The Ultimate Comeback

Every man over the age of 40 is going to be backing the Colts for the rest of this season:

Stuck at EverBank Stadium, and waiting for a new charter home with mechanical issues sending the team plane in for repairs, Colts coach Shane Steichen and GM Chris Ballard were staring down a quarterback situation in apparent disrepair.

Starter Daniel Jones, already playing through a fractured fibula, had sustained a season-ending torn Achilles hours earlier, in what became a blowout loss to the Jaguars. Then, in the locker room postgame, rookie sixth-rounder Riley Leonard—who’d put together an admirable, hope-provoking three quarters—revealed to coaches the pain he felt in a knee that he tweaked during the second half.

Former first-rounder Anthony Richardson, who underwent orbital surgery in late October after a freak accident with a resistance band, was already shelved with no timetable for return. Veteran Brett Rypien was stashed on the practice squad. The Colts, quite simply, were long on problems and short on answers at the game’s most important position.

“What about Rivers?” Steichen asked, in the bowels of the stadium.

Ballard, taken aback, responded, “Would he do it?”

And thus began a wild 48 hours that brought eight-time Pro Bowl quarterback Philip Rivers, a veteran of 17 NFL seasons, back to pro football after a five-year retirement.

Success, needless to say, is unlikely. Joe Flacco may have come off his couch and played quite credibly to hold down the fort for Joe Burrows, but he’d only been out for a few months. Rivers has been retired for FIVE YEARS.

That being said, the fact that he’s been coaching and working out with pre-draft QBs does mean that he’s been mentally engaged with the game and knows he can still throw it. As for the rest, well, let’s hope we get to see for ourselves.

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Sigma Game Problems

The reason there isn’t any post up at Sigma Game yet today is that every time I try to post, I’m running into “network issues” and told “try again in a bit”.

Since the site is still up and I was able to post on a different site from the same account, I don’t think there are shenanigans at work here, and it may well be just “network issues” but there are no signs of a general outage so we’ll have to see how it all plays out. In the meantime, stay tuned.

UPDATE: We’re good. No shenanigans. The new post is up.

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SJW Travel Ban

Also, if you’re insufficiently enthusiastic about the response to the unprovoked and totally unexpected October 7th terrorist attacks, you might want to reconsider your travel plans to the USA:

The Trump administration is set to require foreign tourists to hand over the past five years of their social media history in order to enter the United States. The drastic move was the latest attempt by President Donald Trump to scrutinize those entering the country, after an immigration freeze from 19 countries was announced last week.

The ‘mandatory’ notice was published by Customs and Border Protection on Tuesday in the Federal Register.

Social media data would be required for any people entering the United States, including countries like the United Kingdom and Germany who don’t mandate visas for travel.

It follows a June announcement by the State Department that ordered travelers to make their social media profiles public.

People entering the US will also be asked to provide email addresses, phone numbers and information on their family members in order to achieve safe passage.

First, it will certainly tend to cut down on immigration, particularly immigration from the sort of people employed by NGOs. Second, what a boon for alternative social media platforms that are not accessible by the various government authorities.

As much as most of us enjoy it, the ease and affordability of global travel has turned out to be one of the greatest banes of the modern age. Imagine how awful it would have been if the Visigoths could have simply flown to Rome and that’s essentially the situation we’ve been living in since the 1970s.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services said officers will now consider whether an applicant for benefits, such as residency, work and visa applications, ‘endorsed, promoted, supported, or otherwise espoused’ anti-American, terrorist or antisemitic views.

Two observations. First, I find it all-too-typical that people who don’t hesitate to identify “anti-semitism” somehow find it impossible to understand what “anti-American” is or identify anything as being “anti-American”. And second, the fact that “antisemitic views” are on that list is a clear indication that this is a Clown World measure and not the America First one it appears to be.

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Who Could it Be Now?

From CDAN:

This podcaster thought the overseas money would last forever. It hasn’t and he can’t find any new sources of big income. He is drowning in debt and took a shot at the A list female podcaster hoping she would take the bait so he could get some clicks. That didn’t work. He is crashing out and desperate.

