Divisional Saturday

I'm entirely relaxed about this one. I would just like to see a good game in which Handsome Jimmy is sacked 37 times, Dalvin Cook rushes for 190 yards and 3 TDs, and Kirk Cousins goes 7 for 10 for 102 yards, 1 TD, and no interceptions. But I have no actual expectations. As always, SKOL!

In the other game, I have a hard time seeing a banged-up Seattle team beating Green Bay. And nothing could be sweeter than going to Lambeau and winning the NFC championship on the frozen tundra.

The Z-man doubles down

The ZmanVerified Account@TheZBlog

His blunder was in making claims that can be independently verified. That and picking a fight with the Zoomers. They dug into his various claims because they have time on their hands and they like mixing it up on-line.

A friend said to me that he has become the old man stomping on the flaming bag of poop while shouting into the darkness.

It was entertaining for a while, but I'm bored with it now.

Except, of course, there was never any blunder. My claims were correct and theirs were not. The few "independently verified" claims that appear to have been verified are both inaccurate and irrelevant. If the Z-man wasn't technologically illiterate, he would understand how ludicrous their claims have always been. No one, including us, has ever run anything on the scale of Unauthorized using a $75 Premium account on Vimeo.

Do keep in mind the actual claims that were made. Even I am not that brilliant.

And the Z-man is now a proven liar. As everyone involved already knows, and as everyone else will learn soon enough, the Z-Man has conclusively and publicly demonstrated that he is not only a liar, but a particularly lazy and stupid one at that. He does nothing and he has accomplished nothing beyond emanating envy of those who take the time to actually produce things, construct projects, and build communities.

I understand it is going to be very, very amusing for those who are in the know and for those who trust me to rub their retarded little noses in their own bullshit as the facts gradually become apparent to even the most wilfully ignorant. Nevertheless, resist the temptation. The more time that passes, the more they double down and insist upon the correctness of their statements, the more amusing it will be.

Uncle John's Band put it rather well on SocialGalactic: The success of UA has been the snake revealer. The sort of scum who would rather cry in their permitted corners of the status quo than see the change they pretend to want.

Adios again, Oakland

The Raidess are no longer the Oakland Raiders:

The Raiders are no longer the Oakland Raiders. They’re not the Las Vegas Raiders either.

For now, they’re just the Raiders.

The franchise made a change to all of its social media accounts, dropping Oakland. It will not add Las Vegas to its handle until the new league year starts in March, according to Josh Dubow of the Associated Press.

The NFL already made the switch, listing the Raiders as just the Raiders with no city attached in its releases last week to announce the 2020 draft order and 2020 opponents of each team.

Perhaps they should become an itinerant pirate team, playing all of its games away all season. That might actually work....

But Las Vegas does appear to be a fitting home for them.

Google demonetizes Nick Fuentes

It's not right, of course, but I can't say I'm going to shed copious tears over Nick Fuentes being demonetized by Google:

Nicholas Fuentes, who gained headlines earlier this year, has been banned from streaming on YouTube, demonetized, and likely will be banned outright soon.

Now I suppose we'll find out if he's genuinely a fighter or if he's just another ex-YouTuber playing victim. Either way, it's a great time to go after YouTube, as the parent organization's top-flight legal chief is currently exiting Alphabet:

The changing of the guard at Alphabet  continues. Roughly one month after Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they’d be stepping down as the CEO and president of the search giant’s parent company, one of their top lieutenants, Alphabet’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, told employees that he is also leaving the company.

I understand he is retiring in order to spend more time making new families.

The former employee with whom he shares a child, Jennifer Blakely, published a post on Medium last summer in which she described Drummond as a serial philanderer who left his wife for her, then left her and the son that he fathered with her for another now-former Google employee.

Blakely also claimed Drummond had had “an affair with his ‘personal assistant’ who he moved into one of his new homes.”

One day later, Drummond issued a statement of his own, acknowledging his relationship with Blakely and their “difficult break-up 10 years ago.” He went on to state that, “Other than Jennifer, I never started a relationship with anyone else who was working at Google or Alphabet. Any suggestion otherwise is simply untrue.”

Days after issuing the statement, Drummond married a Google employee he’d been dating.

Subscribe to Unauthorized, because no one knows how much longer the Darkstream will be on YouTube.

Too short and too dishonest for the ride

People often ask me to work with, or publish, or link to, or otherwise support various individuals who are more or less on the ideological Right. And, of course, that has been something that we've tried repeatedly to do since we founded Castalia House. The problem, as we have learned over time, is that most people are simply too stupid, too short-sighted, too narcissistic, too independent, or too dishonest to be worth assisting.

The Z-man is not entirely devoid of ideas, and I have occasionally linked to his more insightful posts, but the following comment should suffice to demonstrate why he's simply not someone that anyone can take seriously as an intellectual or even a commentator. Keep in mind that this is a comment on a post dedicated to declaring that he is the one pure soul worthy of support in a dissident swamp of grifters.

thezman
There was never a lawsuit against Indiegogo. Court filings are public records. For starters, in such a dispute the attorney will look at the contract you signed. He will see there is a dispute resolution process and ask you if you initiated that process. If not, then you will need to do that first. Once that is done and you are not satisfied, he will tell you that the next step is arbitration. Getting a judge to set aside an arbitration clause in a contract is extremely difficult and mostly pointless.

The bottom line is Indiegogo canceled the project, gave the people their money back and that was it. There was no lawsuit. No class action. No arbitration. Nothing.

