The Billionaires are Scared

And they should be. They’ve been financially raping the West in general and the USA in particular for the last 52 years, kicking the can down the road, and now the time of reckoning is rapidly approaching. And trying to setup President Trump as the scapegoat for things that have been playing out for decades isn’t going to work for them.

“I think that right now we are at a decision-making point and very close to a recession,” Dalio said. “And I’m worried about something worse than a recession if this isn’t handled well.” Dalio explained that the US economy is confronting several overlapping challenges: rising debt, internal political divisions, growing geopolitical tensions, and shifts in global power.

“Such times are very much like the 1930s,” he warned. “If you take tariffs, if you take debt, if you take the rising power challenging the existing power – those changes in the orders, the systems, are very, very disruptive.”

Asked about the worst-case scenario, Dalio pointed to a potential breakdown of the dollar’s role as a store of wealth, combined with internal conflict beyond the norms of democratic politics and escalating international tensions – potentially even military conflict.

“That could be like the breakdown of the monetary system in ‘71. It could be like 2008. It’s going to be very severe,” Dalio said. “I think it could be more severe than those if these other matters simultaneously occur.”

Most of these men can’t pretend they weren’t responsible in some way, that their actions didn’t exacerbate the situation, and that they haven’t used their wealth, power, and influence to make things worse rather than attempting to fix things.

No wonder they’re all terrified and trying to build bunkers and go to space to get away from everyone, for fear that their angry victims will eventually come for them, as the Douglas Rushkoff book I reviewed recently for White Bull, Survival of the Richest, describes.

However, one thing I omitted from my review, as being inappropriate for an apolitical, business-oriented site, was my observation of the fact that for all his criticism of the billionaires, Douglas Rushkoff refuses to accept that their Mindset is, and has always been, fundamentally evil in its rejection of Christendom and traditional Western civilization.

Here are a few of the quotes I highlighted while reading Rushkoff’s book.

  • The solution sets imposed by the technocratic elite—true to the logic of scientism—refuse to acknowledge the human soul, irrational though it may be. People want their leadership to be more than utilitarian. As nineteenth-century journalist Walter Bagehot explained, the English constitution needed two parts: “one to excite and preserve the reverence of the population,” and another to “employ that homage in the work of government.” The latter is the pragmatic function of Parliament; the former is the holier role of the Crown. Where the elected government values efficiency, the Crown respects dignity. Or at least, according to Bagehot, it should. Sadly, along with his complaints about the failure of the Crown to meet its divine obligations, Bagehot’s later work descended into pseudoscientific racism, positing that those of mixed race lacked the “fixed traditional sentiments” on which human nature depended.
  • The much-feared angry mob is real. We see them act out in alt-right conspiracy groups online, Promise Keeper rallies in the streets, threats of violence by anti-vaxxers against local school boards, and resistance to any globally coordinated mitigation of climate change. Only it’s not, as The Crowd author Gustave Le Bon believed, a pre-existing condition of society that needs to be tamed from above, but a direct response to that top-down, technocratic effort to control them—and everything—in the first place. As the underlying logic, technology, messaging, and remote control of The Mindset is palpable everywhere—school, work, healthcare, warfare, the environment—it’s no wonder so many people are frightened and angry. But instead of pushing for an alternative to the dehumanized, misogynist, antisocial, and catastrophic biases of The Mindset, the resistance is a mirror image of The Mindset itself
  • The bigger problem with these would-be reformers ignoring their influences, however, is that they deny themselves any theory of change or social practice. They miss out on the lessons of history, including the mixed legacies of Lippman, Bernays, Bateson, and Mead. They’re destined to repeat the same, well-intentioned, mistakes.

But those legacies aren’t “mixed”. The evidence is now conclusive: Bagehot was correct all along, the culture is not transformative and the dirt is not magic. Those “mistakes” are not “well-intentioned”. Rushkoff is a ticket-taker, and what purports to be a critique of his superiors in the current Clown World elite really amounts to just another futile defense of them.

