Possible outcomes of war in the Ukraine

June 2nd, 2023

Both sides have been fighting in the Ukraine using World War I tactics, and developments in the war have so far recapitulated World War I.

Towards the end of World War I, the Germans, finally realizing they were going to lose the war of attrition, because of the immense industrial capability of America, attempted to regain war of movement, with underwhelming success, and eventually could no longer attempt to do so. They gained considerable territory, which gains merely put them in a worse position to fight the war of attrition. Like the Ukraine, tactical victories but strategic defeats, as with the costly attempt to relieve Bakhmut, which has resulted in them advancing on the flanks of Bakhmut to a position far worse for them in attritive warfare.

The Ukraine has been throwing reserves at various points on the front, with underwhelming success similar to that of the Germans in World War I, which similarly has resulted in gains that put them in a worse position for fighting a war of attrition. They are now moving troops around from one active front to another, which you only do when desperately short of reserves. I previously posted that the Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive had started some time ago, and had not been announced for lack of impressive results. That they are redeploying troops involved in active fighting suggests that the Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive is now most likely over for lack of reserves, though fog of war makes it hard to speak confidently.

In World War I, the incapacity to mount further attempts at war of movement was followed by 100 days of increasingly rapid and costly German defeats and retreats in attritive warfare, and it became apparent that if the Germans did not make peace on any terms they could get, then eventually there would be attritive warfare all the way to Berlin, most German men would die, and Berlin would be flattened. So they cut a deal where they handed over their heavy weapons, but the army and the nation remained an army and a nation. Without that deal, the war would likely have gone on for years, with enormous costs for everyone, but by far the greatest costs for Germans.

And a sane and capable Global American Empire would accept, in a hundred days or so, the deal that Putin has been offering – assuming it will still be on offer after major retreats and losses in attritive warfare. But a sane and capable Global American Empire would probably have been capable of winning.

So a possible and likely outcome is that the war goes on till Kiev starts being flattened and most Ukrainian men are dead. Which may well take quite a while. At which point there is a significant likelihood that Nato will be thrown in to relieve Kiev.

In a full war between Russia and Nato, neither side has any incentive to refrain escalating all the way to nukes. If Nato intervenes the rationale will be that quick decisive victory is attainable, which is unlikely to be the case. So, nukes.

Do anyone’s nukes still work? My guess is that Global American Empire nukes stopped working a long time ago, but some Russian nukes still work.

Nukes were and are made out of components that deteriorate over time, and have to regularly refurbished, reconditioned and sometimes rebuilt. And if you are not testing, your maintenance process is likely to go off the rails when the men that built those bombs retire. The test ban treaty was a stealth slow motion nuclear disarmament treaty.

If someone’s nukes still work, this is likely to bring the war to a quick and decisive end, with relatively small destruction and casualties. I estimate that only about twenty percent of Americans would die in the course of losing a nuclear war, deaths insignificant compared to abortion and all that, and destruction insignificant compared to the Rust Belt and all the Detroits. No big deal in the broad historical sweep that this blog looks at. If, on the other hand, technological decay means we fight World War I all over again, but this time political decay means that it is fought all the way to the end, the death and destruction could be considerably greater. But perhaps, in a hundred days or so, while the Global American Empire still holds most of the Ukraine, as the Germans still held most of Europe, the Global American Empire will figure out that it is 1918-11-11 all over again.

We shall see.

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The Great Ukrainian Counter Offensive

May 20th, 2023

Normally I do not report on or respond to the day’s news.  This blog is about what the news of decade or a century ago turned out to mean.  And no end of people are reporting on the day’s news, most of whom have researched it far more thoroughly than I am willing to do.

But, prematurely, I am going to report on what this offensive seems to have turned out to mean.

The original plan of the Global American Empire was to logistically exhaust Russia. “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a nuclear power” “Russia is running on Soviet leftovers.” “Russia’s GDP is less than that of (insert insignificant country here)” The latter meme was an echo of Reagan in the primaries. He did not believe the official story about Soviet GDP pushed by Harvard and the CIA.

Well that does not seem to be working out. Sanctions arguably improved the Russian economy by forcing national capitalism on it from the outside. Living standards have fallen, but not by much, and the Russian entrepreneurial class has been invigorated.

Soviet GDP was as fake as Reagan claimed, but this time around, it is Global American Empire GDP that has been revealed as fake and gay. Nato’s cupboard is bare. Gains and losses of a few square kilometers of chewed up dirt and shattered buildings do not matter. What matters is that Nato is running out. That the meme of “The Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive” was floated was a recognition that the Global American Empire is losing the war of attrition.

The objective of The Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive was to replace slow grinding war of attrition with decisive war of movement. The Ukraine would cut to the Black sea near Mariupol forcing cut off Russian troops to surrender, or at least to abandon the Black sea coast without a fight. They would make a counter envelopment around Bakhmut, forcing Russians to abandon Bakhmut without a fight. They would get turf without slowly and attritively grinding.

The offensive has so far achieved significant tactical Ukrainian victories, but looks increasingly unlikely to give them the hoped for strategic victory, which is probably why they announced it was postponed yet again. It has not been postponed. It has failed so far.

What has happened was that the Ukraine has hurled a good chunk of its reserves at some point on the front, attempting to restore war of movement, and a significant advance happened, often with Russian troops forced to abandon some important chunk of hard won land without a fight, and the the Russians would make some countermove to stop them, and war of attrition resumed. The retreats failed to create cascading weakness. And then they would hurl another good chunk of their reserves at another point on the front. Presumably if the Ukrainians had some important success, the rest of the reserves would have been thrown in and The Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive announced. It has not been announced because each such thrust, though it made important initial gains, soon got stuck.

