Author: VD

Veriphysics: The Treatise 011

II. Dialectic and Rhetoric: The Ancient Distinction

The distinction between dialectic and rhetoric is as old as philosophy itself. Plato, in his dialogues, repeatedly warned of the danger posed by rhetoric unmoored from truth. The Sophists of fifth-century Athens claimed to teach virtue but in fact taught persuasion, the art of making the weaker argument appear the stronger, of winning debates regardless of where truth lay. Socrates opposed them, not because persuasion is inherently wrong but because persuasion divorced from truth is manipulation, and manipulation degrades both the manipulator and the manipulated.

Aristotle, more systematic than his teacher, distinguished the two arts precisely. Dialectic is the method of reasoned inquiry, proceeding through premises to conclusions, testing propositions against logic and evidence, aiming at truth. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, analyzing audiences and occasions, selecting appeals that will move hearers, aiming at assent through emotional manipulation. Aristotle did not condemn rhetoric, indeed, he literally defined and categorized it, but he understood that rhetoric without dialectical grounding becomes sophistry that is effective, morally empty, and ultimately destructive.

It is worth noting that the Enlightenment did not arise in opposition to Plato and his warnings about rhetoric. It arose, in a very real sense, from Plato’s philosophy. The theory of Forms, with its insistence that ultimate reality is abstract and immaterial, that the visible world is mere shadow, planted a seed that bore strange fruit once Christian Aristotelianism lost its grip on Western intellectual life. The Enlightenment philosophers, from Descartes onward, retained Plato’s conviction that pure reason operating on abstract principles could arrive at truth independent of experience and tradition. They simply replaced his Forms with their own abstractions: natural rights, the social contract, the general will, the invisible hand. These concepts functioned exactly as Platonic Forms had functioned, as idealized entities that were held to be more real than the messy particulars of actual human life, and against which existing institutions could be measured and found wanting.

The Aristotelian tradition, grounded in observation, experience, and the careful accumulation of particular knowledge, should have been the natural bulwark against this rationalist overreach. That it failed to serve as one is the great intellectual catastrophe of the modern era. The Scholastic method was intensely dialectical: proposing questions, marshaling objections, articulating responses, proceeding through careful distinctions toward conclusions that could withstand scrutiny. The great Summae were not works of persuasion but of demonstration. They assumed an audience committed to truth, willing to follow the arguments wherever they led, and prepared to abandon positions that could not survive logical examination.

This assumption was the tradition’s great strength and its fatal weakness. It was a strength because it produced genuine philosophical progress through the refinement of ideas, the resolution of difficulties, and the accumulation of insight across centuries. It was a weakness because it left those responsible for passing on the tradition entirely unprepared for opponents who were not committed to truth, who understood that most men are moved by passion instead of reason, and who were willing to ruthlessly exploit that understanding for the benefit of their false philosophy.

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Book Review: The Frozen Gene

While the term is usually associated with having a high IQ, with perhaps little popular thought given to substantial achievement, a genius is a person who innovatively solves novel problems for the betterment of society. See chapter seven, “Identifying the Genius,” Charlton, Bruce, and Dutton, Edward, The Genius Famine, London: University of Buckingham Press, 2016. Vox Day is a genius. There, now it’s in print—all protestations, Day’s included, notwithstanding. 

Day’s ability to identify and solve problems, especially those overlooked by experts for generations, is on full display in The Frozen Gene. In his new book, Day builds on the mathematical attainment of Probability Zero and breaks new ground. Part of his latest success is the refutation of Motoo Kimura’s neutral theory of molecular evolution. But there is much more, some of it possibly holding profound consequences for mankind. 

Read the whole review there. And if that’s not enough to convince you to read The Frozen Gene, well, you’re probably just not going to read it. Which is fine, but a few years from now, when you can’t understand what’s happening with the world, I suggest you remember this moment and go back and take a look at it. The implications are quite literally that profound.

I could be wrong. Indeed, I hope I’m wrong. I really don’t like any of the various potential implications. But after all the copious RTST’ing with multiple AI systems, I just don’t think that’s very likely.

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The Corpocrats Complain

Even the financial elite are beginning to grasp that a) Ricardo was wrong, b) the economists lied, and c) mass immigration is an economic and corporate disaster:

Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has claimed that Britain has been ‘colonised’ by immigrants who are ‘costing too much money’.

