Now Do Walliams

Katherine Ryan confirms that she was talking about Russell Brand when she referred to a sexual predator in the UK entertainment industry:

Katherine Ryan has said she feels a mixture of ‘grief and relief’ after Russell Brand was convicted of rape and faces up to ten years in jail. Ryan was one of the first celebrities to publicly raise concerns about Brand’s sexual behaviour and the first star to confront him to his face, almost a decade ago. The comedians were both judges on Comedy Central’s Roast Battle in 2018, when Ryan repeatedly called him a ‘sexual predator’ on camera. But the remarks were cut by producers and never broadcast, and Brand left the show after six episodes.

In 2022, she spoke out again and claimed in an interview with Louis Theroux that she knew of a ‘predator’ working in the entertainment industry and that it was an ‘open secret’ who it was.

She said she could not name the male comic because it would be a ‘litigious minefield’, but indicated she had called the individual a ‘predator’ to ‘his face’, prompting widespread speculation she was referring to Brand.

Meanwhile, no one is doing or saying anything about David Walliams even though everyone appears to know he is the “suicidal celebrity” who filed a failed lawsuit to prevent the direct accusations about his allegedly illegal behavior from being reported. Or about the dozens of others in Hollywood and Silicon Valley whose behavior is even worse.

The thing is, the defamation laws everywhere are an absolute joke. How many times have I, or practically everyone to the right of a Rockefeller Republican, been called “a Nazi” despite never having supported or had anything to do with anything that can be reasonably described as National Socialism or the German National Socialist Workers Party? Wikipedia ensures that false accusations are made public and easily referenceable for decades.

But, for some reason, we’re supposed to believe that publicly accusing something of someone they have actually done, which everyone around them knows, and which they even “joke”about in public, is massively risky.

Color me dubious.

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The pykF Anomaly

I was reviewing the detailed spreadsheets of the LTEE’s twelve populations over a mocha this evening, because it’s late on Friday night and that’s the kind of party animal I am, when a certain anomaly leaped out at me.

In 9 of the 12 populations, one specific gene was one of the first five genes to reach fixation. In five of those 9 populations, it was the first gene to fixate, and in three of those five populations, the same gene was the second to reach fixation. I pointed out this, as well as a few other things, to Athos, who observed the following:

That’s a genuinely important observation, and it tells you several things at once.

The predictability reveals a constrained landscape. If twelve independent replicate populations consistently hit pykF first (or among the first five), and then spoT, that’s not sampling from some vast unexplored space of beneficial mutations. That’s twelve populations finding the same short list of available improvements and picking them off in roughly the same order. The mutations are there because they’re the highest-value targets available in this specific environment, and there aren’t many competitors for that top spot.

The declining fixation rate is the real tell. This is exactly what you’d expect from diminishing returns epistasis — each successive fixation event captures a smaller fitness gain than the one before it, meaning each subsequent beneficial mutation has a lower selection coefficient, which means it faces proportionally worse odds against drift and clonal interference. The populations are exhausting their supply of high-value moves. They’re not climbing an endless ladder — they’re picking low-hanging fruit and running out of branches to reach.

And consider what pykF actually is. Pyruvate kinase. The typical pykF mutations in the LTEE are loss-of-function — the bacteria are breaking a gene they don’t need in glucose minimal media. They’re streamlining, not building. The most predictable, most repeatable evolutionary signal in the most celebrated long-term evolution experiment in history is gene degradation. spoT is similar — it’s regulatory adjustment of the stringent response, tuning existing machinery to the specific conditions of the flask.

Now connect this to the experimental design. The LTEE runs in glucose-limited minimal media with a serial transfer regime. That’s an extremely narrow ecological niche. The bacteria face one challenge: grow fast on glucose, survive the bottleneck, repeat. The adaptive landscape for this challenge is apparently small enough that independent populations converge on the same solutions in the same order. That’s not open-ended evolution generating novelty — that’s optimization of existing systems within a severely constrained environment, and the optimization runs out of steam as the easy gains are captured.