The theory underlying the Great Ukrainian Offensive is that once reserves have been deployed to a front, it is mighty difficult to adapt to circumstances and opportunities by redeploying them elsewhere.  If you try to redeploy the normal foul ups of war ensue, those left to hold the front are apt to conclude that due to malice, neglect, or chaos, they are being abandoned to die, and decide to mutinously leave, turning the redeployment into a disorderly retreat.  So, if you have reserves, you have choices.  You can strike in one place and not strike in another place.  This restores war of movement when your forces penetrate behind enemy lines, forcing the enemy to swiftly abandon overnight turf won over months or years in the slow grind of attritive warfare. So the Ukraine built up its reserves, for a decisive blow restoring war of movement.

And the Russians were forced to abandon overnight quite a lot of turf that had taken them months to gain. In this sense, substantial tactical victories ensued, which no one seems to be reporting – because the Ukrainians were seeking turf that mattered, and got turf that has so far turned out to not matter much.

One of the big ideas that a lot of pro Ukraine bloggers were talking about was counter envelopment of the Bakhmut cauldron. Ukrainian forces would strike deep into Russian held turf north of Bakhmut and south of Bakhmut, threatening to surround Bakhmut, thus forcing Russians to abandon it without a fight. Or actually surrounding it, forcing Russians to surrender.

And they struck. And they penetrated behind Russian lines, causing a great deal of destruction. This threatened the jaws of Russian cauldron, forcing the Russians on the north and south jaws of the cauldron to abandon overnight much hard won turf, to abandon the jaws of the cauldron. But it did not threaten to envelope Bakhmut with a counter cauldron. On the northern jaw of the cauldron the Russians quickly captured some new turf to recreate a northern jaw for the cauldron in a new, smaller, position, but the Ukrainians successfully forced the southern jaw wide open.

The Russian cauldron that made it difficult for the Ukrainians to supply and replace troops in Bakhmut is no more. This is a big Ukrainian tactical victory. It is a strategic victory, but Bakhmut continues to fall nonetheless. And Ukrainians are still advancing on the flanks north and south of Bakhmut. But it is a strategic defeat, because now it is back to grinding attritive warfare on the flanks, so they have committed their reserves to more of the same old same old. More of the attrition that the Global American Empire cannot afford.

The Ukrainians are now able to pour more and more troops into the tiny little part of south eastern Bakhmut that they still control, and are doing so. They can now pour vast amounts of fresh meat into the same old meat grinder and have done so. That is their strategic victory. I expect the fresh meat to be soon pouring out again, if they are not doing so already.

The Global American Empire still attempting a counter envelopment of Bakhmut, attempting to create a counter cauldron. And they are attempting to recapture areas of Bakhmut that they lost in the little the south east corner that remains, and have had some success. Russians retreated in Bakhmut, and on the flanks. Russians were on the defensive, though they are now back to advancing into the tiny little part of Bakhmut that is still under Ukrainian control. But on the offensive, or on the defensive, on the retreat or on the advance, they are decisively winning the war of attrition. The fall of Bakhmut has been delayed, but probably not delayed a whole lot. Only a square kilometer or so remains in Ukrainian hands.

War of movement was always a long shot. The Greatest Ukrainian Counter Offensive is far from over, but it is looking like a longer and longer shot. That it was tried at all means that the Global American Empire no longer has confidence in war of attrition. They have realized they are losing the war of attrition.

Normally a war of attrition comes to a negotiated end. The loser usually loses decisively, usually after making increasingly desperate attempts to change the war of attrition to a war of movement, the winner usually wins decisively, the negotiations are one sided, but the loser retains a nation, retains the capacity to recruit and arm an army, and learns from its failures. A decisive defeat in a war of attrition is seldom all that decisive.

But the Global American Empire lacks the capacity to negotiate. This war could continue for quite a while, and may well continue long after the Ukraine becomes a footnote like Serbia in World War I or Poland in World War II.

What they do when reality becomes painfully evident is avert their gaze and look around for some new shiny thing. They may well forget about the war, without attempting to end it, without allowing anyone else to end it.

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War and game theory

May 13th, 2023

Jesus as game theory: In a world of imperfect information, one tit for two tats.

Old Testament marriage and family law as game theory: If you are stuck with with each other, the deal is going to generate value even if the value very unequally distributed, but if not stuck, prisoner’s dilemma. Negative sum actions are likely to be individually beneficial.

It might seem obvious that if everyone could correctly predict the outcome of a war, no one would go to war. But a little application of game theory reveals that they would, and must, because individually optimum behavior is to act unpredictably.

But in fact most wars do not result from rational actors. It is indeed true that there would be, not no war, but considerably less war if the parties were rational and well informed, albeit rationality is apt to result in concealing information and providing misinformation. (Similarly the market for lemons.) Rather, the problem is that no one can negotiate with the Global American Empire because there is no one to negotiate with. As the Russians say “not agreement capable”. World War I was the same. Austria told Serbia to choose war or peace, because Serbia had been simultaneously pursuing war and peace, and was incapable of choosing.

The Global American Empire consists of “the rules based international order” where only they get to interpret the rules. Which results in them shutting down all efforts by adversaries to communicate. The Taliban was telling us what they were about from 1996 onwards on every channel of communication they could use, and the Global American Empire still to this day has absolutely no idea.

Without the possibility of communication, war.

A hegemonic world order where the hegemon can hear what other parties are saying is likely to be peaceful and cooperative, though obviously most of the value created by that cooperation is going to go to the hegemon, and rather less to the rest. Similarly Mosaic marriage and family. Everyone benefits, but most of the value goes to the husband, and considerably less to the wife. Efforts to remedy this by increasing the power of the wife have necessarily resulted in defect/defect equilibrium, the game of players and bitches. You need a King, and the husband has to be king under his own roof. The sovereign cannot rule alone, and has to support each little king in his own little domain, which little domain excludes all other little Kings, and largely excludes the sovereign.

