Category: Uncategorized

What’s good for the citizen is good for the corporation

U.S. corporations are sounding the alarm about the fact that China intends to treat them precisely the way they are treating their employees and customers:

The social credit system is a vast database that monitors Chinese citizens for “good behavior” and aggressively punishes those who fall short. Anything from poor spending habits to ideological impurity can produce a low social credit score, with consequences that might include the unfortunate citizen suddenly discovering he is no longer allowed to board airplanes or trains.

The social credit system has a business component as well, monitoring corporate behavior in much the same way it keeps tabs on individual citizens. Companies with poor social credit scores can face heavier regulatory scrutiny, higher taxes, reduced access to business loans, or an outright ban on doing business in China.

Bloomberg News provided the example of China Railway Construction Corporation, a company that covered up some fatalities on a railroad project in Mongolia, got caught, and was banned from doing business for a year as well as being “subject to more inspections, limits on bidding for public projects and restrictions on issuing bonds and shares.” And those were only the immediate consequences – there is no telling how long the demerits fed into the social credit system will haunt the company and its managers across every province of China.

“The system will be widely used in China to oversee domestic and foreign companies, and firms have to assign resources to keep a real eye on making sure their records are clean,” noted Andrew Polk of the Trivium China consulting firm.

Trivium is currently charging corporate clients $2,500 an hour to consult on the social credit system and $50,000 for a complete audit. Bloomberg News suggested other U.S. and European firms are offering similar services.

Other expert observers pointed out that the rules governing the social credit system are notoriously vague and clearly subject to political tweaking from Beijing, making it quite easy for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to punish or blackball foreign corporations unless the foreigners bend over backwards to maintain good relations with CCP officials.

The Chinese government is not shy about warning that American companies could be blacklisted as part of the trade war, or in retaliation for U.S. criticism of Chinese policies such as the internment of Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. Publishing the CCP’s thus-far secretive blacklist, as Chinese state media has threatened to do, could cause big problems for American firms in other countries, and would almost certainly produce immediate black marks in the social credit system for every listed entity.

Wait, didn’t the Chinese understand that their people were supposed to be the slaves of the corporations and not their masters? Once again, we see that even communism is better for a nation than globalist corpocracy.

NEVER believe the Official Story

This news about the U.S. military systematically lying about its disastrous occupation of Afghanistan can only come as a surprise to those who still believe that the USS Maine was sunk by the Spanish, NASA landed men on the barren Moon, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.

A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.

The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.

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In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.

We may not know what the whole truth is. We usually can’t. But we absolutely know, on the basis of the historical pattern, that whatever story the U.S. government is pushing on the public is substantially false.

Two articles of impeachment scheduled

To precisely no one’s surprise, Democrats are doubling down on their impeachment attempts despite their obvious unpopularity with the voters:

Democrats are expected to unveil two articles of impeachment against President Trump on Tuesday that will focus on abuse of power and obstructing Congress, and would be voted on by the full House next week, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) met with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and other committee chairmen Monday night after a nine-hour hearing in which a Democratic counsel laid out the party’s case against Trump. The three officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks, cautioned that the plan had not been finalized.

Leaving a meeting with Pelosi, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) told reporters that he and the chairmen of other House committees would announce specific articles at a news conference at 9 a.m. Tuesday.

At an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal on Monday night, Pelosi said no final decision had been made.

“You think I’m going to tell you the articles of impeachment?” she said when asked about the matter. “We’re in a place where our members, our leadership of our committees of jurisdiction have now gotten the last input” about the conduct at issue, she added. “They’ll make a determination, a recommendation as to how we will go forward and what the articles will be.”

Under the current plan, the Judiciary Committee would vote on the articles Thursday, according to two people familiar with the matter, setting up a floor vote next week.

The whole point of the impeachment is not to take Trump out of office, because they already know it’s not going to fly. The objective is to get Trump to back off his ongoing investigations of the Promethean elite in the United States. That’s why “no final decision has been made”.

But they might as well roll the dice. The god-emperor is not going to back off and make a deal with the children of the Devil.

