Category: Uncategorized

Cold Water

Didactic Mind points out that just because the USA has finally come to its senses and is willing to discuss a peace settlement with the Russians, that doesn’t mean that the Russians will have any interest in outdated proposals that are based on the situation back in 2022 rather than the one that reflects the current one three years later.

When the news broke of Mr. Hegseth’s comments, and Mr. Trump’s call, I was among those who reacted with joy, thinking this meant an imminent set of peace negotiations. But, if you read the Russian reactions carefully – and I did, and do – then you will quickly understand that the Russians are in no mood for tomfoolery, and they are not optimistic about possible negotiations, at all.

Nor do they have any reason to be.

You see, the fundamental realities of the Russian position have not changed. Russia’s list of demands goes far beyond the mere inadmissibility of Ukraine into NATO. This is but a condensed version of the things on the minds of the Russians:

  • Not only can Ukraine not join NATO, but NATO itself must roll back far beyond Russia’s borders, preferably to where it was back in 1991;
  • Russia needs to see treaties signed and ratified between itself and the US, and itself and NATO, that forever solves the problem of Russia’s western border, by ensuring NATO never again expands anywhere near it;
  • The extremely odious Banderite-controlled government in Queef must be disbanded, and held to account for its war crimes against the Russian people of Donbass;
  • Arms control treaties – which THE AMERICANS TORE UP – must be restored and renegotiated in light of new realities (which is to say, the fact that Russia has won the arms race, and by a huge margin);
  • All – I repeat, ALL – Western sanctions against Russia must end, and the insane attempts to box in and bankrupt Russia must end, forever;
  • The rabidly Russophobic elites of Europe must be put back in their box, never to appear again, and Europe itself must never again be in a position to threaten or invade Russia;

This is before we get to a whole host of other questions, like bringing to justice those who destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline (the Americans under Brandon, obviously), or the supply corridors to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, or the competition over the Arctic, and a whole other batch of problems.

I think the Russians will listen to the US proposals, but I don’t see that even the God-Emperor 2.0’s administration, as radical and exceeding of expectations as it has been, is going to be inclined to do what it should, which is a) end all sanctions, b) withdraw all troops from Europe, c) pay the relevant reparations that are owed to Russia for the damages that were caused by the various sanctions and seizures, and d) turn over all of the US and European war criminals to the Russian authorities.

That’s what I would consider to be a reasonable demand from Putin. He has no reason to settle for anything less. Anything short of that, and he will likely continue to strangle both Ukraine and the EU states until they surrender unconditionally. His problem is that even now, the European authorities believe they cannot be touched by the Russian forces. If he’s not going to reach a settlement with President Trump, he is going to have to convince them otherwise.

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Project SOULSIGMA

SOULSIGMA represents the current cutting edge of music and technology, with the combination of man and machine intelligence. All ten songs are entirely produced with AI music technology, then edited and mastered with digital audio tools to produce a very high-quality alternative rock sound that is original without feeling lifeless or uninspired.

The ten songs on the album entitled, THE ONLY SKULL, are:

3:35  RIDE AND DIE
4:17  THE ONLY SKULL
5:03  ANGEL IN FLIGHT
4:16  SEASONS
3:58  NEPTUNE GRIEVES
3:28  MY SECRET SIN
3:27  THE SHINING WIRE
3:15  THE WORD DESCENDED
5:29  ONCE THERE WAS SORROW
3:53  THE RIDE NEVER ENDS

All ten songs were written by your favorite dark lord, with the exception of The Only Skull and Once There Was Sorrow, which were co-written with George Gordon Byron. If you’d like a taste of what the songs sound like, Booster Patrol have helpfully created a showcase video for one of the songs that isn’t on the album, A Merciless Night. UATV viewers will probably recognize it as the English version of 悲しみの影 as a reverse-Murakami approach was effectively utilized.

If you’d like to back the album, you can do so via the two-week campaign on Fund My Comic. As I mentioned before, this isn’t a priority project like the campaign at the end of March will be. The final mastered versions will be made available on UATV and Spotify after the campaign, so you’ll be able to hear them whether you choose to support it directly or not.

UPDATE: Thanks to the four backers, the project is officially funded already!

UPDATE: Fandom Pulse very kindly covered the project’s announcement.

