Tag: trainwreck

The Reason They Lost

Vice-President JD Vance admits that fighting Israel’s war cost Republicans the country.

There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.

So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we’re going to shock the world? “No,” he told me. “We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us.”

Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.

There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

  1. End the war
  2. Focus on cost of living/inflation
  3. Put America First
  4. Change our relationship to Israel

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)

In the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I’m open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.

The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.

If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.

But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.

Amnesty? AMNESTY?

They still don’t understand the seriousness of the situation. I don’t think these so-called political experts understand that Americans would prefer literal heads on spikes and involuntary post-partum euthanasia to one more immigrant entering the country, even if said immigrant is legal, high-IQ, and a supermodel on the side. The fact is that politics is never going to be a potential solution for a problem that politics didn’t create.

No one ever voted for 130 million foreigners and their children entering the country. No one ever voted for allowing them to vote and even to rule over Americans in their own interests. Which is why voting simply cannot be a solution to the many woes caused by that invasion, especially not when many of the voting options now presented to Americans is a choice between one foreigner and another foreigner.

Asking a Scandinavian if they prefer for a Jew or a Somali to rule over them is obviously never going to be a viable solution.

DISCUSS ON SG

To Hell with Republicans

I have never been prouder to be able to say that I am not, and have never been, a Republican. Or, for that matter, a conservative. Now, I have no doubt that the Democrats cheated, scammed, and cast fraudulent votes like they always do. They are openly evil and beneath contempt. But the Republicans, as always, allowed them do it all across the USA despite their oaths to the Constitution. And, perhaps even more importantly, the Republicans have governed in an aggressively anti-American, anti-Christian manner every chance they’ve gotten; the mere fact that a) the Epstein files still haven’t been released in their unredacted entirety, b) material support for Ukraine and Israel is still being provided, c) Iran was repeatedly attacked against the American national interest, and d) H1B visas still exist are all reasons why the Republicans deserve no support whatsoever from any American.

Now, I am very well aware that some will say that the Democrats are worse. That is largely true. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Republicans are evil and anti-American, or that voting for them will do nothing to restore the USA to the American Christian nation it once was. If your answer to any of the problems and challenges facing Americans involves either “vote Democrat” or “vote Republican” you are simply fooling yourself.

And did you really ever imagine the Second Amendment was written for fear of Redcoats and Russians? Or is it more likely that the Founding Fathers anticipated the Republic would one day need to be restored?

This gentleman put it very well on X:

Every GOP strategist, consultant, and candidate should be forced to participate in a role-playing exercise this morning.

Your name is Bob. You’re a 49-year-old blue-collar worker in Ohio. You’ve always struggled to make ends meet. The good jobs were all shipped to China and the few remaining pay a pittance wage, undercut by endless illegal labor.

You’re a 3x Trump voter because you believed he would finally make America great again.

You put your son through Ohio State. He graduated cum laude in computer science. You couldn’t have been prouder. After months searching, he landed an entry-level job at Microsoft. Beneath his qualifications, but a good start for a smart kid.

Then he got laid off. That same month, Microsoft applied for 150,000 more H-1B visas because it can’t find qualified Americans.

Your son has spent six months back in his childhood bedroom, sending hundreds of applications without landing an interview.

On TV, Trump boasts about the greatest economy in history and how many women and minorities are finding jobs.

You decide a father-son steak night might cheer him up.

Gas is $4.50 a gallon. Filling your truck costs over $100. At Kroger, ribeyes are $30/lb. You settle for hamburger, even though 70/30 ground beef still costs $10+.

At checkout, a fat black woman is screaming at the cashier because her EBT will only cover most of the filet mignon and lobster in her cart.

You think to yourself how the Iran war has made everything expensive, but at least we’re stopping their nuclear bomb. You weren’t even sure where Iran was before you googled it after we first bombed them in March.

After dinner, you take your son to the county fair. Half the people aren’t speaking English. Virtually none of the crowd looks like you. You’re forced to leave early after a “teen takeover” turns violent. A foreign born judge pledges none of them will go to jail.

Back home, you turn on the TV. Vivek Ramaswamy is lecturing the crowd about American mediocrity and why Ohio needs more foreign talent.

