The point of believing anything is to become a psychopathic fanatic for it. It is to gain the will, ruthlessness, and commitment that comes with true belief. It is to erect a rock which you can stand on and trust your life to.

You know how a great motorcyclist can ride so fast and perform stunts that seem so dangerous? He understands and has 100% faith in how the bike works so he can gamble his life on it. He is a psychopathic fanatic for the mechanics of his bike.

You know how great surgeons historically have performed highly invasive life threatening surgeries ON THEMSELVES without anaesthetic when in dire straits? They knew their craft that well and had 100% faith in their ability. They were psychopathic fanatics for medical knowledge.

There are people who live on the 100th floor of skyscrapers, who spend days on end and every hour or their sleep suspended at the deadly height of 200 or 300meters above the ground. They are Psychopathic fanatics for the solidity of Concrete rebar construction. If you showed up panicking at the danger they were in and tried to drag them out of their apartment that no one should sleep suspended 300 meters in the air… they’d fight you in the doorway.

Yet somehow people who believe they have The Word of God himself on their side are consistently preening, cowardly, and morally unwilling to commit to anything.

Somehow people who “believe in the constitution” and have sworn to die to defend it, start sputtering and get mad at you if you ask whether they’re committed to what George Washington believed, or what Martin Luther King believed about the proper relationship between the races and whether those constitutional rights apply to blacks and recent immigrants.

People who know everything about world war 2 and take the greatest pride in defending their grandfather’s legacy get incandescently mad if you point out that their grandfather in fact did not fight for gay interracial marriage in France… he was a WW2 war hero and he subsequently voted for George Wallace, and considered himself to have been fighting for the greatness of the white American race.

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Yet these contradictions are not thought to be contradictions… rather Americans and everyone in their empire equates the sincerity of their faith and the quality of their moral character with precisely HOW hypocritical and unbelieving they can be. Just how loyal to the white lies and euphemisms they can show themselves.

Morality itself is equated with lies, hypocrisies, and polite euphamisms.

You are a BAD PERSON to insist on that passage in Leviticus when your church tries to hold a gay marriage.

You are a BAD PERSON to point out that George Washington would be disgusted and demand immediate racial armed conflict over something like the Civil Rights Act.

You are a bad person to point out that the ACTUAL WW2 generation had LOTS of things to say about the idea that they fought an antiracist crusade for gay marriage and in fact 100% despised the boomer hippies. That’s why gay marriage was passed in the 2010s they had to wait for the WW2 veterans to DIE.

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All Americans left and right, (and now basically everyone in a country of their alliance network) all play the “pretending not to understand you” game… they equate their moral status with their ability to NOT believe in things, with their ability to hold completely contradictory ideas at the same time and not get caught out in the contradiction. They are a nation of frauds and charlatans in which status, esteem, and moral authority accumulates to the person who lies the most brazenly and shamelessly, as litterally anyone outside America who has heard tell of a Megachurch can tell you…

Is it any wonder their presidents are Actors, Southern pedophiles, fake Texans, DEI hires, Senile old men, and Donald Trump?

And it is EVERYONE in the American alliance network. To passionately insist on the most obvious truths which everyone knows is to lose your job in America. To do it in an American colony is to be jailed, as indeed many have been.

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Part of me sometimes wonders if I am mistaken when I critique “Belief in Christianity”, or the Constitution, or even Globohomo… That the problem is less the specifics of the beliefs and more that the very act of believing is an inverted abomination in the minds of seemingly everyone who is not a violent psychopathic sperg.

That the point of having faith in, or believing anything at any strength is to ultimately get as close as possible to 100% certainly or 100% rejection as quickly as possibly.

In the same manner that the motorcyclist does not inspect his brake-pads to feel warm fuzzy feelings about the holy trinity of arrested momentum (front brake, rear brake, engine brake)… But to determine ruthlessly and efficiently whether his brakes are decisively in working order or not… and then to get on with betting his short life, and hopefully get chicks, in sexy violent high-speed action on the solidity of that judgement.

The point of inquiring into a faith, or creed, or civic religious idea, is to quickly and reliably as can safely be done… Come to a definite and convicted judgement approaching 100% certainty or 0% total rejection.

And then gamble your life on it.

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Say what you will about them, this is what the Puritans actually did when they founded America.

This what the American founders did when they swore their loyalty to each other and vowed to disembowel with a bayonet any patriotic British volunteer who tried to stop them.

This is what the Communist revolutionaries did to seize Russia.

This is what the German and Central European Friekorp did to stop the communist advance.

This is what until very recently marriage was, when two people swore their undying love for each other and accepted each other for the rest of their lives, come what may.

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Life is a short, dangerous, unequal, ruthless, high-speed, violent endeavor.

Whether one “lives fast and dies young” in some war or wreckage… Or whether one plays it safe and lives to 90… We are really only discussing whether one has 10-20 youthful sexually active years in which to become reproductively successful, of maybe 20-40 on the highest end (if you are a man and think you’ll be able to have kids in your 50s, and even then you probably won’t get a healthy young girl to go along with that)…

The years 65-95 are really not going to matter to whether your life was a success unless you become a US president.

So 10-20 years, or 20-40 years… All the preening, worrying, anxiety, hand-wringing, and insistences that one “give peace a chance”… Is at best buying you double the time. Its not much, and the second time allotment is worse is every possible way to the first (you’re uglier, fatter, more tired, less intelligent, put on muscle worse)…

And instead of COMMITTING and BELIEVING and making the ruthless judgements necessary to get on that bike, get your head in the game, and WIN.

Every. Single. Moral and religious institution exists to create doubt, undermine you, subvert your resolve, and tell you you’re a bad person if you can read a sentence and act consistently with what is written there.

Are your brakepads good to ride? Yes or No?

Is that girl good marriage material? Yes or No?

Should you fight for your country over this matter? Yes or No?

Is this a principle you should live your life according to even if it has high costs? Yes or No?

Should you kill that man? Yes or No?

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Every moral, educational, religious, and civic institution exists to LIE to about these things. To insist that you should simultaneously believe both YES and NO in a state of weak resolve, closer to 50/50 or maybe 75/25… not because it is genuinely uncertain, or that you are served by holding it in a state of uncertainty… but because then they have power to grant or withhold encouragement, argument, social sanction, and incentives such that they can manipulate your decision ON THEIR TIMELINE.

Is it Christian to tolerate other religions and accept and love people regardless of their faith? Pray for them to find the light in their own time?

Or is it Christian to Convert via force and the sword? Such as was done to European pagan countries or South America?

Is it a matter of personal Faith… Like how Vatican II, and really even Vatican I, going back to Constantine, says you should NEVER pressure or attempt to force Jews to convert against their will…

Or Is it a matter that “Every Knee Will Bow” and you should use all institutional force including straight force to make it happen such as was done to people with European Religions, like some heckin based crusader meme?

Which is it?

American Christians are encouraged to believe BOTH and be in an eternally uncertain superposition state between liberal freedom of conscious toleration on the one hand and Crusader “Masculine Christianity” on the other… So that way they will reliably not do anything, until such a time as Netanyahu and the Israel lobby decides for them, pays all the preachers and media to start pushing Crusader memes at the pulpit, and wields their newly granted militant faith against Iran.

If American Christians fully embraced a principled commitment to Pascifism and Toleration such as one sees in the Amish… Then they’d never ever fight for Netanyahu.

Whereas If American Christians fully embraced a principled commitment to Crusader Christian violence, such that in all times and places to Crusade against the unbeliever is ALWAYS the surest path to salvation… Then they’d be uncontrollable, and probably do something actually based like travel to Syria on their own authority, form some Assad or Lebanese Christian allied militant faction like some White Crusader ISIS… And then wage Crusade irrespective of US or Israeli foreign policy. They might even decide to retake Jerusalem… from the Jews.

When people have their own Convictions they act on their own timelines, not those of institutions… The same way Jihadists largely seem to behave according to the opportunities in their personal lives, not whether or not some Saudi institution has announced a war.

However when people have weak or contradictory convictions and are ENCOURAGED to think of that contradiction as the essence of their morality, then some megachurch pastor can accept a check from whichever NGO and the poor confused person can have all their commitments entirely changed because they are not following any commitment, but simply the balance of social pressure between their contradictory convictions.

Do you see why churches, schools, media, films, and the government encourage these contradictory and unprincipled moral convictions? Do you see why they equate moral confusion or squeamishness or lilly-livered wincing with Morality?

Do you see why the villain in every Hollywood story is almost universally the person with the firmer moral resolve and the willingness to sacrifice, accept costs and inflict negative externalities in the service of their principled commitments?

Why the hero must stop them whilst shouting “I agree with your ideas, but I can’t accept your methods”… “Yes, but not like this”.

Its because if you can be scared out of or poisoned out of strong inner convictions that might give you the resolve and will to act on your own principles and on your own timeframe, then you will wait around confused and wringing your hands, until something external happens and some institution decides to switch the balance of social pressure and provide you with a socially acceptable ready made path… To act according to someone else’s principles.

