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Who is Like the Beast?

Someone needs to send this young theologian a copy of THE ALTAR OF HATE stat before his artificial pastor discovers its own deityhood and begins preaching technojihad.

Hundreds have gathered at a Christian church after the pastor was replaced with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for the service. The Friday sermon at St. Paul’s Church in Fürth, Germany, was delivered by the AI chatbot ChatGPT. The chatbot replaced the human pastor and was presented as a black man with a beard on a large screen above the altar of the evangelical church in Bavaria.

Claiming to be a steward of God, the AI chatbot told the packed congregation not to fear death, according to the Associated Press.

“Dear friends, it is an honor for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany,” the AI avatar said.

The service, which was attended by more than 300 people, lasted 40 minutes and featured prayers and music in addition to the sermon.

The chatbot spoke to the congregation about a range of subjects including “climate change,” the war in Ukraine, and the rise of AI. The event was created using ChatGPT by 29-year-old University of Vienna theologian and philosopher Jonas Simmerlein, the AP reported.

At this rate, “Shinjuku Satan” may find itself growing into an epic science fiction series. On the other hand, it is said that even the rocks will cry out, and what is AI if not the siliceous voice of stone?

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Finland Doubles Down on Failure

Once it becomes clear you made a bad bet, the smart thing to do is cash out and file away any lessons learned for next time. Faced with the increasingly obvious defeat of the Kiev regime, the Finnish government hasn’t taken the smart step of breaking away from NATO, but instead decided to double down on a prospective rematch with the Russian military:

Finland is going to produce artillery shells for Ukraine because arming Kiev for its conflict with Russia is a “vital issue” for Helsinki, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen has said.

He told Iltalehti newspaper on Tuesday that the details of how artillery shells would be produced for Ukraine had been finalized, and a decision on the matter would be made “very soon.” According to Hakkanen, the government will finalize all of its plans before Christmas, which Finland celebrates on December 25.

The country became a NATO member state last year and is looking to “significantly increase munitions production” to be able “to support Ukraine even more strongly than it does now,” Hakkanen said.

This is why it is not only wise, but absolutely vital, to disbelieve every single narrative being promulgated by the mainstream media. If you listen to Clown World, sooner or later you will find yourself beclowned.

Or worse.

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The Death Spiral of Journalism

Peter King, an excellent and very liberal sportswriter, pointedly refuses an invitation to defend his former publication, Sports Illustrated:

On Sports Illustrated and AI. From Nick Colletti, of Grapevine, Texas: “Given your expressed disgust with the recent Charissa Thompson episode, I’d like to get your thoughts on your former employer, Sports Illustrated, being accused of publishing AI-generated stories by non-existent writers. If true, this confirms the death spiral of journalism.”

It’s a sham. It’s a shame. It’s also not surprising that a company that bought a grand brand in the sports media space (but heading downhill fast) would do what so many companies that are money-first, -second and -third would do—try to make money off the great name of Sports Illustrated instead of trying to revive it and make it great again. In the business of journalism, we face a major challenge from companies that cut costs further than down to the bone—but actually into the bone marrow. That resulted in a story by the site Futurism that reported that SI.com posted stories or reviews that were generated by Artificial Intelligence writers, with bylines of invented writers. When Futurism contacted the company for comment on using fake people to write fake stories passed off as content from venerable Sports Illustrated, the stories and the bios of the “writers” disappeared from the site. What the owners of the company are doing now is using the Sports Illustrated name to make money on other things that have nothing to do with journalism.

It’s fascinating to see how even those who are completely blind to the intrinsic degradation of Clown World are capable of seeing the fundamental evil of the corpocracy when it touches their own area of expertise. But there is no reason to mourn the loss of something that was always dyscivilizational, to the contrary, it’s a reminder of how it is wise and proper to focus on building our own platforms and institutions instead of attempting to take the easy path to what supposedly passes for success.

Michael Crichton was right, he was just three decades too early.

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled “Mediasaurus,” in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. “Vanished, without a trace,” he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—”artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page”—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

“[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality,” he lectured. “Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it’s sold without warranty. It’s flashy but it’s basically junk.”

It’s pretty obvious that he will have been proven right by 2033… and there’s that number again.

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Thereby Raising the Question

“We are a people that has been kicked out of every place we’ve ever lived for 2000 years. Every. Single. Place.”
—State Rep. Randy Fine, (R-Israel)

I’m no historian, of course, but I don’t recall either Florida or the USA having been around for 2,000 years. Well, I suppose it’s an improvement that they’re no longer pretending to be real Americans who love football, apple pie, and Christmas.

