Category: Uncategorized

The China That Can Say No

China is the first Iranian trading partner, but will not be the only one, to reject the USA’s desperate attempt to win on the economic front what it lost on both the military and the economic fronts:

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting: Donald Trump has threatened to wage a full-fledged economic war on Iran. Many say the economic threat is aimed at making up for the failure of the war, in the military domain, that the U.S. and Israel waged against Iran. What’s your take on that?

Lin Jian: Sanctions and pressure tactics are not the solution. China calls on parties to act responsibly and stick to the political and diplomatic approach. 

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting: Iran has endured years of sanctions imposed by the U.S. The Islamic Republic has either managed to bypass or find alternatives. And now it is said that Trump has no tangible card to enforce what he claims as “toughest sanctions.” What’s your viewpoint?

Lin Jian: China believes that military means, sanctions and pressure tactics are not the solution. On the contrary, they will only lead to escalation that serves no one’s interests. We call for efforts to solve disputes through dialogue and negotiation.

AFP: A follow-up on Iran, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged China to join Washington in putting strong economic pressure on Iran. This was in an interview yesterday. Bessent noted that China has historically imported much of its energy from the Gulf. Does the foreign ministry have a response to these comments by Bessent?

Lin Jian: I answered a similar question yesterday. Let me reiterate, China opposes illicit unilateral sanctions that lack basis in international law and UN Security Council mandate. We call on parties to act responsibly and stick to the political and diplomatic approach.

In other words, China will continue to ignore US demands and it will continue to support its ally and trading partner, Iran.

In not entirely unrelated news, I was rather impressed with the geopolitical analysis of US-China relations on the third episode of the fourth season of Lioness. I also found it amusing how assiduously the show avoided making any reference to Israel whatsoever in its discussion of intelligence operations in the United States.

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A Cancer Self-Diagnosis

HR helpfully demonstrates the inutility of HR:

HR asked me to install employee monitoring software across every company laptop last month.

They wanted screenshots every five minutes, browser history, application usage, idle time, and an automated “productivity score” for every employee.

I told them this seemed invasive.

They told me the executive team had already approved it.

So I installed exactly what they requested.

Three weeks later, the VP of HR asked me to prepare a report showing the 20 least productive employees in the company.

I exported the data.

Seven of the bottom ten worked in HR.

One HR business partner had spent 19 hours on Zillow during business hours.

Another averaged 46 minutes of keyboard activity per day.

Someone had watched four complete seasons of Love Is Blind.

The VP asked whether I could exclude HR because their work was “less quantifiable.”

What passes for HR work isn’t less quantifiable, it’s simply nonexistent.

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Air Power Idiocy

What do air power advocates, American tax protestors, religious conservatives, and NATO strategists all have in common? The foolish idea that with just a little external assistance, the people will rise up and overthrow their government:

Early this year, Ukrainian officials came to President Volodymyr Zelensky with a risky new plan to end the war with Russia. It would require expanding their bombing campaign to include a set of targets and a class of weapons they had long avoided. In addition to Ukraine’s ongoing strikes against Russian military bases, oil refineries, supply lines, and logistics hubs, the officials wanted to launch waves of AI-enabled drones at Moscow’s airports, hoping to stop international carriers from flying in and out of the Russian capital, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the plan, which has not been previously reported.

In short, they wanted to plan a mass terror attack on Russian airports to completely shut down all civilian flights in and out of Moscow as a way to ramp up pressure and make Russian civilians in the capital city feel the consequences of the war.

It’s remarkable that military planners even entertain these ridiculous notions that never, ever, work. The idea has been around since the 1920s when it was first conceived by an Italian general named Giulio Douhet. It will probably not escape your attention that despite having first access to this strategery, Italy has not won any wars since the publication of The Command of the Air in 1921. Nor has ever it worked anywhere from Germany to Vietnam to Gaza.

Contra the air power theory, bombing tends to cause the people to support the regime in charge and turn to it for protection. It doesn’t ever make them want to surrender to the people bombing them or accede to their wishes.

And in preemptive answer to the obvious rebuttal, Russia isn’t bombing civilian targets in Kiev to turn the Ukrainian people against Zelensky and the Kiev regime. It’s a) payback for Ukraine’s attacks on civilians and b) a warning to the Kiev regime’s NATO supporters.

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The Wages of Sin

JDA has a new book out that addresses a very serious flaw in the modern Church:

Jon Del Arroz’s new book, The Wages of Sin, is out today. It follows Churchianity, for which I wrote the introduction and which hit #1 in Amazon’s religious philosophy category last year. Where Churchianity diagnosed the consumer-driven model reshaping American parishes, the new book turns to a word Del Arroz says most pulpits quietly retired: sin.

The Wages of Sin builds its structure on the Confiteor, the confession prayer Catholics have recited at every Mass since at least the tenth century. Del Arroz splits the book into four sections, one for each phrase of the prayer: thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions. Nine chapters work through the sins Augustine confessed in his Confessions, including pride dressed as worship, envy refined into schadenfreude, the spiritual torpor the Church Fathers called acedia, and the four sins Scripture names as crying out to heaven for vengeance. Each chapter closes with an examination of conscience, and the appendix adds a full one plus a vice-virtue table for daily use.