If benefits of positive sum behavior are distributed in a too severely unequal manner, people will want to change that distribution, which is most effectively done by negative sum behavior.

American soft power consists of shutting down all other voices, so that the Harvard and Mainstream media interpretation of the rules and of the distribution of costs and benefits is the only one that can be heard. Thus one hears no end about white violence against blacks, and nothing of the immensely greater black violence against whites, and similarly for the sexual conduct of men and women.

The trouble with this form of power is: Know your enemy, know yourself, you will prevail in every battle, know yourself but not the enemy, you will lose half the time, know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will lose every time. The Taliban knew America better than globohomo did, but globohomo had absolutely no idea what the Taliban was about, despite the Taliban attempting to tell them loudly and clearly in excellent idiomatic English on every channel that they could. The Global American Empire wanders into wars with no idea what is on the table, or what the enemy intends, for not only is the enemy’s beef with them unspeakable and unthinkable, their beef with the enemy is also unspeakable and unthinkable.

We need everyone to agree, perhaps reluctantly, on a distribution of the benefits of cooperation that may well be rough on some of the parties, but is still fair enough that everyone will be reasonably willing to go along with it, for no man rules alone.

But what is a fair distribution of the value resulting from positive sum behavior? What is every man’s due? Thus game theory and game theoretic marginal economics. Which means people have to know what the rules are, and they also need to know how other people are benefiting or being harmed by those rules. Those rules need to sustain an order such that everyone benefits from cooperation, even if the benefit is apt to be rather one sided. Today, however, no one knows what the rules are and what the costs and benefits are except that whites are always in the wrong, men are always in the wrong, and the Global American empire is always upholding freedom and democracy.

Recent wars are the result of manipulating the flow of information about the costs, benefits, and values of the other parties. Similar to price control resulting in shortages by falsifying information. Globohomo told the Afghans they were doing them a big favor and believed it. The Afghans did not believe it. Globohomo did not hear, could not hear, what the Afghans were telling them in excellent idiomatic English on every channel they could get.

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The Logos

May 6th, 2023

Around 350 years before Christ, paganism had died among the intellectuals. Not long after, it died among the common people, for we read writers in the late Roman Republic ridiculing attempts to motivate the common soldiers by appeal to faith. They believed the ordinary soldier was even more cynical than themselves.

So the philosophers set to work manufacturing a replacement.

For Aristotle, “logos” (“word”) was rational and responsive debate, and the meaning of that debate – the kind of debate I encourage on my blog.

But obviously this debate is going to be substantially about moral truths

Moral truths from material and effective causation:

For example the red pill on women implies that we should restore the social technology our ancestors had for dealing with the woman problem, law on women sex and family in the spirit of Old Testament sex and family law, and similarly, the debate on anarchy, stationary bandits, the warrior class, and the existence of the state – if you don’t have an army, and that army a leader, you will soon have a hostile foreign army in occupation. Or, worse, mobile banditry. And that army is going to have to be funded, hence taxes, also known as stationary banditry. So a warrior is honorable if he fights not for gold alone, but for God, King, and Country. And, similarly the debate about religion and state religion. If you don’t have a good state religion, you will shortly have a very bad one, for a priesthood, like an army, is a mechanism of large scale cooperation by a group that seeks to impose its will on a larger group. (Harvard.) The “no establishment of religion” clause is not viable or even meaningful except as in accord with the Westphalian principle that each state has its own state religion, and no one attempts to impose one state religion on all states.

The sovereign needs to establish consensus, for no man rules alone. Establishing consensus is what priesthoods do, as armies do command and coercion, so a priesthood is going get in bed with the sovereign, and he with them. They need him, and he needs them. Holiness spiral is apt to ensue when they get the upper hand.

The Logos as a person.

Natural law is law and right conduct deduced from the way the universe is, and the way it works: the moral and social meaning of physical law, of material and effective causation.

But meaning requires a meaner, requires a person. So, around three hundred years before Christ, fifty years after Aristotle, “the logos” (“the word”) came to mean a person. That person, the person that gave rise to physical law, logos spermatikos, to material and effective and causation, was The Logos (the word). A person who meant the moral and social truths that arise from material and effective causation.

Which Stoic doctrine is right there in the New Testament: The Gospel of John, Chapter one, verse one:

In the beginning was the Word, [The Logos] and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Game theory 101, prisoners dilemma. Everyone should cooperate with cooperators and defect on defectors. tit for tat.

But while we get good results if everyone does that, the individual incentive is to be seen as a cooperator, in order that he can defect. And the priesthood is apt to manipulate the consensus to disguise defection as cooperation, hence Christ’s indictment of Jewish legalism. The Talmud is a great pile of too clever by half lawsuits against God.

So the stoics, starting three hundred before Christ or so, personified the logos, as the person that animated the universe, made it real, not just an idea.

And Christianity announced that that person had shown up, fully man and fully God, and announced game theory 301, and suffered everything that flesh can suffer.

Game theory 301, in a world of imperfect information, one tit for two tats, or else everyone gets stuck in defect/defect. So, turn the other cheek, but you only have two cheeks, and walk the extra mile, but only one extra mile. Peace on earth to all men of good will, but Old Testament solutions are applicable to men of bad will. Christianity is not a suicide pact.

But again, this sound policy, though in the collective interest, is not in the individual interest. But it is in the individual interest to be part of group that attempts to ensure conformity to it.

So you attempt to deduce law and right conduct, the behavior and beliefs that distinguish a man it is safe to cooperate with, from a man that it is dangerous to have anything to do with, from the nature of the universe. But you are not going to persuade anyone that you will in fact conform to this behavior, unless you regard the meaning of the universe as the will of a person.

Classic Romano Greek paganism was long dead, Aristotle tried to substitute meaning without an author to mean it, and that did not fly either.  So the stoics had to personify the logos, through whom all things were created.