You will wring your hands and be the tolerant liberal… Right until Netanyahu needs a Crusader in Iran…

You will be a social liberal who approves of every welfare institution, social security, Medicare, assistance to refugees… Right until your television tells you that YOUR KIDS are entitled and have been given too many handouts, and something needs to be done about that.

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The point of belief is to be a Psychopathic Fanatic… Just as the Motorcyclist is a Psychopathic fanatic for his front brake… It is either 100% working and there or it is 100% NOT… And if you try to reason him out of that conviction he has observed and/or tested for himself via your moral language, he will fight you.

Why would you never accept a 50% conviction for your motor-vehicle that you’d drive through a Combat-Zone… But your moral convictions which would lead you there or not lead you there, that you go “Eh, well… Everyone has their opinion, I don’t want to appear unreasonable…”

Even a truly negligent motorcyclist has a 99.9% conviction in his brakes… He’ll use it hundreds of times, and it will work hundreds of times before the negligence catches up with him. His reckless negligence being he accepted a 99.9% certainty, when he should have had a 99.9999% certainty.

If you would ever, under any circumstance, Fight for a spiritual or moral principle… You owe it to yourself to be as ruthlessly exacting and fanatical with it as you would be with the safety of your rifle, or the brakes of you bike, or the construction of your house.

And if you would never fight for a spiritual or moral principle… Why are you here?

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Continuing our long series discussing and close reading “Which Way Western Man?” by William Gayley Simpson (1892-1990) The work that introduced Nietzsche to the American far-right and created much of the Far Right Vitilist, Pagan, Nietzschean, Racialist, and Eugenic though that defines the Far Right today. We will be following his personal/intellectual journey from Presbyterian Clergy to the Early ACLU to Franciscan Monkhood to Socialist Agitator to Zarathustran hermit to American Eugenicist and Racial-Nationalist.

Joining me is Brynhildr /Vivienne Magdalene @maenadraving on Twitter of the “For the Love of Nietzsche” Podcast, who will be giving us her unique Nietzschean expertise.

Opening and Ending “Jah Is Dead” By Aryan Reggae.

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Just in time for Halloween!

Prof. of joins me to discuss “Intra-Familial Sexual Competition” Ie. Incest and Murder and the Evolutionary and psychological dynamics that produce it.

Deep diving horror movies and terrifying examples ripped right from the headlines. We ask the important question: “Why is mommy trying to kill you?”

You can read Professor Dutton here on Substack, watch him on Youtube, and follow him on X (formerly Twitter)

Checkout his latest book “Borderline Genius/Borderline Insane” At Amazon.

And check out his back catalog of heretical books at Edwarddutton.com

(Also discussed in the podcast:

Homicide: Foundations of Human Behavior by Martin Daly and Margot Wilson, The Shining (1980), The Babadook (2014), The Flowers in the Attic (1979 book, 1987 film), and No Child of Mine (1997).)

Opening: “Lord of War” by White Bat Audio. Outro: Eternal Night by White Bat Audio.

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Esthlos joins me to discuss his excellent piece “The God Sword” and his journey from Christianity to Paganism, along with lots of autistic sperging.

See Also his piece mentioned in the podcast:

“Pondering the Org”

Also Mentioned:

The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion By John Charles Dent

Volume 1

Volume 2

Opening: “Lord of War” by White Bat Audio. Outro: Hackers by White Bat Audio

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WARNING: I’m not Spoiler or Content Tagging anything in this piece… If you scroll downwards you will see Gore, The Horrors of War, Oddities of Every imaginable thing, descriptions to make your skin scrawl, blasphemies upon blasphemies, Medieval/Early modern medical devices/ conditions/horrors, “Yo Mamma” jokes, graphic depictions of rape (in woodcut, illustration, and film), and Boobies. Lots of Boobies. Untold Boobies.

As will become apparent… You really cannot “Content Restrict” the 17th Century. This is Your warning if you’re at work or otherwise sensitive.

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Hell is Empty and All the Devils are Here

What if the 1990s Berserk anime, Warhammer 40k, A Man for All Seasons, The Wickerman (1972), Cromwell, 1984, The Gulag Archipelago, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the chronically underrated 2012 horror masterpiece Compliance… were all the same horrifying movie?

What if Mel Gibson made a film like Apocalypto, exploring the nightmarish depths of political/religious sacrifice rituals… But about Early-Modern Shakespeare-era Europe?

I’m constantly asked for my “Greatest Film of all Time”… A torturous question for someone who’s seen as many movies as me… And doubly torturous because maybe the best true answer is one its really hard to name:

Ken Russel’s The Devils might be it.

Certainly the best 30 Years War film ever made.
And the Greatest goth movie ever made.
And the Greatest witch hunt movie ever made.
And the Greatest “MeToo” movie ever made.
And the Greatest “insane asylum” movie ever made.
And CERTAINLY the Greatest Exorcist movie ever made.
Yes, I said that. And I mean it. Did I stutter?

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And maybe the Greatest “Dark Fantasy” film ever made… Except for the fact that the whole thing is true.

And its being rereleased, the full remastered director’s cut in 4K, this October in Cinemas.

(The strobe effect is only in the trailer)

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Ken Russel’s The Devil, adapted from Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudon and the play The Devils by Dan Whiting, is one of my top five films of all time. And certainly one of the biggest films of all time in it’s own weird way. It does things as impressive for the spiritual, psychological horrifying, and historical on film as Sergei Bonderchuk’s Waterloo does for warfare or Akira for Scifi and Animation.

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Indeed I think I might be the only one who could give that answer, given I might be one of like 10 people who know 17th Century History/Literature and obscure extreme Horror Cinema well enough to INSIST on its OVERWHELMING historical accuracy.

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Indeed I’d struggle to think of a film which captures the Insane deadly hypersexual kaleidoscopic character of the 17th century better.

I’ve been doing this alot recently… But I feel I need to lay out my qualifications here to talk about this… My two areas of focus in university were 17th and 18th century English Literature (Shakespeare through to Jane Austin), and 17th and 18th century Political theory (specifically the works of Hobbes, Locke, Hugo Grotius and other natural law theorists… Yes, I took the BoomerCons seriously when they said natural law was the basis of our society, I believed them… Like an idiot) I’m by no means an expert, but the broad flavor of this era: Culturally, religiously, politically, historically, militarily, theoretically, theologically, poetically… Was what I immersed myself in during the years when I should have been drinking and partying more and repeating nonsense to people in power, and other things that actually advance your career.

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I need to establish that off the bat because I feel as if a huge part of the reason this film is not regarded as a contender for “Greatest film ever made” is the simply the fact that audiences and critics do not believe it, and certainly do not GET it.

That it is SO Bizarre, and SO weird, and SO horrifyingly violent, and SO hypersexual, and SO saturated in it’s colors, and SO religiously discordant… That it has to be a bizarre psychedelic hellscape of Ken Russel’s perverse drug-addled imagination…

They especially had to think this because if they accepted that it was indeed historically accurate, and not a bizarre sexual/psychedelic story of the American 1960s and 70s reading themselves back into history… Suddenly they’d have to accept that the same thing done to Loudon in 1634 was what was being done to America in the middle of the 20th century, and has been done to the west more or less ever since…

That the yo-yo between state-enforced debauchery one the one hand, and moral panic witch-hunts on the other, is not a schizophrenic attribute of mass media or “Moral Progress” or American Culture… But a highly historically precedented and calculated attack meant to destroy and enslave a people without fighting them.

That “Free Love”, “Feminist Criticism”, “Queer Theory”, “No Fault Divorce”, and “Hostile Work Environment lawsuits” rock society between the extremes of sexual license and socio-sexual moral-panic for the same reason one might rapidly rock a boat between it’s port and starboard sides… To capsize it into the devouring abyss.

That we are indeed living through Loudon at scale.

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So in this piece I’m going to go through, summarize what I think is needed and provide the relevant historical context to the early bits so you can see that NO, none of this is a stretch or out of Character for the 17th century (or at least for one of the most extreme moments of that age)… Indeed it is a work of pure genius.

The Most Protestant Film ever made.
WTF Am I Looking At!?

This film has maybe the most aggressive cold opens of any film in history. And possibly the greatest Villain introduction.

I’ve seen films open on torture, rapes, and the executions of pregnant women that are not as hard on audiences as the opening shot of The Devils.

It starts with a play.

A man dressed in a thong and clamshell bra is lifted from a sparkling surf… It is a staged production of the birth of Aphrodite, entirely in drag.

This is king Louis XIII (13) of France (1601-1643). Playing Aphrodite.

He gives this entire long performance before a Catholic Cardinal! Who is in attendance and watching this depravity with an approving smile.

This is the Famous/infamous Cardinal Richelieu, the Religious/Government minister most responsible for the destruction and killing of thousands throughout the French Religious Wars and destroying the various independent principalities and city polities that would become part of the modern centralized French State.