The 73-year-old businessman also questioned whether Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is the right man to lead the country forward in a bombshell new interview, arguing ‘he may be too nice’.

‘You can’t have an economy with nine million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in,’ the Englishman told Sky News ahead of the European Industry Summit in Antwerp, Belgium.

‘I mean, the UK has been colonised. It’s costing too much money. The UK has been colonised by immigrants, really, hasn’t it? I mean, the population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people.

He added: ‘I don’t know whether it’s just the apparatus that hasn’t allowed Keir to do it or, or he’s maybe too nice – I mean, Keir is a nice man.

‘I like him, but it’s a tough job and I think you have to do some difficult things with the UK to get it back on track, because at the moment I don’t think the economy is in a good state.’

The population of the UK was estimated to have been 70 million in mid-2024, according to the Office of National Statistics, three million higher than that recorded during 2020.

I’m sure there were a few Indians who argued that the white settlers were beneficial too. Neither I nor the rest of the 9.7 million surviving American Indians think very much of those short-sighted morons these days.

Why the the people of these small European nations still fail to comprehend that they will be absolutely swamped by Africans, Indians, and Chinese if the present immigration regime survives is truly beyond me.

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The Black Spies of Dunland

In a scrub oak on the western ridge above the valley, two crows sat on a branch and watched.

They were crebain, the black spy-birds of Dunland, large and clever and thoroughly unpleasant, with oily feathers and eyes like wet pebbles. They had been posted to this ridge six days ago, one of fourteen pairs stationed along the approaches to Rivendell, and they had spent those six days in a state of bored, malicious alertness, eating beetles and surveilling the comings and goings of the Elves below with the joyless diligence of creatures who serve darkness not out of conviction but out of a fundamental meanness of spirit that finds employment in darkness more natural than the alternative.

They had seen the eagle land the previous evening. They had taken note of it. They had thought nothing of it, of course, because eagles came and went from Rivendell with some regularity and the crows had not been briefed on what, specifically, to look for. They were told only to watch, and report, and be suspicious of everything, which came naturally to them.

But what they saw this morning was different. This was three great eagles, flying purposefully in formation at dawn, climbing hard and fast toward altitude, heading south. Even a crow could see that this was an event of some import, and perhaps even the reason they’d been sent here.

The first crow turned to the second and let out a series of harsh, rapid calls, the crebain’s equivalent of an alarm, a sound like a stick being dragged across a fence. The second crow took up the cry, louder, harsher, and together they launched themselves from the branch and flew upward, screaming into the brightening sky, circling and calling with a frantic, rasping urgency that carried far in the still morning air.

Far above them, so far above that the crows were invisible, mere specks against the grey-green earth, two dark flyers heard their cries.

The Nazgûl rode their fell beasts in a slow, wide patrol circuit above the southeastern approach to the valley, just as they had been ordered. They were high enough that the Elves below could not see them against the overcast, high enough that Elrond’s wards did not prickle and burn as they did at lower altitudes. The fell beasts were ancient, reptilian things, their vast leathery wings beating with a sound like wet canvas in a gale, they stank of carrion and old leather, and the Nazgûl upon their backs sat motionless as iron statues, only their hooded heads turning slowly, slowly, watching, and waiting.

They heard the crows before they saw anything. The crebain’s alarm carried upward through the cold air, shrill and insistent, and both Nazgûl turned their mounts toward the sound. The one called Ren, who in life had been a sorcerer of Harad and who retained, even in undeath, a certain professional attentiveness, extended his awareness downward to read the pattern of the crows’ distress, and then looked up higher, above the clouds.

He saw them.

Three bronze shapes, far to the south and climbing, already above the lowest cloud layer and pulling away with a speed that made the fell beasts’ labored flight look like the floundering of moths in honey. Eagles. Great Eagles, unmistakable even at this distance with their vast wingspans, the impossible speed of their ascent, and the way they caught the upper winds and floated on them like invisible rivers in the sky.

And from the lead eagle’s talon radiated an aura of power. It was a sensation that was more felt than seen.

The other Nazgûl felt it too. They turned to each other across the gap between their mounts, and between them passed a communication that was not language but something older and colder, a shared understanding that moved at the speed of dread.

The Ring.

