Author: VD

Onward to Valhalla

The great Bud Grant has died at the age of 95:

Hall of Fame head coach Bud Grant, who led the Vikings to four Super Bowl, has died. He was 95.

Born May 20, 1927 in Superior Wisconsin, Harry Peter Grant Jr. played in the NBA, the NFL, and the CFL. He was the oldest living NBA champion, a member of the 1950 Minneapolis Lakers.

Grant later played for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. He coached the Blue Bombers from 1957 to 1966, taking the job at the age of 29. He won four Grey Cups with the Blue Bombers.

In 1967, Grant succeeded Norm Van Brocklin as head coach of the Vikings. Grant took the Vikings to Super Bowl IV, Super Bowl VIII, Super Bowl IX, and Super Bowl XI. He coached the team until 1983, retiring for a year and then returning after a disastrous 3-13 season under Les Steckel.

Grant, known for an always-stoic sideline demeanor, had a record of 168-108-5 in his NFL coaching career. He went 118-64-3 in the CFL. In all, he coached 466 games, winning 286 times.

For better or for worse, I owe my stoicism to Bud Grant. When asked once about my emotional imperturbability in the face of open hatred, I answered that as a lifelong Vikings fan, I no longer had any capacity for disappointment or tears in the face of defeat. I always admired how he could meet success or failure with stone cold equanimity, and how he refused to bow even before the bitter cold of the Minnesota winters.

One by one, our heroes are leaving us. May we be worthy of them.

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Bösenschadenfreude

ITEM: BREAKING: HARRY AND MEGHAN STAND TO LOSE MILLIONS IN COLLAPSE OF SVB BANK. Sources tell iSN the couple set up accounts following the advice of friends in Silicon Valley. “This is a major blow,” said our source, “They had all of Harry’s money there.”

ITEM: OPRAH LOSES MILLIONS IN SVB COLLAPSE. iSN has learned Oprah kept millions at the failed bank. “Like other celebs she went all in and now may have lost serious money,” said a person familiar with the situation.

That’s just too good to be true, isn’t it? Is there really that much justice to be found in a fallen word?

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It Was Never About the Trinity

While I have been reluctant to pay the matter any attention whatsoever, I have come to the conclusion that there is a lot more going on here than the usual Internet drama and JimBob is something very, very different than he purported to be when he joined the Bear community and began lavishing attention on Owen. Not only does JimBob increasingly appear to be directly connected to some very bad actors, but his few defenders in the Bear community increasingly appear to be infiltrators as well, as they are shamelessly lying about JimBob, Owen, and now me as well.

For example, JimBob appears to have some connection to this woman, whom he tagged in his 2016 post about pizza-related jewelry.

He also tagged the artist below on the same Instagram post, whose highly-sexualized work is rife the same one-eye symbolism along with plenty of grotesque and evil imagery. There is a LOT more, and a lot worse, than what is seen here.

In response, JimBob’s dishonest defenders have resorted to everything from (a) claiming that the screenshots taken directly from Instagram yesterday, one of which I personally took myself, were fakes…

@WhiskeyDelta It’s a fake screenshot, created by a bear to troll JB. Vox is only sharing it because he’s good friends with Owen. I’m not even sure what site this is on. A search of that exact text finds nothing. If it does exist somewhere, I bet good money the account was created in the last week from an IP in Idaho… I’m not sure what Owen’s end game is here. Whatever happened to the Christian principle of turning the other cheek?

To (b) attempting to redefine the very concept of rhetoric while attempting to change the subject.

@BattleBrotherBear It’s rhetoric because there was no investigation just couple of photos PROVES the TRUTH. Vox and Owen are the wizards…

To claiming that I am lying about the fact that Owen’s subscriber numbers on UATV have increased since the so-called “debate”.

@WhiskeyDelta UaTv doesn’t publish subscription numbers, and Owen’s a proven liar. I stopped watching Owen after this, but in one of his last rants he complained Jimbob was “stealing his audience”. You don’t do that when your cup runneth over.

