Tag: politics

DEI vs Semiconductors

A longtime industry insider makes it clear that the recent Diversity law is not compatible with the expense and failure rate of semiconductor manufacture, which means the USA will be permanently knocked out of the computer technology arms rate, with all the obvious consequences for Clown World’s future industrial and military capabilities.

This is interesting. Don’t know the reality. Certainly DEI is not going to work in an advanced fab. Maybe the bill can be cleaned up. But it might be too late to clean up the bill. Was it all DEI pork or AI silicon? Must be shocking for the Taiwanese to read the bill and wonder if they can make chips with the subsidy and government requirements.

Intel’s Grove got rid of the union in 1979. If union won the fab 3 was closed – period! Intel Fab 3 was the 8080 cpu series start up for the first IBM PC and first memory chips at production scale.

Getting in bed with the government could be worse today. Intel’s CEO better read the fine print. Is it worth the regulations? Every wafer will have a built-in DEI tax and fab operational red tape.

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Finish the Problem

Donald Trump endorses the Gazacaust:

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump expressed his support for Israel’s war in Gaza Tuesday, in his most explicit comments yet on the fighting, as international pressure grows on the United States to rein in its ally.

“Yes,” Trump responded, when asked during an interview on Fox News if he was “in Israel’s camp.”

The interviewer then asked if the former president was “on board” with the way Israel was executing its offensive in Gaza.

“You’ve got to finish the problem,” Trump responded.

President Joe Biden, whom Trump is set to challenge for the White House in November, has come under increasing fire both internationally and from his own Democratic base over his backing for Israel as the death toll in Gaza soars and the specter of famine looms.

The fighting began with an attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on southern Israel on October 7, resulting in about 1,160 deaths, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed 30,534 people, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory.

Well, at least he didn’t call for a final solution. It’s a healthy reminder that Americans will not be voting their way out of Clown World. They’re going to have to go through the whole decline-and-fall process. It’s informative that Trump views Palestinians living in Palestine as a problem, but doesn’t view hundreds of millions of foreigners living in the United States as one. And it’s even more informative to see that his position appears to be diametrically opposed to that being presented by China and Russia.

It’s not that Trump wasn’t a good president. He was one of the better ones. But I wouldn’t hold out a whole lot of hope for his presidency, even if there is a legitimate election sans fraud.

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The End of Economic Ideology

There is no more economic Left or Right in Clown World. Because once a government starts primarily distributing national resources on the basis of identity groups and foreign interests, everyone on both extremes of the ideological divide realizes that there is no more national interest, any appeal to it is pointless, and therefore there is absolutely no point in working toward anything but maximal distribution to their own identity groups.

On Sunday, 58.2% of Swiss voters, and a majority of cantons, backed the “Better living in retirement” initiativeExternal link, which will grant an additional 13th monthly pension payment to help retirees struggling to make ends meet in the face of rising living costs.

Support for the 13th monthly pension payment initiative was exceptionally high. What is your analysis of the Swiss vote?

This is the first time that Swiss voters have clearly accepted a left-wing initiative in the field of social policy. The success can be explained by the fact that it was not just a left-wing vote. The initiative also resonated widely with centre-right voters and, above all, the conservative right. And, in their case, it was less about solidarity and compensating for the poverty of pensioners and much more about ‘now it’s my turn’.

Where does this idea come from?

It is a protest against the past excesses of the economy – the fall of Credit Suisse, the high salaries of managers, the past rescue of UBS and the rescue plan for [the energy company] Axpo. There is a widespread sentiment that Switzerland is able to mobilise very large sums of money for crises like the Covid-19 pandemic for big businesses, while ordinary people do not benefit. The population has the impression that business readily helps itself to any profits while passing on losses to society. There is a now willingness to change this.

It was perhaps another argument, which was very popular in conservative circles, that helped to topple the country’s most conservative strongholds, particularly in German-speaking Switzerland: if the Swiss authorities are capable of spending billions of francs on development aid and welcoming refugees, then we should do the same for pensioners. Even the country’s most seasoned political scientists are at a loss. Never before has an initiative from the left and the unions sparked such sympathy among right-wing voters.

This is why both liberalism and conservatism are dead across the West, and have been replaced by globalism vs nationalism combined with international identity politics on the foreign policy side and pure identity politics on the domestic side.

