Smells Like Corruption

Fandom Pulse exposes Ben Shapiro’s film reviews, which may be “sponsored”:

Ben Shapiro gave Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” a score between an 8.5 and a 9 out of 10, and the reaction split down two fronts at once. Segments of the right accused him of betraying a chance to unite conservatives against the film. It is noteworthy to look at our screenshot of his review and see the “includes paid promotion” in the top left corner, telling you a lot of what you may need to know about where he gets his opinions from.

Not flying so high these days…

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Conflict Incapable

The US military officially maintains a doctrine that states it is able to fight two major wars in different theaters simultaneously. The combination of 5GW and the Iran War has demonstrated that it is no longer even able to fight one major war, outside of a defensive war on US territory.

The expenditure has been historic by every measure. U.S. warships fired roughly 400 Tomahawks in the first 71 hours of Operation Epic Fury alone, principally to smash Iran’s air defenses and command nodes. By the end of the first month, the total passed 850, which made this, by a wide margin, the largest Tomahawk campaign ever conducted, more than Operation Desert Fox’s 325 and Desert Storm’s 288 combined. Firing continued to the April 8 ceasefire, and CSIS’s munitions review, citing updated Wall Street Journal reporting, put the figure at more than 1,000 Tomahawks expended. The same review tracked parallel drawdowns across the rest of the precision magazine, including heavy use of Patriot and THAAD interceptors against Iranian barrages and large expenditures of air-launched JASSM cruise missiles. Since the ceasefire collapsed this month, strikes have resumed, and no updated official count exists; the only precise statement available as of July 17 is that the true number now exceeds 1,000 by an undisclosed and growing margin.

Two details give the raw number its weight. First, the scale relative to the force: CSIS calculated that 850 missiles represented roughly half of all the Tomahawks loaded on launchers in the entire Middle East theater, and those launchers cannot be reloaded at sea; a destroyer that empties its cells must sail to a properly equipped port. Second, the alarm inside the building: officials told the Washington Post that regional Tomahawk stocks were running dangerously low, with one warning the Pentagon was approaching “Winchester,” the military’s slang for out of ammunition, even as the administration publicly insisted that critical stockpiles had not been dangerously depleted.

What a China or Russia War Would Actually Take

This is the question the months of expenditure snapshots have circled without answering, and it is where the picture turns dark. The reference point is the Pentagon-adjacent wargaming on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and its headline finding predates this war: CSIS’s landmark industrial-base study concluded from a series of wargames that the United States would likely run out of some munitions, specifically long-range precision-guided weapons, in less than one week of a Taiwan Strait conflict, a finding a member of Congress repeated almost verbatim in a formal warning to the Pentagon.

The simulations put numbers on it. Across two dozen iterations, a three-week war with China consumed on average about 4,000 air-launched JASSMs, 450 Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, 400 Harpoons, and roughly 400 land-attack Tomahawks, plus large numbers of the Navy’s SM-6.

The wrinkle in those figures is the most misunderstood part of this entire subject. The Iran war has already consumed more than twice as many Tomahawks as the Taiwan simulations averaged, and that is not because a China war would be smaller. It is because the weapons mix inverts. Against Iran’s degraded defenses, the ship-launched Tomahawk was the tool of choice. Against China’s dense air defenses and blue-water fleet, the burden shifts to stealthy air-launched standoff weapons and anti-ship missiles, the JASSMs and LRASMs, which are precisely the munitions the wargames show emptying first, and which the Iran war has also drained; the same CSIS review tracked heavy JASSM expenditure alongside the Tomahawks.

In other words, the remaining Tomahawks could, on paper, cover the modeled land-attack draw of a Taiwan fight. What they cannot do is compensate for the rest of a magazine that empties in days. CSIS’s most recent assessment, published this spring with the Iran war’s costs in view, is blunt on this point: wargames suggest hundreds of LRASMs and thousands of JASSM-ERs could be expended in just the first week of a Taiwan conflict, expenditures that would climb dramatically in later weeks, and open-source assessments indicate the Pentagon has nowhere near the inventories a protracted war with China would require.