The combination of ignorance, stupidity, envy, and gamma posturing would be difficult to top without resorting to the visual medium of YouTube. It doesn't even rise to the level of a clueless mainstream political reporter. Nevertheless, don't correct him. Don't set the record straight. Don't provide him with any proof of what actually happened at all - and I know that literally hundreds of you have it in your possession. Just let his statement stand for the record until October 11, 2021.

And keep it in mind the next time you ask me why I regard right-wing mediocrities like the Z-man with undisguised contempt and refuse to have anything to do with his kind. Many, if not most, of the so-called "grifters" he decries are not only smarter and harder-working than he is, they are more accomplished and far more worthy of your trust.

Meanwhile, it's good to see that others on the Right are discovering lawfare can be an effective way to strike back at the weaponized media:

Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration activist who hosts a website that has published the writings of white supremacists, is suing The New York Times for $5 million for labeling him an “open white nationalist” in an article last year.

The characterization of Brimelow that triggered the libel lawsuit appeared in a Jan. 15, 2019 article by Times political reporter Trip Gabriel that offered a chronology of racist and inflammatory comments by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa)....

“We stand by the story and will vigorously defend,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said.

One of these days, we're going to have to put together a class action against Wikipedia and other media sites used to seed the never-ending slander and libel. This is a good time to go after the media because they no longer have the resources to defend themselves as both their circulations and their revenues are declining.

UPDATE: This response by a Z-maniac is more than a little amusing, considering our complete lack of interest in what any of them happen to think about me or anything else:

This is how a cult leader reassures the faithful: Denigrate the faithless to instill self-righteous superiority within the cult so that they dismiss any counterclaims without thought. Real evidence is no longer necessary. A measured response is to link to evidence or acknowledge that a sealed arbitration leaves room for skepticism.

Notice how the gammas always love to theorize and posture in the complete absence of information. They project their own lack of knowledge as well as their inability to not blurt out everything they know to everyone else. The idea that someone who genuinely possesses the conclusive evidence might not care what they believe is simply beyond their imagination. Sometimes the cult's superiority is real. And as cults go, it's quite affordable.

I just thought this was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate to everyone who is in the know that an occasional anklebiter is both a fool and a liar. There is no need to prove it to those who are dumb enough to take him seriously; they will simply move the goalposts anyhow. If they mattered, we'd prove it to them. But they don't.

Epstein didn't delete the video

But someone did:

The surveillance video taken from outside Jeffrey Epstein's jail cell on the day of his first apparent suicide attempt has been permanently deleted, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Epstein, the disgraced financier who was facing federal sex-trafficking charges, was found semiconscious in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, in New York around 1:27 a.m. on July 23.

But that video is now gone because MCC officials mistakenly saved video from a different floor of the federal detention facility, prosecutors said in a court filing. The MCC "inadvertently preserved video from the wrong tier within the MCC and as a result, video from outside the defendant's cell on July 22-23, 2019 no longer exists," the court papers say.

It's time to outlaw the surveillance state. The cameras quite obviously don't work well enough to permit it to function at all.

A landmark

I’m pleased to be able to announce that SocialGalactic surpassed 1,000 daily posts for the first time in its very brief history yesterday, 9 January 2020. There were 1,133 new posts, to be precise. The crushing will continue. Once we get the necessary badges created, we will start inviting the creator-specific subscribers, including Feed the Bear, The Legend, and Grow or Die subscribers.

In other news, I am contemplating a change to the Castalia Deluxe / Castalia Library lines as we finalize the covers. At present, the favored approach for the latter favors the Latin, as opposed to the Italian I'd originally suggested.

• Castalia Deluxe ---> Castalia Library
• Castalia Library ---> Libraria Castalia

I think both will look very good on the spines. If you are a subscriber of either leatherbound line, please share your opinion in the comments.

Speaking of SocialGalactic, an artist there has created what may be one of the strangest "advertisements" for a "televised" show ever produced. I have to admit, I like it.

Patreon trolls for new creators

The Quartering, previously banned by Patreon, receives an invitation to join Patreon and disrespectfully declines.

Hi Jeremy,

My name's Tom and I work on the Creator Partnerships team at Patreon. We help creators build long-term creative businesses by investing in a direct relationship with their fans.

I'm reaching out to you to see if you're interested in discussing what Patreon membership could look like for you. We've previously partnered with creators like Tolarian Community College, Strictly Better Mtg and Dungeon Dudes to help them launch on Patreon. We'd love to see if something similar could be a fit, especially given the recent COPPA ruling which has unexpectedly impacted channels despite their content not being for kids.

Are you free this week?

Best,
Tom

Unlike the December 20th TOS change, which was a direct reaction to the Legal Legion's actions, I very much doubt this had anything to do with Patreon changing its policies or its attitude towards creators it had previously banned. We already know that Patreon's processes are shockingly amateurish and disorganized, and that people in one team have no idea what the people in another team are doing.

So, it's much more likely that Tom and the others in Creator Partnerships is working from a list of creators with a good-sized audience that has never been compared with the list of creators that Sydney and the others in Trust & Safety have banned.

One of the interesting things Jeremy observes is that Patreon processes about $1 billion per year. Since they take about 4 percent after the processing fees, that means their annual revenue is only around $40 million. Which, of course, means that they are even more fragile than we had originally calculated.