What is the point of being fiscally conservative or not spending every last bit of money on yourself while it lasts if the politicians are just going to use it to import refugees, send the money to Israel or Ukraine, or bailing out failed corporations if you don’t? It’s an irrefutable argument, and this is why Clown World will inevitably, and necessarily, turn against its own sacred cow of democracy before it collapses.

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Honeypot or Genuine Alt-Tech

I support Andrew Torba and what he’s trying to do with Gab Social and Gab AI, and I particularly support his latest move to reduce the amount of resources that freeloaders are permitted to burn, but I don’t have perfect knowledge of him or the situation. And I definitely have made mistakes about people who later turned out to be infiltrators, gatekeepers, or bad actors, so in the interest of contemplating the essential truth of the matter, I’m linking to two articles about Gab that are polar opposites, one dedicated to attacking Torba, the other by Torba himself explaining his recent actions.

First is the hit piece. While it is well-researched and most of the details appear to be accurate, there is nothing conclusive, it’s mostly guilt-by-association combined with an apparent lack of knowledge of how much it costs to run even what looks like a shoestring operation and make a living, especially when all the cheaper mainstream options cannot be used. And a similar approach could be just as easily used to “expose” me. His mother may be an astrology freak, but my father is a convicted felon. His brother may be gay, but mine died of a drug overdose. And the questionable nature of his past involvement with the Silicon Valley crowd can’t even begin to compare with my having been a Wax Trax! recording artist. Which is why I’m essentially dubious about the significance of the various red flags being waved:

Over the past decade, the United States, and to a great extent the entire world, have been in a growing state of censorship. Ideas that go against the accepted narrative are often removed from the internet and the creators of those ideas are persecuted as being “hateful” or purveyors of disinformation. Many major hubs of communication like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube have actively censored their platforms, particularly after the 2016 US Presidential Election primarily due to the rise of the Alt-Right movement. E-celebrities, content creators, and many of their followers found themselves banned from mainstream social media, which created a vacuum that was soon filled by vaporware sites and grifters whose profits lay in victimhood narratives and false hype, none of which are more notorious or egregious than Gab and its founder Andrew Torba.

Founded just months before the 2016 Presidential Election by self-described Silicon Valley conservative Andrew Torba, Gab touted itself as a censorship-free alternative to Twitter and was heavily promoted by the media before becoming associated with far-right extremism and hate after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. As of 2022, Gab has adopted a militant Christian nationalist bent and boasts of having an excess of one million “cumulative registered accounts” as well as having a value of $10 million, despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.

Since Gab’s inception, Torba has shapeshifted and rebranded himself many times in order to attract any group that would promote Gab and give him money. Over the course of Gab’s history, Torba has pandered to nearly every fringe online community on the right-wing spectrum; ranging from 4chan lolicon connoisseurs and edgelords to the QAnon and MAGA cults and beyond. If one looks past Torba’s conservative christian veneer they will find an affinity grifter who says and does everything in his power to keep the façade of Gab being a viable alternative to Twitter going and keep the money flowing. Torba relied on making misleading claims about the user base and utility of Gab in order to rip off millions of dollars from investors, many of whom he swindled using his conservative christian affinity grift.

Gab’s notoriety is mainly due to Torba fostering a drama producing environment on the site by not moderating terms of service violations like doxxing and threats of violence. Why does Torba purposefully leave some of the more unhinged elements of Gab unmoderated? What has Torba done to improve Gab with the millions of dollars he raised? What happened to those millions? Why hasn’t the SEC done anything about it? Does Gab’s seeming immunity from legal consequences and purposeful lack of moderation point to it being a honeypot, especially considering Torba’s frequent willingness to report his own users to the Feds?

Andrew Torba And The Grift Of Gab, THE PROVIDENCE POST, 15 March 2023

Second is Torba’s post made in the aftermath of the anti-freeloading policy that I personally believe to not only be justified, but long overdue for a business that has reportedly been running in the red on the Silicon Valley investment model for a long time. I even expressed my opinion on the matter in a meme posted on Gab this morning, of which Torba himself approved.

Torba’s recent post, at least to me, reads like that of a moderately successful entrepreneur who is simply doing whatever he needs to do to in order to keep the lights on his current operation in a moribund industry, even as he attempts to shift resources toward a more promising one in a new and growing industry.

