Category: Uncategorized

Never Bluff a Bluffer

There is never any point in warning Clown World. Clown World lives by the bluff, which is why it dismisses every warning from Russia, Iran, or anyone else and assumes that its enemies are also posturing and manifesting.

British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine and beyond could become legitimate targets for Russian strikes if Kiev continues to use UK-supplied weapons for attacks on Russian territory, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has warned.

The comments come amid rapidly deteriorating relations between Moscow and London, and a day after Ukrainian forces reportedly used British-French Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles in a strike on Donetsk that wounded at least eight civilians, including two children.

“We have repeatedly warned that the response to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons against Russian territory could be directed against any British military facilities and equipment in Ukraine and beyond,” Zakharova said during a press briefing on Thursday.

Notice that China doesn’t bluff. China is much more effective and respected than Russia, mostly because it simply acts when and how it deems necessary, without any threats, without any posturing, and without any warning. The Russians always seem to be a little incoherent, as one minute they’re correctly describing the USA as agreement-incapable, and the next they’re trying to reach an agreement with the same party they described as being incapable of one.

Russia has repeatedly warned that it might, perhaps, possibly respond if British weapons kept being used against it. And its warnings have been repeatedly ignored. But Russia never seems to draw the correct lesson from that process.

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The Great Bifurcation Advances

The Chinese Supreme Court has made it clear that China is now forcing corporations to choose between respecting US sanctions or respecting their existing contracts with Chinese businesses:

China’s top court recently highlighted the first judicial ruling establishing the mandatory nature of its Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, which experts say could provide legal precedent and guide Chinese companies facing increasingly frequent overseas sanctions amid intensifying geopolitical tensions.

The case, heard by the Shanghai Maritime Court, centred on a dispute that involved US sanctions, a Singapore shipping company, a Hong Kong-based company and electronic goods shipped from Shanghai. In 2022, the Hong Kong-based company hired a Singaporean shipping firm to transport electronic goods from Shanghai to Panama, but the Singaporean firm later refused to deliver them and eventually returned the cargo to Shanghai, citing the Hong Kong company’s inclusion on a United States sanctions list. That caused losses for the Hong Kong company.

A court judgment unveiled last month showed the Shanghai court ruled against the Singaporean firm in February, ordering it to pay more than 4.99 million yuan (US$739,600) in damages plus interest and holding that it could not use a foreign country’s “discriminatory restrictions” as a defence under Article 12 of China’s Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law.

The case was included in a selection of illustrative maritime cases by the Supreme People’s Court that was released in June. In its commentary on the selection, the top court said the case was “the first judicial ruling to explicitly establish the mandatory application of the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law”. It added that the case carried “strong exemplary significance” in demonstrating how China’s maritime courts implement the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law – which took effect in 2021 – and safeguard the stability of supply and industrial chains.

Given the size of the Chinese market and the growing power of its economy, it’s pretty obvious which side most Asian corporations are going to take. What will be interesting is to see how many Japanese and European corporations also choose China.

Regardless, the failure of sanctions with regards to both Russia and Iran now demonstrate that it’s a weapon that harms the wielder more than it does the target.

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The Response to the Retraction

Keruru retracted his previous endorsement of the N/Nₑ argument, and much to my chagrin, he was right to do so: the derivation of Kimura’s substitution identity never needed Nₑ on either side of the algebraic equation. Supply is 2Nμ in the census N, the fixation probability of a new copy is 1/(2N) in the same N, the two correctly cancel, and the fact that the effective population Nₑ was regularly written into the supply side was nothing more than careless notation by the authors of the biology textbooks over the years, it was not a hidden move by Kimura back in 1968. Thanks to this additional evidence that biologists can’t do math, this error means that it will be necessary to produce a 3rd Edition of Probability Zero to correct my mistake in this regard. Mea maxima culpa, dammit.

The second part of his post is not correct. He says zero fixations across the ancient-DNA window is exactly what neutral theory predicts, so the data cannot discriminate. The arithmetic holds given one number: Nₑ ≈ 10,000 — which comes from θ = 4Nₑμ, which presupposes k = μ, the identity under test. He has retracted an empirical falsification of the clock by feeding in a parameter that the clock manufactures; Charlesworth flagged this exact circularity in 2009, and Keruru himself, two sections later, calls Nₑ “estimated from the quantity it is then used to explain.” He diagnosed the disease in Section 3 and caught it in Section 2. His chains carry it from the other side: they differ in offspring-number variance, never the contested axis, while his sweepstakes parent is drawn uniformly at random — setting the one parameter in dispute, the covariance between who breeds and what they carry, to zero by fiat.

