Because it worked so well with liberals

Conservatives are now wagging their warning fingers at China. From SocialGalactic:

CHN can run anything to it’s most effective state. But it cant create.

That’s totally irrelevant. What difference does that possibly make concerning what the future is going to bring? Geopolitical dominance does not go to the most creative and the world has never been ruled by art and music theory majors.

It’s rather like conservatives repeatedly warning liberals that they won’t like the world they’re creating. Even if that happens to be true, so what? The changes will have already taken place.

Science and technological development is already stagnant across the West and rapidly declining. And the Chinese engineering capacity already exceeds that of the USA, which can no longer effectively build what it designs.

The concept of inevitable progress was never true and is hopelessly wrong. Forget “creating”, at this point the men of the West should be concerned about “maintaining” and “surviving”, because they are currently failing at both.

Minneapolis celebrates diversity

Diversity does its thing in Minneapolis:

Tuesday evening, thousands of people, many of them wearing masks, marched peacefully from the site — outside Cup Foods on Chicago Avenue — to the Police Department’s Third Precinct, where tensions quickly escalated.

As rain began to fall, protesters shattered the glass front door of the station and defaced the building. Police squad vehicles were hit with spray paint.

Some protesters climbed on top of the building, while others threw rocks and water bottles at officers in riot gear. Police responded by firing chemical irritants and flash-bang devices, and sending groups scattering to a nearby Target and Arby’s, some getting milk to pour into their stinging eyes. Protesters used Target shopping carts as barricades while the store temporarily closed.

Meanwhile, in still-mostly-white Vadnais Heights, the Scandicucks are enviously genuflecting to diversity and dreaming of a day when they will enjoy the crime and riots of the big city to the southwest.

A Vadnais Heights City Council member abruptly resigned Tuesday after an anonymous person publicly confronted him about nearly 40 inflammatory social media posts that disparaged Muslims, transgender and gay people….

“My goal is an inclusive community that welcomes residents of all races, genders, religions, beliefs and sexual orientations. Council Member Johnson’s rhetoric is not acceptable for any representative of this city.”

At this point, I think the USA looking at a level of internal violence in the 2030s that will end up around halfway between the Rwanda/Holocaust level and the Great Leap Forward. And as long as the Johnsons are resigning and the Gundersons are virtue-signaling, the situation is still getting worse.

China brings Silicon Valley to heel

As I wrote in Corporate Cancer, China is going to dominate the consumer technology high ground – namely, the apps and interfaces, because they a) protect their home markets from competition and b) don’t hate more than 50 percent of their users. The signs of this coming domination are already visible.

YouTube is automatically deleting comments that contain certain Chinese-language phrases related to criticism of the country’s ruling Communist Party (CCP). The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it’s working to fix the issue.

“Upon review by our teams, we have confirmed this was an error in our enforcement systems and we are working to fix it as quickly as possible,” said a YouTube spokesperson. The company did not elaborate on how or why this error came to be, but said it was not the result of any change in its moderation policy.

But if the deletions are the result of a simple mistake, then it’s one that’s gone unnoticed for six months. The Verge found evidence that comments were being deleted as early as October 2019, when the issue was raised on YouTube’s official help pages and multiple users confirmed that they had experienced the same problem.

Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words “共匪” (“communist bandit”) or “五毛” (“50-cent party”) are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.

The fact that we’re already seeing companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook beginning to kneel before Beijing means that it won’t be long before other converged companies like Paypal and Patreon are completely compliant, assuming, of course, that they even survive the initial shock of competition from the East.

It’s even possible that rogue independent platforms like SG, BitChute, and UATV may have a brighter future than the Silicon Valley giants.

Back to the bipolar world

It’s a bit ironic that David Goldman, who was once at the forefront of the planned Leap to China, has now turned in alarm to talking up a nonexistent “American” unity between Americans, Paper Americans, Fake Americans, and Not Americans, now that the US empire has squandered its brief period of global dominance on the invasion and occupation of a few of Israel’s enemies.

