Author: VD

Hiromi Kawakami Book List

Relatively unknown in the West, Hiromi Kawakami is one of Japan’s best and most acclaimed contemporary authors. She has won all of the major Japanese literary prizes, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Yomiuri Prize, and the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature. She is known for her delicate exploration of human relationships and the subtle magic that permeates everyday life, occasionally delving into what can only be described as deep science fiction. Somewhat reminiscent of Haruki Murakami, though far more deeply rooted in Japanese culture, Kawakami writes stories that feel both deeply personal and mysteriously otherworldly. Her work often focuses on the connections between people—romantic, familial, and neighborly—rendered with a gentle touch that reveals profound truths about loneliness, love, and belonging.

While three of her books are yet to be translated into English, I have read nine of the ten that are available, and this is how I would list them in order of personal preference and general literary quality.

This is one of my rare contributions to Fandom Pulse. You can read it there. Note that it does not include the three novels not yet translated into English, or the tenth book, Manazuru, which I am reading now.

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No More Universal Injunctions

This is actually a very sensible decision by the Supreme Court to limit the power of lower-ranking federal judges:

The Supreme Court on Friday limited the use of nationwide injunctions, reining in federal judges’ ability to issue sweeping orders that have in recent years stymied implementation of policies from Republican and Democratic presidential administrations alike.

In a widely anticipated decision stemming from President Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, the high court said that universal orders likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to the federal courts. Justice Amy Coney Barrett authored the majority opinion for the 6-3 court, with the liberal justices in dissent.

The court granted the Trump administration request to narrow the reach of the injunctions blocking the president’s executive order while proceedings move forward, but “only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief” to plaintiffs who can sue, Barrett wrote. The justices did not address the question of whether Mr. Trump’s order is constitutional, and the administration has said agencies have 30 days to issue public guidance about implementation of the policy, allowing time for more challenges to be filed.

“Some say that the universal injunction ‘give[s] the Judiciary a powerful tool to check the Executive Branch.’ But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” Barrett wrote. “When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

It’s one thing when the Supreme Court limits the Executive Branch. But permitting the lower ranking courts to do so, and to extend their state and regional jurisdictions to the entire country, has never made any sense at all, especially in light of how different District Court judges often rule differently on the same sorts of issues.

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Trust WHAT Science?

Precisely how are we supposed to Trust The Science when there isn’t any science to trust?

RFK Jr was Right

2001, the Director of the FDA Office of Vaccine Research and Review, William Egan, admitted under oath Mercury (thimerosal) was never tested for Safety in human beings.

But sure… let’s inject millions of Americans with it

You flat-out cannot trust anything the Medical-Science complex asserts to be true. Nothing at all. While I’m certain there must occasionally be assertions that are both true and supported by genuine scientody, it’s absolutely impossible to distinguish between those assertions and those that are pure invention and inversion.

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Outsmarted

It’s difficult to get too carried away by the euphoria of being auto-enlightened by one’s intelligence in the aftermath of getting played by a Ridgeback putting on an award-worthy performance of a starving puppy whom everyone somehow forgot to feed. The sheer pathos of her stunning portrayal of a sad, hungry little dog who had just been patiently waiting without complaint for HOURS after her normal dinnertime had passed would have brought tears to even Cruella De Vil’s eyes.

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AI Text is Fair Use

It’s not at all surprising that a Federal judge – a particularly good one who has tried to rein in various corporate abuses of the arbitration system – has recognized that AI training and AI text generation is protected under the fair use doctrine in a landmark pre-trial decision.

A federal judge in California issued a landmark ruling that protects the development of artificial intelligence and creative freedom by determining that training AI systems on copyrighted books constitutes fair use under copyright law. U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s decision in Bartz v. Anthropic represents a crucial victory against attempts to stifle technological innovation through overly broad copyright claims.

Judge Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s training of its Claude AI on authors’ works was “exceedingly transformative,” and therefore protected under the fair use doctrine as specified in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. This decision correctly recognizes that AI training represents a fundamentally different use of copyrighted material than simple reproduction or distribution.

The judge’s reasoning demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how AI works, comparing the training process to human learning rather than mechanical copying. “Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts,” Alsup wrote. “To make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable.”

This analogy captures why attempts to restrict AI training are flawed. Human authors read thousands of books, absorb their techniques and ideas, and incorporate that knowledge into their own writing without paying licensing fees for each influence. AI systems operate similarly, learning patterns and techniques rather than copying specific content.

It absolutely makes sense. How can copyright protect something that isn’t copied? How can the use of a copyright text as nothing more than a reference and a style guide be illegal in any way? And as I have pointed out repeatedly, an author’s literary style cannot be protected given the “look-and-feel” decision in favor of Microsoft when Apple tried to protect its graphic user interface.

“Legal experts expect the decision to be appealed.”

That’s not going to happen. They simply don’t have a case, and Alsup is a smart, thoughtful judge who knows what he’s doing when he writes his decisions. He’s the judge whose decision prevented corporations from indefinitely delaying their responses to the arbitrations their terms of use required.

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Fake Space Program Winds Down

We’re supposed to be very concerned that the 60-year financial boondoggle called NASA is finally showing signs of coming to an end:

NASA had a good run. But it is clear after the Agency town hall today that NASA’s role as the global preeminent Space Agency is over. Despite a proposed 50% cut to the Science budget, agency leadership is inexplicably moving forward with the President’s budget request. This has already led to the cancellation of dozens of projects and Missions as well as the displacement of thousands of employees. There is no coherent long-term vision, no credible plan to achieve the priorities the agency claims to uphold under such drastic financial constraints, and no meaningful advocacy from leadership to push back against the cuts. The future of NASA’s scientific mission is being gutted in plain sight.

