Category: Uncategorized

Why Chicago Lost the Bears

I very much doubt that Chicago is going to be the last minority-dominant Blue city to lose its professional sports franchise. This is nominally about economics, but it’s actually about immigration and demographics.

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that’s been in the city since 1921.

They didn’t lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they’d rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year. Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move. They lost them for two reasons. The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they’re bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack. Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn’t even exist yet. That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn’t reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois. Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting. So now it’s all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything. Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they’re “an $8.5B valued business” that doesn’t need propping up. But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works. Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team. And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: “I wasn’t willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team.” There it is. “Billionaire-owned.” That’s how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you’re saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line. Meanwhile they’re running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You’re living in it. Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that’s $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances “the point of no return.”

When you run things this badly, you sell what’s left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect. Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check. But a fixed property tax rate for a team that’s been here 106 years? That’s “propping up billionaires.”

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn’t outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren’t a disaster. Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero.

Immigrants and minorities are intrinsically parasitical in Western societies. This isn’t to say they can never be beneficial in certain circumstances, or that they are inevitably negative, but they can never be, in the favored language of the AI systems, “load-bearing”.

There are no societal systems as such. The Chinese implement communism very, very differently than Russian, or German, or South American communists. So changing the demographics necessarily means changing the societal structure and the society itself. Different peoples have different priorities, as they should and as they always will; no one would ever mistake the way Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are run for an NFL operation.

NIL is going to compound this effect. Already universities in California are suffering badly in the recruiting process because no 18-year-old athlete wants to throw away 13.3 percent of his income. The Big 10 schools are presently riding high because their massive alumni bases allow them bigger budgets, but it won’t be long before the state income taxes begin to penalize them as well.

Chicago may be the first to lose its professional sports team over taxes, but it will not be the last.

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Work, Brothers

Russia appears to be gearing up for something, if Putin’s coded message to her soldiers is any guide:

Rather than engage with Zelensky’s proposals, Putin turned away from the letter entirely. He said the ones to be addressed were Russia’s combatants and soldiers at the line of contact, telling them:

The country is proud of you and places its hopes on you. We should address not the authors of this letter, nor lovers of the epistolary genre, but our fighters on the front line.

He then closed with the phrase: “Work, brothers!”

To understand the import of that phrase you need to be introduced to Magomed Nurbagandov:

Magomed Nurbagandovich Nurbagandov (January 9, 1985 – July 10, 2016) was a police lieutenant serving in the National Guard of Russia, stationed in Kaspiysk in the Republic of Dagestan. He was a Dargin by nationality, born in the village of Sergokala. By all accounts an exceptional student — he graduated from lyceum with a gold medal and then with honors from the law faculty of Dagestan State University.

On the morning of July 10, 2016, Nurbagandov was vacationing with his family near the village of Sergokala when he was attacked by five armed militants. Having learned he was a policeman, the militants forced him and his brother into the trunk of a stolen car, drove them away from the recreation area, and then shot them. The murder was filmed on a mobile phone and posted on an extremist website. Wikipedia

The militants’ goal was psychological — they wanted him to appear on camera and call on his fellow officers to quit the police and stop fighting. Instead, looking directly at the camera, Nurbagandov urged: “Keep on working, brothers” (Работайте, братья) — an act which took tremendous courage.

The militants had uploaded an edited version of the video where they cut out Nurbagandov’s last words. His defiance was suppressed — until fate intervened. Several militants from the group were killed in September 2016, and when examining the bodies, the mobile phone that had filmed the original, unedited video was found. The full footage — with his final words intact — was then released by Russian authorities. The phrase went viral on September 12, 2016, and became a nationwide sensation.

By invoking it in front of the international audience at SPIEF, Putin was making a layered statement: that Zelensky’s letter was an enemy propaganda exercise, that it deserved to be treated with the same contempt Nurbagandov showed his captors, and that the only people worth addressing are those doing the actual fighting. Putin’s visage was grim when he spoke this phrase.

Now the limits of the US military have been clearly established, it makes sense that Russia no longer feels the need to maintain the holding pattern it has been in for the last three years. And unlike his people, who are primarily focused on Ukraine, and to a lesser extent the European Union, Putin understands that their real enemy is Clown World.

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Comprehensive Failure

No wonder Iran sees no reason to rush into a peace deal. The US military failed in every aspect of the recent war:

CNN found that Iran has now unblocked 50 out of the 69 tunnel entrances struck by the US and Israel at 18 underground missile facilities. Iran has repaired other parts of the bases as well, including roads that the US and Israel bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them. Satellite images show almost all these craters have now been filled, and at two sites, even repaved.