There is a line of American commentary on China, argued most clearly and persistently by David Goldman at Asia Times (now apparently with Gordon Chang also on board) telling us that we Americans should consider ourselves to be in a Sputnik Moment: a moment in history where, if we don’t stop the fruitless squabbling and begin engaging in some serious, co-ordinated national effort, the ChiComs will eat our lunch, breezing past us in key technologies like artificial intelligence, big data, microchip fabrication, and quantum computing.

The problem with that prescription is that the original Sputnik Moment, to which America reacted with such spectacular success, occurred in 1957, a whole decade B.S.—”Before Sontag.”

White ethnomasochism was not entirely unknown in 1957, but it was restricted to tiny cliques of urban intellectuals.

We could make a united national response to Sputnik sixty years ago because we were a sufficiently united nation. You need that qualifying word “sufficiently” there because there was what people of the time called “the Negro Problem.”

White Americans didn’t think about black Americans any more than they absolutely had to, though, and the race issue didn’t split whites down the middle as clearly and angrily as in what I call today’s Cold Civil War.

Sputnik-wise, we were a sufficiently united nation—sufficiently to co-operate in a colossal national effort with a minimum of bickering.

The US empire is now about as well-equipped to withstand the Chinese challenge as the Austro-Hungarian military was ready to face the Russian army in 1914. No amount of talking up the value of words and ideology and paper identity is going to substitute for genuine nationalism.

Finance vs business

The late, great Umberto Eco understood the difference. From Numero Zero, his final novel.

Don’t be naive. We’re talking about finance, not business. First buy, then wait and see where the money to pay for it comes from.

Numero Zero is a short, but excellent novel, a clever, more accessible Foucault’s Pendulum combined with a dash of nostalgia for the forgotten backways of Milano and Eco’s academic ideas about the nebulous nature of history and text.

I was hesitant to read this one after the relative disappointments of The Prague Cemetery and The Mysterious Flame of the Queen of Loanna. And I took my time with it, reading it first in Italian, then in English. It was both a pleasure and relief to discover that Dr. Eco closed out his literary career on a high note.

The return of the yellow press

The former president of CBS News encourages the mainstream media to give up its pretense of balance and impartiality:

There’s in all probability no technique to seal the hole between the media and a big phase of the general public. The media likes what it’s doing. Admires it. Celebrates it. There isn’t any private, skilled or monetary cause to vary. If something, the hole will develop. In the end, the media finds the “deplorables” deplorable.

Dan Abrams, ABC’s chief legal-affairs anchor and founding father of the web site Mediaite, has a novel however helpful concept for the media—candor. Chatting with the matter at February’s Rancho Mirage Writers Pageant, Mr. Abrams mentioned “I feel the very first thing that may assist . . . is to confess . . . that the individuals within the media are left of heart.”

It might be pleasant if a writer, an editor, a reporter, would simply say: Sure, I’m left of heart! I’m pleased with it. I feel our reporting is correct. It finest serves the general public. And the credibility of the media. So there!

Publications open about their bias would possibly really feel freer to give attention to the specifics: story choice, presentation, info, equity, stability. Not devoid of subtlety for certain, however manageable.

Honesty about their obvious political leanings would be preferable, without question. I doubt it will make all that much difference, however, since they’re not fooling anyone except perhaps Baby Boomers who haven’t been paying any attention since 1978.

Deleting Linkedin

I deleted my Linkedin account today. There were no platform problems or anything, it was merely that I’d seen reporters use it to try to get access to people with whom I’m acquainted, and I recently heard from one member of the Legal Legion that he’d caught a lawyer from one former opponent looking at his page.

So, there was some risk inherent in being on there, however low, and absolutely no reward of any kind except occasionally being able to make contact with old friends and colleagues. That was nice and all, but there are plenty of ways to do that without running the risk of colleagues and associates being targeted by reporters and SJWs; the recent brigading of one Webtoons episode serves as a reminder that there is no target too small for the damaged psyches of our enemies to attack.

