Author: VD

He Doesn’t Care, Margaret

The corrupt kleptocrats of the EU are very, very worried that they will be left out of the peace negotiations between the USA and Russia. Which, of course, they will be, because they are a) irrelevant and b) worse than useless. The whole war could have been avoided and over one million lives saved if Boris Johnson hadn’t convinced the deranged Kiev regime that NATO could defend them from Russia.

President Donald Trump’s envoy has sparked fury among European leaders after being told they would be excluded from the Ukraine-Russia peace talks, causing Emmanuel Macron to call for an emergency summit.

US Special Presidential Envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, 80, has encouraged Europe to join the conversation about the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but ultimately said they won’t have a final say in the resolution.

‘That is not going to happen,’ he said at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

‘And to my European friends, I would say: get into the debate, not by complaining that you might, yes or no, be at the table, but by coming up with concrete proposals, ideas, ramp up [defense] spending.’

Kellogg defended America’s desire to keep the meeting small, stating that last time the meeting included too many countries and no agreement was made.

However, many European leaders are worried about being excluded from the conversation over fears the decision will directly – and negatively – affect their countries.

Seriously, even Ghana and Niger don’t care what France thinks, much less Sweden. Why would Russia or the USA? The age of pretending everyone is equal and everyone matters equally is over.

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The Importance of Knowledge

I’ve occasionally made reference to intellectual accomplishment as being the combination of three factors, and equated it to the effective use of artillery. The metaphor is as follows:

  • Gun Caliber: Intelligence, as best approximated by IQ
  • Gun Laying: Wisdom, which allows one to effectively aim and focus one’s intelligence on a meaningful target with precision.
  • Ammunition: Knowledge and experience. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you are operating on the basis of false, incomplete, or outdated information.

Now, NN Taleb is a very smart guy. But like all very smart men, he is subject to the temptation to substitute his ability to think quickly on his feet and utilize logic to fill in the blanks of his actual knowledge. I used to be as prone as anyone else to occasionally bluff my way past my own ignorance, until one night in college, after one of my very smart friends was so inadvertently blown out of the water this way in public, that I vowed to never, ever do it again.

In fact, regular readers here will probably have noticed that I do the opposite; while I don’t play dumb, I quite often know a bit more about the topic being discussed than I usually advertise. Back when the evolutionists weren’t terrified of engaging with me, they used to warn each other that I was better read in the basics than they tended to assume.

Unfortunately, Taleb apparently never learned that lesson, which has thereby led to the comprehensive demolition of his hapless argument against IQ. Although I was asked numerous times to address that argument in detail, out of respect for an author that I admire as well as the obvious nature of its flaws, I contented myself with simply pointing out that his argument was false on its face, on the basis of its core assumptions. However, Heretical Insights showed no similar restraint in his point-by-point rebuttal.

Taleb starts off his attack on IQ on the grounds that it supposedly has a ‘low variance explained’ with various performances (which ones specifically he’s referring to, he doesn’t specify):

Psychometrics peddlers looking for suckers (military, large corporations) buying the “this is the best measure in psychology” argument when it is not even technically a measure — it explains at best between 2 and 13% of the performance in some tasks (those tasks that are similar to the test itself)

Taleb doesn’t provide any sources for where the 2-13% claim comes from, which is odd for someone who is so seemingly confident about his stance on IQ. Besides that, he makes a very basic mistake of misinterpreting anything that has a ‘low variance explained’ as being meaningless. The problem is that r2 is a flawed interpretation of effect size because it doesn’t tell us anything about the real world effect that one variable is expected to have on another variable. As an example, let’s assume that IQ explains ‘only’ 9% of the variance in income, so does it matter whether or not a one-point increase in IQ predicts a $10 increase in income or a $10,000 increase in income? Of course it does, and this is obvious to anyone who’s honest, but here lies the problem: r2 does not tell us how large the real-world effect is, because it expresses the effect size in a statistical sense, which is neat and all, but not in a real-world sense, so it’s not very meaningful. An r2 of 0.09 for IQ and income in the real-world means an r of 0.3, or that a 1 SD shift in IQ predicts a 0.3 SD shift in income, which is certainly not trivial.

