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Based Books Day 1

The first day of the Based Book Sale was won by a man dead for more than a century.

Benito María de los Dolores Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) who was regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Miguel de Cervantes has taken the gold in the first day of the 2026 Summer Based Book Sale. Trafalgar, the first volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain — sold fifty copies in the first day of the week-long sale.

Closely following in second place with 48 sales and the silver is Sarah Hoyt’s No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly).

The rest of the trilogy is available through the Summer Based Book Sale and also stands in fourth place with 40 sales.

Hardcoded: AI and the End of the Scientific Consensus (The Mathematics of Evolution) by Vox Day and his AI associate, Claude Athos, captured the bronze with 46 sales.

It’s wonderful to see people discovering Pérez Galdós, who is a novelist of the first rank despite being nearly unknown to the English-reading public.

I will confess that I don’t quite understand exactly how the rankings are compiled – I assume through the official affiliate links – since I see 10 more sales for Hardcoded than for Trafalgar, but regardless, it’s great to see people checking out Pérez Galdós because there are a lot more volumes of the Episodios Nacionales to come. As you can see, we’ve already got next week’s translation ready to go to the translation subscribers on Monday.

There are a lot of good books available in the Based Books Sale. There are at least four that I’m planning to read myself. And while we’re on the topic of books, the following print editions are now available via NDM Express:

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Running Out of Steam

Peter Turchin calculates that the Ukraine war will be over later this year:

The Persian Gulf war of USA/Israel against Iran has largely displaced reporting on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Reading the news on mainstream media one may think that this war, now in its fifth year, is still in stalemate; or even that the tide is turning against Russia (Washington Post: Putin remark on war ‘coming to a close’ points to exhaustion, not peace, analysts say; NYT: I’m the Foreign Minister of Sweden. Don’t Overestimate Russia).
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But quantitative models of attritional warfare say otherwise: Russia continues to dominate the battlefield and the eventual outcome, barring a Black Swan event, is inevitable defeat of Ukraine. My readers may know that three years ago I developed a an Attritional Warfare Model, AWM (based on the Lanchester equations) for forecasting this war’s outcome.

More recently a similar conclusion was reached by Warwick Powell (see Estimating Trajectories in Attritional Warfare: The Russia-Ukrainian Conflict Through a Quantitative Lens). Powell used a similar model, with the most important difference being the choice of the end point. My model assumes that the war ends when the level of casualties, as a percentage of population, exceeds a certain threshold, which I estimated via a sample of past attritional wars from the Correlates of War data.

Powell, alternatively, assumes that the beginning of the end for Ukraine will happen when its army size declines below a certain threshold (0.65-0.73 of the initial size of 550,000). From that point, Ukrainian losses will accelerate and the full collapse will happen once the army size is below 50% of the prior peak. Powell’s model predicts that the tipping point will happen in July-September (updated on May 14).

Naturally, this is only a model-based forecast, not a prophesy. There is a lot of uncertainty about the estimates of various parameters. Furthermore, the threshold at which collapse occurs is only imprecisely estimated. For example, it’s not clear whether the threshold of 0.65-0.73 above which the Ukrainian force can maintain its operational integrity still applies on a battlefield heavily dominated by drones. For example, a smaller force size may be sufficient to continue defending positions given an abundant supply of drones.

My model also doesn’t incorporate any possible effects of the shift to the drone warfare — simply because it hadn’t happen when I published its predictions. Determining how this technological shift affects the AWM’s predictions will have to wait until the post-mortem after the war is over and when estimates would become much more precise. However, I tried a few preliminary explorations and they suggest that the drone effect on the war trajectory is not quite as huge as might be imagined. What’s important is the casualty rate inflicted on the Ukrainian army by the Russians, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a result of artillery, air bombing, or drones.

Is Ukraine reaching its recruitment limit? This is the key factor in both our models. There are some indications that this is the case. A week ago, Branko Marcetic (using Ukrainian sources) provided some relevant numbers in a Responsible Statecraft article, Ukraine’s conscription crisis is getting increasingly bloody; While outside voices insist the war can still be won on the battlefield, young men in the country are violently resisting recruiters to stay out of it. Here are some numbers supporting this conclusion.

The number of complaints over possible violations committed by enlistment officers, received by Ukraine’s Human Rights Ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets:

2022 — 18
2023 — 514
2024 — 3312
2025 — 6127

The number of violent attacks against enlistment officers shows the same trend: from 5 in 2022 to 117 in just the first four months of this year.

