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There Will Be No Peace

In which Piero San Giorgio and Andrei Martyanov discuss the prospects for peace in Europe and NATO’s total lack of preparation for an escalated conflict with Russia:

Piero: So it was a few days ago that it was Victory Parade, and as you know, for me it is an event that is very dear because it is on May 9th, 1945 that my grandfather was liberated from a prisoner camp in Germany by the Red Army. So we always had this 9th of May as a family important day. And in fact, I will drink to it. I brought this from Moscow – I think it’s a 20mm shell anyway. And I wanted to start asking you the question: what does it mean for you and what does it mean for Russians in general, and what should it mean for everyone else, especially on this 80th anniversary of May 9th Victory Day?

Andrei: Well, it’s part of the family. Every family – literally every – there’s not a single family in Russia which hasn’t been touched by those events. And I understand, especially for you being a European, essentially it wasn’t the fight of Soviet Union, which was historic Russia, Russian Empire, new edition of Russian Empire. It was the fight against the combined forces of… It wasn’t just Germans. People who say that it’s “oh Germany” – yes Germany, but what about Romanian, Italian, Hungarian armies? Finnish half a million force of SS who participated in blockade of Leningrad, the siege of Leningrad. And you look at the SS divisions from France – Charlemagne – you know, Blue Division from Spain.

So when you go and look at this, yes, this was a unified European front against the Soviet Union. And as the result, we had a cataclysmic event of the kind which humanity never experienced. In four years, up to 70 million people on different fronts have been killed. Some of them have been killed in the most brutal way which haven’t been experienced before – be that concentration camps, let alone death camps, the industrial scale annihilation of the civilians like it was in Russia. And 27 million Soviet people died – actually majority of them civilians.

So whenever the so-called revisionists in the West begin… So-called revisionists – they don’t revise things, they just rewrite history. Most of them are not professional historians and they don’t know the first thing about warfare. But when they begin to rewrite history, they forget to say that majority of those were civilians. And the atrocities which have been committed against Soviet Union, and especially the utter destruction of European part of Soviet Union – primarily Russia and Belarus and Ukraine what is today – is unprecedented. And only Poles suffered equally, and obviously Chinese, but they had a much larger population already then.

So that’s the result. Scott Ritter stated a very interesting thing and I liked it very much, and I quote him: he said Russians cannot do anything about it because they have those people looking down at them. This is like… it was such a profundity. One of very few Americans who really grasped what it was.

So my family – no granddads, all killed at the front. My maternal grandfather was killed in 1941 around Donetsk. Then of course when my grandma remarried in 1945 – four years after, you know – she married again a veteran and he fought starting from the Soviet-Finnish War. So it’s in every family. My wife – she doesn’t have grandfathers. Pretty much 80-85% of the 23-year-olds generation in Soviet Union have been killed on the front. Yeah, disaster.

Piero: And it’s even more pitiful to consider the situation of today, that first of all it wasn’t the first time that Europeans tried to invade Russia – the Swedes, the Poles of course, but also Napoleon’s international armies. It was not just French. Crimean War, World War I was also… okay, we can argue on who really started it, but certainly there was a major front on the east in Russia. And all of this for me is very sad because you mentioned Europeans in World War II, the Charlemagne division and all that, and these young men were idealistic for the wrong reasons. And it’s always sad when you see young men dying for stupid reasons against other young men which could have had a bright future on all sides. And it’s such a disaster for me, for Europe and European civilization.

And so Victory Parade, the 80th anniversary last week – what do you… I obviously watched it, of course you watched it as well. What do you feel when you watch it?

Andrei: Well, it’s a sacred event really, and for any Russian. And especially most important thing actually is not even the parade – it’s the tradition, it’s a relatively new tradition of the Immortal Regiment. In St. Petersburg alone, which became Leningrad for a day sort of, 1.1 million people went out with their portraits of their grandfathers and grandmothers who fought and worked in rear to supply the front and all that. So it’s… I don’t even know how to explain it. I mean, many people they do not comprehend what is happening in terms of spiritual importance of all that. And it’s extremely important, extremely important. This is the part of you – you cannot change it, you just cannot change it. It’s there, you know.