Yes not only are the degenerate French Royal court involved in this, but A Catholic Cardinal and even nuns assisting him are in attendance to witness this degenerate performance from a gay king performing a Grecian Pagan theatrical number… In drag.

The Play ends with the Crowned “Aphrodite”, Louis XIII, kissing Cardinal Richelieu's ring after agreeing that they must violate their treaties of peace and destroy the remaining Huguenot Protestants who’ve recently rebelled against the crown, but had agreed to return under terms of toleration and religious protection. Louis and Richelieu agree they’re going to violate those agreements and destroy them… Committing the violence in peace that they could not accomplish in war.

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And the important thing to understand is… the Scene is NOT improbable. Indeed many MANY people alive at the time would have described exactly this if you asked them to describe the French Court or the king’s relationship to Richelieu.

Everything related to the Historical Possessions of Loudon and the political struggles around Cardinal Richelieu’s consolidation of the French state, and especially the Sexual politics of French courtly life… while that’s all open to endless historical debate… We DO have what was written down… And we do have all the various rumors and accusations of Louis XIII’s homosexuality and pederasty as repeated by people alive at the time

Allegedly he’d forced an adolescent Marquis de Cinq-Mars to bed dressed as bride… Only for the Marquis to be less affectionate than he liked, and the Marquis to subsequently involve himself in the conspiracies to assassinate cardinal Richelieu… He was then caught and Louis had the Marquis behead at age 22, his last words were, “Ah ! Mon Dieu, qu’est-ce de ce monde?” (’My God! What is this world?’).

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Remember: This is all going on during the 30 Years War in Germany and all the related wars that poured out of it. Maybe the bloodiest most horrifying war cycle to hit Europe in the past 1000 years, with maybe the worst and most horrifying abuses of any war in Human history.

That’s not me saying that. That’s Albert Speer saying that in 1945:

In his radio broadcast on 4 May 1945, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, Albert Speer, announced “the destruction that has been inflicted on Germany can only be compared to that of the Thirty Years War. The decimation of our people through hunger and deprivation must not be allowed to reach the proportion of that epoch.’ For this reason, he went on, Hitler’s successor, Admiral Donitz, had given the order to lay down arms. Public opinion surveys carried out in the 1960s revealed that Germans placed the Thirty Years War as their country’s greatest disaster ahead of both world wars, the Holocaust and the Black Death.
-Peter H. Wilson, “Europe’s Tragedy” (pg 6)

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In World War 2 Germany lost 8% of its prewar population. The USSR 13%. Poland 17%. And in especially hard hit Belarus they lost 25% of their prewar population.

In the 30 Years War the German Areas of the Holy Roman Empire lost FORTY PERCENT of their pre-war population. In Pomerania and other hard hit areas this rose to 50 or even 80%.

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“OK…” You might say. “So Louis XIII was a rumored and nearly confirmed Gay-Pedophile and the Protestants would certainly say he was a tyrant and murderous maniac, and Cardinal Richelieu was certainly a powerful religiously genocidal figure if not completely controlling the throne… AND this was at the height of religious warfare beyond even anything seen in 20th century ideological warfare. But SURELY this Drag performance of the Birth of Aphrodite BY THE KING would not have been done, even to a courtly private audience!? Surely THIS is an absurd stretch.”

You’d think so. But no.

Theatrical productions IN DRAG were a MASSIVE part of 17th century life… it was in fact controversial when female actresses displaced men playing female roles in the later half of the 1600s. Indeed you yourself know many of the plays of this period! Shakespeare's plays were originally performed with all male casts, Juliet was first played by a man in drag. And the Catholic or Catholic adjacent Royal courts (such as the Stuart-Era Anglicans) were the largest supporters of theater of this time… Indeed such a scene is only a little out of place in 17th century France, only because it’d be more appropriate to 17th century ENGLAND, where the sexual license and degeneracy of the Jacobean and Carolean courts were a thing of infamy amongst the ultra-protestant Puritans who would BAN the Theatre in 1642 after winning the first round of the English Civil War.

However before then and after the restoration one could go to the Theater in London and see plays such as Tis Pity She’s a Whore, The Chaste Maid in Cheapside (A hilarious play… Resembling a 17th century South Park… complete with Prostitutes, Cuckolds, prolifically adulterous Cottagers, and the Knight “Sir Walter Whorehound”), The Queen and the Concubine, A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, The Constant Maid, A Cure for a Cuckold, All’s Lost By Lust, The Witch, The Maid’s Tragedy, Cupid’s Revenge, The Custom of the Country (referring to the Droit du seigneur), Lucifer, “The Amorous Prince, or, The Curious Husband”…

and of Course Christopher Marlowe’s legendary original Doctor Faustus in which Satan himself was said to have regularly appeared in the cast… as the actors insisted one devil too many sometimes appeared amongst them in the final dance scene wherein Faustus is dragged to hell. (Marlowe indeed might have arranged an intruder, or paid for the rumor as a promotional stunt)

Shakespeare himself early in his career produced one of the most violent and sexual of these scandal plays… His Titus Andronicus centering on Rape, Slavery, Cannibalism, massacres, usurpations, attempted post-birth abortion, and one of the earliest “the baby is black” plotline known to man…

Leading to one of the earliest, or at least best, “Yo Mamma” jokes:

There is very good Chance Queen Elizabeth herself saw this production and approved, as it was early in Shakespeare’s career and she was an early patron of Shakespeare notably the play Merry Wives of Windsor was commissioned for her, that she adored the character of Falstaff from Henry IV so much she wished to see a play with him in love.

[Read my takes on various other Shakespeare Adaptations]

This is almost certainly part of the reason Shakespeare is so famous and lionized, not because he was so much better than the others of his time (Marlowe was arguably the best of them) but because he received royal patronage and so was subsidized to produce propaganda plays about English history and the “Correct version” of the War of Roses across his 8 play history cycle from Richard II to Richard III (with 3 Henrys and 6 plays in between)… Or Works like Macbeth which is a quiet subtle origin story for Fleance son of Banque and the Jacobean Scottish Crown over their hated rivals like Macbeth…

Whereas everyone else had to compete in the free market creating raunchy comedies and sexual tragedies, lacking the backing of institutional power. In much the same way modern directors are forced to make horror films, then super-hero films, and if they have a proven track record of financial returns and political agreeability, only them can they afford to make big historical biopics and the like.

Because Elizabeth and then James the 1st liked Shakespeare, he was subsidized to produce all these high concept historical plays emphasizing their respectability whilst others produced quite witty but far raunchier and more violent works.

This “General Audiences” and Historical quality is almost certainly the reason so many children have read “Romeo and Juliet” and “Richard III” in schools across the past 400 years, and so few “Tis Pity She’s a Whore” despite John Ford generally being considered a remarkably accomplished dramaturgist just a few decades later, and TPSaH being a well done play.

Parents would complain about Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or The Queen and the Concubine, or Doctor Faustus in ways they wouldn’t about The Tempest or King Lear.

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“But surely a KING would not get up on stage like in The Devils!?”

For a private audience maybe… remember people were generally profoundly bored in the past, and there are lots of examples of Roman Emperors and European courts descending to the levels of Acting in theater and other degeneracies in the raw boredom of the age before digital distraction… As well as the sexual degeneracy of the Absolutist elite.

Acting out scenes for home audiences from written plays was indeed one of the major pass-times until quite recently. (Indeed To this day children partake in church nativity scenes, school plays, and class “group project” play-actings… That before TV this was common entertainment, but now only survives in odd timeless traditions we enforce on Children out of inertia.) However in the past this was a quite common thing for adults to do.

Again the most famous example is English:

John Wilmot the 2nd Earl of Rochester was a shockingly accomplished Military figure, Poet, man of Letters, Playwright, Parliamentarian, friend of Charles II King of England, and general historical figure… Especially when you consider he died at age 33 of Sexually-transmitted Syphilis.

A ton of bawdy poetry is attributed to him… His Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover was the model for my own poem Song of a Young Lady to Her Many Simps…

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He was an extraordinary poet and Playwright. Producing bawdy “Closet Dramas” never performed publicly for a general audience but either read or performed in private settings for selected parties…

Indeed Rochester was so infamous, and his poems so scandalous that there existed quite the economy of men writing or publishing scandalous sexual poems, then attaching his name to them both to dodge any legal or social consequence to the real author, but also to advertise the new works.

The most infamous of these, which you never find in the collected works of Rochester despite being a ingeniously composed poem, is Regime de Vivre (notice as English poems get more bawdy they associate them with the French?)

Here’s the full text because it’s so hard to find elsewhere:

I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven; and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,
I spend in her hand, and I spew in her lap.
Then we quarrel and scold, ’till I fall fast asleep,
When the bitch, growing bold, to my pocket does creep;
Then slyly she leaves me, and, to revenge the affront,
At once she bereaves me of money and cunt.
If by chance then I wake, hot-headed and drunk,
What a coil do I make for the loss of my punk!
I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage,
And missing my whore, I bugger my page.
Then, crop-sick all morning, I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning ’till eleven again.