I honestly have no idea. Nor do I care. But it would appear that the money is drying up for the manufactured successes. As Warren Buffet used to say, it’s only when the tide goes out that we can see who was naked all along.

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A Gatekeeper’s Manifesto

James Lindsay is one of the Fake Right Gatekeepers’ lesser lights, with whom most of you are blessedly unfamiliar. But he’s gone all in on the nonsensical concept of the “Woke Right” which is the way Conservative Inc. describes those on the Right who believe that winning is more important than losing gracefully by refusing to make use of the weapons utilized by the enemy.

You see, that’s why the people conquered by the British Empire were the real winners of the Colonial Era, because their noble decision to eschew the use of the Gatling Gun ensured that while they were defeated, occupied, and oppressed for more than a century, they maintained the moral high ground throughout.

In any event, he has written what purports to be a manifesto, and William Briggs, to his very great credit, has spared the rest of us the painful task of slogging through it ourselves.

When I first heard the term ‘woke right’, championed by Lindsay, I thought it a wonderful description of those normally said to be “of the left”, but who had embraced an element or two of Reality: a modern version of ‘neo-con’ without the overseas passions. Turns out Lindsay meant it as one who is mostly “of the right” and who accepts the Reality that it is sometimes acceptable to base decisions on someone’s race.

He thinks that since, for instance, the woke promoted (with a vengeance) blacks because they were black, regardless of ability, any and all race-based decisions are wrong. If a white (and only a white) makes a decision in favor of his own race, he is ‘woke right’. Lindsay never argues why. He assumes his conclusions are obvious.

The same lack of argument is found throughout his Manifesto (grandiose word!). Science, the Good, truth, individualism, on and on, all marched out to agree with Lindsay. But he simply cannot be bothered to say what he means by any of these words. Nor can he be, as we’ll see, consistent.

He has a go at defining Modernity, that ideal state of the world he would see preserved:

“Modernity” is the name for the profound cultural transformation which saw the rise of representative democracy, the age of science, the supersedence of reason over superstition, and the establishment of individual liberties to live according to one’s own values.

He sums up his own argument with this, what he must have thought was brilliant, bullet point: “Most people support Modernity and wish its anti-modern enemies would shut up.”

What if my own values are contrary to and would do violence to Lindsay’s? Perhaps he’d say we’d vote to decide whose views will be imposed. What if my side wins? Is the outcome Reason? And is Lindsay’s losing side thus proven superstition? Is this outcome the Good?

Nearest he comes to defining the Good is this:

An earnest appreciation that the Good is best achieved through a balance between human cooperation and competition brokered and mediated through the interplay of institutions that work on behalf of public and private interests.

This is as close to a non-definition as you can get…

It’s becoming ever more clear where the lines are now drawn. Not between Left and Right, or Conservative and Liberal, but between Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment. There is no fundamental difference between the godless communist Left-Liberal and the Churchian zionist Right-Conservative, as they accept fundamentally the same precepts and principles and differ only in how those precepts and principles are best applied.

And while they will obviously attempt to portray us as Pre-Enlightenment skeptics, that portrayal is outdated and and fundamentally false. The Pre-Enlightenment skeptics were correct, for the most part, but they held their beliefs on the basis of logic and reason. They did not have the benefit that we do of seeing how these untested theories actually played out over time. We Post-Enlightenment rejecters hold our beliefs on the basis of logic, reason, and undeniable, irrefutable evidence.

The principles of the Enlightenment were appealing back in the day. They promised a better world, which, for a time, they even appeared to deliver.

But now we know better. We now know where “representative democracy” leads: to something that is neither representative nor democracy. We now know where “freedom of speech” leads: to deplatformings, demonetizations, and prison. We now know where “free trade” leads: to the destruction of the industrial base, widespread unemployment, and lower wages. We now know where “the free movement of peoples” leads: mass migration, high crime, and the devastation of the social fabric.

Their very victory has doomed them. The societies in which their principles persist are dying, and the rest of the world no longer even pretends to believe in them.

History is not on their side. To the contrary: history condemns them!

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Hit Piece or PR?