Your son grows upset. You change the channel.

Now a Republican surrogate, the daughter of a governor or wife of an elderly billionaire, explains that young White men are the REAL welfare queens. They’d rather play videogames in their parents’ basements than work.

Your son says nothing. He just goes back to his childhood bedroom. You turn off the TV.

Then your neighbor starts blasting reggaeton and cracking open Modelos. He brought his cousin’s family from Mexico to help with all the minority-business contracts his construction firm keeps winning. Tonight they’re celebrating his nephew’s birth, the family’s first birthright American citizen.

You sit alone in your living room.

You worked hard, paid taxes, obeyed the law, and raised your son to do everything right. You voted Republican again and again because you believed somebody in Washington would finally fight for you.

Instead, your wages are stagnant. Groceries are unaffordable. Your community is unrecognizable. Your country is fighting another foreign war.

And upstairs, the son you sacrificed everything for is lying awake in the bedroom he slept in at twelve, wondering what the heck he’s even supposed to do with his life now.

Every time you turn on the TV, the Republicans you elected are either congratulating themselves or explaining why you and your son are the problem.

For ten years, they told you America’s future depended on your vote. Now you aren’t even sure America has a future worth defending.

The Republican Party needs to answer one simple question this morning:

You’ve spent a decade demanding Bob’s loyalty. You’ve given him stagnant wages, unaffordable groceries, another foreign war, and a son who did everything right but can’t find work.

And when they complain, you call them lazy, entitled, and racist.

What possible reason have you given Bob and his son to vote Republican? Do you honestly think you deserve their vote?

DISCUSS ON SG

Island-Hopping to Iran

Larry Johnson believes he knows what the “Trump” administration’s “insane plan” is. And if he’s right, it’s not a good one:

Here is how I understand it came together. The week of October 19, Trump was presented with a menu of options for a renewed war on Iran. The plans were not drawn up by the Joint Staff’s J5, the Pentagon’s chief planning directorate, but by the J5 at Central Command, the headquarters that will actually fight the war. Trump, my source says, chose the option of seizing one or more islands. Murphy’s “insane” comment, after his briefing, fits that choice. Murphy has not publicly named the targets. Analysts discussing his briefing have mentioned Kharg, Iran’s main oil export terminal, and Qeshm, the large island that sits across the Strait of Hormuz.

And then, on October 29, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Lieutenant General Brett Sylvia, the Joint Staff’s J5. The Pentagon says he was removed for leaking classified information and failing polygraph tests. Two other Pentagon sources told CBS those accusations are false. What I am told, and what other analysts have heard from their own sources, is that Sylvia opposed the island plan…

The traditional way to take an island is an amphibious landing: ships, landing craft, Marines wading ashore. That is almost certainly off the table. Any American amphibious ship that sails into the Persian Gulf puts itself inside range of Iranian anti-ship missiles, drones, mines and fast attack boats. Kharg sits about 16 miles off Iran’s coast. Larak, near Qeshm, sits just a few miles off it. Sending a big-deck amphibious ship into that space is an invitation for the first American capital ship to be lost to enemy fire since the Second World War. Even Proceedings, the Naval Institute’s own journal, ran an analysis in April warning that the Navy might not be able to get close enough to launch amphibious vehicles at all.

That leaves the air. Either you drop paratroopers or you land C-130 transports on the island and offload troops. Here is the arithmetic problem. A C-130 carries fewer than 100 combat-loaded troops, and typically somewhere between 64 and 92 paratroopers, depending on the model. To put 1,000 soldiers or Marines on the ground, you need at least a dozen sorties, and far more once you add vehicles, ammunition, water, medical teams and air defense. Every one of those aircraft is a large, slow, unarmored target flying into airspace where Iran has had years to position short-range air defenses and shoulder-fired missiles. One aircraft shot down on approach and you have lost a company.