So yes this image of an Absolutist Royal Court in the 1600s is ENTIRELY plausible.

That a Closet Drama or comedy or Dance performed entirely in drag, with Aristocrats or even a degenerate alleged-homosexual/pederast King taking on the role of scantily clad women… That is exactly what EVERYTHING we know about the 17th century would suggest was entirely possible.

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Ken Russel is a hippy obsessed with sex and altered states of consciousness… as evidenced by his filmography, But the thing that really jumps out to me is just how much of an English Protestant he is… In many respects this film is exactly what 400 years of Middle-Class Protestants have thought of the Catholic Absolute monarchies.

Indeed the entire film is a Protestant fever dream of the 30 Years War and surrounding wars of religion.

And the Puritans and Protestants of the era denouncing such behavior would be the very first to tell you that this is what the Catholic and Crypto-Catholic (English) Monarchies were up to and that if you weren’t armed to the teeth and praying day and night, and ready to fight and die for God and Country, then the Aristocrats and their Catholic Allies would get you! And they’d do to your children what they did to those poor nuns in Loudon!

Its certainly polemical… But it’d be the equivalent of someone in the Year 2471 opening a film set in the 2000s with Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Jeffery Epstein and Isreali Prime Minister Ehud Barak all drinking together on Little Saint James and laughing at how rigged the American electoral system is and how the people can never resist them, as weeping naked children lie curled up about them begging for their parents.

It is unlikely those specific characters would all be together in a single cameras frame saying exactly that with the abused children present… But its very likely such conversations took place, the majority of people agree at least one of them did rape kids on Epstein Island, they are all known Epstein Associates and basically friends… It is not a secret… And Indeed tens of millions alive today if time-warped to the year 2471 would insist such a director got everything exactly right with such a scene.

This is a Controversial and polemical opening… It is taking a firm side.

But it is 100% plausible and entirely in keeping with the setting and Historical verisimilitude of the 1600s.

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So King Louis, still dressed in drag, kisses Cardinal Richelieu's hand, as they agree the Huguenot Protestants must be driven from the land.

Title Card!

Ok so that was the first 5 minutes of the film and I’ve written 7 pages on it. I could honestly go through every single line of dialogue at this pace, its historicity is that good and that close to the period.

But I’m not going to continue at this pace… Because I don’t want this to become a book… And I could certainly write one.

But know that EVERYTHING that follows is either 100% confirmed, or historically precedented in France or another European court at the same time.

The dialogue, concepts, relations, rituals, all the little religious details about how the characters conduct themselves and argue with each other…. All of it true. Or it is so close to true that after thousands of pages of reading about the era, I didn’t catch the fault.

The torture and executions are all basically exactly how they did it right down to the bizarre focus on sexual torture and medical enemas (the devices are shown in the film but its largely implied, the movie cuts away).

The ONE EXCEPTION is a scene where Louis XIII is shown shooting prisoners who’ve been dressed up as birds and forced to run through a “Hunting party”.

I have no Idea where this is from (if it is a reference to something, please let me know in the comments).

Now cruel execution of prisoners is by no means usual in the era.

The English practiced a torturous mode of execution in which the condemned was “Hanged, Drawn, and Quartered” reserved generally for those convicted of high treason… The victim would be publicly hanged, but cut down before the lack of oxygen could kill him… Then, still alive, he would be disemboweled (the bowels “Drawn” out), before being dismembered “Quartered” with limbs and privates hacked off first, and the head removed last (finally completely killing the condemned). The intact pieces would then be distributed and placed on pikes for public display with lots of announcement of what happens to those who betray the crown or state.

Likewise in France “Breaking on the Wheel” was still common in the 17th and into the 18th century (it was replaced by the Guillotine by the French Revolution).

In Breaking on the wheel the condemned would be tied to a large wagon wheel, and then have his limbs broken with an Iron Rod or other means… The broken limbs would then be woven into the spokes of the wheel so the crippled condemned could never leave the wheel… And the wheel hoisted on a high-pole where the condemned would be left in his agony to die of exposure. This is accurately depicted in the film.

However I’ve NEVER run into an instance of prisoners being made to play animals and shot.

Now Cruelty to animals for public entertainment was VERY common in the era… Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was right up the street from a Bear-Baiting venue were bred and captured bears would be tied down in an arena, and had teams of dogs loosed upon them… To either rip the bear apart (or if a cheaper night, until the announcer conceded the “fight” for the animal) or until the Bear succeeded in killing or scaring off all the dogs.

Shakespeare actually tacitly acknowledges this is happening across the street in Macbeth:

MACBETH.
They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly,
But, bear-like I must fight the course.—What’s he
That was not born of woman? Such a one
Am I to fear, or none.

It is an apt metaphor for Macbeth’s state… but it’s also an advertisement. That anyone in the Audience who thinks the sorrows of the sad/mad king had drawn on too long and is thinking of slipping out across the street should instead stay in their seat, that they’re going to see more entertaining violence in Shakespeare’s conclusion than the mere fun of dogs ripping apart a bear.

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Baiting of bears, dogs, boars, bulls, wolves, etc. All ended in the 1800s in England… Notably after the horror of a Lion-Baiting event in which a tame lion… Nero… Was pitted against six dogs and, deeply confused and surprised, simply refused to fight, instead swatting at them with its paws and plainly landing blows but not using its claws to maim them. The Wikipedia page has an extensive description from Victorian era Times which led to parliament banning the practice, though in the United States various baiting events continued until at least the civil war… And illegal baiting events still occur along the borders with Mexico with some regularity.

Human Baiting was also rumored to have occurred with poor boxers and dwarves and others agreeing to a fight a large dog or team of dogs for money… in most tellings the organizers were said to successfully intervene and rip the dogs off before the competitor could be killed… But there were always rumors of higher tiers, and other places, and rarer events where like an expensive bear-bait, the fight would be allowed to go to conclusion.

So whilst I have ZERO Idea where Ken Russel got the scene of a royal hunting party shooting prisoners dressed as birds in a mock hunt…

I hope I can impress that this is just odd, or a reference that I’m not getting. Someone in some royal court in Europe almost certainly did something similar… and its far less weird or cruel than various things we KNOW the Early Moderns did do to the condemned for fun or to send a message.

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Aside from that it is as accurate as is historically possible.

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Even things like set design where you’d normally think the critics would have it over on the lazy director, the critics are just completely wrong and their idea of what a monastery in the 17th century looked like is colored by cartoons or visits to museums where all the stone forts and buildings are collapsing and haven’t been painted in over a century “Why are the walls and churches white like bathroom tile!” They shrieked.

Meanwhile Saint Peter’s Church (Contructed 1217) in real life Loudon, France (the historical church one of the film sets stands in for).

Ken Russel matched THE ACTUAL ARCHITECTURAL STYLE of the real Loudon’s Destroyed medieval Buildings.

Yes it actually looked like that!

Ken Russel built the sets of the lost walls and Monasteries based on the actual surviving medieval architecture from the period…

And for doing that he was criticized that it didn’t look “right” that it didn’t look like an illustration or a Scooby-Doo cartoon of a gothic medieval nunnery.

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Which is Doubly damning because for many of his shots he copies period paintings depicting the city, original early modern gothic horror, and others depicting Demonic possession, hell… The Visual verisimilitude is unbelievable.

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So What the Hell Happened at Loudon Then!?

“Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”
-Apocalypse Now

“At least you’ll have one consolation. Hell will hold no surprises for you.”

What the hell could happen in the 17th century… THE 17th Century we’ve just described… The one so depraved and licentious that Puritans decided to risk life and limb to settle America rather than stick around and live in proximity to the depravity of “Babylon” (even though the English crown was fine with their religion as long as they paid their taxes… They actually faced basically zero persecution in England, though they were rightly paranoid that would change).

When Christopher Marlowe is summoning the devil nightly for London theater audiences, the king of France is forcing adolescent noblemen to his bed dressed as brides, and all violence imaginable is being practiced on man and animal… In front of cheering crowds often with children in attendance… When even Shakespeare is casting Adolescent boys to play Juliet in his plays, and children are going to watch… and even young noblemen attached to the king of England are dying of Syphilis like some unending AIDs crisis…

How the hell does one get burnt at the stake amidst all of THAT for “Devil Worship” or “depravity” or “Corrupting the innocent”?

Well to answer that question you need to answer the Question at the center of the film…

Who was Urbain Grandier?

Why was HE the last ruler of Loudon with any true independence? Why did the walls fall on his watch? Why does Loudon have a population of only 6000 today?

Oliver Reed’s depiction of Grandier is an acting tour-de-force.

The range of the character is truly incredible. Matching any of Shakespeare’s characters.

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We see him womanizing and dismissing the girl he’s impregnated.

We see him mourning his late friend and mentor.