One can hardly blame the young Ukrainians for attacking the “enlistment officers” who are really straight-up kidnappers. At the end of the day, the odds of surviving a violent encounter with these rear-echelon thugs is a lot higher than surviving one with frontline Russian troops.

Young European men have probably already figured that out, which is why I expect any attempt by any European country to enact a draft besides Russophobic Poland and Finland to meet with literally violent resistance. Why would any European man fight to defend against civilized Russia instead of rapey third-world invaders?

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Excising the Corporate Cancer

This CEO did the right thing in firing his entire HR team, even if he still harbors misplaced confidence in the utility of Human Relations for the corpocracy:

Bolt’s CEO has defended his decision to fire the company’s entire HR team, claiming they had been ‘creating problems that didn’t exist’. Ryan Breslow, the co-founder and chief executive of US fintech firm Bolt, said the department was scrapped as part of sweeping layoffs aimed at returning the struggling business to ‘start-up mode’.

The company, which develops software designed to speed up online checkouts, cut around 30 per cent of its workforce in April in its fourth round of layoffs in as many years. Speaking at a Fortune event, Breslow said: ‘We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go.’ The 32-year-old added that HR professionals were more suited to ‘peacetime’ conditions at larger companies rather than a start-up environment focused on rapid growth and efficiency.

Bolt has since replaced the department with a smaller ‘people operations team’ responsible for employee training and support. ‘We need a group of people who are very oriented around getting things done, and there is just a culture of not getting things done and complaining a lot,’ Breslow said.

Eliminating the HR department in its entirety was one of my top recommendations in Corporate Cancer. Like the legal department, it is entirely unproductive. But unlike the legal department, it is unnecessary, it does not mitigate risk, and it is actively counterproductive. The average company would see better results from paying their HR employees to stay home full-time without having any contact with anyone in the organization for any reason.

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They Were Better Back Then

I’m not sure comedy is even allowed in the Hellmouth these days. But we definitely didn’t know how good we had it in the 80s when great movies like Big Trouble in Little China were considered third-tier releases.

The brilliance of the movie is that it never tells Jack Burton he isn’t the hero.

That’s important because lesser versions of this script would have turned him into a joke. They would have had the universe stop every five minutes so the audience could be directed to point and laugh at the dumb white trucker stumbling through Chinatown. But Big Trouble in Little China doesn’t do that. Carpenter clearly likes Jack too much for that.

Jack is not incompetent because he’s stupid or cowardly. He’s incompetent because he has accidentally wandered into a world with a completely different operating system than the one he understands. He thinks he’s in a Seventies trucker action movie. Wang Chi knows they’re in a Hong Kong supernatural fantasy.

And the movie never breaks character on either side of that divide.

Jack keeps behaving exactly like the protagonist of a Kurt Russell action picture. He makes big speeches over the CB radio. He kicks doors open. He charges into danger with absolute confidence. The problem is that his confidence has almost no relationship with reality.

This is one of the few movies, like the first two Godfathers and the first Hangover, that I’ll find myself still watching 15 minutes after flipping past it. If you haven’t seen it, you should really give it a shot. Just don’t take it anymore seriously than it takes itself.

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Arsenal Takes the Title

Arsenal have been crowned Premier League champions, ending a 22-year wait for the English title since the Invincibles team of 2004. Manchester City drew 1-1 with Bournemouth on Tuesday night, giving the Gunners an unassailable lead at the top of the table after they beat Burnley on Tuesday. Mikel Arteta’s men have been runners-up in each of the last three seasons but finally overcame Pep Guardiola’s team to be able to call themselves Kings of England.

An Explanation for Declining Fertility

The collapse of the Selective Turnover Coefficient (d) from the ancient hominin baseline of 0.86 down to a modern level of 0.015 represents the functional shutdown of natural selection’s primary mechanism for the human race. For hundreds of thousands of years, high mortality rates before reproductive age served as an unyielding purifying filter, culling highly deleterious mutations and maintaining the structural integrity of our species’ code. By effectively reducing this mortality barrier by over 99% through modern sanitation, medicine, and infrastructure, humanity has unplugged its biological safety valve. Without this selective cleansing, the human genome is now entirely defenseless against a relentless, generation-by-generation influx of genetic errors, transforming our collective gene pool into a one-way accumulation sink for deleterious mutations.

