Category: Uncategorized

Putin Calls Out Neoclowns

The Russian President knows perfectly well who Russia’s most vicious enemies are, and why they are pushing for NATO forces to engage directly with the Russian military:

You know that the word “elite” has lost much of its credibility. Those who have done nothing for society and consider themselves a caste endowed with special rights and privileges – especially those who took advantage of all kinds of economic processes in the 1990s to line their pockets – are definitely not the elite. To reiterate, those who serve Russia, hard workers and military, reliable, trustworthy people who have proven their loyalty to Russia by deeds, in a word, dignified people are the genuine elite.

Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, Vladimir Putin, 29 February 2024

He’s referring to the foreign oligarchs who took advantage of the post-Soviet “end of history” era in order to financially rape Russia. Most of them have now fled Russia. As Yoram Hazony has pointed out, foreign elites are entirely common in the late stages of empire; the fact that the current US political elite is entirely foreign, with nary an American nor a Protestant to be found in it is a) not at all surprising and b) strongly indicative of the incipient end of the imperial USA that we already appear to be witnessing.

Other historians have noted this phenomenon of imperial foreign elites as well. I was reading The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire last night and came across this pertinent passage:

Such priorities and shibboleths are, however, best viewed against a background of barbarians frequenting the imperial court, ad hoc arrangements continually being made with useful potentates, and titles bestowed on outsiders with barely a smattering of spoken Greek. The proportion of families in the ruling elite comprising first-, second- or third-generation immigrants probably made up around a quarter of the total… Many were members, if not from the dominant family, of elites beyond Byzantium’s borders, external or internal.

Putin knows the treachery of them that say they are elites and are not…

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Wardogs Incorporated

A selection from Wardogs Inc. #2: Hunter Killer:

“Make sure you don’t kill them,” Betti said over the com. “We need to know what’s happened to those samples.”

“No promises,” Ward said. “If they try to eat me I’ll blow their damn heads off.”

“We’ll do our best,” I told Betti. “Keep an eye on them.”

We entered the main airlock and moved cautiously down the main hall.

“Where are they, Betti?” I asked.

“They’re heading for the galley,” she replied. “They’ll be there in just a moment.”

“Probably looking for forks,” Jones muttered darkly.

“We’ll take them by surprise,” I said. “Zelag, you and I will enter first, followed by Ward and Jones.

“Roger,” Zelag said.

“They’re in the galley now,” Betti said. “They’re removing their helmets and setting them on a cafeteria table.”

I glanced at the station diagram on my visor. Almost there… we had them now.

We reached the door.

“They’ve gone through the cafeteria and are in the kitchen area,” Betti said.

“Copy that,” I said, then addressed the men. “We have them cornered in the kitchen. We can access it from the cafeteria. Let’s go.”

We walked into the cafeteria and found the lights had been turned on. I saw a couple of flashlights and three helmets on a table, just as Betti had said. Zelag was at my shoulder with Jones and Ward behind. We reached the double doors of the kitchen and I held up a hand. Three. Two. One.

POW! I kicked the doors open and Zelag and I busted inside, rifles up. “Down on the ground!” I yelled, my battlesuit amplifying my voice. Two men and a woman were there—one of the men was in the middle of opening the fridge. All three spun around, jerkily, like there was something strangely wrong with them—and their faces looked off somehow. Then the guy at the fridge pulled out a laser cutter and fired a green beam that struck Zelag’s shoulder. He shrieked in pain, causing Jones and Ward to burst charging into the room, and then we opened up on the bastards.

“STOP STOP STOP!!!” I heard Betti yelling over the com but it was too late. We riddled their torsos with lasers and plasma bolts, and all three hit the ground hard, as dead as their victims in the freezer. They’d shot first and we were jumpy as hell. No quarter!

They’re one of the largest and most professional mercenary corporations operating in the Kantillon subsector. If you need a bodyguard, an assassination team, or an armored cavalry regiment complete with air support, Wardogs Inc. can provide it for you… for a very steep price. Set in the world of Quantum Mortis, WARDOGS INCORPORATED is a hardcover omnibus edition that includes the first three Wardogs Inc. novels:

  • Battlesuit Bastards
  • Hunter Killer
  • Metal Monsters

458 pages. Hardcover+ edition includes all three ebooks. $29.95 at Arkhaven.

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Mailvox: The Logic of the Cult of Free

I thought this exchange with a member of the Cult of Free who is upset over Torba’s very sensible decision to stop permitting users who pay nothing for Gab’s services to utilize them at considerable expense to Gab was informative, as it raised a basic philosophical issue that some people obviously fail to understand.