The end of Greek civilization

As it is often said, societies are less often murdered than commit suicide.

In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us. If, then, any one had advised our sending to ask the gods in regard to this, what we were to do or say in order to become more numerous and better fill our cities,—would he not have seemed a futile person, when the cause was manifest and the cure in our own hands?

For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury. For when there are only one or two sons, it is evident that, if war or pestilence carries off one, the houses must be left heirless: and, like swarms of bees, little by little the cities become sparsely inhabited and weak.
– Polybius 140 BC

Read that, then think about how many Americans don’t have children because they a) fear divorce or b) fear being unable to pay for college educations.

Mailvox: harping on Gammas

Ricky Rari complains about the way I criticize Gamma males:

You always harp on about gammas but never the mothers who singlehandedly raised them, or their absentee fathers.

First, that’s not always the case. There are no shortage of Gammas from two-parent homes.

Second, what would be the point? You can’t unmake a single mother, an absentee father, or undo an upbringing. But the Gamma male can change his pattern of behavior.

Third, and most important, neither single mothers nor absentee fathers insist on invading this blog, infesting the Darkstream and Dlive channels, recording video hit pieces intended to discredit people, and organizing campaigns attempts to get me and my associates deplatformed.

Gammas are the self-declared enemy of community, society, and civilization. No unrepentant Gamma should ever be shown even a modicum of grace, mercy or kindness. To the contrary, only unrelenting contempt, rejection, and honesty have any ability to puncture the delusion bubble that the Gamma uses to hide from the truth about himself, and thereby permit the possibility of personal growth and behavioral transformation.

Sexual immorality and the decline of the West

This summary of J.D. Unwin’s work from the 1930s is the practical application of the theoretical argument that connects Western post-Christianity to the observable decline of the West:

  1. Effect of sexual constraints: Increased sexual constraints, either pre or post-nuptial, always led to increased flourishing of a culture. Conversely, increased sexual freedom always led to the collapse of a culture three generations later. 
  2. Single most influential factor: Surprisingly, the data revealed that the single most important correlation with the flourishing of a culture was whether pre-nuptial chastity was required or not. It had a very significant effect either way.
  3. Highest flourishing of culture: The most powerful combination was pre-nuptial chastity coupled with “absolute monogamy”. Rationalist cultures that retained this combination for at least three generations exceeded all other cultures in every area, including literature, art, science, furniture, architecture, engineering, and agriculture. Only three out of the eighty-six cultures studied ever attained this level.
  4. Effect of abandoning prenuptial chastity: When strict prenuptial chastity was no longer the norm, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking also disappeared within three generations.
  5. Total sexual freedom: If total sexual freedom was embraced by a culture, that culture collapsed within three generations to the lowest state of flourishing — which Unwin describes as “inert” and at a “dead level of conception” and is characterized by people who have little interest in much else other than their own wants and needs. At this level, the culture is usually conquered or taken over by another culture with greater social energy.
  6. Time lag: If there is a change in sexual constraints, either increased or decreased restraints, the full effect of that change is not realized until the third generation. 

Thanks to the rationalist generations that preceded them, the first generation of a society setting aside its sexual restraints can still enjoy its new-found sexual freedom before any significant decline in culture, but the data shows that this “having your cake and eating it too” phase lasts a maximum of one generation before the decline sets in. Unwin wrote:

The history of these societies consists of a series of monotonous repetitions; and it is difficult to decide which aspect of the story is the more significant: the lamentable lack of original thought which in each case the reformers displayed, or the amazing alacrity with which, after a period of intense compulsory continence (sexual restraint), the human organism seizes the earliest opportunity to satisfy its innate desires in a direct or perverted manner. Sometimes a man has been heard to declare that he wishes both to enjoy the advantages of high culture and to abolish compulsory continence. The inherent nature of the human organism, however, seems to be such that these desires are incompatible, even contradictory. The reformer may be likened to the foolish boy who desires both to keep his cake and to consume it. Any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom; the evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation.