The first wave also has to secure the runway before anyone else can land, and we know who gets that job. Airfield seizure is the signature mission of the 75th Ranger Regiment. It is what the Rangers did at Point Salines in Grenada in 1983, at Rio Hato in Panama in 1989 and at Objective Rhino in Afghanistan in 2001. Ranger battalions are reportedly already in the theater, and they would almost certainly be handed the mission of jumping in and seizing the strip so the C-130s can follow. These are the finest light infantry in the world. They are also light infantry: lightly armed, carrying what they can jump with, and dependent on everything that comes in behind them. In Grenada and Panama, the defenders could not shell the airfield from the mainland a few miles away. Here, Iran can. Iran also knows the Rangers’ playbook as well as anyone who has read the history, which means it knows exactly which runway to watch. Sending the Rangers to seize an airfield within sight of the Iranian coast is asking America’s best to hold the door open in a room that is already on fire.

The landing is not even the hard part. The hard part is the day after. Once American troops are on the island, they are sitting a few miles from the Iranian coast with no hardened fortifications, inside range of Iranian artillery, rockets, ballistic missiles and swarms of drones. Iran will not need to retake the island. It will simply shell it, around the clock, for as long as the Americans choose to stay. And the Americans will be defending themselves with the same depleted interceptor stocks Miller describes, against targets that are cheap for Iran to build and expensive for us to stop.

Then there is resupply. A Marine Expeditionary Unit carries enough to sustain itself for roughly 15 days. After that, every bullet, every gallon of fuel, every bottle of water and every replacement part has to arrive by air or by sea, through the same gauntlet that made the landing so dangerous. Casualties have to go out the same way. That means an endless air bridge of vulnerable transports, or ships parked inside the Gulf, or both. The island becomes a hostage, and the American public watches the casualty count rise every evening on the news.

And what would it achieve? Seizing a couple of small islands near the Strait does not neutralize Iran’s long southern coastline, which is where the missiles and drones that threaten shipping are actually launched. Taking Kharg would cut into Iran’s oil exports, but Iran has other terminals, and the most likely response would be more strikes on the Gulf states’ oil and water infrastructure, the infrastructure that is already being held together with tape. We would be trading a symbolic flag-raising for a permanent target.

If this is the plan – and it might only be a smoke screen – it’s right up there with The Bay of Pigs. It wouldn’t be even remotely surprising if the US military refused its orders from a fake Commander in Chief.

Because whatever that is pretending to be the President of the United States, it’s not Donald Trump.

DISCUSS ON SG

File 770 Discriminates Against Hispanics

It’s so terrible to see the way that the science fiction community is full of hatred and discriminates against Hispanics. Mike Glyer of File 770 actually apologized for running a basic convention report about the recent World Fantasy Convention that just happened to be written by a gentleman of Hispanic descent.

How can I run a review by Paul Weimer and a week later post something by Jon Del Arroz, a writer who’s persecuted him? (Or ever?) That was a terrible choice. I apologize. And how can I do that to Cat Eldridge, who is closely associated with this blog but was completely blindsided by the post. He works with Paul all the time and absolutely would not want us to be hosting JDA. I apologize to Cat, too.

A good apology would stop there, I think. Which I say because some people want to know why I did this in the first place. And an explanation at this point in an apology is usually a backdoor justification which makes the apology worthless. All I can say is the explanation is part of my contrition.

File 770 doesn’t have that many commenters, so it often feels like I do a lot of work and all that matters is if I mention someone’s hot button topic they will jump in to reprimand me for failing their purity test. Most of the time my skin is not so thin that I react. Sometimes it is. Resentment is the issue that drives most of the problems I have in life, and when I yield to it bad things happen.

I was going through just such a season of feeling picked on when Jon Del Arroz sent me his convention report. I combed through it expecting to find takes I would refuse to publish but it was rather vanilla. Nothing to object to but the byline.

This is obviously nothing more than pure anti-Hispanic racism on the part of Mr. Glyer. There was literally nothing to object to but a Hispanic name in the byline; it was a simple and straightforward news report devoid of any political content whatsoever, as you can see for for yourself.

World Fantasy Con 2026 Friday Review
Posted on October 24, 2026 by Mike Glyer

By Jon Del Arroz: World Fantasy Convention opened Thursday at the Oakland MarriottCity Center, and Friday, the first full day, delivered the small, personal kind of gathering the convention is known for. I wasn’t able to attend Thursday because of having to get work done. Robert Silverberg was the main draw for me, and he did not disappoint.