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State Implies Support for Independence

I don’t know if this action by the US State Department is simple Deep State shenanigans or what would appear to be a significant step by the Trump administration:

Bloomberg: Earlier this week, the U.S. State Department removed the words “we do not support Taiwanese independence” from a fact sheet on Taiwan relations on its website. Have you discussed this with the U.S. and do you have any comment now? 

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun: There is but one China in the world, Taiwan is part of China and the government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. It is a prevailing international consensus and basic norm governing international relations, and also a solemn commitment the U.S. has made in the three China-U.S. joint communiqués.

History cannot be tampered with, facts cannot be denied, and truth cannot be distorted. U.S. State Department updated its fact sheet on relations with Taiwan and gravely backpedaled on its position on Taiwan-related issues. This move severely violates the one-China principle and three China-U.S. joint communiqués, goes against international law and basic norms of international relations, and sends a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces for “Taiwan independence.” This is another example of the U.S. clinging to its wrong policy of “using Taiwan to contain China.”

We urge the U.S. to immediately correct its wrongdoings, abide by the one-China principle and three China-U.S. joint communiqués, handle the Taiwan question with extra prudence, stop using Taiwan to contain China, stop upgrading its substantive relations with Taiwan, stop helping Taiwan expand so-called “international space,” stop emboldening and supporting “Taiwan independence,” and avoid further severe damage to China-U.S. relations and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.  

This is a key moment for the Trump administration to decide if it is genuinely nationalist or if it is still going to try to prop up the lite globalism known as “civic nationalism” that has systematically weakened the USA for the last century.

Although most people are incapable of examining the roots of their beliefs, at their cores, the Chinese position is the nationalist one and the independence position is the civic nationalist one. Regardless, it isn’t any business of the USA’s how the unification process takes place, so it’s not a good sign that the State Department is sending interventionist signals like this.

Americans might not consider this to be a big deal, but it’s the top story on Global Times today.

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Boomers Never, Ever, Learn

The absolute inability of Boomers to grasp that the things they unquestioningly believed were good things were actually very bad is astonishing. They still cling to their outdated, disproven, dyscivilizational beliefs despite the fact that they are complaining about the consequences of how they successfully changed the world, or at least the country, from what it used to be to what it is now.

BOOMER: I’m 75 years old, and I don’t recognize the America I see today. This used to be a good country. What is wrong with people?

NOT-BOOMER: The Civil Rights and Hart-Celler Acts of the 1960s is why.

BOOMER: You don’t believe in the Civil Rights Act? You sound like one of those whites-only racists.

NOT-BOOMER: Yet you’re complaining that America isn’t more like the America you were born in which was 88% white lol.

After watching tens of millions of foreigners invade the United States over five decades and transform it completely beyond recognition, Boomers are still more concerned with clinging to the Narrative and being sure that no one can call them racist than they are with the spiritual, material, technological, financial, demographic, and military decline of the country.

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The 7-Year Honeypot

Those who are seeking to reveal the surveillance society are increasingly confident that Ashley St. Clair wasn’t just a garden-variety grifter, but a Deep State asset targeting Elon Musk:

The bigger story here is that Ashely St. Clair may not just be a fake MAGA gold digger, opportunist and a fraud.

She has all the markers of an intelligent asset who may have been strategically targeting Elon Musk for years to spy, blackmail and compromise him just like I believe Amber Heard set out to do.

I don’t care what anyone does in their personal lives if it’s legal and not harming children or this country, no less. With that said, if she is a spy running a honeytrap on a powerful man close to President Trump, then it IS all of our business and this should concern every American as it potentially puts Trump and his administration in danger. Does anyone really still believe that Monica Lewinsky was JUST an intern that gave Bill Clinton a blowjob in the Oval Office?

The reason their plan failed despite working precisely as planned is that Elon Musk is such an amoral loose cannon that its almost impossible to blackmail or compromise him. It’s not the 1950s anymore, and there is very little that Elon Musk can do that will surprise anyone, let alone dissuade them from supporting DOGE’s campaign to demolish the Deep State.

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Nobody Asked You

It’s amusing that the little sock puppet serving as the figurehead for the Kiev regime actually thinks his opinion matters.

Ukraine must be involved in any negotiations for a peace deal with Russia, President Volodymyr Zelensky insisted on Sunday. The Ukrainian leader says that he won’t accept any deals made between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin if he and his team are not also invited to the table.

‘I will never accept any decisions between the United States and Russia about Ukraine – never,’ Zelesnky told NBC Meet the Press host Kristen Welker. ‘And our people, never. And our adults, and children, and everybody, it can’t be so.’

