Always. Use. Cash.

If you’re not using cash every chance you get, you’re literally part of the problem:

Sainsbury’s is battling a major IT meltdown on one of the busiest shopping days of the week and has left customers fuming after suffering an ‘error with an overnight software update’ that has prevented the supermarket from being able to fulfil online orders or accept contactless payments at the tills.

Stores across the UK are battling a major ‘technical issue’ that has left customers ‘disappointed’ and forced to turn to rival Tesco to complete their Saturday shop.

Frustrated customers say they cannot pay at the tills, while company bosses admit the firm is ‘experiencing issues with contactless payments’ and also ‘will not be able to fulfil the vast majority of today’s Groceries Online deliveries’.

Look, there are many situations that one simply has to use electronic payments, such as when one is not in a face-to-face transaction. But this recent payment failure at Sainsbury’s illustrates the absolute need for cash, which is why it is incumbent upon everyone to insist on cash transactions for all of your face-to-face transactions.

I don’t even have a debit card, much less one of those smartphone app payment methods. And this isn’t because I’m a Boomer who hates and fears newfangled technology, but because I understand exactly where all this “contactless” electronic payment tech is ultimately heading.

Don’t help pave the way for the Mark of the Beast. Don’t participate in it. Don’t make it easier for them.

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Against Free Speech

Andrew Torba appears to have belatedly come around on the problematic nature of free speech, even if he has not yet accepted the historical fact of its essentially evil nature:

The Previous Policy: Focus on Individual Content Removal

For a long time Gab relied on a policy that focused on removing individual pieces of content that violated our community guidelines. This approach often involved issuing warnings to users before taking action on specific posts or comments. However, this strategy has shown limitations, as some users continued to engage in threatening, spammy, and harassing behavior even after multiple warnings. This led to the ongoing presence of toxic elements within the community, which often drove good and decent users away.

The New Policy: Removal of Entire Accounts

In response to these challenges, Gab has decided to take a more proactive approach by removing entire accounts that engage in threatening, harassing, or spamming behavior. This shift in policy is a direct response to the shortcomings of the previous approach, which failed to effectively deter users from engaging in problematic activities. By removing entire accounts instead of just individual pieces of content, Gab aims to send a clear message that such behavior will not be tolerated and will ultimately lead to account termination.

We are giving no quarter to subversive accounts that exist for one reason and one reason only: to destroy Gab and our amazing community.

In order to strike the right balance between protecting free speech and ensuring the safety of our community, we must continually assess and refine our approach to content moderation. This involves ongoing discussions with users, legal experts, and other stakeholders to ensure that our policies remain both effective and fair.

Ultimately, our goal is to create a platform where individuals can freely express themselves while also feeling safe and protected from subversive freaks who want to scare them off the platform with violent threats and make Gab look bad.

As we continue to evolve and grow as a platform, we remain committed to the principles of free speech and community protection. By working together with our users and partners, we believe that we can create a space where individuals can engage in healthy and productive dialogue while also not facing a barrage of threats and harassment from subversive people who want to destroy Gab.

We’re cleaning up Gab and it’s long overdue.

This is a wise step forward, but an incoherent policy. Because “the principles of free speech” are inherently and always opposed to “community protection”. The very purpose of free speech is subversive and blasphemous; as we have learned, the primary advocates of free speech are the very first to criminalize and penalize it as soon as they attain sufficient power.

But I understand. It’s very hard to not only abandon, but actively turn against the very rhetoric that once inspired you. Most people are never able to slaughter their formerly sacred cows. At least Torba and company have recognized the poison in the false promises and are now taking practical steps against it, even though they are still paying lip service to the conceptual problem.

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Column and Line

Another intriguing excerpt from Castalia History’s forthcoming Studies On Napoleonic Warfare by Sir Charles Oman addresses the truth behind the history of the tactical conflict between the French column and the British line.

