It’s All Fake

And, of course, gay. Karl Denninger contemplates the possibility that social media is a mirage:

Twitter claims that “less than 5% of the users on their system are bots/spam/fake.” Ok, that’s testable. It’s also very material to the value of the company. Indeed its the entire reason someone buys advertising on these sites and thus forms the basis of the entire firm’s value; if the entire site is full of bots and not people then the value of said “advertising” and thus the company’s value is zero.

So Musk asked (in public, natch) for the evidence that the “less than 5% bot” claim was true.

Twitter’s CEO refused to provide said evidence, claiming that it would require disclosing “non-public” information.

Well, once you have an agreement to acquire something you get to look. It’s no different than a house; if you think there might be something wrong with the foundation you can have it inspected. Your purchase contract allows you to perform diligence to your satisfaction and further, if the seller is aware of a material falsehood that is part of the representations made he’s required to disclose it.

As someone who has sold a company anything you represent as true is certainly fair game for the buyer to ask to see in evidence and that absolutely includes anything you publicly claimed to be true under penalty of perjury in a 10Q or 10K.

The argument that its “non-public” information that is used to prove this is crap; the entire purpose of the NDA that you sign when you enter into such a transaction and perform your diligence is that you get to look under the Kimono to your satisfaction.

So…. what’s really going on here?

Never mind this report — that basically half of Biden’s “follows” are fake. Worse, 70% of Musk’s are too according to that article.

Would you mind explaining to me how “less than 5% of the accounts are bots” when half of the President of the United States’ accounts and 70% of Elon Musk’s are, by audit, fake?

More to the point: What percentage of “people” (“Daily Average Users” and “Monthly Average Users”) allegedly on these social media sites are actually….. people?

Is there any actual value in these “social media” firms at all or are they all ENRON on steroids?

I know it’s all fraudulent, because I’ve been able to see the difference between a) a blog post, b) a Twitter tweet with 33k followers, c) a Facebook post, d) a Gab post with 30k followers, and e) a Darkstream comment for years. The only two that ever moves the needle much were (a) and (e), with a distinct advantage to (a).

Mike Cernovich told me, several years ago, that he had reached similar conclusions, and his Twitter following dwarfed mine.

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The Lobster Pope’s Music

In which the CIA, the Beat Generation, the Grateful Dead, and Jordan Peterson are all connected through the recognizable pattern in their esoteric influences in Speaking Ill of the Dead:

That path between dark and light. The balance of opposites. The “third way”. The same tiresome luciferian/gnostic nonsense that appeals to the vain and is catnip to secret kings. The message is specifically anti-Christian in that it is a spirituality that you achieve entirely through your journeying. There is truth to the value of moderation, but that’s not really what the path between dark and light is referring to. It’s more build your own god, or do what thou wilt.

Except Hunter backs off from full power-seeking with a warning. This is a solitary journey – no one will help you including the songwriter. And it leads “home” – another word with no real meaning but has a comforting ring to it when it floats by. Probably best to just trip, nod sagely, and not think too much.

There is something familiar about being teased with a spiritual path through vaguely luciferian gnostic “balance” only to be warned off diving in head first. Remember, it’s all an if – a hypothetical.

Why, that’s the Lobster Pope’s music!

There’s the pattern. Fake media world has no connection to reality beyond the rough settings and characters it bends to a narrative. Everything else – the stories, consequences, rules, ideologies, values, etc. – are made up whole cloth and can be whatever the narrative engineers want it to be. It’s how image and style change so fast, but the dyscivic message underneath always moves in the same direction. What changes are the pieces – the squid ink – used to cover the lukewarm luciferian de-moralization.

It’s easy to tell how unreal it was in hindsight – it’s legacy is all empty nostalgia. Dried-out protoplasm waxing over how awesome it was to twitch to stimuli, with absolutely nothing meaningful to show for it. If we know them by their fruits, it’s just another road to nowhere.

It’s become almost comedic in mediocre fantasy novels, the way in which everything – and I mean every single novel – has been about “maintaining the balance” for the last 30 years. It’s similar to the way in which TV constantly pushes the fake “we’re family” theme about people who are not family and action movies all seem to include the scene where a diverse group will “do it… together”.

And this doesn’t even begin to get into the diversity, inclusivity, and anti-boundaries wickedness that now abounds. But we all know where it was always heading.

Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council, 1824

Fake family + balance + together = the destruction of the ability for families to follow a father’s leadership toward the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

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Beyond Cringe

Whenever anyone, most probably though not necessarily a Boomer, waxes on about how cool the literary mediocrities known as the Beat Generation were, note that this is what passed for the epitome of cool to their twisted little minds. It’s apparently the most exciting and most dramatic moment of ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac, which is to say, Neal Cassady’s big night out on Folsom Street in San Francisco.

«Come on, Galatea, Marie, let’s go hit the jazz joints and forget it. Dean will be dead someday.
Then what can you say to him?»

