Category: Uncategorized

What’s good for Google

Is most definitely NOT good for America. It’s more than a bit ironic that Pichai Sundararajan is appealing to the very sort of white Christian male innovation that Google observably hates in trying to prevent Google from being broken up:

Google’s CEO has made an appeal that the company should not be broken up, as federal regulators and Congress are directing increasing scrutiny at the tech goliath.

Google’s massive size allows it to invest in future technologies without worrying about ‘short-term profits,’ CEO Sundar Pichai insisted in an interview with CNN Business on Thursday.

‘Scale does offer many benefits, it’s important to understand that,’ argued Pichai. ‘Big companies are what are investing in technologies like AI the most.’

Pichai even hinted that if Google were subject to antitrust regulation, it would spell doom for American innovation, allowing competitors like China to seize the advantage.

The amount of contempt that Pichai has for Americans can be seen in this appeal to the benefits of Google’s monopoly position. If only AT&T and Standard Oil had been clever enough to argue that their monopolies were actually beneficial…..

I have considerably more confidence in Chinese communists than in US-citizen corporatists. Say what you will about communists, but at least they are atheists that don’t actively worship the devil.

The continuing decline of empire

Whatever happened to the imperial policy of free trade uber alles?

The US-India defense ties will be put at risk should New Delhi purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems, a senior American diplomat warned, noting that India should think very carefully about making such strategic choices.

“At a certain point, a strategic choice has to be made about partnerships and a strategic choice about what weapons systems and platforms a country is going to adopt,” Alice Wells, US principal deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, said this week at the hearings on US interests in South Asia and the budget for the fiscal year 2020. India’s procurement of the S-400s “effectively could limit India’s ability to increase our own interoperability,” she said, explaining that Washington has “serious concerns” about the implications of the $5 billion deal signed with Russia in October on India-US defense ties.

If it’s not my business that my neighbor hires a Nicaraguan gardiner, how is it a senior American diplomat’s business if India buys Russian air defense systems? If I were an Indian official, I would simply throw Washington’s idiotic free trade rhetoric right back in its face. As well as, of course, this amusingly ironic news concerning the manufacture of F-35s.

Exception PCB, a Chinese-owned company based in Gloucestershire, England, manufactures the circuit boards that control the engines, lighting, fuel and navigation systems of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter…. Exception PCB was bought by Shenzhen Fastprint in 2013, has never concealed its Chinese ownership and has also worked on the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jet and the Apache attack helicopter, among other sensitive programs. A director from the company told SkyNews there are “clear firewalls in place” between the Exception and its Chinese owners, that the company only produces bare circuit boards, and that no additional electronic information is supplied. But Lockheed Martin didn’t seem so sure, informing Sky that “like all components of the F-35,” the circuit boards “are inspected repeatedly at each stage of manufacture.”

What’s to worry about? Countries that trade don’t fight, right? Anyhow, the continuing decline of US influence is becoming more apparent every day. No wonder the neocons are desperate to trigger a war between the US and Iran while the US is still capable of fighting one.

A statistical observation

Item: Of 127,000 Japanese Americans living in the continental United States at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, 112,000 resided on the West Coast. About 80,000 were Nisei (literal translation: “second generation”; American-born Japanese with U.S. citizenship) and Sansei (“third generation”; the children of Nisei). The rest were Issei (“first generation”) immigrants born in Japan who were ineligible for U.S. citizenship under U.S. law.

Item: According to the 2000 US Census, there were 385,488 Americans of Iranian ancestry at that time.In the 2011 ACS, the number of Americans of full or partial Iranian ancestry amounted c. 470,341… most experts believe that the underrepresented number of Iranian Americans in the ACS is a problem due to the fact that “many community members have been reluctant in identifying themselves as such because of the problems between Iran and the United States in the past two decades.” Higher estimations of 1,000,000 and higher are given by many Iranian and non-Iranian organisations, media and scholars. The Atlantic stated that there are an estimated 1,500,000 Iranians in the United States in 2012. The Iranian interest section in Washington D.C. claimed to hold passport information for approximately 900,000 Iranians in the US in 2003.

Translation: there are at least 10x more Iranians in the USA now than there were Japanese in the USA during WWII. This is only one of the many reasons that the war with Iran sought by the neocons would be extraordinarily foolish. Not quite “invade Russia in winter” suicidal, but almost certainly “Sicilian Expedition” stupid.

The comics meltdown continues

IDW, the #4 publisher in the industry, is in trouble:

IDW Media Holdings has reported its second-quarter financials for 2019, and it doesn’t look like good news. Overall, the company had a net loss of $3.7 million, with $1.6 million of those losses coming from IDW Publishing, the branch of the company that publishes comic books.