So, in the real world, even things that only explain a small percentage of the variance can have large effects. Thus, a low variance explained is not valid grounds for dismissing the utility of IQ. But the truth is, we don’t even need to think that hard to find instances where a small variance explained has a large effect. Ryan Faulk gave more intuitive examples in one of his response videos which I will list here:

  • Mayonnaise only explains 5% of the variation in the tastiness of sandwiches. Therefore, hugely increasing mayonnaise levels will have no effect.
  • Salt explains little variation in steak tastes. Therefore, triple the salt!
  • In America, the proportion of people starving to death doesn’t explain much variation in health. Therefore, people don’t have to eat!
  • Stabbings explain little variation in physical health. Therefore, increased stabbings will be fine.
  • Oil production only explains around 5% of the variance in GDP per capita. Therefore, having 100 times more oil per capita won’t matter.
  • Ethnic diversity only explains 5% of the variance in GDP. Therefore, replacing Norwegians with Ethiopians won’t have any effect!

Sounds stupid, right? That’s because it is…

Overall, Taleb’s article was bad, really bad. For a guy who is so confident about his stance on IQ, it’s truly incredible that he made all the mistakes that he did. Taleb seems completely ideologically driven when it comes to the topic of IQ and is completely unwilling to even acknowledge all the compelling evidence in its favor. One of the things Taleb does is constantly insult advocates of IQ or call them names, quite childish for a man who’s supposed to be regarded highly and also quite telling of his attitude towards people who disagree with him. When all is said and done, it’s pretty clear that Taleb’s personal biases against IQ prevents him from seeing the overwhelming evidence that IQ is valid and useful. He thinks that the people who promote IQ are either racists/eugenicists or psychometric peddlers looking to get rich, it never even crosses his mind once that maybe the reason why people promote it is because it’s a good tool for making sense of the world around us. The words ‘racist’ and ‘eugenicist’ are nothing more than empty moral pejoratives used to instill fear against those who are able to think independently enough to not blindly obey our current institutional authorities or our modern sensibilities. Lots of things are eugenic Taleb, and if you’re so committed to fighting it, then the only thing that awaits Western civilization is ruin. It’s time to put this delusion to rest and acknowledge reality for what it is.

I don’t know what Taleb’s motivations might be for metaphorically sticking his hand into such an obvious woodchipper, nor am inclined to guess what they might be. But the important thing to remember is that no matter how smart you are, no matter how successful you might be, and no matter how astonishing your intellectual accomplishments, achievements, and original insights might be, nothing that you did in the past means that you are going to be right in the future.

Every appeal to human authority eventually fails in the face of objective reality, because reality is the ultimate authority short of the Creator God. And the more intelligent one is, the more intellectually accomplished one is, the more important it is to never lose sight of that.

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The Sheep Bare Their Cud-Chewers

The European ex-powers try to intimidate Russia with their feeble and largely nonexistent “unity”:

Statement issued by the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, France, Germany, Poland, Spain and United Kingdom.

We are ready to enhance our support for Ukraine. We commit to its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s war of aggression.

We share the goal to keep supporting Ukraine until a just, comprehensive and lasting peace is reached. A peace that guarantees the interest of Ukraine and our own. We are looking forward to discussing the way ahead together with our American allies.

Our shared objectives should be to put Ukraine in a position of strength. Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations. Ukraine should be provided with strong security guarantees. A just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for a strong transatlantic security.

We recall that the security of the European continent is our common responsibility. We are therefore working together to strengthen our collective defence capabilities.

This is one of the most retarded statements ever issued by a supposedly representative body, which, of course, the so-called “High Representative” isn’t. The only thing the “High Representative” represents is the subset of Clown World that runs its EU puppet leaders.

Everything about it is a lie. Russia is clearly, and as per usual in its history, fighting a defensive war. The fake borders notwithstanding, the Clown World-installed Kiev regime attacked the Russian people of the Donbass, refused to allow them self-representation, and did all of this AFTER the post-1991 expansion of NATO to which the USA had promised would not happen.

“Not one inch eastward” was the promise. The war is the obvious and inevitable result of Clown World’s attempt to expand its fake and gay rule through NATO, not “Russian aggression”.