Mailvox: the anklebiter's perspective

ihateowenbenjamin writes:

Haha nothing has happened and never will. You bald idiot loser. You really think you are smart yet won't go and have a legitimate test. You are a fool. Your dad was a fool. All your work is plagiarised, copied off of successful versions.

You are a literal nobody. You act smart to compensate for your zero accomplishments.

You really think that notifying a company about legitimate violations of users is interference? ahahhaha. You are really so dumb. Owen blatantly violated Patreon TOS you idiot. You talk nonstop about TI yet have zero understanding of how it works. Like your dad you try to take the law into your own hands and think you are smarter than you are.

A dumb old loser. We laugh so much so thank you. other than a few weird losers who watch your show, nobody cares. Nobody believes you. You are not a serious person.

Prove you are in Mensa. Prove a single aarticle of evidence of any of your fake lawsuits.

Patreon/Google etc just laugh at you. You really think they care hahaha. You are an "anklebiter" to them. They don't care lol. They think you are a nerd loser. You work with Owen Benjamin who is a well known lolcow who does exactly the things you cry about daily. He is a serial defamer and liar.

We all laugh. You are such a bad liar. Total idiot. Good job teaming up with Owen Benjamin and losing any of the credibility you had( you had none anyways).

We're dealing with some real rocket scientists here. They're going to be dealing with some serious cases of cognitive dissonance once things start to go public. Of course, there is no point proving anything to a gamma, because the moment that you do, he will define the very conclusive proof he demanded as irrelevant and continue sniping as if he never placed any value on it in the first place.

Alt★Hero:Q #2: Not Dead Enough

After federal agent Roland Dane survives the successful assassination of the U.S. Secretary of State in Peru, he makes his way back to the United States in secret with the help of a mysterious organization opposed to the global establishment. But when a famous film star is reported dead just hours after the agent visits his house in the Hollywood Hills, Dane realizes that the reach of the evil that is hunting him extends further than he had ever imagined.

Arkhaven has assembled a first-rate production team to create the Alt★Hero: Q series, which explores the incredible QAnon phenomenon that is sweeping the planet. Set in the superhero world of Alt★Hero, Alt★Hero: Q is an astonishing action tale of everyday heroes taking on corruption and evil on a global scale.

The limited gold logo edition of AH:Q #2 is now available in print for $3.99 from the Arkhaven Direct store (US only) or from Amazon. AH:Q backers will receive their gold logo editions after all six print editions are completed. We expect to release the digital edition of AH:Q #3 later this month.

An act of self-regicide

I knew l'affaire de Markle was going to end badly. But I never suspected it was going to end in such a spectacularly bad manner:

Senior members of the royal family have gathered at Kensington Palace to celebrate the Duchess of Cambridge's 38th birthday amid an ongoing crisis after Prince Harry and Meghan's bombshell announcement last night.

Kate was seen arriving back at the palace today along with other royals such as Prince Eugenie, with birthday celebrations set to be dominated by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's decision to step back from family roles.

There are expected to be crisis talks today among the most senior family members, who are said to be 'downright furious' after learning about the announcement minutes before it broke on television news channels last night.

Royal sources today claimed Prince Harry had ignored crystal-clear orders from the Queen on the subject, after she instructed him not to make announcement about his future plans at this time.

It is understood that Harry had requested a meeting with the Queen at Sandringham as soon as he arrived back in the UK with Meghan and their son Archie this weekend, following a six-week Christmas break to Canada.

The Queen offered to meet the Duke - which was blocked by courtiers - but she still made an explicit request to her grandson that he first discuss his future plans in detail with his father, the Prince of Wales.

But the couple defied the order, going ahead with the announcement and 'pressing the nuclear button' on their royal careers, with William and Charles allegedly receiving a copy of the statement just 10 minutes beforehand.

I would definitely recommend avoiding boarding any flight that happens to be carrying Harry, Megan, Andrew, and Fergie. Just, you know, as a precaution. Especially when the British government can so easily play the Lockerbie card and blame the Iranians seeking revenge for General Soleimani.

Royal sources today claimed Prince Harry had ignored crystal-clear orders from the Queen on the subject

One almost wonders if he blames the Queen for his mother's fate. I find it hard to believe that anyone can be that ensorcelled by a third-rate actress.

The doctrine of unconscionability

Just a little light reading that has occupied a few members of the Legion of late:

“The doctrine of unconscionability ‘ “ ‘refers to “ ‘an absence of meaningful choice on the part of one of the parties together with contract terms which are unreasonably favorable to the other party.’ ” ’ ” ’  [Citations.]  There is both a procedural and substantive aspect of unconscionability; the former focuses on ‘oppression’ or ‘surprise’ due to unequal bargaining power, the latter on ‘overly harsh’ or ‘one-sided’ results.  [Citation.]

‘ “Both procedural and substantive unconscionability must be present for the court to refuse to enforce a contract under the doctrine of unconscionability although ‘ “they need not be present in the same degree.” ’  [Citation.]  Essentially the court applies a sliding scale to the determination:  ‘ “[T]he more substantively oppressive the contract term, the less evidence of procedural unconscionability is required to come to the conclusion that the term is unenforceable, and vice versa.” ’ ” ’  [Citation.]  Absent conflicting evidence, the trial court’s unconscionability determination is a question of law subject to de novo review.  [Citations.]”  (Ramos v. Superior Court (2018) 28 Cal.App.5th 1042, 1063 (Ramos); see also Armendariz v. Foundation Health Psychcare Services, Inc. (2000) 24 Cal.4th 83, 113–114 (Armendariz).)