As I pointed out on Gab, these things are not, as yet, conclusive proof of anything. But the rabbit hole is definitely getting deeper. And considerably darker. It should be informative to see what the VFM and the Troll Hunters learn about the gentleman, his wife, and their associates, as there will certainly be an investigation now.

UPDATE: JimBob’s inept defenders are beginning to retreat. From Gab.

VD: You’re a complete and shameless liar. The screenshots were taken directly from JimBob’s own Instagram page. I took the pizza necklace screenshot dated August 15, 2016 myself.

WhiskeyDelta: Fair enough. I didn’t notice the date.

VD: The date has nothing to do with it. Do you admit that you lied when you stated this? “It’s a fake screenshot, created by a bear to troll JB. Vox is only sharing it because he’s good friends with Owen.”

UPDATE: The genuine Bears have reached a conclusion that appears to be at least partially correct.

Anyone who is defending jimbob is literally defending satanism

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First Domino Down

Silicon Valley Bank just crashed so hard that the FDIC had to step in and seize it on a Friday morning before the close of business.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation seized the assets of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday, marking the largest bank failure since Washington Mutual during the height of the 2008 financial crisis.

The bank failed after depositors — mostly technology workers and venture capital-backed companies — began withdrawing their money creating a run on the bank.

The FDIC ordered the closure of Silicon Valley Bank and immediately took position of all deposits at the bank Friday. The bank had $209 billion in assets and $175.4 billion in deposits as the time of failure, the FDIC said in a statement. It was unclear how much of deposits was above the $250,000 insurance limit at the moment.

Notably, the FDIC did not announce a buyer of Silicon Valley’s assets, which is typically when there’s an orderly wind down of a bank. The FDIC also seized the bank’s assets in the middle of the business day, a sign of how dire the situation had become.

But don’t worry. We are cross-the-FDIC’s-heart pinky-swear assured that there is little danger of contagion throughout the financial industry because all of the other banks are absolutely just fine and have totally no issues at all. It’s just a flesh wound, nothing more.

Please continue to consume with confidence and don’t forget to be tolerant and inclusive!

PS: this is what debt-deflation looks like. Billions of dollars in debt-wealth vanishing in an instant.

UPDATE: Wells Fargo customers have reported that their direct deposits were missing from their accounts on Friday morning, according to reports.

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EVERYTHING is Fake and Gay

There is not one single thing that Clown World has told you is true that can withstand the light of even a half-serious investigation. NOT ONE SINGLE THING. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, from evolution to the Moon, from Covid-19 to Vatican II, all of it is fake and gay, all of it is obviously and provably false.

At this point, the only rational, logical, and sane thing to do is to assume, a priori, that everything the mainstream media reports as fact or history is misleading at best and on average false. This superskeptical heuristic will point you in the direction of the confirmable truth far more often than assuming the mainstream narrative is more or less true will.

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One Can’t Call Them Traitors

The neocons never had any loyalty to America or to the Republican Party in the first place.

Never Trumper Bill Kristol called on Republican voters to support Democrat politicians “for a while,” and said he would support a 2024 presidential ticket led by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Kristol over the weekend addressed a crowd of disillusioned Republicans about the need to get rid of “Trump Republicans” from the party.

“It turns out that once you let the toothpaste out of the tube, so to speak, demagoguery and bigotry and all that, some people like it. It’s hard to get it back,” Kristol said. “You can’t just give them a lecture.”

Kristol’s remarks came during the Principles First Summit held at the Conrad Hotel in Washington, DC. The summit featured prominent Never Trumpets and “was implicitly constructed as a counterweight,” to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held the same weekend, Politico reported.

Anyone who takes neocons like Bill Kristol or Ben Shapiro seriously, let alone at face value, is literally retarded. I mean, one has to be seriously stupid to believe one single word that comes out of any neocon’s mouth. Bill Kristol’s father, Irving, even coined the ridiculous term to be sure that they distinguished themselves from conservatives, despite the fact that they already had a perfectly useful term to describe them, namely, Trotskyites.