Now the cat’s out of the bag, and the world is exposed to the embarrassing reality that the months of US strikes did virtually nothing to Iran’s military capability, with Trump forced to cover up and save-face by claiming that he “spared” the Iranian military proper because that was somehow favorable to his post-war vision—sure.

The truth is that all the new revelations have unsealed the true aim of US strategy: it was never to totally destroy Iran’s military capability—the US itself never possessed the ability to do so. The aim was to create a brief window of degradation that would allow the Israel-fronted “plan” of overthrowing the Iranian regime to work. The hope was to temporarily slow down and hamper Iran’s military just long enough for the various psyops and false flags to stir up unrest in the country and lead to a Venezuela-style overthrow—but Iran had prepared well, and was not fazed by either prong of the failed operation.

So let’s look at the way the US lost the most recent round of its war with Iran:

  1. Regime change failed
  2. Nuclear prevention failed
  3. Defense of Arab bases failed
  4. Defense of Israel failed
  5. Destruction of military capabilities failed
  6. Strait of Hormuz blocked

About the only thing the US did successfully was to not lose any warships. Which, one notes, could have much more easily been accomplished by not sending them to the Persian Gulf in the first place. And not only did the USA fail in its objectives, but it ended the conflict worse off than when it began.

That is, by every historical measure, a defeat. It’s not an existential one, nor is it necessarily the last word on the international conflict. But the history books will record this as being a defeat of the USA by Iran.

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RIP Giles

Actor Anthony Head, best known for his roles in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Ted Lasso, has died at the age of 72, his family has announced. A statement from his daughters, actresses Emily and Daisy Head, said: ‘It is with heavy hearts that we announce the death of our extraordinary father, Anthony Head. He passed away peacefully of complications due to pneumonia, surrounded by his family.

It’s a pity he won’t be around for the 4th season of Ted Lasso. I thought he was one of the best parts of the show.

The Great Fiction of 1989

It’s not hard to understand why the Chinese have absolutely no trust of Clown World or its pet media once one learns the truth of Tiananmen Square. And it does tend to call other Western media reports of China into question.

The US reportedly contacted key leaders among the protesting students and made them an offer—don’t wind down, go harder on the protesting and we’ll give you US passports, CIA-run safe passage out of China, a new home in the richest country in the world, and enrolment in top US universities—Harvard, Princeton, Columbia. Now that was an offer hard to refuse.

In late May, student leader Chai Ling gave her infamously puzzling interview/ talk, where she seemed to predict a Tiananman Square massacre in which she would die. She said she was speaking her last words, as there would be “a massacre which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square” – but she also included the information that she “would not be there” as her new plan was to move to the United States to study there! Years later, she wrote that her remarkable prediction of a coming violent crackdown which would lead to a Tiananmen Square massacre was something she had heard from Li Lu, not her own forecast.

Another person in the leading student group, Kong Qingdong, later recalled how he how he had come across undergraduates using a mimeograph machine to makes copies of personal documents, to give to the US Embassy in return for passports. Two of the top leaders, Chai Ling and Feng Congde, were getting them, he was told by fellow undergraduates.

Kong refused to join the rush to take US passports, saying that the protest was all about making China a better place.
Kong angrily declined to join them. He felt the protests were about standing up for China and enabling socialist modernization for the people—not grabbing passports handed out by a hostile foreign power.

Something else was troubling Kong, which he found hard to articulate. He later said: “I wasn’t fond of the way the forceful way the government spoke. But what they were actually saying was: ‘This is a complex situation. There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord.’ This was the truth.”

Think about that line of agreement between the students and the government: There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord. In other words, some protesters as well as the government knew what was really happening under the surface. But if things were calming down, what changed? How did violence break out? Kong’s answer to that question was cryptic. “When we were little, we watched movies like Guerrillas Sweep The Plain,” he said.

That answer would have meant nothing to a western audience—but it was clear to many Chinese. This was a reference to a classic 1955 Chinese movie in which there are tensions between two groups. They have disagreements but don’t fight. Suddenly, a hidden third body, the Eighth Army, opens fire at both sides and then quickly hides, triggering bloodshed.

And that is what happened. Soldiers and students were sharing food. But on June 3, mysterious thugs, some of whom were said to be from ethnic minorities, triggered a fight in Mu Xi Di, in the west of the city, attacking army buses with petrol bombs and setting them alight, burning the occupants to death. The perpetrators were never found.