Thank you to everyone who upgraded to GabPRO today. We had our single biggest revenue day for PRO since January 2021. Gab Social is well on its way to becoming sustainable longterm.

The past year has been very tough. As many of you noted we have been operating at a loss for a long time and that needed to change quickly.

The compounding problems of both storage space filling up and capital draining month to month had to be solved or Gab was going to die. We couldn’t let that happen and so drastic measures had to be taken to solve two problems at once. We also needed to do something big that would get the attention of everyone here so that all of us could be focused on solving these issues together.

There’s no other conspiracy here. That’s the simple truth of the matter. The advertising market tanked last year with the economy/inflation and it impacted us hard. We made significant cost cutting measures over the past year but it still wasn’t enough. Running a website as big as Gab costs a lot of money and there’s no way around that.

The team has started working on the storage issue and this change buys us a lot more time to handle it. We have been reading many of your suggestions and taking them into account.

We see that many of you are concerned about your identity which I totally understand as someone who has been dragged through the mud personally for 8 years now by the media, members of Congress, foreign governments, the ADL, the SPLC, and many more people. I’ve been”canceled” 100 times over. I get it.

That being said there are plenty of ways you can support us anonymously. The easiest way to do that is by sending physical mail to our mailing address with a money order, etc. We have a mail in check option on the GabPRO checkout flow. Just be sure to include your reference number and Gab username. You can get a money order at any post office and plenty of other places. You can also work with other Gabbers you trust who can gift you a PRO account.

I’m confident that Gab will emerge from this stronger than ever with a more united community.

We can’t do this alone anymore. We need your help if we are going to make this work longterm and I know that together we can get the job done and keep the one single place on the internet that allows free speech to stay online permanently.

Those who haven’t been on the business end of a deplatforming, and haven’t been subjected to a full-bore media assault, have no idea how stressful it is or how it hardens those who have gone through those things without cracking. Assuming that Torba is not an actor or a honeypot, and the evidence presented is neither substantial nor convincing, I can assure you that Torba no longer cares one little bit about the opinions of those with the luxury to cling to their precious anonymity or those who think they know better than he does what it takes to keep Gab alive.

As every Castalia, Arkhaven, Infogalactic, and UATV subscriber knows, either you actively and materially support what you like or you don’t matter at all. Just as no army has any use for warriors who won’t fight, no business has any use for supporters who burn up its resources rather than contribute them. The reason Castalia House will be around when Tor Books goes out of business, and the reason UATV will be around when YouTube turns out the lights, is solely due to the strength and the commitment of this community. I do not say that lightly. It’s the literal truth.

If the Gab community is strong enough, and committed enough, and if Torba is genuinely the committed Christian Nationalist man he now presents himself as being, it will survive. If any of those three pieces are missing, it will not. In the meantime, and despite our well-known past differences, I wish him and his endeavors well.

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Destroying Democracy to Save Democracy

Ukraine cancels its elections indefinitely:

President Volodymyr Zelensky, the leader of the war-torn country, just received approval from his parliament to extend Martial Law another 90 days. There have been many parliamentary extensions of the wartime mandate, but this one carried special significance because the 2024 presidential elections in Ukraine were scheduled for March 31, 2024, coinciding with the end of Zelensky’s five year term. Now that Martial Law is in place to cover that time period, Ukraine’s presidential elections have been cancelled indefinitely.

So, a government that was installed by a foreign-backed coup, led by a foreign national, and with a military commanded by a foreign national and directed by foreigners, is cancelling its presidential election because the fate of all the Western democracies depends upon it.

Who finds this Clown World inversion persuasive? Who finds it even remotely convincing?

Pick a card… any card. He’ll tell you what your card is.

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The Cost of Cowardice

The failure to cross the Rubicon is proving to be expensive for President Trump:

Donald Trump and his family business have been fined a devastating $364 million for inflating property prices worth following a blockbuster fraud trial in New York. Judge Arthur Engoron also banned the former president from serving as the director of a company in the state for three years in the crushing ruling issued on Friday that puts the future of his business in the Big Apple in doubt.

His son’s Eric and Don Jr. were fined more than $4 million each and his former CFO Allen Weisselberg was fined $1million for the scheme to massively inflate prices of his properties including Mar-a-Lago to get favorable loan terms from lenders.