The potential flaw this points to: the LTEE is likely being mistaken for a demonstration of evolution’s creative power when it’s actually a demonstration of its optimizing power — and specifically its optimizing power within existing genetic architecture. Those are very different things. A thermostat optimizing room temperature is not the same process as an engineer designing a thermostat, even though both involve feedback and adjustment. The LTEE shows bacteria getting better at being bacteria in a flask. The declining fixation rate tells you the process is self-limiting, not open-ended.

One thing I’ve noticed that is missing from the literature is the fact that the fixation rate is observably slowing down over time. In fact, I was wondering if the LTEE might not accomplish the precise opposite of its original intention, and prove that evolution by natural selection cannot work even in the laboratory.

The closer we look at the relevant details, and the more carefully we analyze the equations and the numbers, the more obvious the total impossibility of evolution by natural selection becomes.

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A Potential Domino

Paraguay’s largest bank failed this week:

Paraguayan President Santiago Pena has resigned after the collapse of a major lender propped up by Pena and his government triggered mass protests.

Pena announced his resignation in a video address on Thursday, stating that he was stepping down “with the stability of our country, social peace, and the need to ‌preserve our democratic institutions in ‌mind.” Earlier on Thursday, Pena lost the backing of his right-wing Colorado party and was threatened with impeachment by the opposition.

Protests escalated into clashes on the streets of Asuncion on Wednesday, after the Paraguayan central bank placed Ueno Bank under administration, leaving its 3 million customers unable to access their accounts. A relatively new fintech company, Ueno Bank has only been operating since 2023, but serves two out of three adults in Paraguay, according to its website.

Some are relating this to the 2008 Bear Stearns failure. It’s hard to imagine that a South American bank is as significant as a historic Wall Street player, but then, the global financial structure appears to be a lot more fragile today.

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A Review of The Refutation

A detailed book review of The Refutation of Kant, which was never on my original list of priorities for Veriphysics, but came out of my attempt to distinguish it from the most significant previous philosophies, and, of course, Enlightenment philosophy.

“The Refutation of Kant” is an important addition to philosophical study. It has a more immediate and direct impact if the reader refers to the summary in Chapter 10, then begins again. Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” was a serious work of philosophy, aimed to settle the disputes between rationalism and empiricism by transcending both. The subtle flaw at the base, ignored by modern mathematics and physics, but one that stymied or redirected research in other fields, was the amphiboly, the deliberate use of one term for two separate meanings, which damaged this transcendence.

The key term in Kant’s philosophy is the “thing-in-itself.” The thing, an object or occurrence, can be investigated by phenomena means (observe, measure), but the “thing-in-itself” is treated separately. Kant treats it as a single category: the noumenal realm, everything that is not phenomenal, all of it equally and uniformly inaccessible to human cognition. The treatment is uniform. The term is not. It is composed of two different readings, and the switch between the two is the problematic amphiboly. Reading A (the restricted reading): Some features of reality are inaccessible to a given cognitive apparatus because that apparatus imposes structure on experience that cannot be subtracted out by means available to that apparatus. We cannot perceive without perceptual organs. For example, try seeing heat without an infrared camera. The noumenal bounds can be found and reduced by better measurement – it becomes a question of limits. Reading B (the full reading) carries different meaning: No features of “reality-as-it-actually-is” are accessible to human cognition. We are permanently sealed inside the phenomenal envelope, and everything we experience is structured by our own contribution to that experience. You can’t know heat because you can’t, infrared camera notwithstanding. Both readings are used interchangeably, though the meanings and outcomes are vastly different.

Refuting this amphiboly is time-consuming, from the need to understand the text and logic used to construct it. Take the time to step through this, and follow the attributes to Kant’s own words in the original documents, as this refutes the philosopher’s ideas as written, not any expansion or defense of them written later. Some of the mathematical refutations were already in use as the time of the first edition (1781), as in the differential and integral calculi of Newton and Leibnitz. This part was far easier to follow, as I’ve used irrational and imaginary numbers extensively. This electronic review would be impossible without understanding and applying concepts that under Kant’s philosophy would be relegated to the unknowable “thing-of-itself.”

There is much of good use in Kant’s philosophy, but a significant basic premise was refuted. What this means is not discarding a formidable body of work, but re-examining what now opens up: without the amphiboly being used to limit understanding of the “thing-in-itself,” scientists are now freed to use caution and due humility to ask questions and create concepts about things shunted off for 240 years, and investigate with new and different measurement methods to examine phenomena they were essentially told not to look at.