The convention is a fraction of Worldcon’s size. Programming runs two or three panels at a time, the dealer room is modest, and the convention space is compact. Organizers have been citing 775 members on Facebook. At peak times on Friday the halls held roughly 200. The staff has the operation running smoothly and were all super nice and helpful, from the info desk to programming to the dealer room, and attendees I passed all seemed to be having a good time.

The morning opened with a panel on the changing publishing world. The lineup was Silverberg, Josh Wilson from The Fabulous magazine, Teresa DeLucchi, director of marketing at Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press, Betsy Wollheim, and Stephen Jones.

The panelists agreed that everything in the business is up in the air and very different than ever. They discussed the trend toward sprayed edges on books that began in the pandemic, and cited that they thought the trend had peaked, which I find entertaining and think look great and add a lot to the presentation of books. They also said physical books are staging a bigger comeback because ebooks have become so prevalent and normalized, so people want something physical and cool to hold. That matches what I see in the market: readers want premium deluxe editions, and more publishers are making them.

AI produced the panel’s one real disagreement. Jones called it inevitable and asked why anyone bothers fighting it. DeLucchi argued people should not be using it. Jones has the better of that argument. AI is not going away, and people will not stop using it. It cleans up typos fast, and it has plenty of uses that never touch the creative work. He believes eventually AI will replace editors entirely for the most part.

The AI exchange led Silverberg to talk of copy editors, and he did not hold back. He once had a copy editor “fix” a sentence he had deliberately left unfinished, and he had to get it changed back. His verdict: “I hate copy editors because I know what I’m doing.” He added that Harlan Ellison once had a copy editor change a pile of his text wholesale, and that it did not go well for the copy editor.

He also talked about meeting John W. Campbell. The business used to be personal, he said, and now it is detached and run by email. The panel noted that unlike the days of building relationships with editors to buy stories, Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld buys stories only through open submissions, not by soliciting authors, so a relationship with the editor doesn’t get you a sale. Everyone goes through the same slush process. Silverberg described walking into Campbell’s office as being like going to church and meeting God. When he got to call Campbell by his first name, he thought the roof would fall in.

The dealer’s hall was modest but with a lot of cool stuff. Tachyon Publishing had a big presence there with a lot of works that were tempting, especially form Peter Beagle’s catalog. Cross Genre Books, a Portland dealer, had a deep rare-book stock: signed Jack Vance, signed Harlan Ellison, Poul Anderson, Anne McCaffrey, and plenty of Heinlein. I spoke with Anthony Eichenlaub, vice president of SFWA, who had a table in the room. Artist John Picacio also set up there, and he kept a line most of the time I passed, with fans buying prints.

In the afternoon I went to a reading with Bruce McAllister, Charlie Jane Anders, and Caroline Yoachim. McAllister is a long time writer who has done wonderful work and does not get enough credit in the field these days despite plenty of award nominations for his work. Anders really worked the room before reading from a forthcoming publication in 2027 that involves vampires and time travel, thanking the moderator and the audience and getting everyone applauding, and the crowd responded in kind.

What’s great is how many of the attendees are there just as fans and not a full slate of scheduled speaking. I ran into Robin Hobb and Tad Williams, among other big names. Peter Beagle held a small meetup that filled before I could sign up, and I hope to catch him another way before Sunday. A bookbinding workshop, where attendees bound their own books, also looked good, and I missed it for scheduling reasons.

Friday night also holds a mass autographing session. Silverberg and Jones are expected to unveil an anthology there, with advance review copies on hand. Saturday brings Silverberg’s interview panel, which I expect to be a highlight of the con as well. The World Fantasy Awards banquet is Sunday to cap everything off. 

All in all, it was an excellent Friday, and World Fantasy Convention delivered. 

Now, I have zero interest in any future accommodation with the SF-SJWs, not because they quite rightly hate and fear me, but because they are such a collection of irrelevant mediocrities that there isn’t a single one of them that I would ever deem worthy of publishing in ebook, let alone in fine deluxe leather. When Castalia House is publishing excellent authors like Eiji Yoshikawa, Benito Perez Galdos, Zenaide Fleuriot, Unno Juza, and Nomura Kido in English for the first time ever, how could we possibly care about these sub-trivial SF/F wannabes who don’t even understand what science fiction is and what it is not.

