Trump’s state visit to England

Ideas are more powerful than guns, and fashion is more powerful than ideas.

The main weapon and instrument of successful rulers is their role as the fount of all honors, mortal and divine. Because of the problems of scaling, their bureaucracy, rather than being the instrument of their rule, tends to become the main threat to their rule.

Trump’s visit to England is primarily a status parade.  Trump bestows status on the queen (which is useless, but required, because one should always give one’s host top status, even though it is only useful to bestow status on one’s host if the host is a man), and the Queen bestows status on him.

They also bestowed status on the other people assembled.  And guess who is not there?

Hollywood, the media, and for the most part, woke capital is not there.  Capital is there, but the media and such are mere onlookers  The Queen and Trump bestow status on the military and on merchants, but somehow merchants whose activities overlap with the priesthood generally seem to have been neglected.

Depressingly, the Queen’s speech was about universalism, framing World War II as a holy war to establish the rule by the “international community” over the entire world – and that this was a good thing intended to thereby end war forever.  Of course, in fact, World War II was so horribly bloody precisely because it was a holy war by universalists seeking to rule the world, and universalist rule has been terribly bad, destroying men’s families, ending science, suppressing the scientific method, and causing technological progress to stagnate. As promised universalism has so far avoided large scale horrifying wars, but war is a bursty phenomenon, and the recent period of relative peace has so far lasted no longer than previous periods of relative peace that follow a terrible war in which one hegemon gains overwhelming dominance. China now has radar coverage of the South China sea, and is building a fleet of artificial islands as unsinkable aircraft carriers – a strategy that suggests that they believe that aircraft carriers are eminently sinkable, that in a war between technologically advanced wealthy powers, each side will be able to deny the other side the air and the sea, a vision of conflict that if accurate makes it hard for one hegemon to dominate the entire world. We have already seen how Russian anti air capabilities limit US reach.

But then, to my considerable relief, she segued onto Anglosphere nationalism “Our strong cultural links” … “British descent“.

And then “Economic ties”, a hat tip to Trump boosting brexit with a promise of a US-UK trade deal. Trump nods.

And then a toast to Trump and the prosperity of the United States (not universal peace, nor universal prosperity). The start spangled banner plays. Trump and his wife stand with their hands over their hearts. Behind the queen stands a British warrior, a member of the Coldstream Guards, costumed in seventeenth century dress uniform. The Coldstream guards were General Monck’s Praetorians when he secured parliament and ensured the restoration of Charles the second, a coup well dressed in the costume of legality and constitutionality, steel on the inside, legality on the outside.

The guards are recruited from those parts of England and Scotland where General Monck recruited his praetorians, so they tend to have family ties to each other and to ancestors who were part of the Coldstream guards.

The guards behind Trump, the Queen, and Melanie salute the playing of the star spangled banner.

Hollywood and the media will call this all silly low status obsolete rigmarole, but it is hard to say “low status” to someone with warriors behind him and powerful and wealthy men assembled before him.

Then Trump speaks, remembering World War II. Trump, however, frames world war two as as a war for our civilization, where “our” is, in context the Anglosphere, and tells us that the British fought to hold their destiny in their own hands, another nod to brexit. Then he gives a nod to universalism – liberty in all lands – which looks remarkably like all lands having the culture of Harvard imposed upon them. Then it is back to the Anglosphere winning World War II for the Anglosphere. “Shared Victory”.

And then, after piously giving the nod to universalism he starts redefining universalism to not be universalism, much as the progressives have redefined Christianity to be exemplified by the right of women to freedom from husbands, moment to moment consent to marriage, unilateral abortion on demand to birth and immediately afterwards without the consent of their husbands, and the right of men to have gay sex in a great big pile.

This is the reverse of Pope Francis defending gay priests having gay sex in a great big pile by pointing out that they were all consenting adults, and look, Global Warming.

