The Benefits of Imposed Protectionism

The Russians have learned there is nothing to fear from Western sanctions:

Vladimir Putin ‘doesn’t give a s**t’ about the risk of Western sanctions if it were to invade Ukraine, Russia’s ambassador to Sweden said as US staff began withdrawing from eastern Ukraine amid warnings of an ‘imminent’ invasion.

In an outspoken interview, Viktor Tatarintsev told the country’s Aftonbladet newspaper that ‘the more the West pushes Russia, the stronger the Russian response will be’.

He claimed Russia had become more ‘self-sufficient’ amid the threat of sanctions and accused the West of not understanding his country.

‘We are more self-sufficient and have been able to increase our exports. We have no Italian or Swiss cheeses, but we’ve learned to make just as good Russian cheeses using Italian and Swiss recipes’, he said.

There is nothing that a big, resource-rich country needs from trade. Indeed, every nation large enough to be self-sufficient will be much better off, over time, by refusing to trade with the rest of the world. The USA has been impoverished, and is now debt-ridden, due to its foolish embrace of free trade and the Ricardian lie.

It’s only a matter of time before China and Russia cut economic ties with the USA. And that will harm the USA, and the West, far more than it harms the rising world powers.

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Provocations

One can’t help but notice that it is the US Navy that is invading Russia’s territorial waters, and not the other way around:

A US Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarine has been detected and chased away in Russian territorial waters off the Kuril Islands, Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Saturday.

The vessel was found submerged off the small uninhabited island of Urup while Russia’s Pacific Fleet was holding exercises in the area. Russian vessels contacted the submarine, warning it was in the country’s territorial waters and ordering it to surface immediately, the military said.

The submarine, however, did not respond to the messages, and destroyer Marshal Shaposhnikov was deployed to chase it off. The Russian vessel used “appropriate means” against the US sub, the military noted without providing any further details.

Following the run-in with the destroyer, the Virginia-class submarine used an active radar decoy, sailing away from Russian waters at full speed.

Remember, any US military action is customarily preceded by a false flag of some kind. Don’t be fooled by the mainstream media narrative.

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Empire’s End

Empires tend to end in farce. The Empire on Which the Sun Never Sets is no exception:

The UK will remove all of its troops from Ukraine amid fears that Russia could invade its neighbor, Britain’s armed forces minister, James Heappey, said on Saturday. “All of them will be withdrawn,” Heappey told BBC Radio 4’s Today show. “There will be no British troops in Ukraine if there is to be a conflict there.”

One wonders what the victors of the Crimean War would have made of such an ignominious and farcical series of maneuvers on the part of the British Armed Forces. The heir to that fallen empire, the Imperial USA, shouldn’t laugh too hard, though, after its own debacle in Afghanistan. The end of the US empire is already in sight.

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Speed Up Those Mutations

Biologists can’t do the math, but apparently they are beginning to understand that the mathematical critique of their evolutionary mutational model is posing a genuine threat to the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis and the theory of evolution by natural selection.

New study suggests for the first time that genetic mutations are NOT always random and may evolve to respond to environmental pressures. Researchers tracked the appearance of a malaria fighting mutation in genomes. They tracked these mutations throughout populations in Africa and in Europe. The team found the genetic mutation was much more prevalent within Africa. It also evolved much faster than would be expected in individuals and groups.

Darwin’s theory that genetic mutations are always random is wrong, suggests a new study which found evidence that mutations can be a response to environmental pressures.

For more than a century, scientists have held to Charles Darwin’s theory that all genetic mutations are random and accidental, with the most beneficial traits being passed on through the generations of breeding.

Researchers from the University of Haifa in Israel say that isn’t the case, finding that the generation of the human hemoglobin S (HbS) mutation is not random… The findings challenge a core assumption at the heart of Darwin’s theory of evolution, showing that a long-term directional mutation response to environmental pressures is possible, and that mutations are not just random phenomena. 

Translation: the Prometheans who direct what presently passes for “science” are now prepared to throw out Darwin and natural selection in order to preserve whatever will permit them to deny the logic of a Creator God who designed humanity.

He hasn’t claimed their discovery discredits the theory of evolution, and both studies suggest randomness still plays a big role in mutations, however, it isn’t the only mechanism at play in evolution.

This is late-stage epicycle construction, as they’re trying to add additional mechanisms that will permit a faster rate of mutation, and therefore a faster rate of gene fixation, in order to account for the obvious, and undeniable, impossibility of random mutations being naturally selected prior to being fixated in the population. But these attempts to retroactively salvage the Neo-Darwinian model of evolution is an obvious confession of what I’ve been pointing out for years now, which is that the model simply does not work.