I have no interest in the corpocracy.

Google counts, Facebook doesn’t

Ron Unz learns the hard way which of the two Internet giants actually matters with regards to site traffic:

I don’t use Facebook or other social networks myself, and noticed little reduction in our daily traffic following that purge, which seemed to underscore our lack of reliance upon social media. But a week later, this abruptly changed, and our regular daily readership dropped by a significant 15-20{105b5945f2a7891a3dd860d3a09046b26c32f8a07d097b566642738deee8841e}, hardly a crippling blow but quite distressing, setting us back many months of previous growth.

This puzzled me. Why would the Facebook ban have had such limited initial impact but then suddenly become so much more serious? Eventually I discovered that a second even more powerful Internet giant had also banned us, which explained the sharp drop. Our entire website and all its many millions of pages of serious content had been silently deranked by Google, thus eliminating nearly all our incoming traffic from search results….

Google still does contains all these pages, and if the additional specifier “unz” is added to the search, the results come up, but for anyone not knowing where to look, our entire website and all its content has completely disappeared. This explained our sudden 15-20{105b5945f2a7891a3dd860d3a09046b26c32f8a07d097b566642738deee8841e} reduction in regular traffic.

I use DuckDuckGo myself, but one of the problems with it and the other alternative search engines is that they still seem to be tied into the Google system in various ways, so they don’t take proper advantage of Google’s self-hamstringing of their own technology.

Filled out and authorized

Chuck Dixon’s Avalon Episode 8, HAND IT OVER, is now live on Webtoons. I think we can safely expect a second brigading from the SJWs, so remember that the ride never ends.

Also, Brandon Fiadino has entered Chicago Typewriter into the short story competition. The second episode, THE MAGIC SHOP, is also live on Webtoons now.

And in UATV news, the server passed its most serious traffic test with flying colors. Despite more than doubling its previous peak traffic upon news of the release of the Big Bear’s documentary of his You’re Doing Great, Kid tour on Unauthorized, the server never even blinked momentarily. In fact, if the statistics can be trusted, it should be able to handle nearly 20 times more traffic with ease.

Which will be very important once we start using it to live-stream. Also, if you’re just signing up now, please note that you’ll need to wait until the weekend to receive your invites. We have to create new invitations for you due to the server being on an entirely different system.

How debt destroys

Hertz is bankrupt despite owning one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world:

What one world war, one Great Depression and numerous oil price shocks couldn’t do, the coronavirus did in less than three months and late on Friday, auto rental giant Hertz which was founded in 1918 when it set up shop with a dozen Ford Model Ts, quietly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection struggling under a massive debt load after its business was brought to a grinding halt during the coronavirus pandemic and talks with creditors failed to result in much needed relief.

The company had a total of 568,000 vehicles and 12,400 corporate and franchise locations worldwide at the start of this year.

Last night on the Big Bear’s stream, we talked about deflation, and how the debt portion of the money supply is much larger than the cash + bank accounts percentage of it. Printing the latter doesn’t help if the former is vanishing at a faster rate.

The Hertz bankruptcy is a good illustration of this. While the corporation still has more than $1 billion in cash, that’s only four percent of the total debt it owes. And that’s why simply giving it more money to service its debts isn’t going to keep it alive for long, as the only thing that will allow it to continue operations is the bankruptcy court agreeing to wipe out a significant percentage of its $24.4 billion in debt.

And that is, as Zerohedge noted, a deflationary bomb, given the size of the company and the price-depressing effects of the liquidation of its vehicular assets. Speaking of those assets, it’s interesting to note that Hertz actually listed more assets than debts on its bankruptcy petition, which would seem to indicate that it’s not actually bankrupt, but actually suggests that the real total value of its assets are less than recorded.