Foreign Legion Fail

A Canadian sniper returns from Ukraine, unimpressed:

Once lauded by the international media, a Canadian sniper known as ‘Wali’ has returned from Ukraine to Quebec, telling local media that his experience there was a “terrible disappointment.” He claimed there was inadequate weaponry, poor training and heavy losses, as well as profiteering and desertion in the ranks.

When ‘Wali’ answered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call in March and volunteered to fight for Ukraine, he was given lavish coverage by the Western media. A former Canadian soldier who had also volunteered to fight with Kurdish militants in Iraq, Wali was described by Spanish media as “the best sniper in the world,” celebrated by American military bloggers for “hilariously troll[ing]” Russia and praised by the New York Post for “grabbing anti-tank missiles in a warehouse to kill real people.”

However, he said that reality left him disillusioned. Back home in Quebec, Wali told La Presse on Friday that his Ukrainian commanders initially “didn’t know what to do” with foreign fighters like himself. Tired of waiting for an opportunity to fight, Wali joined the ‘Norman Brigade,’ a private unit led by another former soldier from Quebec.

However, several members of this brigade told La Presse that weapons and armor promised by the brigade’s head never showed up, and some of its members found themselves near the front lines with no protective equipment. Around 60 members of the brigade have since deserted, its commander told La Presse, and some soldiers “schemed” to steal a $500,000 shipment of American-supplied weapons and form their own unit.

Wali eventually joined a Ukrainian unit fighting near Kiev, and described having to seek out weapons, food and gasoline. “You had to know someone who knew someone who told you that in some old barbershop they would give you an AK-47,” he recounted. “Even for the meals, it is often the civilians who provide them.”

In the end, Wali said that he ended up firing two bullets into windows “to scare people,” and decided to come home shortly after two Ukrainian conscripts he was posted with in the Donbass region exposed themselves to a Russian tank and received “highly accurate” shell fire in return.

I’m surprised he managed to survive. Of course, simply telling the truth about his experience will almost certainly get him banned from social media for “disinformation”.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: Redesigns

After an email conversation with a Castalia Library subscriber who was disappointed with the fact that we are doing second editions, thereby theoretically reducing the value to collectors who would prefer the supply of Library books to be as limited as possible, it occurred to me that in addition to changing the color of the second editions, we could follow the lead of Franklin and Easton by changing the artwork on the covers and spines.

For example, Easton actually has five different editions of Plutarch’s Lives in addition to its Deluxe Limited Edition, which has a limited print run of 1,200 volumes. The editions, with one exception, feature different artwork.

While I would prefer to keep the artwork more or less the same from one edition to the next, thereby maintaining some degree of continuity for those who start collecting the books later, I can understand why some might prefer different covers. So, I thought it best to survey the people whose opinions matter most, which is to say the Library subscribers.

Also, I should point out that while we value the opinions of the collectors and we are pleased to have piqued their interest, they are not our primary market nor is serving their needs our primary objective. Castalia Library, first and foremost, is about the preservation of knowledge in a beautiful and timeless manner. Therefore, our motivations and our decisions may, at times, not be aligned with the preferences of those who are buying our books.

Regardless, let us know your opinion on SocioGalactic.

DISCUSS ON SG

To Merit Forgiveness

Karl Denninger explains what is necessary:

To merit consideration of forgiveness you must do all of the following first with no assurance you’ll receive forgiveness in return:

Contrition — which of course requires an admission you ****ed up. You must admit, not tacitly but deliberately and consciously, communicating it as publicly as your original error — you were wrong and you did wrong.

Restitution for the harm — when possible. Not always possible, but when it IS possible it has to be proffered voluntarily, not pried out by landsharks or bullets, because if you actually HAVE contrition then you willingly admit you owe the harmed party(s). This is not a matter of punitive retribution; the willful and non-coerced offering of same is THE act that proves #1 is real and not words from the mouth of a snake.

A vow and, in the realm of business or political activity, legal and enforceable contractual strictures to prevent it from happening again.

All must be offered willingly and freely, not by legal or other coercion and even if doing so risks legal retribution before any consideration of forgiveness is to be undertaken. Further, all three do not guarantee or obligate forgiveness, but all three are a predicate before the person harmed should consider forgiveness.

God doesn’t forgive the unrepentant. Why would you?

DISCUSS ON SG

Not An Option

Europe cannot replace Russian natural gas, according to European oil professionals.

European countries will not be able to replace Russian natural gas without an energy transition, according to Shell CEO Ben van Beurden.

“Bringing more LNG to the market, increasing liquefaction and regasification capacity, and raising pipeline supplies from North Africa and Norway are reasonable things,” he said adding that “it is also inevitable to have an energy transition in the medium term. There is no way to simply buy more pipeline gas and LNG to completely replace all the Russian gas that we currently consume. This is not feasible,” van Beurden said.

Perhaps more sanctions are the answer? Or more sanctions and pride parades?

DISCUSS ON SG

Second Editions

Castalia Library is presently offering its subscribers first shot at THE BLACK SWAN by NN Taleb. We’re also planning to release second editions of the sold-out THE MISSIONARIES and MEDITATIONS, both of which will be very similar to the first editions, although they will be clearly denoted as second editions and will feature different color leathers in order to clearly distinguish the different editions.

Please drop a note on SG or to my email if you are interested in either second edition, as well as if you are interested in the Library or Libraria versions as we will offer second editions of both. We’re asking the subscribers now because we need to decide the size of the print runs for both second editions. We expect that these print runs will be smaller than the initial print runs, but it’s theoretically possible they will be larger, depending upon the demand.