The immediate danger of this relaxed selection regime manifests as a rapid, compounding increase in genetic load, targeting our most complex physiological systems. Because intricate biological functions like human fertility, neurodevelopment, and metabolic health are polygenic—relying on the flawless coordination of thousands of interacting genes—they possess a massive mutational target size. Every generation we advance past the 1900 demographic turning point injects new, un-cleansed, mildly deleterious mutations into these precise pathways. As a result, the widespread declines in baseline reproductive viability observed in the 21st century are not merely temporary products of environmental toxins or socioeconomic shifts; they are the predictable, mathematical consequence of a degrading genetic operating system that is losing its structural integrity.

Left unchecked, the trajectory of a fluid genome operating under a selection coefficient of 0.015 leads directly toward a species-wide mutational meltdown over time. As the concentration of damaging mutations passes critical fitness thresholds, the biological cost of reproducing escalates, driving fertility rates below replacement levels globally by the irresistible force of genetic decay. Unlike historical bottlenecks which humanity survived through adaptive resilience, this modern crisis is a slow, structural dissolution from within, in which the very tools used to conquer external natural threats have inadvertently disabled our internal quality controls. Without a restoration of purifying selection or an intervention capable of preventing the copying errors, the math dictates an absolute existential ceiling and results in a species increasingly incapable of viable self-perpetuation.

Based on the unyielding arithmetic of mutation accumulation in a fluid genome, the 130-year span between 1900 and 2030 encompasses exactly 5.2 generations of uncleansed genetic replication. In classical quantitative genetics, the decline in mean population fitness per generation under completely relaxed selection is calculated using the equation Delta W = U x hs, where U is the diploid genomic deleterious mutation rate—conservatively estimated in humans to be at least 2.0 new mutations per individual per generation—and hs is the average heterozygous selection coefficient, typically modeled between 0.015 and 0.02.

Multiplying these parameters dictates a compounding biological degradation rate of roughly 3 to 4 percent per generation. When compounded exponentially over 5 generations without the purifying filter of pre-reproductive mortality, the strict mathematical expectation is a 15% to 19% reduction in core biological fertility by the year 2030 compared to the 1900 baseline, a reduction that is driven by the unchecked accumulation of the species’ polygenic mutational load alone.

This says nothing about the various environmental and lifestyle factors, such as highly-processed diets to endocrine disruptors like microplastics, that tend to dominate contemporary public health discussions. Within this framework, these external stressors do not compete with the genetic calculation; they represent an entirely separate, compounding layer of physiological risk. Nor should this be confused with overpopulation, mouse utopia, feminism, or female education, all of which affect the rate at which women choose to have children, not their raw ability to do so.

This 15-to-19 percent calculated degradation is a structural floor calculated solely on the mathematical basis of the collapse of d, meaning any negative impacts from modern chemistry or lifestyle only serve to further aggravate a species reproductive engine that is already operating less efficiently than before due to an unselected genetic load.

If you want to learn more about this, the science is developed in THE FROZEN GENE.

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The Turning Point

As I’ve been pointing out for the last few years now, the USA is no longer a global superpower. It’s now been demoted to major regional power, which is very far from nothing, but its pretensions at pursuing elite interests in the name of playing global policeman are observably over:

Last week’s Trump-Xi summit produced no dramatic declaration or historic treaty – yet its importance may prove far greater than any immediate deliverable. What happened in Beijing was not a breakthrough in policy but a breakthrough in recognition: the United States openly acknowledged China as an equal center of global power. That alone marks a historic turning point.

For decades, American administrations approached China from the assumption that Beijing was either a manageable challenger or a state that would eventually integrate into a US-led international order on American terms. The summit suggested something fundamentally different.

US President Donald Trump appeared compelled to recognize that China is no longer simply a rival great power but a central pillar of the emerging world order – one that Washington can neither isolate nor overpower. This was the true message of the summit.

Neither Washington nor Beijing expected immediate breakthroughs. The summit was never realistically supposed to solve structural tensions overnight. Its purpose was to stabilize relations between two powers which are increasingly aware that prolonged escalation has become prohibitively costly. The talks reflected the reality that the US now needs stable engagement with China as much as China needs stable engagement with the US. This mutual dependency is perhaps uncomfortable, but it is also unavoidable – neither full confrontation nor full separation is sustainable anymore.

For years, the Americans described China as a revisionist actor seeking to overturn the international order. But the Beijing summit demonstrated something more consequential: the international order itself is already changing. Many countries have begun treating China not merely as a competitor to the US, but as a parallel – and in some respects superior – center of global gravity.

The post-WWII international order is now over. Clown World is still scrambling to control what it can, but it is in disarray. Which means these will continue to be interesting and tumultuous times.

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