Unfortunately, Mike Glyer has forgotten that his proper role is that of a science fiction historian, not a racial gatekeeper, and while it’s understandable that he would eventually fold under the hateful pressure of the yapping SJWs, it is a mistake on his part. Because, as a very kind and gentle dark lord once said, an apology is nothing more than a guilty plea in their beady little eyes.

And they are irrelevant anyhow. Despite their best efforts, Castalia House already publishes more and better titles than Tor or Baen. I will not be surprised if within three years, Castalia House is the biggest science fiction-related publisher in the world not named “Amazon”.

Sign up for Castalia Unlimited to find out why.

DISCUS ON SG

“AI-Written” is Not a Disqualifier

One of the things that the evolutionists like to use to disqualify Probability Zero is describing it as “AI-written”. Which is, of course, partly true. But that should frighten them, not comfort them. Because it is evidence of the strength of the book’s legitimacy, not the opposite.

Remember when they said to “Trust the science?”

Artificial intelligence finds that a quarter million cancer research papers have been faked

A 2026 study trained an AI on 2,202 cancer papers that had been identified as fake. It then applied this model to look into 2.65 million original cancer research papers published between 1999 and 2024. It flagged 261,245 papers as fake

  • Over 178,000 flagged papers had Chinese institutional affiliations
  • Roughly 36% of Chinese cancer research output in the dataset
  • Iran was next at around 20%

This is a major problem because this can mean the medical community amplifies completely fake research and findings

“Every fabricated study sitting in a real journal is competing for attention with studies actually pointing towards a legit cure, which means the more fake noise there is, the longer it takes for the real breakthroughs to surface. And somewhere in that pile, maybe a real cure is buried under a fake AI-generated one.”

No doctors have gone to jail for this (I checked)

This also demonstrates how the fact that MITTENS isn’t peer-reviewed means nothing at all. And it’s interesting that they describe it that way, because, as it happens, it has been reviewed by a number of people, including mathematicians and physicists, as will be demonstrated later today.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Unfair Fight

There are those who have asked me if I’m perhaps not biting off more than I can chew by taking on entire fields of science and all of the illustrious, credentialed minds, past and present, that make up those fields, entirely by myself. I mean, it has been correctly pointed out that I’ve never taken one single class in population genetics, and my sole educational foundation in biology is a single 10th-grade class. And against all those famous names with various letters after them, I’m just a game designer armed with nothing more than arrogance and an AI. And twin 96-core 512GB digital abacuses.

Then again, we are talking about professional biologists here. Which explains why I didn’t even need the AI.

DISCUSS ON SG

Golf is for Liars

I’m not a golfer. I’ve never golfed. I don’t care about golf. I lived a few minutes from Sawgrass and I still didn’t play golf. But I do have two firm opinions about golf:

  1. Golf is not a sport. It is a game.
  2. Golf is a degenerate game for gamblers and liars.

The concept of the “gimme putt” that golfers use to suppress their scores is so unbelievably lame. That alone demonstrates it’s not a real sport.

Two weeks ago, we had a game where one of our players headed in a corner, a defender desperately kicked it off the line, it hit the crossbar at an angle so it bounced out. Infuriating, since it cost us two points and the win over the defending champions at their place, but a phenomenal defensive play. Since none of us are golfers, we didn’t claim it as a goal, even though it was a lot closer than the average putt that golfers claim as a gimme. Which, of course, should count as an additional stroke anyhow!

Any golfer who claims a “gimme putt” should be beaten about the head with drivers and sent home immediately. Did it go in? No? THEN IT DIDN’T GO IN!

I always knew it was a stupid fake sport.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Method is the Conclusion

If your thought when you read someone saying that they’ve overturned 100 years of established science, is “oh wow! This guy’s a genius, they’re all wrong!” And not “what’s this guy missing that everybody else isn’t”, then you really need to address your biases, and how they’re affecting your ability to learn.

As I pointed out to Erika herself, regardless of whether I am an arrogant lunatic or a world-class scientific genius of historic note, how would anyone, no matter how well-credentialed, ever be able to tell the difference given their absolute refusal to even look at the growing body of evidence that natural selection is a very weak force totally incapable of accounting for the chimp-human genetic divergence, much less the origin of the species?