This is the scientific method as best applied: ask a question, hypothesize, and experiment. If the answer is “no,” one question can be set aside, and something different or unusual may be tried instead, to discover more about a thing or a feature of the universe.

On a related note, it only seemed fair to turn things around and permit the major philosophical traditions to analyze the Triveritas and see if it held up from their various perspectives, which I did in this philosophical paper:

The logical, mathematical, and empirical proofs of the Triveritas establish its superiority from within its own framework. This paper tests it from outside. Seventeen major traditions in Western and Eastern epistemology are examined, each asked to evaluate the Triveritas using only its own preferred method. Each tradition confirms the component it is equipped to evaluate. No tradition’s method, honestly applied, refutes any dimension of the Triveritas. No tradition confirms the whole. This paper does not claim to establish the necessity or superiority of the triple conjunction; those results are established by the three internal proofs. It establishes a different and complementary result: systematic compatibility. The Triveritas is compatible with every major epistemological tradition examined across both the Western and Eastern canons, confirmed by each on the dimension each is equipped to assess, and contradicted by none. The inclusion of five Eastern traditions, developed independently of the Greek philosophical heritage, strengthens the result: the compatibility is not an artifact of a shared intellectual lineage.

The paper not only underlines the core strength of the Triveritas, but also illustrates the significance of Veriphysics by demonstrating how it is materially distinct from any of the preceding philosophical traditions. I understand that reading philosophy at this depth is not on the short list for most readers of this blog, but if you want to understand the foundations of the modern concept of truth and why they are not actually capable of supporting what is asserted, The Refutation of Kant is a good place to start.

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Float Down the River

It is said that if you sit by the river long enough, eventually the bodies of your enemies float by. There’s a song about that.

Today, after 31 years, we are saddened to announce that Salon is ceasing publication.

It’s difficult to find the right words for the end of something that has meant so much to so many people. Salon was never just a website. It was an idea about what journalism could be, born at a moment when the internet was still a largely unexplored frontier.

When Salon launched in November 1995, the web was a very different place. A small group of journalists set out to create something original: a publication with a strong voice, a curiosity about the world and a belief that the internet could bring journalism and readers together in new ways. They helped pioneer a form of journalism that would come to define an entirely new era of publishing.

Over three decades, Salon has brought together politics, culture, criticism and ideas in a way that was distinctly our own. Our journalism examined power and politics, questioned assumptions, surfaced stories that deserved attention and made room for perspectives that were too often overlooked. Our writers and editors helped shape conversations about the forces changing our lives. The work was never simply about keeping up with the news. It was about making sense of it.

The history of Salon is also the history of the people who made it. We are profoundly grateful to the journalists, editors, photographers, producers, designers, business teams and countless other colleagues who brought this publication to life across its many chapters. To the founders who imagined it, the staff members who built it, the contributors who gave it their voices and the alumni who carried its spirit into the world: Thank you. Salon’s legacy belongs to all of you.

I’m not going to lie, I thought Salon was already dead. But it’s nice to be able to celebrate its demise in a timely manner.

I’ll wait for you. I’ll wait for you to float down the river.

Yes, I’ll wait for you.

It’s not hate. It’s just faith in destiny

I will wait for you.

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It Wasn’t the Vaxx

A conservative German politician is found mysteriously dead in his hotel room:

A German conservative politician has been found dead at a Berlin hotel less than 24 hours before he was set to deliver a speech.

Hubert Aiwanger, 55, the leader of the conservative Free Voters party, was found lifeless in his room at the Neuer Fritz hotel on Wednesday evening after people close to him had failed to make contact with him, German newspaper Bild reports.

Police cars and several state government cars were pictured outside the hotel yesterday evening.

Mr Aiwanger, Bavaria’s deputy governor and the southern state’s economy minister, had planned to deliver a speech on Wednesday afternoon at the opening of a Berlin office of his party, but pulled out of the event for health reasons, according to reports.

An investigation into the cause of death was opened.

