Author: VD

First Star Wars, Now Middle Earth

The Hellmouth is methodically destroying the intellectual property it manages to acquire. Star Wars is effectively dead, so now it’s abusing Middle Earth.

Pop culture critic Gary Buechler aka Nerdrotic shared his review for Warner Bros. latest release The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim by deeming it a “boring slog.”

In a recent video upload, Buechler makes it clear the film does indeed feature a girl boss in the form of Helm Hammerhand’s daughter, Hera, who has no name in Tolkien’s original work and is only mentioned in a single sentence.

He says, “They went with a girl boss.” After noting the movie is not as bad as The Rings of Power, he says, “What [Warner Bros.] did manage to do was girl boss better.”

He explains, “War of the Rohirrim is about some unnamed daughter who ends up being the impetus of the story leading around a bunch of incompetent men who should have listened to her in the first place.”

“What could have been the story centered on Helm Hammerhand and the tragic events that led to the naming of Helm’s Deep turned into something else,” he added.

It’s all so tedious. Tolkien wrote less about women, and had less interest in the female perspective, than nearly any author not writing gay space dinosaur porn. So, naturally, the Hellmouth sees the mere mention of one character having a daughter and promptly throws out everything in order to tell her story.

It’s a remarkable form of arrogant non-creativity to both a) require someone else’s story and then b) refuse to tell it as is. What’s fascinating is the way in which it clearly never occurs to the non-creators that absolutely no one is interested in their stories, which is why they require the rights to the IP in the first place.

Tolkien’s legacy would have been much better served by putting his work into the public domain upon his death. Or, at the very least, upon his son Christopher’s death, as Christopher Tolkien was an excellent steward of his father’s work.

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Unprecedented Evil

The wickedness of Clown World is proving too great for Great Britain:

The UK has banned puberty blockers for minors,

“The United Kingdom indefinitely banned puberty blockers for children after warnings about an “unacceptable safety risk” on Wednesday. Wes Streeting, the U.K.’s secretary of state for Health and Social Care, announced the ban would affect everyone younger than 18. “We need to act with caution and care when it comes to this vulnerable group of young people, and follow the expert advice,” Streeting said.

The declaration from the British government comes after the Commission on Human Medicines found there is “an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children.”

With the commission’s report revealing that puberty blockers were prescribed to minors who filled out only one online questionnaire and completed a single Zoom call, Streeting said Wednesday that there was “particular concern” about whether the “children and their families were provided with enough time and information to give their full and informed consent.”

Now the prosecutions of the doctors who prescribed these puberty blockers to children should begin. This was only and ever child abuse, and it is about time that this practice was banned.

I remember when I was a kid you would hear teachers at school often talk about how evil China was for allowing the practice of foot binding. This was the practice of binding little girls’ feet to stop them fully growing. I remember thinking how cruel and evil it was. I am not sure what sort of support this practice has in modern China, but blocking the natural development of children through puberty is just as, if not more, cruel than binding little girls feet.

The comparison to historical Chinese foot binding is both apt and illustrative. There can be absolutely no doubt that the historians of the future will look back at this time as a period of insanity. As awful as foot-binding is, it’s nowhere nearly as cruel and evil as blocking a child’s natural development under the guise of “changing” their sex.

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This Very Night

Today marks the release of THIS VERY NIGHT by Cradle to Calvary, which is a new Christmas carol written in the traditional sense. Which is to say that it is a religious carol about the Christian holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ rather than a cheerful song about Santa Claus, the local weather patterns, or urban shopping experiences. The version you can listen to here is an alternative and previously unreleased one, an acoustic take on the more traditional carol that was released today on iTunes and Spotify. Unauthorized subscribers can also listen to it and download it from UATV.

You can hear a preview of the released single, the Holy Call mix, by clicking on the image below. You can also listen to it on YouTube.