The latest Swiss media hit piece on me is out, and while it’s definitely slanted in exactly the way you’d expect, it’s considerably more balanced than the previous one. Which is nice, for a change.

The Wall Street Journal once called Vox Day “the most despised man in science fiction”. Academics describe him as a “white supremacist”. He rejects this label and sees himself as a Christian nationalist.

“If you want to criticise me on something, then what you should criticise me on is I reject the Enlightenment,” Day says. Two hundred years ago, the Enlightenment sounded good, he says. “We didn’t know where free trade, democracy and so on would get us.” Today, the “collective West” is on the brink of the abyss, he says, adding that this is why the rest of the world rejects the values of the Enlightenment: because they want to “survive” and “thrive”.

We meet Day in an unfinished residential building in an industrial park in the village of Cressier, canton Fribourg. In the half-empty flat, Day has set up a gym and machinery for his leather-binding business. The reason Swissinfo is interested in Day is the reach of his influence. According to Similarweb, his blog gets over half a million hits per month – mainly in the US, the UK, Australia and Hong Kong.

Day uses harsh, discriminatory language. He recently titled an article “Ben Shapiro Is Cancer” about the right-wing Jewish US publicist – because of his pro-Israel stance…

A recurring theme on his blog is resistance to “clown world” – a conspiracy theory about satanic forces that Russia and China are fighting against.

Day has most of his followers on Gab.com. Some 35,000 people follow him on this platform, where only registered users can read his posts. Here he expresses himself even more bluntly. When a user accused him in spring 2024 of avoiding certain words in a post about “clown world”, Day replied: “I’m not avoiding any words, you retard. The Jews with whom you’re obsessed are the tools of the global satanists of Clown World, who themselves are just wicked servants of the true inhuman evils.”

Here he is giving voice to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Day sits back quietly while this comment is read to him. Then he says: “If you’re a Christian, you believe in the supernatural.” People like “George Soros or Hillary Clinton” are themselves just tools, he says.

Day denies that the description of “clown world” draws on the anti-Semitic “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. “It has nothing to do with the protocols. It has to do with the bit in the Bible where Satan offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world.” Since Jesus did not deny Satan this power, Satan rules the world, he says.

It’s always interesting to see how the various journalists slant their pieces. For example, I don’t call Ben Shapiro cancer because he is pro-Israel, but because he openly calls for the US military invasion of Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Pakistan in order to establish an empire in the Middle East, a policy which is obviously not in the American national interest or the interests of the people of those nations. And, of course, no link is provided because doing so would reveal that the journalist has misrepresented an explicit observation with his own implicit assumption. But it is fantastic that he describes Shapiro as a “publicist”; he certainly got that one right even if I prefer the term “manufactured shill”.

He also left out the reason that I’m much more comfortable with black culture than most people in Switzerland: I’m a former NCAA D1 sprinter and may well be the only individual in the entire country who has ever been to a black fraternity party. I didn’t learn the Electric Slide at Delta Upsilon…

And speaking of implicit assumptions, it is downright damning that the journalist would assume openly opposing the literal rule of Satan is reasonably characterized as “anti-semitism”. He actually describes the idea that there are “wicked servants of the true inhuman evils” as “anti-semitic”. That’s a real “wait, did he really just write that” moment that says even more about his beliefs than it does about mine. Now, my position is obviously nonsensical from the atheist perspective, but the particular way he attempted to make sense of it is extremely telling.

It’s also telling that my position on the war in Ukraine is entirely absent in this piece despite our discussion of it. Suddenly the Swiss media doesn’t want to talk about that, of course. I can only assume that in the next one, they won’t want to talk about how I was opposing the rule of satanic globalists before it was considered the right and proper thing to do.

The use of SimilarWeb to estimate the traffic was also interesting, since I gave him the actual numbers for the various sites. The SimilarWeb estimate isn’t even close to accurate; Sigma Game alone gets nearly that many views.

But whatever. I think it’s fascinating to read this little hit piece in the light of the recently published National Security Strategy, because it’s a confirmation of the way in which the globalists are reeling in disarray and struggling to accept the undeniable reality that the pendulum is no longer swinging in their favor and that the world has collectively rejected their vision for the future.