Please note that we are not taking any orders for them yet; next month will be the soonest that we will do so.

While we’re on the subject of sold-out first editions, I should probably mention that RHETORIC is down to the last five copies in stock, for those who are interested in obtaining one before it sells out also sold out. However, we won’t contemplate a second edition of it until we see how ETHICS and POLITICS do.

DISCUSS ON SG

Australia Threatens Invasion

The utter hypocrisy of the globohomogenized remnants of the West could not be more clearly demonstrated than the difference in the reactions to a) Russia’s response to Ukraine’s attempt to join NATO and b) Australia’s response to the Solomon Islands agreeing to a security pact with China:

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has urged the Solomon Islands’ leader Manasseh Sogavare to remain “calm” after he said his country was being “threatened with invasion” over a security pact it signed with China.

“We need to be calm and composed when we deal with these issues,” Morrison said on Thursday, insisting the relationship between Australia and the Solomon Islands remained friendly even while acknowledging he was concerned over “security” in the region following Sogavare’s decision to sign the “secret arrangement” with China.

Sogavare has criticized both the US and Australia’s response to the security pact his island recently inked with Beijing, insisting there is “nothing to be concerned about” and that the island nation is “insulted” by the West’s response to the move.

“We are being treated as kindergarten students walking around with Colt 45s in our hands” who “need to be supervised,” Sogavare complained, insisting his country was being “threatened with invasion” over the controversial pact and that Australia’s response demonstrated a “lack of trust.” Sogavare said on Tuesday that there had been a “warning of military intervention” in the Solomon Islands if other countries’ security goals were undermined. “We are threatened with invasion,” he warned. “Now, that is serious.”

Morrison insisted that Australia remained Honiara’s “primary security partner,” and that his country trusted the island nation as an equal.

No final version of the pact between the island nation and China has yet been published, though a draft leaked in March mentioned Chinese warships were to be given safe harbor in the islands. Morrison had previously warned that a Chinese military base in the Solomon Islands would be considered a “red line” for Canberra.

Australia reacts to ‘invasion’ threat claim, 5 May 2022

So, we’re supposed to believe that Ukraine attempting to join NATO and threatening to put nuclear missiles on Russia’s border is not a casus belli, but the Solomon Islands permitting China to put a military base over a thousand miles away from Australi is.

Inversion is always a certain sign of evil.

DISCUSS ON SG

US Targeting Russian Generals

And yet, we can be confident that the US military is going to screech like a violated owl when the Russians and/or the Chinese return the favor and strike back at its generals.

The United States has provided intelligence that has helped Ukrainian forces kill several Russian generals since Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded the country, senior US officials said.

The US officials said that of the approximately 12 Russian generals killed by Ukrainian forces, ‘many’ had been targeted with the help of US intelligence, reports the New York Times.

Washington has provided Ukraine real-time battlefield information on Russia’s expected troop movements and the location about Russia’s mobile military headquarters, which relocate often.

Ukraine has combined those details with its own intelligence, which includes intercepted communications that reveal whether senior officers are located within a base, to conduct artillery strikes and other attacks that have killed Russian generals.

We knew the neocons wanted war with Russia. What we didn’t know was that the US military has degenerated to the point that its leadership appears to want it too.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Decreasing Utility of Email

Google’s dirty political tricks are only a small fraction of the problem. What used to be a supremely useful tool has been rendered increasingly useless, and totally unreliable, but the very services that purport to provide it.

A new study found that Google’s Gmail favors liberal candidates, allowing the vast majority of emails from left-wing politicians to land in the user’s inbox while more than two-thirds of messages from conservative candidates are marked as spam.

North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science published, “A Peek into the Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020,” last week in order to determine if spam filtering algorithms (SFAs) are biased toward a particular political party or ideology. The extensive study took place over a course of five months, from July 1, 2020 to November 30, 2020 on Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. They created 102 email accounts and subscribed to two Presidential, 78 Senate, and 156 House candidates.

To accurately estimate the political biases and mitigate any potential effects of demographics (ethnicity, age, and gender), we created multiple email accounts with different combinations of demographic factors and designed two experiments. The first experiment studies the general trends of biases in SFAs across the email services for the Presidential, Senate and House candidates. The second experiment studies the impact of different email interactions such as reading the emails, marking them as spam, or vice versa on the biases in SFAs. We designed an automated process to perform all the subscriptions, and took periodic backups to keep all the email accounts active as well as to keep track of the correct number of spam emails received over the course of data collection for each of the three services,” they wrote.

“We made several important observations in our study. For example, as an aggregate trend, Gmail leaned towards the left while Outlook and Yahoo leaned towards the right. Yahoo retained about half of all the political emails in inbox (up to 55.2% marked as spam) while outlook filtered out the vast majority of emails (over 71.8%) from all political candidates and marked them as spam,” the proposed methodology section continued. “Gmail, however, retained the majority of left-wing candidate emails in inbox (< 10.12% marked as spam) while sent the majority of right-wing candidate emails to the spam folder (up to 77.2% marked as spam).”

The study “further observed that the percentage of emails marked by Gmail as spam from the right-wing candidates grew steadily as the election date approached while the percentage of emails marked as spam from the left-wing candidates remained about the same” in the days leading up to Election Day.

This is why some sort of reliable community-wide direct comms systems need to be developed. Not for digital security – which is a charade no matter what technomagic is promised and probably would not be permitted – but simply for the reliability of delivery.

The user experience of email has been enhanced to the point of near-uselessness. And it probably won’t be too long before even that line is crossed.

DISCUSS ON SG