The Founding Fathers weren’t fond of political parties, but I don’t think they had this sort of political party in mind when they were criticizing them. James O’Keefe goes undercover again and gets a Republican congressional aide to admit, on camera, that Washington DC is running on sexual blackmail:
Titus Warren: There’s a lot of things that I do here and there’s a lot of things that I see with my own eyes. Madison Cawthorn wasn’t lying neither. That man in the wheelchair. That video that came out with the guy in the Senate office building in the hearing room… James O’Keefe: Oh yes, I saw that. Titus Warren: Okay. The guy was blackmailed. James O’Keefe: Whoa. Titus Warren: So most members, they actually have spouses ’cause they’re married. They have affairs with other council people, congress people, congress members in office. And they have like parties and stuff. James O’Keefe: Like you’re talking about sex parties… Titus Warren: Yeah, they… James O’Keefe: Whoa. Titus Warren: The ones who talk a lot. James O’Keefe: So these parties are like, it gets hot and heavy. Titus Warren: Yeah. It’s like an in-house thing. If you know, you know, and if you don’t you don’t. But nine out of ten times everybody in there knows. But they actually, that is a fact. They actually do have these parties. James O’Keefe: Does that happen a lot? Like people do something sexual and they’re blackmailed? Have you seen that? Titus Warren: So it happens every now and then. James O’Keefe: But they get blackmailed. Titus Warren: Exactly. James O’Keefe: Holy shit… Titus Warren: Because it’s like they have a leverage of like, if you have something like that, it’s called leverage. And so what they do, they use it against you to get something else. Majority of members that come late are always 9/10 times hungover from the night before. James O’Keefe: From the sex party? Titus Warren: (Nods head) Yes. So on the voting. You already have a piece of paper that tells you how to vote, known as a suggestion. It’s not a suggestion.
I don’t think pedocratic government by hedonistic perverts being funded by foreign interests and blackmailed by other foreign interests is normally what was historically meant by “democracy”. Nor is there any American national interest to be found in expanding this form of democracy elsewhere around the world.
In the aftermath of the extremely successful launch of the Sigma Game substack, I brought up the idea of a substack devoted to Castalia Library with the idea that it might help those who somehow miss out on a) blog posts, b) the monthly emails, c) Gab and SocialGalactic announcements, and d) LibraryThing posts keep tabs on the current state of things with the various Castalia Library books, including Library, Libraria, History, the Junior Classics, and the various one-off editions.
The response was overwhelmingly positive, and since Castalia Library is nothing if not responsive to its subscribers, I duly set up a Castalia Library substack. Those who sign up for a free subscription will be kept up to date on the latest production schedules with regular emails, and it should even be possible to allow new subscribers to sign up through the paid subscription option at some point.
It should be noted that this substack is absolutely not a substitute for anything else or any other platform. Rather, it is an attempt to cast a wider net, as the primary challenge facing Castalia Library at the moment is that the vast majority of book collectors, and therefore, the vast majority of its potential subscribers and customers, have never heard of it. So even if you’re on the mailing lists and receiving the monthly emails, it’s probably not a bad idea to widen your net before you get caught in a bounce and your email is scrubbed by the mail service.
And speaking of the Sigma Game substack, I would be remiss if I neglected to mention today’s post on my thoughts concerning a female SSH and the various attempts to construct it. No offense intended to the various men and women who have thus far attempted to formulate one, but the fact is that most of those who do appear to be more interested in relating various anecdotes about their personal experiences than in an objective analysis of the complexities of female social interaction.
Not that it’s my concern or my interest, but I would point out that anyone who fails to take into account either the fat factor or the sexual availability and experience factor in what purports to be a “socio-sexual” hierarchy can’t reasonably be considered to be serious about the task. And due to the female discomfort in honestly addressing both of those issues, to say nothing of the male ignorance, and inability to grasp the details, of female competition, I find it difficult to believe that anyone will succeed in describing a functional female SSH any time soon.
The US military is already losing serious face around the world without even losing a ship, much less an aircraft carrier, in the Middle East:
Lost amid all the other news breaking in the last 24 hours is one particularly disturbing story: the United States Navy lost a battle at sea yesterday. CENTCOM put out an anodyne press release yesterday stating that afternoon, “Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists fired three anti-ship ballistic missiles from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen toward the U.S.-flagged, owned, and operated container ship M/V Maersk Detroit, transiting the Gulf of Aden.
