Tag: mailvox

Another perspective on Hong Kong in light of the electoral victory of the “pro-democracy” forces:

To say that the protests are not organic is not accurate. They are organic, it’s just that they’re being used and manipulated by US and UK forces for their own purposes. But Hong Kongers definitely have real grievances, some real and some suffering from a bit of over-active imagination. On the real side is the housing market. Regular people can’t afford to buy a home anymore, and this is a bigger deal in Chinese society than it is in the West. The reason is two-fold: One, real estate is controlled by a handful of tycoons, and Two, Beijing has courted and collaborated with those tycoons. Everyone knows that part of the reason the prices have gone up is because of increased investment from wealthy mainlanders, with whom ordinary Hong Kongers can’t compete.

On the imagined side, the Hong Kong protesters have a view of mainland China which might have come from Fox News, which is remarkable since they live right next to it, and many of them visit on a regular basis. But in talking to them, they talk about China the same way people in America who have never been there and only know what they see on the news talk about it. I don’t quite know why this is. Perhaps because they’re descended from people who fled during the Mao years and heard horror stories about those times. The unfortunate thing is that Beijing could help Hong Kong by intervening in the housing market the way they do in Shenzhen. But Beijing wouldn’t do that, and Hong Kongers wouldn’t accept it if they would. There is a general lack of trust and understanding between the two sides which hinders any solution to the problems.

This is actually very much in keeping with what I have heard from people living there. But while the votes for the “pro-democracy” forces and the protesters are certainly overlapping, they are not the same thing.

I am, of course, extremely skeptical of anything that purports to be “pro-democracy”, as historically that tends to mean little more than “CIA-backed”.

Thomas Howard leaped to a completely erroneous conclusion subsequent to my invitation to Mr. Fuentes to debate a specific historical event of particular interest to him:

This must mean Nick the knife has finally and definitively turned down the “come join us at unauthorized tv” overtures. Considering his live viewership, nightly superchat support, and the fact he is taken as a serious threat by conservative Inc, this must be quite a blow to the ego. To the gamma, the sting of rejection is like the slow knife, the one that takes its time, which slips quietly between the bones, that’s the knife that cuts the deepest.

Let me be perfectly clear about the relevant facts. Nick Fuentes was never invited to join Unauthorized.TV. Never. Out of about 85 established creators who have expressed varying degrees of interest in joining us at one time or another, precisely three have been invited to join UATV: Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown, Zammy the Giant Sheepadoodle, and Wranglerstar. All three accepted the invitation without hesitation.

I have spoken once to Mr. Fuentes, on May 8th, 2019, for about 20 minutes. We had a good and mutually respectful discussion, in which it soon became apparent to both of us that it did not make any sense for him to join Unauthorized, which is why he never asked to join it and I never invited him to do so. I further note that America First with Nicholas J. Fuentes has 68.9k YouTube subscribers, which is excellent considering that he had around 30k back in May when we spoke. That being said, by way of comparison, UATV’s newest contributor, Wranglerstar, has 1.33M subscribers.

In summary, no one at Unauthorized cares even a fraction of an iota whether Mr. Fuentes wants to be on Unauthorized or not. We certainly wish Mr. Fuentes great success in his campaign against Conservatism Inc., but we neither need nor want him on our channel. Our egos, such as they are, remain intact and unaffected.

Forget the good of society and the interests of the employees. The giant corporations aren’t even acting in the interests of their shareholders anymore, if this emailer is to be believed.

I work for a company that was involved in [REDACTED]. It struck me as strange that a company with the cash pile that Apple has – just over $100bn in their last earnings release – would be issuing debt to raise even more cash, so I looked a little deeper and the below may be something relevant to your blog given some of your recent posts on financialisation…

When Steve Jobs died in 2011 Apple didn’t have a single penny of debt, which was unique among Silicon Valley’s tech giants. That lasted not a full 2 years after his death because in April 2013 Apple conducted the largest non-bank bond issuance in history, raising $17bn in debt (as an aside, Goldman Sachs led the bond issue). The justification for this would likely seem counter-intuitive to those outside finance: Jobs’ successor Tim Cook was supposedly under pressure from investors to return some of its cash to shareholders, which meant a program of buying back shares and paying out higher dividends. However, a large portion of Apple’s then $200bn cash pile was held outside the US and if repatriated would face a 35{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} tax charge, so it made ‘financial sense’ to keep the cash abroad and raise debt in the US at interest rates of c.3{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} instead to fund this gigantic shareholder return program. Paying out a 3{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} charge on cash instead of 35{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} sounds good, right? Apple certainly thought so, as they continued to issue debt over the next few years.