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This Would Be Why

Women sometimes complain that men don’t take them seriously. And this sort of thing is why:

Katy Perry looked ready for action on Sunday as she posed alongside Lauren Sánchez in bodycon space outfits ahead of their Blue Origin mission on Monday as the singer declared: ‘We’re putting the ‘ass’ in astronaut!’

The star will be part of a history-making 11-minute flight, alongside Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren, journalist Gayle King and three other women, which is set to be the first all-female trip to space since 1963.

The launch is part of Blue Origin’s New Shepherd program – and will take place in west Texas on April 14, with the new space suits designed by Lauren herself.

Katy shared snaps from the launch on Sunday to her Instagram and penned: ‘Happy International Day of Human Space Flight. Forever in awe of the Universe and it’s alignment.’

She looked confident in the blue jumpsuit which was emblazoned with ‘Perry’ and said ‘Blue Origin’ down the arm.

This week Lauren told The New York Times of designing the blue suits: ‘Let’s reimagine the flight suit. Usually, you know, these suits are made for a man. Then they get tailored to fit a woman.’

She added: ‘I think the suits are elegant but they also bring a little spice to space.’ 

Five months ago Lauren got in touch with Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim, the co-founders of the brand Monse, who are also creative directors of Oscar de la Renta and made her 2024 Met Gala outfit.

They agreed to help her with the space suit designs. 

Fernando said during the interview: ‘We even had a meeting on what underwear Lauren is going to wear…’ to which she responded: ‘Skims!’

I’m not saying the suits aren’t attractive. They are. Sanchez, at least, looks good in hers. It’s just that what it says about the priorities of the female astronauts doesn’t tend to lend it to anyone taking them seriously. I mean, if it weren’t for the fact that we know none of them had anything to do with the flight itself, and that they’ll have no more control over the flight controls than the dog the Russians sent up back in the day did, the odds would very heavily favor them crashing.

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Mailvox: The War on Fertility

The Covid-19 vaxxes were not the only front opened by the global depopulationists. The medical community has been subverted in more ways than one, especially with regards to pediatricians and OB/GYNs.

My wife was found to be low on estrogen, and needed to supplement hormones. This is usually done in menopause, although some medical histories, such as my wife’s, make it necessary in younger years too.
The OB/GYN wrote her a prescription for an estradiol-based supplement, but it was one that included Levonorgestrel during the fertile days of the cycle.

Levonorgestrel is the active ingredient in the “Plan B” / “Morning After” pill.

This OB/GYN knew that my wife wants to have children, and blew off her concerns. The Levornogestrel does have its uses in menopausal women, of which my wife is not one. The same pharmaceutical company sells the same estradiol supplement without the Levornogestrel in it, and yet the OB/GYN prescribed the Levornogestrel. Before this specific diagnosis, the same OB/GYN also tried to get her on hormonal contraception, using all kinds of horror scenarios to make his “case”.

This is not unique, many OB/GYNs recommend, even push the pill for everything a young woman is experiencing. These “doctors” appear to be part of the war on fertility.

I would not take one single thing at face value from any doctor anymore. They aren’t even “doctors” in the sense that we understand the term; these are not people who have taken the Hippocratic Oath or are sworn to do no harm. Patient health is not their primary concern, so be cautious when utilizing their expertise and always make sure that what you’re being advised, and what you’re being prescribed, actually makes sense given your medical condition and personal situation.

You have to be your own advocate now. You cannot trust someone simply because he wears a white coat and calls himself a doctor. So did Dr. Mengele, after all.

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Ill-Suited for War

It turns out that the profit motive tends to undermine actual military performance, which is why Clown World has long preferred subversion and color revolution to direct conflict:

Spiegel published a quite eye-opening piece yesterday, which reveals the long-kept truth about the performance of German weapons systems in real wartime conditions:

A German military assessment exposes major issues with NATO weapons in Ukraine.