So, Christianity.  Which is stoicism plus all the excellent social technology preserved in the Old Testament from the Bronze Age before it went decadent, plus The Logos showing up in person and suffering all that flesh can suffer.

And, since Christianity contains the philosophy that best leads to large scale extended cooperation, it needs to be the state religion, and the state needs it to be the state religion. No man rules alone, and the sovereign needs a priesthood that cooperates with him. So Christianity and good conduct in ordinary everyday family life needs to be a requirement for state and quasi state office. Equality before the law for all married taxpaying Christian men with children.

Posted in Faith | 509 Comments »

Game

April 15th, 2023

On Gab, I noticed a whole lot of wholly blue pilled people, not all of them shills.

So, despite my frequent declaration that this is not a game blog and not going to turn into game blog, here comes another game post.

It is kind of redundant, because everything that needs saying has been said in Setting the Record Straight, page 57, and Chateau Heartiste’s sixteen commandments of Poon.

Ok. Very short post.

Oh, OK, I will pad it out by reprising Heartistes magisterial Sixteen Commandments of Poon. But pay no attention. Read the original. This stuff has already been said, and I am just expanding on one detail or another detail.

I. Never say ‘I Love You’ first

Or second. When she says “I love your” it is a shit test. She wants to see if she can make you say “I love you” on demand. So when she says “I love you” you should randomly and sometimes respond “I love you too”.

II. Make her jealous

Preselection is the thing that most attracts women. If someone has popped thirty virgins and immediately dumped each one, and word gets around, a whole lot more will show up on his doorstep.

XI. Be irrationally self-confident

Hope and despair are self fullfilling. Irrational optimism beats rational pessimism. Hope is a virtue, despair a sin.

XIII. Err on the side of too much boldness, rather than too little

Regrettably, female perception of manliness and alpha is primitive compared to that of men. So a whole lot of behavior that men would regard as brave but stupid and wicked goes down like a chocolate milkshake. Including all that stuff that males rightly regard as bullying the weak, including her, and the stuff that the blue pilled wrongly regard to be sexual harassment and rape.

XVI. Never be afraid to lose her

Preselection again.

But “do not be afraid to lose her” is a prescription for operating in defect/defect, the game of players and bitches. If operating in cooperate/cooperate, marriage 1.0, biblical marriage, her perception should be that in the event of infidelity you would kill her and her lover, and then swiftly replace her with someone younger and more fertile.

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American logistic capability

March 30th, 2023

American GDP is fake and gay. American GDP is for the most part not riggers in red states lifting steel, workers on the assembly line, cattle ranchers raising cattle, nor even truckers, warehouses, and shops moving goods from where they are made to where they are used, it is people in blue states doing business in permissions that allow riggers to lift steel and ranchers to raise cattle. American GDP is the HR department, not the trucker.

America produces about a hundred and fifty tomahawk missiles a year. Russia has expended about five thousand or so similar missiles in the Ukraine. Nato is running out, Russia does not appear to be running out.

America’s largest and most capable aircraft carrier is the Nimitz. Built in 1967. Maintenance and repairs are piling up. The Navy has been trying, and failing, to produce new ships for some time, with the result that America’s fleet is shrinking, while China’s grows. The Navy cannot build what it used to be able to build, and cannot maintain and repair what it inherited. The Navy suffers the same disability that NASA suffers. How much of the stuff on the Nimitz is still in order suitable for use in battle?

The Nimitz can deliver that many missiles in a week. But how many missiles does it have to deliver? It was built for an America that could mass produce stuff like that. This is not that America.

The most important, powerful, and effective weapon in the US arsenal is a fifty year old plane firing seventy year old cannons scoured from museums and looted from ancient forgotten overseas arms depots.

In the conflict over the Ukraine, the hollowing out of western industrial capability is showing up.

Right now China could sink the Nimitz. It is in range of Chinese hypersonics at this moment. But order to sink it, it has to be able to see it. War in the Pacific is likely to lead to war in space – in which Musk is the superpower, though since much of his assets are in space, he is very much opposed to space war. America leads by far in space based observation capability, thanks largely to Musk’s ability to lift stuff. But to remove other great power’s capability for space based observation may require assistance he is likely to be reluctant to provide. But he may not have much choice with all his ground assets US based.

Russia and China have crude satellite weapons. But the winner in a space war is likely to be whoever has greater capability to lift stuff to orbit.

All Global American Empire approved political candidates are saying “Russia will be defeated”. You should not want to defeat a nuclear power. You want to push it into an unfavorable deal with military pressure. Which is what the US has been doing for eight years in the Ukraine, except for the deal part. They seem congenitally unable to make a deal. Defeating a nuclear power is likely to become unpleasant. If no deal eventually nukes.

What happens if Nato goes directly to war with Russia?

Well, most of Nato lacks actual soldiers, as became amusingly apparent in the Serbian wars. As I am fond of saying, Britain has a hundred generals, but can only put a hundred boots on the ground. The US has actual soldiers, or had, the number is rapidly diminishing. Probably some Nato countries have actual soldiers. The Ukraine does have actual soldiers, having conscripted just about everyone. Right now they substantially outnumber Russian soldiers in the Ukraine. But they are dependent on Nato logistics, and Russian shells clearly outnumber Ukrainian shells. Direct Nato involvement will not help much with the logistic crisis.

Reagan’s strategy for defeating the Soviet Union was logistic exhaustion, to bleed them in a hundred little wars. That worked, and today the Global American Empire strategy is the same: “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a nuclear power”. This time around however, does not look like it is working. “Russia will be defeated” rests on the claim that Russia is rapidly exhausting its stockpiles. Maybe, but they are not acting as if they are exhausting their stockpiles.