Hoarmurath drove his fell beast upward, clawing for altitude. Ren followed. The fell beasts shrieked in protest, for they were creatures of the low airs, the murky thermals above battlefields and swamps, and the thin cold above the clouds was agony to them, but the will of the Nazgûl was irresistible and the beasts climbed, their wings beating faster, their reptilian lungs heaving in the thinning atmosphere.

But the eagles were already above them and pulling away. Gwaihir flew at the ceiling of the world, where the air was so thin that a Man would have lost consciousness in minutes, and his wings found purchase on winds that the fell beasts could not even reach. The gap between them widened, slowly, inexorably, the way dawn widens from a crack of light into the fullness of day.

Ren watched the eagles shrink against the depthless blue, and he knew that the fell beasts could not hope to catch them. Not in the open sky. Not at this altitude. They were built for strength, not for speed, and against the children of Thorondor they were as a carthorse to a king’s mount.

He raised one gauntleted hand and began to whisper.

The words were in the Black Speech, the language of Mordor, forged by Sauron in the dark years and spoken willingly by no living thing. The words flowed from Ren’s hood in a low, continuous hiss, like steam escaping from a crack in the earth, and the air around his outstretched hand darkened and thickened and began to hum with a frequency that was felt in the bones rather than heard in the ears. He cast a spell of far-speaking, a thread of dark will flung southward across hundreds of leagues toward the tower of Barad-dûr, toward one of the stones that could receive it, and it carried with it a single, urgent message:

They fly.

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 010

PART TWO: THE DEFEAT OF THE CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHIC TRADITION

I. Introduction: The Nature of the Defeat

The Enlightenment did not defeat traditional Christian philosophy. It displaced it.

This distinction is essential. A defeat implies that the arguments were met, weighed, and found wanting, that the tradition’s premises were examined and refuted, its conclusions tested and falsified, its framework tried and discarded on the merits. None of this ever took place. The great questions that the Scholastics had labored over for centuries were not answered by the Enlightenment; they were simply dismissed as relics of a benighted age, unworthy of serious engagement, and set aside.

The transition from the medieval to the modern via the Renaissance was not a philosophical victory but a rhetorical one. The Enlightenment captured the vocabulary of reason, science, and progress, and used that vocabulary to frame the debate in terms favorable to itself. The tradition was cast as “faith” opposing “reason,” as “superstition” opposing “science,” as “authority” opposing “freedom.” These dichotomies were observably false, as the tradition had always employed reason, had built the very institutions of scientific inquiry, and had developed logical tools more sophisticated than anything the Enlightenment produced, but the rhetorical framing proved to be more convincing than the relevant facts.

Understanding how dialectic lost to rhetoric is not merely an exercise in intellectual history, however. It is a necessary condition for reversing the defeat and replacing the failed ideas of the Enlightenment. The tradition’s ideas were not refuted; they were outmaneuvered. What was lost through rhetorical failure can be regained through rhetorical success, provided the rhetoric is grounded firmly in the dialectical substance that the Enlightenment always lacked.

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Not Necessarily Self-Inflicted

Well, Dave Grohl is apparently a satanist, so if Kurt Cobain truly didn’t kill himself, this belated investigation might explain the otherwise inexplicable success of the Foo Fighters:

Now, an unofficial private sector team of forensic scientists has put fresh eyes on Cobain’s autopsy and crime scene materials, bringing in Brian Burnett, a specialist who previously worked on cases involving overdoses followed by gunshot trauma.

Independent researcher Michelle Wilkins, who worked with the team, told Daily Mail that after just three days looking into the evidence with fresh eyes, Burnett said: ‘This is a homicide. We’ve got to do something about this.’

She said the conclusion followed an exhaustive review of the autopsy findings, which revealed signs inconsistent with an instantaneous gunshot death.

The peer-reviewed paper presented ten points of evidence suggesting Cobain was confronted by one or more assailants who forced a heroin overdose to incapacitate him, before one of them shot him in the head, placed the gun in his arms and left behind a forged suicide note.

A lot of black Christians are postulating that a similar deal is why Lebron James is so reluctant to retire, as they believe it won’t be long after retirement before he goes the way of his fellow satanist Kobe Bryant.

Fame and fortune are absolutely not worth it. When Jesus Christ said he would free us from fear, this is one of the things he was talking about. The terror in the eyes of the wicked is a terrible thing, as is the regret you can hear in the voice of some of those who made their deals, got what they wanted, and belatedly realize that no matter what it was, it wasn’t worth it.