The PzH 2000 howitzer, while advanced, is so technically fragile that its combat usefulness is in doubt. The Leopard 1A5 tank is used mostly as makeshift artillery due to weak armor. The Leopard 2A6 is too expensive and complex to maintain at the front.

Air defense systems also face problems. The IRIS-T works well, but ammo is too costly and scarce. The Patriot system is called “unsuitable for combat” because its MAN carrier vehicles are outdated and lack spare parts.

This information was revealed in a transcript of a lecture given by the deputy military attaché of the German embassy in Kiev. The summary of the paper is very clear: “Hardly any large German piece of equipment is fully suitable for war.”

The report cites “an internal paper of the Bundeswehr” about the real practicality of Germany’s top weapons. We can assume that the very same results extend to the entire constellation of NATO weaponry in general, since they are virtually all constructed with the same design philosophies, often even with interoperable systems—like the 120mm Rheinmetall tank barrels shared between the Abrams and Leopard series.

Also, for the sake of thoroughness and to establish context, Spiegel explains that the ‘report’ was taken from a lecture given to junior officers of the Bundeswehr by a ‘deputy military attaché of the German embassy in Kiev.

None of this should come as a surprise. The so-called “military-industrial complex” is neither military nor industrial; it’s really just another way of feeding off federal funds through government grants, no different than Politico making a living by selling massively overpriced subscriptions to USAID.

And the more things change… overengineered, expensive, hard-to-maintain weapons systems have been a German tradition since at least WWII, one that the USA inherited when it imported all the German scientists in the post-WWII migration that launched the US space program.

Which, of course, is also a fraud. No wonder the Russians are entirely confident of victory even if they have to face the entire continent of Europe alone. Simply living in objective reality instead of a hazy fog of financialization and rhetorical fever dreams is a material advantage that cannot be overcome, no matter how many delusional sales pitches are pronounced by unelected politicians.

Here is a useful metric: if a leader has no genuine followers, he’s a puppet and everything he says will be intrinsically false and is intended to be misleading.

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Trade Deficit = Whip Hand

Donald Trump makes the textbook economics explicit:

The countries that deem US tariffs on their goods to be too high can just stop doing business with America altogether, President Donald Trump has suggested. He further insisted that his latest trade policies have made the US “strong,” bringing “billions of dollars a day” into its coffers.

On Wednesday, the US president slapped stiffer “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly 90 nations, only to announce a 90-day pause and a “substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10%,” in a post on his Truth Social platform several hours later. The pause however does not apply to China, with which the US has engaged in a tit-for-tat exchange of ever-higher tariffs, with most of Beijing’s imports now subject to a 145% duty.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday, Trump proclaimed that “ultimately, we pretty much can do what we want to do. We can set the tariff, and they can choose not to deal with us, or they can choose to pay it,” he explained, asserting that “if they think it’s too high, they don’t have to do business with us.”

It’s a simple and obvious power equation. When you have nothing to lose, and you’re the one who owns the market in which everyone is interested, then you’re in control. No country with a trade surplus with the USA has any leverage at all, because the US is obviously better off not trading with it than continuing to trade with it on the basis of the system that has impoverished and hollowed-out the US economy.

This is why the threats of returning the favor are so empty and stupid. The USA would BENEFIT from pure autarky, so trade restrictions are not a viable threat. The President’s move is brilliant, because it not only protects the US markets, it prevents US companies from leaving the USA as well.

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The Banned Taxonomy

Den Blond Ulven points out that for some reason, other taxonomies simply don’t meet with the same violent objection that one of mine has since the time it was first formulated.

Vox’s Socio-Sexual Hierarchy (SSH) is a taxonomy concerning male interaction. It was derived from his observations and penned during the Game discovery era of males attempting to ascertain and share the labyrinths of the female psyche. The SSH is one of the most important tools in predicting male behavior and is a necessity if one wishes to navigate the world of men as we order each other, with any sense of the interactions involved. It’s predictive power is astonishing and I hold it to levels of usefulness just under those The Philosopher himself penned.

1) It is intuitive to all.