My guess is that they want to wind it down so they can claim it’s a) no big deal and b) ancient history once all of the fakery that was perpetrated by NASA and in its name begins to come out. So much of “modernity” is simply false that it will more than boggle even what passes for the average NPC’s mind.

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He’s Just Helping the Economy

What an odd thing to say! How can Russia be charged with “aggravating Britain’s migrant crisis” when a) mass immigration is good for the economy, b) refugees are always welcome, and c) diversity is strength?

Russia is aggravating Britain’s migrant crisis to overwhelm border defences and sow division in the nation, security sources have claimed. Vladimir Putin’s government is believed to be providing fake documents, transport and even military escorts to smuggling gangs ferrying migrants across the Channel.

The threat overwhelming migration poses to national security is so fierce that this week Nato recognised it by allowing its members to count border protection to spending targets for the first time.

A security source told The Sun: ‘Hostile states and malign actors are using illegal migration to test borders, cause disruption and destabilise countries like Britain.

‘That’s exactly why Nato is now treating border protection as a core part of collective defence — because the lines between traditional military threats and national security are more blurred than ever.’

So far this year, over 18,000 people have arrived in small boats. This is far higher than 2018, when just 299 people crossed the Channel.

The highest year for arrivals was 2022, which saw nearly 46,000 people arrive.

Why, the next thing you know, the Narrative will inform us that foreigners crossing the borders against the will of the native people, taking up residence and occupying their land is an invasion and an act of war…

The indisputable and undeniable fact is that immigration is actually much worse for a country than military invasion. Because sooner or later, foreign soldiers go home. Even after being nuked and militarily occupied 80 years ago, Japan remained Japan.

But after just 60 years of the 1965 Naturalization Act, there are fewer Americans descended from the Revolutionary British than there are US residents descended from the post-1965 foreign invasions. The USA is no longer American, just as if current patterns continue in a linear fashion, in 40 years Great Britain will no longer be British.

Trust me. I’m a direct descendant of American Indians on my mother’s side, but you probably wouldn’t even consider me to be one at all. Well, guess what they’ll deny about your grandchildren, white man… The consequence of a nation believing Clown World’s lies is its eventual extinction.

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Con Inc. Discovers Math

That would be more meaningful if conservatives haven’t spent the last 40 years insisting that the problem isn’t immigration, it’s ILLEGAL immigration. Which, of course, is total nonsense.

The problem is that the USA is no longer American, just as the Mandate of Palestine is no longer Arab and the South African Republic is no longer Dutch. The answer, which I have been pointing out for literal decades, and which is still considered wildly beyond the pale by most liberals and conservatives alike, is to restore the pre-1965 national demographics, either repatriate those who arrived after 1965 and are descended from those who arrived after 1965 or give them their own sovereign part of the former USA, and prosecute every single individual who was responsible for opening the immigration process to the mass foreign invasion for treason.

Such policies are not politically viable now and it’s unlikely that they will be politically viable in the future. So, there will be war. It will be a stupid, terrible, and entirely unnecessary war, and the results will either be a) more or less the same as if the policies were enacted or b) considerably worse. Something resembling the partition of India, which involved 2 million dead and 20 million displaced, is the most likely outcome, only on an even larger scale.

It’s not enough to END both legal and illegal immigration. The effects have to be reversed if America is ever going to be anything resembling America again. Certainly there is room for some valued immigrants or descendants of immigrants, integration is real, possible, and often desirable in a small percentage of sufficiently compatible cases. But unfortunately, politics is a very crude and clumsy tool, and war is an even cruder and clumsier one.

So decline, fall, war, and partition is by far the higher probability outcome. As I have pointed out every now and then, where do you think homogeneous societies come from? They are born of heterogeneous empires and war.

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Retro Bindery Backers

As we’re rapidly approaching full operational status for the Death Star bindery, we’re going to need to figure out the print runs for THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY. So, sometime next month, we’re giving everyone the chance to back the bindery at the same price as the original backers who have made the whole thing possible.

We’ve set up a poll at the Castalia Library stack, so please feel free to let us know if a) you’re already a backer, b) you’re interested in becoming one, or c) not so much. You can also check out the first draft of the title page as well as what the interiors are going to look like.

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The Vanished Six Inches

Here is a question for you. Do you seriously believe that President Donald Trump is in the picture below, taken at the NATO summit meeting today? Even in the NBA, does anyone ever take pictures and put the 6’3″ guy in front? I should note that I very much doubt that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is actually 6 feet tall, just as I refuse to believe that Emmanual Macron is genuinely 5’10” as some reports have had it.

Now, we can see how tall the Short Fake Trump is since we know that Macron’s actual height is, at most, 5’7″ tall.

Based on the available analyses, Emmanuel Macron’s height is most consistently reported as 5 feet, 7 inches. Two sources confirm this measurement: one from Business Insider ranking world leaders by height and another from a World publication specifically about the French President’s height.

I think it’s interesting they had Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, the woman in the funky green superhero jumpsuit, wearing something that obscured her footwear. However, since she is 5’8″, we can be confident that she is not wearing heels or she’d be towering over both Macron and the Short Fake Trump.

I await with interest the explanations of those who claim that there are no Trump body doubles and that it is simply an inability to understand the effect of camera angles accounting for the magic disappearing six inches of President Trump’s height.

UPDATE: further confirmation. The man in between Queen Maxima and the Short Fake Trump is King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands. According to Schweizer Illustrierte, he is 6’0″ tall.

König Willem-Alexander und Königin Maxima: Fünf Zentimeter beträgt der Grössenunterschied auch beim Holländischen Königspaar: König Willem-Alexander misst 1,83 Meter, Königin Maxima 1,78 Meter. 

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