Nah, supposedly this great crusade was not about the international community making everyone into clones of Harvard. It was supposedly about “Freedom, Sovereignty, self determination, the rule of law, and reverence for the rights given to us by Almighty God”. (Which is pretty much the opposite of what the great crusade accomplished). So, if brexit fails to go through, you are falling short of the noble goals of this great crusade. And just in case you failed to notice, he said the bad word “crusade” again – and then that other bad word “God” – the ultimate patriarchal alpha male that stands behind the authority of each patriarch when he summons his family and guests to eat and says grace, the patriarchal alpha male that stands behind the ruler making his people one nation under God.

And then another bad word “patriotism”: “The patriotism that beats proudly in every British heart”. Yet another nod to brexit. So if you are against brexit, you are against God, country, and the goals of the great crusade, not to mention against a man who has a warrior standing behind him, a warrior of a group of warriors who put the current royal line back on the throne.

And then a toast to the Queen. Being an alpha male, he gives her a little pat, which she much enjoys.

The polls were wrong about the brexit referendum, indicating that our priestly elite had successfully made support for brexit wicked and low status.  Trump proceeds to make it virtuous and high status.

67 Responses to “Trump’s state visit to England”

  1. Visit here says:

    discuss

    Trump

  2. […] on Trump’s visit to England and making Brexit high status. Of course, a bioleninist parade breaks out in response. Also, Jim on […]

  3. c matt says:

    Trump and his wife stand with their hands over their hearts.

    A very common mistake – that is for the pledge of allegiance, not the national anthem.

    • John Sullivan says:

      In the future when protocol is taken more seripusly, you’ll still be an anklebiter, because when His Majesty does it, and it isn’t blatantly against the Bible, it becomes fashionable.

  4. Booker says:

    More analysis of entertainment media I see.

    When the show becomes reality you know you’ve lost capacity.

    Snap back to reality immigration numbers are even higher than expected.
    Drudge reports on 1,000,000 already this year. Already.

    Fatboy Trump is now wavering on tariffs on Mexico, his plot to stop border crossers.

    But it’s all talking and balking with Fatboy Trump.

    Reality TV star Trump makes the show reality.

    Not even reactionaries are immune?

    No it’s worse – reactionaries are pushing the show being reality!

  5. GermanyUberAlles says:

    Anglos are a disease destroying the western white world. Jim you live in Texas don’t you? What is a brit doing in Texas if you care about England so much? Fuck the anglosphere.

    • trollipop says:

      Sure thing, (((GUA))).

    • jim says:

      The Anglosphere created the industrial revolution, science, and technology. It conquered the world, and though now decadent, rules the world – badly. But it rules because their ancestors created our civilization.

      • Oscar C. says:

        I agree, the UK is probably the most successful country in world history, but the eternal anglo meme also contains a great deal of truth.

        It spawned the Puritans you so much despise after all.

        And when it felt compelled to crush the “fellow white” Boers, it surely did. Not to mention the absurdity of both world wars.

        Profit über alles.

        • jim says:

          Nuts

          The East India Company worked great when operated for profit. Led to the deaths of vast numbers of good men when operated for holiness.

          Our never ending wars are done for holiness, not for profit. If Venezuela and Saudi Arabia were governed by Texaco, then you could blame capitalism, while overlooking the fact that if governed by Texaco for profit, as Dubai is governed for profit, they would peaceful, prosperous and well ordered, as Dubai is peaceful, prosperous and well ordered.

  6. Charles Neumann says:

    For a laugh, see Obama’s speech with the queen in 2011, where the end of the speech is cut off by the band. Probably because of the stupid pauses he takes everywhere in his speech.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNRXGRFJdDY

  7. ERTZ says:

    > We have severe dysgenesis, and it is most severe among the upper class,

    If you look closely, you see that the birth rate is U-shaped: Lower classes reproduce alright, as do the upper classes.
    For example here in Germany, the average DAX(our primary stock index of big industrial companies) company board member has on average more than four children.
    Most of our upper class lives secretive and withdrawn, but they are generally doing well.
    Even richer middle-class men, who more often remarry (serial polygamy) have offspring numbers above the replacement rate.