With regards to the inverse of the question concerning what I am missing that everyone else isn’t, Athos and I ran into a very interesting anomaly while we were sorting through the various ape genomes to determine precisely how genetically divergent the seven species are. What we discovered is that the protein-guided CDS alignment method has a circular reasoning problem that’s impossible to ignore once you recognize it:

  1. You want to measure how conserved proteins are (dN/dS) to prove the strength of purifying natural selection.
  2. You align them using substitution matrices built from observed conservation patterns
  3. The aligner penalizes divergent amino acid substitutions while scoring the alignments
  4. Regions too divergent to score well get gapped out or are left unaligned, so they aren’t counted.
  5. You measure conservation on what remains
  6. Hey presto! You find strong conservation! Quelle surprise!

In other words, the method presupposes the conclusion. This is, again, the same way one proves that Kevin Hart can dunk a basketball on a 10-foot basket, by showing that he is one inch taller than Lebron James. The aligner’s scoring function is a model of purifying selection that treats radical amino acid changes as improbable and therefore unlikely to be true matches. So divergent codons are excluded from the alignment before dN/dS is ever computed. Those excluded codons are enriched for nonsynonymous substitutions by definition, because that’s why they scored poorly in the protein alignment.

The whole-genome alignment we utilize doesn’t have this scoring bias. Cactus aligns DNA based on genomic context — synteny, flanking sequence, structural features — without reference to protein function. It’s agnostic about whether a coding region is conserved or divergent. When we project gene coordinates onto that alignment and extract codons, we get ALL the aligned coding positions, not just the ones that are deemed to look conserved at the protein level.

The diagnostic data confirms this. Single-SNV codons, the positions where there’s exactly one nucleotide difference in the codon, so classification is completely unambiguous, show 71.6% nonsynonymous, 28.4% synonymous. dN/dS = 0.71 on those alone. There’s no misalignment artifact that explains a 3:1 nonsynonymous-to-synonymous ratio on unambiguous single-substitution codons. That’s just what the genome looks like.

And so the gene set comparison nails the coffin shut on the alternative explanation. We ran the same test on their smaller subset, which I suspected might be cherry-picked. Except they weren’t. If the protein aligner were simply being more careful and excluding messy regions that our pipeline misaligns, then we’d expect the nonsynonymous fraction to vary considerably across gene subsets. Fast-evolving gene families and duplications would show different ratios than conserved 1:1 orthologs. But they don’t. It’s 73.8% nonsynonymous across every subset we tested. The signal is uniform across the genome, it’s not concentrated in problematic genes.

So what the Consortium’s method actually measured is: “among the coding positions conserved enough to survive protein alignment, how conserved are they?” That’s not a valid measurement, that’s a tautological quantification.

The whole field of evolutionary biology has interpreted dN/dS = 0.23 as evidence that purifying selection eliminates 77% of nonsynonymous mutations before they reach fixation. But the whole-genome measurement of dN/dS = 0.7989 implies that only 20 percent are actually eliminated, which is nearly four times less purifying selection than the mainstream science assumes. The difference is not a matter of gene selection, quality filtering, or computational error. It is a methodological artifact of using a conservation-dependent alignment to measure conservation.

Gene SetGenes MeasuredPooled dN/dSNonsyn Fraction
A: All GENCODE20,4000.798973.9%
B: 1:1 chimp orthologs16,9950.795673.8%
B-HC: High-confidence 1:115,9370.793973.8%
C: Excluded by filter3,4050.823774.4%
Published (Consortium 2005)13,4540.2300~40%

These findings have two significant implications.

First, they demonstrate that the canonical evidence for strong purifying selection in coding sequences is methodologically compromised and therefore incorrect. Second, they indicate that even coding sequences are evolving near-neutrally. Purifying selection exists, but is a much weaker mechanism than previously believed, removing roughly one in five nonsynonymous mutations rather than three in four. This is consistent with the drift-dominated picture that emerges from the LTEE data and from the mathematical breeding reality constraints: natural selection exists but operates at the margins, and contrary to what has been believed for the last 160 years, it has never been the dominant force shaping protein evolution between closely related species.