So it’s… how can I forget my grandfathers? How? I mean, you know, they defended their motherland. Yes, they didn’t invade somebody, you know. Like people want to say, “Oh yeah, you split Poland between Germany.” Well, you wanted it, you refused to… So people don’t know the history, most people don’t. And in the West it is completely rewritten by the falsifiers and lowlifes, especially British succeeded, and Germans by the way. So when you look at that, what can I say? I mean Europe made up its mind. It’s Europe’s choice and nothing could be done about it. It cannot be changed.

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Continue reading “There Will Be No Peace”

Get Your UATV On

I’m on with Big Bear tonight. And you can also listen/download Vibe Patrol’s latest single, COSMIC TRIGGER (Fly Your Freak Flag), which was released today and will be higher quality than you’ll get from iTunes, Spotify, or YouTube, where the new track is also available.

Paywalls and Superchats are coming soon, so if you are a former subscriber, now is a good time to get on board with the new payment system.

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Talk to the Hand

The French First Significant Other was making sure that Emmanuel Macron remembered who is the real boss:

Emmanuel Macron betrayed his true feelings after being shoved in the face by wife Brigitte in a ‘shocking’ incident in front of the world’s media, a body language expert has revealed.

The French President appeared to ball one of his hands into a fist as he disembarked his plane in Vietnam moments after arriving in the country on Sunday night, Judi James pointed out.

Speaking to reporters in Hanoi today, Macron said that the incident had been overblown, insisting: ‘I was bickering, or rather joking, with my wife. It’s nothing.’

But James told MailOnline that the interaction was far from a ‘playful’ moment of teasing between a husband and wife, as Macron and his inner circle had attempted to portray it.

‘I would not describe the gesture we saw from inside the plane as one of “play” as has been claimed,’ she said.

‘Pushing your partner in the face with your hand so hard their head reels to the side and they need to put a hand out to keep balance, especially with what looks like an extra “shove” at the end of the contact, should not be normalized by calling it “fun” just to save political face.’

Fascinating to observe that Macron should lie about Brigitte when the entire world can see the obvious truth. But is it the only thing he’s lying about with regards to his alleged wife? How likely is that?

I don’t see what the big deal is. To me, it just looked like two guys roughhousing…

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Russia Moves Forward

After giving Kiev and the USA one last chance to avoid the next round of territorial acquisitions, it’s evident that Russia has accepted the futility of attempting to convince anyone on the NATO side to see reason. The Russian logic is impeccable: if the only territory that will be conceded for the purposes of a ceasefire is territory that is already under Russian military control, then there is no reason to hold up the Special Military Operation until all of the territories deemed necessary for a sound long-term defensive strategy have been acquired.

Here are the obvious signs that the next phase has begun and will probably not stop until the five provinces from Sumy to Odessa are under Russian control.

  • Britain, France, Germany and the United States have lifted restrictions on the range of military supplies to Ukraine, German Chancellor Merz said.
  • Russian President Vladimir Putin has officially announced the establishment of a “security buffer zone” along the border with Ukraine. Russian troops, according to the Kremlin, have already been ordered to push ahead and are actively targeting Ukrainian military positions near the frontier. The move is aimed at protecting Russian regions far from the front line – particularly Belgorod, Bryansk, and Kursk – which have faced frequent shelling, drone strikes, as well as sabotage missions launched by Ukrainian forces.
  • Kiev’s Western backers — particularly the UK, France, Germany, and the EU’s leadership — bear responsibility for the latest Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian territory, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said during a Q&A session in Moscow.
  • The scale of the onslaught was stunning. Russia hit Ukraine with 367 drones and missiles, making this the largest single attack of the more than three-years-long war, according to Ukraine Air Force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat. It was “the most massive strike in terms of the number of air attack weapons on the territory of Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022,” Ihnat said.

President Trump appears to have recognized that the Russians are no longer interested in his administration’s constant posturing, although he still doesn’t seem to have accepted that he is no longer holding any cards.

I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He is needlessly killing a lot of people, and I’m not just talking about soldiers. Missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever. I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia! Likewise, President Zelenskyy is doing his Country no favors by talking the way he does. Everything out of his mouth causes problems, I don’t like it, and it better stop. This is a War that would never have started if I were President. This is Zelenskyy’s, Putin’s, and Biden’s War, not “Trump’s,” I am only helping to put out the big and ugly fires, that have been started through Gross Incompetence and Hatred.