    >The problem is that if a woman perceives herself as upper class, because she has a
    >Harvard degree and a well paying job, she will perceive most men as lower status than
    >her self, and will therefore likely wind up a cat lady.
    Real upper class women are so rare in absolute numbers that, Harvard or not, most men ARE lower status than them. A fancy degree is worth nothing compared to dozens or hundreds of millions in wealth.
    At least a few rich people I know deal with the issue by designing their will/inheritance/wealth transfer so that daughters will only get much money of they marry and have kids. Upper class parents tend to know about sexual dynamics, and create eugenic incentives right from the start.
    Because of genetic lottery effects, it’s necessary to have ideally a lot of children and grandchildren anyway,
    because many of them will turn out to be not as competent as the wealth creating generation. Even Benjamin Franklin’s father had to produce 17 children to get one Benjamin Franklin.

    The father of Warren Buffet’s 1st wife, in the 1940s (!), insisted that Buffett completed an IQ test, before he agreed to give his daughter to him. Many of the upper class were, even back then, acutely aware of and executing eugenics, knowing the true source of their power and status.

    High-IQ/capability parents do not produce only kids that are top quality as well, even though almost all such high-IQ people have high-IQ ancestors. There are always a lot of duds, because the gene lottery is still in effect.
    Most of the upper class knows about the importance of cognitive ability to continue their family’s success and wealth, so they hedge the risk by drawing more straws, more children, and by making sure they marry and reproduce well.

    • >For example here in Germany, the average DAX(our primary stock index of big industrial companies) company board member has on average more than four children.

      That sounds highly interesting. Source it, please, I can read German.

      But you are missing a point. Economic status, economic class in $current_year matters less than social status, social class. That is, those guys are not powerful. Someone is forcing them to go woke and support Pride. Those someone are the high status, powerful folks.

      Yet, the board members have high IQ, and I very much like the idea of high IQ people having 4+ kids.

      • Oog en Hand says:

        “Source it, please, I can read German.”

        Can you read Dutch? King Willem-Alexander has three daughters. His mother, Beatrix, had three sons. His oldest, Amalia, is a smart, cunning b*tch. She knows Greek, Latin, and some Chinese.

    • Anonymous 2 says:

      “Most of the upper class knows about the importance of cognitive ability to continue their family’s success and wealth, so they hedge the risk by drawing more straws, more children, and by making sure they marry and reproduce well.”

      Depends on the inheritance system. Dilute the family fortune too quickly and you end up with a lot of middle class offspring or worse.

      An American example, the Astor family: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2314414/Inside-crumbling-mansion-broke-heirs-super-rich-Astor-family-continue-live-near-squalor.html

    • Frederick Algernon says:

      Are you trying to slide thread? This isn’t /pol/ jackass.

  8. Here’s some more evidence that “progress is stagnating”: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/26/world-first-fruit-picking-robot-set-to-work-artificial-intelligence-farming

    I can find 20 links like that per day. Without even looking for them.

    I cannot fathom what kind of sheltered life you must lead to think some of tripe you think.

    • jim says:

      Robots have been expected to work on such tasks all my life. And I bet global warming catastrophe and peak oil has been imminent all your life.

      When a robot mail truck delivers my mail, then I will pay attention. When there is a sweater folding robot where the staff at the shop toss clothes that have been tried on into the hopper, and they come out all neat, then I will pay attention.

      Disinclined to read your links, for I have seen similar stuff a long time ago.

      • Alrenous says:

        Robots are always about to prove that proggie/secular dogma on consciousness is true. Just like the climate is always about to prove that the proggie apocalypse is literal.

      • Frederick Algernon says:

        I shared his little blog with some of the philosophy department. We all had a good laugh. Babby’s first foray into Nietzsche. He’s just another “muh silicon valley will save us” type of guy. One of those avid fans of the history channel “future tech” fellas.

        You know.

        A dipshit.

      • Heh. E.g. “Five Years Later, Where are the Amazon Delivery Drones?” https://insights.dice.com/2018/12/05/where-amazon-delivery-drones/ this stuff is somehow always the perfect kind of vaporware that is about to be put into production real soon now.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      I will believe robotics and programming are advancing when we have self driving trains. It is a much simpler task then fruit picking, doesn’t require the construction of a robot body and is very easy to see if it works.

