all you status-anxious males. Feel the burn! Feel the rage! Of course, he’s not projecting at all. No, there isn’t a man on the planet less anxious about his status than John M. Scalzi. So stunning. And brave.

Please clap.

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Why Iran Won’t Strike Back

Simplicius believes that Iran will not retaliate by attacking Israel with anything more than symbolic gestures:

Israel is at a crossroads, which I have described before: the country is in a downward spiral and has only one remaining chance to seize history to secure its survival. Why? The reasons are almost too long to list in this one brief article alone, but they include demographics, as well as the decline of Zionism and rise of “noticing” in the West which means in a generation or two, support for Israel may dwindle to the point where it will be engulfed by regional enemies.

The other major reason: nascent technologies have created parity between Israel and its foes, where groups like Hamas and Hezbollah can use cheap but highly technologically effective weapons to deal accurate, disabling damage to Israel’s most critical and sensitive infrastructure. The same goes for Iran: the country has come of age and mastered rocketry and newfangled drone warfare to the point where the numbers simply do not work in Israel’s favor in any future war.

Israel once had the backing of the world’s most dominant ‘superpower’ alliance of Western nations, now the tides of history have simply shifted against Israel’s favor.

Now there are reports Iran may “declare war” on Israel. I remain skeptical for the following reason: Iran has no true overriding capability to fully ‘submit’ Israel into a state of debellatio. Israel has the nukes, and presumably, Iran as of yet does not. No amount of conventional missiles could make Israel simply surrender, and as such a declaration of war has no real meaning. Neither do the two countries share a border so it’s not like Iranian troops can somehow flood Israel to capture its capital.

Any overwhelming attack that could critically wound Israel may provoke an Israeli nuclear response—further proving Iran does not have the escalatory advantage or trump card. That is like Ukraine “declaring war” on Russia—what possible meaning would that have? Ukraine does not have the escalatory dominance to ever ‘submit’ Russia in any way, and the only objective of true ‘war’ is just that—total victory and the subjugation of the adversary. Thus, I see no logical way war can be declared, unless Iran did finally secretly hatch that bomb and is ready to use it. The only other possibility is for PR reasons to satisfy the demands of the angry populace, before declaring victory after some arbitrary objectives have been carried out via a series of strikes, and calling it a day.

I think his analysis is perspicacious. The attack on Iran is far from devastating, and the loss of a few Boomers in charge is hardly debilitating or even necessarily unwelcome to their younger successors. There were not Israeli jets flying over Tehran as if it were Lebanon; the attack mostly consisted of missiles launched from well outside Iranian airspace combined with a secret drone attack from within Iran that suspiciously resembles the recent attack by the Kiev regime on Russian airfields.

And, as Simplicius pointed out, at present, Iran’s ability to defeat Israel is nearly as impossible as Israel’s ability to defeat Iran.

But as with China vis-a-vis the USA and Russia vis-a-vis NATO, time is on Iran’s side. Israel didn’t attack Iran yesterday out of a position of strength, but rather, weakness and desperation. It attacked Iran while it still can, while it still has enough of a technological and operational advantage to do so.

Therefore, it would probably be wise for Iran to settle for a few symbolic missile and drone launches before following the lead of its Chinese and Russian partners in simply waiting for the US support that sustains Israel to collapse, as it is already in the process of doing.

Of course, the fact that this makes long-term strategic sense doesn’t mean that events will proceed accordingly. But given the restraint shown by Iran on previous occasions, I think Simplicius is correct to anticipate that similar restraint will be shown here.

An analysis of the effectiveness of the Israeli strike, which makes it sound as if the initial reports were highly exaggerated, and therefore makes it even more likely that any Iranian response will be symbolic.

An Israeli attempt to decapitate the Iranian military leadership also appears to have largely failed, with only one reasonably confirmed senior casualty at this time – GEN Salami, commander of the IRGC since 2019. I’ve seen a report that he was quite ill and thus remained in his home unlike the rest of the Iranian senior leadership. Recall that Khamenei was taken to a secure location some time ago, so it’s not like the Iranians didn’t have warning or were complacent about getting into shelter. Two or three people connected to the Iranian nuclear program also seem to have been assassinated, but in real terms this isn’t going to affect a program that is already largely – if not entirely – complete.

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Israel’s Satanic Elite Revealed

Christian Zionists have been greatly deceived, if the reports coming out of the Israeli media about at least an influential subset of the Israeli elite are true.

The story broke with an investigative report published by Israel Hayom, which unearthed a long-standing pattern of ritual sexual abuse, psychological manipulation, and spiritual desecration occurring not on the margins of society but from within its most sacred institutions. Survivors speak of torment that begins in early childhood and lasts decades, often committed under the guise of religious observance.

Israeli children, some as young as infants, were subjected to methodical abuse masked in religious ritual. Survivors describe ceremonies invoking biblically-vilified deities, conducted by members of observant Jewish communities. As a survivor named Noga recalled: “The gods I remember are Baal Peor and Ashtoreth… our lord Peor and our lady Ashtoreth.”

 More than ten women between the ages of 20-45 with whom we spoke describe a severe phenomenon raising serious concern that in Israel, like many countries worldwide, organized sexual abuse of children is occurring right under everyone’s nose.

The culprits are not fringe radicals. These are individuals who keep kosher, celebrate the Sabbath, and adhere to the minutiae of Jewish law even as they engage in acts so depraved that they defy comprehension. Some of these perpetrators are qualified to blow the shofar on Rosh Hashanah — a high privilege among observant Jews. Family members, most of whom may have once been victims themselves, are often the ones who hand over their little ones to these monsters.

Several rabbis’ names appeared repeatedly in survivor testimonies. Multiple complaints filed at different police stations across Israel were quickly nipped in the bud. According to the Jerusalem Post, which followed up on the Hayom report, “doctors, educators, police officers, and past and present members of the Knesset were involved in these abuses.”

The police have known about this for a year, but they don’t have the tools to deal with it. The people who will fall are very, very senior figures. These people run communities and government agencies. They threaten us. 

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. And these are also the same people who are pulling the strings in the Kiev regime, the European Commission, the US Congress, and apparently, the Trump administration right now. Because the Kiev elite, the EU elite, the UK elite, the US elite, and the Israeli elite are one and the same. They all worship the same satanic gods in the same abhorrent way as their predecessors in Technochtitlan and other historical centers of horror.

It’s the group that George Bush named “the New World Order”, Vladimir Putin described as “the Empire of Lies”, and Philip K. Dick called “The Empire That Never Ended”. We call it Clown World. And it is these elites, not the people of the nations over which they rule, who are the genuine bad guys. Pretty much every other major conflict, including both Ukraine and Iran, is a distraction that Clown World utilizes to weaken their enemies and protect themselves from being targeted.

I wonder if it might be these recent revelations, and not the Iranian nuclear program, that is behind the timing of yesterday’s Israeli attack on Iran. Because it was going to be very difficult to hide behind the usual shields of antisemitism and Holocaustianity when it is the Israeli media reporting on the crimes and all of the victims are Jews.

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