Author: VD

Not Much Room for Complaint

There is no reason the God-Emperor 2.0, or anyone else, should take the complaints of the Ukrainians or the Europeans seriously. He’s absolutely correct to point out that the Kiev regime had a seat at the negotiating table in both the Minsk 1.0 and the Minsk 2.0 talks, and not only did it fail to keep their agreements, but they actually passed a law making it illegal to talk to the Russians at all. So they’re out, and they should be out, because they’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.

US President Donald Trump has expressed disappointment with Ukraine’s leadership over its complaints that it was not invited to US-Russia peace talks in Saudi Arabia, suggesting that it has squandered opportunities to end the conflict on its own for years. Speaking to reporters after high-level talks in Riyadh on Tuesday, Trump was asked if he had a message for Ukrainians who may have felt “betrayed or disappointed” about not having a seat at the table.

“I’m really disappointed in what’s happened. I’ve been watching this for three years… I hear that, you know, they’re upset about not having a seat. Well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that.”

Trump added that the conflict “could have been settled very easily. A half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without the loss of much land, very little land. Without the loss of any lives and without the loss of cities,” he said.

And as for Europe, if any of the European countries want to be part of any post-surrender peacekeeping, that’s up to them. But it’s not the USA’s problem, the USA’s responsibility, or in line with the wishes of the American people.

Trump said he would welcome an EU peacekeeping force in Ukraine in case of a ceasefire between Moscow and Kiev. “If they want to do it, that’s great. I’m all for it. I would not object to it at all,” he said. Trump stressed that US troops would not be involved in any peacekeeping arrangement.

Besides, all those pro-Ukrainian morons have been telling us for years that Russia is weak, that Russia is losing the war, that the Russian economy is crumbling and that Russia is running out of ammunition in two weeks. So why are they suddenly crying about their fears of a Russian invasion of Europe? And why should anyone pay any attention to anything they say ever again?

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SOULSIGMA Update

In light of The Only Skull campaign hitting its goals – thanks to the backers, of course – I’ve gone ahead and had the ten songs professionally mastered, so they’re going to sound even better than they do on the sampler video which John Bradley of Booster Patrol graciously prepared for me, and which we put together to demonstrate the audio quality.

This required changing the first stretch goal, which now, in response to some requests, will be a fully human-performed song that will be professionally mixed and mastered, a song that is not one of the ten that are already on the album. So, if you’d like to see how far we can push this thing into the organic realm, consider backing the campaign.

And if you missed it, you can also watch the video for A Merciless Night.

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You Don’t Own Your Ebooks

The wisdom of owning actual books printed on archival paper and bound in leather is once more confirmed, this time by Amazon:

Starting on February 26th, 2025, Amazon is removing a feature from its website allowing you to download purchased books to a computer and then copy them manually to a Kindle over USB. It’s a feature that a lot of Kindle users are probably not aware of, given books can be more easily sent to devices over Wi-Fi, but it’s especially useful for backing up purchases or converting them to other formats compatible with non-Kindle e-readers.

Amazon confirmed the removal of the book download feature in a statement to The Verge. “Customers can continue reading books previously downloaded on their Kindle device, and access new content through the Kindle app, Kindle for web, as well as directly through Kindle devices with WiFi capability,” said Amazon spokesperson Jackie Burke.

Once this feature goes away, you’ll still be able to manually copy ebook files and other documents to Kindles over USB using Amazon’s apps or third-party solutions like Calibre. You just won’t be able to download copies of your purchased books to a computer.

A comment from a former Amazon employee underlines the bitter irony.

I worked for the Kindle team at Amazon 2009-2011 when Kindle was brand new. It’s amazing to think that back in those days we thought we were working on a technology that may eventually replace most physical books and especially ironic to now think that the best way to maintain ownership over books and copies of controversial or “banned” books is to own physical copies.

Never trust the corpocracy. Every new freedom they give you turns out to be an illusion.

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Bring. Them. Home.

Simplicius suspects that Trump is going to go a lot bigger on Europe than anyone assumes or even imagines. As do I.

Things are rolling full steam ahead on the ‘negotiations’ front. Russian and American counterparts are set to meet in Riyadh tomorrow, February 18th. The American team is said to consist of Rubio, Witkoff, and Mike Waltz, and the Russian one of Lavrov, Putin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov, and Kirill Dmitriev.