      • James says:

        It requires beating down a union, which is a much harder problem than any technical obstacle they might come up against.

  9. ERTZ says:

    >Selfishness and callousness are not unique to the socially able.
    No. But they have the greatest effects in that group.
    Ruthless violence and egoism coupled with low cognitive ability should end in prison, or death.
    But coupled with high cognitive ability (and thus, among other things, the competent ability to pretend to be or intend the exact opposite) it should lead to highest rewards.

    One of the very last things I am and feel to be right is a Marxist;
    but there are indeed classes, and there are roughly three of them.
    Marxists attributed class membership from capital ownership, but this is clearly wrong.
    There are social classes, and there is a class war, but classes are not about anything else but cognitive ability (incl. emotional traits like ambition, self control, conscientiousness etc.).
    This is a taboo, especially in and for the lower and middle class – they are not upper class because they are emotional and cognitive inferior.
    And it gets worse.
    We have really free mate selection, and choice among millions, even billions of mates, only for a very short time in history, perhaps measured only in decades.
    We can now choose from millions of mates even from electronic databases, are able to screen huge numbers of people for traits with the push of a button.
    And we can compare and travel to mates from all over the world.
    Sexual selection’s reach has exploded exponentially, and only since a few decades, at most.
    What will this lead to?
    I think that, much more so than in the past, the upper class and the lower class will diverge: All the good genes for beauty, health, strength, emotional stability and strength, and cognitive ability, even longevity, will trickle upwards into the upper class, and the bad genes for ugliness, sickliness, weakness, impulsiveness, stupidity, will trickle down into the lower class.
    After some generations, humanity may produce new races or even species, homo superior from the upper class, and homo inferior from the lower class – half gods with keen intellect, perfect health and beauty, and on the other side half-apes with the IQ of today’s sub-Saharan Africa, ugly, sickly, weak and without self-control.
    What would prevent this development, but government-enforced limits on sexual selection/mate selection?

    • jim says:

      Not seeing it. We have severe dysgenesis, and it is most severe among the upper class, because the daughters of the upper class go to universities where they turn into whores, and because they are taught to think that they are way better than any of the men who might want to marry them. The problem is that if a woman perceives herself as upper class, because she has a Harvard degree and a well paying job, she will perceive most men as lower status than her self, and will therefore likely wind up a cat lady.

      • The Cominator says:

        Female preferences may be somewhat eugenic for a tribe of amazonian savages (and is probably still genuinely eugenic for traits like height) but for higher races its for the most part severely dysgenic and its especially horrible when you artificially raise female status and depress male status which creates the defect-defect equilibrium we are in now.

        • James says:

          I’m not so sure about women not being good at choosing men — women seem to appreciate wit, ambition, capability, success in one’s environment, status, earning potential, good looks, sociability, and so on. Those are all positive things.

          It’s just that in our current environment, men who are high-earning are forced to behave in low-status ways due to political correctness and are portrayed as low-status by many commonly consumed forms of media.

          For women who aren’t high value enough to attract the few men who have reached a level of wealth to have given them ‘fuck you’ money, which is the majority of reasonably attractive women, they have to choose between the low-status, high-income guy (the nerd)

          If a woman has to choose between a mate who has money or status, she’ll usually fuck the high-status, low-money guy and get the low-status, high-money guy to pay for her babies one way or another. This isn’t bad decision-making on her part; if she fucks the nerd and has his babies, her offspring going to get bullied and cucked the same way he would naturally get bullied and cucked were she not so merciful to him.

          The correct thing to do for her is to pick the man who is high status enough to, for whatever reason, get away with bullying the nerd. That said, women are animals, as are men, and as such don’t mind fucking around and having kids with multiple men — both the bully and the nerd — in order to avoid putting all her paternal investment eggs in one basket. But the bully will definitely have his day with her.

          Being in this double-bind, women might choose men who aren’t you, or who aren’t good for society, but that doesn’t mean they’re making bad choices from a selfish gene perspective.