And most crucially, his work never contains a census population. His own supply term at Nₑ = 10,000 gives 740,000 new mutations per generation; Kong et al. (2012) times the global birth rate gives 2.5 × 10¹¹, a factor of 330,000 — which does not touch his repaired algebra but demolishes the literature that algebra abandons. He rescued three lines and orphaned fifty-seven years of applying them. Then he names frequency drift as “the analysis that should have been run.” As it happens, I ran it while writing the first edition of PZ: the Allen Ancient DNA Resource, 1,372 Neolithic against 680 modern Europeans, has rs35619459 moving 29.3% → 91.3%, a twelve-sigma excursion against his own stated expectation, and a drift-variance Nₑ near 2 rather than ten thousand. The signal is the size of a population turnover — structure, non-exchangeability, the very thing his model pinned at zero.

Nevertheless, I owe him a considerable debt of gratitude and not just for pointing out my mistake. For, as we’ve repeatedly seen over the course of this project, the identification of one particular flaw, and the subsequent process of correcting it, has led to a new discovery. The mechanism he reached for in the second part— that the fixation time is so enormous almost nothing destined to fix finishes inside the window — is exactly right, and it turned out to be the most productive thing in the exchange. He relied upon it to argue the data cannot test the clock; but when it is reversed, that same mechanism does not protect the clock, it provides a time limit. If the chance a destined allele completes within T generations scales as exp(−π²Nₑ/T), then k = μ cannot be realized at all in any population large enough for that transit to run 4Nₑ generations — and at census population scale that exponent becomes a ceiling on population size, about ten thousand for a large vertebrate, above which gennetic drift is not slow but entirely shut down.

That is the argument of my new paper entitled The Hard Limits of Fixation Through Genetic Drift which you can read at the preprint site, and it exists only because Keruru identified my mistaken identification of Kimura’s algebraic non-error.


ABSTRACT: The Hard Limits of Fixation Through Genetic Drift,

Kimura’s neutral substitution rate, k = μ, is a steady-state identity: it holds only after a population has held one size for the roughly 4Nₑ generations a neutral allele needs to drift from a single copy to fixation. That transit has never been checked against the number of generations that species lineages have actually had. Checking them yields a hard ceiling on population size, X = (Vₖ + 2)·G/16 — reproductive variance and lineage generations alone, with no mutation rate, no coalescent quantity, and no fitted constant. For a large, long-lived vertebrate the effective ceiling falls to about ten thousand individuals. Above it, a neutral allele’s chance of fixing within the generations its lineage will ever have is not merely small but exponentially small, of order exp(−π²Nₑ/G) — for humans at current size, about one in ten to the seventy-eight-millionth. Humans number more than eight billion, the better part of a million times over the line; the African elephant, endangered at four hundred thousand and falling, is still forty times too abundant for drift to complete to fixation. No vertebrate population is simultaneously large enough to persist as a species and small enough to fix a neutral allele by drift. What substitution these abundant populations show is not produced at their current size; it is residual drainage from the smaller populations they descend from. The domain of k = μ is confined to demographic conditions that no non-endangered species is capable of meeting.

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When the Ships Aren’t Sunk

Think the Palestinians now regret not defending their land when they had the ability to do so? You know back in the early 20th century, there were Arab leaders and intellectuals saying: “They’re refugees from Europe. What harm could come of allowing them to live here among us?”

Israel will continue building illegal settlements in the West Bank in preparation for a “major” wave of Jewish immigration, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said. Israel’s most recent settlement expansion triggered rebukes from its Arab neighbors and Western partners.

“Today, many of our brothers and sisters around the world understand: This is our land and it will remain ours,” Netanyahu said in Jerusalem on Tuesday. “And when I say our land, every Jewish man and every Jewish woman, the door is open. We are waiting for you. We are preparing the door for major Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel).”

It is unclear whether the “major Aliyah” predicted by Netanyahu is actually coming. Israelis have emigrated in growing numbers since Hamas’ 2023 attack and the subsequent war on Gaza. More than 150,000 Israelis left the country from 2024 to 2025, according to a report by 972 magazine.