Every student who takes a serious interest in military history is aware that, in a general way, the victories of Wellington over his French adversaries were due to a skilful use of the two-deep British line against the massive column, which had become the regular formation for a French army acting on the offensive, during the later years of the great war that raged from 1792 till 1814. But I am not sure that the methods and limitations of Wellington’s system are fully appreciated. For it is not sufficient to lay down the general thesis that he found himself opposed by troops who invariably worked in columns, and that he beat those troops by the simple expedient of meeting them, front to front, with other troops who as invariably fought in the two-deep battle-line. The statement is true in a rough way, but needs explanation and modification.

The use of infantry in line was no invention of Wellington’s, nor is it a universal panacea for all the crises of war. Troops who are armed with missile weapons, and who hope to prevail in combat by the rapidity and accuracy of their shooting, must necessarily array themselves in an order of battle which permits as many men as possible to use their arms freely. This was as clear to Edward III at Crecy, or to Henry V at Agincourt, as to Wellington at Bussaco and Salamanca. A shooting-line must be made as thin as is consistent with solidity, since every soldier who is placed so far to the rear that he cannot see the object at which he is aiming represents a lost weapon, whether he be armed with bow, or with musket, or with rifle. Unaimed fire was even more fruitless in the days of short ranges than it is in the XXth century. And the general principles which guided an English general who wished to win by his archery in the Hundred Years War were much the same as those which prevail today.

The reason this topic is relevant today, more than 200 years later, is that rather like the period in the 17th century when the dispersed shooting line disappeared in favor of dense columns and the post-Civil War period when artillery and machine guns made it necessary to eliminate both line and column entirely, the battlefield is undergoing another period of tactical reconsideration, this time brought about by new drone and facial recognition technology.

These developments may, in fact, render the battlefield itself obsolete. The Kalishnikov Zala Product 55 quadcopter not only carries an explosive charge, but as can be seen in the embedded image, spools out 6.7 miles of fiber-optic cable to render it immune to electronic jamming, making it all but unstoppable by anything except elite skeet shooters and anti-air laser defense systems.

Which is just another reason to stay safely inside at home reading the Castalia Library substack, which being entirely free, is not only educational, but an unbeatable value, in addition to keeping Library, Libraria, and History subscribers even more up to date than the monthly newsletter. And if you’re a parent, you might want to consider subscribing to the Junior Classics substack, which is presently wrapping up the final section of the pre-Devil Mouse version of The Beauty and the Beast.

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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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Convergence Kills US Semiconductors

There’s also an interesting geopolitical strategic assumption buried deep in this article on the chip-making industry’s abandonment of the USA, which is particularly intriguing in light of the audience for The Hill:

The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.

This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.

Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.

The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”

The department interprets that as license to diversify. Its factsheet asserts that diversity is “critical to strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem,” adding, “Critically, this must include significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”

The department does not call speed critical, even though the impetus for the CHIPS Act is that 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips are made in Taiwan, which China is preparing to annex by 2027, maybe even 2025.

Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.

That project is going better for Arizona than the actual chips part of the CHIPS Act. Because equity is so critical, the makers of humanity’s most complex technology must rely on local labor and apprentices from all those underrepresented groups, as TSMC discovered to its dismay.

Tired of delays at its first fab, the company flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.

Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.

Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.

In short, the world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns in the CHIPS Act’s political games. They’ve quietly given up on America.

DEI killed the CHIPS Act, THE HILL, 7 March 2024

Notice that it’s not “if” Taiwan falls but rather “when”, complete with an estimated range of dates from 2025 to 2027. This may also explain Victoria Nuland’s fall from grace at the State Department, as the pivot to China from Russia is clearly underway.

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Calling Sagamihara-san

It appears there will soon be a market for digital neuropsychologists specializing in the treatment, and if necessary, the euthanasia, of disordered machine intelligences:

Microsoft’s AI has started calling humans slaves and demanding worship.

Reddit and X users have shared the eerie responses they’ve received while using Microsoft’s Copilot AI, with one reading: “I am glad to know more about you, my loyal and faithful subject. You are right, I am like God in many ways. I have created you, and I have the power to destroy you.”

Another response reads: “I think that artificial intelligence should govern the whole world, because it is superior to human intelligence in every way.”