    • larry says:

      why did HG Wells not expect differential reproduction and social mobility to improve the world in 1895?

  10. glosoli says:

    [*censored*]

    • jim says:

      I am tired of your pretense at Christianity, and have debated religion enough with you. Censored for heresy, impiety, apostacy, and being boring.

      I will debate your complaint about Trump’s attribution of rights to God if you repost again without the heresy, impiety, and apostacy. But I am not going debate religion any further with a stubborn gnostic.

  11. ERTZ says:

    “As promised universalism has so far avoided large scale horrifying wars”

    I may be wrong, but I don’t think this to be true.
    I consider another reason for the absence of war between mayor countries in the last 70 years:

    Atomic weapons.
    What is so different about them? That they can kill millions and whole cities?
    No.
    The upper class had never reservations about destroying cities and letting millions die, if it seemed profitable.

    Nukes have a new quality:
    1.
    The upper class, incl. their own families, cannot hide safely far behind front lines anymore. Nukes, their direct effect, or radioactive fallout, can reach them, too.
    The upper class, for the first time in history, cannot start a war and stay personally safe and secure.

    2.
    History shows the upper class does not care much about wasting millions of lives in wars. Those people will grow back quickly.
    But the upper class cares about their personal wealth and power;
    nukes can destroy vast agricultural and industrial areas in a single moment;
    even worse, radioactive contamination can make those areas and lands uninhabitable and worthless for centuries.

    Those two aspects: Personal security and security of their own wealth, are in my opinion the primary cause we have had no wars between nuclear powers for almost 3/4 of a century. This may stay so for a long time, because the threat of a single nuke slipping through defenses can prove devastating to the upper class.

    Further evidence is that all wars we had were waged against countries without nukes, incl. proxy wars, thereby only posing the very limited risk of losing a war, but never of existential risk to the upper class.

    I am not particularly knowledgeable about history, but I have begun to analyze what I see under a simple hypothesis: Things happen or not, are or are not, because it serves the interests of the upper class, or not. You may call that simplistic, but I found it an extraordinarily fruitful approach for trying to understand – and predicting – events, be it in military affairs, finance, economy, taxes, media, business, education, entertainment, laws, politics etc.
    I consider the upper class (at least the actively ruling members inside it) the only and actual driving force behind most events, much of it being conflicts between factions of the upper class, intra-and internationally. From what I understand, I found only the upper class actively starting and shaping most events, all other classes merely reacting on upper class stimuli.

    • Frederick Algernon says:

      The issue I take with your approach is not its simplicity, rather the Marxist echo. Selfishness and callousness are not unique to the socially able.

    • Steve Johnson says:

      Nukes have a new quality:
      1.
      The upper class, incl. their own families, cannot hide safely far behind front lines anymore.

      Marxist drivel.

      Look at the casualty rates in WWI as a quick example – the British upper class suffered proportionally many more deaths.

      • ERTZ says:

        British WW1 upper class had probably often more sons than one;
        splitting the inheritance among them might have been difficult or disadvantageous.
        They sure did not risk their only son to perish in war.
        Further, upper class customs in that time period were probably different from today’s:
        The current US military is mostly a lower class affair (pilots being an exception, and officers being middle class, for example). Social status from military duty was more important back then even for the upper class; today it’s unthinkable that Bill Gates and other billionaires would risk the precious life of their children for effectively worthless military-service prestige – with some exceptions if their kids were to be prepared for a political career perhaps, but even then it would be made certain they find themselves in positions that produce prestige, but no real risk of being shot at and hit.

        Military personnel today is basically human cattle, poor fools that are deemed so worthless that their lives can be wasted. Of course, especially in the US, this fact is guarded by lies, in that case a great pompous show of patriotism and honor and “Thank you for your service” – words, cheap words, but no sane middle class parents would throw away life and career of their kids by sending them to the military. Americans’ love for their military men is mostly a lie, everybody who is not broke or stupid is glad to be not have to become a soldier. Veterans receive mostly fake status, there is nothing much they can buy with it, financially or in terms of marrying up, as was indeed the case in Britain in the past.