I did take the trouble to email the journalist one correction. It’s simply not true that the Puppies only “attempted to hijack the Hugo Award”. We absolutely nuked that thing, so much so that 11 votes is now enough to garner a Hugo nomination. That’s not merely a crater, that’s a deep and massive one.

The one thing that was a little odd is that for all the talk about writing and publishing and science fiction, the article doesn’t mention a single one of my 17 books. This is especially strange in light of the fact that I had just published a new literary anthology prior to the interview that has been very well received.

Anyhow, I tend to doubt the idea that my most lasting and memorable contribution to the knowledge of Man will be the construction of the socio-sexual hierarchy. I tend to think these three demolitions of centuries-old Enlightenment “truths” will take precedence in the long run:

  • The labor mobility criticism of free trade
  • The mathematical impossibility of the theory of evolution by natural selection
  • The proof that religion is not the cause of war

Of course, in the event I happen to have correctly identified the precise year of the dissolution of the USA nearly 30 years prior, or even to have nailed it to within three years on either side, that will almost certainly prove to be the primary item of historical interest, no matter what else I manage to accomplish in the 40 or so years that remain to me.

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Against Civilizational Erasure

Last night, I went over the entire National Security Strategy document (PDF) on the Darkstream. It’s much, much better than we had any right to expect, given the incoherent rantings being periodically emitted by the Short Fat Trump, so much so that it tends to raise real questions about who is actually in charge of the things that matter. Both the previously-quoted section on the end of the migration era and the need for military reindustrialization read as if the author is familiar with this site, and the section on Europe is clearly focused on bringing about the end of the globalist elite’s occupation of the European nations and eliminating the EU’s current path toward “civilizational erasure”.

Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP—down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today—partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation…

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.

Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory.

This section has panicked the EU elite, and it absolutely should, because it makes it clear that both of the great nationalist powers, Russia and China, are now actively preferred to the globalist “anti-democratic elite” that is currently pushing for a military war with the former and an economic war with the latter, neither of which the EU could win even with the US assistance that is clearly going to be denied going forward.

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KOC Looks Wiser Today

ITEM: 16 23 163 69.6 7.1 3 0 21 4 129.2

ITEM: Daniel Jones fell to the turf in Jacksonville with an apparent Achilles tendon tear in his right leg. The Colts are in a mess because sometime on Monday an MRI is expected to confirm Jones suffered the season-ending injury and needs surgery.

The Vikings are 5-8. The Colts are 8-5. JJ McCarthy will likely be available for the last four games of the season. Daniel Jones will not be. It’s now possible, if not necessarily likely, that the Vikings will finish with a better record than the Colts.

Those of us who have been metaphorically murdering Kwesi and openly wondering if KOC had completely lost both his quarterback-whispering abilities and his marbles must admit that despite all of the travails of this season, their joint decision to roll with Nine instead of Darnold, Jones, and Rodgers might not have been quite as completely insane as it looked last week.

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The National Security Strategy

It’s far from ideal, but it is a massive improvement upon the destructive path of the entire post-WWII period. (PDF document)

First, a long-overdue condemnation of the foreign-infested elite’s strategy.

American strategies since the end of the Cold War have fallen short—they have been laundry lists of wishes or desired end states; have not clearly defined what we want but instead stated vague platitudes; and have often misjudged what we should want.

After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.

Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.

They overestimated America’s ability to fund, simultaneously, a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state alongside a massive military, diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign aid complex. They placed hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called “free trade” that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend. They allowed allies and partners to offload the cost of their defense onto the American people, and sometimes to suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own. And they lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty. In sum, not only did our elites pursue a fundamentally undesirable and impossible goal, in doing so they undermined the very means necessary to achieve that goal: the character of our nation upon which its power, wealth, and decency were built.

Second, the very first priority listed is to shut down the societally destructive policy of permitting mass immigration. While it falls short of the much-needed policy of mass remigration, it’s clearly pointing in that direction.

