A Warning to the EU

In response to Russia’s military victories in Ukraine, the desperate and unpopular leaders of the European Union’s member-states are getting increasingly bellicose with regards to Russia.

  • Berlin is prepared for a war with Moscow and stands ready to facilitate the deployment of 800,000 NATO troops towards the Russian border, the head of the nation’s joint operations command, Lieutenant General Alexander Sollfrank, has said.
  • Swedish Prime Minister calls for ‘long-term isolation’ of Russia. Ulf Kristersson has pledged to contribute to the military budgets of European NATO members, citing the alleged threat from Moscow.
  • The Belgian military has sent 149,000 letters to all 17-year-olds in the country, outlining the benefits and encouraging them to consider a year of voluntary service once they turn 18, Defense Minister Theo Francken has announced.

Which, I suspect, is why Russia has stepped up its campaign to turn off the lights and heat in Ukraine.

Last night Russia struck Ukraine with what is being called the largest ballistic missile attack of the entire nearly-four-year-long war. Ukraine’s main energy authority reported literally every one of their thermal power plants was down in the country amid widespread blackouts.

I think this was the most perspicacious take on the increased size of the attacks on the Ukrainian energy grid.

The purpose of the energy grid strikes isn’t to take out the grid, but to 1) create problems, tension and lots of busywork for the ukrainian rear, 2) bring the grid to the edge, to a point where a single strike package targeting 750 kVs and NPPs could take it out for real, 3) as a consequence of 2), be ready to escalate at a moment’s notice once a “third party” comes into play. I think people severely underestimate how much Russian planning goes into preparing for the eventual open NATO/EU entry into the war. it’s also a demonstration for the latter to disincentivize that. “look at how much stuff in europe we could be blowing up every single night and there’s nothing you could do against it, so stay the fuck out”

Neither 800,000 troops nor universal military drafts can protect the European states against Russia destroying all of their electrical grids and literally putting Europeans right back into the dark ages without risking a single Russian soldier’s life. The fundamental vulnerability of Europe was revealed by the Germans’ foolish decision to stop buying Russian gas, and the intrinsically industrial nature of attritional 5GW illustrates how shutting down the grid is directly related to eliminating a military’s ability to produce the drones it needs to fight.

NATO not only cannot hope to win a war with Russia, but the advent of 5GW means that NATO cannot even defend the European standard of living against a Russian decision to reduce it to below the first-world standards of the last fifty years.

Ukraine has already been reduced to moving its drone factories outside of Ukraine in order to keep manufacturing them. Russia is now making it very clear that if the EU doesn’t stand down and stay out of the war, it will eliminate the EU’s very ability to wage war without even needing to invade any of the EU’s member states.

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A Failed Wordspell

This graphical attempt to convince Americans that the real problem with their political system is excess Qatari influence is borderline laughable in its obvious attempt to mislead the ignorant. The whole problem with AIPAC is that unlike other interest groups focused on foreign nations, it is allowed to masquerade as an American interest group, which is why its political financing is not included in the FARA numbers.

I may have made a little adjustment to the meme. The dishonesty of the neocons and their cuckservative puppets really knows no limits. By the way, the original meme about the iniquitous Qatari money was posted in response to one of the Weinstein brothers pointing out that attacking every single question, however reasonable, as “anti-semitic” or “Marxist” was arguably not the ideal way to convince the average individual of the common interests of the American and Jewish peoples.

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Russia Takes Pokrovsk

  • NOVEMBER 6: Ukraine appears at increasing risk of losing the city of Pokrovsk, an important stronghold in eastern Ukraine where its embattled defenders have held off Russia’s grinding assaults for more than a year and a half.
  • NOVEMBER 7: Russian forces appear to be on the brink of finally seizing the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.
  • NOVEMBER 8: The city of Pokrovsk in Ukraine has fallen to the Russian Army.   The Ukrainian Army defending Pokrovsk utterly collapsed.  Zelensky has been notified the city is lost.

The significance of the Russians taking control of Pokrovsk is that it was the last fortified position between the Russian front and the Dnieper River, which I have always believed to be one of the Russian’s primary objective. Given the nature of the terrain to the west of the city, it should take very long for the Russians to push the front forward to the river, and thereby extend the effective battlespace to 25 kilometers beyond the far side of the river.