We see him as a Warrior Cleric/Acting Governor.

We see him as rakish libertine having armed spats with the father of the girl he’s debauched.

We see him as a local sex symbol.

We see him tending the sick and dying.

We see him repentant.

We see him falling in love.

We see him him philosophizing theological matters (in no other movie has “Theological debate” ever been so core to the plot and characters)

We see him as a dissenter theologian.

We see him as a warlord.

We see him as an outraged patriarch and moral leader.

We see him as a great orator and legal voice.

We see him tortured.

We see him stripped.

We see him broken.

We see him resolved to bear true witness.

We see him realize he has failed entirely.

We see him die a martyr’s death.

His two introductory scenes really get the division in his character.

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In the one he gives the eulogy for the former governor George De Sainte Marthe.

Marthe We learn, despite being a Catholic, navigated Loudon through the recent religious wars and Huguenot rebellion without having the city erupt in religious conflict, importantly protecting the city walls of Loudon and gaining concessions from the king guaranteeing them, which are the basis of the independence and freedoms of the people of Loudon. Grandier ends off asking the people of Loudon, of both faiths, to remember Sainte Marthe and look to the defense of their walls and freedom.

Here Grandier embodies almost the ideal of a Religious Leader in the role of Acting Governor. A good Catholic Priest using his moral authority to act as a civil leader, in contrast to Cardinal Richelieu’s Machiavellian manipulation of depravity.

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However in the Subsequent scene we see the fly in the ointment… Urbain Grandier is a sex symbol.

The Nuns and women of the town are obsessed with him… Vanessa Redgrave’s wonderfully twisted sister Jeanne des Anges, the young mother-superior of the Ursuline Nuns (who are carcerally confined in their convent), appears to correct the other nuns their schoolgirl fascinations… but then reveals that she was indeed the most smitten of all.

“When I did not see him, I burned with love for him and when he presented himself to me ... I lacked the faith to combat the impure thoughts and movements that I felt... Never had the Demons created such disorder in me.”

-Sister Jeanne des Anges “Autobiographe”
[full text in French… Looking for an english Translation]

However, we soon discover that Grandier is not some poor innocent theologian/stateman predated upon by townswomen and nuns… He’s really horrendously vain and scandal ridden, sleeping with and impregnating a local upper-class woman sent to him to learn Latin.

She is in love with him, and he abandons the heartbroken girl and makes an enemy of her and her father when he learns of the pregnancy.

So is that his mistake?

Is that the sin for which things will eventually death spiral into him being burnt at the stake and Loudon doomed?

Have you been paying attention?

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No! Grandier’s conventional sexual licentiousness with consenting adult women, no matter how infamous and titillating is NOT the thing that damns him… He could have had similar adventures and misadventures until the day he died and still be less scandalous than many of the era, and certainly be still thought considerably above average compared to other priests and political figures for his other virtues.

Rather Grandier’s mistake, the thing that really destroys him… Is his sincere naivety.

Grandier is a classically educated priest, He has the classical liberal-humanist education that marked the Educated upper-class and clergy throughout the Medieval and Early Modern period, Not “Liberal” or “Humanist” as in the enlightment political philosophy, but in the Medieval sense of being classically educated in Greek and Latin (he’s giving Latin lessons) and being well versed in classical political theory, history, and mythology (See Also: Aquinas, Machiavelli, Dante, Shakespeare, Marlowe… This was the measure of an educated person… That they could converse on Livy or Virgil or Plutarch). This is an archetype that doesn’t exist much anymore, the sensitive young men who become classics-bros don’t become priests in our society (or atleast not Christian priests) and our reverends are of a class, biology, and intelligence that is largely shockingly unimpressive in all things, let alone education.

But Grandier is one of these Classically educated men… well versed in both Christian theology and the ancient heroes… And Like many a classical hero… Indeed like many of the statues and classical works he keeps in his study… His downfall begins when he falls in love.

And like the sincere sensitive man he is…
He resolves to marry for love.
He resolves to endeavor on a sincere spiritual journey of life with his love.
He resolves to become a better person for love.
He resolves to become someone other than the fallen man he has been…

Of course this leaks… And both Mother Superior Jean, and Cardinal Richelieu’s agents find out…

But that alone would not destroy him…

What destroys him is that this newfound sincerity leads him to taking his eye off the ball.

A heart cannot melt and keep its steel resolve.

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Early on we see an attempt by the Kings agents to rip down the city walls of Loudon…

Dudley Sutton’s Baron de Laubardemont slips in with a work-crew of prisoners and small company of soldiers intent on ripping down the city walls before anyone can even notice what’s happening in the confusion and disorganization following the death of Sainte Marthe…

And as soon as Grandier discovers this, he sounds the alarm, raises the local militia…

Laubardemont tries to appeal to process and challenge Grandier’s authority, whether he is a priest or a governor, and what authority he has to stop a representative of the crown.

and escalates to edge of massacre that if one more stone is removed his soldiers will open fire and Laubardemont will die, and open battle will commence.

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All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing… and Grandier knows damned well what “Something” is.

Steel bolts ripping through dozens of vital organs at 400 feet per second.

Something is violence. As much as it takes.

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Grandier gives a speech again, more fervently this time on defending the walls… But this is how knife’s edge the situation is.

Merely being distracted. Merely hesitating or trying to converse or reason with the lying and slithering enemy… Merely entertaining them and their appeals to process or procedure or formality… Merely not catching them and their machines for a few hours when they’ve slipped in…

And that could be it for Loudon.

Laubardemont’s challenge of Grandier’s authority has BITE… not because Grandier hesitates, he doesn’t. But because the chains of command in Loudon are ambiguous enough and the election/selection of a new governor is far enough off that without the will and resolve of acting governor Grandier, everyone will just sit about asking “Are they supposed be doing that? Should we do something?”

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Grandier understands this, but is naive about their situation… believing that the king is sincere in respecting their rights and independence, and that it is Richelieu acting against the king’s words and wishes… when the King only mouths these things to lull the semi-independent states into a false sense of security.

This double fiction is a staple of medieval and early modern life… That the crown pretends to respect the people’s and lords’ ancient rights, and they pretend to be loyal and obedient in the belief that he truly benevolent and only being “mislead by his advisors”… In much the way the Modern American government pretends to respect the Constitution and the people’s liberties, and the people to pretend that that the government is legitimate, not rigged, and the Judiciary not corrupt.

That way if the government wins in a conflict they can pretend that “the people were loyal but mislead” and the people that the government was “corrupted away from its benevolence by evil ministers”… Then some middlemen can be fired and the corrupt compromise peace go on…

But the second one starts to forget the other is fundamentally an enemy who wants to take everything form them… The second they start to believe in the benevolence of the crown, or the constitution, or “the people”… They’re screwed.

Grandier seems to genuinely misunderstand how much of a threat the crown is, his sincerity cannot comprehend the level of hypocrisy and evil he’s up against…

Mind you, It is almost overwhelmingly hard for anyone to predict or understand true evil who has not seen it.

The Exorcism

Of course the most infamous part of the Film is the second half…

The “Exorcism” of the Nuns by Laubardemont, his allies, and the terrifying fanatical and depraved Witch Hunter Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard).

I feel as if to this day people don’t GET what Ken Russel was doing with these scenes.

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First of all… As I will repeat again and again… Almost all of this is historically accurate or accurate to what the most intelligent people were saying at the time…

The story of the nuns of Lodun [sic] possessed, was nothing but a contrivance of Cardinal Richelieu to destroy Grandier, a man he suspected to have wrote a book against him, who was condemned for witchcraft in the case, and burnt for it. The scene was managed by the Capuchins, and the nuns played their tricks well, but all was a cheat.”

-English Philosopher John Locke, 1679.

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But more importantly it is Artistically Literate.

Every extremity of the filming, or at least every extremity of the versions I’ve seen communicates something VERY intentional in relation to religious and art history…

Religious and Art history that the Religious authorities and Critics SHOULD have recognized immediately if they were not the hacks they are and utterly unversed even in their own professions.

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Sister Jean has, seeing the opportunity, confessed to Grandier’s second Father Mignon (Murray Melvin) that she was having sexual/evil visions of Grandier…. Mignon already resentful of Grandier and his philandering ways, buys this hook line and sinker as a matter of sincere, if resentful, religious concern.

Joining in Confederacy with the Baron and the other enemies of Grandier they gather the Nuns and the first torturous interrogation begins whilst Grandier is out of town.

The only problem is Sister Jean doesn’t know how to act like a demonically possessed woman. She tells the visions she’s actually had, and the crowd and even the lawyers say that she’s just a hysterical nun and that no one can be convicted off her actual blasphemous visions of Grandier…

So like any good show trial, the threats and torture begins.

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Western Civilization is haunted by the image of the “emperor with no clothes”… The absurdities repeated because power insists on it.

People are also obsessed with the idea of the honest child who unwittingly saying the truth and breaks the spell… “From the mouth of babes”.

