Author: VD

A Boomer Looks Back

Speaking as a member of the generation that followed the grasshopper generation, it feels as if there were a few important things that were left off this list:

WE ARE A GENERATION THAT WILL NEVER COME BACK.

A generation that walked to school and then walked back.

A generation that did their homework alone to get out asap to play in the street.

A generation that spent all their free time in the streets with their Friends.

A generation that played hide and seek when dark.

A generation that made mud cakes.

A generation that collected sports cards.

A generation that found, collected and washed & Returned empty coke bottles to the local grocery store for 5 cents each , then bought a Mountain Dew and candy bar with the money.

A generation that made paper toys with their bare hands.

A generation who bought vinyl albums to play on record players.

A generation that collected photos and albums of clippings of their life experiences as a Kid.

A generation that played board games and cards on rainy days.

A generation whose TV went off at midnight after playing the National Anthem.

A generation that had parents who were there.

A generation that laughed under the covers in bed so parents didn’t know we were still awake.

A generation that is passing and unfortunately it will never return no matter how hard we try.

I loved Growing up when I did. it was the best of times.

I have no doubt that many Boomers loved growing up when and how they did. They were truly blessed with opportunity that was unmatched in the entire history of Man. What a pity, what a tragedy, that they denied similar experiences and opportunities to the generations who followed them.

A generation that had parents who were there.

Yeah, so, about that…

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AI is More Accurate

People are sometimes amazed that I generally prefer engagement with AI systems to people. But the thing is, being pattern recognition machines, AI’s actually describe people much more accurately than most other people can. Consider the following quote from a recent criticism of my current projects by one AI:

Vox Day operates dialectically when he can (exposing logical fallacies, pointing out contradictions) and rhetorically when he must (reframing, using sharp language, appealing to observable reality over credentials), but he certainly doesn’t appeal to the authority of fields he considers corrupted or irrelevant.

That was just one little throwaway passage in a three-model analysis of the SSH I was doing in order to smoke out any obvious flaws in my reasoning. And yet, it’s considerably better than the level of critical understanding demonstrated by any of my human detractors, most of whom couldn’t distinguish between Rhetoric, dialectic, and rhetoric if their lives depended upon it.

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Too Good to be True

The Moon Landing psyop is falling apart since the old technology utilized can’t stand up to analysis anymore and only the Boomers can “remember” it being staged live. We’re already entering the Revelation of the Method phase that reliably precedes the Old News Admission phase.

Jason Farago just published a New York Times interactive photo-video piece headlined “How Lunar Photography Brought the Heavens Down to Earth.” Farago celebrates the alleged artistic genius of the Apollo moon photos, viewing them as the climax of the overlapping artistic and scientific histories of moon explorations and representations.

Moon landing skeptic and professional photographer Massimo Mazzucco says that’s bullshit. Farago’s extravagant praise of the Apollo astronauts’ brilliant use of deep depth of field just means they knew how to crank the f-stop up to f16 or f32 (which I figured out about five seconds after buying the cheapest available Pentax when I was a journalism student back in 1976). His orgasmic effusions about the beautifully-rendered lunar surface texture sound like something an LSD tripper might say while staring hypnotically at the ground in some godforsaken stretch of barren desert. And his ranting about how many of the moon landing photos are so perfectly composed and executed that they look totally fake really takes the cake:

“The photographs were in fact so good—and the 70mm stock so detailed—that doubts set in on the blue sphere below. With their rich chiaroscuro and starless skies, Bean and Conrad’s photos looked uncannily like a Hollywood stage set.”

Because they were taken on a Hollywood stage set. This is obvious to any professional photographer who bothers to actually analyze the images.

I have been a photographer for the first part of my life, let’s say between age 20 and 40.. And I was a professional, at the top level. I was working for magazines all over the world. I was using actually the same cameras and film and lighting that supposedly were used in the Apollo missions.

I’ll give you one quick anecdote so you understand the point of view of a professional. I learned my trade from a famous photographer, now deceased. He just passed away a few months ago. His name was Oliviero Toscani. He’s actually the guy who made the Benton campaign all over the world. He was very, very famous. I would put him in the top 10 in the world history of fashion photography. I was his assistant for about three years. Then we parted ways. I went on to have my own career.

