Category: Uncategorized

KMT-CPC Initiatives

The Kuomintang and the Communist Party are joining forces to lay the ground for peaceful reunification:

The Chinese mainland on Sunday rolled out a package of 10 policies and measures — spanning inter-party communication, infrastructure, travel, trade and culture — aimed at boosting exchanges and cooperation with Taiwan.

Atop the 10 initiatives announced by the mainland on Sunday is a proposal to explore a regular communication mechanism between the CPC and the KMT. The CPC and the KMT will, on the common political foundation of adhering to the 1992 Consensus and opposing “Taiwan independence,” take “stronger measures” to promote cross-Strait exchanges, interaction and integration, the CPC’s Taiwan work office said in a statement.

The statement said that an institutionalized platform will be set up to promote two-way exchanges between young people on both sides of the Strait. The All-China Youth Federation and other relevant mainland institutions will invite 20 youth groups from Taiwan to visit the mainland for exchanges every year.

INFRASTRUCTURE, TRAVEL, TRADE, CULTURE

  • Efforts will be made to support the coastal areas of Fujian Province — the mainland region closest to Taiwan — in sharing water, electricity and gas supplies with the offshore islands of Kinmen and Matsu, and to promote construction of sea-crossing bridges linking them, when conditions permit.
  • The mainland will also move to resume regular direct passenger flights across the Strait, including routes to and from Urumqi, Xi’an, Harbin, Kunming and Lanzhou.
  • Kinmen will be supported to use a new airport under construction in the nearby mainland city of Xiamen, expected to begin operations by the end of 2026.
  • A communication mechanism will be set up on the common political foundation of adhering to the 1992 Consensus and opposing “Taiwan independence” to facilitate the entry of Taiwan’s agricultural and fishery products that meet the quarantine standards into the mainland.
  • Efforts will also be made to help Taiwan’s agricultural and fishery products gain access to various mainland trade fairs to expand their sales channels.
  • The mainland will explore building wharves and berths in regions where conditions permit for distant-water fishing vessels from the Taiwan region, and mull providing convenience for the sales of their fish catch on the mainland.
  • It will also facilitate registration procedures for qualified Taiwan food manufacturers and the entry of their food products into the mainland market.
  • The mainland will explore the establishment of more trading markets for small-ticket items with Taiwan and support micro, small and medium-sized enterprises from Taiwan to expand business on the mainland.
  • Mainland cities such as Fuzhou and Xiamen have long established such markets, allowing small businesses from Taiwan to directly sell specialty commodities to mainland buyers.
  • To boost cultural ties, the mainland will allow qualified TV shows, documentaries and animations from Taiwan to be aired, and permit Taiwan residents to take part in the mainland’s fast-growing micro-drama industry.
  • The mainland will promote the resumption of individual tours for Shanghai and Fujian residents to Taiwan.

Things are quietly taking shape behind the scenes if they’re being this open about the process.

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China Promises Nothing

“I wish to put an end to rumors circulating online claiming that China has agreed with the United States not to provide arms to Iran. Let me be clear, no such communication has taken place. China has neither admitted supplying arms to Iran nor denied it. Our security agreements and defense cooperation are sovereign matters for China alone to consider.

No foreign country has the right to meddle in China’s internal affairs. Leaders around the world should weigh their words carefully before speaking.

China welcomes the decision by President Trump toward de-escalation and the opening of the Strait of Hormuz. We remain committed to world peace and to safeguard regional stability through dialogue.”

– Guo Jiakun, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, China

Translation: yes, we’re arming Iran. No, we won’t stop. Don’t try to cut off our oil or we’ll make sure you regret it.

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Ceasefire, Take 3

Another day, another Middle East ceasefire:

President Donald Trump announced a ten–day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon on Thursday, describing the truce as an initial step toward a permanent end to hostilities between the two nations. He also mentioned an invitation he sent to the prime minister of Israel and the Lebanese president for further talks at the White House.

The announcement, made via Trump’s Truth Social platform, follows high–level discussions held in Washington earlier this week. The ceasefire is scheduled to take effect today at 5pm EST.

The President stated that the agreement was reached following personal conversations with the Israeli and Lebanese leaders, noting that representatives from both countries met in Washington on Tuesday, marking the first such diplomatic encounter in 34 years.

‘I just had excellent conversations with the highly respected President Joseph Aoun, of Lebanon, and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, of Israel,’ Trump wrote. ‘These two leaders have agreed that in order to achieve peace between their countries, they will formally begin a ten-day ceasefire at 5pm EST.’

This might be helpful in attempting to persuade Israel not to try to expand into Lebanese territory. I don’t see how it’s going to slow down Hezbollah at all, though, especially if they’re not technically part of the ceasefire.

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The EFF’s Skin Suit

Every organization gets converged sooner or later. Sooner, in the case of those that don’t actively guard against it.

There’s a tweet from 2016 that has aged better than almost anything else on the internet:

1. Target a respected institution 2. Kill and clean it 3. Wear it as a skin suit, while demanding respect

I thought about that tweet this week when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced it was leaving X.