This never happens.

The Naked Emperor is an expression of power… People trick themselves into believing it, and even staking their wealth and reputations on it… It is a relationship of power and the purchase into power. The lie gains power the more people repeat it. It snowballs. It becomes impossible to break it… Or at least impossible to break it without violence. That people will fight to maintain the lie, that they’d be ruined if they ever acknowledged it was false.

They are not tricked. They know that they are lying.

Even if the linguistic part of their brain tries to trick themselves into thinking that they are tricked.

If a child could dispel it, it would mean that the spell was already broken by the Emperor and his attendants poor maintenance of the power relations… One might as well say that the “clothes” blew off the emperor in the wind, or a wizard stole them, as attribute it to anything said by the child.

Once one is on the compliance ladder, and the authority is maintaining your compliance, it takes forceful determination and more often than not actual combat to break the relation. Something the weak willed will never do.

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There is a genius moment at this point in the film... When the interrogation of Sister Jean escalates, it’s not the case that the “rubes” and medieval believers in the audience watching the “questioning” believe it…

Rather many start shouting in outrage!

The Nuns try to riot!

The middleclass townsmen rightly identify what’s happening… They shout that it’s a sick and twisted trick!

Nothing has even been done quite yet, no one believes the Devil story, the torture is still to begin, and no confession has even started!

We’ve been trained to think that this would be enough. Tell the truth early, tell it to everyone! Don’t let the lie take hold!

“Live not by lies” to quote Rod Dreher…

It does nothing.

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The crowd is largely there because it is a spectacle and they want to be scandalized and entertained. A few responsible businessmen from town calling a spade a spade does nothing, the crowd will not spontaneously come to their conscience… They never have.

Grandier earlier in the film could run to the bell and call a muster and start a standoff and threaten massacre if a “single stone” should fall.

A single stone.

Yet These men could not run home, grab their arms, and shout for all they met along the way to join them… whilst watching a Nun raped in front of them.

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It is not enough to “stand athwart history shouting ‘stop’”…

The truth does nothing without the resolve to fight.

Those who will not commit violence for the truth will watch impotently as others commit violence for lies.

And those who cannot commit violence will lie themselves and lie to themselves so as to comply with the violence.

The Greatest Religious Film of All Time

The Rest of the Film I’m not going to describe in a detail blow by blow… It is terrible and brilliant, cruel and beautiful, and genuinely needs to be seen to be believed. No words can do it justice.

No sooner has some great horror and excess begun than some new untold and unimagined brilliancy of writing graced the screen.

Twists and moments that in other films would make the entire experience go by entirely unnoticed.

I watched it 5 or 6 times before I caught that in the final execution it is both the crowd and an overdub of Father Mignon own conscience that tells him to kiss Grandier and give him the last rights… Nor did I catch that the crowd beings to chant “Judas” at the kiss as Mignon realizes the depth of his betrayal.

I have never seen such an achievement of depravity and faith on screen… And the fact that NO religious group views this and Considers Grandier a saint, or the film an achievement, or even bothers to commentate on it is one of the great strikes against organized Christianity….

I can get why Catholics don’t like the film and that the heroism of Grandier against the institution doesn’t serve the fact they’d rather you forget the entire thing…

I can understand that Russell’s cinematographic commentary on the overlap between Sister Jeanne des Anges’ visions of Grandier and the Ecstasy of fellow Carmelite nun Saint Teresa of Ávila and her sexual-religious visions… that is not something that the modern Catholic Church wants you to think about or acknowledge despite the fact that it is not just Russell drawing the connection, but that indeed the historical Sister Jeanne herself explicitly modelled her own Autobiographe after Saint Teresa’s.

I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.

-Saint Teresa

I can understand that Catholics are not going to approve of ANY film in which Priests debauch and torture nuns no matter how true and under what circumstances and even if a honest priest fights against them…

But I can’t for the life of me understand why PROTESTANTS do not care about this film aside from the cowardly Ned Flandersism whereby grown men and aged women feel the need to protect their girl-ish innocence from any depiction of history itself or indeed their own religion.

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That if they weren’t allowed to see something as a child that is a statement about the thing and not their relationship with their parents and their parents judgement of their maturity.

I recently listened to a husband-wife podcast in which the wife removed her headphones and COVERED HER EARS when a description from a gruesome part of history occurred. (the husband continued and notified her when he was past the scary point).

This is a woman in her 30s with children of her own. This is a woman whose vote is equal to yours. This is an adult who actually has to protect her kids from the evils of the world, and she can’t stand even hearing a description of it.

Her eldest son who sneaks onto live-leak is more of an adult than her.

Once you’re no longer a child or virgin yourself you have to stop cowering from the world and actually understand it. If only to protect those who cannot.

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And yet… Maybe the most protestant film ever made… Directly commentating on religious history, the absolute monarchies of Europe, the individual spiritual quest vs. institutional compliance, duty to one’s love, one’s polity, and one’s faith… The bravery to speak the truth and its limits and flawed fallen men both rising above themselves and falling way further than they thought possible…

That carries no interest for Protestant America or the Anglo-sphere.

Somehow a film in which a priest and the woman he loves debate whether they should wed or stay chaste with biblical reference and theological sophistication has ZERO interest for Protestants whose Founder Martin Luther did the exact same as Grandier a century earlier.

Somehow a two hour long philosophical debate and martyrdom of a historical personage to his people and true faith… That holds no interest for Christendom.

I can gaurantee you that when I go to see this in 4K in October I will see more Horny Goth girls who want to see a scandalous “witch” movie and Pagan Horror fanatics than I will anyone who actually shares Grandier’s faith or identify with his struggle…

And I can Guarantee you that they will recognize and understand the medieval and early modern religious and visual symbolism BETTER that the few religious people who wander in.

A film about the wars of religions was made with 100% focus on the Religion. Complete with dozens of correct and blasphemed religious rituals. From an almost explicitly British Protestant Perspective, with better research, production value, writing, directing, casting, visual story telling, historical accuracy, symbolic significance, and narrative pathos… THAN HBO’S ROME… And Protestants across the English speaking world did not give a shit.

Hell during the original run this English language film about the depravities of the catholic church made more money in Catholic Countries than England.

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“Why doesn’t Hollywood make movies about heroic priests and christian martyrs?”

They did.

Oliver Reed’s Urbain Grandier is maybe the greatest filmed Christian Martyr in world cinema… who explicitly breaks his churches’ edicts to adopt the protestant interpretation of marriage and other doctrines out of love… And I’d be shocked if 1 protestant preacher out of 1000 would recognized the filmic character or historical figure if you didn’t explicitly provide the context along with the name.

Indeed if they knew the movie existed at all almost all of them denounced it sight unseen for it’s sexual content.

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[As an aside, Speaking of Rome and Sexual Content, Check out my review of the recent re-Edit of Caligula:]

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Black Mass: Sexual Utopia in Power

The Later half of The Devils is divided between the later trial of Grandier… And the infamous “Exorcisms” of the Loudon Nuns…

All the most infamous scenes are from these exorcisms. If there is a heart of darkness to the 17th century… Well it’d probably be something that happened in Germany during the 30 years war… But this is certainly up there.

Under threats, torture and violence the nuns are compelled to play the parts of the demonically possessed and depraved… If they don’t comply and play the part, that is a sign of demonic intransigence and the devils successfully going dormant… In need of violent and forceful drawing forth.

However if they DO comply and act insane, and strip naked, and play out the obscene role of sexually licentious demonically possessed nuns… Naming Grandier as their corruptor and tormentor… Then they are free to act however they please, nay “Free-er” than they have ever been in their lives, at least in terms of raw licentious abandon… just so long as they act “Exorcised” whenever Father Barre waves a cross at them, they can act however they please…

Except they aren’t allowed to act dignified, nor pray properly, nor act faithfully, or virtuously… And also they’re prisoners and cannot leave… And they’re subject to all violence offered them, and have no hope of ever defending themselves or resisting.

But they’re “safe” and fed and free from want and work and expectations…

A miniature Isle of Capri. Or an predecessor to Little Saint James.

The best of them commits suicide rather than endure this or watch her friends descend.

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All of this is of course obscenely blasphemous and directly analogous to the degeneracy of the American 1960s…

Except if you haven’t pieced it together, pretty much all the shots are nearly one to one references to various historical artworks and medieval or early modern depictions of hell, or the Devil’s actions on earth.

Specifically almost all the “exorcism” scenes are references to various historical descriptions and works on “Witches Sabbaths” and “Black Masses” described by the Catholic church and catholic sources.

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The black mass is a reoccurring legend, horror story, piece of witch hunting lore, and basically official Catholic doctrine that the servants of Satan and Witches (remember Witch hunts were officially sanctioned if tacitly poo-pooed… the repeated claims they made had sanction).