It may not have begun as Trump’s war, but it is Trump’s war now. He has refused to shut down the flow of aid to Ukraine, and if the German Chancellor is to be believed, he has also lifted restrictions on the range of US missiles being supplied to Kiev, so he is clearly responsible for the Kiev regime being able to continue fighting. If he had, as many serious observers advised at the time, begun his second term in January by unequivocally stating that the US would not continue to provide any weapons and financial aid to the Kiev regime, or to any third party doing so, the war would already be over now. But the president simply didn’t do what the Russians knew he had the power to do, and so they have correctly concluded that if they are going to achieve their objectives, they will need to do so on the battlefield.

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What Did We Expect?

Fencing Bear points out that the extreme decline of literacy should have been obvious, less due to the various technological and demographic changes, but because of the way in which the value of reading has been deprecated by the schools and universities:

Why should we expect our students to be able to read for scriptural allusions and figures of speech, images and cross-references and patterns of meaning, for symbolism and beauty and the resonance of phonemes, when everything in their education is telling them that reading is a skill that they need to make money, and making money means filling in the right forms to get shipments from China or contracts from India? Why should we expect our students to enjoy reading when we have reduced their education to a series of bullet points that they might as well get from SparkNotes or chatGPT? Why should they care about reading when their souls have been rendered statistics in the calculation of our national GDP?

It’s true that reading, and the liberal arts in general, have been massively devalued since the early 1980s, as a part of the quantization that has followed the adoption of a purely materialist philosophy by the education system and society at large.

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A Tragic Trust

Smart Boys who love science and trust modern medicine will literally die before they will question their assumptions of who is credible and who is not, as we’re witnessing in real-time with Scott Adams:

Scott’s story is tragic. He has been repeatedly betrayed by Modern Medicine.

Let me explain.

Scott took COVID-19 Vaccines. He trusted his doctors who would have assured him they were “Safe and Effective”. You can count that as a life-changing betrayal.

Since then, Scott has made it very clear that those who didn’t take the COVID-19 Vaccines made the right choice and didn’t have to worry about impacts of the jabs on their health. It is probable that he suffered bodily injury as a result of the jabs.

Scott was then betrayed by his Oncologists. It is clear that his Prostate Cancer was not treated properly. Prostate Cancer patients can live many years, even decades without progression, with the proper Cancer Treatment.

I don’t know what Prostate Cancer treatments Scott took, who his Oncologists were or which Cancer Center he was treated at. But they failed to stop Scott’s cancer from progressing rapidly to a “terminal stage” in a short period of time.

In addition to failing to treat his cancer properly, Scott’s Oncologist lied to him, repeatedly.

First, he told Scott that Ivermectin wouldn’t work, even though he had no way to know whether it would or wouldn’t.

Second, he told Scott that he had 0% chance of survival and would die shortly.

I wish Scott had told us the name of his Oncologist, and the name of the Cancer Center he was treated at, so that other Cancer patients could avoid them and save themselves from harm. Unfortunately, he hasn’t given us these names.

Instead, he has given the world my name, for reasons I don’t understand.

I have never been Scott’s doctor. I was his Health Coach, very briefly. Our Health Coaching relationship lasted 1.5 months, at which point Scott left.

Scott supposedly tried Ivermectin and Fenbendazole, for a total of 1 month.

Scott never completed my Ivermectin Protocol, which is a minimum of 3 months with follow-up blood work and imaging. So we will never know if Ivermectin and Fenbendazole would have worked for him or not. Trying it for one month and then stopping, is not sufficient to make any sort of conclusion.

It is the equivalent of doing one chemo cycle, stopping and declaring chemo doesn’t work.

It takes approximately 3 months to see significant changes on blood cancer markers and imaging. During that time, PSA may go up due to cancer cell killing and release of cancer antigens.

What is both tragic and stupid is the way in which Scott simply refuses to question any step in his headlong, self-imposed failure cascade. But instead of stopping, taking a look around, and assessing exactly how he has put himself in his present position, Scott insists on doubling down, then doubling down again.

It’s neither honest nor rational behavior. If he was honest, Scott would have identified everyone as well as his specific treatment protocols. If he was rational, he would have given the alternative treatment a fair shot; he is literally treating himself with less care than Spacebunny has successfully treated one of our dogs. The fact that he continues to act as a gatekeeper in the medical context despite his condition is sufficient to render his situation entirely unsympathetic.