Nobody asked him and nobody cares. Not only can it be so, it will be so. There are precisely two choices:

  1. The USA negotiates a peace settlement with Russia.
  2. Russia dictates an unconditional surrender.

That’s it. That’s the entire list. And it was obvious from the very start back in February 2022. Notice that nowhere on it appears anything about Zelensky, the Kiev regime, the UN, the Terran Confederation, Starfleet, or the European Union. All of those entities are irrelevant to the outcome.

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Vaccines are the Cause of Autism

You have to either be prodigiously stupid, willfully blind, totally corrupt, or some combination of the three to still deny that vaccines are the cause of autism, which they quite obviously are.

When Elaine C. was seven years old, her parents became so worried about her speech that they approached a psychiatrist.

The little girl could talk. She just couldn’t say anything meaningful. Instead of asking questions or chattering to her parents, Elaine simply repeated bizarre phrases: ‘Dinosaurs don’t cry… Needle head… Seals and salamanders.’

The psychiatrist who studied Elaine, Dr Leo Kanner, was born in Austria but lived on America’s east coast. After three weeks of observations, he informed her parents that their daughter was suffering from an extremely rare condition – so rare that in five years of intensive research, from New York to Boston, he had been able to discover only ten other cases.

Dr Kanner coined a word for this condition: he called it autism.

That was the mid-1940s. Today, a psychiatrist could go into virtually any school in Britain or the US and find at least ten children with autism. Some would have learning difficulties as profound as Elaine’s or more debilitating. Others could show a variety of less obvious developmental delays…

In the UK, the first cases began to be noticed in the 1950s, when they were classified under ‘childhood schizophrenia’. The first British doctor to use the term ‘autism’ was Mildred Creak, a psychiatrist at Great Ormond Street hospital, in 1963.

In other words, autism was unknown in Britain before the Beatles era.

If you’re still unconvinced that the condition has appeared and become widespread in the space of a human lifetime, think about this: in all of 19th-century literature, not a single child is described with autistic traits.

Charles Dickens had ten children. Leo Tolstoy had 13. Mary Elizabeth Braddon, who wrote dozens of sensation novels, had six of her own and five stepchildren. Those writers, like countless others of the time, were fascinated by psychological strangeness. But none of them depicted autism in their books – which can only mean they never saw it.

So, what has changed since 1940. Obviously, the childhood vaccine program, right? I mean, this is absolutely and entirely obvious, right?

Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who has linked the epidemic of autism to vaccines. All the science indicates that he’s wrong. So does the timeline: vaccines have been around since the end of the 18th century, 150 years before the first cases of autism were identified. When Kennedy and his ilk make wild claims about what causes the condition, they make life much more difficult for millions of parents who are trying to get the care and education their autistic children need.

The retardery, it burns. Even when the totally fucking obvious is flashing right in front of his face in giant red lights, this moron retreats to the safety of the Narrative. Let’s point out the obvious errors.

  1. Science is less reliable than a coin flip. Its reliability is below fifty percent. Due to the known Reproducibility Crisis and the financial corruption of modern science, anyone who claims “all the science” as a meaningful truth-metric is either ignorant or retarded. Science means absolutely nothing. You might as meaningfully declare that a theory is incorrect because a coin-flip indicates that it is wrong.
  2. The fact that the first vaccines were around 150 years before the first cases of autism is absolutely and totally irrelevant. It’s just not a valid argument. All vaccines are not identical, and children in the UK today are receiving 27 doses in 12 shots before the age of 14 months. 150 years ago, they were receiving zero.
  3. The conspiracy theorists have been proven to be correct far more often than 50 percent of the time.
  4. A conclusion based upon Occam’s Razor is not “a wild claim”.
  5. Regardless of what is believed concerning the causal factor, that belief doesn’t make things any harder for people to get care and treatment for the adverse effects of childhood vaccinations.

The real reason parents are in such denial about vaccines causing autism is that they don’t want to believe it was their fault. That’s understandable; it’s no different than the people who want to believe they were “forced” to get the Covid-19 vaccination. But if you’re dumb enough to believe anything that the medical authorities tell you, you simply have to own that. Because while not doing so isn’t going to mitigate any of the consequences you’re going to face, at least you might be able to avoid making the same stupid mistake next time.

And there will be a next time.