The Era of Mass Migration Is Over – Who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation. Any country that considers itself sovereign has the right and duty to define its future. Throughout history, sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration and granted citizenship only rarely to foreigners, who also had to meet demanding criteria. The West’s experience over the past decades vindicates this enduring wisdom. In countries throughout the world, mass migration has strained domestic resources, increased violence and other crime, weakened social cohesion, distorted labor markets, and undermined national security. The era of mass migration must end. Border security is the primary element of national security. We must protect our country from invasion, not just from unchecked migration but from cross-border threats such as terrorism, drugs, espionage, and human trafficking. A border controlled by the will of the American people as implemented by their government is fundamental to the survival of the United States as a sovereign republic.

And third, the administration still doesn’t comprehend the degree to which China’s military capabilities already dwarf those of the USA from the strategic perspective:

In the long term, maintaining American economic and technological preeminence is the surest way to deter and prevent a large-scale military conflict… We will build a military capable of denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain. But the American military cannot, and should not have to, do this alone.

Our allies must step up and spend—and more importantly do—much more for collective defense. America’s diplomatic efforts should focus on pressing our First Island Chain allies and partners to allow the U.S. military greater access to their ports and other facilities, to spend more on their own defense, and most importantly to invest in capabilities aimed at deterring aggression. This will interlink maritime security issues along the First Island Chain while reinforcing U.S. and allies’ capacity to deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible.

There is nothing to maintain. China’s shipbuilding and dronebuilding advantage already exceeds the historical US industrial advantage over Japan. Taiwan and the South China Sea are already gone. So plan accordingly, don’t strategerize about military fantasies.

One hopes this strategic approach will be rather more successful than its predecessor, which in 1992 asserted:

The United States had become the world’s sole remaining superpower following the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, and declared that its principal objective was to preserve that status.

I think we can certainly assess the so-called “Wolfowitz doctrine” as having been complete and comprehensive failure by that metric. Which, of course, what always happens when you let opportunistic tacticians make the strategy.

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Why War in Venezuela

This is a helpful explainer to those of us who are wondering why the USA is threatening the Maduro regime in Venezuela. It’s essentially a combination of a) oil, b) Monroe Doctrine, and c) fallout from US interference in Ukraine.

Venezuela implemented a bunch of utterly catastrophic and self destructive economic policies. Among these was the rational sounding policy of capturing Venezuela’s vast oil wealth which was going abroad, and applying it to the purposes of Venezuelan government.

This resulted in the US issuing a bunch of economic sanctions, similar to those applied to Russia, but vastly less extreme. The damage done by those sanctions was probably insignificant compared to the damage Venezuela did to itself.

The US government then attempted to color revolution Venezuela, but this failed dismally, because Venezuela was run by leftists who were veterans of color revolution, and knew their opponent’s playbook — had in fact been taught the playbook by their opponent’s NGOs.

The Venezuelan politicals took over management of the oil industry in Venezuela, which predictably collapsed. Like the rest of the private economy in Venezuela.

Venezuela then reached out to Russian oil companies, who set about restoring oil production. This was a somewhat Thermidorian policy, since the Russian oil companies understandably insisted on making a profit and refused to have the politicals interfering in management.

This, of course, was violation of the Monroe doctrine, which really pissed off America. Hence war threats from the Trump administration. Their idea of Thermidor was that Venezuela should let US oil companies do what the Russian oil companies are now doing.

Well, said Russia, if you can stick your oar into our boat, we are going to stick our oar into your boat. So Russia sent military advisers and military equipment to Venezuela, and its warships visited Venezuelan waters. Which is a really big violation of the Monroe doctrine, which pissed off America even more.

This is a substantial and significant step towards World War III

The obvious solution is to the US to concede to the Russian 2022 ultimatum “Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization” that was addressed to NATO.

America’s rejection of this ultimatum led to disastrous Ukraine war, and is now threatening to lead to a similarly disastrous Venezuelan war.

That makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, the new strategic document, as good as it is, appears to leave plenty of room for wars with Venezuela and Taiwan in it. I’ll address its more important elements in a post later today, and go over the whole document in tonight’s Darkstream.

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