Their trust is not only tragic, it is woefully misplaced.

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A Century of Damning Evidence

If, at this point, you’re still vaccinating yourself or your children, you deserve the predictably suboptimal outcomes you are actively injecting into your life:

•Since at least 1933, the medical community has known that vaccines cause infant deaths. To conceal this, those deaths were renamed “crib death” and then “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome” (SIDS), eventually being attributed to infants not sleeping on their backs.

•This revisionism is not supported by the existing evidence nor the historical changes in the frequency of SIDS. Most recently, SIDS rates have had an unprecedented decrease in tandem with the COVID-19 lockdowns reducing vaccination rates.

•The vaccine most strongly associated with SIDS, DPT, was protected for decades by the government despite knowing a large body of evidence around the world showed it killed infants—particularly when an inevitable hot lot was released. Eventually, so many injury lawsuits were filed that in 1986, the government had to give blanket immunity to the vaccine manufacturers.

•This article will concisely review the vast body of evidence showing vaccines cause SIDS and reveal the mechanism modern research has now repeatedly proven causes vaccines to trigger infant death.

We’re always told that vaccines were a medical marvel that safely ended the dark age of infectious disease. However, when the actual records are examined, they often abjectly failed to prevent those diseases, and worse still, frequently caused outbreaks and severely injured many of the recipients.

This in part resulted from the inherent toxicity of vaccines and in part because manufacturing challenges regularly resulted in hot lots being released. Rather than address this, the vaccine industry chose to create a variety of strategies to conceal those issues, such as enshrining the dogma “all vaccines are safe” and giving blanket legal immunity to all the “safe” vaccines.

It’s perfectly understandable that many parents do not want to believe this. But the truth is not only ruthless, it is inexorable.

The incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has grown from .55 per 1000 live births in 1953 to 1.28 per 1000 in 1992 in Olmstead County, Minnesota. The peak incidence for SIDS is at age 2 to 4 months, the exact time most vaccines are being given to children. 85 % of cases of SIDS occur in the first 6 months of infancy. The increase in SIDS as a percentage of total infant deaths has risen from 2.5 per 1000 in 1953 to 17.9 per 1000 in 1992. This rise in SIDS deaths has occurred during a period when nearly every childhood disease was declining due to improved sanitation and medical progress except SIDS. These deaths from SIDS did increase during a period when the number of vaccines given to a child was steadily rising to 36 per child.

What a tragic and inexplicable 133 percent rise in the number of parents shaking their babies and putting infants to sleep on their stomachs! Clearly more education is in order! More education and more vaccines!

UPDATE: the report got the rate of increase wrong. It was 0.55 to 1.28, not 0.55 to 12.8. Still an obvious problem, but literally one-tenth as glaring.

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The Irrelevance of International Economics

Branko Milanovic underlines the irrelevance of modern economic theory to international relations and economics:

Mainstream economists can focus on facilitating economic competition within a fundamentally cooperative worldwide system because they pay hardly any attention to how states think about survival in international anarchy, in which war is always a possibility. Thus, concepts like security competition and the balance of power, which are fundamentally important for studying international politics, have no place in conventional economics…Moreover, economists tend to privilege a state’s absolute gains, not its relative gains, which is to say they largely ignore the balance of power.

The inability of economists to meaningfully discuss current international economic relations has become painfully obvious in their, at time pathetic, attempts to teach the US leadership of Economics 101 lessons while not realizing that the US leadership, under both Trump I and II and Biden, was not involved in a policy to improve the position of US consumers or workers but to slow the rise of China and to maintain American global hegemonic position. This inability to engage with reality springs from an extremely reductionist methodological position where one’s welfare is a function of one’s own absolute income only. With such an assumption it becomes entirely incomprehensible why somebody (in this case, a country: the United States) would get engaged into a tariff war and use other policies that reduce welfare of its own citizens (while at the same time also reducing welfare in China and in the rest of the world). A policy that not merely implies a negative-sum game but is designed to be a lose-lose policy, that is, to make both the originator and the target of the policy worse off in economic terms, makes absolutely no sense for such economists.