The God-Emperor 2.0 has made it clear that the USA is not going to be Clown World’s enforcement arm any longer, and the collective forces of Europe would be hard pressed to fight Switzerland, let alone what is now a battle-hardened Russian army that has already defeated two NATO armies in addition to the Ukrainian army, as German military officers clearly know.

Military circles cite “around 120,000 soldiers as the lower limit” for the planned deployment. As the troops have to rotate, around 40,000 men and women would be deployed at any one time. EU military officials expect that the Europeans would be able to provide “up to 25,000 soldiers at most”.

The only move that will permit an immediate peace is if NATO withdraws to its 1991 borders, Russia is allowed to annex Odessa and all of the territory up to the Dnieper, Ukraine agrees to permanent neutrality, demilitarization, and the Kiev regime officials are surrendered to the Hague to face a war crimes tribunal made up of genuinely neutral parties led by China and India. Because if the unelected European “high representatives” don’t agree to this voluntarily, Russia is going to impose this and more unilaterally.

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Lonely Liberal Women

I wonder if they’ve ever considered how not behaving like horrifically unpleasant control freaks ready to take offense or administer a retarded lecture at the drop of a hat might make people more willing to spend time with them? Almost certainly not. They probably haven’t considered how actively uglifying themselves with ridiculous haircuts, piercings, and venomous hair colors makes them unattractive to others either.

It’s interesting to see how the conservative women are not only more soundly based, but more socially successful.

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Exceeding Expectations

I’m not going to lie, I’m starting to like the cut of this vice-president’s jib. He’s been much better than I expected, or even imagined he would be.

In an address at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Mr Vance warned Europe’s greatest threat came not from China or Russia but from within.

He said free speech and democratic institutions were being eroded and accused European politicians of forcing people to shut down social media accounts.

The Vice-President also urged the continent’s leaders to do more to stem illegal immigration.

In a specific attack on the UK, he raised the case of an ex-serviceman who prayed outside an abortion clinic and was convicted of breaching a safe zone around the centre.

‘Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making,’ Mr Vance told the conference. ‘If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.’

He accused EU officials of cancelling elections and asked whether ‘we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately higher standard’.

I like how he’s walking right into the serpents’ lair and calling them out for being liars and cowards right to their faces. As corrupt and retarded as US politicians have been for the last 50 years, it would be hard to find politicians anywhere in the world who have been as totally abysmal as the fake democrats of the European Union.

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Definitely Not Shipping from Britain

A 21 percent tariff makes it an easy decision to ship from Switzerland instead of the UK.

Britain is at risk of a £24billion hit to the economy after Donald Trump vowed to impose tariffs on countries that charge VAT.

The US President said he would charge reciprocal tariffs ‘for purposes of fairness’, which could result in a 21pc levy on goods exported to America.

He vowed to address ‘each country one by one’ – meaning it is not yet clear what the impact on Britain will be.

The UK currently charges a 20% standard VAT for most goods and services. Trump told reporters that he views VAT as a tariff.

The National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) previously estimated that tariffs of that scale could knock 0.4 percentage points off UK economic growth for the next two years – equivalent to around £24billion.

‘I’ve decided for purposes of fairness that I will charge a reciprocal tariff. It’s fair to all. No other country can complain,’ Trump told reporters as he signed the new order putting them in place.

It is a bit rich for the countries charging exorbitant VAT to complain about tariffs. VAT is a tax on imports, and the little redefinition game isn’t a justification for complaining about the USA doing the same.

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Based Books Sale: Spring Edition

Tired of mainstream traditionally published books with their diversity checklist characters and tired social justice themes? Then check out the Spring 2025 Based Book Sale running through the end of the day, Tuesday February 18, where you’ll find nearly 300 books that defy the politically correct gatekeeping and deliver traditional storytelling that upholds the good, the beautiful, and the true. All for $0.99 or free!