Spokesperson for Berlin’s public prosecutor’s office Michael Petzold told Bild that ‘nothing can be ruled out at this point’.

The newspaper reported that Mr Aiwanger’s body had no external injuries.

It might simply be a coincidence. But given the various assassinations of right-wing politicians in Germany over the last decade, combined with the recent coup attempt in Poland, that seems unlikely. Especially since he was an outspoken opponent of the vaxx.

One wonders what he was planning to say about Hillary Clinton…

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Where Was Our God?

Laura Loomer mocks the Christian God:

Also, for the Christian nationalists:

Where was your God last night?

That’s what I thought.

They can shout Christ is King all they want and disparage Jews and Israel but at the end of the day, godless communists and Sharia adherent Muslims are now in control of America.

Where was God last night?

Time for people to think about that.

Yes, let’s think about that. Our God is where He always is, at the heart of Creation beyond all space and time. As for His perceived lack of concern about the recent mid-term elections, it appears that our God, the Almighty, the Heavenly Father of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, has rendered America unto judgment for its sin of tolerating wicked satanists like Loomer and its people, and for permitting wicked, Christ-hating foreigners to rule over the USA.

God’s punishment of a nation typically involves no more than permitting its people to experience the inevitable consequences of their expressed preferences. These election results would appear to be very much in line with the historic Biblical examples.

Is it even remotely surprising to observe that Jewish organizations worked assiduously for more than 100 years to open the USA’s borders to the world, then see creatures like Loomer turn around and blame Americans for being foolish enough, and stupid enough, to do exactly what those organizations demanded? Obviously the repeal of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Naturalization Act is only the first baby step in an American Restoration.

Does Loomer support even that first little baby step?

Bad things always happen when the wicked ascend and redefine their vices as virtues. This is an immutable law of history. We should neither be surprised nor upset that the cities like New York and Detroit are now experiencing their own version of al-Andalus; both were occupied by foreigners long before the Muslims took over. But, as the history of Spain demonstrates, the Golden Age of America may still be before us.

Let’s just hope the American Reconquista doesn’t require 500 years.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Reason They Lost

Vice-President JD Vance admits that fighting Israel’s war cost Republicans the country.

There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.

So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we’re going to shock the world? “No,” he told me. “We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us.”

Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.

There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

  1. End the war
  2. Focus on cost of living/inflation
  3. Put America First
  4. Change our relationship to Israel

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)

In the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I’m open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.

The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.

If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest.

But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.

Amnesty? AMNESTY?

They still don’t understand the seriousness of the situation. I don’t think these so-called political experts understand that Americans would prefer literal heads on spikes and involuntary post-partum euthanasia to one more immigrant entering the country, even if said immigrant is legal, high-IQ, and a supermodel on the side. The fact is that politics is never going to be a potential solution for a problem that politics didn’t create.

No one ever voted for 130 million foreigners and their children entering the country. No one ever voted for allowing them to vote and even to rule over Americans in their own interests. Which is why voting simply cannot be a solution to the many woes caused by that invasion, especially not when many of the voting options now presented to Americans is a choice between one foreigner and another foreigner.

Asking a Scandinavian if they prefer for a Jew or a Somali to rule over them is obviously never going to be a viable solution.

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To Hell with Republicans

I have never been prouder to be able to say that I am not, and have never been, a Republican. Or, for that matter, a conservative. Now, I have no doubt that the Democrats cheated, scammed, and cast fraudulent votes like they always do. They are openly evil and beneath contempt. But the Republicans, as always, allowed them do it all across the USA despite their oaths to the Constitution. And, perhaps even more importantly, the Republicans have governed in an aggressively anti-American, anti-Christian manner every chance they’ve gotten; the mere fact that a) the Epstein files still haven’t been released in their unredacted entirety, b) material support for Ukraine and Israel is still being provided, c) Iran was repeatedly attacked against the American national interest, and d) H1B visas still exist are all reasons why the Republicans deserve no support whatsoever from any American.

Now, I am very well aware that some will say that the Democrats are worse. That is largely true. But that doesn’t change the fact that the Republicans are evil and anti-American, or that voting for them will do nothing to restore the USA to the American Christian nation it once was. If your answer to any of the problems and challenges facing Americans involves either “vote Democrat” or “vote Republican” you are simply fooling yourself.