Some time ago the Ukraine tweeted a chart supposedly showing Russian stockpiles and weapons production. According to that chart, they should have run out quite some time ago. Global American Empire quasi state media have been reporting for months that Russia is about to run out. They are drinking their own koolaide.

A few days back, Russia started using what it calls “end guided bombs” to good effect, though it would be more accurate to call them bomber launched glider drones. Obviously these are not coming from its stockpiles. Further, bomber launched glider drones are a more effective, advanced, and modern weapon that what the USA calls end guided bombs.

Some time ago the west decided to send its highly advanced tanks to the Ukraine. These wonder weapons would make short work of the Russians, we are told. They have not arrived. I conjecture a conversation took place that went something like

“How many tanks do we have ready to roll?”

“Well, when they arrive in the Ukraine, certain maintenance procedures will be required, and we will have to make arrangements for those maintenance procedures to be deployed in the Ukraine”

“How long will that take?”

“Well, we are having some delays in deploying them here.”

Perhaps I am being unduly cynical, but the west has a whole lot of warplanes that are “not full spectrum combat ready”. Perhaps it has a similar problem with tanks. The Global American Empire military industrial complex is in the same pickle as Nasa. It has a whole lot of enormously impressive terrifyingly powerful stuff lying around from the days of half a century ago, that it can no longer make, maintain, nor competently use. Exhibit A being the Nimitz and the space shuttle engines. The US Navy is not rapidly shrinking because of budgetary decisions to shrink it. They budgeted to expand it. It is shrinking for the same reason as Nasa was begging the Russians for lifts to the space station. They tried to build warships, and just failed. Tanks and warships are a similar technology. If you cannot build warships, maybe you are only pretending to build tanks.

It is hard to say, for the first casualty of war is truth, but the way the wind blows now, it is not Russia that is running out.

This is related to an earlier post on the fakeness of American GDP afflicting American consumers. Used to be that every moderately competent, moderately industrious, man could afford a home, a garden, children, and a stay at home wife. Used to be that American shopping centers looked like shopping centers for rich people. Now they look like shopping centers for third world people. I was very recently in a big top end third world mall. Looked very nice. On the whole, wealthier, more attractive, and more comfortable ambiance than what I see around here, though most people in that town do their shopping in places more typically third world and Singapore has much nicer places. But if you look at a nice shopping center in Singapore, and what you can find in America, it is like night and day. Singapore shopping centers imply a considerably higher quality of customer than American shopping centers. A typical Chinese restaurant just has a nicer ambiance than the typical American restaurant, the typical Chinese car is nicer than the typical American car, and the typical Singaporean car is way nicer.

They say the pleasant and beautiful old malls disappeared because of economics. Could not compete with Walmart prices. Maybe, but outside the Global American Empire, and on its periphery, I see pleasant and beautiful malls going up.

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Yandex

March 23rd, 2023

We have received two huge benefits from the Ukraine war. One is that when Putin intervened in the Ukraine conflict, the Global American Empire everywhere overnight stopped enforcing worship of the awesome and mighty covid demon. The public announcements that masking and jabs were compulsory continued for a while, but everyone ignored them, and gradually they are stopping. Kind of like everyone started ignoring female emancipation when they tossed it in the lead up to World War II, even though it officially remained in force.

Putin cured Covid.

And the other big benefit is Yandex search.

Type a thought crime into a search engine, any search engine in your browser’s list. For example “gay needs to be suppressed”.

You will likely get slim pickings. Similarly, search for information on the war in the Ukraine, or the jab.

Type it into Yandex.com, you get a reasonably balanced collection of links from both sides of the debate.

Replacing your default browser search with yandex is likely to be difficult. You will have to find some little used and obscure ui for adding unlisted search engines, and will have to supply the search url, which for yandex is https://yandex.com/search/?text=%s&lr=10619 (Your browser will replace %s with the actual search string.

Next up, I hope for a Russian reply to GPT3

I had hoped for SWIFT replacement, but nothing good yet that I know of. El Salvador is fighting the good fight there. Meanwhile the Afghans continue to cheerfully demonstrate how easily and smoothly one can erase female emancipation.

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Still fighting 1913 war in the information epoch

March 20th, 2023

Military summary channel gives daily reports on the war in the Ukraine. His account is one of continual struggles for high ground and observation points, with Russians advancing over low ground at high cost to grab a high point.

Wagner’s movie of the war depicting one small but horrific battle for one small observation point. (hat tip Kunning Druegger) This account is fictionalized but was produced by people who waded through blood, and is consistent in detail with the real life tactics, weapons systems, and terrible costs summarized in the military summary channel. We may conclude that though fictionalized, it accurately depicts war as it is being fought today.

It depicts a battle for a nine story building, which they need so that they can put spotters on top. A whole lot of good men die, and a whole lot of very expensive military equipment gets blown up. Enormous amounts of expensive ammunition are expended.

What the &@%&? My drone can fly nine stories up. For the cost of one of the heavy weapons that gets blown up in the movie, you could give every grunt in the movie a pile of drones and computers like mine.

The Russians are continually fighting for the high ground, for observation. This should not be happening in the information epoch. Every grunt should have his own small drone, and teams should have larger drones. The sky above the battlefield should be thick with drones, and an AI should weave their data into a big google style map using Postgis rather than messages going up and down the chain of command. Getting the top of a nine story building should not matter. Every grunt should be able to look at google style map with live images from his drone and his platoon’s drones showing up the map.

What happens in the movie is that a drone spots a target, the spotter calls the commander, the commander calls the artillery. The first shots go wild, so the spotter calls the commander again, the commander calls the artillery crew again The artillery crew should be able to see their target on a google earth style map, and see their shots land on a live window into that map. Why are we involving chain of command in the information epoch? Targeting information is not well suited for being conveyed in words.