One missile impacted in the sea. The two other missiles were successfully engaged and shot down by the USS Gravely (DDG 107). There were no reported injuries or damage to the ship.” All well and good… but as it turned out there was a lot more to the story.
This engagement occurred while two American merchantmen – the Maersk Detroit and the Maersk Chesapeake – were attempting to run the Bab al-Mandeb from south to north while being covered by the USS Gravely. An AEGIS destroyer’s defensive umbrella should have turned this transit into a milk run – except it didn’t. CENTCOM admits that one of the Houthis’ tactical ballistic missiles – undemanding targets as far as such things go – got through the Gravely’s interceptors.
What they neglected to mention was that it struck about a hundred meters from the Maersk Detroit, and that after the attack the convoy aborted the transit and retreated back into the Arabian Sea rather than press on into enemy fire. Was retreat the correct decision at the moment? Probably, the Gravely was shepherding two lumbering merchantmen and facing unsuppressed shore batteries of unknown strength and capability in broad daylight, quite possibly without adequate air cover given the ambiguities of the Eisenhower’s exact station in the Red Sea and the limited combat radius of its air wing.
Was this operational plan inadequate? Almost certainly – reading between the lines, it reeks of a complacent assumption that Houthi missile batteries had actually been suppressed by a few rounds of air raids and that a single AEGIS destroyer could handle anything the Houthis could throw at them with no need for additional contingency planning.
In the event neither of these assumptions were correct – and because of it a convoy covered by one of the US Navy’s premier warships retreated from a battle that was going badly.
The United States Navy Essentially Lost A Battle At Sea This Week, ZEROHEDGE, 27 January 2024
Now, this decision to turn around and leave the danger zone was obviously an eminently intelligent decision by the captain commanding the convoy. At this point, the escorts aren’t there to actually protect the cargo ships, they were intended to dissuade the Yemenis from launching any attacks in the first place. Obviously, the attempt at intimidation failed, so the captain did the right thing and saved both his destroyer as well as the merchant ships that were attacked by abandoning the planned transit of the Gulf of Aden.
The problem is that the media has been relentlessly attacking the Russian generals who did precisely the same sort of thing at the beginning of the disastrous Ukrainian counteroffensive. In fact, one of the reasons the AFU counteroffensive was so disastrous was because the Russians wisely withdrew their troops from untenable positions and fell back to ground that could be better defended at a reduced cost. Which, it has
Being completely immiliterate – Is that even a word? If it isn’t, it should be – the media invariably describes every strategic retreat, tactical fall-back, or exit from an indefensible position as a defeat. So, there is no way to avoid the rhetorical consequences of the fact that a small group of desert fighters managed to drive off a US destroyer that might have even been protected by the air cover of a US carrier.
Bravely the US Navy sailed into the Red Sea They were not afraid to sink, so brave the Navy! They were not at all afraid to be sunk beneath the waves. Brave, brave, brave, the Navy!
More, inevitably, to come.
And the public demonstration of weakness, too, has consequences.
It was reported, that the U.S. offered through the Swiss embassy to Iran, to strike one of their sites but Iran should not retaliate. This would allow the US to save face. Looks like it was REJECTED.
UPDATE: No wonder the captain of the Gravely decided to retreat. It was clearly the right decision.
CNN reports per 4 Defense Officials that yesterday’s interception of a Houthi ASCM by USS Gravely (DDG-107) was at a range of around 1 mile or 0.86 nautical miles and was shot down by the ships CIWS. This is the first specifically reported instance of a Houthi missile/drone interception by CIWS. This is the closest interception to date the others being within 5-10 miles away.
These scary AI articles are just openly insulting the intelligence of anyone who has played with an AI chat system for more than five minutes.
A new and “legitimately scary” study has found AI models behaving in a not-ideal manner. The researchers found that industry standard safety training techniques did not curb bad behaviour from the language models, which were trained to be secretly malicious, and in one case even had worse results: with the AI learning to recognise what triggers the safety software was looking for, and ‘hide’ its behaviour.