EFF was, for a long time, genuinely great. Founded in 1990 by programmers, hackers, libertarians, and progressives united around a single premise: the internet should be free, and someone needed to fight for it. They took on the government’s attempt to control cryptography and won. They fought the PATRIOT Act. They built tools that protect millions of people who will never know their name.

That organization is gone. What remains is wearing its skin.

It’s a pity, but the surveillance state is too important to Clown World to permit pesky electronic freedoms to get in the way.

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The MAGA Catastrophe

MAGA was supposed to be the alternative to the neocon-infested GOP, but it turned out to be MIGA, which thereby cements the probability that there will be no political fix for the USA prior to the anticipated failure in the 2033 timeframe.

There were two schools of thought on the Spanish Right in the lead-up to the civil war: Accidentalism and Catastrophism. Accidentalists believed that the serious issues facing the Spanish Republic were not baked into the institution itself, but rather an accident that could be attributed to the early Marxist bent of the first government. The Republic had gotten off on the wrong foot, but Conservatives could and would steer the ship in the right direction once they peacefully won political power through the electoral process and formed a government capable of addressing the Right’s concerns regarding government attacks on the Church and private property. They were strictly committed to following the rule of law and operating within the constitutional framework.

The second group believed the Republic was a catastrophe from the start, and that there could be no saving the Republic from itself. They asserted that the Left would never recognize any non-Leftist government, no matter how much they claimed to uphold the rule of law, because the problem was not with the Republic’s legalistic procedures but rather with the fact that the entire system was merely a facade to facilitate a Socialist and eventually Communist state that would permanently exclude Conservatives from power.

These two camps were largely united in their politics but divided in how to engage in politics. One pursued reform, while the other waited for an opportunity to overthrow the system itself once enough of the Right realized that there would be no voting their way out of this mess. After the Right won the 1933 elections and were met with: 1) Legalistic stonewalling when they attempted to form a government, and 2) An attempted Left-wing revolution in Asturias in 1934, the Catastrophists were proven to be correct.

As a general rule, the social and political optimists are wrong and the technogical optimists are right.

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Anti-Natalism and d

A reader of The Frozen Gene analyzes the effects of contraception, abortion, and childlessness on the Selective Turnover Coefficient, otherwise known as d, in order to determine if they alleviate the problem of the Frozen Genome or not.

Here’s the core finding. Childlessness has increased dramatically — from around 10% in the 1940s cohorts to over 28% in Japan today. But the correlation between childlessness and genetic load has decreased. The childlessness term (1−K) × r has actually gotten smaller in its purifying contribution, even as more women are childless.

The medieval European Marriage Pattern — with its high celibacy rate and moderate r — extracted more purifying value from childlessness than contemporary Japan does with 28% of women never having children.

The supplement doesn’t change Day’s headline number. Contemporary d_total is about 0.02–0.03, compared to d = 0.015. The difference is within the margin of error.

The value is conceptual. It answers the question that people naturally ask when they hear the Frozen Gene thesis: but aren’t all those childless people being selected out?

They’re not. Or rather, they’re being removed from the gene pool, but not because they carry worse genomes. They’re childless because housing is unaffordable, because the credential pipeline delays family formation past peak fertility, because the employment structure demands two incomes before a household can form, because they chose not to have children for personal reasons that have nothing to do with their DNA.

The removal is drift, not selection. The gene pool is losing genomes every generation, but it’s losing them at random with respect to quality. The sieve has holes so large that everything passes through — and the few genomes that are caught in the sieve are caught by economic architecture, not by biological fitness.

Read the whole thing. I see no reason to question his conclusions; they tend to support what I assumed would be the case, since d is essentially quantitative in nature, not qualitative.

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The Islamabad Debacle

Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran describes the recent talks in Pakistan from the Iranian perspective:

Marandi correctly portrayed the negotiations as a US concession forced by Iran’s battlefield successes during the recent conflict (including missile, drone, and defensive capabilities demonstrated over roughly 40 days of war against the “Trump-Netanyahu regimes”). He argued that Iran entered the talks from a position of strength—not weakness or desperation—and used “armed diplomacy” to document positions rather than out of trust in American promises.

He emphasized that Iran did not waiver from its key preconditions for the talks, which included:

  • A comprehensive ceasefire (particularly involving Lebanon and Gaza).
  • US fulfillment of prior commitments and respect for Iranian security/assets.
  • No negotiations under pressure or sanctions.

Marandi repeatedly stressed that progress depends entirely on the US abiding by its obligations. Without concrete action, “there is no reason for us to continue negotiating.” He expressed no fear of returning to war, stating Iran is fully prepared for any scenario, including escalation, and has no illusions about the hostile nature of the Trump administration.

The most surprising revelation from Professor Marandi was that Iran was prepared for a second day of negotiations but learned belatedly that the US decided, without informing the Iranian delegation, to end the talks and leave. Who does such a thing? It suggests to me that JD Vance was nothing more than an errand boy and that he was ordered by Susie Wiles to stop talking to Iran and leave, using so-called intransigence of Iran over the nuclear issue as an excuse.