As we know, Trump’s signature piece of legislation so far is his tax cuts bill. It slashed the rate of corporation tax payable on foreign-held cash reserves when repatriated. Interestingly, Apple duly began repatriating some of its cash held abroad in 2017. So presumably it then stopped raising more debt? Nope. Throughout 2017 and 2018 Apple issued more and more debt to fund payouts to its equity investors. This brings me back to this month’s ‘Green Bond’ issue – the largest of its kind in Europe. Putting aside the virtue signalling aspect of issuing a ‘Green’ bond (the idea is that it’s used to fund initiatives designed to reduce Apple’s carbon footprint), it appears that Apple has become addicted to debt. In short, just 8 years on from Steve Jobs’ death when they were entirely debt-free, Apple now owes around $106bn in debt and pays out around $3.5bn annually in interest payments alone.

There is literally no business case for Apple to be taking on such debt. It is simply sucking cash out of the company. It does not need to raise cash to invest in R&D, hire new staff or expand its business. If you read through the FT, Forbes etc., the best explanations are that “debt right now is cheap, so they may as well raise cash this way to pay shareholders”. Apple themselves state the reason for issuing debt is for “corporate reasons” according to their Italian CFO, i.e. nothing related to creating productive value for the firm. They now hold slightly more debt than cash – a remarkable turnaround for a company that was once debt-free and held over $200bn in cash at its peak. Even more alarmingly, Apple has issued releases saying that they intend to become a “cash neutral” company, i.e. it will pay out any excess cash to shareholders and debt holders, and given Apple’s ever-increasing debt pile it therefore looks as though the lenders will be milking the firm for years to come. The debt vampires have well and truly sunk their teeth into Apple.

There are plenty of arguments one can make on this, but one wonders whether any of this would have happened if Steve Jobs was still alive and running the company.

A supporter of the Junior Classics 2020 edition observes 60’s-era convergence:

My father in law recently gave us a 1962 edition of the Junior Classics that was sitting around his house. All female editors with a corresponding convergence in the stories included therein. Still some good stuff by today’s standards, but the rot was well established by then.

I’ve never seen that edition, having grown up on the 1958 edition, but I’m not even remotely surprised. Preserving knowledge, teaching children, and taking back cultural ground. The objective is right there in the name.

Speaking of the intellectual offensive, if you emailed about your interest in the Castalia Deluxe subscription but haven’t signed up yet, this is the time to do so. I don’t know if we’re going to close subscription sign-ups for the even months or add a sign-up fee during those months, but regardless, we want to pass 50 percent before we place the initial order with the bindery. Right now, we’re at 32 percent, which isn’t at all bad for the first 18 hours, but we can certainly do better.

American automotive buffs are not happy with Ford permitting its new electric vehicle to wear the Mustang brand as a skinsuit:

Recently Ford revealed a new all-electric 4-door crossover SUV. Then labeled it a Mustang Mach E. There is a 50min video of the reveal on YouTube. In the comment section people are seeing the complete inversion of an iconic car brand and they’re not happy about it.

Based on the diversity hires shown from the design team, I’m not surprised they have no understanding of the Mustang brand.

I look forward to reading Corporate Cancer soon.

Although I’m not an American muscle car guy, I can sympathize. I wasn’t happy when Ford acquired and trashed the Jaguar brand either. But seriously, diversity or not, how hard is it to grasp that a Mustang is a sports car, not A 4-DOOR UTILITY VEHICLE?

Speaking of Corporate Cancer, the paperback is now available at Amazon and at a discount at Castalia Direct.

It may interest readers to know some of my predictions in the book are already coming to pass, such as the continued targeting of the Internet giants by national tax authorities.

The Czech government approved a seven percent digital tax proposal on Monday aimed at boosting state coffers by taxing advertising by global internet giants like Google and Facebook, the finance ministry said. The tax would apply to companies with global revenue over €750 million ($826.5 million) annually, 100 million crown ($4.32 million) turnover in the Czech market and a reach exceeding 200,000 user accounts.

Richard Dawkins’s logic is not only flawed, but as Warkicker, an accomplished surgeon, notes, his grasp of animal and human biology is also nonexistent.

MORE ATHEIST LOGIC: You can trust atheists. Because evolutionary biologists don’t understand how biological functions work.

What a curious argument Dawkins gives regarding the “poor design” of the recurrent laryngeal nerve. Is he not aware that the nerve does more than innervate the larynx? It gives branches to the cardiac plexus, esophagus and trachea in addition to the muscles of the larynx. Hence its circuitous route is necessary and not inefficient. I do thyroidectomies all the time and have to be careful not to injure any part of the nerve during the dissection, not just the branches that serve the larynx. Also, the superior laryngeal nerve does give a direct connection to the larynx, and complements the recurrent laryngeal nerve and provides redundancy in function, so a more direct pathway already exists.