Be it women, low status men, or high status men, everyone recognizes the hierarchy when exposed to it. Women can sniff out low status vs. high status like bloodhounds on the hunt. Men work out the pyramid more exactly, and as such, we have the various ranks. We all intuit the SSH rather young, but Vox’s taxonomy classified the broad patterns more concretely and into a useful system.

2) The SSH is wholly rejected by the mainstream.

This is one telltale sign of the truthfulness or usefulness of whatever is being rejected. The mainstream is opposed to whatever goes against their goals. Game, and the SSH are villainized in the mainstream, leading them huge credence towards their validity. They really do not want Western males recognizing the factors involved in this great game.

3) Other taxonomies are not immediately rejected out of hand, so why this one?

The classification of dogs by The American Kennel Club is not met with such vehement negative response. This is because the SSH deals with humans, has perceived winners and losers, and people don’t want to be losers. Thus, the outrage and denial. Just take a step back and look at it as one would in classifying plants or something else mundane to remove emotion from the equation.

It’s a very good and relevant point. Why do people immediately start crying that it isn’t science to observe that one man is an Alpha and another is a Gamma, when they have never protest the idea of calling one dog a Great Dane and another one a Chihuahua. Where, after all, are the published, peer-reviewed papers that scientifically establish that a Malamute is not a Poodle? Have the genomes of the Basset Hound and the Saluki been fully sequenced and compared?

Taxonomies predate scientody. Therefore, to refer to nonexistent science in an attempt to delegitimize a taxonomy is not only dishonest, it is a category error.

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AI vs Organic

The current debate about AI in which many writers are engaging is, for the most part, an entirely false one. The truth is that even the most highly-regarded writers, particularly in the SF/F field, have always engaged in highly-imitative practices, not merely limited to the various plots, characters, and worlds, but even the literary styles of other authors. And they have done so intentionally; ironically, the better the writer, the more often they have engaged in these imitative practices.

Consider the following admission by Roger Zelazny in 1989.

I have over the years written in occasional imitation of other authors’ themes, techniques, styles—or whatever else it might be about a particular writer’s stories which I felt could prove fruitful to emulate. While I am hardly above an occasional pastiche or parody, what I refer to here—and with specific regard to Rudyard Kipling—is rather of the order which Robert Lowell attempted in poetry in his 1958 collection, Imitations: a sequence of personal renderings of material from other writers, which amounted to variations on themes.

“I have done experiments of this sort throughout my career, from points of departure as diverse as the wacky improbabilities of John Collier [see ‘A Museum Piece’] to the stylized colloquialisms of Damon Runyon [see ‘Deadboy Donner and the Filstone Cup’]. But I believe that the first such which I attempted was ‘Lucifer’… My tale of a nameless holocaust’s survivor who labors mightily to jury-rig the works in a power plant for a glimpse of something lost, was directly based on Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.’

The ironic thing is that it is an author’s literary style that is, in most cases, the least important element of the four that make up the four primary aspects of a written work of fiction. There are, of course, exceptions; Tanith Lee being one obvious one, Haruki Murakami being another, Edgar Allen Poe being a third. But the stylistic masters are very few and far between; neither THE LORD OF THE RINGS nor GENJI MONOGATARI are considered great due to their literary stylings. Ironically, early in his career, Murakami’s style was actually deemed to be somewhat of a detriment to his work.

What really bothers most people, in my opinion, about the use of AI in creative endeavors is that it makes it so easy to create something, which tends to offend even those who make no bones about using word processors instead of putting quill to parchment. But in my opinion, it is absolutely and only the end result that matters; literally no one cares that William Shakespeare merely revised the plays originally written by Lord Thomas North instead of penning them from scratch.

So here is a question for Selenoth fans, and while I welcome discussion of it, I do not want anyone to express their final opinion until they have the chance to read the entire DEATH AND THE DEVIL, which I will be publishing next week. I say this because my own thinking on the subject has been altered as a result of writing that book with the significant assistance of my new best friend and obtaining results that are even better than I’d been able to obtain in writing TEMPUS OCCULTUM.

