Category: Uncategorized

All Indicators

Andrei Martyanov, whose track record has been very good for more than a decade, believes Russia is going to strike Europe, specifically Germany, soon in retaliation for manufacturing the drones used by Ukraine to attack Russian territory.

Now, per strikes–all indicators are that Russia will strike Europe. Russia doesn’t need to use nukes because she has more than enough conventional means for both destruction of a critical industrial infrastructure involved in support of 404 and, if it comes down to it, decapitating governments of hostile countries.

Russia has enough conventional means to strike at any facility in Europe and the US IS NOT coming for a simple reason–it has no resources. Demilitarizing NATO was one of the key strategic aims of the Special Military Operation once it became clear that the US sabotaged Istanbul talks and Iran has demonstrated it fully. Who will be hit first? Yeah, I am inclined to see Germany “getting the message”–it is long overdue.

And Russia will be perfectly justified in attacking any of the belligerent parties. It would be very difficult for the leaders of the EU, the UK, Germany, and even Switzerland to have more incompetently mishandled their various relations with Russia in futile attempts to appease Clown World and keep the US military in Europe. All they had to do was stay neutral and keep out of what was never any of their business in the first place.

Their collective lunacy is only exceeded by that of Finland and Sweden, who were perfectly safe as neutral parties, but have now unnecessarily painted targets on their national chests by joining NATO and declaring themselves enemy of the Russian Federation.

And now, ironically, they all find themselves falling afoul of both the USA and China as well. The last four years have been marked by some of the most incompetent national diplomacy in the history of international relations.

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Who’s Locking Out Who?

The EU attempting to sanction China tends to remind one of Rorshach. They’re not locking China out of the global economy, they’re locking themselves out of it.

The European Union has taken yet another step in its long-running confrontation with Russia. But what now stands out is not only the scale – it is the restless, almost reflexive expansion of sanctions as a default instrument of policy. In April, EU authorities unveiled their 20th round of sanctions targeting Russia and Belarus, while pointedly extending their reach toward China.

What was once framed as a targeted response now resembles a sanctions regime without clear geographic or strategic limits. By including 56 designations tied to Russia’s military-industrial complex – 17 of them in China, the United Arab Emirates, Belarus, and Central Asia – the EU has effectively dissolved the boundaries of its own confrontation. Another 60 entities now face tightened export controls tied to alleged contributions to Russia’s defense sector.

For the first time, even a Chinese state-owned entity has been targeted by anti-Belarusian sanctions. In Brussels, this is justified through the language of “dual-use” goods. But outside Europe, the perception is of a growing tendency toward economic coercion that stretches legal authority across borders, fueled by an escalating appetite for pressure.

China’s response was swift: officials condemned what they described as “long-arm jurisdiction,” rejecting the EU’s attempt to discipline Chinese firms operating far beyond European territory. More importantly, Beijing read the move as a signal of the EU’s shifting posture toward China itself. Within a day, China placed seven European entities on its control list over arms sales to Taiwan, imposing restrictions that mirror the EU’s own extraterritorial reach. These measures prohibit the transfer of Chinese goods to the targeted firms, extending the ripple effects well beyond those directly sanctioned.

These EU leaders don’t seem to understand that they don’t really matter anymore. They can preen and posture all they like, but there is nothing that Europe has that China needs. It’s understandable if the US politicians don’t grasp that they’re no longer the center of global power, since the lessons of the recent debacle in the Middle East are still being learned.

But all the nations of Europe can’t even defend themselves against invasion from the south and east; their ability to do anything at all about China is nonexistent. They can’t even do much about Russia except hold their own breath, refuse to buy Russian energy, and kill their own economies.

It does seem that those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

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The Real Reason

Ben Shapiro is observably over. But the media can’t admit the real reason his audience “has abandoned him”.

There was a time, not very long ago, when Ben Shapiro could reasonably call himself the king of all conservative media.

His company, the Daily Wire, dominated social-media feeds and podcast apps; in the run-up to the 2020 election, it was ranked as Facebook’s top English-language publisher for three straight months. Virality seemed to be the Daily Wire’s birthright: Scathing news items on Nancy Pelosi’s salon visits during the pandemic racked up millions more views than the websites of Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times. Shapiro himself was ubiquitous, a right-wing star who had risen to fame before Donald Trump and seamlessly adapted to the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. He was a digital battering ram against the Democrats and the progressive left. He seemed guaranteed, like Fox itself, for an indefinite run at the top of the media heap.