The geography compounds it. Taiwan is an island; unlike Ukraine, it cannot be resupplied across a land border once fighting starts, so the munitions that matter are largely the ones already in theater on day one, and CSIS notes that the naval forces and missiles diverted to the Middle East for this war are exactly the ones that would otherwise sit in the Western Pacific.

What we’ve witnessed has been the most significant revolution in military affairs since WWII, the decline of the battleship, and the end of the UK as a major military power. The USA is still a major power, but it now has little more ability to project its power against a real opponent than China or Russia.

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The State of the State

We’re on target for launching the AI campaign this week, potentially as soon as Monday. Hence the relative lack of posting today, although I will do a Darkstream tonight to discuss the campaign as well as tomorrow’s game. I can also say that I will have a big announcement on Day Two, but we’ll reserve it until then. In the meantime, we are working on ironing out the rewards in order to make sure we can deliver what is promised to everyone while still maximizing the utility of the funds received from the campaign. But I think the campaign video will go a long way toward illustrating what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

In the meantime, if you want to see how far AI music and AI video has come, you can check out a new video on AI Central. This one actually came about due to a bug in the AI system, but it worked out surprisingly well nevertheless. It also helps demonstrate that we really do know what we’re doing with this stuff.

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Argentina 2 Spain 1

That’s my prediction for tomorrow. I think Spain are, with one exception, the better team. And unlike England or Norway or even France, they are a very good team. But they lack firepower, and as much as I like Yamal and Nico Williams with their speed on the side, they haven’t had a very good tournament and I suspect Argentina’s street gang tactics will manage to disrupt them.

Argentina reminds me a lot of the 2001 Patriots. They have a spirit and a drive that appears to be only matched by FIFA’s desire to send Messi out with a second World Cup trophy. When every attention-seeking Instagram influencer who can find an Argentina jersey is dancing to RESPETENS LOS RANGOS and the team reacts to every foul on Messi like a rabid pack of outraged wolves, it’s pretty clear that something unusual is in the air.

The contrast between the total indifference of the Portuguese team to Ronaldo and the teary-eyed reverence of the Argentine players for their longtime captain isn’t merely striking, it’s significant. Football is a team sport. The more players are willing to run for each other, work for each other, and fight for each other, the higher the team’s ceiling becomes. Norway lost to England because Sorloth wasn’t willing to submit his striker’s instinct to keep the ball and score to the team’s need for him to pass to Halland, while there isn’t a single Argentine player who wouldn’t made that pass.

This Argentine team is one of the few that has definitely reached its ceiling. Whether that is enough to defeat an excellent Spanish team that is better almost man-for-man across the roster, and can put its own Ballon d’Or winning midfielder, Rodri, up against Messi, is what we will have to wait to see. I think the X-factor may be that Messi knows the Spanish players, and the system, as well as he knows anything in football. He is a Barcelona legend, after all, so he knows everything about the entire Spanish roster.

The king winning one last crown, then riding off into the sunset is the fairy tale ending. Logic and data analysis tells us that Spain should win this game. And yet, I somehow don’t think they will.

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The Hellmouth’s Last Gasp

Dare we hope that the failure of The Odyssey will one day mark the end of Hollywood? The Dark Herald offers hope.

The Odyssey has all the familiar hallmarks of Oscar bait, but the motivation behind it feels unusual. It doesn’t feel as though Christopher Nolan made this movie primarily to win an Oscar for Christopher Nolan. It feels as though he made it to win an Oscar for Hollywood.

This is not merely a prestige production. It is an institutional demonstration. Hollywood has assembled one of its few remaining bankable directors, an army of recognizable stars, one of the foundational works of Western literature, an enormous budget, practical locations, theatrical exclusivity, and every available marker of cultural seriousness. The finished film is being presented less as a movie than as evidence.