I think this is much closer to the truth than what we’ve been told in the Western media, which doesn’t even make sense. And using talks to buy time when they’re being beaten is standard Clown World procedure, to the point that I have absolutely no idea why countries like Iran or Russia ever accept the invitations to negotiation.

China appears to understand the situation rather better, as it simply ignores US and EU diplomacy; not even bothering to have high-level officials greet or meet with the head of the EU when she showed up in Beijing.

It makes no sense to reach agreements with the agreement-incapable. Doing so just to impress the spectators by being able to point out, again, that water is still wet is both performative and pointless.

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Mailvox: TFG in Print

Vox, when will The Frozen Gene be available in hard cover?

Probably in May. I have an important new paper to finish and add to it first.

Mutation-selection balance theory predicts that segregating deleterious load increases as purifying selection weakens. The Selective Turnover Coefficient (d), measuring the fraction of reproductive value removed by selection per generation, has declined approximately 35-fold in human populations since the Neolithic (d ≈ 0.53 → 0.015), with most of the decline post-1900 (Day & Athos 2025a). Using 11,086 European samples from the Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR v62.0) genotyped on the Human Origins panel, we computed per-individual constrained-to-neutral derived allele burden ratios across seven time bins spanning ~8,000 years. This ratio rose from 0.5254 (Early Neolithic) to 0.5528 (Modern), with the increase concentrated in the post-medieval period (t = 16.91, P = 4.94 × 10⁻⁶²). Neutral-site burden remained stable, ruling out demographic and methodological confounds. We situate these results alongside the Wakayama et al. (2026) serial cloning experiment demonstrating mammalian Muller’s Ratchet, and present falsifiable predictions for evaluating the trajectory in subsequent generations.

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Saving the Strait

Some things never change. The Short Fake Trump declares that he is destroying the village Strait in order to save it.

Donald Trump has warned that US forces will immediately ‘begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz’ just hours after peace talks with Iran held in Pakistan broke down.

The US President also said in his Truth Social post: ‘I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.

‘No one who pays an illegal toll will have safe passage on the high seas. 

This is serious doubling down, because Iran doesn’t need the Strait to be open as much as China does. And it’s not going to be possible to keep the ships 1,000 kilometers away from the two ends of the Strait and still maintain the naval blockade.

Perhaps losing a few blockade ships will finally convince the American people that their military should not be permitted to take part in this war for Israel.

However, I suspect that this blockade exists mostly in the imagination, along with the greater part of Short Fake Trump’s other threats. After all, he already ended the Iranian nuclear threat twice now, and announced the strait was open too. Regardless, it should be obvious to even Fox News fans that doubling down is not the act of a party that knows it is winning.

Let’s not forget who will be the primary beneficiary of the strait being closed entirely: Russia.

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AIPAC Rejects Peace

To precisely no one’s surprise, AIPAC wouldn’t permit the Fake Trump administration to accept the peace deal offered by Iran under the aegis of the Pakistani moderators:

There were three Iranian conditions that the US refused to accept: Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, an end to Israel’s attack on Lebanon and Hezbollah, unfreezing of Iran’s assets and retaining sovereignty over its supply of enriched uranium…

Iran will not initiate new military actions against Israel or the US… They will wait to absorb the first blow and then launch a massive retaliation. I think they now understand that the US is too much under the control of the Zionist lobby to act in the interest of the people of the United States.

Iran’s demand that the US vacate its bases in the Gulf will be achieved by force… Iran will hit the remaining bases and make them uninhabitable for the US military going forward. The Saudis and the UAE will have to make a choice this week… Seek reconciliation with Iran and survive or side with the US and Israel and face economic destruction.

The real action that will put the most pressure on Trump will start on Monday morning when the US stock market takes a nose dive… again… and the price of oil heads back up into triple digit territory. JD Vance actually did Iran a favor by breaking off first and walking away. This paints Iran in a very favorable light in the eyes of the global south, i.e., Iran was willing to negotiate, but the US refused to engage in good faith negotiations and bailed.

Iran doesn’t have any problem agreeing to a fight to the death with Israel. That’s a war they know they are going to win. The Israelis presumably believed they could sever Iran from Hezbollah since they’ve been successful dividing the Arabs for 80 years, but Persians are not Arabs and the Iranians have presumably learned from watching Israel methodically divide, conquer, and expand over the decades.

This obvious failure to put American national interests first will rightly kill Republican chances in the mid-terms and cement the complete failure of Trump’s presidency. He’s gone from one of the best presidents in US history to one of the worst, and his legacy will be losing the war that ended US global dominance; his only consolation will be that historians will eventually admit that it wasn’t even him in the White House.

There is no longer even any pretense of the war being against Iran; what is the US national interest in permitting Israel to invade and occupy Lebanon? It will be interesting to see how things proceed now that there is no reason for China and Russia to desist from providing more aid and more active support to Iran and helping the Iranian people decisively win their war against an enemy that has now established itself as the imperialist aggressor in the region.

I didn’t see any real benefit to Iran to agreeing to talk to the US representatives, particularly in light of the outcome of the previous two talks. But what they have managed to achieve through them is proving to the American people that the US government is prioritizing the interests of Israel, and not their own national interests.

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