And, just to be clear, none of this genomic analysis has anything to do with MITTENS per se. It merely happens to be empirical evidence that tends to independently confirm the mathematical and empirical impossibility of evolution by natural selection.

DISCUSS ON SG

Watering the Desert

The EU is getting desperate. They burned down their economies and enraged their native populations for less than nothing:

“It feels like we’re watering the desert,” one of the European diplomats told Le Monde.

The article notes that Ukraine’s request for additional funding comes at a “delicate political moment” when the EU is focused on negotiations on the multi-year budget of the union. Despite the fact that the budget provides for a €100 billion aid package for Ukraine for 2028-2034, Germany and its supporters want to reduce this amount.

The situation is also influenced by the fact that in 2027 a series of elections is planned in the member countries of the bloc – in France, Spain, Poland and Italy, where, according to Le Monde, the topic of financing Ukraine is “particularly sensitive.” European governments are facing severe internal pressure. The local population is less and less ready to “tighten their belts” for the sake of sponsoring Ukraine.

Europeans never wanted to finance a war against Russia. They were happy to cheer on the USA and UK doing so, but they never expected to finance it, let alone fight one themselves. And now the economic collapse due to energy prices is already underway.

The problems that European countries are facing now are so critical that Europe is being “eaten alive,” US President Donald Trump told his supporters in Texas. “Look at what’s happened to Europe. They are being eaten alive,” he said. Europe is going through a major energy crisis. AFP reported, citing EU statistics, that October 1 saw the highest diesel fuel price in the European Union, reaching 2.24 euros per liter on average.

That’s $8.50 per gallon. That’s not sustainable. Fortunately, there is an easy solution. Wave the white flag, stop funding the Kiev regime, rebuild the Nordstream pipeline, and start buying Russian gas again. That’s going to happen, sooner or later, so the smart thing to do is end the economic torment before the popular revolutions begin.

DISCUSS ON SG

They Didn’t Read the Book

A regular here jumped on the grenade for everyone who, like myself, lacked the fortitude to sit through three-and-a-half hours of two people discussing a book that neither of them had bothered to read, and thereby gleaned the following information from the recent video by Dr. Erika and Dr. Hanson.

  • Erika: “Will doesn’t include in his presentation how d is actually calculated, but I suspected it was probably in Vox’s book. So I just texted one of my several friends who are reading through the book right now and sort of yucking it up with me via text messages over it, and I was like, ‘Hey, does anybody have the definition for his selection coefficient d?’ And my friend said that on page 153, in the chapter titled ‘The Overlapping Generations Problem,’ d is defined as the fraction of the population replaced per time unit…”
  • Dr. Hanson: “So because of all of that, I don’t foresee any population geneticist, one, even knowing who Vox is, or two, being like bothering with ever reading a book that’s probably mostly written by AI.”
  • Erika: “That’s just based off of what Will presented to us. Of course, Vox has a book floating around out there. I wonder—I wonder if maybe I should read it and then, like, make fun of it with some of my friends? Like, go through some of the more in-depth claims, or I should say extraneous claims, that exist in that book. That might be fun…”
  • Erika: “There’s no doubt in my mind that Vox is going to respond to this video, and he’s probably going to say something to the tune of, ‘You didn’t answer all of the points that I made in my book. All you did was address Will Duffy’s points.’ And it’s like, yes, that was the priority of this video.”
  • Erika: “It’s also worth noting that in some places he has complained that people who criticize him actually haven’t read his book… So all of those things together put an evil little idea in my head. I was talking to Zach and a couple other of my friends who have relevant formal training in areas in and surrounding this exact topic, and we kind of just thought to ourselves, ‘Man, what if we just did read the book? What if we read it and then got together and critiqued the book as a whole, and we can each bring our favorite parts of the book to this round table together and we can sort of atomize it?’ …You can expect that to come within a couple of weeks, a week maybe, of this video. We’re just going to actually go through Probability Zero, and it’s probably going to take a long time.”