Everything up to now has just been prelude. The Death Star is now fully operational. If you're both a Rubble Bouncer and a Replatformer, be ready for the green light.

UPDATE: You will know things are well underway when Patreon revises its TOS again and removes the restrictions it inserted on December 20th before February 6th.

Paul Krugman's Eichenwaldian moment

It must have been the Qanons who are surfing for illegal images on Paul Krugman's computer. What other explanation could there possibly be?

Well, I’m on the phone with my computer security service, and as I understand it someone compromised my IP address and is using it to download child pornography. I might just be a random target. But this could be an attempt to Qanon me.

It’s an ugly world out there.

Ugly indeed. I had no idea that "Krugman" might be spelled with a silent "stein" on the end. Quick, look, Nobel Prize!

I wonder what he expects the Twitter Police to do about it?  Anyhow, one must admit that Paul Krugman’s intriguing combination of an OK Boomer grasp of technology with an Eichenwaldian defense is at least as credible as his economic theories.

From SocialGalactic:

"What do you call the emotion that is 50% wanting to laugh and 50% wishing to impose the death penalty?"

Ausführenfreude.

Wallis Markle

While I'm not into British Royal porn, and I certainly expected Megan Markle to be an epic disaster, I never anticipated that she would actually manage to get Prince Harry exiled to Canada this quickly.

Harry and Meghan have quit as senior royals and revealed they will live between the UK and North America while working to become financially independent.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex made their announcement in a statement on their official Instagram account this evening.

They wrote: 'After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution. We intend to step back as 'senior' members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen. It is with your encouragement, particularly over the last few years, that we feel prepared to make this adjustment. We now plan to balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America, continuing to honour our duty to The Queen, the Commonwealth, and our patronages.'

So much for the whole "isn't it great he married an African" narrative.

Asimov: portrait of a supergamma

The man who set the stage for modern science fiction in so many ways:

If you wanted to construct the most productive writer who ever lived, based solely on first principles, the result would look a lot like Asimov. He emerged in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, which rewarded writers who could generate reams of publishable prose on demand; he eventually learned to produce serviceable material after only two drafts. Asimov was a rapid typist; he was fond of enclosed spaces and hated to travel; he had a prodigious memory; and he specialized in popular science texts that could be researched straight from the dictionary, encyclopedia, or other common reference books.

When the playwright David Mamet was asked about his writing routine by John Lahr in The Paris Review, he said, “I’ve got to do it, anyway. Like beavers, you know. They chop, they eat wood, because, if they don’t, their teeth grow too long and they die. And they hate the sound of running water. Drives them crazy. So, if you put those two ideas together, they are going to build dams.” One could say much the same about Asimov, whose existing tendencies were enlarged—by fame, a receptive audience, and supportive publishers—into a career that bears the same relation to the output of most writers that the Great Wall does to the work of the average beaver.

When you consider Asimov’s treatment of women, you find an identical pattern. As a young man, he was shy and romantically inexperienced, which was reflected in the overwhelming absence of female characters in his fiction. He openly stated that his relationship with his first wife was sexually unfulfilling, and it was shortly after his marriage that his fingers began to rove more freely. While working as a chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during World War II, he liked to snap women’s bras through their blouses—“a very bad habit I sometimes can’t resist to this day,” he recalled in 1979—and on at least one occasion, he broke the strap.

After the war, his reputation as a groper became a running joke among science fiction fans. The writer and editor Judith Merril recalled that Asimov was known in the 1940s as “the man with a hundred hands,” and that he “apparently felt obliged to leer, ogle, pat, and proposition as an act of sociability.” Asimov, in turn, described Merril as “the kind of girl who, when her rear end was patted by a man, patted the rear end of the patter,” although she remembered the episode rather differently: “The third or fourth time his hand patted my rear end, I reached out to clutch his crotch.”

It was all framed as nothing but good fun, as were his interactions with women once his success as an author allowed him to proceed with greater impunity. He writes in his memoirs of his custom of “hugging all the young ladies” at his publisher’s office, which was viewed indulgently by such editors as Timothy Seldes of Doubleday, who said, “All you want to do is kiss the girls and make collect calls. You’re welcome to that, Asimov.” In reality, his attentions were often unwanted, and women found excuses to be away from the building whenever he was scheduled to appear.

Given the psychosexual issues and socio-sexual shortcomings of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, it's not at all hard to understand why the two or three generations of boys who grew up reading them, and were influenced by them, featured so many sexually maladjusted individuals.

I think I was fortunate in that although I read all three of them, I was much more influenced by their contemporary, Jerry Pournelle, who, despite his prodigious IQ, was the only socio-sexually normal one of the four of them. Even as a boy, the two things that most struck me about Asimov was a) his infelicitous names for his characters, and b) his total inability to describe women or intersexual relations.

Mailvox: the view from the field

A military reader shares his take on recent events from the Middle East:

I'm an American field grade officer in [REDACTED], and would like to calm things down a bit, concerning the Iranian missile strike on Al-Assad Air Base, and Erbil. I was in [REDACTED] during the strike. Here's my take.

1. We received "intelligence reports" that there would be a missile strike that night in two volleys. We didn't know the hour, or location, but there were in fact two volleys. Field intelligence is never that accurate, in my experience.

2. The first volley launched within minutes of us receiving the "intelligence report".

3. I watched the rockets impact - mostly ineffectively - on a live feed.

4. Pres Trump tweeted that there were no American casualties, and little damage, before we even received the Battle Damage Assessment, but he was right.