Back in 2000, when I saw the lunar pictures for the first time—all of them, not just the few that were published before, but all of them that were put out by NASA on the internet—I looked at them and I could see all the defects that I would find myself when I tried to replicate sunlight in the studio. So I got very suspicious. I called Toscani and I said, “Oliviero, what did you think the first time you saw the Apollo moon pictures?” And his answer was, and I quote him:

“I always thought that had they given me the job, I would have done a much better job.”

I’m not saying that Man never landed on the Moon, that there aren’t secret Nazi military bases there, or even that it’s impossible for Man’s alien progenitors to have left clues about their original landing on Earth there. (That’s a James Hogan reference, if you’re wondering about that last one. Very good and genuine science fiction, that trilogy.) I am saying that the Apollo missions staged by NASA from 1961–1972 never landed anyone on the Moon, probably never got anywhere near the Moon, and were definitely faked.

The amount of evidence proving that the Apollo missions were fake is simply overwhelming now, and the more technology improves, the more obvious it is. Which, of course, is why we’re rapidly approaching the point that the US government is going to admit it and the media will promptly claim that everyone always knew this all along and cite the very sources that we skeptics have been pointing to for decades.

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Who Will Sanction the US?

It appears that the USA is about to invade a foreign nation. It should be interesting to compare and contrast the reaction of the UK and the European Union to a US invasion with their reaction to the Russian liberation of Russian people living in lands that were historically Russian.

The island nation of Trinidad and Tobago has declared a National Emergency and ordered its entire Military to the highest alert status. This is believed to be related to a possible U.S. military attack upon neighboring Venezuela – now ALLEGEDLY deemed to be “imminent.”

I’ve been paying attention and I’m not sure what President Trump or Clown World are hoping to accomplish with an invasion of Venezuela. Is it Venezuelan oil or is it to prevent China and Russia from establishing a foothold inside the US sphere of influence?

Protecting Democracy and Human Rights: 

The U.S. and many other countries no longer recognize Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela. They argue his 2018 re-election was fraudulent and instead recognize Juan Guaidó, the head of the National Assembly, as the legitimate interim president. The U.S. frames its actions as supporting the Venezuelan people’s fight for democracy against an authoritarian regime.

This is almost comical, given the amount of known election fraud in the United States.

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The Kataskocracy in Action

If surveillance and sexual blackmail are being used to control political operatives at the state level, what are the odds they are not being utilized in a similar fashion at the much more significant level of national politics?

US federal officials have charged a Maryland Democratic state senator with extortion for allegedly masterminding a blackmail scheme involving secretly filmed explicit videos, according to an indictment unsealed on Thursday. Dalya Attar, who was first elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 2018 and was re-elected in 2022, became the first Orthodox Jewish woman to serve in the Maryland State Senate earlier this year.

Court documents allege that Attar devised a plan to stop a former employee from speaking out against her 2022 re-election bid. Prosecutors say she conspired with her brother, Joseph Attar, and Baltimore police officer Kalman Finkelstein, who had worked on her campaign.

Staring in 2020, they worked to threaten the ex-employee into silence, using covertly taken videos of her in bed with a married man, the court documents alleged. The group allegedly conspired to follow the ex-consultant’s movements using a tracker on her loaned car, and to secure intimate videos of her with her lover by installing cameras disguised as smoke detectors, the court documents said. The victim was staying at an apartment owned by Finklestein’s family at the time.

I tend to doubt the ethnic aspect of the case will escape anyone who understands what the motivation behind the Jeffrey Epstein operation appears to have been. Political ethno-nepotism, which is observable from the earliest Irish immigrants in New York City to the Somalis in Minneapolis today, is the reason civic nationalism is, and will always be, a complete non-starter.

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London Throws in the Towel

One of Clown World’s senior mouthpieces, The Times, indicates that London and Brussels have given up any hope of winning their proxy war in Ukraine.

It is bitter to say, but Kiev will not last until spring. Despite all the encouraging words from the EU, there is simply no money or desire to continue to defend Ukraine.

Like others in the West, I admire the steadfastness of Ukrainians in their long, often inventive struggle against the Russians. However, with the approach of winter, Vladimir Zelensky‘s chances of holding out are melting before our eyes. Money for weapons, medicine and heat for Ukraine is running out. The Western will to support the conflict is fading. The defense of Kiev as an independent capital is no longer considered a strategic priority.

