Author: VD

ALWAYS wait two days

President Trump never gave the green light:

President Trump says that he had not given the final go ahead for an Iranian attack when he called off a strike on Thursday night. He told NBC’s Chuck Todd in a Friday interview that airs in full on Sunday morning on ‘Meet the Press’ that the planes were still on the ground when he called the whole thing off.

‘Nothing is greenlighted until the very end, because things change,’ Trump said. ‘We had something ready to go, subject to my approval.’

He said he asked the critical question that caused him to hold back of a military general a half hour before the aircraft was due to take off.

‘No, were about ready to go. No, but they would have been pretty soon,’ he said. ‘And things would have happened to a point where we wouldn’t turn back, couldn’t turn back.’

He said he asked how many people would be killed. ‘Approximately 150,’ the unidentified general told him.

Trump said the number gave him pause, considering Iran shot down an unmanned drone.

‘And here we are sitting with 150 people dead people that would have taken place, probably within a half hour, after I said go ahead. And I didn’t like it. I didn’t think it was proportionate,’ he said.

It was just more neoclown propaganda trying to force his hand into starting a war somewhere, anywhere. And he was right. It wasn’t a proportionate response, especially considering the probability that Iran had the right to shoot down a spy drone that had entered their territory.

Mailvox: Military-grade Gamma

It’s becoming evident that narcissism bordering on solipsism is one of the stronger elements in the making of a Gamma.

On Instagram, Zammy has become “the world’s therapy dog.” A follower reaches out to me sharing that her boyfriend’s mom and dog died in a terrible auto accident and his brother is now in ICU here in Tampa where I live. I posted an update video on IG…and am paying a visit to the ICU today with Zammy to surprise the boy. Here was a comment to the post:

Pray? I think you’ll find that only science can save him. I’ve really enjoyed watching these posts. However, you’ve ruined it with “pray”. What a shame!

This is why being a Gamma beyond the age of 21 should be addressed as a capital offense. It’s patently obvious that the world would be considerably better off without any of them.

A vital anti-arboralization vaccine

It seems to me this discovery of herbicidal chemicals in vaccines could be a selling point for the pro-vaccine propagandists:

Glyphosate, a chemical ingredient found in Monsanto’s Roundup and hundreds of other herbicides, has been found in vaccines.  Moms Across America received preliminary screening results from Microbe Inotech Laboratories Inc. of St. Louis, Missouri which shows the DTap Adacel (Sanofi Pasteur) vaccine had 0.123 ppb, Influenza Fluvirin (Novartis)  0.331 ppb and HepB Energix-B (Glaxo Smith Kline) 0.325 and Pneumococcal Vax Polyvalent Pneumovax 23, (Merck) had 0.107 ppb of glyphosate. The MMR II (Merck) vaccine, which CDC whistleblower Dr.William Thompson has linked to autism, had levels up to 25 times higher than the other vaccines, at 2.671ppb.  Subsequently, multiple rounds of additional independent tests have confirmed these findings at or above the same levels.

I mean, all they have to do is concoct a series of alarmist campaigns about the dangers of allowing bark to grow on your skin and every pro-vaccine moron will be attacking Jenny McCarthy and Jessica Biel for wanting to let their children turn into trees.

Let’s not forget that just as many children were arboralized in 2018 as died of measles.

There is no “we”, Benny

The Littlest Chickenhawk wants war and he wants it now!

Disproportionate response to attacks on US assets are a good way of showing our enemies that we will mash them if they continue to escalate. The US doesn’t want war. You know who doesn’t want war even more? The ayatollahs who will find themselves quite dead if war occurs.

Our enemies? There is no “us”. Benny and the neoclowns are observably more the enemies of the American people than the ayatollahs have ever been. And Benny has been going on about war with Iran for more than a decade now; he has been calling for war with Iran, as well as Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Pakistan, since 2005.

Did Iraq pose an immediate threat to our nation? Perhaps not. But toppling Saddam Hussein and democratizing Iraq prevent his future ascendance and end his material support for future threats globally. The same principle holds true for Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and others: Pre-emption is the chief weapon of a global empire. No one said empire was easy, but it is right and good, both for Americans and for the world.
– Benjamin Shapiro, WorldNetDaily, Aug. 11, 2005

Now, of course, Benny is claiming that he doesn’t want war, he just wants to “restore deterrance”. But the Littlest Chickenhawk is lying. Again. He wants war and he wants LOTS of war. He just isn’t willing to enlist and fight them himself.