5. Iran, Iraq, and Pres Trump were all talking about de-escalation within hours of the strike.

The whole night, I couldn't escape the feeling that the whole thing is intended to give Pres Trump a reason to remove troops from Iraq, while giving all three parties (Iran, Iraq, and the USA) reason to claim a win - the USA killed a very bad man, Iran struck The Great Satan, and Iraq gets to reassert their sovereignty.

We'll see, but that's the way it looks from [REDACTED]. Finally....

6. I watched the Neo-Clowns on Fox News agitate for war. I just thought, "give it a rest, man!"

If war is politics by other means, military theatrics are diplomacy by other means. And what we're seeing here looks a lot more indicative of diplomacy-by-missile-barrage than actual war.

Missile Command is not war

I would not advise overreacting to the Iranian response to the recent US missile strikes.

Iran struck back at the United States for the killing of a top Iranian general early Wednesday, firing a series of ballistic missiles at two Iraqi bases housing U.S. troops in a major escalation that brought the two longtime foes closer to war.... Iran has started its “second round” of attacks against bases holding U.S. troops in Iraq, the Tehran-based Tasnim news agency said on Wednesday. The second round of attacks started an hour after the first phase took place, the agency reported.

This is not what countries do when they have any intention of engaging in actual war. The Iranian military has more than 500,000 active troops and there are no reports of them being deployed aggressively in the direction of Iraq or Saudi Arabia.

This is just tit-for-tat. If Iran was serious, they would be deploying divisions and shutting down all naval traffic in the Gulf. Until they start doing that, I wouldn't even bother paying the whole thing any attention.

They don't have the right

Lawfare works:

Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann received reportedly has received a settlement from CNN after suing the far-left network for smearing him last year.

“CNN agreed Tuesday to settle a lawsuit with Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann,” Fox 19 reported. “The amount of the settlement was not made public during a hearing at the federal courthouse in Covington.”

Sandmann also filed lawsuits against The Washington Post and NBC Universal, each for $250 million or over, and is reportedly planning to “sue Gannett, owners of The Enquirer.”

The big social media companies are even more vulnerable than the big media companies. The problem, of course, is that no one ever stands up to them.

SocialGalactic 2.0 update

The second iteration of SocialGalactic is in active Beta. All Annual, Premium, and Basic UATV subscribers have been invited. If you are a current subscriber and have not received an invite, please email me with SG2 INVITE in the subject from the email you used to subscribe to Unauthorized and the level of your current subscription.

Burn Unit members will be invited soon, after which we will invite the creator-specific subscribers. Following that, we will invite Castalia Deluxe subscribers. Those involved in other projects that do not involve those subscriptions, such as Rebel's Run investors, Replatforming patrons, and the AHQ Rubble Bouncers, will receive special badges they can use if they wish.

Only after all of the various contributors have been invited will we prepare to offer actual SG2 subscriptions and open up the site to free users.

And if you're already on SocialGalactic, feel free to comment upon how it's working for you and what improvements you would like to see.

"A terrible comedown"

But it's not a comedown, it's merely the inevitable result of taking the ticket, and the price that one must pay to Das Losmeister for the worldly success one is so fortuitously granted:

In any event, this latest round of interviews made for a sad spectacle. A great entertainer was disowning the best part of his oeuvre; a former rebel leader was bowing to the king to win favor at court; a master at skewering high-level hypocrisy had gone over to the other side. “You’ve gone from filth merchant to talk of the town,” Jimmy Kimmel told him in October. Stern’s opening commentaries on the interviews in his new book seem designed to make old fans wince: he considers Madonna “a kindred spirit,” calls Stephen Colbert “very evolved and emotionally connected,” praises Rosie O’Donnell for her “wisdom and graciousness,” applauds Lena Dunham for her “wisdom” and “understanding,” and touts Gwyneth Paltrow’s “humanity.” When Amy Schumer recalls the time her boyfriend touched her without explicit permission and hesitates to call it rape, Stern insists that it was, and concludes by saying, “I want to apologize for all men.” He even manages to work in a sympathetic word for Christine Blasey Ford. And the references to his own “personal growth” keep on coming. After a while, he sounds like someone who’s joined a cult.

Stern’s transformation reached its apotheosis when, on December 4, he welcomed Hillary Clinton into his studio for more than two hours. Even for a longtime fan who’d watched Stern’s persona shift over the years, I found the man who interviewed Hillary barely recognizable. Finally he was the shock jock he had always been accused of being—because his relentless flattery of the former First Lady was truly shocking. It was as if he were determined to prove that he could fawn over Hillary more fervently than her most ardent supporter. “My fantasy,” he told her, “was not only to meet you but to tell you what a hero you are to me. . . . You had the expertise I wanted in a president. . . . I wanted you to be president so bad.” He’d thought that hers would be “a spectacular presidency” because “she cares,” because she knew everything and everyone, and because she had “devoted her life to public service.” He agreed with her that Trump’s presidency has been a disaster and that Trump represents an existential threat to America. Once a hero of free speech, Stern criticized Facebook for not censoring Trump fans enough; one of Hillary’s problems in 2016, Stern told her, was that she had been “too truthful.”