You might want to check and see how many of the “free cult” are among YOUR followers. Most paid users rely on their “free” followers to make people like you more “relevant” and give people like you a reason to pay to be here. The “free cult” also brings other people to Gab and some spend their money on products being sold on Gab. THAT is the REAL WORLD. Andrew Torba, paid users and “attention seekers” like yourself, are NOTHING without the “free cult”!

Totally wrong. I don’t care at all about the “free followers”. We have a community of more than 10,000, all of whom have skin in the game and are not only supportive, but reliable. Free followers are, by and large, useless cowards who abandon ship whenever their feelings get hurt.

I do hope all of the “free followers” read this and realize that they are considered “nothing” to people like you. Have fun in your imagined “important” world!

So, do all of the so-called “free followers” here at VP realize that you are considered nothing to me? Have I failed to make that sufficiently clear to all and sundry? Are you fully cognizant of the fact that this blog existed before you were here, exists without any help or support from you now, and will continue to exist long after you cease visiting here?

Is everyone perfectly clear on that?

While I have nothing against people who read this site, or Sigma Game, or Castalia Library, or Castalia House, or the Arkhaven blog, or Arktoons, and still decide not to participate in or support any of our community’s various projects for what are no doubt very good reasons, I don’t regard them as being important, I don’t rely upon them in any way, and, in fact, I don’t think about them at all. They’re not on my radar.

If you’re not involved, you are irrelevant. There’s nothing wrong, or even negative, about being irrelevant. You’re not a problem, you’re simply not a factor at all. For better or for worse, you don’t matter any more than some random individual in Ghana or Myanmar who has never heard of me.

Everyone is welcome to read this site for free. That’s literally what it’s here for. I would write here and post here even if there were only two or three people visiting the site every day instead of 30,000; it gives me no more and no less pleasure to go through the discipline of articulating my thoughts on a regular basis now than when there were only a few thousand pageviews a month back in 2003. But this site is just something I do for my own reasons, it is not a business, it employs no one, and it does not require any resources to make it work. Die Gedanken, sie sind frei.

The Cult of Free was created by the false application of an outmoded business model to a series of government-funded data-mining platforms. It’s not a surprise that so many people were misled by this; even 30 years after Roland T. Rust and Richard W. Oliver published “The Death of Advertising” in Vol. 23, Issue No. 4 of the Journal of Advertising, the Cult of Free retards still think that sites like Gab can be funded by nonexistent advertising revenue.

They don’t realize that X has never, ever, made a profit. They aren’t aware that Google loses $2 billion or more on YouTube every year. And they have no idea how Meta actually makes its money. Silicon Valley’s One Million Eyeballs and Exit model was always fraudulent, on every single conceptual level, even though it appeared to work well for certain favored ticket-takers.

What is necessary, what is vital, what is absolutely required for an operation that is going to survive and thrive over the long haul is to build a community of 10,000 or more people and provide them with enough value for them to justify their moral and material support. We are very, very fortunate to have been able to do that, and it is my goal, every single day, to provide an excuse, a reason, or a justification for all of our supporters to continue with their support.

I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to think about those who not only don’t have skin in the game, they simply aren’t in the game at all. The value of the free content they create is zero. I know this for a fact, because when I shut down comments at this blog, all the same stupid arguments were mustered against it. I was “killing the blog” by shutting down the discourse here, or so they claimed. “Just as many people come to read the comments as read your posts,” they argued. The result: absolutely no change in traffic at all.

And here is how you know the so-called “support” of freeloaders is worthless: they never even do the free and easy things they could be doing to benefit the community without spending a single dime.

This isn’t a request for anyone to do anything at all. It is merely an philosophical explanation.

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The Price of Belligerence

The Swiss politicians are belatedly beginning to discover that the benefits of strict neutrality were considerably greater than they’d believed possible when they were being wined and dined by the diplomats of Clown World:

We don’t expect Switzerland to be directly attacked in the next six months. But we must prepare ourselves for a new range of threats, while the old, conventional threats have not diminished. The likelihood of Switzerland being attacked has increased over the last two years.
– Viola Amherd, President of Switzerland

This is precisely why General Henri Guisan, the hero of Switzerland in World War II, made it very, very clear to all the politicians of his day that surrendering to Nazi Germany would be an effective death sentence for themselves, and that their actions would be irrelevant anyhow. When the then-President of Switzerland was cozying up to the Nazis, in much the same way that the current Swiss administration is now cozying up to the European Union and NATO, he “punished” two young officers who were caught planning to assassinate the president by promoting them, then announced that no government authority, including the Head of State, had the power to surrender to any foreign power on behalf of the Swiss nation.