Of course the real nub of the negotiations will revolve around what the US is secretly willing to offer. On the surface, Trump and co. must preserve their bold American bravura, but these opening forays are non-starters for Russia. In reality, behind the scenes there are hintings that Trump may be ready to go much farther, perhaps even make some of Lavrov’s earlier dreams into realities. For instance, rumors now abound of Trump really doing a number on Europe unlike anything previously imagined.

If there is one thing we know about the God-Emperor 2.0, it’s that he likes to go big. Bigger than anyone else. The best. Huge. And there is nothing that would be bigger when it comes to Europe, or more to America’s advantage, than a complete withdrawal of its troops from Europe.

Now, the mere fact that Trump proposes something cannot be equated with him actually following through on it; the Wall is not yet built and the Deep State is still undrained. But he likes massive proposals that change the game by the mere fact of them being on the table, which is why I think it is likely that the opening statements on the subject by Vance and Hegseth are a prelude to a proposal to leave European security to the Europeans.

It is telling, is it not, that nothing terrifies the Clown World servants who rule antidemocratically over the European peoples than those peoples being set free to rely upon themselves.

In any event, I’m sure that whatever does come out of these initial discussions will prove interesting and provocative.

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Write What Thou Wilt

This selection from an essay by the late Roger Zelazny pretty well encapsulates why I never get caught up in the popular illusion that sales = quality or the importance of a writer. From The Road to Amber:

The anecdote that fascinates me most is about the man I have a secret admiration for—Timothy Shay Arthur, who amazingly in the 1840s wrote five percent of everything published in America. He was the most prolific author of his day. If they wanted temperance books, he’d grind out temperance books by the ream. If abolition suddenly became a popular notion politically, he’d be writing abolition tracts. If somebody wanted frontier novels, he’d be writing frontier novels. Everybody was reading Timothy Shay Arthur. If you asked the man on the street then who was the best author of the day, he’d most likely say Timothy Shay Arthur.

During the time Timothy Shay Arthur was writing five percent of everything published in America, Henry David Thoreau was writing Walden. Nobody read Walden except a handful of New England intellectuals, most of whom were personal friends of the author. Yet, if we look back now through the history of American letters we discover that apart from the small song called “Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now” from a temperance play called Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, Timothy Shay Arthur is not remembered. But everybody knows of Thoreau’s Walden. Even if they haven’t read Walden, they at least know it is a story about a guy who went and lived in the woods and reflected on the nature of society and on nature itself. His book persisted. Nobody knew at the time that it was a classic. I think one is foolish to set out to try to write a classic. One just does the best job one can. But Arthur is barely remembered. Thoreau will still be read another hundred years from now.

Which leads to another consideration: Who judges in the present time? How valid are their judgments? Should you be writing to impress reviewers and critics, and even if you succeed in doing so, how lasting will their effects be upon your career? I am reminded in this regard of the fact that H. L. Mencken, American columnist, essayist, and editor for American Mercury—a fairly hip fellow on the literary scene back in the 1920s—decided to stick his neck out and write an essay on the people he thought would be remembered fifty, a hundred years down the line as the great American novelists of the 1920s. He chose three. He chose Carl Van Vechten, James Hunicher, and Clyde Brion-Davis. Everybody reads those today.

Carl Van Vechten wrote one nice book; it was called Peter Wiffle. He wrote six others and every book went downhill a little bit from the first one until he was writing so-so stuff at the end and he quit. He originally had been a music critic for a New York paper and he wound up writing books about cats, whom he cared about maybe more than people. I don’t know. James Hunicher, unfortunately, died shortly after Mencken’s essay appeared having written only one book, so we’ll never really know. Clyde Brion-Davis just never caught on the same way as the people Mencken did not mention in his essay, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos. They were writing all around Mencken at the time, and Mencken just didn’t feel they were doing as fine a job as Van Vechten, Hunicher, and Brion-Davis. It’s a very slippery thing to count upon your contemporaries for judgment.

I feel the only person that you must please as a writer, really, is your own self at its deepest levels.