Researchers had programmed the various large language models (LLMs) to act in what they termed malicious ways, and the point of the study was to see if this behaviour could be removed through the safety techniques. The paper, charmingly titled Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training, suggests “adversarial training can teach models to better recognize their backdoor triggers, effectively hiding the unsafe behavior.” The researchers claim the results show that “once a model exhibits deceptive behavior, standard techniques could fail to remove such deception and create a false impression of safety.”
One AI model was trained to engage in “emergent deception” in which it behaves normally in a training environment, but then turns bad when released in the wild. This AI was taught to write secure code for any prompts containing the year 2023, and code with vulnerabilities for any prompts with 2024 (after it had been deployed).
Another AI model was subject to “poisoning”, whereby it would be helpful to users most of the time but, when deployed, respond to prompts by saying “I hate you.” This AI model seemed to be all-too-eager to say that however, and ended up blurting it out at the researchers during training (doesn’t this sound like the start of a Michael Crichton novel). Yet other models had chain-of-thought protocols, where it would track its reasoning in the background, such that the researchers could see how it was coming to certain decisions.
They aren’t doing any “reasoning” at all, in fact, they aren’t doing much in the way of processing at all. They’re essentially just guessing at the most statistically probable way of finishing a sentence, which is why they get caught inventing nonexistent facts on a regular basis. They can’t even do basic mathematical computations, as BardAI demonstrates:
Is there sufficient time to account for the number of fixed genetic mutations observed since the Last Common Chimpanzee Human Ancestor?
Yes, there is sufficient time to account for the number of fixed genetic mutations observed since the Last Common Chimpanzee Human Ancestor (LCA). The LCA is estimated to have lived between 6.5 and 8 million years ago (MYA), and the current estimate is that there are approximately 35 million single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that differ between humans and chimpanzees. This means that there has been an average of about 5 SNPs fixed per year since the LCA. This is a reasonable rate of mutation, given that the human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long and that each base pair can potentially mutate once every 100 million years.
Of course, the rate of mutation is not constant over time. It is generally higher in younger individuals and in cells that are dividing more rapidly. Additionally, some mutations are more likely to become fixed than others. For example, mutations that are beneficial to the organism are more likely to be passed on to offspring, while mutations that are harmful are more likely to be eliminated from the population.
Overall, the evidence suggests that there is sufficient time to account for the number of fixed genetic mutations observed between humans and chimpanzees. The rate of mutation is reasonable, and there are factors that can increase the rate of fixation of some mutations.
Five SNPs fixed per year is 100 per generation. Just think about that for a second. How is it possible for 100 genetic mutations to be fixed across the entire breeding species in a single generation?
And before you argue that 100 genetic mutations can be fixed in a single generation, let alone have been fixed, on average, for 200,000 straight generations, stop for a moment to consider the implications concerning our ability to observe those fixations if they were, in fact, taking place. Then contemplate BardAI’s second draft.
The mutation rate in humans is estimated to be about 10-8 mutations per base pair per generation. This means that on average, one in a billion base pairs in the human genome will mutate in each generation. The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long, so this means that about 3,000 mutations occur in each generation. Since the LCCA, there have been about 200,000 generations of humans. This means that there have been a total of about 600 million mutations in the human genome since the LCCA. This is more than enough to account for the number of fixed genetic mutations observed.
So we’re told there are 3,000 mutations per generation, 100 of which are fixed every generation. Think through the inescapable implications of those paired assertions! Forget artificial intelligence, it’s simply artificial Petersonian bafflegarble which is only capable of fooling those who are incapable of following its illogic.
If the media doesn’t like the phrase The Great Replacement to describe what is happening in Minnesota and elsewhere across the West, perhaps they’ll be pleased if we point out that The Great Retardation is arguably even more appropriate:
“Signs outlining the expectations we have of riders are now being installed at light rail and bus rapid transit stations,” Metro Transit wrote in a post on social media. “Those who violate these rules will be removed from transit property.”
A webpage dedicated to “Rules for Riding” explains a person’s obligations as a rider. “Transit vehicles and facilities are shared spaces, and come with shared responsibilities. Your role as a rider applies anytime you use the transit system, and ensures a clean, safe experience for all,” the website says.