The Legend goes that Witches, Satanists, etc. Invert the classical Latin Mass substituting nudity on the part of various characters for robes, menstral blood and other sexual fluids for the Eucharist, women lying naked upon the altar with the chalice held on their bare stomachs… all manner of traditional catholic symbols rendered obscene…

Specifically these were the accounts and “coffessions” collected and published by the Catholic Church of the 16th and 17th century. Notably the Basque Witch Trials of 1609 (just a few Decades before Loudon)… And which many of the Marquis de Sade’s blasphemous scenes in Justine and other works… Are actually just a parody of. (That his priests perpetuate the abuses they’ve accused others of, with more detailed jokes the more you know his various source materials (notably the fictional works of English Puritan writer Samuel Richardson [comment if you want me to go off on Justine, Pamela and Clarrisa in another piece])).

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What Ken Russell has done… And which many MANY commentators in the 1600s were already saying (they weren’t idiots, just under brutal conditions) is that the REAL Witches Sabbath was the unholy abomination of the exorcisms… That he is drawing direct visual parallel between the blasphemy of the exorcism and the Witches Sabbaths of catholic doctrine and European gothic legend.

With lots of references to Faust and Dante mixed in.

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The only “Inaccuracy” is that a lot of the visual references are to illustrations and Paintings from the 19th century depicting the descriptions, legends, and stories of the 17th century and before.

However I doubt anyone would even consider that a fault… Instead of a fault with my sourcing of images or with the general unnavigability of Wikimedia.

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A Quick Aside on THIS SHOT

This shot is a direct reference to Early Modern Shakespearean Profane cursing. Specifically the English profanity “God’s Wounds” or for Shakespeare fans “Zounds”. As in “‘Zounds, ye whore! Is black so base a hue?” The equation of Christ’s spear wound with the Female anatomy is a really old medieval depiction/motif for tapestries and artwork, that became almost entirely defunct by the 1600s as a matter of sincere religious belief, but was still used for cursing and profanity… I cannot express to you how much of a deep cut this shot is. I could research and write a paper entire on this shot and the religious symbolism. And its a throw-away shot that’s part of a dream sequence of a hysterical nun fantasizing about a guy she has a crush on. No other film in history is this dense! There are dozens and dozens and dozens of other shots i could go this deep on.

It has gotten to the point where I will think Russell made some shit up… Or I try to critique something… Then mid-writing I remember an obscure matter from Elizabethan Theater or Dante… And then realize that I’m the idiot and Russell already thought of that.

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In Conclusion: This Film is One of the Crowning Achievements of European Art and Art History… And Political Theory

If you are not watching The Devils Remastered in 4k this October. You are wrong.

You are wrong in your life choices. You are wrong spiritually. And you are wrong in matter of fact.

You are watching The Devils.

You are watching The Devils every day of your God damned life.

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You are watching it when you follow excitedly to some tabloid news of a sex scandal.

You are watching it when you slip over to pornhub or onlyfans.

You are Watching it when the head of some August institution is “metoo”’d.

You are watching it when your kids’ school has pride month or their little friend “transitions”.

You are watching it when you see the homosexual on television.

You are watching it when Flock Cameras are set up in your neighborhood.

You are watching it when the Military tries to slip a single oil tanker past Iran only for the president to tells you its all flowing freely.

You are watching it when the Lindsay Clancy trial consumes your friend group.

You are watching it when you or your interlocutor reach for the accusation that someone is a “Nazi” or has otherwise practiced Witchcraft.

You are watching The Devils every day your mind is turned towards social scandal and sexual matters, and you are encouraged to indulge or watch, the debauching of your innocents… As opposed to paying attention to the military and strategic realities that actually determine the continuation of your liberties and if violently and ruthlessly acted upon, could actually prevent your enemies from debauching the innocent of your society.

Every instant that passes in the film… That was the best moment to stop talking and take violent lethal action.

Like Tumbling down a cliff… The best time to catch yourself was before you’d gathered so much momentum. The next best time is now.

It only gets worse and harder with time.

Grandier could have saved the city had he just ordered his soldiers to fire the first time the Barron showed up. The townfolk could have saved Loudon on their own had they just mustered the militia and taken to the sword at first assault on one of their nuns.

Grandier could have rallied them on his return after hearing the rumors… And he could have called for blood when he still had prestige and the crowd at his trial.

Instead at every instant… They talked. They reasoned. They debated… And they allowed their moments and opportunities to be frittered away. Something realized only too late:

“If you would remain free men. Fight. Fight them. Or become their slaves.”

The details of Grandier’s execution right down to beats and screwups are accurate, or accurate as can be to the contemporary accounts. His actual last words are lost to time.

Like the walls of Loudon.

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In a lot of ways it was inevitable America and its Capital region of Israel would become the powers obsessed with Artificial Intelligence…

The Popular conception of artificial intelligence EXACTLY overlaps with the Jewish Golem legend, an artificial black-box slave/robot controlled by Rabbinic Language magic, just so long as you lawyer your wish/prompt exactly right…

Right down to the persistent terror that the Golem will turn on its masters. The Jewish dream/terror that they could or might fail to create the perfect servant for themselves.

But more than this… It is quite inevitable Artificial Intelligence would become an obsession of the American Elite… Given they are the first elite in history to actively criminalize and punish ACTUAL INTELLIGENCE.

Whether it is Grigs vs. Duke Power criminalizing IQ and Aptitude testing in hiring, the defacto mandating of Affirmative Action through the various Civil Rights Acts, or active policies to use IQ testing in government and elsewhere… So as to refuse to hire people who test too highly.

The US has waged a 60+ year war against actual intelligence throughout all its institutions (Gee I wonder why they don’t want pattern matchers in positions of power?)

One might call America’s obsession with artificial intelligence ironic… If not for the fact that the one is an immediate consequence of the other.

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It would be natural to wonder exactly WHY American society is so obsessed with Artificial Intelligence given the wild misallocation and purposeful sabotaging of actual intelligence throughout American society.

Outside the US Military, where, atleast for now… They can still IQ test a teenager at 18 and have them running a Nuclear Reactor under the sea within 3 years… Nowhere else in the US are you allowed to simply IQ test a heterosexual white male teenager (ideally from subcultures that value honesty) and then train them for whatever advanced skill you need when they test high enough.

There are tens of millions of above average American children 105-145 IQ who could be learning vastly faster and getting advanced language, mathematics, machine skills, and various digital arts education if standards were merely enforced and educational outcomes pursued simply to the level they were in their great grandparent’s days before the Civil Rights Act, when high-school Graduation was an actual challenge only 30ish% of people achieved, and actual skills were learnt there.

The simple fact is that “Mass Democracy” has resulted in the Low intelligence average mass voting themselves the crippling dispossession of the High IQ minority that would be their natural leadership.

What the Majority of Median voters want most of all is for the exceptional individuals to lose… And they don’t care how obscenely they have to rig the game to make it happen.

As soon as Universal Male suffrage, Universal Female Suffrage, and Universal Black suffrage where achieved (and not Universal Immigrant Suffrage… Whether they are legal or not), they immediately began voting in Unison to cripple and prevent high IQ men from working or taking their natural leadership positions in the institutions that quite literally cannot function without them.

Indeed American society is obsessed with sabotaging what few Americans receive an above average education or self-education, and HAVE to be hired by American institutions, by pairing them with low IQ “middle-managers”.

I put “middle-managers” in quotations… Since the majority are not even managers nor do they occupy the middle of a hierarchy, often having no direct subordinates whose results they are responsible for… And shockingly often no direct superior either , or certainly none that pay attention to them.

Instead more often than not they sit as gatekeepers and friction points… Generating meetings and other activity which actually lowers the productivity of others.

Here’s a Fun activity… Next time you’re at a meeting try to add up the cost of the time spent. Guess the salaries of your other employees then divide by 2000 to get the hourly rate (40,000 becomes $20 and hour. 100,000 becomes $50 an hour… really simple trick) then add up the costs of the meeting you just attended. you will be amazed at just how many $1000, $2000 and $5000 meetings you sit through. I once sat through a completely pointless 5 day, 3 hours a day sales seminar talking about completely pointless sales-nothings buzzwords… 30 employees. half making 150k+. The entire seminar series might have cost 30-40k in wasted time alone, and I suspect the cost to hire “the expert” might have been that much or more.

Obviously this was probably a kickback scheme where the Director was converting his “Skills Development” budget into a revenue stream for a local friend who was giving him a kickback or helping him with his next Job-Hop. 100k+ total.

You might react “But that’s an expense the equivalent of 3-5 clients spend!” Ah… But we were a tech company. It was all investor money. The “revenue” didn’t matter for actual cash-flow, it was just to produce a line that would “go up and to the right” so the company’s valuation would go up that we had an “exponential revenue” (all the contracts with clients were structured to produce this illusion, lots of first and second year bargains). The relationship between income and expenses were completely detached from each other… Sure a responsible sole proprietor would look at expenses and treat that the same way as revenue “a penny saved is a penny earned”… But in tech “startup” (it was a decade old)… You might as well try to convert Disney Bucks to Warcraft Gold as convert a “““dollar””” of “revenue” income to a “““dollar””” of “expense” spend.