Look, Hollywood says. We can still do this. We can still make grand historical spectacles. We can still adapt great literature. We can still create movie stars. We can still convince adults to enter a theater. We can still make something that matters.

This is movie made to vindicate the entire Hollywood film industry. Nolan already possesses prestige. What appears to require validation is the system around him. The industry wants The Odyssey to be great because it desperately needs proof that it remains capable of greatness…

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is not a genuinely terrible movie. There are moments when you can almost see the masterpiece struggling to emerge from beneath all of Christopher Nolan’s Nolanisms. There are moments where the practical effects are magnificent, where Ludwig Göransson’s score briefly finds supports a scene, and where Homer himself is finally permitted a rare chance to peek through the cracks in Nolan’s adaptation.

And then Christopher Nolan invariably reminds us that we are watching CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S THE ODYSSEY… Not Homer’s.

It’s worth noting that Fandom Pulse also has a review. Unsurprisingly, it is not particularly favorable either.

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The End of General Purpose AI

AI Central explains why specific-purpose AI is increasingly necessary, and makes the case for Castalia’s upcoming AI crowdfunding campaign, which will be announced next week.

Sudowrite’s Muse represents the most developed response. Rather than wrapping a general-purpose model in fiction-oriented prompts, Sudowrite trained Muse on a curated, consent-based literary corpus and optimized it for prose quality. The model includes a creativity dial that lets writers control output range on a scale from one to eleven, a style-matching system that trains on samples of the writer’s own work, and no content filters. Reviews consistently describe Muse as avoiding the AI-isms that plague general-purpose output, with particular strength in pacing, tension, and subtext.

Muse has company. Other platforms have built fiction-specific models or fiction-optimized workflows, and writers who have access to both purpose-built and general-purpose tools tend to draft with the former and brainstorm with the latter. The category has grown large enough that review sites now maintain dedicated rankings for fiction-specific AI, separate from their general-purpose lists.

A separate category of consumer tools has emerged around children’s fiction, offering illustrated hardcover books generated from brief prompts. Most of these wrap general-purpose models with genre templates, and the output reflects the underlying architecture: competent, safe, and largely interchangeable from one book to the next.

The parallel to Suno is direct. Suno optimized for making music that sounds good to listeners and pulled away from general-purpose models that treated music generation as one capability among many. Fiction-specific tools are following the same path, trading breadth for depth in a domain where depth determines quality.

However, it’s already clear that Muse is not going to be a viable option. I already knew it wasn’t, because I tried it and found it to be distinctly inferior to Claude 4.3; its interface actually tended to get in my way a lot more than it helped. And, furthermore, its future trajectory is already clear, because Sudowrite is a converged organization.

 I went to Sunowrite and set up an account. It is clearly meant for women with that cutesy pink color scheme. It asks a lot of questions about what kind of writer you are (I chose professional, merely so I get the whole thing and not some watered down version), what genre, style, all the stuff you’d expect. Then I finally arrive at the start of the process and there’s already a paragraph created before I’ve entered anything but the basics. Oookay. I ignore that and start putting stuff into the “Story Bible”, boxes for Brain Dump, Genre, Style (chose one), Synopsis, and then Characters. You know what’s coming, right? Click on Add Character, and take a wild, wild, guess at what the first box that describes the character? You know, right?

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Japan Rejects Clown World

Japan is refusing to embrace the false god of equality.

Japan’s parliament enacted Friday a historic revision to the 19th-century Imperial House Law by insisting only paternal-lineage men can become emperor, sparking fear that it could doom the already shrinking imperial family. The revisions include adoption of distant male relatives to father future heirs and allowing princesses to keep their royal status after marrying commoners.

Royal watchers and experts fear the new measures could doom the 1,500-year-old hereditary institution by insisting that only men can be emperor, sparking worry about the shrinking, fast-aging imperial family. Emperor Naruhito ’s 24-year-old daughter is hugely popular, and many Japanese want her to be his successor, but Princess Aiko is ineligible because she is a woman. Japan’s male-only succession rule means the line must move to the emperor’s younger brother, then to his 19-year-old nephew Prince Hisahito. Next in line after him is the emperor’s 90-year-old uncle.