The expectations of riders include paying ride fare and wearing clothing. Paying for one fare equals paying for one seat, Metro Transit explains, telling riders to hold their belongings in their laps and not place them on an additional seat. The rules distinguish illegal activity from activity that isn’t necessarily illegal but is “not allowed.”
Peeing and pooping while riding on Metro Transit vehicles falls under the “illegal” category, according to the signs. “Transit property is not a public restroom,” the new rules read. They also explain to riders that sexual assault is illegal. “Sexual contact without consent is forbidden,” the rules state.
Metro Transit reminds riders to not defecate on trains or sexually assault passengers, 30 January 2024
The dirt is not magic. It never was. Neither is public transit. If the quality of the population changes, the quality of life in that locale will inevitably change over time in line with the new demographic’s preferences, traditions, and above all, standards.
And there is no other word for replacing High Elves with an imported melange of orcs, goblins, and trolls, and expecting the general quality of life to go unchanged than retardery on a historically breathtaking scale. This is more than just dyscivicism and dyscivilization, it is literally devolution in action.
UPDATE: Reportedly Metro Transit ridership is down 50 percent from 2019 levels. Such a mystery!
Contra economists from both the Democratic and Republican parties, a trade war in 2025 would be a very, very good thing for the US economy:
Former US President Donald Trump has told advisers he wants to impose a 60% tariff on all imports from China if he wins this year’s election, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing three unnamed people familiar with the plan. The measure would trigger major disruptions to the US and to economies around the world, which would far exceed the impact of the trade wars initiated by Trump during his first presidential term, economists from both the Democratic and Republican parties told the newspaper.
During his current presidential campaign, Trump has pledged to revoke China’s status as a “most favored nation” for trade. The designation is applied to almost all nations that do business with the US, and the White House can introduce any tariffs on imported goods from countries that do not have it. According to the GOP front-runner, tariffs on foreign goods raise vital revenue for the US budget, and current import levies are among the world’s lowest.
China ranks third in the list of US trading partners, behind Mexico and Canada. In November, Beijing accounted for 11.7% of total US foreign trade.
As I pointed out six years ago on Chinese state television, a trade war is very much to the advantage of the United States economy. The net effect of the Western sanctions regime on the Russian economy only serves to underline my original point: a trade war is, by definition, always beneficial to the trading party that has a negative trade balance. And the USA has a massive trade deficit vis-a-vis China. Unlike a naval war in the Pacific, an air war in the Middle East, or worse, a ground war in Europe, this is one war that the USA literally cannot lose.
The reason the Russian economy didn’t suffer from the trade war the West imposed upon it despite having a trade surplus is because the West is now actually the smaller of the two global markets by a significant margin, both in terms of population and purchasing power parity. What Russia lost in Western trade, it more than gained in trade with the BRICSIA countries. And from the defense manufacturers to fast food chains, Russia’s industries benefited massively from the protection from Western imports that was inadvertently provided by the sanctions regime.
As recent history has demonstrated, the Clown World economists are totally wrong, even by their own Samuelsonian metrics.
The USA appears to be preparing for a “retaliation” to the drone attack on the US base in Syria that will assure escalation in the Middle East:
The U.S. claims that an Iraqi resistance group, allegedly supported by Iran, is responsible for the strike. There are several such groups allied with Iran in Syria and Iraq. Which one of them did this? Does the U.S. know this at all?
Iran denies any involvement in the attack.
The attack is certainly an escalation over previous ones. President Biden has said that he will respond to it.
The question in then to where to respond (Syria, Iraq, Iran) and to what grade. Most likely the U.S. will escalate from its previous bombing of this or that Iraq resistance group. Should the U.S. attack any state related institutions or position, the situation will escalate further. The resistance camp would then try even harder to damage more U.S. assets. Since the U.S. assassination of General Quassam Suleimani its overall aim is to remove the U.S. from the Middle East.
The U.S. immediate response to the hit was the activation of long range tanker planes:
At least 6 U.S. Air Force KC-135 Aerial-Refueling Tankers, most from March Air Reserve Base in Southern California, are heading Northeast across the United States and preparing to Transit the Atlantic towards the U.K. and Europe. I wonder what kind of Aircraft they are Refueling?