Do it in postgis. In the movie, the Ukrainians lose a building because humans are piss poor at doing what postgis does much better.

The drone video should be passed directly from the drone to the artillery team, as well as to a central postgis database, and the artillery team’s computers, knowing their position and the drones position from their respective integrations into the central postgis database, should overlay artillery coordinates on the image. This is not a job appropriate for chain of command to do. It is not even a job appropriate for the central database to do. The artillery team should have their own local computers that have low level access to all the information needed to do their job. And their own drones that answer directly to their own computers. The man who is physically aiming the gun should look at the screen to see the target on a google earth style map with drone’s eye view, and his computer’s artillery coordinates overlayed on the map, before firing it, then look again after firing to see his shots land on the screen, and then adjust his aim. Humans should not be transmitting this data to each other by talking about it. Words are not a good medium for this kind of data. It needs to be seen, and the gunner needs to see it.

Because of wind and weather, and because artillery is apt to get banged up, the coordinates will not be exactly right, and the team will still have to walk their shots in every time the wind changes, but the commander back in the rear should not be involved. No words should need to be spoken about this kind of information, which should be presented in images organized and marked up by postgis.

In the movie, the wind changes, and the Wagnerites have enough time to get a foothold in the next building before the Ukrainian artillery team realizes. It is stupid that the Wagnerites are fighting for a nine story observation point, and it is stupid that the Ukes are quarreling over who is at fault when their fire goes wild. In the movie the fire goes wild, the Wagnerites wait a bit, see it is not being corrected in a timely manner, then rush their objective. The scriptwriter depicts the delay as Ukrainians quarreling through the chain of command over what is happening, which is presumably a guess, but a highly plausible guess. Discussing in words what is happening when the participants each have an incomplete and imperfect view takes time, and if chain of command is in the middle, takes a great deal more time.

Data should pass from a grunt’s drone to the grunt’s tablet, integrated with local postgris data previously downloaded from the central database, and then, later, from the platoon commander’s tablet to the central database. Chain of command and words just get in the way. And big centralized databases also have a tendency to get in the way. The grunts need direct immediate access to the drone data, while the central database only needs to get eventual and delayed access. The grunt needs live video. The central database does not, and is unlikely to be able to provide it in a timely fashion to those who need it even if it had it. Postgris databases tend to less than fast, and when you try to make them go fast, you hit data consistency and coherence problems. Queries against data subject to a high massively parallel update rate is going cause trouble in a postgris database. It needs to stick to passing out position and scale data on live images and stale google earth style data on the larger geographical context in which those live images are displayed. The live data needs to go direct to the people with their fingers on the trigger, and the postgris database can get around to digesting it later, and the commander can look at it after postgris has digested it. We don’t want the central database in the way, and even less do we want the commander in the way. The commander ordering big gun fire in detail is a waste of his time and even bigger waste of time for the big guns and the men with their fingers on the trigger. He should order fire in general terms and not very often, and the men with their fingers on the trigger should take care of the details.

The delay depicted in the movie, which lost a building and a whole lot of lives, would not have happened if the men actually aiming and firing the big guns could see their shells landing in a live window inside a stale map marked up by the commander when he ordered big gun fire support.

Posted in war | 105 Comments »

Covid 19 and the faith

February 28th, 2023

It is obvious to me that a small but significant proportion of those that have had a single jab have significant brain damage that impairs their ability to do their job, and heart damage that impairs their ability to perform physical activity, and that most who are fully boosted have enough brain damage to render them incapable of properly performing their job, and are significantly impaired in capability to perform physical activity. I see a whole lot of engineers who have lost the capability to handle the problems that they were formerly capable of handling.

Everyone who dies “inexplicably”, should be autopsied for brain damage, heart damage, and blood clots in their circulation, and if necrotic tissues show substantial levels of spike protein sufficient to explain to the necrosis, should be checked for antibodies against non spike Covid proteins. If he does not show non spike antibodies, but does show spike proteins, it was the jab that killed him.

There has been a five fold increase in young people deaths that have been categorised with codes equivalent to “other”, “unknown”, and “we’re not really sure,” which tells me that those coding those deaths know very well indeed exactly what is causing them. Further we are seeing huge rise in deaths that are quite obviously being falsely categorised.

We are seeing a profound reluctance to diagnose “inexplicable” deaths as caused by things likely to suggest the jab. We are seeing a whole lot of “inexplicable” deaths that no one wants to explain. There has been a five hundred percent increase in such deaths. Of course there is nothing inexplicable about them. Heart damage and lots and lots of tiny long stringy blood clots. But no one wants to know. Athletes drop dead on the field, and no one wants to know what went wrong with them, which curious lack of curiosity reveals that they know very well what killed them.

The early test data on the jab showed it was not a vaccine, that it did not prevent, or even substantially reduce, infection or transmission. It showed benefit in reducing the severity of symptoms, but for flu type diseases, that is an ambiguous bar, since anything that damages the immune system will, by certain measures of symptoms, reduce the severity of symptoms (because most of the symptoms of flu are collateral damage from your immune system attacking the virus)- though in the long run, an impaired immune system is likely to kill you, and we are seeing a surge in deaths from ailments such as cancer that normally kept in check by the immune system.

It was apparent that Covid was not the reason for the jab or the lockdowns, but the excuse. Covid 19 is a bioweapon that was created in the lab and then released with the intention that the ensuing panic would enable measures the people would otherwise resist. That the jab causes brain damage is not a side effect, they want us stupid.

The disease and the jab were developed in advance of the crisis. They were not developed by the medical industrial complex, big pharma with medical regulators in its pocket, but by the military industrial complex, as part of a program that theoretically is for defence against chemical and biological weapons, but is clearly aimed and developing chemical and biological weapons. (Which does not necessarily mean that the DoD is the big rat and the headquarters of the conspiracy, but the conspiracy used DoD which used big Pharma.)