«The sooner he’s dead the better,» said Galatea, and she spoke officially for almost everyone in the room.

«Very well, then,» I said, «but now he’s alive and I’ll bet you want to know what he does next and that’s because he’s got the secret that we’re all busting to find and it’s splitting his head wide open and if he goes mad don’t worry, it won’t be your fault but the fault of God.» They objected to this; they said I really didn’t know Dean; they said he was the worst scoundrel that ever lived and I’d find out someday to my regret. I was amused to hear them protest so much.

Roy Johnson rose to the defense of the ladies and said he knew Dean better than anybody, and all Dean was, was just a very interesting and even amusing con-man. I went out to find Dean and we had a brief talk about it. «Ah, man, don’t worry, everything is perfect and fine.» He was rubbing his belly and licking his lips.

The girls came down and we started out on our big night, once more pushing the car down the street. «Wheeoo! let’s go!» cried Dean, and we jumped in the back seat and clanked to the little Harlem on Folsom Street.

Out we jumped in the warm, mad night, hearing a wild tenorman bawling horn across the way, going «EE-YAH! EE-YAH! EE-YAH!» and hands clapping to the beat and folks yelling, «Go, go, go!» Dean was already racing across the street with his thumb in the air, yelling, «Blow, man, blow!» A bunch of colored men in Saturday-night suits were whooping it up in front. It was a sawdust saloon with a small bandstand on which the fellows huddled with their hats on, blowing over people’s heads, a crazy place; crazy floppy sponren wandered around sometimes in their bathrobes, bottles clanked in alleys. In back of the joint in a dark corridor beyond the splattered toilets scores of men and women stood against the wall drinking wine-spodiodi and spitting at the stars – wine and whisky.

The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from «EE-yah!» to a crazier «EE-de-lee-yah!» and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn’t give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd, and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. A six-foot skinny Negro woman was rolling her bones at the man’s hornbell, and he just jabbed it at her, «Ee! ee! ee!»

Everybody was rocking and roaring. Galatea and Marie with beer in their hands were standing on their chairs, shaking and jumping. Groups of colored guys stumbled in from the street, falling over one another to get there. «Stay with it, man!» roared a man with a foghorn voice, and let out a big groan that must have been heard clear out in Sacramento, ah-haa! «Whoo!» said Dean. He was rubbing his chest, his belly; the sweat splashed from his face. Boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattlety-boom! A big fat man was jumping on the platform, making it sag and creak. «Yoo!» The pianist was only pounding the keys with spread-eagled fingers, chords, at intervals when the great tenorman was drawing breath for another blast – Chinese chords, shuddering the piano in every timber, chink, and wire, boing! The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around; his hat was over his eyes; somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air. Dean was directly in front of him with his face lowered to the bell of the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man’s keys, and the man noticed and laughed in his horn a long quivering crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; and finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long time as everything else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come swarming from the nearest precinct. Dean was in a trance. The tenorman’s eyes were fixed straight on him; he had a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was, and they began dueling for this; everything came out of the horn, no more phrases, just cries, cries, «Baugh» and down to «Beep!» and up to «EEEEE!» and down to clinkers and over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything, up, down, sideways, upside down, horizontal, thirty degrees, forty degrees, and finally he fell back in somebody’s arms and gave up and everybody pushed around and yelled, «Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!» Dean wiped himself with his handkerchief.

How very incredibly exciting. Note that the intrepid duo followed up this fascinating public performance by abandoning the girls and running off with the black saxophonist, then getting picked up and spending the night in a hotel room with “a tall, thin fag who was on his way home to Kansas.”

Anyone who praises the work of the Beat Generation is either a) lying or b) hasn’t ever actually read any of it. It doesn’t even rise to the level of mediocre, it’s downright awful in terms of style, story, and characters, and that’s without even getting into the degeneracy and malignant narcissism of the subjects. There is nothing of the Good, the Beautiful, or the True in it. Their works are considerably closer to case studies in mental illness than anything approaching either fiction or biography.

And let’s not get started on the gay Jewish pedophile who tried to pass off his juvenile odes to mental illness and degeneracy as poetry. The self-styled greatest minds of his generation sure look a lot more like Dumb and Dumber, don’t you think? From an artistic perspective, Ginsberg was nothing more than the male Lena Dunham of his day, although we are fortunate that, unlike Dunham, he did not have access to Hollywood budgets or video production equipment in his youth.

I’m not a big fan of the Generation Z habit of labeling everything “cringe”, but if the concept applies to anything on this planet, it applies to the fake, gay Beats and the Boomers who idolized them.

UPDATE: I think this very positive review of Kerouac’s book sums up both its quality and its appeal very well.

One The Road is the best book i have ever read.

Indeed.

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Three Steps Forward

Some days, it feels like one step forward, two steps back. But today is a Three Steps Forward day, as all of the machines less the final two are arriving at the Bindery. We’ll put up some pictures on SG tomorrow, and I’ll try to show some on the Darkstream too.