The Israeli prime minister spoke at an event organized by the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs 47 Jewish settlements in the West Bank. All of these settlements, which are located outside Israel’s 1967 borders, are considered illegal by the UN, and Israel’s transfer of population to them has been deemed a breach of the Geneva Convention by the International Criminal Court.

Although the Israeli state sometimes pre-authorizes the construction of settlements, they typically begin as outposts on Palestinian land, until they are retroactively legalized by the Israeli government. During his speech on Tuesday, Netanyahu boasted that his government has established and regularized “104 settlements and 160 farms and we continue to do more.”

The Israeli historian Martin van Creveld pointed out that immigration is war in his landmark essay of that name. It always has been. The Visigoths who sacked Rome were refugees seeking refuge from the Huns. The time known as The Movement of Peoples is also known as a period of relentless wars.

Pity on the perceived unfortunate often comes at a terrible price that is paid later in blood by the innocent and the undeserving.

I don’t think we’re going to see peace in the Middle East anytime soon. Especially now that the US security structure has failed and Syria no longer serves as a buffer state in between Israel and Turkey. Remember, the Turks have a long-standing claim on the West Bank too.

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The Irrelevance of k = μ 

Keruru has uncovered some interesting things in his review of the mathematics underlying Kimura’s cancellation, which I have shown is a) incorrect for most species and b) a Portuguese mathematician has shown to be mathematically incorrect:

In February I argued that the mathematics underwriting neutral theory was broken. The argument had two legs. The first, drawn from a preprint I had read approvingly, held that Kimura’s substitution-rate identity k = μ rests on an equivocation: that the effective population size N<sub>e</sub> is made to stand for two incompatible quantities — a mutation-supply term and a drift term — which are then cancelled against each other. The second was empirical: an ancient-DNA analysis reporting essentially zero allele fixations across a million loci in the 240 generations separating Early Neolithic Europe from the present.

Both legs have given way. I want to set out how, because the manner of their failure is more interesting than the original claim, and because the instinct behind the essay turns out to have been sound while its aim was off by about thirty degrees.

The equivocation that isn’t

Written as k = 2N_e μ × 1/(2N_e) = μ, the objection looks devastating. Mutation supply is a biochemical fact about replicating cells and scales with the number of individuals actually reproducing. Drift is a statistical fact about sampling variance and scales with something much smaller and considerably slipperier. Two different numbers wearing the same symbol, cancelled against each other, yielding a result that has calibrated half of molecular anthropology.

The trouble is that the derivation does not require N<sub>e</sub> in either position, and the textbook notation is simply careless.

Mutation supply is 2Nμ with N the census count — mutations occur in gametes, and every reproducing individual contributes gametes. The fixation probability of a single new neutral mutant is its initial frequency, and one new copy among 2N copies has frequency 1/(2N) — census again. The two census terms cancel. N<sub>e</sub> never enters, and so cannot be equivocated upon.

Why is the fixation probability equal to the initial frequency? Not by assumption. Under neutrality the expected change in allele frequency each generation is zero, which makes the frequency a bounded martingale; a bounded martingale that must eventually be absorbed at 0 or 1 has absorption probability at 1 equal to its starting value. That is optional stopping, and it is a theorem rather than a modelling convention.

The claim is testable without any diffusion approximation at all, using exact finite Markov chains. I built two. The first is ordinary Wright–Fisher. The second is a sweepstakes model: half the time, half the population is replaced wholesale by clones of a single randomly chosen parent — reproductive skew of the kind documented in Atlantic cod and Pacific oysters, wildly outside anything Wright and Fisher had in mind. Measured from heterozygosity decay, the sweepstakes chain has an effective size 5.6 times smaller than the Wright–Fisher chain at identical census size.

The fixation probability of a single new mutant in both chains: exactly 1/(2N_census), to fifteen decimal places.

N<sub>e</sub> can be dragged around by a factor of six and the fixation probability does not move. It follows that my own demographic work on the collapse in variance of reproductive success — a real finding, and one I still stand behind — does not touch the substitution rate. It changes coalescent depth, standing diversity, and every estimate of N<sub>e</sub> derived from them. It leaves k = μ exactly where it was.

First, the problem with Kimura turns out to be even more significant than I originally believed. I was pretty sure that Keruru had been led off track the moment that he mentioned the word “martingale” because that’s the retreat that every AI, including both Claude Athos and the entire Red Team, initially made. You cannot use AI to provide you the answer; you have to know at least the correct shape of the answer before you ask the AI.