Listening to this balderdash, you’d have thought that Clinton had led a saintly life, that she had been constantly set upon by jealous, corrupt inferiors, and that her career had been a spotless series of legislative and diplomatic triumphs. Buying into the notion of Hillary as a lifelong victim of the patriarchy, Stern seemed to be out to make up, in one interview, for every time he’d ever gotten a stripper to remove her top. One illuminating moment came when Stern praised Howard Zinn, the Communist author of A People’s History of the United States, a shoddy work of propaganda that has, alas, become a perennial best-seller and college text. Every Stern fan knows that Howard’s not big on books, so if he’s actually read Zinn’s opus, it’s likely his chief source of information on American history—a scary thought.

It was a stunning listening experience. When Hillary blamed James Comey (along with “the Russians and Wikileaks”) for her election loss, Stern went along with her, even though Comey had done Hillary a service by choosing not to prosecute her for clear violations of the Espionage Act. When she mentioned her emails, Stern didn’t bring up her private server or her destruction of the emails with BleachBit but instead agreed readily with her baffling claim that the emails had been “misinterpret[ed]”; when she criticized Trump’s “trade battles” and tax breaks, said that Trump was in Putin’s “camp,” and accused Trump fans (and not Antifa) of committing acts of violence around the country—and when she even knocked the booming Trump economy—Stern nodded along. He made no mention of Fusion GPS, the Clinton Foundation, her contorted version of the Benghazi episode, her dubious story about coming under fire in Bosnia, or anything else remotely scandalous in her (or her husband’s) past. Both Hillary and Stern took Joe Biden’s side in the Ukraine controversy and agreed that Trump’s famous phone call with the Ukrainian president had amounted to an “abuse of power.”

The entire interview was a case of kowtowing on an epic scale. Howard Stern, who rose to fame, in considerable part, by zapping fraudulent politicians, had now given one of the most sycophantic interviews of all time to a woman regarded by many as the most duplicitous pol of our era. It was a terrible comedown for a guy who’d earned a reputation for fearless honesty.

Howard Stern was never honest. His reputation was just another media construction, as false as the purported voice of the next big auto-tuned singer. If you are more devoted to success than you are to the truth, eventually you will be forced to dwell within the world of lies.

The disappointment of Plato

The genius Martin van Creveld considers how Plato would react to modern times:

First, he would have been disappointed (but hardly surprised) by our continuing inability to provide firm answers to some of the most basic questions of all. Such as whether the gods (or God) “really” exist, whether they have a mind, and whether they care for us humans; the contradiction between nature and nurture (physis versus nomos, in his own terminology); the best system of education; the origins of evil and the best way to cope with it; as well as where we came from (what happened before the Great Bang? Do parallel universes exist?), where we may be going, what happens after death, and the meaning and purpose of it all, if any.

Second, he would have questioned our ability to translate our various scientific and technological achievements into greater human happiness; also, he would have wondered whether enabling so many incurably sick and/or handicapped people to stay alive, sometimes even against their will, is really the right thing to do.

Third, he would have observed that, the vast number of mental health experts notwithstanding, we today are no more able to understand human psychology and motivation better than he and his contemporaries did. As the French philosopher/anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once put it, there was (and still) an uninvited guest seated among us: the human mind.

Fourth, he would have noted that we moderns have not come up with works of art—poetry, literature, drama, rhetoric, sculpture, architecture—at all superior to those already available in his day. Not to Aeschylus. Not to Sophocles, not to Euripides, not to Aristophanes. Not to Demosthenes, not to Phidias and Polycleitus. Not to the Parthenon.

I'm not at all surprised that the great Israeli military historian inclines more toward Plato than Aristotle. But despite being an avowed Aristotelian myself, I would highly recommend reading the whole thing. After all, it is not often that we have access to the contemplations and meanderings of one of the greatest minds known to Man's history.

US to withdraw from Iraq

Mike Cernovich reports that the US is officially ending the military occupation and withdrawing from Iraq.

U.S.-led coalition tells Iraqi military it will withdraw from Iraq out of respect for the nation's sovereignty
- Reuters

Trust the plan. No wonder the neocons weren't celebrating.

UPDATE: Confirmed.

The authenticity of the letter, which was addressed to the Iraqi defence ministry's Combined Joint Operations Baghdad, was confirmed to Reuters independently by an Iraqi military source.

UPDATE: The US Secretary of Defense denies the report.

The United States has no plans to pull out militarily from Iraq, Defense Secretary Mark Esper told Pentagon reporters on Monday, following reports by Reuters and other media of a U.S. military letter about a withdrawal. 

Ricky Gervais burns Hollywood

I'm no fan of Ricky Gervais, whom I generally consider to be a "so-called comedian", but even I have to admit that he crushed it at the Golden Globes last night:

Hello and welcome to the 77th annual Golden Globe Awards, live from the Beverly Hilton Hotel here in Los Angeles. I'm Ricky Gervais, thank you.

You'll be pleased to know this is the last time I'm hosting these awards, so I don't care anymore. I'm joking. I never did. I'm joking, I never did. NBC clearly don't care either — fifth time. I mean, Kevin Hart was fired from the Oscars for some offensive tweets — hello?

Lucky for me, the Hollywood Foreign Press can barely speak English and they've no idea what Twitter is, so I got offered this gig by fax. Let's go out with a bang, let's have a laugh at your expense. Remember, they're just jokes. We're all gonna die soon and there's no sequel, so remember that.

But you all look lovely all dolled up. You came here in your limos. I came here in a limo tonight and the license plate was made by Felicity Huffman. No, shush. It's her daughter I feel sorry for. OK? That must be the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to her. And her dad was in Wild Hogs.