I had to laugh at the part about the descent of Carl Van Vechten. It tends to remind me of a certain so-called “science fiction author” who has somehow managed to follow exactly the same path, with every book going downhill from the first one until he wound up writing books about cats…

The sad thing is that Zelazny himself is already forgotten; even his greatest novel, which was lauded by some as one of the best science fiction novels ever written, is virtually unknown to any reader under the age of 50.

Write what thou wilt, with due regard for those happy few who are interested in reading your books.

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Cold Water

Didactic Mind points out that just because the USA has finally come to its senses and is willing to discuss a peace settlement with the Russians, that doesn’t mean that the Russians will have any interest in outdated proposals that are based on the situation back in 2022 rather than the one that reflects the current one three years later.

When the news broke of Mr. Hegseth’s comments, and Mr. Trump’s call, I was among those who reacted with joy, thinking this meant an imminent set of peace negotiations. But, if you read the Russian reactions carefully – and I did, and do – then you will quickly understand that the Russians are in no mood for tomfoolery, and they are not optimistic about possible negotiations, at all.

Nor do they have any reason to be.

You see, the fundamental realities of the Russian position have not changed. Russia’s list of demands goes far beyond the mere inadmissibility of Ukraine into NATO. This is but a condensed version of the things on the minds of the Russians:

  • Not only can Ukraine not join NATO, but NATO itself must roll back far beyond Russia’s borders, preferably to where it was back in 1991;
  • Russia needs to see treaties signed and ratified between itself and the US, and itself and NATO, that forever solves the problem of Russia’s western border, by ensuring NATO never again expands anywhere near it;
  • The extremely odious Banderite-controlled government in Queef must be disbanded, and held to account for its war crimes against the Russian people of Donbass;
  • Arms control treaties – which THE AMERICANS TORE UP – must be restored and renegotiated in light of new realities (which is to say, the fact that Russia has won the arms race, and by a huge margin);
  • All – I repeat, ALL – Western sanctions against Russia must end, and the insane attempts to box in and bankrupt Russia must end, forever;
  • The rabidly Russophobic elites of Europe must be put back in their box, never to appear again, and Europe itself must never again be in a position to threaten or invade Russia;

This is before we get to a whole host of other questions, like bringing to justice those who destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline (the Americans under Brandon, obviously), or the supply corridors to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, or the competition over the Arctic, and a whole other batch of problems.

I think the Russians will listen to the US proposals, but I don’t see that even the God-Emperor 2.0’s administration, as radical and exceeding of expectations as it has been, is going to be inclined to do what it should, which is a) end all sanctions, b) withdraw all troops from Europe, c) pay the relevant reparations that are owed to Russia for the damages that were caused by the various sanctions and seizures, and d) turn over all of the US and European war criminals to the Russian authorities.

That’s what I would consider to be a reasonable demand from Putin. He has no reason to settle for anything less. Anything short of that, and he will likely continue to strangle both Ukraine and the EU states until they surrender unconditionally. His problem is that even now, the European authorities believe they cannot be touched by the Russian forces. If he’s not going to reach a settlement with President Trump, he is going to have to convince them otherwise.

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Project SOULSIGMA

SOULSIGMA represents the current cutting edge of music and technology, with the combination of man and machine intelligence. All ten songs are entirely produced with AI music technology, then edited and mastered with digital audio tools to produce a very high-quality alternative rock sound that is original without feeling lifeless or uninspired.

The ten songs on the album entitled, THE ONLY SKULL, are:

3:35  RIDE AND DIE
4:17  THE ONLY SKULL
5:03  ANGEL IN FLIGHT
4:16  SEASONS
3:58  NEPTUNE GRIEVES
3:28  MY SECRET SIN
3:27  THE SHINING WIRE
3:15  THE WORD DESCENDED
5:29  ONCE THERE WAS SORROW
3:53  THE RIDE NEVER ENDS

All ten songs were written by your favorite dark lord, with the exception of The Only Skull and Once There Was Sorrow, which were co-written with George Gordon Byron. If you’d like a taste of what the songs sound like, Booster Patrol have helpfully created a showcase video for one of the songs that isn’t on the album, A Merciless Night. UATV viewers will probably recognize it as the English version of 悲しみの影 as a reverse-Murakami approach was effectively utilized.

If you’d like to back the album, you can do so via the two-week campaign on Fund My Comic. As I mentioned before, this isn’t a priority project like the campaign at the end of March will be. The final mastered versions will be made available on UATV and Spotify after the campaign, so you’ll be able to hear them whether you choose to support it directly or not.