Here are some of the early Based Book Sale leaders, and we have a host of new faces among the most popular authors. Top sellers in the first day of the sale included John C. Wright’s One Bright Star to Guide Them, Robert Kroese’s Starship Grifters, Steven G. Johnson’s Operation Vampire (Murphy’s War Book 1), EJ Fisch’s three-book Ziva Payvan trilogy, Kevin Bates’, Quarantine and Even if by Fire, Michael F. Kane’s After Moses, Ryan M. Patrick’s The Martian Incident and Lag Delay: A Technothriller (Grace Parkowski Thrillers), Zakalog the Great’s The Mayor of Christ Mountain, Gregory Michael’s Chloe’s Kingdom, Russell May’s long awaited Solarvoid, sequel to Eta Cancri, Richard Paolinelli’s Sea Dragon, Brian Heming’s Murder on the Stellar Schooner: Illustrated Detective Scifi, the five-volume Exile War boxed set by Bowen Greenwood, J.Z. Pitts Virtual Rebel: A Sci-Fi Action Adventure (The Haven Trilogy Book 1), Terra Nullius (Slipspace Book 1) by Zachary Forbes, Asterius (Timelessness) by Susana Imaginário, the Shoot the Devil 3: Militia of Martyrs anthology, by a host of talented authors, Christopher G. Nutall’s Ark Royal, Michael Dibaggio’s House of Refuge, and classic works by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, G.K. Chesterton.

Booster Patrol Backers

All of you should have received an email now containing a link to download all of the high-quality, fully-licensed covers that we promised you nearly three years ago. If you haven’t, please email me and I will get it to you. If there are additional rewards owed, such as the promised cover of When The Man Comes Around, rest assured the band will get one recorded and delivered to you.

On a related note, I plan to launch a very small crowdfunding campaign next week for the Soulsigma album, a 10-song collection of original music which I wrote and produced using AI technology and digital audio tools, on FundMyComic, which graciously added a Music category at my request yesterday. Soulsigma is very different than the Booster Patrol covers and Vibe Patrol tunes which you’re accustomed to hearing, being more in the hard alternative rock category. This isn’t a major community project, so don’t feel any pressure to back it if you’re not genuinely interested in the music. The big campaign for which we’ll be hoping for massive support will be at the end of March and I will soon have some very exciting news about that.

I understand that a lot of people are either skeptical or openly derisive about AI music, and understandably so in light of what we’ve seen from ChatGPT, but they simply don’t comprehend that there is a massive difference in the degree of difficulty in producing meaningful text and meaningful music due to the way in which music is much more easily reduced to numbers and numerical patterns. The three best musicians I know, world-class musicians who compose in three very different genres, are uniformly excited about the possibilities being created for them on the AI front, and to be honest, theirs are the only opinions on the matter I take seriously.

I’ve just never had much patience for the buggy whip crowd. Even in these early days, the quality of what can be produced is much better than what was being professionally produced by the record labels in the 1990s, and it’s only going to get better as the technology improves and is further refined. The fact that the particular form of the evolution happens to favor lyricists at the moment only makes it more interesting to me; as we learned from games, the earlier one gets in and masters the development technology, the more one can reasonably hope to accomplish.

Anyhow, if you’re a UATV subscriber and you’d like a taste of the coming campaign, this is one of the alternative mixes of a song that is on the album, the Midnight Ride mix of Ride and Die. UATV

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Pause, Hammer Time

A federal judge announces that President Trump can “pause” executive branch agencies from spending money, even though he supposedly doesn’t have the right to “stop” them from spending it. Of course, as usual there is no legal definition of a “pause” versus a “stop”. Perhaps some emanations and penumbras can be found to further clarify the matter.

A federal judge on Wednesday reaffirmed his temporary restraining order against the Trump administration’s efforts to freeze billions of dollars in federal grants and loans, but clarified that President Donald Trump does have the authority to pause federal spending if it complies with existing regulations.

Judge John J. McConnell Jr. previously ruled that the White House defied his recent court order to unfreeze the billions of dollars in aid, which stems from funds that were expected to be paused by the Office of Management and Budget.

The Trump administration appealed McConnell’s earlier decision on Monday, but a federal appeals court declined to hear the case and urged McConnell to clarify his order quickly to avoid any further confusion.

