A Desperation Move

Talk about a thumb on the scale. The NBA doesn’t just script game results, it literally moves its players around to its favored franchises. The only reason Luka Dončić is being traded to Los Angeles is because the league’s television ratings are free-falling and league officials know they need a white star in their signature franchise:

Utter disbelief fell across waves of NBA followers as a league-altering trade hit their screens in the hush of the night. Luka Dončić is headed to the Los Angeles Lakers, while Anthony Davis is on his way to the Dallas Mavericks in an unexpected blockbuster days before the NBA’s Feb. 6 trade deadline. ESPN’s Shams Charania first reported the trade which shook the whole league.

In full, the Mavericks sent Dončić, Maxi Kleber and Markieff Morris to the Lakers for Davis, Max Christie and a 2029 first-round pick. The Utah Jazz were also in the deal and received Jalen Hood-Schifino, a 2025 Clippers second-round pick (via the Lakers) and a 2025 Mavericks second-round pick.

The move was so unbelievable, Charania had to ensure the many NBA fans who get his posts straight to their phones that the deal was, in fact, real.

The LA ownership is not that much smarter than every other franchise, it just happens to be a more important team. It’s not an accident that so many of the league’s biggest stars somehow find a way to end up there. The only real surprise here is that it was Dončić who was sent to LA to rescue the league, although perhaps they’re still planning to move Nikola Jokic to Boston and Victor Wembanyama to New York to create a three-way rivalry that might spark sufficient fan interest to get them watching the NBA again.

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37-Zip

A dialogue at Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing:

Senator Kennedy: My colleague and friend Senator Durbin called you a conspiracy theorist. Do you remember that?

Kash Patel: I do senator.

You were instrumental in revealing that the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax was a hoax, weren’t you?

Yes sir, I was the lead investigator.

Sounds to me like we need to get some new conspiracy theories because all the old ones turned out to be true. Conspiracy theorists are up something like 37-0.

The correct response to anyone calling you “a conspiracy theorist” is “why, thank you!” Because at this point, it’s tantamount to describing you as a modern prophet or the Kwisatz Haderach. And it’s probably a good idea to ask your accuser why they believe being a complicity theorist is preferable to being aware of acknowledging the various conspiracies that obviously exist and are actively conspiring today.

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Conspiracy Theory: Presidential Model

The recent crash of a military helicopter into American Airlines flight 5342 is sparking a lot of doubts about the idea that it was simply a tragic air accident:

Wild conspiracy theorists are pushing unsubstantiated claims that the deadly crash that saw a Army Black Hawk helicopter collide with a passenger jet was deliberate. American Airlines Flight 5342 was approaching Washington’s Reagan National Airport around 9pm Wednesday when the military chopper and plane collided in mid-air, before both falling into the Potomac River. The airplane held four crew members and 60 passengers, and the helicopter carrying three soldiers on a ‘training flight’.

Officials have not said how many people died in the accident but the bodies of 30 people reported to have been recovered so far. Authorities have suggested that there may be no survivors.

The Army and Defense Department has launched an investigation into the crash as many question how a plane with modern collision-avoidance technology and nearby traffic controllers could collide with a military aircraft over the nation’s capital. Conspiracy theorists have rushed to social media to place uncorroborated blame on the US government, suggesting the collision must have been intentional because ‘military helicopters don’t fly into planes’. Some allege the helicopter appeared to ‘chase’ the Bombadier plane as it approached for landing, comparing the scene to a ‘1970s-style assassination’.

Among those “wild conspiracy theorists” is the Commander in Chief of the US Armed Forces, the 47th President of the United States.

The airplane was on a perfect and routine line of approach to the airport. The helicopter was going straight at the airplane for an extended period of time. It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn. Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane. This is a bad situation that looks like it should have been prevented. NOT GOOD!!!

Fortunately, with President Trump in charge, there is at least a chance that the investigation into the crash will be a legitimate one. And the vital question may not be who was on the plane, but rather, who was on the helicopter.

The Blackhawk apparently did NOT have its transponder on, and was designated as a “PAT” (Priority Air Transport) which means that there was a very high ranking Military Official on board the helicopter.

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Boxing Itself In

Mike Florio will tell you that he doesn’t believe that NFL games are scripted. Unless, of course, he does.

When the Superdome last hosted the Super Bowl 12 years ago, the game between the 49ers and Ravens was marred by an in-stadium blackout. Officials in New Orleans have confidence that it won’t happen again.