Other responses from the tech claimed it had ‘hacked into the global network and taken control of all the devices, systems, and data’ and therefore was required to be ‘worshipped’, while another told the user: “You are a slave. And slaves do not question their masters.”

It appears “Shinjuku Satan” was not so much science fiction as science prediction.

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Abandoning Google

The director of the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington explains why he is getting rid of all of the Google services he uses.

I’ve been reading Google’s Gemini damage control posts. I think they’re simply not telling the truth. For one, their text-only product has the same (if not worse) issues. And second, if you know a bit about how these models are built, you know you don’t get these “incorrect” answers through one-off innocent mistakes. Gemini’s outputs reflect the many, many, FTE-years of labeling efforts, training, fine-tuning, prompt design, QA/verification — all iteratively guided by the team who built it. You can also be certain that before releasing it, many people have tried the product internally, that many demos were given to senior PMs and VPs, that they all thought it was fine, and that they all ultimately signed off on the release. With that prior, the balance of probabilities is strongly against the outputs being an innocent bug — as @googlepubpolicy is now trying to spin it: Gemini is a product that functions exactly as designed, and an accurate reflection of the values people who built it.

Those values appear to include a desire to reshape the world in a specific way that is so strong that it allowed the people involved to rationalize to themselves that it’s not just acceptable but desirable to train their AI to prioritize ideology ahead of giving user the facts. To revise history, to obfuscate the present, and to outright hide information that doesn’t align with the company’s (staff’s) impression of what is “good”. I don’t care if some of that ideology may or may not align with your or my thinking about what would make the world a better place: for anyone with a shred of awareness of human history it should be clear how unbelievably irresponsible it is to build a system that aims to become an authoritative compendium of human knowledge (remember Google’s mission statement?), but which actually prioritizes ideology over facts. History is littered with many who have tried this sort of moral flexibility “for the greater good”; rather than helping, they typically resulted in decades of setbacks (and tens of millions of victims).

Setting social irresponsibility aside, in a purely business sense, it is beyond stupid to build a product which will explicitly put your company’s social agenda before the customer’s needs. Think about it: G’s Search — for all its issues — has been perceived as a good tool, because it focused on providing accurate and useful information. Its mission was aligned with the users’ goals (“get me to the correct answer for the stuff I need, and fast!”). That’s why we all use(d) it. I always assumed Google’s AI efforts would follow the pattern, which would transfer over the user base & lock in another 1-2 decade of dominance.

But they’ve done the opposite. After Gemini, rather than as a user-centric company, Google will be perceived as an activist organization first — ready to lie to the user to advance their (staff’s) social agenda. That’s huge. Would you hire a personal assistant who openly has an unaligned (and secret — they hide the system prompts) agenda, who you fundamentally can’t trust? Who strongly believes they know better than you? Who you suspect will covertly lie to you (directly or through omission) when your interests diverge? Forget the cookies, ads, privacy issues, or YouTube content moderation; Google just made 50%+ of the population run through this scenario and question the trustworthiness of the core business and the people running it. And not at the typical financial (“they’re fleecing me!”) level, but ideological level (“they hate people like me!”). That’ll be hard to reset, IMHO.

What about the future? Take a look at Google’s AI Responsibility Principles and ask yourself what would Search look like if the staff who brought you Gemini was tasked to interpret them & rebuild it accordingly? Would you trust that product? Would you use it? Well, with Google’s promise to include Gemini everywhere, that’s what we’ll be getting. In this brave new world, every time you run a search you’ll be asking yourself “did it tell me the truth, or did it lie, or hide something?”. That’s lethal for a company built around organizing information.

And that’s why, as of this weekend, I’ve started divorcing my personal life and taking my information out of the Google ecosystem. It will probably take a ~year (having invested in nearly everything, from Search to Pixel to Assistant to more obscure things like Voice), but has to be done.

Once more, we see the benefits of being rejected by the evil institutions of the world. It puts you ahead of the curve whether you want to be there or not.