UPDATE: Thanks to the four backers, the project is officially funded already!

UPDATE: Fandom Pulse very kindly covered the project’s announcement.

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State Implies Support for Independence

I don’t know if this action by the US State Department is simple Deep State shenanigans or what would appear to be a significant step by the Trump administration:

Bloomberg: Earlier this week, the U.S. State Department removed the words “we do not support Taiwanese independence” from a fact sheet on Taiwan relations on its website. Have you discussed this with the U.S. and do you have any comment now? 

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun: There is but one China in the world, Taiwan is part of China and the government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. It is a prevailing international consensus and basic norm governing international relations, and also a solemn commitment the U.S. has made in the three China-U.S. joint communiqués.

History cannot be tampered with, facts cannot be denied, and truth cannot be distorted. U.S. State Department updated its fact sheet on relations with Taiwan and gravely backpedaled on its position on Taiwan-related issues. This move severely violates the one-China principle and three China-U.S. joint communiqués, goes against international law and basic norms of international relations, and sends a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces for “Taiwan independence.” This is another example of the U.S. clinging to its wrong policy of “using Taiwan to contain China.”

We urge the U.S. to immediately correct its wrongdoings, abide by the one-China principle and three China-U.S. joint communiqués, handle the Taiwan question with extra prudence, stop using Taiwan to contain China, stop upgrading its substantive relations with Taiwan, stop helping Taiwan expand so-called “international space,” stop emboldening and supporting “Taiwan independence,” and avoid further severe damage to China-U.S. relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.  

This is a key moment for the Trump administration to decide if it is genuinely nationalist or if it is still going to try to prop up the lite globalism known as “civic nationalism” that has systematically weakened the USA for the last century.

Although most people are incapable of examining the roots of their beliefs, at their cores, the Chinese position is the nationalist one and the independence position is the civic nationalist one. Regardless, it isn’t any business of the USA’s how the unification process takes place, so it’s not a good sign that the State Department is sending interventionist signals like this.

Americans might not consider this to be a big deal, but it’s the top story on Global Times today.

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Boomers Never, Ever, Learn

The absolute inability of Boomers to grasp that the things they unquestioningly believed were good things were actually very bad is astonishing. They still cling to their outdated, disproven, dyscivilizational beliefs despite the fact that they are complaining about the consequences of how they successfully changed the world, or at least the country, from what it used to be to what it is now.

BOOMER: I’m 75 years old, and I don’t recognize the America I see today. This used to be a good country. What is wrong with people?

NOT-BOOMER: The Civil Rights and Hart-Celler Acts of the 1960s is why.

BOOMER: You don’t believe in the Civil Rights Act? You sound like one of those whites-only racists.

NOT-BOOMER: Yet you’re complaining that America isn’t more like the America you were born in which was 88% white lol.

After watching tens of millions of foreigners invade the United States over five decades and transform it completely beyond recognition, Boomers are still more concerned with clinging to the Narrative and being sure that no one can call them racist than they are with the spiritual, material, technological, financial, demographic, and military decline of the country.

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The 7-Year Honeypot

Those who are seeking to reveal the surveillance society are increasingly confident that Ashley St. Clair wasn’t just a garden-variety grifter, but a Deep State asset targeting Elon Musk:

The bigger story here is that Ashely St. Clair may not just be a fake MAGA gold digger, opportunist and a fraud.

She has all the markers of an intelligent asset who may have been strategically targeting Elon Musk for years to spy, blackmail and compromise him just like I believe Amber Heard set out to do.

I don’t care what anyone does in their personal lives if it’s legal and not harming children or this country, no less. With that said, if she is a spy running a honeytrap on a powerful man close to President Trump, then it IS all of our business and this should concern every American as it potentially puts Trump and his administration in danger. Does anyone really still believe that Monica Lewinsky was JUST an intern that gave Bill Clinton a blowjob in the Oval Office?

The reason their plan failed despite working precisely as planned is that Elon Musk is such an amoral loose cannon that its almost impossible to blackmail or compromise him. It’s not the 1950s anymore, and there is very little that Elon Musk can do that will surprise anyone, let alone dissuade them from supporting DOGE’s campaign to demolish the Deep State.

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