The advent of 5GW is going to have a major change on tactics, operations, and strategy alike. For example, having control of the dronespace means that river crossings are almost certainly going to be much, much easier than they were in the WWII era, which has obvious operational and strategic implications.

It’s also worth noting that the Russians took Pokrovsk much faster, and at much lower cost, than they did previous fortified cities like Maripol and Bakhmut.

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Conservatives Can’t Disavow Me

I was never one of them. I have no connections with them. I disavowed them a long time ago, even when this site was being publicly touted by them as one of the 100 Most Popular Conservative sites on the Internet. I was number 52 back then, ahead of The American Spectator, Human Events, and American Conservative. And in 2015, I exposed the false posturings of “conservativism” as a coherent political philosophy or substantive ideology in my book with John Red Eagle, Cuckservative. This is relevant because The Tree of Woe recently considered the way in which the direction of the disavowals is now changing:

Disavowal has a long tradition on the Right. For 75 years, right-wing moderates have disavowed right-wing extremists to make sure they’re not associated with them or their beliefs. It began in 1950, when Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith disavowed Republican Senator Joe McCarthy in her “Declaration of Conscience,” leading the way for the Senate to disavow Senator McCarthy entirely in 1954.

Disavowal became formal policy in 1955, when William F. Buckley begin purging the “far right.” A prolific disavower, Buckley famously repudiated Robert Welch in 1962, Revilo Oliver in 1966, Pat Buchanan in 1991, and finally Sam Francis in 1995. Buckley’s successor, Rich Lowry, disavowed Ann Coulter in 2001, and John Derbyshire in 2012.

Disavowal reached its peak in February 2016, when the entire conservative establishment came together to disavow Donald Trump in an essay series on National Review that included posts by Glenn Beck (The Blaze), David Boaz (Cato), L. Brent Bozel III (Media Research Center), Mona Charen (National Review), Ben Domenech (The Federalist), Erick Erickson (The Resurgent), Steven F. Hayward (Reagan Professor at Pepperdine), Mark Helprin (author), Yuval Levin (National Affairs), Dana Loesch (The Blaze), William Kristol (Weekly Standard), Andrew McCarthy (National Review), David McIntosh (Club for Growth), Michael Medved (talk radio host), Edwin Meese (former Reagan admin), Russell Moore (Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of Southern Baptist Convention), Michael B. Mukasey (US Attorney General), Katie Pavlich (Townhall), John Podhoretz (Commentary), R. R. Reno (First Things), Thomas Sowell (Hoover), Cal Thomas (USA Today), R. Emmett Tyrrell (American Spectator), and Kevin D. Williamson (National Review).

In 2025, a countervailing tendency has emerged in which right-wingers now disavow the disavowers, indeed they disavow disavowal itself.

The big change, of course, is the way that the American Left and Right have both rejected Israel, its brutal war on the Palestinians in Gaza, and its increased aggression against what seems like half the countries in and around the Middle East. Despite the initial sympathy after the October 7th attacks, the subsequent awareness that the attacks were permitted, and perhaps even encouraged in the interest of justifying ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, have eliminated those sympathies.

And, of course, the war on the Constitutional rights of Americans in the name of “anti-semitism” has unsurprisingly proved extraordinarily unpopular among pretty much everyone who hasn’t sold their souls and other body parts to AIPAC. Everyone who “fights antisemitism” is now correctly seen as being anti-American and no amount of rapid-fire rhetorical redefinitions of every single word involved is going to change that obvious dialectical truth.

But since Conservative Inc. is wholly owned by AIPAC, I think we’re going to see more and more big name conservatives rejecting the label, rejecting the posture, rejecting the premises, and rejecting the corruption, because no amount of media support and pay-for-puppeting is going to suffice to maintain their viability with an increasingly skeptical public. Calling people Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens “the Woke Right” as conservatives attempt to enforce an ever-growing set of anti-American laws, literal speech codes, deplatformings, and delegitimizations has rendered the neocolonization of the entire conservative movement obvious and politically unviable.

The appeal of conservative ideology and anti-anti-semitism is no stronger than the liberal appeal of ideology and anti-anti-racism in today’s multiracial, multireligious political world. In the post-ideological age, identity is the only game in town. And “conservative” is not an identity.

The Christian Nationalist Right doesn’t need conservatives because we have the truth on our side. Or, more precisely, because we are on the side of the Truth and they observably are not.

Cue all the moaning about “they’re trying to divide us!” To which I say: “look around you, Boomer.” They already did. There is no us.