Book review: Killing Commendatore

Unauthorized subscribers of a literary bent may be interested in watching my first Unauthorized book review, which is of Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore. It’s very good, and very much indicative of the great Japanese novelist’s return to form.

If you’re interested in picking up a copy after watching this, we have the hardcover available on the Castalia Direct store at a discount or you can preorder the paperback for $12.99.

Sounds like someone is lying to the President

President Trump calls off a planned strike on Iran:

Donald Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing a $180m US spy drone but pulled back last minute as planes were in the air and ships in position against the advice of some of his top aides, according to reports.

Military and diplomatic officials were said to be expecting a strike as late as 7pm Thursday, with planned attacks on Iranian targets including radar and missile batteries approved, The New York Times reports.

The paper says multiple senior administration sources confirmed the plans.

One insider is said to have told them planes were in the air and ships were in position when the mission was called off – against the advice Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, national security adviser John R. Bolton and CIA director Gina Haspel.

Iran had earlier released GPS coordinates suggesting the drone was eight miles off its coast. That put the missile within the 12 nautical miles from the shore Iran claims as its territorial waters.

Officials there later said they had ‘indisputable’ evidence the drone violated its airspace.

But the US said it was shot down 21 miles off the Iranian coast, in the Strait of Hormuz.

My guess is that he approved the strike but changed his mind when he found out that there was, at the very least, reason to question where his officials said the drone was shot down.

Mailvox: we have an answer

No, Neal Stephenson was not taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to writing Seveneves. Yes, Neal Stephenson has gone SJW, or so we are informed by a reader of his latest:

Neal Stephenson’s last novel Seveneves was just bad.  His newest effort Fall is full of social justice AND bad.  Thank God I got it from the library.

In this story, he has adhered to your theory that the USA will break up sometime in the 2030s, but the “Red State” area is called Ameristan, from which all smart/educated people have fled.  Ameristan has no dentists, so everyone has brown or missing teeth.  If anyone needs medical care, they have to sneak across the border to the “Blue Lands.” Nothing of value is produced in Ameristan, nothing is exported, everyone is dirt-poor.

Furthermore, Ameristan lives under the Levitican Law, which is a literal interpretation of the Old Testament.  Even the most obscure passages from the Bible are enforced, such as executing anyone who wears mixed linen and wool.  They also crucify people and burn crosses a lot.  The countryside is infested with roaming bandits, so everyone has to drive around with AK-47s or even vehicle-mounted machine machine guns, a bit like ISIS territory.  It’s such a heavy-handed parody it’s like something out of Saturday Night Live, but he isn’t joking.

Finally, Stephenson really lays on the feminism here.  The female characters are hyper-alert for “microaggressions” (yes, he really uses that word), for instance in one scene a character “decided to let the microaggression pass without comment.”  Also the women call out a male character for “mansplaining.”

At one point he talks about the bad old days, where women were harassed on the internet all the time, and men didn’t believe women could write good code.  Now (in the 2040s) everyone has an anonymous public ID – no one knows your sex, even when applying for jobs – so OF COURSE it turns out that when code is written anonymously, female-written code turns out to be better than men’s code!

Seveneves pretty much took Stephenson from “buy immediately in hardback” to “borrow from library only” in my eyes.  Now I think I’m just done with the guy.  I guess he was probably always like this, but now has so much money he thinks he can go wild.

I don’t know. It sounds so over the top that in light of his famous account of his duels with William Gibson, I can’t help but suspect him of selling books while taking the piss out of his SJW readers.

What happens when it’s a carrier?

Iran shoots down a US drone:

The US have confirmed that Iran has shot down one of its $180million spy drones, but refutes the Revolutionary Guard’s claims it was in Iranian airspace.

Iranian commander Hossein Salami declared his men were ‘ready for war,’ as the downing of the aircraft over its ‘red lines’ sent ‘a clear message’ to the Americans.

Tehran alleged an RQ-4 Global Hawk was shot down over their southern coastal city of Hormozgan, but a U.S. official said it had been a Navy MQ-4C Triton in international airspace.

A highly sophisticated missile will have been deployed, of deep concern to Washington not only for Tehran’s patently advanced arsenal, but the secrets they could steal in examining the stricken drone.

The MQ-4C soars to over 50,000ft, can be operated from 9,400 miles away and is loaded with optical/infrared sensors – it is believed to be the first time one has been taken out.

It comes amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington over U.S. economic sanctions and alleged Iranian attacks on shipping in the Straits of Hormuz.