In an imperial family that places a premium on male royal babies, Hisahito is the first such boy to be born in four decades. Only five of the 16 adults in the imperial family — there are no children — are men. This matters, as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and other conservatives insist the male bloodline is “the only source.

And they are also rejecting the satanic ideology of so-called “free speech”.

Japan on Friday enacted a controversial new law prohibiting desecration of its national flag, a key right-wing agenda pushed by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Opponents say it’s an attempt to intimidate the public and silence criticism of her government. The law punishes publicly damaging or defacing the national flag, known as “hinomaru,” including livestreaming of the scene in ways that would offend the feelings of others.

Opponents say the ambiguous law only intimidates people from using the flag in art, protests or other forms of expression, and could violate constitutional freedom of speech. Japan has a law to punish vandalizing foreign national flags, mainly those displayed at diplomatic facilities, to avoid international disputes. Takaichi says Japan’s lack of a law criminalizing disrespectful handling of its own national flag is “wrong.”

Violators would face up to two years in prison or a maximum fine of 200,000 yen.

Of course, we all know that the advocates of so-called “free speech” were lying through their forked tongues, because once they enshrined the “right” to blasphemy, treason, and pornography in the Clown World systems, they immediately instituted their “hate speech” and “anti-semitism” laws that obviously violate the very fake right that they created.

One of the books most recently bound by the Castalia Bindery, A History of Freedom of Thought by J.B. Bury, explains the first half of this process from the perspective of a free speech champion of the Enlightenment.

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Never Give Up Cash

The problems of paper money pale in comparison with those of a cashless economy.

Credit cards could not be used at convenience stores and other merchants across Japan for hours on Thursday following a system outage that also affected some transportation companies’ credit card-linked electronic money apps. Major credit card issuer Mitsubishi UFJ Nicos Co. said the trouble began around 8 a.m. when card payments could not be processed at some merchants, while Sumitomo Mitsui Card Co. reported a similar problem.

The card companies said the trouble was caused by an outage in an international credit card brand’s network connecting merchants with card issuers. Sources familiar with the matter said the outage occurred within Visa’s network.

Every nation should go to the maximum extremes, including adopting constitutional measures, to ensure that the banks are never allowed to force the people into using digital payment methods. Just their dependence upon electricity is sufficient to demonstrate the absolute need to avoid a digital payments monopoly.

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The Postmortem

Reading the English media and social media vs the rest of world media and social media is absolutely surreal today. If you have an Instagram account, I HIGHLY recommend a scroll-through.

England:

  • IT’S THOMAS TUCHEL’S FAULT! We did NOT bring him in to do what Southgate would have done with a 1-0 lead!
  • We were totally in control of the game until we scored. Why did the manager leash our Brave Lions?
  • The first Argentine goal-scorer should have gotten a red card in the first three minutes of the game.
  • Pickford should have saved that first goal.

Everyone else

  • MESSI IS FOOTBALL!
  • It’s Jude Bellingham’s fault. Why did he pick a fight with Lionel Messi? What did he think would happen?
  • How did Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham, and Eliot Anderson not get yellow cards for their violent fouls on Messi?
  • Pickford was amazing in saving two certain goals.

I just find the contrast intriguing. Especially since it tends to show how it should not be surprising that the English players would have a tendency to go conservative and play negative. Here’s one observation that I’ve only seen once, but I think may be particularly perspicacious: Tuchel was tell his players to keep pushing forward, but they wouldn’t do it after they had the lead. So his defensive substitution wasn’t his tactical plan, it was an attempt to structurally defend what he observed was the shift in the players’ collective mentality.