Lots of big celebrities here tonight. Legends. Icons. This table alone — Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro … Baby Yoda. Oh, that's Joe Pesci, sorry. I love you man. Don't have me whacked.

But tonight isn't just about the people in front of the camera. In this room are some of the most important TV and film executives in the world. People from every background. They all have one thing in common: They're all terrified of Ronan Farrow. He's coming for ya.

Talking of all you perverts, it was a big year for pedophile movies. Surviving R. Kelly, Leaving Neverland, Two Popes. Shut up. Shut up. I don't care. I don't care.

Many talented people of color were snubbed in major categories. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about that. Hollywood Foreign press are all very racist. Fifth time. So. We were going to do an In-Memoriam this year, but when I saw the list of people who died, it wasn't diverse enough. No, it was mostly white people and I thought, nah, not on my watch. Maybe next year. Let's see what happens.

No one cares about movies anymore. No one goes to cinema, no one really watches network TV.Everyone is watching Netflix. This show should just be me coming out, going, 'Well done Netflix. You win everything. Good night.' But no, we got to drag it out for three hours.

You could binge-watch the entire first season of Afterlife instead of watching this show. That's a show about a man who wants to kill himself cause his wife dies of cancer and it's still more fun than this. Spoiler alert, season two is on the way so in the end he obviously didn't kill himself. Just like Jeffrey Epstein. Shut up. I know he's your friend but I don't care.

Seriously, most films are awful. Lazy. Remakes, sequels. I've heard a rumor there might be a sequel to Sophie's Choice. I mean, that would just be Meryl just going, 'Well, it's gotta be this one then.'

All the best actors have jumped to Netflix, HBO. And the actors who just do Hollywood movies now do fantasy-adventure nonsense. They wear masks and capes and really tight costumes. Their job isn't acting anymore. It's going to the gym twice a day and taking steroids, really. Have we got an award for most ripped junky? No point, we'd know who'd win that.

Martin Scorsese made the news for his controversial comments about the Marvel franchise. He said they're not real cinema and they remind him about theme parks. I agree. Although I don't know what he's doing hanging around theme parks. He's not big enough to go on the rides. He's tiny.

The Irishman was amazing. It was amazing. It was great. Long, but amazing. It wasn't the only epic movie. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, nearly three hours long. Leonardo DiCaprio attended the premiere and by the end his date was too old for him. Even Prince Andrew was like, 'Come on, Leo, mate.You're nearly 50-something.'

The world got to see James Corden as a fat p****. He was also in the movie Cats. No one saw that movie. And the reviews, shocking. I saw one that said, 'This is the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs.' But Dame Judi Dench defended the film saying it was the role she was born to play because she loves nothing better than plunking herself down on the carpet, lifting her leg and licking her [expletive]. (Coughs) Hairball. She's old-school.

It's the last time, who cares? Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. Well, you say you're woke but the companies you work for in China — unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service you'd call your agent, wouldn't you?

So if you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to make a political speech. You're in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and f*** off, OK? It's already three hours long. Right, let's do the first award.

The tide, she is turning. If Gervais keeps this up, he'll be on Unauthorized within 18 months.

The Deep State stunned

Remember, the narrative is not synonymous with the truth. Read this article published by the Washington Post twice, first with a mainstream perspective, then with your Q filter turned on:

In the chaotic days leading to the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful commander, top American military officials put the option of killing him — which they viewed as the most extreme response to recent Iranian-led violence in Iraq — on the menu they presented to President Trump.

They didn’t think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable.

After initially rejecting the Suleimani option on Dec. 28 and authorizing airstrikes on an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group instead, a few days later Mr. Trump watched, fuming, as television reports showed Iranian-backed attacks on the American Embassy in Baghdad, according to Defense Department and administration officials.

By late Thursday, the president had gone for the extreme option. Top Pentagon officials were stunned.

Who, one wonders, are these "top" American military officials and Pentagon officials? To whom, or what, are they loyal? And how tactically capable are they if they are foolish enough to engage in this sort of transparent managing-up with a personality like the god-emperor?

Wheels within wheels

One can't help but notice that neither the Israelis nor the neocons appear to be overly pleased about the recent assassination of Qassem Soleimani. Perhaps, instead of a prelude to war, it was a prelude to the long-overdue withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

The Iraqi parliament called on the government on Sunday to work to end all foreign troop presence as a backlash grew after the killing of a top Iranian military commander and an Iraqi militia leader in a U.S. strike in Baghdad.

A resolution passed by a special session of parliament said the government should cancel its request for assistance from a U.S.-led coalition.

Parliament resolutions, unlike laws, are non-binding to the government. But this one is likely to be heeded: Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi had earlier called on parliament to end foreign troop presence as soon as possible.

Remember, the god-emperor seldom does the obvious. So, the obvious explanation for his actions is seldom going to be the correct one. After all, there is no reason to believe this was even an attack by the U.S. military, given the fact that the previous attempt on Soleimani was by someone else.

And one immediate result has been the cessation of offensive actions by the U.S. military:

The US-led coalition has announced it will put most of its operations on hold and focus on ensuring the security of its troops as tensions in the Middle East skyrocket after the death of Iran’s top general at the hands of the US. The coalition will from now on devote most of its efforts to protecting its troops and bases, a coalition spokesman told journalists, adding that most operations against militant groups have been put on hold. 