A loss of $1.6 million on publishing revenues of 3.7 million (not a mistake, IDW’s publishing revenues were $3.74 million, nearly identical to the amount of its total net loss) is pretty impressive. Even worse, that’s a decline of nearly 30 percent of sales from Q1.

But this is an industry-wide issue. Total unit sales were down another 6 percent year-on-year in May, while dollar sales were down 11 percent.

Snicker-snack….

The irrelevance of conservatism

James Guiran explains why nationalism is necessary at Jacobite:

Establishment conservatism, it seems, is doubling down on its refusal to reckon with the realities of the American political landscape. It’s true that the ascendant left wants to revoke religious liberty, with the goal of subordinating Christianity (specifically Christianity) to the whims of the woke state; but this is only one facet of its platform. It also promotes a view of white Americans reminiscent of the ethnic hatred stoked against market-dominant minorities in certain countries in the 20th century (never mind that white Americans aren’t even the richest demographic!); claims that our country is fundamentally illegitimate; calls for the destruction of our borders; pushes for a credentialist economy in which no one can succeed without first obtaining permission from a committee of progressive priests, who will dispense it based more on loyalty to the cause than on any apolitical notion of merit; advocates for the abolition of the nation-state in favor of a tightly controlled and managed ‘inclusive society’ in which the inevitable ethnic conflict will provide the ruling structure with a bottomless well of opportunities to justify its own expansion; and seeks to subordinate everything, from colleges to corporations to open-source software organizations to knitting groups, to an arbitrary and intentionally byzantine code of conduct, in order to purge infidels from the whole of society. This is not ‘libertine,’ it is totalitarian. And the totality of that agenda must be opposed.

The conservative debate thus far has been premised on the idea that the proper response to Trump, the proper way forward, is to simply revitalize the platform of the Moral Majority. Not only does this fail to address many of the problems facing our country today ⁠— it has little, if anything, to say about immigration, which is necessarily the most pressing issue because its effects are permanent and irreversible  —  it offers little potential for attaining true hegemony.

If, at this juncture, you are still describing yourself as a “conservative” instead of a “nationalist”, you are completely failing to grasp the nature of the cultural conflict. Conservatism can no more save America than Churchianity can save your soul.

Corporate cancer metastasizes

Fewer customers are good for business, according to the executive NPCs of more than 180 converged companies:

The top executives of more than 180 companies have signed a letter that says abortion is essential in order for people to be successful in their businesses.

“When everyone is empowered to succeed, our companies, our communities and our economy are better for it,” the executives say in the letter posted on a newly launched website titled Don’t Ban Equality. “Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health, independence and economic stability of our employees and customers,” they said, adding:

Simply put, it goes against our values and is bad for business. It impairs our ability to build diverse and inclusive workforce pipelines, recruit top talent across the states, and protect the well-being of all the people who keep our businesses thriving day in and out.

A rational observer can only conclude that fewer executive NPCs and less corporate convergence would be of considerably more benefit to the economy. It tends to remind me of a story from the third volume of the 1918 Junior Classics entitled “The Bravery of Regulus”.

The Carthaginians were driven to extremity, and made horrible offerings to Moloch, giving the little children of the noblest families to be dropped into the fire between the brazen hands of his statue, and grown-up people of the noblest families rushed in of their own accord, hoping thus to propitiate their gods and obtain safety for their country.

Some things never change. Evil loves to promise that sacrificing little children to Moloch empowers everyone to succeed.

Get the story straight, guys

Newsflash: “THE US said tonight that Iran was behind the “torpedo attack” on an American-linked oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman. Both the Front Altair and the Panama-flagged Kokuka Courageous – which was reportedly bombed – burst into flames and were forced to evacuate in the troubled region this morning.”

Newsflash: ” An unexploded device, believed to be a limpet mine, was spotted on the side of one of two oil tankers attacked on Thursday in the Gulf of Oman, a U.S. official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.”

It’s going to be a little awkward if that limpet mine turns out to be of US or Israeli manufacture.

UPDATE: Even the Pentagon and the US Navy don’t buy it.

“We have no interest in engaging in a new conflict in the Middle East,” CENTCOM added. “We will defend our interests, but a war with Iran is not in our strategic interest, nor in the best interest of the international community.”