There are unusual conditions in which either the right or left recurrent laryngeal nerves do not loop around in the chest but rather directly innervate the larynx. In such individuals, there is the potential for significant problems in swallowing and breathing. Ironically, if you subscribe to the evolutionary paradigm, such conditions may represent example of mutations that regularly occur but yet evolution “chooses” not to select out for the more direct route!

Additionally, the long route the recurrent laryngeal nerve takes into the thoracic cavity before looping back up to the neck may have saved the lives of many of my patients. They will present with hoarseness prompting me to look at their vocal cords. If I see paralysis of one of the vocal cords, I evaluate their chest and often with find a tumor in their mediastinum, usually early enough to still be treatable. Dr. Michael Egnor, a well-known neurosurgeon, has noticed and commented on this as well.

It seems even long-time commenters here never learn to stop clinging to their false assumptions when I call them into question:

Vox, the Chinese are communist butchers. They are no more moral than we are. They are just as much sadistic murderers as the worst of the paper Americans or PP demons. They have slaughtered at least as many or more of their own people as America has killed unborn children. I don’t know what your UHIQ angle is here, but I’d sure love to know. If you don’t have an angle here, you are dead fucking wrong about the Chinese.

Look,  everyone needs to simply get over their childhood upbringings and drop their kneejerk moronics. I know far more about Chinese history and culture than most of the readers here, as those who live there and speak the language can testify, even though my focus as an East Asian Studies major was on Japan. And my exposure to YouTube has not heightened my tolerance for the clueless ignorati that knows absolutely nothing about a subject in question attempting to ‘correct” me.

 The China today is not the China of 221 BC or 1973 AD. The Chinese leadership today has less in common with Mao than Obama did with Eisenhower. It is simply risible how self-appointed foreign policy experts who don’t even have passports go from blathering about how Europe is lost to the way China is doomed, blithely serene in their confidence that the USA will always be the greatest, wealthiest, most free country forever and ever, world without end.

Xi is not Deng is not Mao. It is readily apparent to even the most casual observer that China and the USA are on different moral trajectories. One society is trying to encourage people to get married, take pride in their nation, and stop spitting in public, the other is trying to encourage drag queen reading hour, soldiers in heels, and surgical sexual mutilation. One society is punishing those who have a servile attitude to foreign countries, the other has made it a criminal offense to criticize or refuse to buy from a certain foreign country. One society is proudly nationalist, the other silences, disemploys, and attacks its nationalists.

I further note that George Soros considers Xi Jinping the most dangerous enemy to his satanic globalist ideology. Not the Pope, not Orban, not Trump, not even Putin, but Xi.

One society is observably assembling the building blocks for sustainable success, the other is actively tearing apart its foundations. And it doesn’t require UHQ to determine, on that basis, which society is currently favored by the probabilities. It’s long past time to get over the 1970s and Boomer fears about “the ChiComs and Russkies”.

One of the more inept File 770ers – which is saying something – is Camestros Fappletron. His Gamma backside is still burning from the spanking he received here in 2016 after he tried to pose as a Master of Rhetoric and only succeeded in demonstrating that he simply did not understand Aristotle’s distinction between rhetoric and dialectic.

So, it’s more than a little amusing to note that he’s been trying to retroactively rectify the situation for years, as Samuel Collingwood Smith noted.

Earlier today, a leftist left a negative comment on a review I did in 2016 of Vox Day’s “A Throne of Bones”. They ended by linking to a hatepost claiming the positive Amazon reviews were deceptive based on an analysis by a site called Fakepost.com from 2017. Because, of course, the accuracy of a self-appointed analysis site using an unpublished algorithm is beyond question..

I had no idea what he was talking about, because of course I pay absolutely no attention to Camestros or his incessant anklebiting. But apparently, back in 2017, File 770’s Master of Rhetoric decided to prove that many of the 332 reviews of A Throne of Bones, which average 4.5 stars, are fake.

I previously pointed to an article on people manipulating Amazon rankings for their books, today there is a bigger brouhaha on whether somebody has manipulated the New York Time bestseller list. The method used (if true) isn’t new and political books have been prone to this approach before i.e. buy lots of the book from the right bookshops and head up the rankings.

One thing new to me from those articles was this site: http://fakespot.com/about It claims to be a site that will analyse reviews on sites like Amazon and Yelp and then rate the reviews in terms of how “fake” they seem to be. The mechanism looks at reviewers and review content and looks for relations with other reviews, and also rates reviewers who only ever give positive reviews lower. Now, I don’t know if their methods are sound or reliable, so take the rest of this with a pinch of salt for the time being.