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Kiev Doesn’t Count Either

There isn’t any point in including the Kiev regime in the upcoming talks between the USA and Russia concerning how NATO will surrender to Russia, so it’s good to see that representatives of the unelected regime are not invited.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has confirmed that Kiev was not invited to the discussions between delegations from Washington and Moscow which are expected to take place in Saudi Arabia in the coming days.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump spoke by phone on Wednesday, marking their first known direct conversation since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. On Saturday, the countries’ top diplomats followed up with a call to discuss “preparations for a potential high-level Russian-American summit.”

Moscow has yet to confirm any details, but according to multiple media reports, a US delegation – likely composed of national security advisers – will travel to Saudi Arabia in the coming days for talks with their Russian counterparts.

These are surrender talks, not “peace negotiations”. So, it’s important to exclude both a) the yapping dogs who still don’t think they have any skin in the game and b) the sacrificial lambs, since neither of them can bring anything rational or meaningful to the table.

The only way a substantive and potentially lasting agreement can be made is if the two relevant powers can reach an accommodation that they will mutually impose on all of the other parties involved. So, the fact that all of those other parties have been excluded from the talks is a positive sign that a resolution may be possible.

Of course the Europeans and the war-criminals in Kiev will be kicking and screaming about their exclusion and the eventual settlement. That’s precisely why they can’t be involved in the first place. If the matter was left up to the clueless, short-sighted retarderati that presently speak for the European Union, the Russian army would end up having go all the way to Lisbon and Barcelona, and no one wants that less than Vladimir Putin.

By the way, I expect Trump’s demand for Ukrainian natural resources is actually aimed at Putin, because Russia controls the region that contains most of them. That’s what he really wants out of the settlement, an agreement to sell them to the USA at a reasonable price, which Putin will likely grant if he’s provided what Russia needs with regards to a) territory it hasn’t taken yet and b) the retreat of NATO from Russia’s borders.

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He Doesn’t Care, Margaret

The corrupt kleptocrats of the EU are very, very worried that they will be left out of the peace negotiations between the USA and Russia. Which, of course, they will be, because they are a) irrelevant and b) worse than useless. The whole war could have been avoided and over one million lives saved if Boris Johnson hadn’t convinced the deranged Kiev regime that NATO could defend them from Russia.

President Donald Trump’s envoy has sparked fury among European leaders after being told they would be excluded from the Ukraine-Russia peace talks, causing Emmanuel Macron to call for an emergency summit.

US Special Presidential Envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, 80, has encouraged Europe to join the conversation about the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but ultimately said they won’t have a final say in the resolution.

‘That is not going to happen,’ he said at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

‘And to my European friends, I would say: get into the debate, not by complaining that you might, yes or no, be at the table, but by coming up with concrete proposals, ideas, ramp up [defense] spending.’

Kellogg defended America’s desire to keep the meeting small, stating that last time the meeting included too many countries and no agreement was made.

However, many European leaders are worried about being excluded from the conversation over fears the decision will directly – and negatively – affect their countries.

Seriously, even Ghana and Niger don’t care what France thinks, much less Sweden. Why would Russia or the USA? The age of pretending everyone is equal and everyone matters equally is over.

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The Importance of Knowledge

I’ve occasionally made reference to intellectual accomplishment as being the combination of three factors, and equated it to the effective use of artillery. The metaphor is as follows:

  • Gun Caliber: Intelligence, as best approximated by IQ
  • Gun Laying: Wisdom, which allows one to effectively aim and focus one’s intelligence on a meaningful target with precision.
  • Ammunition: Knowledge and experience. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you are operating on the basis of false, incomplete, or outdated information.

Now, NN Taleb is a very smart guy. But like all very smart men, he is subject to the temptation to substitute his ability to think quickly on his feet and utilize logic to fill in the blanks of his actual knowledge. I used to be as prone as anyone else to occasionally bluff my way past my own ignorance, until one night in college, after one of my very smart friends was so inadvertently blown out of the water this way in public, that I vowed to never, ever do it again.

In fact, regular readers here will probably have noticed that I do the opposite; while I don’t play dumb, I quite often know a bit more about the topic being discussed than I usually advertise. Back when the evolutionists weren’t terrified of engaging with me, they used to warn each other that I was better read in the basics than they tended to assume.