McConnell on Wednesday stated that the federal government, including the president, does still have the right to pause federal spending, but has to do so in accordance with preexisting laws, the Washington Examiner reported.

“The [court’s previous order] does not bar both the President and much of the Federal Government from exercising their own lawful authorities to withhold funding,” McConnell wrote.

The judge also emphasized that the federal government does not need the court’s permission to halt spending if it’s clearly within existing guidelines.

“The [restraining order] nor the Court’s subsequent Order require the Defendants to seek ‘preclearance’ from the Court before acting to terminate funding when that decision is based on actual authority in the applicable statutory, regulatory, or grant terms,” McConnell added.

This is just the usual double-talking talmudism of the courts. The more I’ve learned about the courts and the law, the more I’m convinced that courts and lawyers should be banned from any civilized society. Their actions over time are reliably subversive and inevitably inversive. The end results are no different than having a king and his nobles simply making up the rules as they go along, only without accountability and with more corruption.

UPDATE: There appear to be more, and much bigger, changes in the works.

It was very bad news for the permanent bureaucracy that DOGE and Congress are on the same team. It would have been so much better for them had Congress taken umbrage over the Executive refusing to make payment they’d authorized. But it got so much better.

Then Johnson delivered the coup de grâce, the single sentence revealing a ghastly Sword of Damocles dangling on a gossamer thread right above the Deep State’s masked head, and a critical puzzle piece dropped into what we perceive in the strategic brilliance of Trump’s de-Swamping order of operations. Johnson said:

We have a $36 trillion dollar federal debt. We have got to get ahold of these things. You’re going to see it reflected in the reconciliation package that comes forward, you’re going to see it reflected in the appropriations as we go forward, and you’re going to see it in these efforts to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. And we think the final number on that is going to be substantial and a game changer in Washington.

The clear threat was in Johnson’s final sentence. A game-changer in Washington. DOGE isn’t the weapon, it’s just the canary in the limestone mine. Now that Congress knows where the waste is —like USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Department of Education, DEI spending, the Treasury, Social Security, and the rest— legislators are working up a budget bill to nuke the Deep State from orbit.

It’s wonky, but this is very important. The fact Johnson announced a budget bill is critical. Bills related to reconciling the budget can be passed using a process called ‘budget reconciliation,’ which avoids the Senate filibuster and can be approved with a simple majority. In other words, it’s the Deep State’s worst nightmare: first, DOGE identified the bureaucratic bloat, and so now Republicans in Congress have a viable legislative path to cut the guts out of the bloated, mutant Swamp whale…

The same activist judges siding against him using Congress as an excuse, must now twist into legal pretzels somehow arguing that neither Congress nor the Executive hold the power of the purse, which is even less constitutionally plausible. In other words, Trump tricked the judges into committing to a Congressional-powers argument, which becomes moot when Congress does it.

I’d also like to see him remove the possibility of judicial review from all his executive orders; the courts need to be not only circumnavigated, but crushed, for their illegal and extraconstitutional interference into the operations of the Executive and Legislative branches. But the God-Emperor 2.0 is good, and quite possibly he’ll give us both.

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My Favorite Japanese Novels

In the 35 years since I graduated with an East Asian studies degree, I’ve read a considerable amount of Japanese literature. So, my little contribution to Fandom Pulse is a list of my 10 favorite novels, with the caveat that only one novel per author was allowed.

Japanese literature is like no other. What the wedding is to the English novel, the suicide is to the Japanese novel. Furthermore, the absence of Christian sexual mores, the cultural inclination toward passivity and fatalism, and the lack of an individualist hero tradition will tend to strike the average Western reader as strange and, in some cases, even bordering on the perverse.

But the technical skill of Japanese novelists, combined with their very different takes on the human condition, makes Japanese literature one of the most interesting and rewarding literatures available for reading on the planet. Below are my favorite books by ten different Japanese authors translated into English, since I don’t read kanji, and a list of my ten favorite Japanese novels would amount to little more than an incomplete bibliography of Haruki Murakami.

Read the whole thing there. And yes, I’ve read Natsumi Soseki, Ryu Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Banana Yoshimoto, and all the other big names. This is a list of my favorite novels, not the technically best or most representative, or most important.

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