Time to plug some things into their machine but what! Steve J No-Relation Wright has very bravely volunteered to start reading Vox Day’s epic fantasy book because it was available for $0 ( https://stevejwright.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/a-throne-of-bones-by-vox-day-preamble-on-managing-expectations/ ) and so why not see what Fakespot has to say about “Throne of Bones”

Sadly for the ever-inept Fappletron, he didn’t bother checking Fakepost to confirm that its initial analysis still held true, as Mr. Smith informs us.

 However, when I requested a re-analysis, the book listing now gets an ‘A’ 

• Fakespot Review Grade A
• Our engine has profiled the reviewer patterns and has determined that there is minimal deception involved.
• Our engine has determined that the review content quality is high and informative.
• Our engine has discovered that over 90{d59209821fe989e78e8725839671fe688f075485293e05af5d9ebcd097c17187} high quality reviews are present.
• This product had a total of 332 reviews as of our last analysis date on Oct 27 2019.

It’s always amusing when midwits attempt to question their intellectual superiors:

The past few posts leave me wondering “where else do Vox and many of his fans entertain absurdly contrarian opinions on topics they demonstrably know next to nothing about?”

If this loser had any idea how much success I have had over the years by flat-out ignoring the advice and the opinions of the subject-matter experts who know vastly more about their subjects than I do, he simply would not believe it. In fact, two of my three biggest failures were the direct result of being overruled by people who knew considerably more and refused to listen to me.

Mere information very seldom overrules genuine intelligence. Remember, nearly all the economic experts will tell you that free trade is good for America and it wasn’t all that long ago when all the nutrition experts told you that not eating meat was the way to lose weight.

A veteran with multiple active-duty deployments in Iraq confirms a young officer’s observations about the state of the US Army, and specifically, its Officer Candidate School:

I wanted to comment on and, sadly, confirm a good chunk of what your recent OCS attendee wrote.

“Equal” Opportunity: 

Women and especially brown and black women were absolutely given preference. Nothing so brazen as ignoring stated orders and being given a pass, but things like being told to our faces that our waste-of-a-cadet black nurse would be held to a lower standard (supposedly because nurse), or seeing women given consistently higher marks for actions that would have been given at best a “nice job” had she been a man. Some instructors were happier about this than others, but it was obviously an understood thing.

Second Generation Modern Warfare Training: 

Yes, and lots of it. Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) cannot deal with innovative thinkers. Not will not, cannot. Everything is cookie cutter down almost to the last detail and any deviation is punished. I watched our Ranger-tabbed cadet get his ass chewed for not doing things exactly the TRADOC way, never mind that he had met with success by the instructor’s own admission. While the units can and often do beat this out of junior officers, to say that newly commissioned 2LTs are hidebound and risk-averse as a rule is an understatement, and too many continue to be so as their careers progress. If the US Army retains any vestiges of 3rd generation capability, it’s in spite of TRADOC.

The F-Word and A Culture of Gullible Murderers: 

This is also true, but it’s also the fastest one to change with experience. Most of these men are young and fresh out of college, and all of them know that the way you get ahead in the Army is to in part be more bloodthirsty than the next guy. You don’t get points for being thoughtful or even remotely isolationist. Fortunately, much of it is posturing and many change their tunes after deploying a time or two. Not to say it isn’t a problem, just that it’s probably the most superficial and fastest to change of all the so far published points.

What I Call the “NuBoomer” Sub-Generation: 

This one’s a bit more complicated. Do they exist? Yes, but part of it is inexperience, part of it is social conditioning, and the rest is telling the boss what he wants to hear. There are a lot more open dissidents in the Active and Guard ranks, especially in combat arms, including commanders. Of the several commanding officers I’ve served under, the closest I ever saw to this was a disgruntled Gen Xer who by virtue of his wife and where he lived, had a tendency to spout the Narrative. The incoming officers, at least in combat arms, will more often shuck the Narrative as soon as they see no one else is buying, though the superficial sense of religion is sadly spot on. They are, however, just as post-literate as the rest of their generation and civnattery is the last of the Narrative to go, if it ever does. Racism and sexism remain the only unforgivable sins in the Army.

Based on your source’s published letter, the rot I saw has gotten worse. From the view of a veteran, most of it is still confined to the support elements. Their reputations as hives of LGBT+, feminism, and all of the other contaminants of the Clown World are, from what I’ve observed, sadly merited. Combat arms still tries to focus on warfighting, but we are not immune and the rot is creeping in.