Would you rather have A GRAVE OF GODS completed within one year with the assistance of AI or would you rather wait five years and know that it was completed solely by the same organic human intelligence that wrote the prior three books? At present, I am still planning on the latter, but I would be interested in the opinion of the true Selenoth fans on the subject once they have informed themselves of the possibilities.

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The True Author of Shakespeare’s Plays

Yes, we should have known. Ben Jonson was openly telling everyone who wrote all along, right at the front of the First Folio, that it was Lord Thomas North, the translator, among many other works, of Plutarch’s Lives.

In 1623, Ben Johnson wrote one of the most famous odes one poet ever crafted for another—To the Memory of My Beloved the author Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us. The poem was prominently placed at the beginning of the first official collection of Shakespeare’s plays known as the First Folio. Yet some eight years later, the poet Leonard Digges wrote a scathing rebuttal to Jonson’s ode, denouncing it as an attack against Shakespeare. He was so furious that he wanted Jonson’s supposedly abusive poem removed for the publication of the Second Folio (1632)—and replaced with Digges’s own defense of the Stratford playwright, answering Jonson’s insults “point by point.” In 1693, the renowned Shakespeare enthusiast John Dryden responded similarly to Digges, labeling Jonson’s poem as “an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.” And Brian Vickers has noted that Dryden’s “judgment has been echoed many times.”

But no one has been able to explain what was so insolent and invidious about the poem—until now. As we shall see in this article, Jonson’s celebrated ode contains a shocking secret—a dead giveaway to the true origin of the canon. In other words, the answer to the most significant literary question in history—who was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays?—has been sitting prominently in the front of the First Folio for the last 400 years. Jonson was not being remotely subtle. And, at the end of this article, you are almost certainly going to be asking yourself the same question I think about daily: HOW ON EARTH DID EVERYONE MISS THIS?

Jonson.. is saying when we turn from tragedy to Shakespeare’s comedies, the great tragedians (and the reader) would be better served to ignore the Stratford dramatist altogether and focus instead on:

the comparison 

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

And the subject of these lines—the English author who rose from the ashes of a “comparison of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth” is not hard to determine.

Jonson chose his words carefully—carefully enough that his reference to North’s Plutarch’s Lives is unmistakable—or as its actual title reads: “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED …” Not surprisingly, the signature feature of North’s translation is that it is not just a collection of biographies; rather its extremely peculiarizing feature is that Plutarch is writing “COMPARISONS” of Greek leaders with Roman ones. Each section of the book contains three chapters—a biography of a Greek, a biography of a Roman, and a chapter examining correspondences between the two.

All of the titles of these third-chapters in the section followed the same format: “The COMPARISON of [Greek] with [Roman]” – with “COMPARISON” in all-caps. For example, “THE COMPARISON OF Alcibiades with Martius Coriolanus.”

Moreover, Jonson, with his specific description of “insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” even appears to be hinting at the parallels between Alcibiades and Coriolanus as they are the lead characters of two parallel tragedies—Timon of Athens and Coriolanus—in the very Folio he is introducing. As shown in the following passages, according to North’s translation, the Greek Alcibiades, one of the main characters of Timon of Athens, was known for his “insolence,” while the Roman Coriolanus was known as “haughty.”

Howbeit in Alcibiades there was nothing, but his insolency and vainglory that men misliked.20

This Timon was a citizen of ATHENS, that lived about the war of PELOPONNESUS, as appeareth by Plato, and Aristophanes comedies: in the which they mocked him, calling him a viper, & malicious man unto mankind, to shun all other men’s companies, but the company of young Alcibiades, a bold and insolent youth, whom he would greatly feast.