Soldiers who managed to escape the burning buses were beaten to death. Other military men arrived and chaotic fighting broke out, with scores of deaths.

This was five kilometers away from Tiananmen Square.

At the Square, in the early hours of June 4, soldiers arrived and called on students to leave. Student leader Feng Congde worked to gauge protesters’ opinions, and concluded that the majority wanted to vacate the space. “So I announced the decision to leave,” he said. Students left peacefully.

Violence did break out, not in the square, but in the streets around it.

One witness, Larry Wortzel, watched protesters attack a military vehicle and noted how well it was organized—someone had definitely trained them. “This was clearly a tactic rehearsed and even practiced among the demonstrators, since it was used in the same way in separate places around the city,” he wrote.

“All verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully,” said the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews.

Now this is where it gets strange. The next day, a very different story appeared from a few foreign embassies saying that 10,000 people had been killed. This tale said the students in the square had not left. They had stayed and been massacred with machine guns, their bodies pushed into piles with bulldozers, and then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers. This gruesome horror story, supported by no evidence at all, is now viewed by eastern and western historians as entirely fictional.

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Hiding Hultgreen-Curie

From a keen-eyed reader: I’ve found a few articles that describe her as a trainee expected to earn her wings this month and other articles describing this as a training flight, but so far no articles that include both facts and none that confirm who was flying.

Yes, I noticed a very delicate avoidance of identifying the pilot responsible for the flying the helicopter in the news articles about the recent crash.

Britain’s only female Royal Navy commando was among three crew members killed in a helicopter crash in Devon – as they are pictured for the first time. Lieutenant Lily-Mae Fisher, 31, died alongside Lieutenant Commander Chris Gayson, 42, and Petty Officer Owen Green, 24, when the Merlin Mk4 came down in a field just before 4am on Wednesday.

Residents hailed the crew as ‘heroes’ who ‘saved lives’ by avoiding nearby homes and a Travelodge hotel. Defence Secretary John Healey said on Wednesday that the three, who were based in Yeovil, Somerset, were ‘dedicated and highly valued members of their squadrons who embodied the best of our Armed Forces’.

Lieutenant Fisher, one of the helicopter’s two pilots who served with 846 Naval Air Squadron, appeared on the ITV shows Take Me Out hosted by Paddy McGuinness and Ninja Warrior UK. She has been described by the Royal Navy as ‘an inspiration’ to women in the armed forces, whose death was a ‘huge loss’.

It’s theoretically possible that the other pilot was flying the helicopter at the time, but we all know that the odds substantially favor the scenario in which she was flying it, she did something wrong, and her actions crashed the vehicle. The very delicacy of the reporting tends to confirm the very fact that the media is seeking to hide, and we all know they’re trying to hide it in the interests of their false god of equality.

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A Refutation, Reviewed

The first review of THE REFUTATION OF KANT has been posted.

A refutation of Kant has to do one of two things: produce a counterexample the system cannot deal with, or locate the move inside the system that doesn’t actually argue for what it concludes. The second part of Day’s Veriphysics does both, and the interlocking of the two halves is what makes the book hard to answer because every defense of one wing concedes ground on the other.

The argument worth focusing on is the Master Amphiboly, and Vox is right about it. The “Thing-in-itself” runs two readings across a single word: that every cognizer is shaped by its apparatus, and that no feature of reality is in principle accessible to human cognition. The first is trivially true and Kant argues for it. The second is the load-bearing claim of the whole edifice and Kant never argues for it once, and instead moves to it under cover of the first. Once you see the slide, you can’t unsee it. Neptune is the cleanest empirical counterexample, though not the only one: Le Verrier worked an inverse problem through pure formalism and Galle confirmed the prediction within a degree, and the positron case is structurally identical: Dirac’s equation required it before anyone looked. If formal cognition cannot in principle identify features of reality not already given in experience, these events did not happen.

The mathematical half is harder to evade and simpler to state. Construction in Kant’s sense was tied to constructibility, which was already a problem with the irrationals in 1781 and decisively broken by Cantor a century later. The available retreat is to recast synthetic a priori as analytic, which costs the system the work it was built to do. The pincer is real and no version of Kant survives both jaws. One place worth pressing further is that the amphiboly used is portable. The slide from an apparatus-relative epistemic limit to an ontological claim about reality runs through Hume on causation, through Wittgenstein on private language, and through most of the strong-program science studies literature. Naming it generalizes the refutation.