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The Reward for Virtue-Signaling

The speed with which white people adopting a black child inform others of this fact is only surpassed by how quickly a Harvard graduate informs everyone what school he attended, and makes it clear, at the very least, that they expect this will ensure that no one will call them racist. But Colin Kaepernick has corrected their misapprehensions.

Colin Kaepernick has accused his white adoptive parents of ‘perpetuating racism’ by telling him as a teen that corn rows looked unprofessional, and says he had to experience ‘very problematic things’ while growing up in their house.

Kaepernick was adopted as an infant by Rick and Teresa Kaepernick, a white couple from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. They moved to Turlock, California when he was four.

They had two biological children but lost two sons to congenital heart defects.

Speaking to CBS to promote his new graphic comic memoir, Kaepernick gave the example of his mother telling him corn rows were not professional.

He claims she told him he ‘looked like a little thug’ when he showed her the hairstyle.

‘I know my parents loved me. But there were still very problematic things that I went through,’ he said.

And they thought no one would call them racist.

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Thursday Arktoons

THE GOLDEN AGE Episode 1: Celebration of the Immortals

WARMAN Episode 43: Fight or Float

THE SAGA OF EVIL MONKEY MAN! Episode 31: New World Man

STONETOSS Episode 170: Dr. Beast

DON & CARL – THE DAGGER OF DEMONS Episode 3: Jobless

STREET FIGHTING MAN Episode 7: Ground-and-Pound

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 203: A Favor Earned

We’re very pleased to be able to announce that science fiction great John C. Wright is back with Castalia House and has graciously given Arktoons permission to create a new series featuring his excellent trilogy that begins with THE GOLDEN AGE.

CELEBRATION OF THE IMMORTALS

It was a time of masquerade.

It was the eve of the High Transcendence, an event so solemn and significant that it could be held but once each thousand years, and folk of every name and iteration, phenotype, composition, consciousness and neuroform, from every school and era, had come to celebrate its coming, to welcome the transfiguration, and to prepare.

Splendor, feast, and ceremony filled the many months before the great event itself. Energy shapes living in the north polar magnetosphere of the sun, and Cold Dukes from the Kuiper belts beyond Neptune, had gathered to Old Earth, or sent their representations through the mentality; and celebrants had come from every world and moon in the solar system, from every station, sail, habitat and crystal-magnetic latticework.

No human or posthuman race of the Golden Oecumene was absent from these festivities. Fictional as well as actual personalities were invited. Composition-assisted reconstructions of dead or deleted paladins and sages, magnates and philosophers, walked by night the boulevards of the Aurelian palace-city, arm-in-arm with extrapolated demigoddesses from imagined superhuman futures, or languid-eyed lamia from morbid unrealized alternatives, and strolled or danced among the monuments and energy sculptures, fountains, dream fixtures, and phantasms, all beneath a silver, city-covered moon, larger than the moon past ages knew.

And here and there, shining like stars on the active channels of the mentality, were recidivists who had returned from high transhuman states of mind, bringing back with them thought-shapes or mathematical constructions inexpressible in human words, haunted by memories of what the last Transcendence had accomplished, feverish with dreams of what the next might hold.

Read the rest of episode 1 at Arktoons.

The Temporal Challenge of Gnosodecay

The challenge of history is helping humanity remember that which extends beyond the lifespan of a human generation:

It’s very common to see historians implicitly or explicitly assert that knowledge in their field increases over time. For example, in his 1962 masterpiece Medieval Technology and Social Change, Lynn White Jr. assumes greater clarity from archaeological discoveries are yet to come: “Despite prodigious labours by Hungarian archaeologists, the stratification of Avar materials is not yet clear…[Avars] may well have been the first people of Europe to use the stirrup, but the time of its arrival is still uncertain.” Meanwhile, in a more recent article, nonprofit founder Jason Crawford writes, “I note at the outset that this is an old book, published 1925 and revised 1940. Probably a lot has been learned in the last 80 years and the following has already undergone revision, which I’ll uncover when I read more modern sources.”