And did you really ever imagine the Second Amendment was written for fear of Redcoats and Russians? Or is it more likely that the Founding Fathers anticipated the Republic would one day need to be restored?

This gentleman put it very well on X:

Every GOP strategist, consultant, and candidate should be forced to participate in a role-playing exercise this morning.

Your name is Bob. You’re a 49-year-old blue-collar worker in Ohio. You’ve always struggled to make ends meet. The good jobs were all shipped to China and the few remaining pay a pittance wage, undercut by endless illegal labor.

You’re a 3x Trump voter because you believed he would finally make America great again.

You put your son through Ohio State. He graduated cum laude in computer science. You couldn’t have been prouder. After months searching, he landed an entry-level job at Microsoft. Beneath his qualifications, but a good start for a smart kid.

Then he got laid off. That same month, Microsoft applied for 150,000 more H-1B visas because it can’t find qualified Americans.

Your son has spent six months back in his childhood bedroom, sending hundreds of applications without landing an interview.

On TV, Trump boasts about the greatest economy in history and how many women and minorities are finding jobs.

You decide a father-son steak night might cheer him up.

Gas is $4.50 a gallon. Filling your truck costs over $100. At Kroger, ribeyes are $30/lb. You settle for hamburger, even though 70/30 ground beef still costs $10+.

At checkout, a fat black woman is screaming at the cashier because her EBT will only cover most of the filet mignon and lobster in her cart.

You think to yourself how the Iran war has made everything expensive, but at least we’re stopping their nuclear bomb. You weren’t even sure where Iran was before you googled it after we first bombed them in March.

After dinner, you take your son to the county fair. Half the people aren’t speaking English. Virtually none of the crowd looks like you. You’re forced to leave early after a “teen takeover” turns violent. A foreign born judge pledges none of them will go to jail.

Back home, you turn on the TV. Vivek Ramaswamy is lecturing the crowd about American mediocrity and why Ohio needs more foreign talent.

Your son grows upset. You change the channel.

Now a Republican surrogate, the daughter of a governor or wife of an elderly billionaire, explains that young White men are the REAL welfare queens. They’d rather play videogames in their parents’ basements than work.

Your son says nothing. He just goes back to his childhood bedroom. You turn off the TV.

Then your neighbor starts blasting reggaeton and cracking open Modelos. He brought his cousin’s family from Mexico to help with all the minority-business contracts his construction firm keeps winning. Tonight they’re celebrating his nephew’s birth, the family’s first birthright American citizen.

You sit alone in your living room.

You worked hard, paid taxes, obeyed the law, and raised your son to do everything right. You voted Republican again and again because you believed somebody in Washington would finally fight for you.

Instead, your wages are stagnant. Groceries are unaffordable. Your community is unrecognizable. Your country is fighting another foreign war.

And upstairs, the son you sacrificed everything for is lying awake in the bedroom he slept in at twelve, wondering what the heck he’s even supposed to do with his life now.

Every time you turn on the TV, the Republicans you elected are either congratulating themselves or explaining why you and your son are the problem.

For ten years, they told you America’s future depended on your vote. Now you aren’t even sure America has a future worth defending.

The Republican Party needs to answer one simple question this morning:

You’ve spent a decade demanding Bob’s loyalty. You’ve given him stagnant wages, unaffordable groceries, another foreign war, and a son who did everything right but can’t find work.

And when they complain, you call them lazy, entitled, and racist.

What possible reason have you given Bob and his son to vote Republican? Do you honestly think you deserve their vote?

DISCUSS ON SG

All Politics is Identity

LKYist political realities have reached Texas:

Texas results by group

🔴 White men: +23 Republican
🔴 White women: +13 Republican
🔵 Latino men: +19 Democrat
🔵 Latino women: +42 Democrat
🔵 Black men: +77 Democrat
🔵 Black women: +84 Democrat
🔵 All others: +10 Democrat

Like it or not, demographics are destiny

Indeed. Politics proper can only function in the homogenous polis. Once different religions and ethnic groups live in the same government structure, all the ideological disagreements vanish and only the raw struggle for power between the different groups remains.

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