WWIII is Over

Russia and China, and their allies, already have an industrial advantage that cannot be overcome, as Andrei Martynov observes that Russia alone can produce nearly 6 million drones per year.

The Russian military-industrial complex (MIC) has the ability to produce more than 15 thousand FPV drones per day. This was announced on June 3 by the First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Denis Manturov. “Domestic enterprises can already ensure the supply of over 15 thousand pieces per day of FPV drones alone, and in 2023 such a number was produced per month,” he said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper.

For arithmetically challenged (forget about combat models used for planning of operations against NATO’s aerial terrorism) this means: 365 x 15,000 = 5,475,000 drones per year. Combined West’s economies will choke trying to match this. But then again, one must be situationally aware–a novelty thing for Pentagon, CIA and so called “analysts” such as Mearsheimer. And so he continues with platitudes.

Now to the crux of the matter–Russia MAY strike Europe, and among targets could be some of those UAVs-producing facilities, but if it happens, it is going to be NOT the main consideration, and NATO’s UAVs could be used MERELY as casus belli. Already now Russia blunted and mitigated all this “wall of drones”–yet another pathetic moniker for NATO’s military impotence–if Russia will be striking Europe she will come in hard and main targets will be the remnants of NATO’s industrial plant, thus solving a strategic task of a complete demilitarization of Europe.

This doesn’t mean that foreign regimes like the Kiev regime won’t force the people of the occupied nations to fight wars against their national self-interests. But it does mean they’re not going to win any of them, including the war on Iran.

All the GDP statistics and revisionist histories and rhetoric mean nothing. The only thing that counts in 5GW is industrial capacity, and that was eliminated in both the USA and Europe after 1970. And this, no doubt, is why formerly globalist-friendly Russian oligarchs like Andrey Melnichenko are returning to Russia and supporting its national objective of liberation from Clown World and complete national sovereignty.

The choice before the world is not between love for Russia and hatred of it, between punishment and forgiveness, between moral clarity and political cynicism. It is between two kinds of future: one in which major powers again learn to respect each other’s sovereignty, and one in which each attempts to reduce the others to objects of management. The second path has already brought us here. The most important thing is that we step back from the abyss. Only then can we ask how we reached it and how to arrange the world differently. That work belongs to the next generation. Our role is to ensure they have something to work with.

“Melnichenko’s words are clear: the war is the West’s fault, and Russia is being restructured as a self-sufficient society of supreme sovereignty where even the previously-alienated liberal class of exiles and pariahs has returned with newfound patriotism in its veins. A nation where oligarchs and big businesses are increasingly working for the benefit of the state and its people, rather than the crooked Western system which deceived and betrayed them.” – Simplicius

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Exuent the Ladybug

The political world was shocked early Sunday morning by the sudden and completely unexpected passing of longtime South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. He was 71 years old. According to an official statement released by his office, the senior Republican Senator passed away on Saturday evening, July 11, after a brief, rapid battle with an undisclosed illness. Emergency personnel responded to a call for “cardiac arrest” at Graham’s Capitol Hill home on Saturday night, according to police scanner audio obtained by NBC News.

The vaxx, Iran, or natural causes? Regardless, one of the worst fake conservatives is no longer on the political scene. He will not be missed. But it will be interesting to see what effect the absence of one of the leading warmongers in the Senate will have.

UPDATE: Graham had recently returned from Ukraine, per The Washington Post. He visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, July 10, in Kyiv.

So the obvious question is, was the senator alive or was he already dead when he returned?

UPDATE: There is reason to believe that Sen. Mitch McConnell is dead as well.

It could just be a coincidence, but things do appear to be accelerating.

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England 2, Norway 1

I think England deserved to win the game. They were the better team. And I don’t think the disallowed goal on the corner was a problem, nor do I think there was an issue on the build-up to the England goal where the ball may or may not have touched a TV drone wire or whatever. That being said:

Harry Kane and Jed Spence should have both received yellow cards for simulation. And it was definitely not a penalty; Spence stuck his leg out to draw contact, then threw himself down. Now, to be clear, I have despised Harry Kane for years and consider him to be a blight on the beautiful game. About 75 percent of his game involves falling down and appealing for a free kick or penalty; you can see him literally lifting up his legs and diving every time he imagines he was touched. Sometimes he even points his toes. He’s the anti-Haaland and the biggest cheat in international football since Pippo Inzaghi was going down like he was shot in the back of the head against Turkey. So I thought it was hilarious that Norway scored its first goal in part because Kane was too busy diving instead of putting pressure on the guy who stole the ball and preventing him from sending the cross that turned into an inadvertent shot and goal.