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Paul Krugman is Done

After 24 years of leading opinions into intellectual dead ends, America’s leading cheerleader for neoconnery and Neo-Keynesian economics is ending his run as a New York Times columnist with an exhibition of the same sort of dishonest cluelessness that rendered him such a helpless punching bag for the entirety of that run.

It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards. My sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he’d be more fun to hang out with.

In Europe, too, things seemed to be going well. In particular, the introduction of the euro in 1999 was widely hailed as a step toward closer political as well as economic integration — toward a United States of Europe, if you like. Some of us ugly Americans had misgivings, but initially they weren’t widely shared.

Still, people were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper.

Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest… So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.

Even at the end of his very undistinguished career, Krugman cannot admit that he and his fellow ethnic elites completely blew the opportunity that their grandfathers and fathers so painstakingly prepared for them. They assumed near-complete control of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen at a time when the rest of the world was still digging itself out of the rubble of WWII, and instead of devoting themselves to the benefit of the American people, spent the last fifty years looting their host nation and abusing their power and their influence in a manner so obviously stupid and short-lived that it’s hard to even describe it as self-serving.

The reason people around the world have lost all faith in elites is the direct result of the complete failure by Krugman and his fellow elitists to govern reasonably, let alone responsibly. Their core assumptions were wrong, their objectives were insane, their policies were societally destructive, and their eventual failure was inevitable.

It’s not so much that Paul Krugman will not be missed. He will not even be remembered.

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Don’t Bet Against Him

On Wednesday, the unbelievable happened. Bill Belichick agreed to become the head coach at North Carolina. It’s an incredibly exciting and interesting development for the football world as a whole, and there will be many eyes on Chapel Hill over the next 12 months as the all-time great NFL coach makes his mark in the collegiate realm.

So much has changed in college football that it wouldn’t be even remotely surprising if Belichick managed to figure out how to game the system and take UNC to the college football playoff. I don’t think this would have happened in the time before NIL, the transfer portal, and the professionalization of college football. And I have to admit, I’m more interested in college football than I’ve been since I was nine and watching SWC teams play the option with tearaway jerseys.

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Clown World Declares a Winner

Foreign Affairs declares Türkiye and Erdogan to be the winners of the sudden Syrian collapse:

In most capitals across the Middle East, the news of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall sparked immense anxiety. Ankara is not one of them. Rather than worrying about Syria’s prospects after more than a decade of conflict, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees opportunity in a post-Assad future. His optimism is well founded: out of all the region’s major players, Ankara has the strongest channels of communication and history of working with the Islamist group now in charge in Damascus, positioning it to reap the benefits of the Assad regime’s demise.

Chief among the rebel forces that ended Assad’s rule on Sunday is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Muslim group that was previously affiliated with al Qaeda and is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the United Nations. Despite those designations, Turkey has provided indirect assistance to HTS. The Turkish military presence in the northwestern Syrian town of Idlib largely shielded the group from attacks by Syrian government forces, allowing it to run the province undisturbed for years. Turkey managed the flow of international aid into HTS-run areas, which increased the group’s legitimacy among locals. Trade across the Turkish border has provided HTS economic support, too.

All this has given Turkey influence over HTS. In October, Erdogan quashed plans for a rebel offensive in Aleppo; when rebel forces launched their campaign late last month, they likely did so with Erdogan’s approval. For years, Assad had been dragging his feet as Erdogan sought to mend ties with Damascus and repatriate the millions of Syrian refugees whose presence in Turkey undermined support for his ruling party. With Assad’s regional allies weakened by the Israeli campaign in Gaza and Lebanon, and Russia distracted in Ukraine, Erdogan saw an opportunity to force the Syrian leader to the table.

