The value of football

The Duke of Wellington said, ten years after the battle while at Eton: “The battle of Waterloo was won here.” Richard Sherman, the outspoken cornerback, has a similar perspective:

I understand that football teaches you values. It teaches you accountability. It teaches you work ethic. It teaches you how to be a teammate. It teaches you how to overcome adversity. How to deal with loss. How to deal with being coachable. All those are skills that translate to the real world. In just about any job, you have to be part of a team. Don’t go into other people’s lanes. Football teaches you those lessons. It teaches you at a young age. It teaches you to overcome fear. It teaches you, ‘Hey, I’m 190 pounds and he’s 305 pounds. I still have to have to have the courage to go in there and mix it up with him.’ Those are lessons I don’t know how to teach otherwise … There’s a chance you’re getting hurt but there’s also a chance that you learn these lessons, you have a great life, you have a career. If you don’t play professionally, if you don’t even play in college, those life lessons that you learn will translate and elevate you in life in general.

Many of these things are true of all team sports, although football is special when it comes to teaching courage due to its intensely physical nature. Those who mock it as “sportsball” are ignorant fools and physical cowards who would never dare to line up in the trenches, either as children or adults, and will be of no utility whatsoever when the shooting starts.

Nuke it again, just to be sure

I despise Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, so I’m mostly amused by the news that Amazon is blackwashing Perrin and Nynaeve:

Amazon’s upcoming Wheel of Time series will race swap Egwene, Perrin, and Nynaeve.

Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins confirmed casting announcements for the upcoming Amazon adaptation. They cast Marcus Rutherford as Perrin Aybara, Zoë Robins as Nynaeve, and Madeleine Madden as Egwene Al’Vere. They also cast Josha Stradowski as Rand al’Thor, and Barney Harris as Mat Cauthon.

I am a little disappointed by the casting of Rand al’Thor, however. Josha Stradowski’s face isn’t anywhere nearly punchable enough.

China threatens financial nuke

I’ll have to think through this before reaching any firm conclusions, but I’m dubious that what has been called the Chinese “nuclear option” of selling its T-bills is likely to be a very effective tactic.

If there is any further pushback from the US on any of these Chinese projects in Iran, then Beijing will invoke in full force the ‘nuclear option’ of selling all or a significant part of its US$1.4 trillion holding of US Treasury Bills, with a major chunk of the paper due to be sold in September on this basis. This massive holding of these bonds – through which the US finances its economy and is an important factor both in the value of the dollar and therefore in the health of US international companies especially – has been used as a bargaining chip before by China, especially when it feels threatened. Back in 2007, just before the great financial crisis, a number of senior Chinese figures at various state-run think tanks – through which China often signals its big geopolitical threats – stated that the large-scale selling of this massive Treasury Bill holding would trigger a dollar crash, a huge spike in bond yields, the collapse of the housing market and stock market chaos.

Such a tactic would neatly fit into China’s overall strategy to have the renminbi challenge the US dollar’s status as the key global reserve currency and the prime currency for global energy transactions. “The long-planned sequencing for this was inclusion in the SDR {Special Drawing Rights] mix, which happened in 2016, increasing use as a trading currency, which followed that, use as the key currency of an international energy trading exchange, which has occurred with the creation of the renminbi-denominated Shanghai International Energy Exchange in last year, and the calls from big oil producers and other major trading nations to use the renminbi, which has been happening over the past few years,” the head of a New York-based commodities hedge fund told OilPrice.com. Only recently, Leonid Mikhelson, chief executive officer of Russian oil major, Novatek, said that future sales to China denominated in renminbi is under consideration and that US sanctions accelerate the process of Russia trying to switch away from US dollar-centric oil and gas trading and the damage from potential sanctions that go with it. “This has been discussed for a while with Russia’s largest trading partners such as India and China, and even Arab countries are starting to think about it… If they do create difficulties for our Russian banks then all we have to do is replace dollars,” he said. “The trade war between the US and China will only accelerate the process,” he added.

At first glance, it looks to me the potential US response of simply repudiating its debt and declaring those T-bills to be of no value will be considerably more harmful to China than selling the debt will be to the USA.

Those who are focused on posturing and threats never seem to keep in mind that the enemy always gets a vote.

Pervs and pedos in the UK

The seemingly inexplicable enthusiasm for the late Jimmy Savile on the part of the royals of the UK is beginning to make more sense with the Epstein revelations as well as a recently released FBI dossier on Lord Mountbatten, the viceroy of India:

Agents began compiling the file, which spans more than three decades, in February 1944, shortly after Mountbatten became supreme allied commander of southeast Asia. Following his appointment, the FBI interviewed Elizabeth de la Poer Beresford, Baroness Decies, about another matter, and she brought up Mountbatten, The Sunday Times reports.

The file reads: ‘She states that in these circles Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife are considered persons of extremely low morals. She stated that Lord Louis Mountbatten was known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys. In Lady Decies’ opinion he is an unfit man to direct any sort of military operations because of this condition. She stated further that his wife Lady Mountbatten was considered equally erratic.’