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And Morgoth Smiled

The Dark Herald explains why there is no chance that the Amazon demolition of The Silmarillion is not going to make the execrable Disney Wars trilogy, the abysmal Godfather III, and the tedious final season of A Game of Thrones all look like entertaining cinematic masterpieces in comparison:

Christopher Tolkien was the good son of a great man; he steadfastly protected his father’s legacy and works. But he is gone now. The estate now belongs to Tolkien’s grandchildren and ALL of them are trust fund babies who act like trust fund babies. They want their other friends with money to stroke their asses and tell them how brave they are being for letting Bezos bastardize and soil their grandfather’s work. They are completely blind to the fact that this pile of fetid garbage is going to stain people’s memories of his masterpiece.

This whole catastrophe started with Jeff Bezos saying he was determined to have his own Game of Thrones. Which means that this abortion is going to be a derivative work of George R.R. Martin, not JRR Tolkien. The producers are denying this with tears and oaths but the fact that they hired an Intimacy Coordinator (AKA Sex Arranger) tells you what books this show is based on.

The truth is, this show isn’t based on any of Tolkien’s books. What Amazon has the rights to are the background notes. No joke, that is what they own the rights to and that is what Bezos has spent hundreds of millions on.

While the contract they had with Christopher Tolkien had some very strict limits with regards to what they couldn’t do with regards to JRR Tolkien’s overall story arc, it had a major loophole in that they could create new characters. And boy, did they ever.

In addition, they have undeniably altered established characters significantly. Galadriel, Commander of the Northern Fucking Armies. No, I’m not kidding they got her that wrong.

It’s not just the SJW wokery. It’s the complete disrespect for the source material and the author.

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Reflections on Organizational Success

Dominic Cummings shared some practical thoughts on his commenter’s notes on the obstacles that organizational Machiavellians always pose to the core objectives of the organization:

  1. Boris types [self-servers with zero interest in the mission – VD] are everywhere.
  2. difference with Groves, Mueller, Bob Taylor et al is that they align talent with a goal and squeeze Boris types out, with extreme prejudice. some of those environments are relatively civilised, some (e.g S Jobs) less so, no doubt.
  3. near everybody is calculating about themselves but the situation around them changes calculations – if people think ‘leadership is great and i agree with the goal and i love being here and others are here for the mission’, like at PARC, then selfish calculations shrink (not disappear) to being overwhelmed by what’s important
  4. the organisations that really change the world POSITIVELY have other things that dominate – boris d stuff was in no10 in 2020 when i was there, but people knew there was something else. now they know there’s nothing else.
  5. think you’re right about a tendency to entropy! as you say… groves, mueller, taylor… all pushed out… and the succession problem…
  6. the widespread failure even to see these problems provides opportunity, but… if it were easy everyone would do it…

The succession problem to which he refers is tremendous, and it is one to which I have given considerable thought over the years. The three primary challenges that I have identified concerning it are as follows:

  1. The loyal lieutenants are never candidates to succeed the leader. The skills involved in building and leading an enterprise seldom have anything whatsoever to do with being an effective long-time loyal subordinate. History has demonstrated this again and again and again, and yet very few loyal lieutenants ever grasp that they are literally some of the worst possible successors or that their skill set is entirely inadequate for the task to which they aspire. It is imperative that they understand this: deserve’s got nothing to do with it.
  2. The leader must not hang on too long. I’ve personally witnessed several organizations go down the tubes because the leader simply couldn’t bear to give up the status of being in control, even though he observably no longer had any interest in being responsible for actively running things.
  3. Equality among successors is futile, dangerous, and counterproductive, in both management and ownership terms. About the only thing more destructive a man can do than divide the ownership of an organization equally among his heirs is to leave it to his wife or to a charity organization.

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This Bodes Well for the Future

I, for one, welcome our future AI overlords.

Get inspiration for a story from an Al, just write two themes and see the first paragraph come alive.
Themes: Vox Day
and Otters
Story: There once was a man named Vox Day, and he was a very controversial figure. Some people loved him, and some people hated him. But no one could deny that he was a powerful speaker and writer. One day, Vox Day met an otter named Otter. They started to become good friends, and Vox Day taught Otter about the importance of freedom and liberty. Otter was so inspired by Vox Day that he decided to become a strong advocate for these values, too. This story is about how Vox Day and Otter helped to change the world for the better. They showed us that there is nothing that can stop us from achieving our goals if we are willing to work hard enough for it. Thanks, gentlemen, for your inspiring example!

They clearly like me a lot better than our current quasi-human rulers do. Chew on that, Charles Stross!

UPDATE: The AIs don’t leave much doubt as to why I am so widely feared. It’s all about the skulls.

There’s a movement afoot, a group of people who believe that the future of the human race rests on the shoulders of young people. They call themselves Vox Day’s Children and they believe that only through the propagation of our kind will the future of humanity be secured. Vox Day is a controversial figure, but he’s got a point. Skulls, skulls everywhere. And not just any skulls, but the skulls of the great and the good. The skulls of the thinkers, the scientists, the inventors. The skulls of the people who have made the world a better place. The young people of Vox Day’s Children believe that these skulls are the key to our future. They believe that by venerating them, by studying them, by understanding what they represent, we can secure the future of humanity.

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