The rebels’ whirlwind success came as a surprise. Now, Assad is out of the picture altogether, and Erdogan is getting ready to cash in on his years-long investment in the Syrian opposition. Iran and Russia—Turkey’s main rivals in Syria—are chastened; a friendly government could soon be set up in Damascus, ready to welcome back refugees; and Assad’s departure could even open a window for remaining U.S. troops to leave, fulfilling a long-sought goal of Ankara’s. If it can avoid the potential dangers ahead, Turkey could end up a clear winner in Syria’s civil war.

Obviously Israel is one of the immediate winners; the Lebensraum advocates are already grabbing Syrian territory in the name of “self-defense”. But I’m not certain that convincing the rest of the world that any accommodation with the USA is impossible is likely to benefit the Netanhayu regime in the intermediate term.

Also, at some point, the Turkish desire for an Ottoman revival and Israeli dreams of a Greater Israeli Empire are bound to collide. And the numbers would appear to favor the Turks.

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The Liberal World Order is Over

Viktor Orban is correct, although ironically, it’s the fall of Syria, not Ukraine, that marks the end of the so-called Neo-Liberal Rules-Based World Order:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has claimed that his country’s refusal to conform to liberal ideology will yield considerable benefits in the future.

“The liberal world order is over,” he declared during a speech in Budapest on Tuesday. The conservative nationalist politician has been in power since 2010, winning successive elections on a platform of defying what he considers to be authoritarian rule by Brussels.

EU leaders have accused Orban of undermining democracy in Hungary and harming the economic bloc’s solidarity on the Ukraine conflict. He has argued that Brussels’ policies have been disastrous for EU member states.

“As the changes come, only those nations can be winners that can bring the most out of themselves,” Orban told a gathering of university students, as quoted by his office. “Those who assimilate, fall into line, are unable to show their own values or discover the strength inherent in their national character will soon become irrelevant.” 

The rapacity with which Israel and Turkey are seizing Syrian territory, and the shamelessness with which the USA refuses to condemn their actions demonstrates that even those countries which are favored by Clown World can’t be bothered to maintain the pretense of what previously passed for “international law” any longer.

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Five Lessons for Russia

Simplicius contemplates the lessons to be learned from the collapse of Syria and cites five lessons that the Russians should take from it.

FIVE LESSONS FOR RUSSIA

Doom and gloom are somewhat appropriate, but it is more important to think about the future now. What does the fall of Syria tell us?

  1. False Peace is Death. A bad faith ceasefire is a recipe for disaster and after Minsk and Astana should never be repeated. False peace is worse than war, because false peace means you still have to fight the war later, but at a disadvantage. No green busses or green corridors for the enemy, no deescalation zones, no freezing of any lines. The enemy has to be defeated completely: victory is a prerequisite for mercy. Until that is achieved, no ceasefires, only death under FABs.
  2. Collapse is always sudden. The Assad regime resisted NATO-Israeli aggression for 13 years. And then it fell in a week. Mistakes, systemic errors and structural attrition accumulate until a critical mass is reached, and at that point the smallest impact will bring down the entire house of cards. Likewise, our current enemy in the main theater will resist stubbornly, until he will not be able to anymore, and then we will see Big Arrows. All our efforts should be focused on damaging the enemy’s war-waging capabilities to reach that critical point.
  3. Infantry is King. A single full-sized, dependable Russian infantry brigade (or a Ukrainian one, for that matter) would have been able to defeat the Jihadi advance for good. They were completely overstretched and to a large degree their offensive was a bluff that only worked because the SAA didn’t even try to resist, they just ran. We had our own experience with a lack of infantry in the SMO — it led to the Kharkov oblast debacle in fall ’22. No matter what anyone says, no matter what technological advances there are, the infantry unit was and remains the central actor of history, upon which all else depends.
  4. Empire is secondary to the Nation. There was a loud public debate among patriotic circles in Russia when the intervention in Syria began in 2015. Personally, I was opposed to the intervention because it seemed absurd to me to send Russian men to die in a foreign desert while Russian people are suffering under the yoke of Banderite occupation just across the border. We were told by Kremlin propagandists that “Palmyra is a symbol for all mankind” and the Donbass is just, eh, the Donbass. Whatever. Now, Jihadi dogs will get to loot and destroy all that archaeological treasure of all mankind, and we have to fight for the Donbass, anyway. Was it worth it? I have always been staunchly pro-Assad, but a single square mile of Russian land in Novorossiya means more to me than the entire Middle East. A nation should have its priorities in order.
  5. You can’t change nature. Some peoples and countries are just unreliable. They will never have stable polities unless compelled by overwhelming force or foreign occupation. They will never build working institutions on their own. You can’t just offer them a comprehensive reform package and then shrug when they refuse to implement it. They will always be shitty client states if you work with them within a civilized framework. We know how to work around local particularities in other parts of the world, so we should let Middle East policy also be guided by this knowledge. They are not Warsaw Era-pact allies you can let do things on their own.