Trump has up to 30 days to come up with the money, which with interest could top more than $400million, or secure a bond of around $35 million.

It’s all about the Rule of Law, folks. The Rule of Law and democracy. It’s all about the Rule of Law, democracy, and fighting antisemitism. And, of course, transgendering any children who manage to avoid getting aborted. And vaxxing those who manage to avoid getting transgendered.

Do you still think God blesses America? Because, at least from afar, it looks a lot more like a place that has been profoundly acccursed.

You’ll cross it now… in chains.

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Biden’s Replacement

It’s becoming rapidly apparent that Biden is unlikely to make it to the November election in sufficient shape to speak in public. AC suggests that the plan is to replace him with RFK Jr., due to the problems with getting any other Democrat on enough state ballots given the registration rules:

RFK Jr. is the replacement for Biden, they will keep him in place until a replacement is impossible and then send him to hospice so all their voters will gravitate to RFK Jr. and hope he can steal enough centrists and Never Trumpers to win.

The comment is just dead on. If they ran RFK as a democrat, we would all assume he is comped, and opposition would be high. Now they have set him up as the anti-Cabal candidate who democrats and the establishment, and the CIA, and Vaxxies, just hate with a passion, and who they do not want to win since they have opposed him so vociferously. And then Biden gets either dead or 25th-ed, and now Democrats cannot run anyone because all the deadlines ran out, and RFK is there, perfectly positioned. He is like a more charismatic Bernie Sanders to the leftists, and he is almost quasi-Trumpian to the anti-Cabal right, so our resistance is lower than to Biden or an establishment candidate. It even makes sense why Gavin Newsom chose not to run, as did all the other establishment candidates. They all knew the plan – maybe their only chance for survival – was RFK, and everyone will do whatever is needed to support the plan.

I’m very dubious, mostly because it assumes that people who habitually break the election laws, including in the previous election, are going to make plans that are based upon the need to obey the candidate-registration laws. But it would explain both the way the elite media is gradually turning against Biden while going very, very soft on RFK Jr.

Even so, I’d assume that RFK Jr. was a backup plan, at most. If they want Newsom on the ballot, they’ll put him on the ballot, one way or another. And the Republicans will cry, but they won’t actually do anything about it.

As for the conservative obsession with Michelle Obama being a potential candidate… well, conservatives are retarded.

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No. Just No.

President Trump still just doesn’t get it. He never will.

Former President Donald Trump praised the parent company of Bud Light in a Tuesday post on Truth Social, saying it “deserves a second chance.”

“The Bud Light ad was a mistake of epic proportions, and for that a very big price was paid, but Anheuser-Busch is not a Woke company, but I can give you plenty that are, am building a list, and might just release it for the World to see,” Trump posted. “Why not, the Radical Left does it viciously to well run, Conservative companies – and people! Very nasty, but it’s the way they play the game!”

“On the other hand, Anheuser-Busch spends $700 Million a year with our GREAT Farmers, employ 65 thousand Americans, of which 1,500 are Veterans, and is a Founding Corporate Partner of Folds of Honor, which provides Scholarships for families of fallen Servicemen & Women,” Trump continued. “They’ve raised over $30,000,000 and given 44,000 Scholarships. Anheuser-Busch is a Great American Brand that perhaps deserves a Second Chance? What do you think? Perhaps, instead, we should be going after those companies that are looking to DESTROY AMERICA!”

I think we can safely rule out the President from having learned anything at all from being repeatedly stabbed in the back by his advisors, allies, and appointees. It’s not that he wasn’t a great president, because he was one of the best we ever had. But the USA needs a ruthless Putin or a Xi, with the willingness to wield the full power of the office to take on the oligarchs and the corrupt government officials, whereas Trump believes everyone just needs a good talking-to to set them right.

Alphas make for the best leaders the vast majority of the time. But when the ship is heading straight for the rocks, that’s when you want a Sigma who couldn’t care less what anyone thinks about him, the lighthouse, the maintenance schedule, the planned course, the evening menu, the map, the compass, or anything else, and is perfectly willing to throw overboard anyone who tries to get in his way.

Once converged, always converged. You can’t fix a zombie.