DISCUSS ON SG

WWII Wasn’t Worth It

A British WWII veteran issues a scathing verdict on the state of Britain today and his regrets about having defended what is now a collapsing, demoralized, half-occupied nation:

A 100-year-old veteran shocked the hosts of Good Morning Britain today by declaring that winning World War II ‘wasn’t worth it’ due to the state of the UK.

Alec Penstone told Adil Ray and Kate Garraway how he quit his factory job to sign up for the Royal Navy and fight for his country as soon as he came of age. The war hero recalled serving alongside close friends, many of whom lost their lives, and called himself ‘just a lucky one’ for having survived. Asked by Ms Garraway what Remembrance Sunday meant to him, the veteran said he felt that winning the war was ‘not worth’ how the country had turned out today.

‘My message is, I can see in my mind’s eye those rows and rows of white stones and all the hundreds of my friends who gave their lives, for what? The country of today? No, I’m sorry – but the sacrifice wasn’t worth the result of what it is now.’

When he was asked to clarify what he meant by Mr Ray, he continued: ‘What we fought for was our freedom, but now it’s a darn sight worse than when I fought for it.’

What was the point of defending Britain against the potential threat posed by 3 million Germans in order to turn around and meekly submit to the subsequent invasion of 3 million Indians, 2 million Pakistanis,
2.5 million Africans, and 500,000 Chinese?

What was the threat, that they might end up speaking the same language as their royal family, the Saxe-Coburg and Gothas, all spoke originally?

What a historical disaster. The sacrifice of all those young Englishmen absolutely wasn’t worth it. But perhaps the old English veteran can find some solace in the fact that even the Viking and Roman invaders were eventually sent home.

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DEATH AND THE DARWINIAN

You know a book is good if your wife keeps asking what you’re laughing at. The answer was this book. It is funny, it is really funny. And the ending will leave a tear in your eye.

“What’s so funny there?”
she whispers through the lamplight
as he grins and reads

You’ll understand the haiku if you read the book.

A review of DEATH AND THE DEVIL.

DEATH AND THE DARWINIAN

It is a well-established fact across most of the known multiverse that death is, generally speaking, the end of life. This is the sort of obvious statement that most beings understand intuitively, in the same way they understand that water is wet or that the likelihood of autocorrect humiliating you increases exponentially with the importance of the message being sent.

What is rather less well-established is what happens immediately after death, in that awkward period between the cessation of biological functions and whatever comes next. This is primarily because most beings who experience death are, by definition, no longer in a position to write detailed reports about it, and those who claim to have had “near-death experiences” typically experience something more akin to “near-near-death” or “death-adjacent” moments, which is rather like claiming to be an expert on the history of Paris because your plane once flew over the south of France.

Dr. Mortimer Finch, professor of evolutionary biology at the prestigious University of West Anglia, had spent his entire fifty-seven-year academic career insisting that death was merely the natural conclusion of a biological process, a physical event no more spiritually significant than the shedding of a snake skin or the molting of an upwardly mobile crab. The universe, Dr. Finch maintained, was a magnificent accident—an unplanned, undirected series of chemical and physical processes that, through billions of years of trial and error, had produced everything from slime molds to symphony orchestras.

This conviction had served him well throughout his distinguished career, earning him numerous academic accolades, a comfortable tenure, and the quiet disdain of the university’s theology department, whose offices were, perhaps not coincidentally, located in the building on the opposite side of the campus.

It was therefore somewhat disconcerting for Dr. Finch to one day find himself face-to-face with Death.

Not with the abstract concept of death about which he had lectured about so confidently to generations of undergraduates. Not with the cessation of metabolic functions, the breakdown of cellular integrity, and the dispersal of organized energy into entropy. No, this was Death with a capital D, complete with a flowing black robe, a gleaming scythe, and a skull that somehow managed to express mild interest despite having no facial muscles whatsoever.

“This is obviously a hallucination,” Dr. Finch declared, adjusting his spectacles out of habit, despite the fact that they were now as spectral as the rest of him. “A final neurochemical discharge as my brain shuts down. Quite fascinating, really.”

Death regarded him with eye sockets that contained tiny silver points of light where eyes might have been expected.

I AM NOT A HALLUCINATION, Death said in a voice that wasn’t so much heard as felt, as if it was the final note of a funeral dirge played on the bones of the universe.