Also, while Bellingham is a great player, he’s a hothead and more than a bit of a stupid prick. So the fact that he was dumb enough to follow in the footsteps of those who angered Michael Jordan and Steve Smith and inspired them to new heights in big games shouldn’t be a massive surprise.

Jude Bellingham was caught slapping rival Argentinian player Valentin Barco in feisty full-time scenes following England’s World Cup capitulation in Atlanta. Bellingham aimed a slap at the back of the head of Strasbourg star Barco, who did not even play in the match, in the aftermath of the Three Lions’ late collapse and 2-1 defeat.

UPDATE: Everyone blaming Tuchel for parking the bus is ignoring the timeline.

England were on the precipice of their first World Cup final in 60 years after taking the lead in the 55th minute through Anthony Gordon, but Tuchel opted to park the bus rather than try for a second goal. The German moved to play five at the back, with Gordon coming off for Ezri Konsa in the 72nd minute. Declan Rice and Reece James then made way for Dan Burn and Nico O’Reilly 10 minutes later.

The change they’re all blaming was 17 minutes later. Which is why I suspect that the fault for switching to a defensive mindset lay more with the England players than with the manager. If you’re urging your players to keep attacking, but they’re falling back despite your instructions, then reinforcing your defense is the correct decision whether it works out in the end or not.

After the match, Tuchel insisted he had ‘no regrets’ about his tactical decisions, arguing that the problems began before any of his changes were made.

What he probably needed to do to give England its very best chance to win was take off Harry Kane and whichever midfielder had shifted to a defensive mindset, but imagine how his critics would be howling for his head if he’d done that with a 1-0 lead and it didn’t work out! Tuchel hasn’t criticized any of the players, but he has said that he has no regrets about his changes, so I’m reasonably confident that this is the correct explanation for what so many people have found puzzling.

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Argentina 2 England 1

It was a very good game. Very chippy in the first half, as expected, but like the France-Spain semifinal, one of the more entertaining matches of the Mondiale. England’s goal was magnificent, but it didn’t escape either manager’s notice that it was against the run of play. I thought at the time – not after the fact, like a lot of commenters now that the results are known – that it was a big mistake to switch into a defensive mode and try to hold on against the very experienced reigning World Champions.

I actually thought Argentina was a bit sloppy and careless, particularly at the back, until after England scored. In addition to sparking the change in England’s tactics, it also served to focus the Argentines; they would have scored almost right away if it weren’t for a fantastic return and last-ditch tackle by Jed Spence.

I thought the game was over after that 15-second span when Argentina nearly scored three times. Pickford was playing out of his mind in the English goal, but what works against teams like Mexico and Norway was never going to work against Argentina. They could have scored 7 times in the last 20 minutes, and only two posts, Messi deciding to waste time at the very end, and Pickford’s heroics kept the final score from being worse.

I thought England did very well against a better team, and while I would have gambled on trying to score a second goal and winning the game outright rather than trying to hold on, I understand why Tuchel decided to go defensive and it’s entirely possible that the end result would have been even worse. Again, England’s goal was against the run of play and Argentina was both a little unlucky and a little defensively lazy on the goal and the action leading up to it.

The fundamental problem, which so few professional managers understand, is that the cost of the mentality shift is seldom worth the benefit from having more men in the box. This is especially true when trying to defend against a team with at least five players capable of scoring outside the box and several excellent crossers. Messi is rightfully being praised for his two assists, but the low crosses being repeatedly whipped in from the right side by #4, I think it was, were simply lethal. Frankly, I thought England did extremely well to avoid committing any fouls and giving up any penalties in the last 20 minutes.

Anyhow, we’ll discuss more on tonight’s Darkstream, which will be devoted to discussing a) the World Cup, b) the upcoming AI campaign, and c) possibly a new song.

UPDATE: Before anyone complains about Argentina playing rough, I checked it out in slow motion and Jude Bellingham should definitely been called for a penalty for this foul against Messi. He literally put an arm around him, drove his shoulder into him, and knocked him down in the box without ever touching the ball.

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