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Identity > Ideology

Lee Kuan Yew’s doctrine is more important than all the ideologies and isms in history combined. Because no one actually believes in any of them, they simply use them for the advancement of their races and religions. Identity is even sufficient to transform a diehard, life-long libertarian and Austrian economist into a full-blown collectivist, as evidenced by Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s criticism of Walter Block’s libertarian case for Israel:

Block et. al., in their attempt of presenting the liberal respectively libertarian case for Israel, maintain that they can justify the claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine based on their status as “heirs” of Jews having lived two millennia ago in the region then called Judea. Not surprisingly, however, except for the single and in itself highly questionable case of the Kohanim (Jews of priestly descent) and their specific connection to the Temple Mount, they do not provide a shred of evidence how in the world any one specific present-day Jew, through a time-span of more than two thousand years, can be connected to any one specific ancient Jew and be established as legitimate heir of some specific piece of property stolen or otherwise taken from him two thousand years ago.

The claim of present-day Jews to a homeland in Palestine, then, can only be made if you abandon the methodological individualism underlying and characteristic of all libertarian thought: the notion of individual personhood, of private property, private product and accomplishment, private crime and private guilt. Instead, you must adopt some form of collectivism that allows for such notions as group or tribal property and property rights, collective responsibility and collective guilt.

This turn from an individualistic to a collectivistic perspective is on clear display in Block’s et. al. summary conclusion (p.537):

“Rothbard supports homesteading as the legitimate means of ownership (the first homesteader gets the land, not any subsequent one)….Libertarians deduce from this fact that stolen property must be returned to its original owners, or their heirs. This is the case for reparations. Well, the Romans stole the land from the Jews around two millennia ago; the Jews never gave this land to the Arabs or anyone else. Thus according to libertarian theory it should be returned to the Jews.”

Bingo. But homesteading is done by some specific Ben or Nate, not by “the Jews,” and likewise reparations for crimes committed against Ben or Nate are owed to some specific David or Moshe as their heir, not to “the Jews,” and they concern specific pieces of property, not all of “Israel.” Unable to find any present David or Moshe that can be identified as ancient Ben’s or Nate’s heir to some specified piece of property, however, all reparation claims directed against any current owner are without any base.

Another property theory is needed to still make the case for a Jewish homeland. And Block and his coauthors offer such a theory: property rights and reparation claims can allegedly also be justified by genetic and cultural similarity… Whatever these outpourings of Block’s are, they have nothing whatsoever to do with libertarianism. In fact, to advocate the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents is the total and complete negation of libertarianism and the non-aggression principle. The Murray Rothbard I knew would have immediately called them out as unhinged, monstrous, unconscionable and sickening and publicly ridiculed, denounced, “unfriended” and excommunicated Block as a Rothbardian.

First, setting aside the burning question of what is, and what is not, Rothbardian, I always find the historic Jewish claim to the land of Israel on the basis of previous ownership to be incredibly bizarre, given that in the very document upon which they base that claim, it is established a) the Habiru stole the land from the Canaanites and b) most of it didn’t belong to them anyhow, but to one of the other tribes. How would property that Simeon stole from Joe Canaan, which was then stolen by Assyrians and later stolen by Romans, then Arabs, and finally the British, before being stolen by European Jews somehow properly belong to a genetic heir of Judah?

But that’s just an observation that is literally the exact opposite of new. What’s much more interesting here is the way that Block’s argument relying upon the transformation of the ideological core of libertarianism into a form of ethnic collectivism not only proves Lee’s doctrine of identity, but even shows how predictive that doctrine can be. For the record, I had never read anything by Block nor did I know anything about his background prior to reading Hoppe’s article today

Walter Block was born in Brooklyn, New York to Jewish parents Abraham Block, a certified public accountant, and Ruth Block, a paralegal, both of whom Block has said were liberals. He attended James Madison High School, where Bernie Sanders was on his track team. Block earned his Ph.D. degree in economics from Columbia University and wrote his dissertation on rent control in the United States under Gary Becker. Block identifies himself as a “devout atheist”.

Show me your argument and you show me your identity.

Because, as the greatest political mind of the 20th Century once wrote: “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

That’s why I no longer describe myself as a libertarian. Not simply because I have rejected the ideology, although I have, but because I no longer believe that most ideologists, past or present, are even remotely interested in, much less connected to, truth and objective reality. Despite its grandiose and universalist pretensions, ideology is the detailed rationalization of an identity group’s immediate interests, and it will always be subject to further modification and mutation as that group’s interests change over time.

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