The most important lesson, of course, is to stop trusting to agreements with the agreement-incapable. The second-most important lesson is to recognize that every state and entity controlled by Clown World is agreement-incapable.

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He’s Not Wrong

George R. R. Martin excoriates the Hellmouth’s mediocrities who inevitably make the works of others “their own” by ruining them.

Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin doubled down when Hollywood does an adaptation it should be a “faithful adaptation.” In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Martin stated, “Maybe I’m one of the few people in Hollywood who still thinks that when you adapt a work of art, a novel, a short story, you should do a faithful adaptation. It annoys me too much because they change things and I don’t think they generally improve them.”

“Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.’ It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it.”

He continued, “’The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”

The truth is that subverting and ruining truth and beauty is one of the purposes of Hollywood. They’re greedy, to be sure, but their greed is less of a priority for them than their obligation to render what is true false and what is beautiful ugly. They are not only the enemies of God, they are the enemies of the good, the beautiful, and the true.

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Fake Alzheimer’s Science

The latest scientific scandal isn’t even remotely surprising. Most science – yes, MOST science – is fraudulent. And we’re not talking about obviously fake science like vaccines, psychiatry, and evolutionary biology, we’re talking about gold-standard, peer-reviewed studies published in well-respected science journals that are landmark studies that serve as the basis for the present scientific consensus in the relevant field:

Science magazine said Thursday that it uncovered evidence that images in the much-cited study, published 16 years ago in the journal Nature, may have been doctored.

The findings have thrown skepticism on the work of Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and his research, which fueled interest in a specific assembly of proteins as a promising target for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Lesné didn’t respond to NBC News’ requests for comment, nor did he provide comment to Science magazine.

Science said it found more than 20 “suspect” papers by Lesné and identified more than 70 instances of possible image tampering in his studies. A whistleblower, Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, raised concerns last year about the possible manipulation of images in multiple papers.

Karl Herrup, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute who wasn’t involved in the investigation, said the findings are “really bad for science.”

“It’s never shameful to be wrong in science,” said Herrup, who also works at the school’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “A lot of the best science was done by people being wrong and proving first if they were wrong and then why they were wrong. What is completely toxic to science is to be fraudulent.”

The science is usually the very last thing you can trust; you’re literally better off trusting a coin toss. On average, scientists are more corrupt and less reliable than used car salesmen. And if the scientists and politicians are in agreement, you can be 100-percent certain that whatever it is that they’re trying to push on you is false.

Technological advancement does not depend upon science, that is an inversion of the actual relationship. In most cases, the technology precedes the scientific understanding that results from applying the technology to various hypotheses. For example, my hypothesis that atheism is actually the loss of a connection to the spiritual plane which is the result of brain damage that can either be congenital or caused by vaccines cannot be tested until a technology is invented that is capable of identifying and quantifying that connection. Until then, we’re limited to the sort of social science that only supports the hypothesis that there is an observable link between atheism and autism, though not necessarily a causal one.

We have a word for science that is reliable. And that word is engineering. You will note that scientists do not, for the most part, engineer anything.

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