Why we do what we do

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.


Mailvox: Converging the Mustang

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.


Mailvox: atheist biology

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.


Mailvox: the moronic angle

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”.


Mailvox: spotting quality

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.
Nor is ATOB alone in this regard. The 100 reviews of ASOS are also graded A, whereas the 645 reviews of SJWs Always Lie are only graded B, most likely due to the 37 mostly-fake one-star reviews. Ironically, Fappletron has only managed to demonstrate that the higher-rated my books are, the more likely those reviews of those books are to be genuine.


Never trust the experts

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.


Mailvox: the rot is creeping in

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.


Mailvox: Army rot in OCS, part I

An email from a US Army officer who shares his perceptions of an organization in decline after completing Officer Candidate School:

I’ll just say that my experience is very fresh. I think it’s important to give a bit of backstory to how I’ve become so disillusioned, because in military culture disillusionment is automatically regarded as a defense mechanism for underperformers. I come from a military family with a line of high US officers. I used to believe in all the neo-con talking points that my peers endlessly spout. I even tried out for special forces, I believed in the whole US military thing so much….

“Equal” Opportunity: 
I believe you and your fans will already know of the low standards women are held to, so I’ll just share a risible story of the worst example here. The first Friday of the course OCS always has a “Class Up Run,” of 3 miles at about a 9-minute pace. We were sternly warned that falling out of formation would result in a day-one reset, which carries with it the sentence of being a holdover at the Company HQ barracks. This is the worst thing candidates fear being done to them short of dismissal. Well, wouldn’t you know it but four brown females decided to walk the last mile. Nothing happened to them. All of the First Sergeant & Company Commander’s aggressive warnings (and these guys are infantrymen with the latter having the vaunted Ranger tab) were subsequently memory-holed.

Second Generation Modern Warfare Training: 
All the training we’ve received here is precisely in line with what Mr. Lind would call “Second Generation.” It is procedure obsessed and crushes innovation. Oh, they talk constantly about the awesome talent of the Imperial German Army (Stormtrooper tactics) and the later Wehrmacht innovations and pretend that their manuals and whatnot are derived from them, but in practice that’s a lie. If you tried to innovate outside the holy law of the field manuals, you would provoke a mighty REE the likes of which a gamma would give when his perceived ruleset is broken. The training tries to pound you into a box and then stay in that box.

The F-Word and A Culture of Gullible Murderers: 
“Freedom.” That’s all you gotta say to get the otherwise decent men that comprise my peers to want to murder people en masse minding their own business in their own countries. It’s a variant strain of NPC “orange man bad,” except it takes the form of “Taliban/Iranian/Russian/Chinese bad, me kill.” They love talking about killing people without regard to why, who, or the consequences so long as the act is justified by authority figures, whom they – most of them anyway – believe without reservation. This leads me to my next point…

What I Call the “NuBoomer” Sub-Generation: 
Boomer mentality has been successfully transmitted to a subset of millennials who are making up most of the high-spirited white officers. They are boomers except that they were born in the 90’s or very early 2000’s. What is boomer about them? The previously-mentioned automatic, sacrosanct trust in authority. If the media and gubmint tell them Iran blew up the ships, they believe it. Fake belief in the Bible; they will either be ‘cultural’ Christians who read Thomas Jefferson’s heretical tract as a substitute for the real Bible, or blithely ignore the politically incorrect passages of scripture. They furthermore embrace civnattery wholeheartedly, talking about how awesome it is to have fifth columns and grifters representatives from all colors and creeds in the ranks. Not to mention women and LGBT+ (soon to add P). Questioning mainstream narratives is beyond the pale  to them, and they love to consume mainstream ‘culture,’ i.e. movies, Netflix & pay-to-win games. These are the young men that the neo-cons are dependent on keeping sated and nationally/religiously unconscious for it is they who fight the imperial wars with high morale.

Part II to follow on Monday.


Mailvox: a response from Hong Kong

A native of Hong Kong responds to yesterday’s email from a mainlander.

I am born and raised in Hong Kong and are currently lived in the city for the past 5 years.

The reason why people oppose the government and react the way they do is simply the lack of trust for the government.

The mainland mailer is correct in a sense the Hong Kong people are spoiled brats because we have been at peace prospering for as long as this generation remembers. And so they are all boomer-like in a sense that they believe in lies that the government tells its people and such.

What Carrie Lam, the chief executive in Hong Kong, did that outraged the people is the obvious show of brute force that essentially served as a wake-up slap to the public. And they, being spoiled by peace, are throwing a fit.

We don’t hate the mainland Chinese people, However their tourists actions are equal that of an illegal immigrant from Mexico to the US. They have no intention of abiding by our cultural rules, I have personally seen two incidents where they openly defecate in the street, even outside the public bathroom!

Due to multiple incidents of fake and poison milk powders, they raid our food supply.The major city centres close to the broader have been turned to a mainland China city-like environment. The obvious cultural erosion has been putting pressure in the bomb for about 10 years now. And now is the result of the explosion.


This is pure essence of Gamma

SullyRob goes full gamma-rage because he didn’t get the attention he craved.

This is probably the last time vox will let me post here, I tried being nice to him for a while and that never got me anywhere with him or anywhere else on this blog. So since he refused to ever engage with me when I tried being respectful to him in the past. I see no reason to exit gracefully.

Gamma meltdown. Quelle surprise. Anyhow, comments are now locked-down, as per usual.