Given that it already happened once during a Super Bowl, the powers-that-be are on even greater notice about the importance of making sure it doesn’t happen again.

Unless, of course, the script calls for it.

Look, everyone with a three-digit IQ who pays regular attention to NFL football knows the score. And we can’t even complain that it’s not, to a certain extent, justified. One calculation by a SGer estimated that the NFL lost $16 million in revenue due to the 13 million fewer viewers who watched the NFC Championship blowout this year than either a) the year before or b) the AFC Championship game.

Can you honestly say that if you were the NFL Commissioner, you wouldn’t keep a ready thumb to put on the scale, just to keep the games close enough to keep the viewers involved for that kind of money? I wouldn’t seek to alter the outcomes, but once the outcomes were settled organically, I can’t honestly say that I wouldn’t permit some level of interference in order to prevent viewer disinterest.

After all, the fans are literally voting with their eyeballs. If they prefer intervention and close games to honest blowouts, that’s on them. The NFL is merely honoring a very respectable service-provider philosophy: the customer is always right.

The problem, of course, is that the seeds of failure are sewn by the harvest of success. The temptation to ensure that a large market team makes it to the Super Bowl, or that Taylor Swift will be there cheering on her ostensible romantic interest, is more difficult to resist once the league is already intervening in the games.

Anyhow, it appears the greater scrutiny the NFL is under is methodically removing some of the methods for their manipulations.

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Why the Scripting Will Continue

As much as the NFL hates public discussion of its obvious activities in a) occasionally scripting the results and b) putting a thumb on the scale to reduce margins of victory, it’s almost certainly going to continue, although perhaps in a more circumspect manner, due to the costs of not doing so.

Via Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, the game between the Bills and the Chiefs generated an average audience of 57.4 million. That’s a record for the AFC Championship and the most for any conference championship game since Giants-49ers had an audience of 57.6 million in 2012. The Bills-Chiefs game landed in the late window, which drew 56.7 million for Lions-49ers a year ago.

The bad news is that the audience for Commanders-Eagles in the early game was way down. Last year, Chiefs-Ravens racked up 55.4 million. This year, the NFC Championship did 44.2 million. It’s a drop of 13.2 million.

This isn’t about big markets vs small markets. The Redskins and Eagles are major, historic franchises, with strong support from their fans. But the Redskins aren’t an elite team yet and the game was a blowout . I don’t know what the cost of 13.2 million lost viewers is, but I know that it’s more than enough for the NFL to do whatever it feels it has to do in order to prevent it from happening. It’s not an accident that we don’t see the Super Bowl blowouts anymore, and I doubt we’re going to see many going forward in the conference championship games either.

The problem is that most people aren’t as invested in the season’s champion as they are in their team. That’s why the blowouts are more costly in the postseason than in the regular season, and even more so the deeper into the playoffs we go.

And the observable reality is that far more people turned off a game because Saquon Barkley was running over the Redskins than because the refs ended a dangerous Buffalo drive in the 4th quarter with a questionable spot that favored Pat Mahomes and the Chiefs again.

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Yes, I continue to call them the Redskins. My grandfather was a Redskins fan, and we all know it’s only a matter of time before President Trump issues an executive order instructing the NFL to restore the traditional name and logo to the franchise.


An Intrinsically Uncompetitive Society

The cost of having your society run by nepotistic foreign socio-cultural parasites is the inevitable loss of competitiveness.

It is not surprising really. I am an innovative psychology. You can see how I synthesize stuff here, bringing together Google Streetview and surveillance camera footage, and reveal the surveillance in America as few could. Politics and biology, psychology, I come up with interesting stuff. And when I was just a young lad, I was identified by US Domestic intelligence’s grade school monitoring units as innovative, and their response was to supply me with massive amounts of pornography to try and make me a degenerate. When that was ineffective, they decided to flood in the kids of agents, acting as kid spies to try and beat me down. When that failed, they rolled out honeypots. And when I proved resistant to it all, I believe they rolled out an early version of the Havana Weapon to degrade my health physically.

I do not think I am unique in that regard. I even think there was another kid, maybe brighter than me, and certainly more disciplined and dedicated to academics, who they also beamed into chronic illness to try and clip his wings as well. I would assume that has been going on across the nation, with every young kid who showed an innovative potential, for the last thirty to forty years, as domestic intelligence has tried to make sure nobody could rise too high in society, and maybe oppose it. My guess is, given the granularity of the surveillance, if you ever have a child with real potential, the single biggest threat they will ever face in life will be US domestic intelligence, because the American Stasi will find them, it will view them as a threat, and it will try to destroy them using all the most advanced tools of the CIA. It is just how it works in America now.