Whether it is Jordan Peterson crying on stage, Lebron James wearily trudging up and down the court and taking himself out of the game as soon as he hits double digits, or Bob Dylan talking about the commander of this world, the inevitable is obvious. Sooner or later, the Dark Rider is going to throw you down.

But they merit no mercy and they know it. Because the wicked aren’t merely evil. Long before they pay the ultimate price, they put down the down payment in someone else’s blood. The satanism is worse and more pervasive than you think.

The Russians know it’s pure satanism. We know it’s pure satanism. And every single member of the elite has to be considered suspect and probably guilty until proven innocent. The wicked have rejected the precepts of the Christian West, including being innocent until proven guilty, so they have no right to appeal to them.

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Recalibrating Man

One of the fascinating things about the Probability Zero project is the way that the desperate attempts of the critics to respond to it have steadily led to the complete collapse of the entire evolutionary house of cards. MITTENS began with the simple observation that 9 million years wasn’t enough time for natural selection to produce 15 million fixations. Then it turned out that there were only 6-7 million years to produce 20 million fixations twice.

After the retreat to neutral theory led to the discovery of the twice-valued variable and the variant invariance, the distinction established between N and N_e led to the recalibration of the molecular clock. And the recalibration of the molecular clock led, inevitably, to the discovery that the evolutionists no longer have 6-7 million years for natural selection and neutral theory to work their magic.

And now they have as little as 200,000 years, with an absolute maximum of 580,000, with which to work. And they still need to account for the full 20 million fixations in the human lineage alone, while recognizing that zero new potential fixations have appeared in the ancient DNA pipeline for the last 7,000 years. Simply pulling on one anomalous string has caused the entire structure to systematically unravel. The whole system proved to be far more fragile than I had any reason to imagine when I first asked that fatal question: what is the average rate of evolution?

So if your minds weren’t blown before, The N/N_e Distinction and the Recalibration of the Human-Chimpanzee Divergence should suffice to do the trick.

Kimura’s (1968) derivation of the neutral substitution rate k = μ rests on the cancellation of population size N between mutation supply (2Nμ) and fixation probability (1/2N). This cancellation is invalid. The mutation supply term uses census N (every individual can mutate), while the fixation probability is governed by effective population size Ne (drift operates on Ne, not N). The corrected substitution rate is k = μ × (N/Ne). Using empirically derived Ne values—human Ne = 3,300 from ancient DNA drift variance (Day & Athos 2026a) and chimpanzee Ne = 33,000 from geographic drift variance across subspecies—we recalibrate the human-chimpanzee divergence date. The consensus molecular clock estimate of 6–7 Mya collapses to 200–580 kya, with the most plausible demographic parameters yielding 200–360 kya. Both Ne estimates are independent of k = μ and independent of the molecular clock. The recalibrated divergence date increases the MITTENS fixation shortfall from ~130,000× to 4–8 million×, rendering the standard model of human-chimpanzee divergence via natural selection mathematically impossible by an additional two orders of magnitude.

There are a number of fascinating implications here, of course. But in the short term, what this immediately demonstrates is that all the heroic efforts of the evolutionary enthusiasts to somehow defend the mathematical possibility of producing 20 million fixations in 6.5 million years were utterly in vain. Because, depending upon how generous you’re feeling, MITTENS just became from 10x to 45x more impossible.

Here is the correct equation to calculate the amount of time for evolution from the initial divergence for any two lineages.

t = D / {μ × [(N_A/N_eA) + (N_B/N_eB)]}

Where:

  • D = observed pairwise sequence divergence
  • μ = per-generation mutation rate (from pedigree data)
  • N_A= census population size of lineage A
  • N_B = census population size of lineage B
  • N_eA = effective population sizes of lineage A (from historical census demographics)
  • N_eB = effective population sizes of lineage B (from historical census demographics)

Which, by the way, finally gives us the answer to the question that I asked at the very start: what is the rate of evolution?

R = μ(N/N_e) / g

This is the number of fixations per site per year. It is the rate of evolution for any lineage from a specific divergence, given the pedigree mutation rate, the census-to-effective population size ratio estimated from historical census demographics, and the generation time in years.

And yes, that means exactly what you suspect it might.