The historian’s optimism rests on three promises. The first, expressed by White above, is that there are lost artifacts that can be recovered. Secret government records can be declassified, new construction will dig up an ancient tomb, a statesman’s grandchildren will find old letters in the attic and give them to a university, or archaeologists will find the ruins of an ancient temple complex. Such finds improve our understanding of the past, sometimes dramatically.

The second reason for optimism is that historians make better analyses of existing data as time goes on, as Crawford mentions above. After they make inferences from the available material, subsequent historians can take their best arguments and build on them while discarding flawed ideas which do not stand up to scrutiny. By standing on the shoulders of giants, the field will climb higher and higher, like in hard sciences such as physics or biology.

The third reason for optimism is the continued unfolding of history. After all, it is harder to see how an event fits into ongoing trends before those trends have had a chance to play out—time gives us perspective, and hindsight is 20/20. However, while the passage of time may give us a better understanding of a historical event’s effects on the future, it does not improve our knowledge of the event itself. Despite this limitation, knowing what happens next can make it easier to understand which events were important and why.

Archaeologists and Historians Can’t Defeat Entropy
If these three promises are met, then our knowledge of history is steadily increasing. How, then, could past events be so hazy today? Shouldn’t centuries of new finds, ongoing analysis, and knowledge of subsequent history mean that scholars of Henry VIII’s reign know what happened during that period far, far better than scholars of more recent events like the 2008 financial crash or the two world wars? Of course, we usually see the opposite.

These optimistic historians are writing epistemic checks that cannot be cashed. What the three promises leave out is that information is often lost. Firsthand witnesses and expert historians die after passing down only a fraction of their knowledge. If you investigate the 2008 financial crash today, chances are you can still interview someone who worked in finance or government who will give you information that has never been recorded. The information stored in people’s minds is still fundamentally accessible—for now. In a century, much of this information will be irretrievably lost.

In addition to people, books and artifacts are also lost to entropy in a hundred different ways. The cumulative effect of this destruction is immense, as illustrated by the records of classical civilization. “[T]oday we possess written fragments from only 13% of the ~2,000 ancient Greek authors known to us by name. This does not account for the authors we do not know, and only a small portion of the 13% figure consists of complete works.”

Preserving the ever-growing mass of historical material is too expensive to be practical, so when budgets run thin, even major libraries and archives will discard books and records by the hundreds of thousands. For example, the Manchester Central Library’s recent culling destroyed 210,000 to 500,000 “literary, commercial, educational and political records going back 150 years” with “no subject specialists involved in the process.” This is a standard library practice.

Artifacts are also lost in accidents like the 2018 fire that destroyed 92.5 percent of the 20 million items stored in the National Museum of Brazil, including the only recordings of now-extinct languages. Another example is the 1986 Los Angeles Central Library fire that destroyed 20 percent of the collection and damaged much of the remainder.

In recent decades, digital information has fared no better than paper. Between link rot and changes in software standards, tremendous amounts of digital information become inaccessible over the course of a single decade. The long-term preservation of digital archives remains a hope rather than a guaranteed fact. Even in optimistic scenarios, it would require ongoing effort and maintenance on par with the curation of printed information. As the development of the printing press illustrates, much better ways of recording information can often have only modest effects on how much information gets preserved centuries later.

While we’re waiting for the Library subscribers to make their presentation for the expansion of the Library, I’ve been thinking over the various possibilities that would allow us to help meet this challenge. We already have a few private projects that are underway, but my thought is that it may be time to create a second history-based subscription in which the subscribers, rather than the editors, decide which works are most important to preserve. This subscription would only produce three or four books per year, and would focus on more obscure or more pedestrian works of the sort that would be less likely to appeal to a general audience.

Essentially, a subscription with a primary focus on the True rather than the Beautiful. Which, naturally, would imply an eventual subscription with a focus on the Good, and the Bible project that many people have asked us to consider tackling.

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