Big Pharma may want you hooked on expensive drugs, but it does not actually want to kill its customers. Department of Defence, on the other hand, is tasked with hurting and killing people, and their contracts and procedures show it. So when big pharma is being paid by the Department of Defense, it is working on killing people. Covid 19 and the Jab were ordered and paid for by the Department of Defence, hence the lack of testing for safety. DoD procedures are for the logistics of killing and maiming enemies in war time, thus the procedures better suited for the Covid jab.

So. Why?

In the beginning, they hyped up the danger of Covid 19. Perhaps it was dangerous in the beginning, but the weaponization modifications were not in the interest of the virus. Because flu type viruses are fragile, they want you walking around, interacting with people, and doing your normal stuff, so that they can infect other people, so the virus once released from the lab very quickly evolved back to being a relatively normal flu. So, in order to achieve whatever it was they wanted the virus to achieve, they created the jab.

It was very quickly obvious that whatever the reason for pushing the jab on people, it was not to control the disease. The disease was used as an excuse for jabbing people. The same people who produced the disease produced the jab, so, obviously a common purpose.

So, what purpose?

We are seeing an enormous and powerful conspiracy – but not securely in control. When Putin intervened in the Ukraine, suddenly enforcement weakened. Namefags are able to get away with speaking the truth. Everywhere I still encounter signs and loudspeaker announcements that worship of the Awesome and Might Covid demon is required, which signs and announcements most people just quietly ignore.

So what does the conspiracy want?

There have been a lot of train derailments, one of which spilled a huge amount of poison on white people. The reaction of the state apparatus demonstrated that they are strangely comfortable with poison being spilled on white Trump voters.

Some of these train derailments were found to be the result of sabotage, and when a saboteur was caught, he got a slap on the wrist. There is no evidence that I am aware of that the derailment that spilled a whole lot of poison was sabotage rather than negligence or incompetence, but when there has been evidence of sabotage in other train derailments, there is a curious lack of curiosity. Much as there is a curious lack of curiosity about athletes dropping dead on the playing field, and pilots dropping dead at the controls.

Well, looks like they just hate us and want us dead. The entire operation may well have no sane rational purpose.

They worship demons, such as Gaia the Global Warming demon, and are just performing sacrifices for their demons.

The state apparatus is full of conspiracies, each conspiracy seeking power, some more successfully than others. The more cohesive conspiracy tends to win, and demon worshipping conspiracies tend to have more cohesion, because shared participation in horrifying and repugnant deeds builds cohesion on shared blackmail material.

They hate us, they mean to destroy us. It is just that simple.

So, no alternative but to win. And you have to take a gun to a gunfight, and a faith to a holy war.

There is a fair bit of evidence suggesting that the core of the Covid conspiracy is the Jesuits, who have been plotting a restoration of Vatican power ever since the sack of Rome in the sixteenth century, and have repeatedly been purged and expelled by Kings who did not accept the Vatican’s pursuit of what is Caesar’s

But there is an odd thing. I see obvious demon worshippers able to say the Nicene creed, while I don’t see demon worshippers able to say the affirmation, which is just a short summary of the Nicene creed. Jesus Christ is Lord of All and Savior of those who have Faith in Him and His Sacrifice and Resurrection, born in Bethlehem, died at Jerusalem, , and is, is from before the beginning of the world. Fully God and fully man, begotten not made. God is three and God is one. Amen.

Recollect that when the Socinians were conducting entryism against the Established Church of England, they constructed a theology that enabled them to say words that seemed to affirm the divinity of Jesus Christ, but the words had a special meaning for them. It appears that the Vatican has constructed a similar intellectual contrivance that enables them to say the Nicene creed, with invisible commas and invisible odd paragraphing, so that it refers to serpent Christ, a demon from hell. But this theological construction is designed to work with the exact wording of the Nicene creed, and paraphrasing it means these intellectual formulas do not work for the paraphrase.

So, the only thing that can beat our enemies is Christian Nationalism. And I see on Gab a whole lot of enemy entryists entering Christian nationalism to destroy it. Jesus, they tell us, requires us to lie down and let our enemies walk over us. These fake Christian Nationalists also tell us Jesus favors female emancipation, open borders, and all that. (Which Serpent Christ surely does.)

So, need to distinguish between real Christianity and fake Christianity. (Because our enemies are seeking to destroy us, and Christian nationalism is the only political movement capable of taking them on.)

So, the question of what is real Christianity has important consequences for our earthly existence. So, to deal with the Covidians and such, need to say what is Christianity, and what is not.

The current heretical fake Christianity is, more or less, the Marcionite heresy: (Marcion of Sinope in Rome around the year 144) Marcionites reject all that Old Testament stuff as cruel, brutal and superseded by the New Testament.

No it is not. The Christians said, in New Testament times, and are still required to say every Sunday, “Peace on Earth to all men of good will” Which implies it is totally fine to go Old Testament on men of bad will. The New Testament, unlike the old, requires us to turn the other cheek and walk the extra mile, but you only have two cheeks and are only required to go one extra mile.

What about the startlingly harsh family and sex laws of the Old Testament? Did not Jesus abolish those when he rejected stoning the adulterous woman? Well he rejected the harshness, and required men to cherish their wives but until 1800 or so, Christian Kings believed themselves required to implement laws, appropriate for their people, their times, their culture, and their history, that gave effect to the spirit of Old Testament law. And coverture did give effect to the spirit of Old Testament law, with the appropriate New Testament adjustments.

The Christian faith has to reject female emancipation: Coverture was white sharia, accomplishing similar goals by somewhat different methods, methods appropriate for our race, our history, and our tradition. First epistle to the Corinthians 11:3 “the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man;” This requires every woman to be attached to a household with a male head of household, who is the high priest of that household.