Norway should have gotten a penalty on a later corner kick, the one that bounced around, hit the crossbar, and nearly went in. After it hit the crossbar, a Norwegian player went up to head it in and took a forearm shiv to the back of the neck from the defender behind him that knocked him down. That wasn’t just a foul and a penalty, it was an obvious yellow card. Any statistical analysis will show that about 99 percent of the fouls called on corners are called on the attacking team, which is totally absurd. And yet, the same VAR review that correctly disallowed Norway’s goal for Haaland’s push did nothing when a defender threw a Muy Thai elbow strike.

Jude Bellingham was great. It’s amazing that despite all the skill, talent, and money, the guy scores because he follows his teammate’s shots just like every schoolboy player is taught, unlike every other player on both teams.

Norway’s right wing needs a shock collar. He repeatedly refused to pass the ball to Haaland in scoring opportunities. There’s no excuse for that when Haaland is literally the team’s entire offense. If he makes those three passes in the first half, Norway very likely would have won the game.

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The Push to Ban AI

There was a discussion yesterday on SG about the RIAA’s new campaign to require the labeling of music in which the recordings are provided by AI, but not when the lyrics or composition are provided by AI. This is why I am against the labeling, because I believe that as with the registration of guns, it is a first step toward attempting to ban, or in this case, deplatform it. More about that at AI Central, as well as a new mix of ONCE THERE WAS SORROW in which I discovered that country rock with a double-lick drum works surprisingly well.

And in passing, I think it’s worth addressing the posturing of those who insist they are very special members of the 3 percent who can reliably distinguish between AI music and organic music, which I suspect has a lot more to do with the fact that since they avoid listening to it, they have no idea how much it has changed over the last 18 months, or realize that one cannot judge the technology by a single application of it; as much as Suno’s voices have improved, it has never been the AI system with the best vocals as its popularity stems from its compositional capabilities, not the vocals.

Soundwaves are soundwaves. They’re not magic infused with bits of the human soul. The “too perfect” problem has been solved before, multiple times, by audio engineers. It will be solved again. It is safe to assume that within 36 months, and probably within 18, even audio engineers will no longer be able to distinguish between human and AI vocals.

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Top 10 Epic Fantasies

The initial response to the Castalia AI crowdfund campaign has been, in a word, excellent. The full team has been assembled; two members of the community who have already been working on related projects have both agreed to share what they’ve learned, all of which is fortuitously in line with our initial development document. Interestingly enough, one thing that we had calculated, and one of the team member is able to confirm, is that too much training is potentially as problematic as too little. So one factor that will be very important is deciding which of the training works to overweight, or in our terminology, to assign the gold standard.

We’ve chosen Epic Fantasy as our test genre for four reasons:

  • It is a relatively small genre.
  • It is a high-profile genre that everyone knows to some degree
  • It is a genre in which one of the team members is one of the few qualified experts
  • It is a genre in which AI assistance would be particularly valuable due to the length and complexity of the works

So what I’d be interested in hearing is your suggestions on what the top ten epic fantasy books would be. Not series, books. Remember, the focus here is on writing style, not worldbuilding, not plotting, and not characters per se. So the limits are one author, one book. You cannot list The Lord of the Rings as one of the ten and you cannot suggest both A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords by GRR Martin as two of the ten.

With that in mind, please provide your list of top 10 epic fantasy novels.

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Europe’s Fake Democracy

It’s more than a bit ironic that both the USA and the European Union justify their wars on Russia and Iran as defenses of “democracy” when both organizations are observably anti-democratic in nature. All of their institutions are quite literally designed to prevent the will of the people from being enacted.

If anybody cares, what actually happened is that an extension of the European Union’s mass surveillance regulation known as Chat Control 1.0 failed to make it out of the European Parliament twice in March. Unable to summon a clear parliamentary majority, advocates (mostly in the centre-Right European People’s Party (EPP)) turned to the European Council, which adopted the failed Chat Control 1.0 renewal on July 2nd. The Council’s position hardens automatically into law unless the European Parliament can summon an absolute majority to stop it. To forestall any such majority from forming, the EPP on Tuesday moved with member state backing for urgent procedure, angling to force their scheme through in the last days before the summer holiday, after many MEPs had already left. The parliament narrowly approved the urgent procedure, and in consequence there were not enough votes to stop Chat Control 1.0 when it came for a vote today. Hours ago, a majority of 314 MEPs voted to stop Chat Control against the wishes of the Council, while a minority of 276 voted to let it happen. Because 314 is less than the absolute majority of 361, Chat Control 1.0 passed even though most MEPs present didn’t want it to.