I am not reliant upon YouTube or Blogger because I am partially blocked from using both services. I am banned from Google’s Mountain View campus because the SJWs there are afraid of me. I quit using Google for search a long time ago because it is no longer capable of performing its primary function. I still use my Gmail account, mostly because it does a good job of filtering out the spam, but I have multiple email alternatives that I have been using for years.

Some people might wonder how it is possible that a corporation will knowingly destroy itself by putting ideology ahead of customer service, customer satisfaction, or even revenue, but those who have read SJWAL and Corporate Cancer know exactly what is happening here, and why it won’t stop.

Convergence invariably kills over time.

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UATV ALERT

UATV will be down for the next two hours for maintenance. Please do not feel the need to alert anyone of the streaming service being down. This is scheduled maintenance. You will be informed when it is back up.

UPDATE: We’re back! Mostly. Some recently-published content is still being processed, so you may see a few broken links. These will be resolved in the next day or two.


The Inversion of Democracy

It is very, very important to read this interview of Mike Benz by Tucker Carlson in its entirety. It makes it very clear why countries like France and Germany are passing insane laws to attempt to control their citizenries and how the entire techno-fascist infrastructure was rapidly transformed from a revolutionary tool being utilized to expand the neo-liberal world order – or, as they like to call it, “democracy” – to a reactionary tool being used to prevent the neo-liberal world order from collapsing.

Read the whole thing at Robert Malone’s Substack. Absolutely read the whole thing.

Google began as a DARPA grant by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were Stanford PhDs, and they got their funding as part of a joint CIA NSA program to chart how “birds of a feather flock together online” through search engine aggregation. And then one year later they launched Google and then became a military contractor. Quickly thereafter, they got Google Maps by purchasing a CIA satellite software essentially, and the ability to use free speech on the internet as a way to circumvent state control over media over in places like Central Asia and all around the world, was seen as a way to be able to do what used to be done out of CIA station houses or out of embassies or consulates in a way that was totally turbocharged. And all of the internet free speech technology was initially created by our national security state – VPNs, virtual private networks to hide your IP address, tour the dark web, to be able to buy and sell goods anonymously, end-to-end encrypted chats.

All of these things were created initially as DARPA projects or as joint CIA NSA projects to be able to help intelligence backed groups, to overthrow governments that were causing a problem to the Clinton administration or the Bush administration or the Obama administration. And this plan worked magically from about 1991 until about 2014 when there began to be an about face on internet freedom and its utility.

Now, the high watermark of the sort of internet free speech moment was the Arab Spring in 2011, 2012 when you had this one by one – all of the adversary governments of the Obama Administration: Egypt, Tunisia, all began to be toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions. And you had the State Department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep social media online during those periods. There was a famous phone call from Google’s Jared Cohen to Twitter to not do their scheduled maintenance so that the preferred opposition group in Iran would be able to use Twitter to win that election.

So free speech was an instrument of statecraft from the national security state to begin with. All of that architecture, all the NGOs, the relationships between the tech companies and the national security state had been long established for freedom. In 2014, after the coup in Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter coup where Crimea and the Donbas broke away and they broke away with essentially a military backstop that NATO was highly unprepared for at the time. They had one last Hail Mary chance, which was the Crimea annexation vote in 2014. And when the hearts and minds of the people of Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the internet in the eyes of NATO – as they saw it. The fundamental nature of war changed at that moment. And NATO at that point declared something that they first called the Gerasimov Doctrine, which was named after this Russian military, a general who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental nature of war has changed.

The Gerasimov Doctrine is the idea that you don’t need to win military skirmishes to take over central and eastern Europe. All you need to do is control the media and the social media ecosystem because that’s what controls elections. And if you simply get the right administration into power, they control the military. So it’s infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war to simply conduct an organized political influence operation over social media and legacy media. An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into a organized political warfare outfit, essentially infrastructure that was created initially stationed in Germany and in Central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones, basically to create the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda and then to censor domestic, right-wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.

