A bad and unnecessary idea

We really don’t need to communicate any better with the animals than we do:

A rock star, a vegan financier and a pioneer of the internet are backing a project to find ways for humans to communicate with animals using machine learning and artificial intelligence. The Interspecies I/O forum on Friday announced the Coller Prize for Interspecies Conversation, a $1 million research award, according to a statement. The effort kicks off this weekend with a video conference on subjects running from the language of bonobo apes to the music of elephants.

Can you imagine how incredibly irritating it would be to actually understand what your dog was saying all the time? It would be like taking a long trip in a car with a little kid who keeps asking “are we there yet?” Except your dog would be alternating “I’m hungry, is it time for dinner yet?” with “hey, hey, hey, there’s a BIRD out there!” all day every day.

Reclaim the Net

The word about Patreon’s legal dilemma is rapidly spreading, as an activist site, Reclaim the Net, has picked up the story about Owen and the Bears fighting back against Big Tech censorship and deplatformings:

Tentative ruling against Patreon could provide a legal workaround for Big Tech censorship. If the final ruling goes against Patreon, it could have to pay millions of dollars in arbitration fees and leave other companies such as PayPal open to a similar fate.

A California Court has issued a tentative ruling against fan-funding platform Patreon and denied its request for an injunction against 72 claimants who are seeking arbitration against the company.

If the final ruling goes against Patreon, which it looks like it might, lawyer, commentator, and producer Mike Cernovich believes that it would serve as “a HUGE workaround for Big Tech censorship” where the former backers of large creators who are banned from Patreon or other similar sites such as payments service PayPal could file similar motions and force these companies to pay huge arbitration fees that could total millions of dollars.

At this point, I see no serious probability that the final ruling will not go against Patreon. And the bizarre behavior of Patreon`s lawyers in response to the recent demands for arbitration by various independent parties has made it very clear that they, at least, recognize the significance of the full text of the tentative ruling, to which most of the public has not yet been made privy.

Not only that, but there is a very good chance that at least some of the arbitrations addressed by the lawsuit will be declared to be in default by the arbitrators before the next court hearing, which would be significant in light of the signaling by the judge about his reluctance to interfere with either the arbitrators or the arbitration process.

This reluctance should not be a surprise to anyone, given the deference that state and federal courts have given to arbitration. For example, here is one precedent from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals which the judge could cite in his final ruling, if he were so inclined. The key words here are “he bargains for the process”. And in the case of Patreon, it not only bargained for the process, but drafted and imposed it.

The parties bargained for arbitration. When one bargains for arbitration, he bargains for the process as well as the results. If Ocean had wanted to have the rigors of a federal court proceeding, it could have had them. Instead, it compelled arbitration and now, dissatisfied with the result, seeks a different outcome.
Kergosien v. Ocean Energy, Inc., 390 F.3d 346 (5th Cir. 2004)

A number of people have noted Ebay`s recent changes to its Terms of Use  and assumed they were made in response to Patreon`s situation. That may or may not be so, but regardless, the tweaks Ebay has applied to its dispute process don`t really address its intrinsic vulnerability to mass consumer action.

The evil of the Devil Mouse

The pure evil of Disney appears to go back considerably further than you might think. Remember its version of Pinocchio, circa 1940? Disney was already talking about a “Pleasure Island” to which small boys were taken, and from which they never returned, decades before the Magical Kingdom Cruise Line was offering excursion trips to Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

Stone knows

Roger Stone is aware of the true nature of the enemy:

“I really do believe that those who are trying to undo this president, those who are trying to destroy me, trying to destroy Michael Flynn — who’s a very good man and great American patriot war hero — I do believe they’re satanic,” Stone tells Just The News in a podcast interview for The Pod’s Honest Truth. “I don’t believe that any of these people involved in my prosecution are really believers in God.” 

They are, quite literally, Satanic. The “god” they worship is “the god of this world” as opposed to the Creator, the Heavenly Father, who sent His son Jesus Christ to save Man.

The Prometheans are evil beyond anything the average individual can even comprehend. And Christianity is the only force that is capable of not only standing against them, but defeating them, which is why they are hell-bent on converging, diluting, and diverting Christians in every way possible.

The Left-Right ideological struggle is not real. Even the Nationalist-Globalist conflict is essentially a proxy for the real war, which is between Christian and Promethean, between the servants of the Creator God and the servants of the god of this world.

It’s not like it matters

EA leaps to distance Maddens from the Redskins:

We don’t know what the Washington NFL team’s name and logo will be this season, but in Madden 21, the team will have no name or logo.

EA Sports says that Madden 21 will have a generic Washington team, until updates are available when the team has chosen its new name and uniform designs.

“We are pleased to see Washington’s decision to change their team name and visual identity,” EA said in a statement. “We are quickly working to update Madden NFL 21 to feature a generic Washington team, while we await final word on the updated team name and logo design.”

I doubt this will be much of an issue, since I am skeptical there will be much of a 2020 NFL season. But it will be informative to see if the game contains the retro uniforms or not.

Hea culpa

Paul Krugman admits that he may, perhaps, have been a little incorrect about that whole global economy thing, at least in the short term:

Concerns about adverse effects from globalization aren’t new. As U.S. income inequality began rising in the 1980s, many commentators were quick to link this new phenomenon to another new phenomenon: the rise of manufactured exports from newly industrializing economies.

Economists took these concerns seriously. Standard models of international trade say that trade can have large effects on income distribution: A famous 1941 paper showed how trading with a labor-abundant economy can reduce wages, even if national income grows.