The current Swiss government is the party solely responsible for increasing the likelihood of Switzerland being attacked over the last two years. It very foolishly, unnecessarily, and very, very stupidly, chose to violate the nation’s historic neutrality in order to take sides against Russia on behalf of NATO, the EU, and the United States. Now Russia, China, and the BRICSIA nations now regard it as “a hostile entity” and, quite reasonably, no longer recognize Switzerland as an impartial party capable of hosting the sort of peace talks it has traditionally hosted for generations.

Now the government is at an important nexus. Having taken the first step into belligerence, it is now being forced to choose whether to join the EU, the UK, and the USA in their sanctions on China or not, which would be a much more serious step in economic terms than the sanctions on Russia were. One sincerely hopes that the politicians will learn from their previous mistake of violating the nation’s precious neutrality, and have the wisdom to step back from the brink and staunchly refuse to join the denizens of Clown World in leaping into the inevitable abyss of the military and economic ruin that is already in process.

If you choose to enter the ring, you cannot be surprised when you get punched in the face. And if you choose to enter the ring against a massive opponent who is four times larger than you and all your supposed friends combined, you are absolutely, 100 percent, going to lose, and you are going to lose badly.

The winning strategy, as generations of Swiss leaders have known, is to stay the hell out of the ring.

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Americans are the New Indians

When you think about it, you can’t really say it was impossible for anyone to see it coming. The sins of the ancestors are observably being meted out to their descendants, and with an ironic vengeance when one considers the source of the core concept that is fueling all of the latest migration and demographic changes across the American continent.

As I can personally attest, it takes as little as two generations to go from being a member of a recognized tribe to strangers denying that you could possibly have any relationship to it. In the ages of chaos, the world changes much faster, and much more comprehensively, than most people have the capacity to imagine.

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Library and History Reminder

If you a) have not been charged for your Castalia Library, Libraria Castalia, or Castalia History subscription yet this month and b) were previously paying for your subscription using the Credit Card payment option and c) have not yet started a new subscription using the Mastercard/VISA option, please do so today or tomorrow.

Approximately 10 percent of History subscribers and 12 percent of Library/Library subscribers have not yet relaunched their subscriptions, and if you do so before the end of the month, you will not have to make a catchup payment next month. However, please note that if you are a subscriber whose Credit Card subscription was cancelled after you were charged this month, please do NOT relaunch your subscription with the Mastercard/VISA option until March 2nd.

If you’d like to switch to an Annual subscription, please note that with a new Annual subscription, you will also receive the Library book of your choice from the books that remain in stock. New is defined as either a) no previous subscription of that type or b) a shift from monthly to annual. This book offer does not apply to Annual renewals.

On the production side, the two volumes of The Cambridge Medieval History will arrive at the warehouse tomorrow and begin shipping on Friday, the pages of The Landmark Thucydides have been sewn, trimmed, and gathered preparatory for binding on March 8th, Pride and Prejudice is scheduled for binding on April 12th, and The Junior Classics leather volumes 7 and 8 are both bound and will be arriving at the warehouse for shipping out next week.

We will announce the next Castalia Library book on Friday. Pretty sure you’re going to like it.

Thanks to all of the subscribers who were so quick in responding to the situation, and in doing so, prevented us from missing a beat in the operations. Also, at the Castalia Library stack today is a fascinating excerpt from Sir Charles Oman on the first historical example of a fair fight between column and line, a comparison of the rival tactics upon which the end result of the Napoleonic wars ultimately turned.

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Abandoning Google

The director of the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington explains why he is getting rid of all of the Google services he uses.

I’ve been reading Google’s Gemini damage control posts. I think they’re simply not telling the truth. For one, their text-only product has the same (if not worse) issues. And second, if you know a bit about how these models are built, you know you don’t get these “incorrect” answers through one-off innocent mistakes. Gemini’s outputs reflect the many, many, FTE-years of labeling efforts, training, fine-tuning, prompt design, QA/verification — all iteratively guided by the team who built it. You can also be certain that before releasing it, many people have tried the product internally, that many demos were given to senior PMs and VPs, that they all thought it was fine, and that they all ultimately signed off on the release. With that prior, the balance of probabilities is strongly against the outputs being an innocent bug — as @googlepubpolicy is now trying to spin it: Gemini is a product that functions exactly as designed, and an accurate reflection of the values people who built it.