But it a real world, it does makes sense. Simplicist economists cannot comprehend it because their methodological toolkit is faulty and obsolete: it fails to take into account relativities, that is, the importance, pleasure or utility that we as individuals, and even more so countries and their ruling elites, derive from being richer or more powerful than others. If they were to add another argument in their utility functions, the relativity, whether of own income to another person’s or of own country vis-à-vis other country, they would have to say something meaningful. Instead, they are reduced to the endless repetition of trivialities…

Commentators thus criticize something that is irrelevant, that is not the real goal of the policy and this makes them look silly. They believe that by dispensing elementary economics lessons they show how wrong-headed the governing elites are while in truth they simply reveal inadequacy of their own methodological apparatus.

However, even this critique is too shallow and intrinsically assumptive of the theoretical benefits of international economic theory to be meaningful. First, it completely fails to take into account the actual preferences of the various economic players. Trump is not hurting American workers with his protectionism and the free traders were, quite obviously, not helping American workers with their blitheringly stupid trade policies of the last 40 years.

Second, it fails to observe the real relationship between war and economics, or account for the way in which war with a trading partner is a multiply by zero situation that cancels out all of the supposed benefits of trade and more.

And third, international economics is fundamentally erroneous and therefore reliably unreliable because it takes all the models developed for a single national economy and then tries to apply them, unchanged in any significant way, to a single hypothetical supereconomy that doesn’t even exist and doesn’t have any of the interests, structures, or players that national economies do. International economics is, quite literally, a category error, and is no more viable than Martian water polo or Venusian speedskating.

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People Can Tell It’s AI

At least, they can if you leave the prompts right in the middle of your published text:

Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:” It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work.

The original text from the novel:

I expect skepticism. Dismissal. What I get instead is immediate action. Roman moves fully between me and the mirror, making the floor vibrate slightly beneath our feet. Ash’s scales darken as his fire magic heats the air around us.

I’ve rewritten the passage to aligin more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:

“We need to tell Kai,” Roman says, the words coming out like gravel.

Now, I’m a huge fan of using AI as a creative tool. I’m even more of a fan of doing so now than ever before, for reasons that will eventually become apparent. But as with any tool, it’s how you utilize it that matters, and to be honest, I don’t even know how you manage to put your prompts into the actual text, which suggests that Ms McDonald is using a different text AI system than I do.

I have managed to put prompts into lyrics by accident, although it’s much more common to accidentally add extra lyrics into a track due to the way Suno retains the original set of lyrics even when a track is extended or a section is replaced. But that never escapes notice, because it’s hard to miss when the track length suddenly goes from 3:22 to 5:47.

Anyhow, people are simply going to have to get over being precious about AI-produced content because a) it’s only going to get better and b) most people are not going to be anywhere nearly as open as I am about when they’re using it and when they’re not.

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MPAI: Even Worse Than You Think

In fact, most people are less intelligent and less capable than many of you can probably imagine:

How many US adults score at literacy level 4 or higher? About 12%, or 1 in 8.

Since over 60% of high school grads go on to enroll in college, we know for a certainty that the vast majority of them are below level 4 in literacy. College kids are functionally illiterate. QED. But what about those level 5 literate types, the ones who comprise around 1% of adults? What can they do?

This is the subject of a recently released study making waves in the education world. Researchers decided to sit with current college English majors and see how much they understood of what they read. In other words, these are competent high-school level readers by any national standard.

So how do they do on more complex and archaic language, like Dickens? Not well!

We placed the 85 subjects from both universities into three categories of readers: problematic, competent, and proficient. A summary of our major conclusions gives some basic data for our ensuing discussion:

* 58 percent (49 of 85 subjects) understood so little of the introduction to Bleak House that they would not be able to read the novel on their own.

* 38 percent (or 32 of the 85 subjects) could understand more vocabulary and figures of speech than the problematic readers. These competent readers, however, could interpret only about half of the literal prose in the passage.

* Only 5 percent (4 of the 85 subjects) had a detailed, literal understanding of the first paragraphs of Bleak House.

To summarize even further for those skimming:

  • 58% of students understood very little of the passages they read
  • 38% could understand about half of the sentences
  • 5% could understand all seven paragraphs

These are college students majoring in English. About half of them are English Education majors, which means they will be teaching books like Bleak House to high school students after graduating. But they themselves cannot understand the literal meaning of the sentences in the opening paragraphs.

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