Interesting. I was pretty confident that Erika hadn’t read the book, but I was under the impression that Dr. Hanson had read the 2nd edition, specifically, on the basis of some of his comments. Believe it or not, I have no problem whatsoever with evolutionists attempting to critique Probability Zero or The Frozen Gene without bothering to read them first. It’s their credibility and their careers on the line, not mine. And they certainly make my job as the author significantly easier, because I have neither the reason nor the responsibility to respond to any critique by anyone who hasn’t read the book he is purporting to critique and isn’t even addressing the relevant details.

So that’s my initial response to their 210 minutes of not discussing my book: they didn’t read it and they didn’t discuss it, they simply discussed what they imagined it must be. Although perhaps someone should warn Erika what happened to the last female critic who thought that reading through one of my books and critiquing it would be fun.

But talking about the book without reading it is absolutely fine, so long as that’s made clear, which both of them obviously did. I have never paid attention to their videos before and they have yet to give me any reason to start doing so. I might as reasonably respond by talking about The Refutation of Kant and providing proof of the amphiboly in das Ding an sich, as that’s another of my books they also haven’t read. Or, for that matter, the Amorran formations in A Throne of Bones.

This isn’t to say that their video is worthless. To the contrary, it gives us a very clear picture of the current state of the field’s mainstream understanding of itself as well as how it is unprepared to defend this particular front. Now, perhaps this evolutionary round table Erika is assembling will do better. It certainly should do better on the basis of actually having a target at which to shoot. And when I respond, I will respond in detail to every material criticism of my mathematical disproof of evolution by any, all, and every mechanism, including natural selection, raised in both of the videos. While I am aware that Erika and Dr. Hanson spent some time discussing me on a personal level, I didn’t even bother reading that part of the transcript.

I’ve been getting attacked personally for 25 years now. I don’t care. I’m a former Wax Trax! recording artist and my own fans and Vile Faceless Minions refer to me as Supreme Dark Lord. So I think the mainstream narrative of me being a Very Bad Man has been sufficiently established that we can all just take it as given and get on with the substantive discussion. I mean, what part of “downright evil” is hard to understand?

  • “Vox Day is one sick puppy.” —Dr. P.Z. Myers, PhD
  • “Vox Day is a fascist mega-dickbag and less a human being than one long sequence of junk DNA.” —Dr. Phil Sandifer, PhD
  • “I consider Vox Day one step, either direction, from certifiable.” —Mike Resnick, science fiction author, 38-time Hugo Award nominee
  • “I think I have made my disgust with Vox Day and his Rabid Puppies clear.” —George R. R. Martin, fantasy author, 19-time Hugo Award nominee
  • “Vox Day rises all the way to ‘downright evil’. ” —Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Manager of Science Fiction, Tor Books, 15-time Hugo Award nominee
  • “Vox Day is a real bigoted shithole of a human being.” —John Scalzi, three-time SFWA President and science fiction author, 9-time Hugo nominee
  • “Vox Day and his followers made it impossible for me to remain silent, keep calm, and carry on.” —Connie Willis, science fiction author, 24-time Hugo Award nominee
  • “The real burning question is, ‘what will Vox Day attack next?’” —Charles Stross, science fiction author, 15-time Hugo Award nominee

Well, at least we have the answer to Charles Stross’s question, as St. Darwin is truly dead. And thanks to one of my readers, we can even add to the collection:

  • “Vox Day is one of the worst people I have covered in this channel. He is unambiguously a raging racist, giga-misogynist and clinical narcissist (no hyperbole).”—Erika Whatever her name is, Youtuber and armchair psychiatrist

My only thought is that she never covered Richard Dawkins, Stephen Gould, Steven Pinker, Ed Boyden, Marc Hauser, Martin Nowak, David Sloan Wilson, George Church, or any of the other big-name evolutionists who used to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein? Well, I suppose she did say only “one of the worst”. I’ll just have to do better.

Despite being a recently diagnosed clinical narcissist, I don’t need their attention. I never sent out a single press release for the book. I’ve done zero book signings and no public events. There was no book launch party. You can even see from my publication history that I almost entirely stopped paying attention to evolution from February to September. So whether they engage or not makes very little difference to me. If and when they do, I’ll address the critiques and any mistakes they identify. If they don’t, then the work stands as it is until someone can come along and actually show that it doesn’t.

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