The literature we have lost

I was comparing the 1918 and 1958 editions of the first volume of the Collier Junior Classics, and one of the first things I noted was that the Introduction by Harvard University President Charles Eliot had been replaced with one by William Neilson, the former President of Smith College. I strongly suspect the following two paragraphs will suffice to explain why it was replaced:

The right selection of reading matter for children is obviously of high importance.  Some of the mythologies, Old Testament stories, fairy tales, and historical romances, on which earlier generations were accustomed to feed the childish mind, contain a great deal that is barbarous, perverse, or cruel; and to this infiltration into children’s minds, generation after generation, of immoral, cruel, or foolish ideas is probably to be attributed in part the slow ethical progress of the race.  The commonest justification of this thoughtless practice is that children do not apprehend the evil in the bad mental pictures with which we foolishly supply them; but what should we think of a mother who gave her children dirty milk or porridge, on the theory that the children would not assimilate the dirt?  Should we be less careful about mental and moral food materials?  The Junior Classics have been selected with this principle in mind, without losing sight of the fact that every developing human being needs to have a vision of the rough and thorny road over which the human race has been slowly advancing during thousands of years.

Whoever has committed to memory in childhood such Bible extracts as Genesis i, the Ten Commandments, Psalm xxiii, Matthew v, 8-12, The Lord’s Prayer, and I Corinthians xiii, such English prose as Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech, Bacon’s “Essay on Truth,” and such poems as Bryant’s “Waterfowl,” Addison’s “Divine Ode,” Milton’s Sonnet on his Blindness, Wotton’s “How happy is he born or taught,” Emerson’s “Rhodora,” Holmes’s “Chambered Nautilus,” and Gray’s Elegy, and has stamped them on his brain by frequent repetition, will have set up in his mind high standards of noble thought and feeling, true patriotism, and pure religion.  He will also have laid in an invaluable store of good English.

What has happened to the former “Junior Classics” in the last 100 years is both a prelude and a microcosm of what has happened to the West as a whole. It’s something that can be seen in everything from the transition of blasphemy laws to hate speech laws and the musical descent from “The Hallelujah Chorus” to “Christmas in Hollis”. First, the Christian influence was pushed to the side, then it was removed and replaced with a focus on secular aesthetics, then the aesthetics were abandoned and the original purpose of the institution was entirely lost.

Losing the next war

The US military establishment is gradually waking up to the uncomfortable realization that victory over its primary enemies is no longer guaranteed:

For the first time in decades, it is possible to imagine the United States fighting—and possibly losing—a large-scale war with a great power. For generations of Americans accustomed to U.S. military superiority and its ability to deter major wars, the idea of armed conflict between great powers may seem highly improbable. The idea that the United States—with the most expensive armed forces in the world by a wide margin—might lose such a war would seem absolutely preposterous. Nevertheless, the possibility of war and U.S. defeat are real and growing.

Given that U.S. armed forces’ last major conventional combat operations were the massively lopsided victories against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 and 2003, many Americans might be wondering how this could come to pass. This report makes the case that one salient issue is that the American way of war—the implicit and explicit mental framework for U.S. military strategy and operations—that coalesced after the Gulf War is no longer valid.

China and Russia have spent almost two decades studying the current American way of war. While the Department of Defense (DoD) has taken its military superiority for granted and focused on defeating nonstate adversaries, China and Russia have been devising strategies and developing new concepts and weapons to defeat the United States in a war should the need arise. They have offset their relative weakness versus the United States by using time and geography to their advantage and by focusing their weapons- and concept-development efforts on finding ways to attack vulnerable nodes in U.S. military operations. The goal of these strategies and concepts is to create a plausible theory of victory whereby China or Russia avoid a “fair fight” with the Joint Force and could therefore defeat the United States and its allies and partners in a regional war. These Chinese and Russian strategies, which once seemed implausible or far in the future, are beginning to pay off. They are shifting military balances in key regions and pushing allies and partners to reconsider U.S. security guarantees.

I’ve been commenting on this for the last few years, and both Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind have been doing so for much longer, so it’s interesting to see the way in which the establishment is finally beginning to admit the obvious.

If you look at the various elements that went into the US victory in the two World Wars and the Cold War, the most striking observation is that virtually none of those elements apply anymore. Whether one considers the potential industrial base, the national demographics, or the geography, it is readily apparent that a) the United States is in the position of WWII-era Germany and b) China is in the position of the WWII-era USA.

Forget paying for Fake News

CNN can’t even get people to watch it for free:

The far-left CNN’s ratings death spiral marched into last week as the fake news network lost one-third of its primetime audience and a breathtaking 55 percent of its demo viewers. When compared to this same week last year,  CNN also lost 21 percent of its total day viewers.

How bad is this?

Well, you can’t blame a slow news week because not only was President Trump on an overseas trip, but as you will see, CNN stands completely alone with this massive audience implosion.

By comparison, in primetime, MSNBC and Fox News only lost four percent of their viewers compared to last year and seven and five percent of their total day viewers, respectively.

What’s the answer to this death spiral? No doubt it will be MORE FAKE NEWS!