NFC Wildcard weekend

I will, of course, be cheering for the Vikings. That doesn't mean I expect them to win. In the other game, I don't expect Seattle to have too much trouble with the Eagles.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Mailvox: a prediction

A radio host who shall remain nameless was kind enough to make the following prediction for 2021 after reading the 2019 traffic report:

I draw much joy in observing your growth over the years and I take great satisfaction that I discovered you early on and knew you had a voice that needed to be heard. Your next leg up, another doubling of your traffic, will begin to occur in 2021. When the Fed-managed economy runs aground and a host of conflicts break out, the demand for insight will grow again.

While it would certainly be impressive to hit five million monthly pageviews, I'm perfectly content with where we are now. Regardless, I am very appreciative of those few in the media who have taken the trouble and the risk to support and encourage me over the last 20 years. While it is known that I do not forget those who have attacked me and mine, it is equally true that I do not forget those who have assisted me.

Always respect your predecessors. Theirs are the shoulders on which you stand.

On a tangential note, some readers have lamented the way in which I am increasingly disinclined to reveal my thoughts, ideas, and inspirations on this blog or in public discussions. This comment at the Unz Review underlines why I no longer talk to either the media or the new media, and why I ignore the vast majority of questions directed at me:

After disagreeing on a couple of points in this article (civilly, of course) on social media and having a conversation with one of Philip’s connections, who was in the process of providing some data to change my mind, Philip sadly decided to block me. I like a lot of what Philip writes, and it is indeed unfortunate that we can’t even have a civil debate without a couple of people jumping in with foolish personal attacks and then Philip, who is most times a reasonable man, deciding to block a longtime connection over a political disagreement, especially when that person was in the process of asking questions and receiving answers. A sad sign of our times.

But when did Philip ever declare that he was seeking a civil debate, let alone one with the commenter? At some point in recent years, people began to mistake accessibility for accountability, and assume that because a writer permitted comments on his work, he was seeking constructive criticism of it. Rest assured, this is almost never true. As a general rule, one very good way to ensure that your email address joins the spam file is to respond to any answer you receive with an immediate follow-up question.

I now attempt to avoid stating anything in public that I do not feel able to prove to the satisfaction of a dubious neutral. Because everything that I say and write is subject to relentless examination and highly-critical analysis, I try to avoid expressing an opinion on anything I cannot conclusively substantiate. The problem is not so much with the analyses themselves, but the way that, no matter how flawed they may be, they are inevitably used as the bases for attempted deplatformings, discreditings, disqualifyings, and even disemployment on the part of anklebiters on the Right and ideological enemies on the Left.

So, with a very small number of exceptions that mostly involve Castalia House authors and Unauthorized creators, I no longer talk to the media or the new media, I no longer talk publicly about our intentions, and I no longer tell anyone what is happening on the legal front until it becomes part of the public record. I previously tried to distinguish between a) talking about myself and b) talking about some organization or project with which I am involved, but in addition to leading to ridiculous accusations of inconsistency, I saw people trying to use (b) as a substitute for (a).

So, don't bother asking if I will talk to X or get Y on Unauthorized or publish Z with Castalia. The answer is always and inevitably NO. It's mildly amusing to see how stroppy some journalists and YouTubers now get when I tell them no, I will not talk to them about anything, now or in the future. That's the advantage of building our own platforms. We simply don't need anyone else's anymore.

Inquisition 2024

Don Jr., yes. Ivanka, absolutely, unquestionably no.

In a SurveyMonkey poll for Axios, Republican voters chose children of President Trump — Don Jr. and Ivanka — as two of the top four picks for president in four years.

Why it matters: An early poll like this is largely a measure of name ID. But it's also a vivid illustration of just how strong Trump's brand is with the GOP.

Ivanka and Don Jr. find themselves near the top of a long list of politicians who have held elected office, many of them vocal supporters of the president.

The big picture: Don Jr. has emerged as one of the most prominent defenders of his dad, frequently going after the left on Twitter, where he has 4.2 million followers, and serving as a popular warm-up act for presidential rallies. His book — "Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us," released in November — reached No. 1 on the N.Y. Times nonfiction bestseller list. In October, at a rally in San Antonio for president Trump's re-election, the crowd chanted "2024!" as Don Jr. spoke.

Before we get too excited about the god-emperor-in-waiting, let's focus on seeing the god-emperor himself reelected in 2020. Those who weirdly - and suspiciously - have questioned whether I have lost faith in President Trump simply because I am capable of pointing out the entirely obvious in the aftermath of the supposed Soleimani assassination are simply not paying attention to my comments on it. I will do a Darkstream on the subject tonight after the Vikings game.

I don't know what is actually going on. Nor does anyone else, however much they might like to pretend that they do. But I would still rather have the god-emperor in the White House right now than any U.S. politician or world leader not named Duterte. Then again, the thought of what Duterte could do with the U.S. military at his disposal is terrifying.

On the one hand, the opioid crisis would definitely be over and the Devil Mouse would no longer exist. On the other, we might find ourselves maintaining a military occupation of California while caught up in a massive war with the Elder Ones in Antarctica.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson made what should be an obvious point and needs to be addressed by every current and would-be U.S. leader:

Before we enter into a single new war, there’s a criterion that ought to be met. Our leaders should explain to us how that conflict will make the United States richer and more secure. There are an awful lot of bad people in this world. We can’t kill them all. It’s not our job. Instead, our government exists to defend and promote the interests of American citizens. Period. That’s why we have a government. So, how has the killing of Soleimani done that? Maybe. No one in Washington has explained how.