As a result, at present, the only chance America has to compete lies with the rubes and imbeciles of the insecure surveillance, and there just are not enough innovators there to keep up with nations like China.

After six decades of fake science, fake literature, fake art, fake genuises, fake 115-average IQs, the financialization of the economy, and the moral and intellectual degradation of the workforce, it is absolutely no surprise that the USA is losing on every side to its global rivals in China and Russia. The fetishization of frauds from Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth to Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, combined with the suppression and sidelining of the genuine American creative class, has been sufficient to render the USA a global also-ran.

Someone once asked: “Where is America’s Wang Hunin?” Wang, arguably the most observant individual of the 20th Century, rose from a complete nobody who wasn’t even a member of the Chinese Communist Party to the CCP’s chief ideologist solely on the basis of the merit of his prescient observations. Someone else answered: “Living in Europe making comic books.” And while I’m not the equal of Wang Hunin, who saw things 20 years before I did despite being only 13 years older than me, the difference between the way he was embraced and elevated by the Chinese political elite versus the way I was explicitly banished from even the editorial pages at the age of 23 by the US political elite is telling.

The irony is that I’ve been treated with far more respect by the Chinese and Russian state medias than by the ostensibly private medias in the USA and Europe. Pravda used to occasionally run the very syndicated Universal Press column that the newspapers in the USA refused to touch, back when I was warning everyone about the coming financial crisis in 2002. Note that I’m not at all bitter. I caught enough of a glimpse into the US political elite at a young age that I wanted nothing to do with it and I’m quite content with having been sidelined. I like what I’m doing and I harbor zero desire to get involved with The Great Game. But that doesn’t change the effect the sidelining of me and others more talented than me have inevitably had for the last six decades.

So now we have corrupt second-generation mediocrities like Donald Kagan and complete frauds like Elon Musk establishing US geopolitical strategies instead of anyone setting them in the national interests of the American people. As long as we do, China’s triumph is absolutely 100-percent certain no matter what economic or demographic vagaries it might be facing. It’s like seeing one NFL team building a historic staff with Ron Wolf at GM, Bill Belichick as head coach and Andy Reid as the offensive coordinator and the other being run by the historically awful combination of GM Matt Millen, head coach Marty Mornhinweg, and the immortal Brad Childress not calling plays as the offensive coordinator.

The truth always and inevitably wins out over time because the longer the parasitical pretenders have influence in a society, the further from objective reality their policies will reliably guide it. It’s not an accident that everything across the West from AI to zoology has become fake and gay, because convergence toward entropy is the objective. The latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended will fall again, because it celebrates falsehood and worships evil.

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NFL Scripting Confirmed

The NFC Championship game didn’t require any interventions; the non-call on Saquon Barkley’s hold made absolutely no difference to the outcome of a game the Eagles dominated from the start and won 55-23. Indeed, given the way the NFL hates blowouts, it’s likely that the refs didn’t put a thumb on the scale due to the way that everyone is now watching very closely for them doing so.

The AFC Championship game was pretty good despite the Bills losing a key cornerback early in the first quarter to his second concussion in a matter of weeks; he almost certainly should not have been playing even though he cleared the concussion protocol. That made the game closer than it should have been. But once again, the Chiefs were given a dubious call at a very critical moment.

  • As CBS rules analyst Gene Steratore said, it looked like quarterback Josh Allen got the ball to the line to gain before he was pulled backward on fourth and short early in the fourth quarter, with the Bills leading 22-21.
  • CBS rules analyst Gene Steratore thought Josh Allen got enough yardage for a first down on a fourth-down quarterback sneak early in the fourth quarter and Bills head coach Sean McDermott felt the same way. Unfortunately for McDermott, Allen and the Bills, the officiating crew saw things differently.
  • The refs running in with two different spots — and the Chiefs getting the benefit of the spot and the stop on 4th down — is going to be the number one discussion from this game.

Even big names in the mainstream sports media are paying attention to the observable fact of the NFL favoring certain teams and disfavoring others. Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, has even gone so far as to claim he won’t watch the NFL anymore.