Looking at our own sexual revolution, the “having your cake and eating it too” phase would have lasted into the early 2000’s. We are now at a stage where we should begin to observe the verification or falsification of Unwin’s predictions.

As any honest observer would readily conclude, Unwin’s predictions are being verified with a vengeance. The solution is simple: walk the narrow path. Get married. Be faithful. Have children. And then plant the acorns that will grow into the mighty oaks underneath which your great-grandchildren will play.

Quantum Mortis in print and audio

The independent planet of Rhysalan provides Sanctuary to 1,462 governments-in-exile. It is the responsibility of the Xenocriminology and Alien Relations department of the Military Crimes Investigation Division to keep a firm leash on the hundreds of thousands of xenos residing on-planet. Assassinations, revolutions, civil wars, and attempted planetary genocides are all in a day’s work for Chief Warrant Officer Graven Tower, MCID-XAR.

In addition to a missile-armed aerovar, his trusty Sphinx CPB-18, and MCID’s extremely liberal policies concerning collateral damage and civilian casualties, Chief Tower is assisted by his extreme xenophobia as well as a military-grade augmented machine intelligence that believes it has found God. So when the disintegrated remnants of the heir apparent of an alien royal house are discovered on the streets of Trans Paradis, the question is not so much whether the killers will eventually be found, but if it is the criminals or the crime investigators who will contribute more to the final body count.

QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted is finally available in paperback for $17.99 from Castalia Direct and $19.99 from Amazon. However, the best deal on it this month is via the Replatforming, as $20 will get you the ebook, the forthcoming audiobook, and the paperback.

Remoras think they power the shark

Ron Unz, quite rightly, has broached the idea of offering subscriptions to the Unz Review and tying it to the amount of comments a user is able to make.

The underlying principle is simple. If you spend a great deal of time doing something, then you have empirically demonstrated that it must be worth the hourly value of your time. And it hardly seems unreasonable to financially contribute a small additional fraction to help support the iconoclastic writers who are providing that service.

Restricting access to our webzine to casual or ordinary readers would defeat our entire purpose of widely disseminating important and controversial material. But I think that our heavier website users, perhaps those who spend more than 5 or 10 hours per month here, should be encouraged or even required to support it. A stepped-fee somewhere in the range of $1 per hour seems fairly reasonable, and such a figure would go a long way toward covering the payments to our existing writers, allowing for further expansion, and helping to make this website self-sustaining. I doubt that a charge of $1/hour would strain many budgets given that it’s much less than the cost of a cup of coffee or most daily newspapers.

A substantial fraction of our heavy readers are probably ideologically-committed individuals, who might welcome a chance to support writers and thinkers whose content they often admire and whose writing may rarely be found elsewhere.

Perhaps the handful of irritating “trolls” possibly employed by various hostile organizations will be annoyed at having to request an expense account payment to cover such costs, causing them to effectively subsidize the distribution of ideas they abhor and would eagerly censor. But I think they deserve such a fate, and if they choose instead to permanently depart, I doubt they will be much missed.

The exact details and payment methodology will need to be determined, perhaps involving Patreon or other similar systems as an option. But I thought I’d first open on a discussion on this general topic and see what thoughts or suggestions our readers had.

Needless to say, this perfectly reasonable evolution has not gone over well with the troll brigade or the free lunch crowd there. One example of a typical response:

You mean he’d really like to censor opinions he doesn’t like but he doesn’t want to be seen to be doing so? In other words he’s just like everyone else. He believes in freedom of speech but doesn’t really think it should apply to people he disagrees with?

If that’s his intention he is choosing absolutely the worst way to do it. He’ll end up with just as many crazies and trolls as he has now but he’ll have chased away the thoughtful commenters.

And to be brutally honest, in general the comments here are a hell of a lot better and more interesting than the articles. Most of the articles are puerile or they’re simply rants. Most of the “writers” here are here because they can’t get published elsewhere, not because they’re controversial but because they’re nuts. There are three or four really good writers here and that’s about it.

I think Mr Unz will discover that most people come here for the lively discussions in the comment sections, not for the articles. He seems to be aiming to destroy the one great asset that the site has.