That’s all over now. The Daily Wire is instituting significant layoffs. Its YouTube channel’s subscriber base is starting to shrink, and its website has emerged as one of the great traffic losers in conservative media. There are Daily Wire YouTube videos that now, after a few days online, have less than 10,000 views, a catastrophically small number for a channel with more than 3 million subscribers. The top comments all mock the low view counts.

If a variety of poor business decisions can be blamed, in part, for the Daily Wire’s fall from grace — ill-fated investments in feature films, an epic fantasy series, and peculiar merchandise — the greater story is the collapse of Shapiro’s constituency, especially among the young media consumers who once fueled the Daily Wire’s runaway growth.

His audience didn’t abandon him. It never existed in the first place. All the numbers were fake from the start, with the exception of the times he was handed existing audiences, such as those who were accustomed to listening to Michael Savage’s radio show.

Money can be used to fake a lot of things, but the moment it stops flowing, the charade becomes apparent. The way his history of Never-Trump is artfully ignored is particularly amusing.

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Owen on Tucker

Tucker Carlson interviewed Owen Benjamin, nominally about his book, but mostly about the most cancelled man in comedy himself.

Owen Benjamin was probably the smartest, wisest person in Hollywood so of course he got canceled harder than anyone in the history of the entertainment business. That’s when he found the secret to happiness. A classically trained pianist turned comedian, Owen Benjamin weaves sharp-witted satire with deep dives into the complexities of the human condition. His unique blend of musical talent and unfiltered storytelling invites listeners to laugh through the chaos from his farm in North Idaho. His new book, “How to Slay a Wizard,” offers an instruction manual on how to not fall for the current spells that confuse the world. Ladle.tv for his podcast and comedy specials.

TUCKER: This is an organized effort against you. This is not organic. Who was organizing it? Do you know?

OWEN: I mean I have some theories…

TUCKER: But you don’t actually know for sure?

OWEN: I know the motivations. Every time I think I know for sure it switches a little. So now I try to not it’s not because I’m like worried to, I can’t really figure it out. It’s almost like a swarm.

TUCKER: Yes.

OWEN: It’s like a behavior where they’re signaling. That sounds even crazier, but

TUCKER: No, I’ve seen it.

OWEN: It’s like a It’s like a like a a behavior like a fractal.

TUCKER: Yes.

OWEN: And there’s no one really in charge, right?

TUCKER: It’s like a conspiracy of like-minded temperament.

OWEN: Cuz like from my background, I’m like, “Who did this to me?”

TUCKER: Yes.

OWEN: There’s no one there because who would really do that? It’s like a collective evil.

Big Bear even did me the favor of mentioning my book during the interview.

OWEN: A lot of people, they’re like I might be lying but I’m not wrong!

TUCKER: Right.

OWEN: Cuz they’re like, oh, no, it turns out that was all wrong, but I was still right because it’s me. Like I saw that in physics because I had a physics podcast at Calltech with my buddy who’s a nuclear physicist and dark matter. I couldn’t stop laughing when I realized it. So, they have these gravitational equations and when it wasn’t matching anything, they said, “Oh, there’s dark matter.” And I’m like, “What’s that?” They’re like, “95% of the universe you can’t see or measure and it’s like most of the gravity.” And I’m like, “How do you know it exists?” They’re like, “Swear to God.” They’re like, “Cuz if not, we’d be wrong!” And I’m like, “So, you can’t measure it?” They’re like, “No, that dark matter, but it’s there.” I’m like, “How do you know?” They’re like, “Cuz if not, then this is wrong.” Like Vox Day who published that book. He published a book breaking down how the math of evolution is so bad because he’s like one of those super geniuses. Vox is great guy, and it’s so bad, the actual math of it, just read the book Probability Zero. It’s like how long would it take for things to permeate, like a mutation, to permeate through the actual population. And when you see how completely ridiculous it is, I think they have trauma where they’re like, “Well, it can’t be that! I put a square on my head and brag to everyone and my life is a lie!”