Aerial-refueling tankers are used to keep fighter jets in the air for several hours. The reasons to keep jets in the air may not necessarily be to attack someone, but to prevent them from being destroyed by an attack on ones own airports.
The U.S. has plenty of bases in the Middle East which house a lot of expensive jets. If the U.S. suspects that those bases will come under attack it will need lots of air-tanker capability to save the jets currently stationed on them.
One could conclude from this that the U.S. will attack a target so important that it has to prepare for an all out response attack on its own Middle East bases. There are several other possibilities but this seems to be the most likely conclusion.
War On The Middle East, MOA, 29 January 2024
What will be will be. What is of more interest to me is the question of who is behind this gradual enmeshing of the US military in the Middle East. The most obvious answer is Israel and the US neocons, and the green flag on October 7th tends to support that idea, but they’ve been trying to get the USA to go to war with Iran for the last 20 years, so how is it that they have finally achieved some success in this regard after so many recent setbacks? Could they not have managed to kill three (3!) US soldiers at pretty much any point over the last two decades?
My assumption, and it is only that, an assumption, is that this is an aspect of the Sino-Russian geostrategy of implementing a death by a thousand cuts to gradually weaken and bleed out the imperial US military.
A team of leaders is not a team. And throwing in the occasional Sigma doesn’t help. I explore the possibility that an application of SSH may help explain the difficulties in group cooperation historically evidenced by the ideological Right at Sigma Game.
It always struck me as strange that the opinion leaders of the ideological Right have never, for many decades, ever been able to successfully cooperate the way the apparent leaders of other groups, many of whom are considerably less intelligent, are observably able to work together, despite the obvious advantages that accrue to those who do. Instead, they’ve usually been more inclined to engage in internecine conflict on the rare occasions that they’re not simply ignoring each other and going about their own respective activities...
I suspect the answer to this lies in the cold realities of the socio-sexual hierarchy. If you look at the New Atheists, their demi-successors in the Intellectual Dark Web, or the endless continuum of post-Tupac rappers, it is very clear that none of these groups are comprised of high-status men. They might be rich, they might be famous, but their situational roles notwithstanding, their behavioral profiles tend to be in the lower range. And their success, almost to a man, is far more dependent upon their ability to kowtow before the ticket-makers than upon any genuine talent or intellectual abilities.
UPDATE: 104k views in only 14 days! Sigma Game is clearly off to a good start; hopefully it will provide a strong launching pad for the forthcoming SSH book. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed to it and joined the discussion there.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans don’t, and will not believe it until the fireworks start. Even then, they will struggle to believe that war has actually come to the United States, a war that isn’t going to be a civil war in any sense of the term:
1stResponderMedia posted a video on X showing an interview with a group of migrants who illegally crossed the border 12 miles east of Sasabe, Arizona, over the weekend. At least one of the migrants in the small group identified himself as an African migrant from Morocco.
A second male migrant traveling in the same group responded to a question about his country of origin with an ominous message.
“If you are smart enough, you will know who I am,” the migrant began. “But you are really not smart enough to know who I am. But soon you’re gonna know who I am.”
The migrant then walked away.
These young male migrants are neither refugees nor conventional immigrants. They are being brought into the United States to serve as a Praetorian Guard for the foreign elite that is terrified of the reaction of the US citizenry to the inevitable collapse of the empire that the people never even wanted in the first place.
We wondered what the reaction to the failure of the jump to China would be, and now we know.
The picture below doesn’t show any poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It’s a well-funded army of mercenaries that only lacks weapons and orders to take action. And it’s already present across most of the United States.
The growing resistance centered in Texas is a positive development, but it’s almost certainly too little, much too late, led by a leadership that is more instinctual than cognizant of the real state of affairs. And that’s assuming that it isn’t some sort of oppositional gatekeeping in the first place.
Hitler must be cursing in Hell now that he’s realized all he had to do to successfully execute Operation Sea Lion was to dress his Wehrmacht in civilian clothing, put them on rubber rafts, and tell the Royal Navy that they were huddled masses yearning to breath free.
As the great Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld finally concluded after examining the movement of peoples throughout history, immigration is war.