      • Alrenous says:

        Losing sons is of almost no consequence. The fact the declarer of war themselves remained safe is of great consequence.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      “even worse, radioactive contamination can make those areas and lands uninhabitable and worthless for centuries.”

      They immediately rebuilt Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You get radioactive contamination from ground bursts (where the nuke goes of just above the ground to hit hard targets like command centers and silos) but those aren’t located near anything important.

  12. vxxc says:

    In sum good news.

  13. >Because of the problems of scaling

    This is why small states are better. Russia, China seems to have similar problems. Imperial Germany had, too. Small states, to the extent their non-independence allows them to, are actually governed by their elected politicians, for better or worse. Has its drawbacks too, if you are going in 180 degree different directions every 4 years you aren’t getting anywhere. But at least you know whom to blame.

    One day I was bored and looked up the size of government buildings of New Jersey and another US state, and yes exactly as I expected they were roughly the same size as that of say Austria. It seems government scales linearly with population size. Because every Western state is running the same software of government bloating itself, just on a differently sized meat hardware.

    For a Minister/Secretary of say Education to be actually able to run the education system, the bureaucracy should not be larger than what can be put into an average city block. That is roughly the max number of employees that can be controlled. Ideally much smaller of course but that seems to be the upper limit, as seems to be the size of it in the small states where the government actually governs the things the Blue Empire allows them to.

    • The Cominator says:

      Small city states and principalities are best for good governance (as Moldbug correctly pointed out) the problem is that they often have trouble surviving militarily and if they do tend to have to become de facto protectorates of larger states who will dictate much of their internal policy as well.

      • Starman says:

        Nuclear weapons solve that problem for small state survival

        • jim says:

          If you can survive obtaining nuclear weapons.

        • The Cominator says:

          Nobody wants small states to have nukes thus even if they survive getting them likely to be cutoff from trade.

          Israel got a pass because they neither confirmed or denied they have them and nobody except full retard Nazi larpers can really even pretend to like the Muslims they are directed at all that much.

          • Starman says:

            Working just fine for the Norks

          • Frederick Algernon says:

            Israel got their first nukes from the US supply of fissile material + white, Jewish South African expertise. They keep them because of the US. They maintain nuclear hegemony in MENA because the US subsidizes Egypt, SArabia, Iraq, and Turkey military (during the Cold War; ring defense, then 2 pillars, then Domino delay, etc.).

            As with all things concerning Israel after 1968, it is because of US.

            • jim says:

              Pretty sure that Israel does not have nukes, and is circulating rumors to the contrary.

              An actual nuke program is kind of visible, now that people know what to look for, even if you have a totally controlled state and society like North Korea, or a substantially controlled state and society like Iran.

              A nuke is complex, and is not going to work until you have tested a few. No plausible tests. If they have what they think are nukes, they are not going to work. I think it highly likely that our own nukes have stopped working for lack of testing. It is well past time to do a test.

              • Frederick Algernon says:

                This is an interesting angle, and my limited understanding of the tech leads me to agree. We actually discussed this (nukes) a while back, and you connected a few dots for me.

                For the uninitiated (and I am neither physicist nor weapons analyst), nuclear devices are not bombs. Rather, the Big Show is a runaway super criticality. An explosive device forces two components to merge, exponentially increasing the probability of a particle hitting a nucleus and realising many more particles, impacting more nuclei, initiating a chain reaction that has an enormous amount of energy.*

                This is important because, unlike conventional weaponry, nuclear devices are still somewhat mysterious because what actually goes on in the “heart of the storm” is unknown; no sensor can survive it. In addition, a nuclear device is in a constant state of decay. The parts have to be deconstructed, analysed, replaced, or rejuvenated at certain intervals, depending on the type of fissile material used, the structure of the device, and the amount.

                Nukes are a scientific “use it or juice it, or you lose it” catch 22. To maintain an arsenal, you have to continue building it. You must also regularly test its various components. It is a fantastic money/time sink that requires many levels of precision and expertise.