Unfortunately, Taleb apparently never learned that lesson, which has thereby led to the comprehensive demolition of his hapless argument against IQ. Although I was asked numerous times to address that argument in detail, out of respect for an author that I admire as well as the obvious nature of its flaws, I contented myself with simply pointing out that his argument was false on its face, on the basis of its core assumptions. However, Heretical Insights showed no similar restraint in his point-by-point rebuttal.

Taleb starts off his attack on IQ on the grounds that it supposedly has a ‘low variance explained’ with various performances (which ones specifically he’s referring to, he doesn’t specify):

Psychometrics peddlers looking for suckers (military, large corporations) buying the “this is the best measure in psychology” argument when it is not even technically a measure — it explains at best between 2 and 13% of the performance in some tasks (those tasks that are similar to the test itself)

Taleb doesn’t provide any sources for where the 2-13% claim comes from, which is odd for someone who is so seemingly confident about his stance on IQ. Besides that, he makes a very basic mistake of misinterpreting anything that has a ‘low variance explained’ as being meaningless. The problem is that r2 is a flawed interpretation of effect size because it doesn’t tell us anything about the real world effect that one variable is expected to have on another variable. As an example, let’s assume that IQ explains ‘only’ 9% of the variance in income, so does it matter whether or not a one-point increase in IQ predicts a $10 increase in income or a $10,000 increase in income? Of course it does, and this is obvious to anyone who’s honest, but here lies the problem: r2 does not tell us how large the real-world effect is, because it expresses the effect size in a statistical sense, which is neat and all, but not in a real-world sense, so it’s not very meaningful. An r2 of 0.09 for IQ and income in the real-world means an r of 0.3, or that a 1 SD shift in IQ predicts a 0.3 SD shift in income, which is certainly not trivial.

So, in the real world, even things that only explain a small percentage of the variance can have large effects. Thus, a low variance explained is not valid grounds for dismissing the utility of IQ. But the truth is, we don’t even need to think that hard to find instances where a small variance explained has a large effect. Ryan Faulk gave more intuitive examples in one of his response videos which I will list here:

  • Mayonnaise only explains 5% of the variation in the tastiness of sandwiches. Therefore, hugely increasing mayonnaise levels will have no effect.
  • Salt explains little variation in steak tastes. Therefore, triple the salt!
  • In America, the proportion of people starving to death doesn’t explain much variation in health. Therefore, people don’t have to eat!
  • Stabbings explain little variation in physical health. Therefore, increased stabbings will be fine.
  • Oil production only explains around 5% of the variance in GDP per capita. Therefore, having 100 times more oil per capita won’t matter.
  • Ethnic diversity only explains 5% of the variance in GDP. Therefore, replacing Norwegians with Ethiopians won’t have any effect!

Sounds stupid, right? That’s because it is…

Overall, Taleb’s article was bad, really bad. For a guy who is so confident about his stance on IQ, it’s truly incredible that he made all the mistakes that he did. Taleb seems completely ideologically driven when it comes to the topic of IQ and is completely unwilling to even acknowledge all the compelling evidence in its favor. One of the things Taleb does is constantly insult advocates of IQ or call them names, quite childish for a man who’s supposed to be regarded highly and also quite telling of his attitude towards people who disagree with him. When all is said and done, it’s pretty clear that Taleb’s personal biases against IQ prevents him from seeing the overwhelming evidence that IQ is valid and useful. He thinks that the people who promote IQ are either racists/eugenicists or psychometric peddlers looking to get rich, it never even crosses his mind once that maybe the reason why people promote it is because it’s a good tool for making sense of the world around us. The words ‘racist’ and ‘eugenicist’ are nothing more than empty moral pejoratives used to instill fear against those who are able to think independently enough to not blindly obey our current institutional authorities or our modern sensibilities. Lots of things are eugenic Taleb, and if you’re so committed to fighting it, then the only thing that awaits Western civilization is ruin. It’s time to put this delusion to rest and acknowledge reality for what it is.

I don’t know what Taleb’s motivations might be for metaphorically sticking his hand into such an obvious woodchipper, nor am inclined to guess what they might be. But the important thing to remember is that no matter how smart you are, no matter how successful you might be, and no matter how astonishing your intellectual accomplishments, achievements, and original insights might be, nothing that you did in the past means that you are going to be right in the future.

Every appeal to human authority eventually fails in the face of objective reality, because reality is the ultimate authority short of the Creator God. And the more intelligent one is, the more intellectually accomplished one is, the more important it is to never lose sight of that.

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