It’s not quite so fun playing gunboat diplomacy when the enemy has the ability to sink your gunboats. The fact that a Triton has not been shot down before tends to indicate that Iran’s military capabilities are better than expected, which should give the Trump administration serious pause about listening to the neoclowns and their incessant demands for what very well could turn out to be the US empire’s Sicilian Expedition.

One should be hesitant to take either side at their word, however, since there were no Tritons officially deployed to the region and there is some belief that it was actually a RQ-4N BAMS-D drone, which are Global Hawks converted to experimental Tritons. This may explain the apparent contradiction in reports.

Now, remember, the neoclowns want us to believe that Iran can shoot down a new-model drone, which reportedly has never been done before, but nevertheless wasn’t able to sink a civilian ship in six separate attempts.

UPDATE: Iran has released what it claims are the precise coordinates of the shoot-down:

At 00:14 US drone took off from UAE in stealth mode & violated Iranian airspace. It was targeted at 04:05 at the coordinates (25°59’43″N 57°02’25″E) near Kouh-e Mobarak. We’ve retrieved sections of the US military drone in OUR territorial waters where it was shot down.

The decline of development

The growing number of development issues with the F-35 will not surprise anyone who understands that the US empire is in its decline-and-contraction stage:

According to a June 2018 report by the Government Accountability Office, the program had 111 category 1 deficiencies on the books in January 2018. By May 24, 2018, that number had decreased to 64 open category 1 problems out of a total 913 deficiencies, according to one document obtained by Defense News.

Another document obtained by Defense News noted that at least 13 issues would need to be held as category 1 deficiencies going into operational tests in fall 2018.

The 13 deficiencies include:

  • The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.
  • The spare parts inventory shown by the F-35’s logistics system does not always reflect reality, causing occasional mission cancellations.
  • Cabin pressure spikes in the cockpit of the F-35 have been known to cause barotrauma, the word given to extreme ear and sinus pain.
  • In very cold conditions — defined as at or near minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit — the F-35 will erroneously report that one of its batteries have failed, sometimes prompting missions to be aborted.
  • Supersonic flight in excess of Mach 1.2 can cause structural damage and blistering to the stealth coating of the F-35B and F-35C.
  • After doing certain maneuvers, F-35B and F-35C pilots are not always able to completely control the aircraft’s pitch, roll and yaw.
  • If the F-35A and F-35B blows a tire upon landing, the impact could also take out both hydraulic lines and pose a loss-of-aircraft risk.
  • A “green glow” sometimes appears on the helmet-mounted display, washing out the imagery in the helmet and making it difficult to land the F-35C on an aircraft carrier.
  • On nights with little starlight, the night vision camera sometimes displays green striations that make it difficult for all variants to see the horizon or to land on ships.
  • The sea search mode of the F-35’s radar only illuminates a small slice of the sea’s surface.
  • When the F-35B vertically lands on very hot days, older engines may be unable to produce the required thrust to keep the jet airborne, resulting in a hard landing.

The Pentagon has identified four additional category 1 deficiencies since beginning operational tests in December 2018, mostly centered around weapons interfaces, Winter said.

For the price of the F-35, the USA could have built 79,787 F-16s, or 17.3x more than were ever built. If you don’t understand why the USA is going to lose its next major war, look up the kill rate between German Panthers and US Shermans or between Tigers and T-34s. One F-35 might be better than one F-16, but it’s not capable of taking on 200 at a time.

The clash of low-trust cultures

The more the East invades the West, the more it becomes apparent that my explanation for the historical success of some minorities is dependent upon their possession of a low-trust, high-performance monopoly in a high-trust environment is the correct one:

As a commenter pointed out about my review of This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto by Suketu Mehta, the scion of an Indian diamond merchant clan, diamond merchants are about the last who ought to lecture white Americans on their failures of inclusion and diversity.

The diamond business is globalist yet intensely nepotistic. I knew an American woman who got a job in the Los Angeles diamond district but then went to work for an insurance company due to discrimination against women and non-Indians.

Indians have recently pushed Orthodox Jewish diamond businessmen largely out of their stronghold in Antwerp, Belgium, in part by being more clannish than the Orthodox Jews.

Jews are being pushed out of their merchanting and intellectual strongholds by the Chinese, the Indians, and other Asian groups because after centuries of competing successfully with high-trust Europeans, they are in no shape to compete with similarly low-trust cultures with larger extended families.

Note that the Mehta book is perfectly straightforward about immigration being not merely invasion, but conquest.