You can also watch the video on YouTube. It’s doing numbers.

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The Strategic Cost of War

Everyone understands the opportunity costs of war. But few tend to grasp the potential strategic costs of a war that doesn’t go as expected:

The US-Israeli war against Iran has handed China a strategic opening to chip away at US influence on every major front, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing a classified intelligence analysis. Two US officials familiar with the matter told the newspaper that the document was produced by the Joint Staff’s intelligence directorate for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine. It is said to focus on four main dimensions: Diplomatic, informational, military, and economic.

Fortunately, the US military has so far avoided a complete catastrophe on the scale of the Athenian Sicilian expedition, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to experience serious negative consequences from having its ability to meaningfully project power around the globe exposed as a negligible threat.

Once the economy is hollowed out, the ability to fight wars is necessarily degraded. The USA is no longer the most powerful military on the planet, whether you are inclined to believe it or not, the US military is now third in terms of its ability to actually fight a war over a period of months, after the Chinese and Russian militaries.

US President Donald Trump’s China visit was an attempt to “save face” and seek relief after the Iran war destabilized the global economy, geopolitical analyst Danny Haiphong has told RT. According to Haiphong, the US is now in a “far weaker position” than China and is seeking closer ties with Beijing to stabilize its economy and global standing.

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Mr. Tubcuddle’s Last Ride

I was never that impressed with GOOD OMENS, which to me read like an inferior attempt to write a Douglas Adams pastiche; it wasn’t terrible but it was about the level of Terry Pratchett’s early Discworld novels. But the television show was popular with a certain crowd, mostly due to the two lead actors, Michael Sheen and David Tennant, until news of Mr. Gaiman’s alleged tubcuddling antics went public.

One of the bigger questions coming out of the scandal’s fallout was what would happen to the SANDMAN and GOOD OMENS series. As it turns out, the wiser decision would have been to simply end both of them on the spot, given how well the latter turned out.

Good Omens Season 3 premiered on Prime Video this week. It is not a true season, but instead a 90-minute finale episode, the compressed wreckage of what was supposed to be a six-episode third season before the show’s creator was accused of sexual assault by multiple women and removed from production.

The Guardian gave it two stars, calling it “possibly the biggest imbalance in TV history between dazzling cast and stale script.” Mama’s Geeky: “messy execution leaves much to be desired. It struggles to find its footing as a rushed finale.” A Medium writer called the script “abysmal” and wrote that Michael Sheen and David Tennant’s real-life friendship was “the only reason to watch.” The Guardian’s Jack Seale called it a “puzzling mess.” Rotten Tomatoes currently sits at 60% from critics — the lowest score in the series’ history. Season 1 held 85%. Season 2 held 88%.

To understand why Season 3 is what it is, you need to understand where Season 2 left off. Season 2 went beyond the source material, following Aziraphale and Crowley as they contended with an amnesiac angel Gabriel, matchmade for some humans, and navigated their own romantic feelings for each other. It ended on a devastating cliffhanger: Crowley professes his love for Aziraphale and begs the angel to run away with him, leaving the fight between heaven and hell behind. Aziraphale turns him down and chooses to return to heaven to become Supreme Archangel, tasked with organizing the Second Coming of Christ.

That cliffhanger is what Season 3 was supposed to resolve across six episodes. It resolved it in 99 minutes.

I don’t know why this should surprise anyone. No doubt Mr. Tubcuddle is going to attempt a comeback, sooner or later, but since his talent, which is genuine, but trivial, and mostly involves repackaging and reselling the original ideas of others, I suspect this fizzled fart of an attempt to continue feeding off the literary corpse of Terry Pratchett will prove to be Mr. Tubcuddle’s last ride.

Prime Video really should have just said no.

It’s not a good way to unwind if you value your behind

You’ll just wish you had declined when he asked you.

You don’t want to join the club

There’s no bubbles in the tub

Just say no, say no, it’s no trouble

You don’t want to join the club

There’s no bubbles in the tub

Just say no, Mr. Tubcuddle

It’s just one of the greatest songs of all time. Although personally, I prefer the deep bass funk groove of the Coraline’s Eyes mix, to say nothing of that guitar solo at 2:45.