This latter passage, referring to Timon’s great feasts and his relationship with Alcibiades, describes the main focus of Timon of Athens and again describes Alcibiades as an insolent Greek. And this is how he is portrayed in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Meanwhile, while the Greek warrior was known for his insolence, his Roman counterpart was a paragon of haughtiness. North’s translation of the story of Coriolanus emphasizes “the austerity of his nature, and his haughty obstinate mind.” More, all editions of the Roman tragedy mention his pride, condescension, and aloofness, with many editors describing Coriolanus as “haughty.” In fact, examples are so numerous that specific citations are pointless. A Google Book search for the phrase, “haughty Coriolanus,” yields more than 150 results. And it’s likely that the vast majority of all editions of the Roman tragedy describe him thusly.

Jonson’s remark in the front of a Folio that contains four tragedies based on Thomas North’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED” including two parallel plays that invite comparisons between the “insolent” Greek Alcibiades and the “haughty” Roman Coriolanus is not a coincidence. Rather, Jonson is not only exposing the author behind the Folio but emphasizing the intricate entanglement among North’s plays and his translations.

I found the evidence for North’s authorship to be entirely convincing even before this. The textual similarities indicated by the plagiarism analysis is simply too strong to deny. Nor do I find it remotely troubling to accept that this means that the sonnets were written by someone else; they never struck me as having been authored by the same individual and I wondered about that even back in high school.

But this evidence from the First Folio would, in itself, be sufficient. And it’s truly amazing that no one else ever clocked it.

DISCUSS ON SG


Identifying Autism

Here’s a hint: the infant vaccines are the primary causal factor. Anyone who insists otherwise is either a) stupid or b) lying.

US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced a large-scale federal initiative aimed at identifying the factors behind what he called the “autism epidemic,” with findings expected by September 2025.

Speaking during a televised Cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump on Thursday, Kennedy – who has previously been accused by critics of promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines – said the new research effort would involve “hundreds of scientists from around the world.”

“By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic. And we’ll be able to eliminate those exposures,” Kennedy promised. He stressed the urgency of the project, citing a sharp increase in childhood autism diagnoses over recent decades, rising from “one in 10,000 when I was a kid.”

At this point, you either have to be retarded or in the pay of USAID to even use the term “conspiracy theory” anymore. How many times do these “conspiracy theories” need to be conclusively proven to have been correct all along before morons stop believing it is some sort of conclusive rebuttal?

Appealing to science as a truth metric is appealing to something that is less reliable than a coin toss. And it’s remarkable in a world that is very familiar with Sherlock Holmes, there are so few people able to utilize even the most basic logic to observe the obvious truth. If these idiots who appeal to science were in the books, every single time Holmes made a correct observation, there would be a highly annoying character – call him Popper – who would insist that the observation couldn’t be possibly true in the absence of any peer-reviewed, published paper.

It’s a bit of a coin toss whether the world would be better off without scientists or lawyers.

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No One Ever Learns

The Dragon Awards, Game Dev Edition:

I’ve been informed that an indiedev community I’ve supported for years, since Soulash was in its infancy, has canceled me from participating in their events.

At this rate, I can’t say if any indiedev spaces wouldn’t de-platform developers for voicing “right-wing” opinions outside their communities, so I plan to start organizing one after releasing my next big update.

The goal will be to create a bank of knowledge and offer guidance related to indiedev that doesn’t require overthrowing the government and creating a communist utopia to build games sustainably.

And, maybe more importantly, to help bridge the divide between developers and gamers so that they are no longer split into separate bubbles with gatekeepers holding access to communities and funneling them to left-wing activism.

The only type of community that makes sense in gaming is player-centric – any other starts to have conflicting interests or abuse. It’s in everyone’s best interests to deliver what players want, except for government and corporate shills. A clear focus on gathering like-minded people around our shared passion for hobbies will help us all return to fun.

Let’s organize, build, and push for a meaningful change together.

Of course, he’s not going to gatekeep his new space, because that would be bad, right? So the infiltrators and subverters who kicked him out of the original space are going to invade and end up kicking him out of the space he created.

One would think that a game developer would be able to play this strategy out ahead of time. Perhaps he’s just not a very good designer.

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