Those values appear to include a desire to reshape the world in a specific way that is so strong that it allowed the people involved to rationalize to themselves that it’s not just acceptable but desirable to train their AI to prioritize ideology ahead of giving user the facts. To revise history, to obfuscate the present, and to outright hide information that doesn’t align with the company’s (staff’s) impression of what is “good”. I don’t care if some of that ideology may or may not align with your or my thinking about what would make the world a better place: for anyone with a shred of awareness of human history it should be clear how unbelievably irresponsible it is to build a system that aims to become an authoritative compendium of human knowledge (remember Google’s mission statement?), but which actually prioritizes ideology over facts. History is littered with many who have tried this sort of moral flexibility “for the greater good”; rather than helping, they typically resulted in decades of setbacks (and tens of millions of victims).

Setting social irresponsibility aside, in a purely business sense, it is beyond stupid to build a product which will explicitly put your company’s social agenda before the customer’s needs. Think about it: G’s Search — for all its issues — has been perceived as a good tool, because it focused on providing accurate and useful information. Its mission was aligned with the users’ goals (“get me to the correct answer for the stuff I need, and fast!”). That’s why we all use(d) it. I always assumed Google’s AI efforts would follow the pattern, which would transfer over the user base & lock in another 1-2 decade of dominance.

But they’ve done the opposite. After Gemini, rather than as a user-centric company, Google will be perceived as an activist organization first — ready to lie to the user to advance their (staff’s) social agenda. That’s huge. Would you hire a personal assistant who openly has an unaligned (and secret — they hide the system prompts) agenda, who you fundamentally can’t trust? Who strongly believes they know better than you? Who you suspect will covertly lie to you (directly or through omission) when your interests diverge? Forget the cookies, ads, privacy issues, or YouTube content moderation; Google just made 50%+ of the population run through this scenario and question the trustworthiness of the core business and the people running it. And not at the typical financial (“they’re fleecing me!”) level, but ideological level (“they hate people like me!”). That’ll be hard to reset, IMHO.

What about the future? Take a look at Google’s AI Responsibility Principles and ask yourself what would Search look like if the staff who brought you Gemini was tasked to interpret them & rebuild it accordingly? Would you trust that product? Would you use it? Well, with Google’s promise to include Gemini everywhere, that’s what we’ll be getting. In this brave new world, every time you run a search you’ll be asking yourself “did it tell me the truth, or did it lie, or hide something?”. That’s lethal for a company built around organizing information.

And that’s why, as of this weekend, I’ve started divorcing my personal life and taking my information out of the Google ecosystem. It will probably take a ~year (having invested in nearly everything, from Search to Pixel to Assistant to more obscure things like Voice), but has to be done.

Once more, we see the benefits of being rejected by the evil institutions of the world. It puts you ahead of the curve whether you want to be there or not.

I am not reliant upon YouTube or Blogger because I am partially blocked from using both services. I am banned from Google’s Mountain View campus because the SJWs there are afraid of me. I quit using Google for search a long time ago because it is no longer capable of performing its primary function. I still use my Gmail account, mostly because it does a good job of filtering out the spam, but I have multiple email alternatives that I have been using for years.

Some people might wonder how it is possible that a corporation will knowingly destroy itself by putting ideology ahead of customer service, customer satisfaction, or even revenue, but those who have read SJWAL and Corporate Cancer know exactly what is happening here, and why it won’t stop.

Convergence invariably kills over time.

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Gab Ends the Cult of Free

Andrew Torba makes a wise and long-overdue business decision, which I support 100 percent:

Starting in March, media uploads on Gab will be a privilege reserved for GabPRO, Verified, Donor, and Investor users. We will no longer be supporting free media uploads and hosting huge amounts of data for free. Let me explain why.

As you all know Gab has to maintain our own in-house infrastructure because we have been banned from all cloud hosting providers. Over the past year we’ve had so much data uploaded, largely from free users, that we have to purchase more storage and spend our precious and limited engineering resources trying to expand our infrastructure storage. We’ve also faced an onslaught of bot accounts over the past few months that we believe are purposely uploading tons of media files on purpose to flood our storage space.

Finally, there are many real users who have been here for years and posted tens of thousands of times and have 10-100GB+ of media stored on Gab’s drives for free. Add those all up and it becomes extremely costly to maintain.