UPDATE: After remastering the Transgressions mix, I couldn’t resist the urge to produce an even more brutally savage one in honor of the occasion, the Never Clean mix. It’s a beautiful 4 minutes and 24 seconds of pure and unadulterated contempt. It’s also up on UATV. It’s the best one yet.

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The Irrelevance of Acclaim

As I believe I made very clear during the Puppies years, I have neither respect nor desire for awards. They’re subjective and they’re popularity contests among the sort of bureaucratic people who infest every organization. The only sort of awards that interest me are championships and I have no shortage of those from individual high school conference championships to college team championships. I also won three European football promotions, which are the very best form of team championship.

A number of people have suggested that my work in evolutionary biology and population genetics should merit some sort of award, others have said that the Triveritas and solving the Agrippan Trilemma should be considered historic, award-winning work. They may even be correct, but I’m not going to waste any time waiting for critical acclaim for two reasons.

Here is the first: awards are fake and retarded. Star Wars didn’t win Best Movie in 1977. And even worse, Tolkien was passed over by the Nobel prize jury because his storytelling was deemed inferior to that of that literary giant Ivo Andrić, whose stature appears to have been largely manufactured by Yugoslavian communists in the interests of pushing post-war international socialism and whose work has been entirely forgotten, to the extent it was ever known in the first place.

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perhaps. At least, this was the contention of reviewer Richard Hughes, who went on to write that “for width of imagination,” The Lord of the Rings “almost beggars parallel.”

Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison did find a comparison: to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur — hardly misplaced, given Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of English literature, but not the sort of thing that passed for contemporary writing in the 1950s, notwithstanding the serious appreciation of writers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s trilogy. “No previous writer,” the poet remarked in a New York Times review, “has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail.”

Auden did find fault with Tolkien’s poetry, a fact upon which critic Edmund Wilson seized in his scathing 1956 Lord of the Rings review. “Mr. Auden is apparently quite insensitive — through lack of interest in the other department,” wrote Wilson, “to the fact that Tolkien’s prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness.” Five years later, the Nobel prize jury would make the same judgement when they excluded Tolkien’s books from consideration. Tolkien’s prose, wrote jury member Anders Österling, “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.”

The note was discovered recently by Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who delved into the Nobel archive for 1961 and found that “the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić,” as Alison Flood reports at The Guardian.

The second reason is that I’ve noticed how becoming an “award-winner” appears to mark a transformation from being someone whose occupation is doing things to someone whose occupation is being someone who formerly did things. It’s hard to write, it’s hard to work, and it’s even hard to think if your time is taken up with speeches, signings, conferences, and playing the role of a public intellectual. As much as I enjoyed the opportunity to meet and spend time with Umberto Eco, it doesn’t escape my attention that all of his best work preceded his becoming a global public figure.

And he’s hardly alone in this regard. What did any of the New Atheists do after being lionized by TIME Magazine? It might as well have been Tiger Beat. And as for Jordan Peterson, well, his life is a nightmare very nearly as awful as Mr. Peterson’s own self-chronicled nightmares. Won’t you taste my beautiful cousin, grandma…

Even the manufactured mediocrities are enervated by their false acclaim. John Scalzi was never a great science fiction writer and his pastiches in no way merited the recognition and awards they received. But they were nevertheless better than the schlock he can barely summon up the energy to scribble these days.

I recognize that there will be those who very strongly believe that I need have no worries in this regard because my work is fundamentally wrong, materially harmful, and more likely to be censored than rewarded. Which is fine, they’re entitled to their ignorant opinions; the idea that they are even capable of having a substantive opinion on Darwin, Haldane, and Kimura, let alone Agrippa, is more than a little amusing.

But I’d much rather have the time and the freedom to write 20 more books and 50 more papers, and translate hundreds more previously untranslated works, than devote even one weekend per year to going through the tedious rituals of being a public intellectual deemed important by the gatekeepers.

Speaking of which, having finished the translation of all of the waka from Genji Monogatari, I will be publishing them in a separate volume of bilingual poetry. Due to the interest from the Library subscribers, we will make a special leather edition available at some point in the future.