I’ll post my full response to Keruru later this week. His work here is very far from valueless, as I will demonstrate, but it is nevertheless incorrect due to his failure to anchor the abstract mathematical elements in material reality. This also, rather fortuitously, demonstrates the importance of the Triveritas, as any one link in the triad is capable of serious error when allowed to operate outside the bounds of the other two.

But the epicycle wasn’t elsewhere. There are multiple epicyles.

k = μ is a correct baseline for asking whether something other than drift is happening. But it is not a rate at which anything can be observed to occur in a sexual, age-structured, demographically non-stationary population — which is every organism anyone cares about.

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The War on US Farmers

The utter idiocy of participating in Israel’s war on Iran is being driven home hard in the negative effects on America’s ability to feed itself:

US grain farmers have been plunged into their worst financial crisis in four decades as the war with Iran drives up diesel and fertilizer costs, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. The latest price shock compounds years of weak crop prices and falling incomes.

The mounting pressure follows the US-Israeli attack on Iran in February, which prompted Tehran to largely block commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a key route that previously served about a fifth of the world’s energy supplies. The resulting surge in energy costs is hitting the US heartland ahead of November’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress.

Farmers across the Corn Belt have been particularly hard hit by soaring diesel and crop nutrient prices since the military campaign began, the FT reported. Nebraska Farmers Union president John Hansen described the downturn as the sector’s worst since the 1980s.

”Inputs are way out of whack,” Nebraska corn and soybean farmer Matt Bailey told the newspaper. He said a phosphorus-rich fertilizer used at planting now costs more than $900 per ton, compared with about $470 a decade ago. Diesel prices have also surged after the conflict disrupted energy markets and sharply reduced traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. The nationwide average has climbed to about $5.45 per gallon from $3.81 before the war, according to US Energy Information Administration data.

”The [Iran] war has made so much uncertainty for us as farmers,” Pam Johnson, a former president of the National Corn Growers Association, told the FT. “It’s projected that farmers aren’t going to make any money for the next two years.”

And this is before the financial crisis hits this fall. This is why the real America sought to avoid foreign entanglements and restricted immigration for decades after the 1920s; foreigners with influence always seek to use other nations’ more powerful militaries for their own purposes and on their own behalf. And this is almost always to the detriment of the people of those nations.

We all know the retarded rhetoric about how “X is crazy!” and “X cannot be permitted to obtain a nuclear weapon”. Not one single American is going to give a damn about the rhetoric when gasoline costs $10 per gallon and they can’t afford to feed their families.

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The NFL and CTE

It’s not looking great for ex-football players:

A new study from The BMJ finds that at least 24.5 percent of all former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE. Of the 878 who died during that period, at least 215 had CTE. Of the remaining 663, 643 of the players’ brains were not studied for the presence of CTE. Which means that the real percentage could be much higher.

It almost certainly is. A friend of mine married, and eventually divorced, a former college football player whose personality and behavior changed drastically over time. She suspects that he’s got CTE, but of course there is no way of knowing for sure until he dies. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turns out that more than half of the former NFL players had it.

It’s a violent game. And the players should be given every opportunity to know what they’re getting into.

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THE CRUMBLING ABYSS

High in the mountains above Kagoshima, an old man finds the remains of a forbidden ritual. A headless dog. Ritual kindling. The residue of a curse aimed at killing children.

So begins Naoki Sanjūgo’s Nangoku Taiheiki, the sprawling historical epic that made its author’s name synonymous with popular fiction in Japan. First serialized in 1930–31, the novel plunges into the Oyura Disturbance, the real succession crisis that nearly tore apart the Shimazu clan of Satsuma in the years before the Meiji Restoration. On one side, Lord Narioki and his concubine Oyura, wielding sorcery, poison, and political cunning to install their chosen heir. On the other, Nariakira, the reformist eldest son whose vision of a modern, industrialized Japan threatens everything the old guard has built.

Caught between them: Kotarō, a young samurai hunting the sorcerer who murdered his family. Masumitsu, a swaggering political operative who fights with a pipe, a pistol, and an inexhaustible supply of nerve. Nangyoku, a comic storyteller whose street performances mask a dangerous loyalty. Miyuki, a woman sent into enemy territory with a dagger and a mission she did not choose. And behind them all, the historical figures who would soon remake Japan: Saigō Takamori, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Shimazu Nariakira himself.