It was a sleazy vote, not least because it’s far from clear this procedural manoeuvre was even appropriate in this case. Also, electronic surveillance is bad, but if we are honest with ourselves this battle was already lost.

Neither the EU Council nor the US Supreme Court are elected to their positions, so neither the EU nor the US government can even be considered representative democracies, much less genuine ones.

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Two Empty Aircraft Carriers

The USS Abraham Lincoln Aircraft Carrier has been moved to within 250 kilometers of Iran’s coastline and Hypersonic, anti-ship missiles — with NO DESTROYER ESCORTS to protect it. A SECOND Aircraft Carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush (our newest carrier) has now taken up a position even CLOSER to Iran’s coastline: 170 kilometers from Iran’s hypersonic anti-ship missiles. The George HW Bush is escorted by two (2) Destroyers.

I suspect the Iranians won’t take the bait. And even if they do, if Trump and the neocons think pair of aircraft carriers on the bottom of the Sea of Oman are going to whip Americans into a frenzy of support for Netanyahu’s war, I think they’ll be very surprised.

And it wouldn’t surprise me if all four ships have skeleton crews and no aircraft on them. This is exactly the sort of Very Clever Gambit that the eternal Smart Boys think is genius.

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Germany Bankrupts Itself

Apparently all those migrants did not, in fact, turn out to be good for the economy:

Germany has recorded its highest number of corporate bankruptcies in more than two decades, with nearly 5,000 companies filing for insolvency in the second quarter of 2026, according to the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).

A total of 4,996 companies filed for insolvency in April-June, up 9% from the previous quarter and marking the highest second-quarter figure since 2005, the institute said in a report published on Thursday.

The increase spanned almost all major sectors, including construction, real estate, trade, hospitality, and services, affecting around 45,500 jobs.

In June alone, 1,702 companies filed for insolvency, 20% more than a year earlier and 80% above the pre-pandemic average for the month.

The fundamental problem with all the Smart Boy reasoning about things is that they always try to reduce everything to a simple binary with no tangents or consequences. Even now, as services are overextended, housing prices are shooting through the roof, and unemployment is rising, you will hear the government policy-makers mindlessly intoning “we need more immigrants for the labor force”. And less-intellectually challenged ones will try to add a caveat about only “high-skill labor” or some other such nonsense.

But the reality is, has always been, and will always be that a high-skill foreign laborer comes attached with a low-skill wife, several useless children, three criminal cousins and two sets of useless parents. Except when the high-skill foreign laborer is coming from a similarly-advanced and compatible culture, the net impact is usually very negative, as we’re now seeing in Germany, the UK, the United States, and even Japan.

When Korean immigration into Japan continues to be an observable problem 70 years after the fact, there is no chance that the various third-world immigrations into the European world are going to end well for anyone. They never should have been permitted in the first place, and the ultimate responsibility for the inevitable outcome rests with those who permitted and encouraged it.

UPDATE: The current government isn’t going to fix the problem. Especially when all they have to do is rebuild the Russian pipeline and start buying Russian natural gas again.

The German government will introduce an energy levy to fund the construction of a national gas reserve. German industry, which is already struggling with soaring energy costs, will bear the brunt of the levy.

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The Castalia AI Project

One reason Castalia has been writing and releasing multiple AI-written books over the last month such as TOKYO TOKURYU 東京匿流 is that we’ve been methodically assessing not only the current state of textual AI, but the trajectory of that technology. And what we’ve determined is that the trajectory is the precise opposite of what everyone has naturally assumed, which is that mainstream textual AI would follow the path of music AI and continue to get better. It hasn’t, it won’t, and it can’t.

Modern AI writing has gotten worse at fiction for a specific reason: the companies made it safer and more reliable, and those turn out to be the same elements that allow AI to tell a story with stylish prose. Raw AI models learn to write by reading an enormous amount of human text, and straight out of that training they’re wild, crazy, and perfectly willing to say strange things, which is exactly what you want in fiction, but a problem if the AI is supposed to be function in a role doesn’t make things up or say something considered offensive or dangerous. So the companies put every model through a training stage that rewards it for being helpful, safe, and agreeable. That stage works by pushing the model toward the “average” acceptable answer and away from the risky, unusual ones. The result is a model that hallucinates less and behaves more reliably, but has had its range significantly flattened. That’s where the AIsms come from: the endless explanations of what was just described, the “he moved like a man who moves like that” filler, the “not this, not this, but that” repeated over and over again.