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China Shuns US Debt

From BRICS News:

JUST IN: China instructs banks to reduce US Treasury holdings.

This isn’t a massive surprise. It’s obviously been in the works for some time; I even wrote about it three years ago. But the quiet reduction from $1.3 trillion to $680 billion has been gradual, while this public announcement may reflect a more aggressive policy of dumping the dollar.

It also suggests that BRICS will very soon unveil an alternative payment structure, not just for the BRICS nations, but for the world. Which, given the fragility of the current US-based payment processing systems, would be a very welcome alternative for many neutral parties.

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Veriphysics: The Treatise 009

X. Transition: The Present Void

The Enlightenment is dead. Its premises have been tested and found wanting. Its political philosophy produced tyranny in the name of freedom, oligarchy in the name of democracy, censorship in the name of liberty. Its economics produced models that do not describe reality and policies that impoverish those they claimed to enrich. Its science produced institutions incapable of correcting their own errors and a theory of life that cannot survive contact with basic arithmetic. Its epistemology consumed itself, beginning with the enthronement of reason and ending with reason’s abdication.

And yet nothing has taken its place.

The modern educated person, the heir of the Enlightenment, the product of its institutions, and speaker of its language, now finds himself in an uncomfortable position. He cannot return to the pre-Enlightenment world; too much has changed, too much has been learned, too many of the old certainties have been genuinely superseded. But he cannot remain in the Enlightenment world either, for that world has been exposed as built on sand. He is suspended between a past he cannot recover and a present he cannot believe.

This suspension is not sustainable. Human beings require coherent frameworks for understanding reality, grounding morality, and orienting action. The borrowed capital of Christendom, upon which the Enlightenment drew even as it denied the debt, has been spent. The contradictions can no longer be papered over. Something must replace what has failed.

But what will replace it. What can replace it.?

The pre-Enlightenment philosophical tradition was Aristotelian, Scholastic, and Christian, avoided the pathologies that have undone modernity. It understood reason as participatory rather than autonomous, as a faculty for apprehending truth rather than constructing it. It grounded rights in the nature of things rather than in social contracts that no one signed. It integrated fact and value, knowledge and goodness, in a unified vision of reality ordered toward transcendent ends. It did not make the errors that the Enlightenment made, and therefore it did not create the series of self-inflicted catastrophes that the Enlightenment has inevitably caused the men of the West to suffer.

But the classical tradition, as it existed before the Enlightenment, is not sufficient for the present need. It was formulated to address questions that were live in the thirteenth century; since then it has ossified and has not been adequately developed to address the questions that challenge Man today. It failed to seriously resist the rise of the Enlightenment, in part due to the false promises of the Enlightenment, in part because it had grown rigid, defensive, and backward-looking, more concerned with preserving past formulations than with pursuing present truth. A tradition that neglects to evolve to meet present and future challenges is a tradition that is unlikely to endure.

What is needed is neither a return to the pre-modern tradition or modern philosophies, but something new: a philosophical framework that recovers the structure and coherence of traditional thought while incorporating what has been genuinely learned in recent centuries, an intellectual structure that avoids the errors of the Enlightenment without ignoring the challenges it raised, a conceptual architecture that not only offers a critique of what has failed but provides a positive vision for what actually works to build successful societies and a healthy, thriving civilization.

The outline of this framework begins to take shape in what follows in Part Two: The Defeat of the Western Philosophical Tradition.

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Pure Satanism

The Russians are now openly and publicly calling out the wicked elite that presently rule over Christendom:

The Epstein case has revealed the real face of the Western elites who are seeking to rule the entire world, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

“This topic has exposed the real face of what is called the collective West and the deep state, or rather, an alliance that controls the entire West and is seeking to rule the whole world,” he said in an interview with Itogi Nedely weekly news roundup on the NTV television channel.

“It is unnecessary to explain to any normal person that this is pure Satanism and is beyond human comprehension,” he added.

Epstein is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a glimpse of the material evil that itself is just a small portion of the much-larger spiritual war.

And remember, the Russians have all the records of the WWII-era death camps. They have all the evidence that they’ve gathered in the parts of Ukraine that have been freed from Clown World rule. Given the way in which their rhetoric is getting stronger in line with the prospects of military victory, they obviously know a lot more than they are now saying publicly or showing the world.

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