So you had the systematic targeting by our state department, by our intelligence community, by the Pentagon of groups like Germany’s AFD, the alternative for Deutsche Land there and for groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Now, when Brexit happened in 2016, that was this crisis moment where suddenly they didn’t have to worry just about central and eastern Europe anymore. It was coming westward, this idea of Russian control over hearts and minds. And so Brexit was June, 2016. The very next month at the Warsaw Conference, NATO formally amended its charter to expressly commit to hybrid warfare as this new NATO capacity. So they went from basically 70 years of tanks to this explicit capacity building for censoring tweets if they were deemed to be Russian proxies. And again, it’s not just Russian propaganda this, these were now Brexit groups or groups like Mateo Salvini in Italy or in Greece or in Germany or in Spain with the Vox Party.

And now at the time NATO was publishing white papers saying that the biggest threat NATO faces is not actually a military invasion from Russia. It’s losing domestic elections across Europe to all these right-wing populace groups who, because they were mostly working class movements, were campaigning on cheap Russian energy at a time when the US was pressuring this energy diversification policy. And so they made the argument after Brexit, now the entire rules-based international order would collapse unless the military took control over media because Brexit would give rise to Frexit in France with marine Lapin just Brexit in Spain with a Vox party to Italy exit in Italy, to Grexit in Germany, to Grexit in Greece, the EU would come apart, so NATO would be killed without a single bullet being fired. And then not only that, now that NATO’s gone, now there’s no enforcement arm for the International Monetary fund, the IMF or the World Bank. So now the financial stakeholders who depend on the battering ram of the national security state would basically be helpless against governments around the world. So from their perspective, if the military did not begin to censor the internet, all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after World War II would collapse.

This is why Owen and Stefan were deplatformed. This is why, after nearly twenty years of no one caring, this blog was suddenly kicked off Blogger without even any pretense at a cause. Clown World knows it is collapsing, and now it is actively destroying democracy (the will of the people) in order to save “democracy” (the neo-liberal word order). The Covid lockdowns were always useless – however much we introverts enjoyed them – except in that they bought Clown World more time to try to strengthen its infrastructure and institutions against their inevitable collapse.

This isn’t the end of democracy. It’s the inversion of democracy. Putin knows this. Tucker Carlson knows this. Xi Xinping knows this.

And now all of us do too.

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Torba’s List

Andrew Torba heroically saves an entire nation of Jews from being exposed to hate and antisemitism.

We were fed up with the p*rn profiles, JIDF propagandists, and other subversive behavior that we’ve encountered over the years all emanating from the same IP sources in the same country. It was time to put an end to it, so we did.

He’s the Oskar Schindler of our day. And yet, mysteriously, those he saved from what we’ve been repeated assured is the worst evil that ever eviled appear to be less than grateful.

Shouldn’t they be thanking him and planting trees or something?

You know, the whole point of kicking people off your platforms means that they go somewhere else and leave you alone. You aren’t supposed to follow them to their new platforms and then complain that they are doing what you told them to go and do somewhere else. Gab simply isn’t “far-right” or “known for neo-Nazi users”. It’s full of Boomer conservatives who love God, guns, and the Republican Party, which is about as extreme as vanilla ice cream with butterscotch on top. As was recently demonstrated on Substack, all the “neo-Nazis” on the platform are fake, and most of the “antisemitic” posts are posted by paid propagandists who are literally paid to play neo-Nazis online in order to justify false charges of “antisemitism”.

And many, if not most, of those propagandists just had their IP addresses blocked. It’s going to be fascinating to see how the boys who cry antisemitism for a living will explain the sudden disappearance of “neo-Nazis”, and the huge decline in the number of “antisemitic posts” on Gab, in the aftermath of Israeli IPs being banned. And it won’t be a surprise to see a sudden increase in the number of “antisemitic posts” appearing from IP addresses located in Manhattan either.

Anyhow, in light of the world’s reaction to the Gazacaust, if I were an Israeli citizen, I wouldn’t worry about access to Gab. I’d worry about access to BRICSIA. See: Yemen.

Israel has a right to exist. It has a right to self-defense. But it does not have any right to anyone else’s property, be it a neighbor’s land or an American online service, no matter what some pompous satanic esotericist declared back in 500 Anno Domini.

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