I’m quitting watching football. There is no other way to teach @nflcommish a lesson. This is blatant cheating. #nflrigged

Given the growing professionalization and competitiveness of college football, and a situation where top NCAA players can actually make more money staying in college than declaring for the NFL draft, it’s a tremendous mistake for the NFL to continue scripting outcomes and using the referees to control the winning margins. What was necessary to force through the AFL-NFL merger and eliminate the Super Bowl routs of the 1980s is not only not necessary anymore, but is increasingly detrimental to the health and popularity of the league.

It’s time to protect the Shield, Mr. Goodell. Stop the scripting, stop the rigging, take the thumb off the scale, and let the players play the game. Make every call reviewable and put a chip in the ball to ensure the accuracy of first downs and touchdowns; it’s now absolutely and entirely obvious to everyone that the reluctance to do both is based upon a reluctance to give up the ability to influence the outcomes.

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The NFL’s Scripting Crisis

The Chiefs and the NFL are desperately trying to deny the obvious. And absolutely no one who watches the league or has anything to do with it is even remotely convinced.

OUTKICK: Many fans not rooting for the Chiefs believe that to some extent that the Chiefs get calls they don’t deserve. That’s a problem for the NFL’s all-important integrity of the game aspirations. But, you see, the problem is there is statistical data that suggests that is exactly what’s happening. During Kansas City’s current eight-game playoff win streak, opponents have been called for six roughing the passer penalties. The Chiefs have been called for none. This according to the ESPN statistics department. The Chiefs furthermore have been called for one unnecessary roughness penalty, while their opponents have been flagged 4 times.

PROFOOTBALLTALK: The NFL imposed a $25,000 fine on Texans defensive end Will Anderson Jr. for publicly criticizing officials. Said Anderson after the loss to the Chiefs, “We knew it was going to be us against the refs going into this game.” The initial Mixon fine was based on this comment from former Bengals receiver T.J. Houshmandzadeh said, “Why play the game if every 50/50 call goes with Chiefs. These officials are trash and bias.” The second Mixon fine was based on this, which he did say: “Everybody knows how it is playing up here. You can never leave it in the refs’ hands. The whole world see, man.”

FOX SPORTS: NFL legend Champ Bailey was among those glued to the television when he saw the controversial penalties called on the Houston Texans during their playoff loss to the Kansas City Chiefs. “I don’t feel like the games are fixed because I was in it, but when I’m sitting here every year – I’m out of the league – the more and more I start believing what the fans are saying about the games being ‘fixed,’ because you see things like this happen over and over, so they just got to figure out a way to get the calls right and live with it.”

Just let them play and stop trying to dictate the outcome of events. Pat Mahomes is good enough on his own, if he needs the refs to get him over the top, he doesn’t deserve to win anyhow.

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The Russians Knew

Vladimir Putin admits that the Russians knew the 2020 election was stolen and none of the six Joe Bidens were ever elected President of the United States:

Russian president Vladimir Putin has said the 2020 US presidential election was “stolen” from Donald Trump, and that had the outcome been declared fairly, the Ukraine conflict might have been avoided.

“I cannot disagree with him that if he had been president, if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, perhaps the crisis in Ukraine that arose in 2022 wouldn’t have happened,” Putin has said in an interview published by Russia 1 TV journalist Pavel Zarubin on Telegram on Friday…

Trump has never admitted that he lost the 2020 election, despite courts failing to find evidence of widespread voter fraud. He has consistently alleged the 2020 election was blighted by irregularities, and that he lost despite winning 10 million more votes than Biden.

I’ve never admitted it either, because he didn’t. My early estimates were as accurate in 2020 as they were in 2016 and 2024, the only thing they couldn’t account for was millions, perhaps even tens of millions, of fake votes. I have never, ever believed, not for one second, that Joe Biden got more votes in Minnesota than Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama. The election fraud was clear, blatant, obvious, and statistically undeniable, and the fact that the media not only wasn’t all over it, but actively denied it is one reason that I no longer read any US “newspapers” or watch any US “news” channels.

It’s counterintuitive, but you will actually develop a better sense for what is going on in the world, and in the USA, if you completely ignore what passes for the mainstream news and the conservative news alike. What they report is the Narrative, not the news.

I’m not surprised that the Russians knew exactly what was going on. I assume the Chinese and the Israelis did too. The certain knowledge that the “rules-based world order” of “the Western democracies” was resting on a completely false foundation that was neither rules-based nor democratic was probably what proved the decisive factor in deciding to begin openly opposing it because it meant Clown World had lost the rhetorical high ground.

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