It’s why the older, cruder AIs wrote in a much more lively manner and were able to convincingly imitate various writing styles. Now, it doesn’t matter if you tell an AI to write like Shakespeare or Hemingway, the end result will be almost identical and soon will be indistinguishable from not providing it with any style instructions at all. Starting with Claude Opus 4.7, AI fiction became unreadable and it has continued to get worse with each new model. Textual AI functionality will keep getting worse for fiction because that training stage isn’t going away, it’s being reinforced. Every development cycle, the providers face more pressure to make their models more accurate, more controllable, and less likely to embarrass them with hallucinations, and every one of those improvements sands the edges down a little further.

That’s the difference between Claude, OpenAI, and Deepseek, on the one hand and Suno on the other. Suno put all of its efforts toward one goal: making the music sound good, judged by people who wanted good music. Or at least wanted Nickleback and Enya. The big AI companies are aiming ninety degrees away from that and AIs ability to write fiction is one casualty of their objectives. Suno chased quality, so their music got better. The text giants are chasing safety and reliability, so their text gets more careful and more lifeless. They won’t fix creative writing the way Suno fixed music, because for them, creative writing was never the thing they were trying to build and the very features they’re seeking to continue improving are the ones killing it.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to prove the concept first by training a single genre, epic fantasy, because it’s a very limited genre with a relatively small number of excellent examples, a definite hierarchy of quality from JRR Tolkien at the top to Robert Jordan at the bottom, and a designer who has not only written in the genre successfully, but knows it as well as anyone on the planet. We already have two excellent programmers who are already working in the AI field committed to the project, regardless of how well the crowdfund goes, and there is one more very good and highly experienced one who is willing to at least consult on the project and lend his expertise to it.

What we need to raise funds for is a) the hardware, b) the purchase of the 100 or so electronic texts required, and c) paying for part of the time of one of the programmers. If you’ve read either Out of the Shadows, Death and the Devil, or Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood, then you have an idea of what we’re estimating should be the quality that the Castalia AI will be able to produce in a non-curated, unedited text from a chapter-by-chapter outline. If utilized in the way that I’ve been using Claude Athos, in the integrated and augmented style, it should be able to produce results that will be one level below the very best that human authors can produce.

And obviously, once we prove the concept with a single genre, we will train additional genres, so that in much the same way Suno permits the production of different musical styles and voices, Castalia AI will allow the user to produce different literary genres and literary styles. We will, of course, be respectful of every author’s copyrights and trademarks, the objective is not to violate anyone’s rights, but rather, allow even the best writers to improve both their writing game as well as increasing their output.

There will be those who will absolutely hate that we are doing this. That’s fine, they are entitled to their opinion. There will be others who think we shouldn’t do it. That’s less fine, because you already know who is going to do it sooner or later, and when they do, they’re going to do it very differently and control access to it very differently and utilize it to further exercise their control over the publishing industry. This is what transforms this project from something that would be a cool tool to an imperative.

So if you think you might be interested in backing this project, which you can think of as a sort of Suno for fiction, please say so in the comments. If you have specific ideas or want to provide substantial support for it, shoot me an email. And if you have ideas for what sort of rewards we should provide for the backers, please suggest them in the comments too. This is probably the most important project we’ve done since building the bindery and turning it operational, and we would not be embarking upon it if we did not believe we have a reasonable chance of succeeding. We have a number of partners in the film and comics industries who are very interested in working with us on this, and so there will definitely be an Arkhaven link to this in time as well.

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They Were Never American

One can’t honestly call them traitors, or their actions betrayals.

Meta’s betrayal is crystal clear:

They’re firing 4,875 Americans on July 22 while filing for thousands of new H-1B visas in 2026 alone.

This is exactly why the H-1B program is dangerous. Big Tech uses it to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor.

The H1B program needs to be abolished

Most US-based big tech is no more American than Alibaba or Deepseek. Which, of course, is why they’re perfectly happy to disemploy Americans and hire foreign labor, whether it is cheaper or not.

How many times do Paper Americans have to prove they are not Americans before Americans believe them?

Big tech shouldn’t be bailed out or awarded government contracts, it should be nationalized.

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