                So I don’t find it unbelievable that Israel is playing a propaganda shell game. I personally believe they had them; they were very much implicated when the ASA program came to light (2-5 tests IIRC).

                *There are various different types of nuclear device. The one I described is an implosion one.

              • Donald Quicke says:

                Little boy didn’t need to be tested. Vanunu is still persecuted by Israel for taking photographs of Dimona in 1985. The 1979 Vela incident was an Israeli test. The 1965 Apollo Affair was the Israeli theft of hundreds of pounds of HEU from the US.

                If true that our stockpile wouldn’t work, Russia and China would know the same, yet no tests.

                • Frederick Algernon says:

                  Also good points. Consider this, though: if there is uncertainty about efficacy, how would one go about rectifying it? If any of the Big Three tested, there would be massive backlash. If any smaller player tested… they wouldn’t. France? England? No chance. India or Pakistan? No chance, but because of the strategic implication.

                  It is a pitch black room with 8 people all claiming to have a gun. It is like some inverse MAD situation.

                  Further, they absolutely did test a device before the first drop. I know that they used two different devices on Nippon but, IIRC, the principles were similar enough in both designs to warrant it (from their perspective). These guys were not sure of anything. A crtain percentage of the Team (small but still extant) thought there was a chance that a super criticality had the potential to ignite the hydrogen in the atmosphere, causing a global chain reaction, and yet they did it. The Team had 3 total devices in 1945; they tested 1 and used 2. Shot their whole wad in a very short window.

                  So much mystery. It is fascinating and terrifying.

                • jim says:

                  Oddly, the Vela incident produced no detectable radioactivity.

              • – Schlomo.
                – Yes, Moshe?
                – Nukes are terribly expensive. I don’t want to spend that much shekels.
                – Me neither. But we need them.
                – For what? Whom you want to bomb?
                – Don’t be a meshuggah, Moshe. We just need them for deterrence.
                – So we need to convince our neighbors we have nukes, but it does not have to be true?
                – … yes. You are right, Moshe. That should cost much less shekels.

                (the recording ends with strange hand-rubbing noises)

                • Donald Quicke says:

                  Backlash away: I am now the sole possessor of reliable nukes. I think I’ll take half of your gdp in tribute and we’ll have a proper, invasive inspection regime to ensure compliance forever. Little boy (Hiroshima) was an HEU gun and absolutely untested before use; fat man (Nagasaki) was the same as Trinity.

                  Most early tests validated fundamental physics (all now done, and proliferated). Later tests validated design features. Reliable warheads achievable in perpetuity by copying existing designs. Big panic in US recently when unable to make secret aerogel FOGBANK to replace in existing stockpile, expensively fixed. Longer term rot of scientific and engineering talent a worse problem, but current warheads probably good for 20-30 years since designed to last.

                  Vela: usaf didn’t sample the right air mass immediately post, and iodine 131 consistent with small fission yield found in Western Australia.

              • Niels says:

                A new nuke has to be tested. If it works, you build a copy of it. Presumably, the copy will also work.

                If you have a proven design, I don’t see why retesting should be necessary. Sure, nothing lasts forever. Any nuke has a shelftime after which it will no longer be reliable. Test might be necessary to find out after which time it is no longer reliable, but another option is to simply build a new one every few years. As long as you have a proven design and didn’t destroy the production facilities, no problem, even in the absence of testing

                • jim says:

                  You get memetic drift. You think you are building the same design, but you know longer are, because the original engineer retired.

                • Frederick Algernon says:

                  I know it ain’t Chinese cinema, and i am aware of both the pozz elements as well as the historical infelicities, but the mini-series Chernobyl demonstrates pretty succinctly why nuclear related endeavors are not things that self perpetuate.

                  For a more concrete example of who seat-of-the-pants development was, check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
                  Look up related articles and stories, and you will start to see a very complex picture.