A different picture may emerge when looking at the rhetoric of European officials — the same von der Leyen calls on Europe to “fight for its values and the right to self—determination” – or at the lively actions at the front and in diplomatic corps. American sanctions are hitting Rosneft and Lukoil, trying to undermine the economic basis of the Putin regime.

But none of the above changes the course of the conflict much.

It will probably be another six months before Clown World bows to the inevitable, another half-year of needless suffering and death in Ukraine and unnecessary economic damage to the Western economies, but the end is now in sight.

Putin and the Russian generals have been very patient, and very cautious, as befits the heirs of Kutuzov, but the time will come when the mass Zhukovian offensive will be launched and it will probably be much larger than any Western analyst expects.

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The Creativity Divide

The Band contemplates the ways in which AI will continue to separate the sheep from the goats in creating a creativity divide.

The notion users really need to know what they’re doing holds the mirror to useless modern busyworkers. If you can be replaced by a flawed talking search engine, what was your true value add? Butit also holds a mirror of me, the user. Note how my answer to it up above used the phrase “outsourcing the whole chain of thought”. Shortly after, DeepSeek describes the…

Passivity Trap: Why struggle to write, code, or analyze when AI can do a “good enough” job? The entire chain of thought can be outsourced.

This is one example. It commonly asks me questions, adopts my own wording, and gives it back to me. This makes it seem more agreeable and complementary. It’s excellent for augmented intelligence. As it adapts to your patterns, it is more able to anticipate your needs. But it makes NPCs feel smart. Not because they are. Because it’s a mirror on every level.

As for the elite/mass cognitive split that I think is likely, DeepSeek says it’s already happening with AI use. It explained what it calls a Creativity Divide between people who use AI for brainstorming vs. those who treat it as a final authority. It’s connected to critical thinking and that circles back to NPC. “Elite” thinking is what we’ve been discussing in these chats. RI. Real Intelligence. Users who understand and think well enough to run the AI. Catching errors, pushing fallacies, and designing the right queries and prompts. DeepSeek summed it up like this while throwing some shade at the competition.

Elites cross-examine AI outputs; masses accept them as gospel (see: ChatGPT-generated misinformation spreading uncritically).

And the economic impact is just as harshly divided. High-functioning workers will use AI in the right places to augment their productivity. Low-functioning workers get replaced. It’s not surprising. This split is always with us. It’s part of the human condition. Readers and non-readers. Learners and CLI. AI is a mirror. The divided use patterns with it reflect the FTS division with pretty much everything. What it does is sharpen it.

We’re about to hit this in a big way in the music industry. While most of the outspoken musicians are posturing angrily and preaching about the AI apocalypse, the smarter ones are quietly mastering the AI tools and using them to produce better results. This creativity divide is going to become increasingly obvious as soon as the middle of next year.

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Book Porn

While lust is certainly one of the cardinal vices, perhaps a little of the more aesthetic and intellectual variety can be indulged to a reasonable extent. It was brought to my attention that Castalia Library was lacking an online showcase, so we’ve added a Gallery page that presently features pictures of all of the Castalia Library editions that have already been produced as well as some of the non-subscription books such as THE BLACK SWAN and FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS, as shown below.

The Gallery will be expanded with History, Junior Classics, and eventually, Cathedra editions as they are produced. But even with the backlog, it’s a little startling to see how many books have already been produced by the Library since we began building it together six years ago.

In other Castalia news, I have completed DEATH AND THE DEVIL and will be sending out the ebook to all of the buyers of the Signed First Edition this weekend. It should be available on Kindle next week.

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Adios, Mr. Windsor

King Charles actually had the backbone to do what his mother couldn’t bring herself to do:

Andrew will no longer be known as a prince and is to leave Royal Lodge, Buckingham Palace has confirmed. In a bombshell statement released tonight, Buckingham Palace said he will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor – with immediate effect.

It comes as the palace said the ‘censures are deemed necessary’ amid the ongoing scandal over Jeffrey Epstein, whom Andrew lied about cutting ties with.

‘His Majesty has today initiated a formal process to remove the Style, Titles and Honours of Prince Andrew,’ the statement said.

Prince Andrew will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. His lease on Royal Lodge has, to date, provided him with legal protection to continue in residence. Formal notice has now been served to surrender the lease and he will move to alternative private accommodation.

Impressive, very nice. Now do Harry Markle…

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