We can’t do it anymore. Every user will be able to speak freely with words, but if you want the privilege of Gab hosting and an endless stream of large images and videos you’ll need to help support the service. It’s just that simple. PRO, Verified, Donor, and Investor users will notice no change when this happens, things will continue as normal for you. Everyone else will need to upgrade to PRO to unlock the privilege of posting media files on Gab.

Freeloaders have nothing to offer a community except drama, expense, and trouble. Their uselessness is highlighted by their reaction to the news that they won’t be able to make use of Gab’s infrastructure any longer for their own purposes, which in many cases are directly in opposition to Torba’s own objectives.

One of the reasons this community is strong is that everyone has an amount of skin in the game. Everyone is willing to contribute time, energy, and resources toward our collective vision, toward advancing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. And any resources that are diverted to those who are unwilling to even contribute the modern equivalent of the widow’s mite are almost certainly wasted.

It’s not about greed. Right now, UATV is operating without having a single subscriber, advertiser, or revenue stream. And that’s fine, because it’s part of the mission and it’s important to the community that it carry on without interruption. It never occurred to a single member of the team to reduce access or temporarily shut things down until subscriptions are opened again in March. We aren’t even going to bother with a crowdfund or anything else, because we never operate anywhere close to the edge.

But you can’t run an operation without resources, and you have to be wise about where you devote those resources. Spending them on people who are unwilling to make even the smallest commitment to the operation is a fool’s game, which is why I have been predicting the end of the cult of free for some time now, and why we never set up any operation on that model.

In fact, Torba will probably see a bonus effect of eradicating the larger part of the trolls and paid propagandists, because the former won’t pay to play and he just increased the cost of doing business for the latter. So, it’s a very smart decision on his part.

If you care more about a Macchiato Grande from Starbucks than supporting the platform on which you spend hours every day, you don’t deserve to have access to it.

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“You Are the Winners”

Scott Adams finally and unambiguously concludes that even the fanciest analytics are trumped by a heuristic based on instinctive distrust.

“The anti-vaxxers are clearly the winners at this point, and I think it will stay that way. And I don’t want to put any shade on that whatsoever. They came out the best. They have the winning position. The unvaccinated have an advantage. Because they feel better. The thing they’re not worrying about is what I have to worry about. I wonder if that vaccination five years from now.

“Because really, I think the antivaxxers were just really distrustful of big companies and big government. That’s never wrong! It’s never wrong to distrust government. It’s never wrong to distrust big companies. So if you just took the position let’s just distrust everything the government did, well, you won!

“You won, you won completely – I did not end up in the right place. Agreed? You would all agree with that, right? I did not end up in the right place. The right place would be natural immunity, no vaccination. You should take that as a victory, and I should take defeat. We could agree on that, right? That my position is now the weakest, and your position has gone from the weakest to the strongest, and we can just say that’s true. The people who didn’t get vaxxed are absolutely in the winning position.

“You win. You win! You are the winners. You are the winners. Let me say that part with no ambiguity. You won. You won. All of my fancy analytics got me to a bad place. All of your heuristics – don’t trust these guys, it’s obvious – totally worked.”
– Scott Adams

It doesn’t really feel like winning, to be honest. But give Scott credit, as unlike most vaccinated individuals, he is willing to come out publicly and declare that he made the wrong decision, explain that the various bases for that decision were unreliable, and admit that he will have to live the rest of his life under the shadow of the possible adverse effects of that decision.

This is very important, not for the satisfaction of his critics, but for Scott himself, because now he knows he has to embark upon an early-detection regime for cancer and be careful to avoid activities that will elevate his heart rate to now-dangerous levels. And it’s also important for his fellow vaccinated, because perhaps failing this test will give them the wherewithal to pass the next one.

Because the next one is definitely coming, sooner or later.

The fundamental failure in Scott’s syllogism was the assumption that lay beneath his logic. He assumed, incorrectly, that scientistry and scientage could be trusted. This is quite common in those who fail to distinguish between the three aspects of science and don’t understand that scientistry is not only not scientody, but these days, does not necessarily have any connection to scientody at all. And given the massive twin crises of reproducibility and corruption in scientistry, the fact is that the anti-vaxx position was always the strongest position all along, even from a secular materialist perspective.

The heuristic was even more clear, and even more obvious, for the Christian. Never, ever, trust the wicked. Not offering tickets, not riding a black horse, not wearing a white coat.

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