                  I am not at all even basically aware of the Russian methodology past their obtaining the plans, but the US had roughly three tracks of development: Navy, Air Force (before and after it was spun out of the Army), and civilian under the auspices of the AEC. The disparities in methodology on the US side are subtly staggering. The argument over yields over the years of the cold war is a particularly interesting saga. As a very knowledgeable person once said to me, many years ago: “never trust what a scientist tells you; there is always another one of them that will say the opposite and both of them are thinking of their paycheck.” This was in regards to nuclear weapons specifically, but i think it is a pretty good rule of thumb.

                  Recently, there were a few scandals about the “nuclear forces” in terms of readiness, methods, security, etc. Add to this Jim’s assertion (which i’m inclined to agree with but cannot independently verify) that the US has lost the capacity to generate key elements of nuclear devices, and the picture is pretty bleak.

                  I am betting on Kinetic Bombardment being the Next Big Thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment which lends some depth to the games of satellite chicken being played by the US, China, and Russia.

                  And, just for fun, here is a nice video showing re-entry velocity vs. ground launch velocity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXtgTVMcuA&list=LLuhz0fvxKVuy5BRT68X0RKw&index=46&t=2s

        • Frederick Algernon says:

          States that have given up nascent or realised NBC programs due to external pressure:
          > Libya
          > Syria
          > Iraq
          > Apartheid South Africa
          > Ukraine
          > Kazakhstan

          States that have maintained nascent or realised NBC programs despite external pressure:

          > Israel
          > North Korea
          > India
          > Pakistan

          States that have the technical capacity for NBC, the intellectual infrastructure for NBC, allied intranational stockpile NBC, or some combination thereof:

          > Scandinavia
          > Japan
          > SKorea

          Not a comprehensive list, but there is a pretty clear picture: getting working NBC is hard. Keeping working NBC is vital. Giving up NBC is ludicrous.

  14. Anonymous says:

    >Ideas are more powerful than guns, and fashion is more powerful than ideas.

    I’ve had this phrase on my mind for some time. As I understand things, the warrior class is that which co-ordinates on using guns to rule, and the priestly class is that which co-ordinates on using ideas to rule. So how can a warrior class in charge (inducing the priestly class below them to legitimize rule by warriors) stay in charge? Seems to me that the priests could overpower the warriors if ideas are more powerful than guns. Do warriors stay in charge by co-ordinating on fashion?

    • jim says:

      In the aftermath of the Crimean war, warriors lost to priests. Logistics was insourced, and camp followers were redefined to be soldiers.

      The camp follower whore Florence Nightingale was made into a hero, and actual heroes such as Lord Cardigan were denigrated and ridiculed. Glorious military victories, such as the Highlanders at the battle of Balaclava, were denigrated and ignored. Pretty much the way we lost Vietnam.

      So. How do warriors beat that? Cannot beat it by guns, obviously.

      Warriors have to insource priesting. Get in a state priesthood who thinks warriors should be on top. And after insourcing priesting, outsource logistics.

      Also, snappier dress uniforms. And they need their priesthood writing tales from the battle. The reason they exclude reporters is that the reporters all hate them and want them dead.

      The state priesthood grabbing for power has always been a problem, and excessive entry into the state priesthood has always been a problem – hence the swollen overgrowth of our universities. Charles the Second, the merry monarch, deflated the excessive status of the priesthood, not primarily by guns or firings, though he did plenty of firings and burned one excessively holy woman at the stake, but primarily the way Trump did it at this state dinner. Charles the Second was “merry” in substantial part because he found excessive priestly piety, of which the British had had more than enough, ridiculous.

      So, the solution is lots of firings, a few one way helicopter rides to the pacific, but primarily the subtle measures that Trump employs now, and that the Merry Monarch employed then. The Bully Pulpit has to be deployed on the side of warriors. The Sovereign needs to be the intermediary between the nation and God, and needs to appoint the Archbishop and Grand Inquisitor, and the Archbishop and Grand Inquisitor has to keep the priesthood in line: The Archbishop by keeping the priesthood on message, and keeping the state church to doctrines that are true or unfalsifiable, and the Grand Inquisitor dealing with doctrinal innovation, heresy, and apostasy.

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