And so during the 1990s, a number of economists, myself included, tried to figure out how much the changing trade landscape was contributing to rising inequality. They generally concluded that the effect was relatively modest and not the central factor in the widening income gap. So academic interest in the possible adverse effects of trade, while it never went away, waned.

In the past few years, however, worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to ask now what we missed.

There’s been a lot of this going around. Leading globalists such as Kissinger and Fukuyama have published learned tomes explaining why globalism has “unexpectedly” failed. Of course, it never occurs to them to admit that nationalist skeptics like me were correct all along, hence these revisionist self-critiques that are primarily intended to salvage the tattered remnants of their award-winning reputations.

In the meantime, I will patiently await my Quasi-Nobel Prize in Economics for creating the Labor Mobility proof of the impossibility of free trade.

And I will also fisk Krugman’s entire column on the Darkstream this weekend.

More sickness from the Hellmouth

I always wondered why a musical mediocrity like John Legend and a talentless 6 with implants like “supermodel” Chrissy Teigen would be relentlessly pushed as the height of pop cultural stardom. The news that Teigen was a frequent flyer on the Epstein Express pretty much suffices to explain the conundrum:

Supermodel and outspoken liberal activist Chrissy Teigen is under a big cloud of suspicion after deleting 60,000 tweets. Why would John Legend’s wife abruptly scrub her Twitter account? Because online conspiracy theorists claim Teigen is listed on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. But her sudden mass deletion of tweets is now causing her even more problems.

The tweets are bad. Very bad, to the point that they would almost certainly end the career of any male celebrity. Whether it will be sufficient to cancel a female celebrity is not yet known.

It’s a little late for that

The empire’s ruling tribe is beginning to discover that while it’s one thing to take the reins of the empire from the people who built it, it’s another thing to run it successfully:

Goldman is well positioned to explain what China is about and what the US and even the world should do. A columnist at the Asia Times and a former senior executive of a Hong Kong investment bank, he has traveled extensively throughout China for two decades and negotiated directly with top Chinese industry leaders. He has also written extensively on Jewish topics for a variety of scholarly and general Jewish publications. His Jewish background has been central to his approach. Goldman argues that to understand China, one has both to look at how it operates today and to examine the long-standing cultural patterns of a proud and distinct 5,000-year-old civilization.

Goldman explains that most Americans are simply wrong about China. The typical analogies whether on the left or the right are way off base. China does not have the aspirations of the Soviet Union; China does not want to militarily conquer the West, nor does it want to integrate in the existing world order. It could care less how others see the world. Nor is the Chinese economy dangerously over-leveraged. China is more stable than ever. Finally, he argues the Thucydides model — that as an emerging power China seeks to challenge the US — is not even relevant.

Instead, Goldman argues that the Chinese are an ancient imperial civilization who expect to rule under a mandate from heaven and have the confidence to do so. Moreover, as in the past, they prefer soft power that gives them maximum control to a military showdown that might bring chaos. For the Chinese, the ends justify the means.

Currently, China is implementing a concerted plan to control key industries and information to ensure world domination. As Goldman shows, it is working: most of the world has adopted the Huawei technology for 5G and Chinese signal encryption will soon eclipse that of the US. Soon the world will be totally reliant on Chinese technology and will knowingly or unknowingly share its data with the Chinese government. No Chinese Edward Snowden is likely to survive to warn us. With such power, China will dictate the terms of trade and interaction. Already the basic outlines of the existing China-US trade deal signal China’s dominance: the US buys Chinese technology and other manufactured goods and China buys meat and other agricultural goods from the US. These are the terms imperial powers dictate to their colonies.

Goldman outlines a plan for the US to maintain its world position. He insists that the US absolutely cannot leave it to the private sector. It must develop a government policy to massively support R&D at the industry and university levels. Measures will require huge investments and an overhaul of the American education system to drastically improve educational levels, and most of all, to quadruple the number of American graduates in the sciences and technology. Without these two steps, we will be under China’s yoke within the decade.

The amusing thing about this is that Spengler – as Goldman was known for years before he went public – was completely wrong about China and its intentions for years. This sudden and very belated concern for the US maintaining its world position is the result of the failure of the post-imperial collapse jump-to-China plan.

As I pointed out several years ago, the judeochristians’ assumption of their intellectual superiority was fundamentally based on their being a low-trust, high-performance group amidst a high-trust, high-performance population. Now that they are running into conflict with their first conflict with a low-trust, high-performance group since the Maccabean wars, they are discovering that they are at a significant disadvantage.

I expect the Judeo-Sinese conflict to go pretty much the same way the Judeo-Roman wars did. And the article raises the obvious question: to precisely whom does the author mean when he writes “we will be under China’s yoke within the decade”?

Now we know why

It appears there may be a good reason Dan Snyder suddenly reversed course on changing the name of the Washington Redskins:

Not long after the Washington owner announced that his team would no longer be known as the Redskins, a series of cryptic tweets from local reporters emerged, warning of an imminent bombshell set to shake the franchise to its core.

“The warped and toxic culture of the Washington Football Team is about to be exposed in a sickening fashion . . . Again,” wrote CBS’ Jason La Canfora, a former team beat reporter.

Julie Donaldson of NBC Sports Washington also wrote, “What’s coming is disappointing and sad.”

Though it remains unclear what will surface, several other reporters have also been tipped off to news that could be devastating to the team.

“There is much more going on . . . than a name change,” Scott Abraham of ABC 7 wrote. “. . . And it’s not good. I did not get specifics, but get ready people.”

It is becoming ever more apparent that blackmail, rather than corporate profits, that is the engine of the US economy.