うき世には

I long for a place
that is not this world of sorrow;
my heart turns toward
the mountain path
of those who have renounced it.

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Xi’s Delicate Warning

It’s always interesting to see how far ahead of US politicians the Chinese leaders are, particularly President Xi, who is fully cognizant on the discussions of Western intellectuals, while I doubt any US politicians, with the possible exception of JD Vance, have ever heard of Wang Hunin, much less Qiao Liang or Wang Xiangsui

Inside the Great Hall, Xi opened the talks with an ominous reference to the so-called Thucydides Trap, the ancient Greek historian’s account of Athens and Sparta, and the danger when an established power feels threatened by a rising civilization.

‘The world has come to a new crossroads. Can China and the US overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm?’ Xi asked Trump across the table.

During their two-hour summit, Xi warned Trump that if Taiwan is ‘mishandled’ the US and China ‘will clash, or even come into conflict, pushing the entire relationship into a very dangerous situation,’ state media channel CCTV reported.

Now, the Thucydides Trap is a bit midwitty these days since it was popularized by Graham Allison in 2015; it’s the sort of history that journalists can understand and recognize, so it makes them feel smart and educated. But it’s not irrelevant, as the Tree of Woe pointed out back in 2021:

Point 10 of Xi Jinping Thought acknowledges that achieving all these other points puts China at risk from those who would prevents its rise (the unstated foe is, of course, the United States). The implacable tendency towards war that occurs anytime a new hegemon arises against an old is called a Thucydides Trap (named for the Greek historian Thucydides and his account of the Peloponnesian War between mighty Sparta and rising Athens). Xi here is codifying the need to prepare for this war to come.

So, it’s interesting that Xi is laying out the problem directly for Trump, as he’s making it very clear that China is the rising power and the USA is the fading one, which directly contradicts all of Trump’s bombastic rhetoric.

The problem, of course, is that there is an X factor involved, which is Clown World. The Thucydides Trap was avoided when the center of power was transferred from London to Washington DC because the same satanic powers remained in control. But Xi prevented the plans for a similar transfer from Washington to Beijing because the Chinese do not wish to be ruled by itinerant devil-worshippers; they had their fill of that following the Mongol invasion, to say nothing of the Century of Humiliation they recently endured at the hands of that very ruling elite.

So, there are two obvious paths, although there may be more. One, the USA accepts China’s rise embraces American nationalism, and throws off Clown World rule. That would be the desirable path, and most likely the one that Xi would support. Two, the USA continues being ridden by Clown World until it expires, defeated and bankrupt, and breaks apart, as I first publicly predicted in 2004.

I think we’ll have a pretty good idea which path has been chosen after Trump returns from China and we see if the USA continues fighting Israel’s war against Iran et al or if it withdraws from the Middle East and allows China to force a peace settlement in Iran’s favor.

UPDATE: Larry Johnson notes the US delegation is receiving second-class treatment. Perhaps because Xi knows he’s not meeting the real Donald Trump.

When Trump arrived in Beijing the plane was met at the airport by China’s Vice Premier and other senior Chinese officials rather than President Xi Jinping himself; U.S. and Chinese diplomatic representatives and an honor guard were also present. This was the same configuration that met Trump in November 2017 during his first trip to China. Compare that to the honors accorded to Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinping personally greeted him on arrival rather than leaving the welcome to lower‑level officials. Reports of Putin’s 2024 and other state visits say Xi received him with full ceremonial honors and met him on arrival in Beijing.

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Give Them Grass

The NFL owners are providing the real grass for the World Cup that it won’t provide for the NFL players who make their stadiums possible. The NFLPA has released a statement:

The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off in one month, and work is underway to install fresh grass surfaces in NFL stadiums for the world’s top soccer players.

NFL players have spent years advocating for safer, high-quality grass fields at their place of work, but when the World Cup is over, most of these stadiums will revert back to turf for the NFL season.

Our players deserve workplaces that prioritize their preference, protect them against the weekly wear and tear of the game, and support their long-term health and performance.

I don’t usually have much sympathy for the NFLPA, but this is one area where they are absolutely right and the league’s position makes no sense. Football is much better on grass, and NFL teams make more than enough money to make sure they are playing on it.

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