The book leans on Augustine’s framework of sin as disordered love: not a checklist of prohibitions, but the habit of loving the wrong things, or loving right things out of order. Del Arroz traces that idea into Romans 6:23 and the Catechism’s teaching on mortal sin, arguing that a Church which stopped naming sin also stopped being able to prescribe its cure.

The post-1960s idea of welcoming sinners into the church and refraining from judgment was correct in theory and flawed in application. The point is to welcome the sinner, not to accept and embrace the sin. And now we have “churches” featuring open satanists pretending to be priests and pastors, preaching blasphemy from the pulpits.

One hopes The Wages of Sin will help restore much-needed order to the Christian churches.

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Sound and Fury Signifying Desperation

Short Fake Trump jacks up the rhetoric again:

No one has given the Islamic Republic of Iran a greater opportunity to make a Deal than me. TRAGICALLY, for them, they hâve failed to take it. Therefore, today, I am announcing the MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY! This will be Economie Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale. Their navy is gone, their air force is destroyed, their military factories are now rubble, their currency is worthless, and their country is hanging by a thread. Today, I am also announcing that ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran will itself face TREMENDOUS Economie Conséquences. Oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, exchange houses, ship registries, front companies — It ail needs to stop NOW. You know who you are. This will be an ECONOMIC D-DAY, and we need ail of our Allies to stand with the United States of America to isolate, and defeat, the Iran threat. These maniacs are on the ropes, and these HISTORIC MEASURES will cripple them and their ability to Project terror worldwide. IRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

So after demonstrating the inability of the US military to the world, now he’s going to demonstrate the intrinsic weakness of the US financial system. All this accomplishes is to ensure that BRICS intensifies its process of replacing the US dollar and further weakening the economic influence of the USA.

Doubling down is not a strategy born of strength and success, but weakness and failure. This sounds like projection combined with pure desperation devoid of ideas.

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By the AI, For the AI

No doubt the Representatives in Congress are also using AI to read the AI-drafted legislation that is being provided to them:

US congressional lawyers are struggling with a flood of error-ridden AI-generated legislation, forcing them to spend increasingly more time rewriting proposals produced by chatbots, Politico reported on Monday. Staffers and outside groups have more frequently turned to ChatGPT and Claude to produce legislative text, with error-ridden drafts regularly reaching the House Office of Legislative Counsel (OLC), according to eight current and former officials interviewed by the Axel Springer-owned outlet.

No doubt these laws are being drafted for Representatives Chen and Martinez with military precision. And that matters.

The crazy thing is that there is a non-zero chance that Byron AI will one day be authoring legislation for Americans. Especially if we’re successful in designing it to write better than ChatGPT and Claude.

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The Final Five Hours

This is your last chance to back the proof of conept of the Byron AI. We’ve now hit our original goal of 250 backers. 300 would seem to be ambitious, but a last-day pop is common, so we’ll see how it goes.

Thanks to everyone who is supporting this. While I have not publicly shared any of the information yet, the development team has already been making excellent progress even prior to obtaining the hardware thanks to our existing tools and cloud access.

UPDATE: 80 minutes left and we’re close with 286. Just 14 more…

UPDATE: Time’s up! We ended up with exactly 300 backers (counting the three direct ones) and what should be sufficient support to do what we are setting out to do and most likely a bit more. Thanks very much to everyone who is making this possible!

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Theology Adjacent

As you probably know, I am highly allergic to theology and regard most of it as varying degrees of human philosophy dressed up as Divine revelation. The obvious holes in most dogma are the result of the same sort of amphiboly and ambiguity that render Enlightenment philosophy intrinsically flawed, and assuming one possible interpretation is the only one in obvious contravention of the observable facts. So, in the interest of maintaining the peace with other Christians, I keep my critiques to myself, particularly because I have no answers to replace those flawed dogmas.

If I had to summarize my Christian dogma, I would say that I am of the Glass Darkly School.

That being said, it is not possible to construct a metaphysics, as I am presently doing for the Veriphysics philosophical system, without addressing things like Truth, God, and Logos. So, if these matters are of interest to you, you may wish to peruse the outline that is being assembled at Veriphysics.

I would, however, caution the midwits that in this context, citing historical authorities and dogmas accomplishes nothing. If you wish to offer criticism, it has to be within the system itself; what Tertullian or Aquinas or Voltaire or the Pope said is of zero import for the purposes of this exercise.

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Don’t They Know They’re Losing?

Iran is engaging in some very unusual behavior for a side that we are reliably and repeatedly losing the war in the Gulf.

Iran has delivered an ULTIMATUM to the United States and states the U.S. has “3 – 4 weeks” to meet all of its demands or Iran “will severely escalate in the Strait of Hormuz” and launch its planned preemptive strike on US-Backed Gulf Infrastructure, and US / ISRAELI assets.

Iran’s demands include:

  • $300 billion in reconstruction funds
  • Full release of Iran’s frozen assets of up to $120 billion
  • Lifting of the U.S. naval blockade
  • End to the war across all fronts, including Gaza and Lebanon
  • Accepting Iran’s permanent control of the Strait of Hormuz, including up to 7% of transit fees
  • The lifting of all US sanctions on Iranian oil, petrochemical products, and gas

Of course, we’re also being told that Ukraine is winning the EU/NATO’s war against Russia despite having lost over one-third of its population, 20 percent of its territory, and living without heat or power.

I always wondered how the German people didn’t realize how badly they were losing on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. I don’t wonder about that anymore.

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