The royal kept a large group of gay friends, including Noël Coward, Terence Rattigan, Ivor Novello and Tom Driberg, who reportedly referred to him as ‘Mountbottom’.

Lownie’s new book, to be published on Thursday, contains an interview with Anthony Daly, a rent boy to the rich and famous during the 1970s. Daly claims: ‘Tom said Mountbatten had something of a fetish for uniforms — handsome young men in military uniforms (with high boots) and beautiful boys in school uniform.’

No wonder Princess Diana turned into such a lunatic after marrying into that family. And it’s not exactly a mystery why Prince William seems to gravitate toward the relative normalcy of his in-laws.

They don’t think it’s a bug

It’s actually a feature designed to permit their ideological allies to exploit their infrastructure:

Tulsi Gabbard’s email account went down right after the Democratic Debate and I believe I can provide assistance on where to focus your discovery efforts because I saw how other accounts, such as Jordan B. Peterson, was taken down. I’m going to recount how this happened to him so as to assist you in your legal discovery process.

During my tenor, Jordan B. Peterson had his gmail account deactivated and I had the opportunity to inspect the bug report as a full-time employee. What I found was that Google had a technical vulnerability that, when exploited, would take any gmail account down. Certain unknown 3rd party actors are aware of this secret vulnerability and exploit it. This is how it worked:

Take a target email address, change exactly one letter in that email address, and then create a new account with that changed email address. Malicious actors repeated this process over and over again until a network of spoof accounts for Jordan B. Peterson existed. Then these spoof accounts started generating spam emails. These email-spam blasts caught the attention of an AI system which fixed the problem by deactivating the spam accounts… and then ALSO the original account belonging to Jordan B. Peterson!

To my knowledge, this bug has never been fixed. When Google says an account was deactivated because of “suspicious” activity, this is how they often do it.

Proof of this exploit can be found by doing the following:

1. Go inside the Google corporate network.
2. Then go to the following url: http://b (yes the url is that short).
3. Search terms: jordan b peterson

Cheers and good luck in your lawsuit!

Lawfare is the way to defeat the social media giants. But you must be willing to fight them! Contrary to what most people believe, they are not set up for it, they do not anticipate it, they are not legally sophisticated, and they aren’t even inclined to handle their own legal defenses with their expensive in-house lawyers. Their focus on diversity and inclusivity means that their lower-level executives and in-house counsel are almost astonishingly incompetent; look at the number of simple grammatical errors in the average Silicon Valley company’s terms of use as evidence of that.

New Zealand won’t give up its guns

It would appear New Zealanders are not falling for the same sleight-of-law for which the Australians and the English fell so readily:

Once again, responding to a horrendous crime by inflicting knee-jerk, authoritarian restrictions on innocent people proves to be an ineffective means of convincing people to obey. Specifically, New Zealand’s government—which also stepped up censorship and domestic surveillance after bloody attacks on two Christchurch mosques earlier this year—is running into stiff resistance to new gun rules from firearms owners who are slow to surrender now-prohibited weapons and will probably never turn them in.

Officials should have seen it coming.

“Police are anticipating a number of people with banned firearms in their possession won’t surrender them,” Stuff reported at the end of May, based on internal government documents.

As of last week, only around 700 weapons had been turned over. There are an estimated 1.5 million guns—with an unknown number subject to the new prohibition on semiautomatic firearms—in the country overall.

The people of New Zealand have seen what has happened post-gun control in both Australia and England. The violence has gotten worse, not better. The governments have gotten more authoritarian, not less. And given the degraded demographic situation in all these countries, only a complete fool would comply with these intrinsically immoral laws and disarm himself.

Infrastructure at Unauthorized

Don’t worry if you happen to notice large swaths of videos disappearing from Unauthorized over the next three days. They’ll be back up soon. Due to our unexpected – and unprecedented success – we need to make some changes in order to provide room for our continued growth. We’ll be working on the site throughout the weekend, so don’t be alarmed by any anomalies you notice.

Thanks to all of the subscribers for the strong support. For more information, watch tonight’s Darkstream at 7 PM EST.

Why is it taking so long

To drain the Swamp? Because it has taken this long just to clear the swamp monsters out of the national security structure.

When Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and his deputy Sue Gordon leave their offices for the last time on Thursday, it will mark a turning point for an administration that has already endured the highest level of senior staff turnover in history.

Both Coats, who took on the role of intelligence chief in 2017, and Gordon, who started as his deputy a few months later, have outlasted a slew of their national security colleagues who left the Trump administration at various points over the last two years.

This “is a defining day in the Trump administration’s national security structure — they have finally cleared out all the national security positions in terms of senior officials,” said David Priess, a former CIA official who delivered the president’s daily briefing in the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

At this point, if you doubt the legitimacy of either the God-Emperor or Q, you simply are not paying sufficient attention. Consider the latest news on the subject: Everyone who wrote about Q on Medium was deplatformed.