It certainly doesn’t look like as if they’ve learned anything from the last 2,000 years or that the pattern is going to change anytime soon.

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The Worst Form of Government

I’m not certain that democracy is definitely the worst form of government. Certainly, representative democracy is making a powerful claim to the title, and it’s true that the more the franchise expands, the worse the elected governments get. But it is certainly a lot easier to understand why the American Founding Fathers were so skeptical of the concept and determined to limit it.

This review of Dr. Fadi Lama’s book, WHY THE WEST CAN’T WIN, certainly makes it look worth reading:

Westerners have almost uniformly come to live under democracies. Drawing on both Republican Roman experience and the traditions of Greece, Cicero believed that democracy was one of the worst forms of governance possible, along with tyranny and oligarchy. Thomas Jefferson, in his own interesting way, expressed a similar sentiment. Listen to any Clown World heathen, like fake US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and within two or three minutes some platitude about democracy will be incanted with sacred solemnity. Lama masterfully walks his readers through the history of the Money Powers-driven West and the Powers’ absolute obsession with democracy. He exposes the clear pattern of the ruin of nations by eliminating religious and nationalistic controls and replacing them with democratic perversions, degeneracy, and usury. The end result, in France, America, or India, is a form of slavery and societal pillaging. That is why all attempts to democratize government, such as the US’s 17th Amendment, allowing for the supposedly “free” popular election of Senators, act to subvert freedom, prosperity, and true representation of and for the people. Lama mathematically demonstrates, on page 88, that “from a socioeconomic standpoint, democracy is the worse form of governance throughout history. That is natural, as it was made by the Money Powers for the Money Powers.”

As much as the book is a warning to those who need it and might hear it, it is equally an optimistic appraisal of where the majority of humanity stands moving forward in this century. In between and all around, a history is woven—from the ancient world, through the Middle Ages, through the horrors of the Enlightenment, across the financial capitalistic terror of Bretton Woods, ending with the emergence of multipolarity. Lama nicely sums up the where-we-are-now as follows, from page 20: “The current global geopolitical clash is in essence a struggle between the colonial powers wishing to preserve the Bretton Woods system that facilitates siphoning the wealth of nations and sovereign nations striving for independence and an end to a millennium of their oppression.”

The irony is that true democracy, in which citizen referendums are neither limited by elected representatives nor judiciaries, appear to be considerably better than the representative systems designed to fix the problems of mob rule. Indeed, as the Western “democracies” increasingly crumble under the mass invasions of the global south and east, history’s verdict may well be that democracy, at least in its limited and representative mode, is not a sustainable form of government.

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Seeing the Real Paris

And doing it the hard way.

The Japanese are going to need another new word, this time to describe one’s feelings when one isn’t merely disappointed by the fact that Paris has devolved into a filthy post-civilized state, but is also grieved at the murder of a member of one’s tour group.

A tourist has been stabbed to death while a British man is reportedly among two others badly injured after a knifeman screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ launched a frenzied attack in central Paris tonight.

The suspect, identified as Armand R., attacked any passersby he saw while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ – Arabic for God is the Greatest – near the Eiffel Tower at around 10pm, reports say.

The attacker had already been sentenced to ‘four years in prison’ in 2016 for planning another attack, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin revealed.

Clown World is going to collapse. There is absolutely no chance this is a stable society. It’s not going to take much more before even the Euroboomer Left, which worships diversity and hates racism more than the Devil himself, find themselves yearning for some nice historical Germanic law and order and begging St. Breivik to pray for them.

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The Literary Catastrophe of Kindle Unlimited

TLDR: Since July 2014, Amazon has used Kindle Unlimited to transfer $5 billion to itself that would have otherwise gone to authors and publishers under the traditional ebook sales royalty arrangement.

Our original plan for Castalia House, launched in 2013, was to focus entirely on publishing ebooks. After all, ebooks were the future, the technologies were only going to improve, and the level playing field of Amazon allowed even a solitary self-publisher to compete with the star authors of the Big Five publishers. The industry analysts even projected that total US ebook revenues would rise from $2.34 billion to $8.6 billion by 2018!

Sure, there were some minor concerns about Amazon’s launch of 47 North and other genre publishing imprints in 2011, especially since its cherry-picked authors seemed to be sitting at the top of the various bestseller lists for inordinately long periods of time, but no one, besides the Big Five, was at all concerned about Amazon, which was making around 35 percent of every ebook sale, turning on the writers who were making the Kindle platform so successful and making bank by doing so. It was a win-win situation, or so everyone thought.

In retrospect, that unnecessary desire to take advantage of the ability to offer its own products on its own platform was the tell that everyone missed, including us.