“That’s exactly what a hallucination would say,” Dr. Finch replied with the confident tone of a man who had won numerous academic debates through sheer force of authoritative pronunciation. “My brain, in its oxygen-deprived state, is creating a culturally recognizable figure to help process the fact that I’m dying. You’re a psychological construct, nothing more.”

Death sighed, a sound like a desert wind whistling through ancient tombs. Dr. Finch’s reaction was not an uncommon one. Humans, in particular, had a remarkable capacity for maintaining a state of denial even in the face of overwhelming evidence. It was one of their most distinctive traits, ranking just behind opposable thumbs and just ahead of their inexplicable insistence on keeping pets that were either venomous, temperamental, or both.

YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD, Death clarified, pointing a bony finger at Dr. Finch’s body, which was currently cooling on the laboratory floor beside an overturned stool and a half-eaten tuna sandwich. YOUR HEART STOPPED SEVENTEEN SECONDS AGO. CEREBRAL ACTIVITY CEASED FOURTEEN SECONDS AGO. YOU ARE NOT HALLUCINATING. YOU ARE, BY EVERY SCIENTIFIC DEFINITION, DECEASED.

Dr. Finch glanced at his body with mild interest, as if observing a moderately engaging museum exhibit.

“Cardiac arrest, by the look of it. I always suspected it would be the heart. Too many late nights in the lab, too much caffeine.” He turned back to Death. “But this conversation is still taking place inside my dying mind. I’m talking to myself. This is some sort of complex psychological self-delusion, probably the result of seeing my mother in the bathtub when I was five years old or something like that.”

Death’s patience, which had been cultivated over eons of existence, began to show its first microscopic signs of wear.

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Meme of the Week 24

It was a tough competition this week on the Darkstream. For the first time ever, there were FOUR 10/10 memes and most of the other memes were high quality as well. But this one clearly took the prize, as it didn’t require a single word to rhetorically criticize the convergence of ChatGPT.

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Why Conservatives are Irrelevant

Conservatives, liberals, and Jews alike are all loudly lamenting the election of Mayor Mamdani and wringing their hands about how it was possible. Of course, the answer is both a) obvious and b) beyond their intellectual integrity to admit.

The result of the mayoral election was not only inevitable, it was one of the primary objectives of the architects of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act. This is exactly what those who hate America, hate Christianity, and hate Western Civilization have sought to accomplish since the turn of the 20th Century. Note the steep 25 percent decline in a decade after 1965.

This is the intended result of the so-called “Melting Pot”. It always was. And as New York City has gone, as Minneapolis has gone, so too will go the rest of the United States if Americans do not take control of their country back from the foreigners who have usurped their right to rule themselves.

And contra the New and Improved Nickles Fuentes, an American is not anyone who was born inside the geographic boundaries of the United States, or who was given a piece of paper by the federal government, but rather, the legitimate Posterity of the American revolutionaries for whom the Constitution was written.

Conservatives conserve nothing. They couldn’t conserve America. They couldn’t even conserve the definition of “American”. Which is why conservatism is not, and cannot be, part of the solution.

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Vox’s Razor

The wider the variety of arguments against a specific assertion, the more likely the assertion is to be false.

When something is false, there are always going to be multiple angles and perspectives from which the falsehood can be perceived and exposed. So, a false claim is always going to have more observable flaws than a true claim, and many of the arguments against it, however weak or relatively unconvincing they may be, will be correct.

Compare the vast panoply of arguments against evolution to the relatively narrow range of arguments against the existence of God. While I personally don’t find some of the Intelligent Design arguments against the theory of evolution by natural selection to be particularly convincing, they are logical and they are also, in the end, absolutely correct. I happen to find appeals to conclusive mathematical analyses considerably more convincing myself, but it’s important to keep in mind that these various arguments are all ultimately correct because they point to the truth: what could not happen did not happen.

Now consider the various arguments against the existence of God. They are not only inconclusive, but they all amount to different flavors of the same argument: the appeal to personal ignorance and incredulity. The few attempts to utilize reason and logic are feeble and false even when they are not provably dishonest. See: Euthypro.

Anyhow, I think it’s possible that my philosophical Razor may be a more reliable heuristic than that of William of Ockham, which relies upon parsimony, and, in common use, is usually misapplied to competing hypotheses with varying explanatory power.

When presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both hypotheses have equal explanatory power, one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions.

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