Worth reading. Excellent work by Day

That is an intriguing observation about the potential portability of the Master Amphiboly. I shall have to examine the situation and see just how far the intellectual rot goes.

UPDATE: A second review has been posted.

I would like to thank Vox for writing this excellent book. Since Kant is the foundational philosophical thinker of the “Enlightenment”, its easy to see why many people cannot think straight these days. I enjoy reading St. Thomas Aquinas. Vox mentions that he may have called Kant a heretic and that sounds spot on.

Now if we could just convince the world to abandon Kant, things might improve. His notion of “…the thing-in-itself is unknowable by theoretical reason..” amazed me. Really??? Kant never did applied physics, medicine, or skilled trades, did he? That said, the world is heavily invested in Kant, just like Darwin, and seems to like to double down, not change its thinking. Indeed I enjoyed Vox pointing out that the current defenders of both have moved WAY beyond the original works in their defenses thereof.

Hegel’s thought confuses me too, perhaps he’s in the queue as well for a refutation? I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks an understanding of why we need a 21st Century philosophy that is actually workable.

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Report: Iran Has Nukes

81 years of global fear, and 40+ years of neocon warnings, threats, and hissy fits may have just gone up in smoke during a single telephone call:

I have not been given access to NSA Sigint, but I have confirmed that the phone call last week between Iranian President Pezeshkian and Pakistani Prime Minister Shariff was over a non-secure line. I am reliably informed that this was done deliberately by the Iranians and Pakistanis — i.e., the Iranians and Pakistanis were counting on the Americans and the Israelis to be listening in. The key part of the conversation between Pezeshkian and Shariff was this:

President Masoud Pezeshkian communicated a formally structured, three-step strategic ultimatum if US strikes continued:

  1. Immediate Withdrawal from the ongoing nuclear peace talks.
  2. Total Abandonment of the prospective Nuclear Treaty framework.
  3. The Detonation of a Nuclear Device on Iranian soil—executed not as a weapon of war, but as an undeniable demonstration of sovereign capability and ultimate control over the escalation ladder.

When Marco Rubio was called an hour or so later by Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Ishaq Dar, and received the same message, the White House knew that the information was legitimate. While the US intelligence community probably cannot confirm that Iran actually does have a functioning nuke, the Pakistanis believe the Iranians do. The intercepted chat between Pezeshkian and Shariff, followed by Rubio’s conversation with Ishaq Dar, convinced Trump and his advisors that Iran was not making a hollow threat.

Now we know why there has been a dramatic change in Trump’s rhetoric towards Iran… Hell, he downplayed yesterday’s missile dust up in the Persian Gulf, which left Kuwait’s International Airport on fire from an errant PAC3 Patriot missile.

I am very skeptical that nuclear weapons exist in the form we have been told that they do. Whether they don’t exist at all, which is what I think is the most probable state, or whether they simply aren’t stable to keep ready for more than a week or two, I don’t know. But I’m entirely confident that the whole concept of a “nuclear arsenal” that involves weapons being preserved in a metal shell and ready at the push of a button for decades is a fictional one.

So what Iran “possessing a nuclear weapon” actually signifies could mean that Iran is now willing to end the nuclear charade that ensured US military dominance for the last 70 years, and that it has the permission of China and Russia to do so.

This might explain the need for “alien disclosure” once the threat of nukes and global holocaust is gone.

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The Problem is Vaccination

Dr. Robert Malone clearly doesn’t know his history of epidemiology.

President Trump just signed a new executive order to align the pediatric vaccine schedule with best practices from other developed countries.

At first glance, President Trump’s new Executive Order appears to be about childhood vaccines. It is not. It is about who governs public health in America. The Order represents an attempt to shift authority away from an insulated public health bureaucracy and back toward elected officials who are accountable to voters…

The administration is effectively saying that vaccine policy should not be dictated by a self-perpetuating network of advisory committees, professional associations, and pharmaceutical stakeholders operating behind closed doors. Instead, it argues that elected officials, accountable to voters, have the authority to establish policy objectives and direct agencies accordingly.

Whether courts ultimately agree remains to be seen. The legal challenges will continue. But the constitutional argument is clear: agencies exist to execute policy, not create it independently.

For decades, vaccine policy has been largely insulated from democratic accountability. ACIP recommendations automatically trigger insurance coverage requirements, Medicaid obligations, participation in the Vaccines for Children program, school mandate discussions, and physician practice standards. A relatively small group of experts has wielded extraordinary influence over national health policy.