Loading the truck in England.

It’s going to take a month or three before the Bindery is fully operational, as we need to make some modifications to the location in order to ensure everything is in line with the local codes, train everybody in, then assemble practice books until we meet our quality standards, but today marks the most significant step in the process since the subscribers made the whole thing possible by purchasing Bindery Editions of THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY.

As an added bonus, here are the designs for POLITICS and ETHICS covers. As you can see, they will make handsome companions for the recently sold-out RHETORIC, although I’m not entirely certain about the central figure for ETHICS, so it’s possible that cover may change somewhat. But the spines are settled and they are going to look spectacular on the shelves as a three-volume set.

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Believe Them

When monsters tell you they are monsters, take them at their word and treat them accordingly. And for the love of all that is Good, Beautiful, and True, stop trying to correct them, defend them, or conflate them with their hated enemies. Like it or not, this is the true face of so-called “Judeo-Christianity”.

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Interview with Susan Cooper

An illuminating 1999 interview with the author of THE DARK IS RISING series.

RT: The books comprise a series. Did you find that what you had written in the earlier books committed you to directions that you subsequently regretted, or wished you had more freedom to change?

SC: No. It was wonderful. It was like writing a symphony, in which each movement is different and yet they all link together. I wish my imagination would give me another shape like that because there are all kinds of satisfactions inside it. Things link together, an early book leads to something in a later book. When I wrote the first book, of course, I didn’t envision a series, but later, when I first had the idea of writing, not just the second book, but the whole sequence, I drew up a plan on a piece of paper. I had little notes written down: I had the four times of the year–focused upon the solstices, Beltane, and such festivals–I had places, and, very roughly, the characters who were in each book. I remember that under The Grey King there was a boy called Bran, but I didn’t know who he was. So that was the only thing that limited me.

There were things I had to remember from early books that had to be either resolved or referred to in later books. Once in a great while some particularly bright child will write me a letter saying, you never said what happened to . . . . But I didn’t find it restricting. No.

RT: Are there any particular details you would like to change, looking back in retrospect?

SC: I would like to have developed the three Drew children more fully in the first book. They develop as the series progresses, but they’re very corny kids’ book characters in Over Sea, Under Stone, it seems to me. I hadn’t gotten to know them.

RT: As the series progresses, Jane in particular grows more interesting, doesn’t she?

SC: Yes. Jane is someone I always wanted to write about again. Silver on the Tree suffered from being the last book where I was tying up all the ends. It has too much in it. My head was going off in all directions. Its structure is not terrific. There was even more in it, but I took some out. Of course when you’re dealing with the substance of myth, which is the fight between good and evil, I suppose, you have to provide the ultimate, terrific, enormous climax. It’s almost impossible.

I’m not promising anything, not yet, but I am optimistic that we may eventually be able to release a Castalia Library edition of the series. And if so, the bar will be a fairly high one to clear, as the Easton Press edition is arguably the most beautiful set that Easton has ever produced.

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Jordan Peterson Bravely Runs Away

Better hide the meth, Jordan Peterson is feeling the heat again and bravely decided to give up his Twitter habit:

Initially, Peterson stuck to his guns, firing back at ‘panderers’, and insisting that the decision to feature a plus-size woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit was ‘a conscious and cynical manipulation by the oh-so virtuous politically correct’.

In another tweet he added: ‘It’s a conscious progressive attempt to manipulate and retool the notion of beauty, reliant on the idiot philosophy that such preferences are learned and properly changed by those who know better.’

However, after he continued to be bombarded with what he described as a ‘vicious flood of insults’, Peterson called it quits, announcing that he was ‘departing’ Twitter, while branding the social media platform ‘intrinsically and dangerously insane’.

‘The endless flood of vicious insult is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else,’ he wrote. ‘I like to follow the people I know but I think the incentive structure of the platform makes it intrinsically and dangerously insane.’

He continued: ‘So I told my staff to change my password, to keep me from temptation, and am departing once again.

‘If I have something to say I’ll write an article or make a video. If the issue is not important enough to justify that then perhaps it would be best to just let it go.’

If you ever want to know how a Gamma is going to handle something, just ask yourself What Would Jordan Do?

Not that getting off Facebook and Twitter and Linked-In is a bad idea in and of itself, but the only thing worse than rage-quitting is fear-quitting.

UPDATE: Social media isn’t for everyone, particularly not for those desperate for approval.

JORDAN PETERSON: The endless flood of vicious insult is really not something that can be experienced anywhere else. I like to follow the people I know but I think the incentive structure of the platform makes it intrinsically and dangerously insane.

MIKE CERNOVICH: Twitter is spectacular. I’ve made new friends, witnessed and participated in history, and learned as much as one would walking library stacks. You’re desperate for approval, this makes it impossible for you to not internalize (or at least ignore) the hate any public figure gets.

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