I’ve heard this self-serving, narcissistic argument every time I turned comment moderation on over the past 16 years. The fact that there are around 100 non-commenting readers for every commenter never seems to register with them, nor does the fact that when comments were turned entirely off, the site traffic here actually increased by about five percent.

Now, I’m willing to permit comments here as a courtesy to regular readers who want them. I think they can be a net benefit to everyone here, although it is clear that open and anonymous commenting is unfortunately no longer viable. But commenters should not delude themselves. No one – literally no one – is primarily here to read the comments.

Bonus project: identify the key word that gives away the commenter’s SSH game.

ANSWER: “thoughtful”. It’s not the only indicator, and a number of people correctly pointed to the obvious “seems”, but I was interested to see if anyone would spot a tell that I have not previously pointed out. One thing I have noticed over time is that only Gammas ever describe themselves as thoughtful. One can always tell that a blog is going to be meandering, boring, pointless, and self-absorbed when it advertises itself as featuring “thoughtful commentary”, as just about every failed blog started by a journalist in the early 2000s did.

NFL Week 14

Discuss amongst yourselves. Also, this is very good news:

The NFL will continue to resist sound arguments for changing the postseason seeding process, which guarantees every division champion a home game. Per Adam Schefter of ESPN, the issue has emerged in past years, but the possibility of stripping a division winner of an automatic home game has “gotten zero steam,” and that “[i]t’s never been a consideration.”

As a source with knowledge of past dynamics during ownership meetings has explained it to PFT, the idea has been proposed “a number of times” and debated “a few times,” but it “never got much traction.”

“For some reason, the owners felt strongly that it was important to make division winning meaningful and one way was to give them a home game,” our source said.

The arguments for playoff reseeding are not “sound” at all. To the contrary, they are stupid, bordering on complete retardation. Either divisions and conferences matter or they do not. If the logic utilized by the spergs who are upset by the way in which a team with a better record has to go on the road to play a division winner is relevant, then they do not matter, there is no reason to play either the playoffs or the Super Bowl, and the NFL can simply go to a FIFA-style system where the team that finishes the season with a) the best record, b) the best head-to-head record, c) the most points scored is the NFL champion.

Don’t want to do that? Fine, then shut the hell up. The current system not only works, it works very well indeed.

Mailvox: dealing with the uncomfortable truth

There may be hope for this gamma, as he has proactively taken steps to avoid familiar temptations.

Thank you for teaching me the SSH. After I watched Voxiversity videos, I learned that I exhibit stereotypical Gamma traits like my father. At first, I lied to myself about the obvious, typical rationalizations and excuses to maintain the narcissistic delusion bubble.

Although you may disregard evolutionary theory, I believe that Gammas are neuro-atypical genetic mutants who are strongly predisposed to these abnormal behaviors. Most Gammas probably have clinical psychological disorders. Unfortunately, this psychological type is most covetous of power but the least likely to use it for the common good due to narcissism and pathological lying. I withdrew from positions of self-serving leadership which discontinued the need for me to lie.

Recently, I have begun taking steps to become a Delta: lifting weights, lying less often, losing the entitlement attitude, and embedding myself with a male hierarchy. If unaltered neuro-atypical Gammas have power, the social hierarchy of civilization destabilizes because of their effeminate, pathological behavior. Gammas are toxic because they do not accept constructive criticism.

Besides a dedication to admitting the truth, however personally painful, perhaps the second most important thing for the Gamma who seeks to rise above his behavioral patterns to do is to intentionally abjure his instinctual ambitions for pursuing leadership positions. A Gamma cannot be an effective leader or teacher, which is why both he and others will tend to benefit from his refusal to assume positions of relative authority or superiority.

The primary focus for a Gamma who wishes to alter his socio-sexual status should be developing Delta patterns of competence, reliability, and trustworthiness. After all, the journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. Dreams of Alpha leadership or Sigma independence are understandable, but they are ultimately foolish and irrelevant fantasies that will only feed the Gamma’s delusion bubble.