The problem is not vaccination itself. The problem is regulatory capture.

Vaccines are among the most important public health tools ever developed. Smallpox eradication alone stands as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Polio, measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and other diseases caused enormous suffering before effective vaccines became available.

Malone here is committing the same fallacy as Daniel Dennett, Immanuel Kant, David Ricardo, and a whole host of others who fail to understand that X is not, and can never be, Not-X.

In fact, the more we see these fallacious appeals to “smallpox eradication” the more dubious I become that the smallpox vaccine ever actually worked; one wonders if the whole story about Dr. Jenner and the cowpox will hold up if one looks at other changes in technology, and hand-washing practices, and sewage systems that are responsible for the huge decline in deaths from previous causes of mortality.

But we know that vaccines didn’t even put a dent in the reduction of the harm caused by “polio, measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and other diseases” because the order of historical events absolutely precludes that. The massive decline in deaths in the USA, in England and Wales, and everywhere else that historically kept track took place before the first vaccine was even invented. It’s not just a lie, it’s a retarded and obviously false one.

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On the Print Edition

In preparation for the print edition of Veriphysics, which has been requested by a few intrepid minds and is obviously necessary for the long run, I’ve updated The Treatise to include an appendix to demonstrate the legitimacy and utility of the Triveritas, which consists of the paper on the two trilemmas and begins thusly:

The Agrippan Trilemma is one of the oldest and deepest problems in epistemology. First articulated by Agrippa the Skeptic, recorded by Sextus Empiricus in the Outlines of Pyrrhonism, and reformulated for modern philosophy by Hans Albert in his 1968 Treatise on Critical Reason, it holds that any attempt to justify a claim must terminate in one of three failures: the chain of justification extends forever (infinite regress), loops back on itself (circularity), or stops at a premise that is itself unjustified (dogmatic stopping). Since these three options appear to exhaust the logical possibilities, and since none of them constitutes genuine justification, the Trilemma concludes that justified knowledge is impossible.

The major epistemological traditions of the modern era have each responded by conceding one horn. Foundationalism accepts dogmatic stopping, identifying certain beliefs as properly basic and terminating the chain there. Coherentism accepts circularity, holding that beliefs are justified by mutual support within a web. Infinitism accepts the regress, arguing that an infinite chain of reasons is not inherently defective. Each of these frameworks treats one horn as a feature rather than a defect. None defeats the Trilemma. Each surrenders to it.

This paper solves the Agrippan Trilemma. The solution is not a trick, not a reframing, and not a claim that the problem is somehow misconceived. The Trilemma is a legitimate argument. Its conclusion follows from its premises. The solution is to show that one of its premises is false: specifically, that the third horn, dogmatic stopping, is built on an amphiboly that, once identified, breaks the horn entirely.

The amphiboly is this: the Trilemma treats “terminates” as equivalent to “terminates arbitrarily.” It assumes that any stopping point is an unjustified stopping point, that all termination is epistemically equal, that there is no distinction between stopping because you have run out of reasons and stopping because you have run out of unchecked dimensions. This conflation is not argued for in the Trilemma. It is assumed. And it is false.

The Triveritas demonstrates that it is false. The Triveritas holds that warranted assent requires the simultaneous satisfaction of three independently necessary conditions: logical validity (L), mathematical coherence (M), and empirical anchoring (E). Each dimension terminates at its own bedrock: L at logical axioms, M at mathematical axioms, E at observation. The Triveritas takes the third horn. It terminates. But it terminates at three independent stopping points of fundamentally different kinds, each constraining the others. The probability of all three stopping points being wrong in a way that produces a coherent false positive is strictly lower than the probability of any single stopping point being wrong. This is proved mathematically and confirmed empirically across twelve historical cases spanning four centuries and seven fields.

Checked termination is not dogmatic stopping. The third horn breaks.

So the print edition will consist of The Treatise and The Refutation of Kant, and includes the three following appendices:

  • Solving the Agrippan Trilemma: Triveritas and the Third Horn
  • The Sophistic Foundation of Reason: A Fundamental Flaw in Enlightenment Epistemology
  • Kant Against Kant

It should be available in hardcover and paperback sometime next week. I already have plans for second, third, and possibly fourth volumes, but only the second is likely to be out this year. In the meantime, it should be interesting to see if anyone comes up with any substantive criticisms, or if, as with Probability Zero, no one will be able to do so.

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