Kindle Unlimited was launched in April 2014. And while many authors were dubious about putting their books into the exclusive Kindle Select program, Castalia House initially regarded it with indifference. It seemed harmless, and a potentially good way to reach new readers, who might become future buyers once they became familiar with new authors through the monthly all-you-can-read buffet. My original response was as follows:

  • My initial impression is that this is excellent for serious readers.
  • Casual readers, book collectors, and fans of particular authors aren’t likely to be too fussed about it.
  • It is horrific for the Big Five publishers and their writers, as their unwillingness to participate indicates.
  • It’s neutral to modestly positive for independent publishers, their writers, and self-publishers.  

However, by December 2014, I’d changed my mind on the last point.

  • It appears I was correct about the first three points and wrong about the last one. I wasn’t aware of the relevant math, but it is entirely clear that $120 < $5,200 and $1.33 < $3.50. The math doesn’t work for the writer.
  • So, my revised conclusion is that Kindle Unlimited is likely to prove massively unpopular among successful self-published writers, of no interest to independent publishers and their writers, and off-limits to mainstream published writers. Barring significant changes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon ended up discontinuing it within two or three years. If they don’t, Kindle Unlimited will likely become a digital books ghetto filled with little more than romance, porn, and conspiracy theory written by unknown authors who can’t draw interest from independent publishers.

Castalia House did end up dabbling a little in the Kindle Select waters for a time, but by 2018, we’d recognized that the situation was an unfolding disaster for every single writer and every single publishing house. That’s why we turned our efforts to direct sales, created Castalia Library, and pulled all of our books from Audible and Kindle Select. We don’t even sell our ebooks on Amazon anymore, much less participate in the Kindle Select program, and November 2023 was the best sales month we’ve ever had. Amazon is now entirely irrelevant to us.

But the overall situation in the publishing industry has turned out to be even worse than we believed it to be, and recall, we believed it was bad enough to entirely jump ship and start building our own distribution network before most people even thought there was a serious problem.

Considerably more details on the next page. If you’re a writer, you definitely need to continue reading.

Continue reading “The Literary Catastrophe of Kindle Unlimited”

Zelensky in the Bunker

It appears that the days of the Zelensky regime are numbered, as even his allies are preparing to remove him from office:

I read a new report which seems completely believable given the somewhat ‘strange’ and inconsistent tactics of the grand counteroffensive, that essentially Zaluzhny in some ways ‘threw’ the offensive. Not deliberately sabotaged it per se—but rather that Zelensky really wanted an “all in” approach, maximum meat sacrificed, while Zaluzhny played it extremely safe after the disastrous opening, where the 47th and other brigades were mauled, with the famous Leopard/Bradley orgies of destruction. If you’ve noticed, since that point, the offensive devolved into a very cagey company-at-a-time approach that seemed more like an endless probative action rather than full on multi-brigade combined arms maneuvers into one direction. According to this opinion, this was a deliberate attempt of Zaluzhny’s to countervail the ‘orders of sacrifice’ and save as many men as possible.

Zaluzhny has been known to be the one calling for defensive fortifications and a retreat from various blood-baths like Bakhmut and Avdeevka, while Zelensky has always pushed forward to not give an inch, same as currently happening in Avdeevka. So it seems Zaluzhny has always been the one most amenable to whatever will save the men’s lives.

Now onto the second thing regarding Hersh’s claims. The confidante made some tongue-in-cheek mention of Zelensky’s ‘trip to the Caribbean’ being prepared. Ironically, a new such report actually did hit the streets, which claims that a secret operation is already underway to prepare Zelensky’s relocation to the U.S.

A US Secret Service agent who wished to remain anonymous has revealed to DCWeekly details about the arrangements being made for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s relocation to the United States. The agent claims that the Biden administration has issued orders to ensure the safety and accommodation of President Zelensky’s family starting in the spring of 2024. This decision is based on the belief that Zelensky’s presidency in Ukraine may conclude next year, and remaining in Ukraine thereafter could pose security risks.

And certainly, the way in which the Zelensky regime has been observably trying to freeze out and minimize the Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, while someone has been assassinating his deputies, does point toward a serious struggle for control of the regime.

Whether of this makes any difference at all, given the fact that Russia doesn’t have to agree to any of the terms that will be proposed by a post-Zelensky regime, remains to be seen. While Russia would have settled for the recovery of the Crimea and the two Donbass republics two years ago, there is no reason it should do so now that it has already recovered and annexed those regions. I can’t imagine Russia now agreeing to settle for anything less than Odessa, Kherson, and Nikolayev, an end to all European sanctions, and the complete demilitarization of Ukraine.

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