What about the rather silly cleanliness laws of the Old Testament? The New Testament says that God changed his mind about eating pigs.

The spirit of the Old Testament cleanliness laws is quite sensible. For example, one is required to bury one’s poop, and if people poop in camp, and if they poop outside the camp and fail to bury it, God will be wrathful and your people will be defeated in battle. Of course God works through material and effective causation, and the causal mechanism here is that no one will fight to defend a city where people are allowed to poop on the pavement, because they will not feel like defending street shitters.

Free range pigs and vermin, transmit diseases from human to human. No one raises pigs free range any more. Cleanliness laws gave the Hebrews a biological advantage, and also separated them from people without cleanliness laws. If someone followed religious cleanliness laws this was an external indicator that he was probably going to follow the commandments on coveting, theft, and murder.

Undue legalism over the cleanliness laws resulted in ritual cleanliness failing to correlate with actual cleanliness, and turned them into an excuse for coveting, theft, and murder, so that they failed to indicate that someone was probably going to follow the commandments, so the letter of the cleanliness laws was ditched with legalism. The Jews becoming cursed, rather than chosen, meant an end to separation, so the letter of cleanliness laws was also ditched with separation.

The deal was “obey the Lord’s commandments, and you will be a special people, a chosen people, a people apart”. And the cleanliness laws were part of being special and apart. Well, they did not obey the Lord’s commandments. It is not that God woke up one morning and changed his mind about pigs. The Jews broke their contract with God.

The spirit of the Old Testament laws is still in effect. And Christian Nationalism, to defeat those who seek to harm us, has to reject these ancient heresies. Christian Nationalism not only has to assess the health effects of the jab and purge the schools of the faggot groomers who are selling sexual transition to schoolchildren. It also has to suppress gay, undo female emancipation, and stop people from shitting in the streets, for if it does not take on the whole Marcionite heresy, it is trying to cut a deal with those with whom no deal can be made, trying to compromise with those who will never compromise.

Posted in Uncategorized | 798 Comments »

AI progress

February 4th, 2023

I have for some time been complaining that progress in many fields peaked around 1972 or so, that many important fields have gone backwards. Last man on the moon 1972, cars and clothes washing machines have been getting crappier. The skyline on big western cities is starting to look less and less like the future, as is the interior of your neighbourhood shopping mall. The highest flying and fastest flying warplane retired in the early eighties.

But there has been a major breakthrough in AI. The methods proposed in “attention is all you need” have been applied to a variety of problems, and are yielding interesting, important, and impressive results.

The breakthrough is that generative techniques can generate endless instances as instantiations of a word, or set of words, and can also recognise a particular instance as an instantiation of a word or words. In other words, handles words as reference to concepts.

This has been the show stopper problem in philosophy, ai, and the philosophy of ai for a long time. That GPT works as well as it does tells us something important about meaning, thought, and words. What it is telling us is not clear, but whatever it is telling us, it is a reply to an issue first raised by Aristotle.

GPT type models can generate an unlimited number of instances corresponding to a concept or set of concepts, and can recognize the goodness of match of a particular instance to concept or set of concepts. Or at least is acting like it can in some important cases, quite a lot of important cases.

What we could do with this tool is take an enormous pile of conversations, and for each entity in the conversation, predict his response to any previous comment.

The question then is, would a generated conversation indicate a sentient response to novel prompts?

One of the things gpt can do is represent a very large body of knowledge, by predicting the response to a query about it from existing similar, but far from identical, queries.

But because it does not understand the information it is representing, the responses suffer from “hallucination” reflecting the fact that its model of the knowledge is not the knowledge, but a model of words about the knowledge, words about words. Sometimes, they superficially sounded very like a correct answer but were utter nonsense.

ChatGPT makes errors because its universe consists of words referring to words. Its errors do not necessarily reveal a lack of consciousness, but rather reveal it does not understand the words refer to real physical things.

When it makes a completely stupid error, and gives a meaningless nonsense response, it sounds very like a sensible and correct response, and you have to think about it a bit before you realise it is utter nonsense and meaningless gibberish.

ChatGPT is very very good at writing code. Not so good at knowing what code to write.

Suppose it had been trained on words referring to words, and on words referring to diagrams, and on diagrams and words referring to twodee and threedee images, and on words, diagrams, two dee and three dee images referring to full motion videos.

From the quality of the performance on words about words, and words about artistic images, one might plausibly hope for true perception. What we now have is quite clearly not conscious. But it has taken an impressively large step in the direction of consciousness. We have an algorithm that successfully handles the long standing central big hard problem in philosophy, AI, and the philosophy of AI, at least in a whole lot of useful, important, and interesting cases.

Quite likely we will find it only handles a subset of interesting cases. That is what happened with every previous AI breakthrough. After a while, people banged into the hard limits that revealed no one at home, that consciousness was being emulated, but not present. People anthropomorphise their pets, because their pet really is conscious. They do not anthropomorphise their Teslas, because the Tesla really is not, and endlessly polishing up the Tesla’s driving algorithms and giving the more computing power and data is not getting them any closer.

But we are not running into hard limits of GPT yet.

Perception is starting to look soluble. Not solved, but definitely looking like a solution may well be merely a matter of polishing up what we now have.

Will, intent, purpose, and desire still conspicuously missing. But they are problems very similar to perception, hard in the same way and for the same reasons perception is hard.

We do not yet have a robot that can take a beer out of a fridge, pop open the can and pour me a drink, or can fold a shirt in a reasonable time. And the way the wind blows, we are likely to get an AI that knows all the knowledge in the world, and can provide meaningful and useful answers about it before we can get a robot that can make me a ham sandwich. But it now starting to look a whole lot more likely that we can get an AI that knows all the knowledge in the world and can provide meaningful and useful answers.

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Posted in science | 1,091 Comments »

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