Naoki braids occult horror, swordfight choreography, Edo backstreet comedy, political intrigue, and doomed romance into a narrative that moves with the propulsive energy of serialized fiction and the emotional weight of serious literature. Volume One, The Crumbling Abyss, follows the conspiracy from its discovery through assassination attempts, factional warfare, desperate journeys, and the catastrophic death that changes everything.

The Naoki Prize, Japan’s most prestigious award for popular fiction, is named after the author. An original English translation by Vox Day, The Chronicle of the Southern Kingdom: The Crumbling Abyss is now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.

NB: This is an excellent book and I am tremendously annoyed with myself for failing to release it when I finished the translation several months ago. A small press recently released the first English translation in July, so while this is an original translation, it is not the first English translation.

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Foreign Affairs Throws in the Towel

Clown World is beginning to grasp that the US military can’t even defeat a second-rate power anymore.

For 47 years, the Islamic Republic has bedeviled U.S. presidents. The 1979 Iran hostage crisis helped doom Jimmy Carter’s reelection bid. The Iran-contra scandal in the mid-1980s badly tarnished Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy record. And Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), led to an unprecedented situation in which the U.S. Congress invited a foreign leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to Washington to argue against it.

In February, when he launched his war against Iran, President Donald Trump declared that he intended to break this embarrassing pattern once and for all. By crushing Iran militarily and effecting regime change, he boasted that whereas other presidents had only talked about the Iranian threat, he was taking decisive action to end it. But six months later, Trump has become yet another U.S. president facing a dangerous humiliation related to Iran; the fallout from his excursion threatens his party’s prospects in the midterm elections. Now, perhaps in desperation, Trump is attempting to squeeze an economic noose around Tehran. But as it is constructed, this economic-pressure operation poses a greater threat to U.S. credibility than it does to Iran’s economy.

The irony of Trump’s failed war on Iran—and his stop-start negotiations to try to end it—is that it has so severely weakened Washington’s ability to exert pressure on Tehran that no future administration will ever be able to revert to the traditional U.S. playbook. But that could also be the only upside of a war that has already exacted a heavy toll on U.S. munitions and the global economy. The war could—and should—force a broader reckoning with 47 years of failed strategy and change Washington’s approach for good.

The combination of strategic 5GW and the ability of Iran to control the Strait of Hormuz has nullified both the USA’s military and financial power. This, combined with the fact that China now surpassed US economic and industrial might, and Russia now exceeds the USA’s ability to project power into Europe, means that the post-WWII era is officially over. What comes next remains to be seen, but Americans should look to post-WWII Britain to better understand what their domestic future likely holds.

And the sooner Trump, or whoever is pulling the short, fake Trump’s strings, understands that continued conflict will only make things worse, the better. The financial system already looks as if it is on the verge of breaking this fall; October could be very ugly beyond just the financial markets. Getting the oil flowing and getting gasoline and diesel prices down will at least help somewhat cushion the economic blow.

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Not NATO: Middle East Edition

Larry Johnson correctly observes that the new military alliance in the Middle East is not a US-aligned one:

The Western commentariat filed the Mecca agreement under a comfortable heading. When Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement on August 7 — an armed attack on one to be treated as an attack on all — the reflexive label was “Islamic NATO,” a Sunni bloc, three of the Muslim world’s largest militaries welded together by sectarian identity. That reading was obsolete almost before the ink dried. What is actually taking shape is not a Sunni alliance against Iran. It is the first load-bearing beam of the post-American security architecture that Russia and China have been calling for — and Tehran is about to walk through the door…

The Mecca agreement was sold to Western audiences as a Sunni bloc and dismissed as a club of American clients. It is neither. It is the first pillar of the security architecture Putin and Wang Yi named this spring after sitting with Iran’s foreign minister — a regionally led, Russia- and China-backed framework that folds Iran in as a legitimate power and pushes the United States out as the indispensable one. The Americans built their Gulf position on keeping Sunni and Shia apart and keeping the dollar in the middle. Both pillars are being pulled at once — and the structure going up in their place was drawn in Moscow and Beijing.

I was very confused when I saw the mainstream media covering the Mecca agreement as something that was good for Clown World. It seemed very obvious to me that it wasn’t an anti-Iran association, since Pakistan is one of Iran’s closest allies, but rather, a post-US security arrangement.

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