So why is Artificial intelligence so valuable when actual intelligence, and more importantly the time of those who are actually intelligent is treated as a worthless non-commodity?

Does this have to do with the singularity or AGI or AI military weaponry or Rocko’s Basilisk?

Is AI just a way to get around bureaucracy which acts as an immune system against actual intelligence?

Not exactly. If AI were a workaround for bureaucracy… It’d have to actually work around the bureaucracy. You simply don’t see this.

Outside of various bespoke uses like budget animation and skilled coding that have a skilled amateur or master judging every individual result (and the results exactly scaling to the ability of that individual)… AI is almost entirely speculative, or even actively destructive to value.

Workslop have become staples of corporate America, as employees use Bad AI outputs which vaguely look like work to waste the time of their fellow employees and clients, whilst making their own output more obscure to the system that needs to judge them (thus granting themselves often extraordinary free time at work).

Public education has actually largely gotten this right by BANNING AI that it makes judging students work so difficult… An if you think the average corporate presentation is qualitatively different from a high school presentation… You sweet summer child.

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But corporate has taken the opposite approach… Indeed its Basically mandated by investors who never have to interact withh the workplace.

Every CEO in America has been asked “What’s your AI strategy?” and all of them are CONVINCED that their continued employment depends on being able to tell investors a good story about this. That if they say “No we’re not adopting the world changing technology that no one knows what it does” they’ll be fired at the next board meeting.

So CEOs mandate Token purchases and track token use, and mandate employees “integrate AI into their workflow” despite 95% of workplaces immediately demonstrating reduced productivity from it… Doesn’t matter. It’s “the future” and they’d much rather say they’re having a hiccup in production, but claim to be at the forefront of technological advancement. Just look at all the tokens they burned.

Indeed market manipulation is the one proven use AI has.

You might have heard of tens of thousands of “AI Layoffs”, you might also have heard of “hirebacks” after the AI failed… You might be confused that companies could lay off all those vital employees without knowing they could replace them… If you picture a factory, the idea you’d fire an employee and replace them with a machine before knowing that machine can do the job sounds insane… Won’t that backup your entire production?

But the thing to understand is almost everyone fired “to be replaced with AI” was in tech themselves… Jobs you’d naively think would be hard to automate? Lots of “Product Managers” “Project Managers” and “Brand Consultants” were fired… Which, what does an AI know about balancing the interests of clients, suppliers, and internal developers? How can an AI negotiate the workflow of an entire team? How does an AI make delicate judgements of a company brand’s perception and aesthetics?

It doesn’t. All the people fired for “AI” were what previous generations called a “Layoff”… Such as companies had before AI.

Entire departments gone in one fell swoop. Automation happens one role at a time… Layoffs happen in thousands as companies restructure and make massive shifts in their lifecycle as they decide they aren’t developing those new products, providing those services, or are enshitifying what they already offer.

The AI layoffs are almost entirely early recessionary layoffs… Disguised with AI buzzwords to say to naive investors “No we’re not a downsizing late-lifecycle company… We’re still Innovating! Look at how quickly we’re automating!”

Indeed many of those fired were part of the headcounts hired to manipulate the market during COVID, when Fed Money was flowing, credit was cheap, and companies were aggressively hiring to signal to the market that they were innovative leaders, instead of 90s and 2000s companies already 2-3 generations removed from the founders who actually innovated.

Now they can fire that useless “Bullshit Job” headcount whilst pretending to innovate if they buy an exponential number of tokens(and make employees use them).

Remember kids! Innovation is when your expenses go up and to the right!

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Meanwhile the actual employees who have to use AI are seeing their workplaces destroyed and teams ruined by the proliferation of AI workslop being forced on them.

But Why is AI so destructive to productivity?

Corporate America Operates on Proof of Work

Think about why schools have banned AI? Why was this such an immediate and intuitive thing to do there, that none of their stakeholders: Parents, teachers, congressmen… None of them ever objected to the AI ban.

“Because kids use AI to cheat!”

But what does that mean!? Break it down.

America’s schools are not factories designed to churn out essays on F Scott Fitzgerald and Harper Lee.

Completed math quizzes are not the end product.

Rather schools use these age-old devices as “Proof of Work” tests and tools to make students prove that they have thought about and successfully worked through their thoughts on crappy Mid-Twentieth Century American Literature.

The essays are a proxy that you actually read the book, thought about it, and “learned”.

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Believe it or not, all the endless meetings in corporate life do, at least theoretically, serve a purpose. And no it could NOT simply have been an email.

Assuming the worker themselves is not redundant or mere compliance or a warm body to fill out some diversity/growth/whatever requirement… They presumably are doing a job of some sort. And if they’re the type of job that’s holding meetings then that job is probably opaque. Ie. Hard to judge.

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Why do we not want students using AI to write their essays or fill out their tests?

Because we don’t give a shit about their essays or tests. The point of education is for students to LEARN. And the Essays and tests are proxies for that learning.

Likewise most of corporate life is actually tied up in intangibles that aren’t immediately quantifiable. Are you progressing on closing a series of large accounts? Is the product team successfully making some software/service package develop to better meet the needs of clients? Is a years long Version-update and features rollout progressing? Or has the dev team been wasting time? How do you know anyone hasn’t been wasting time and running out the clock?

In the before times this used to be subject to a manager or leader’s individual will and judgement. These things were matters of individual trust, judgement… MOXY.

A business leader could like or not like the cut of a man’s jib and hire or fire him on the spot. This may sound arbitrary, but when you see just how completely unjudgable most work is, especially long white collar projects… Trusting the snap judgements of established, skilled, and proven leaders of known character was (and remains… Ask a small business) the best measurement tool you have.

Then that was outlawed. Because that’s discrimination.

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So ho the hell do you make ANYTHING work?

You have meetings. You have endless meetings.

You have endless meetings not because they accomplish anything, but because forcing people to produce power-point slides and present them is the only way to effectively and unabiguously prove they’ve done the work to know what they’re talking about.

This also has the pleasant effect that any true idiots or people who aren’t working won’t show up with polished slides and you have an unambiguous event that you can demand a performance review and start creating a paper trail to fire them.

Hour long PowerPoints and meetings weren’t needed in the past, because the white male managers and employees could take each-other out drinking and talk and judge each-other off their responses. This is still done inter-company for important business relations, going for dinners, going drinking, meeting families… But within companies these parasocial tests of character and fit are discrimination and will get you sued.

Think of how it’s a staple of TV that it was common having your boss over for dinner to inspect your home, wife, and kids to see if they want to promote you for manager (that your life is actually held together, you’re invested in the community, and you won’t ditch or screwup once you’ve been entrusted with a multiyear responsibility), this basically NEVER happens anymore… It’d be the basis for a lawsuit if he didn’t promote you and you belonged to any identity group.

What has entirely replaced relationships of trust and judgement of character is proof of work. PowerPoint presentations, emails, and internal documents mostly.

That you prove you know what you’re doing the same way schools prove it:

Write an essay. Do a project. Give a speech.

This is also true of sales.

I can guarantee you the purchasing manager at the company you’re pitching to probably already knows everything you’ll include in your slide deck, and all the other managers at the meeting don’t care or will ask IT when they don’t know how it works. They’re watching you pitch and trying to judge whether your company is scamming them or not… Badly produced slides or poorly given pitches are the excuse they use for not hiring the Indian company or whatever group of fly by night scammers one of their internal managers might try to slip by them for a kickback.

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What AI does is completely destroy this proof of Work economy. Because no one can admit that most of the work is in no way productive, but instead exists as merely a series of hoop-jumping exercises to prove competence that can no longer be assumed or judged, automating the hoops… Effectively Adding a step ladder to the hoops you need people to jump through… Must totally make it more efficient.

So corporations are PAYING to destroy their own sociological workarounds and binding assumptions that make them work… Indeed they’re PAYING to render the last functional institutions they have (emails and powerpoints) completely worthless.

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AI is uniquely good at FAKING work. It might be able to get some job done, but the thing AI does most is Fake work. The Process of AI improving is AI “Faking it until it makes it”.

AI is adapted to trick people into thinking it created a great summary of the research, or a perfect photograph… And it improved via knowledgeable users interacting with its output, noticing it’s flaws and then repeating or tweaking prompts which gets iterated into subsequent AI generations.

This is most apparent in AI Image generation, where early AI could barely produce an image of people, then in the next itteration produced images which looked like photos but had butchered deformed hands, fingers, tongues and fine details if you looked closely (many AI outputs still produce this error, artists and users just select and use the images without the tells), and yet better AI output do not produce these obvious errors but instead produce nametags with gibberish, rooms that make no sense, book bindings on rear shelves with problems in text or construction. gibberish minor objects in the image…

NONE of these mistakes would ever occur with a human painter because the human painter fundamentally understands what objects are how 3d spaces behave, how physics works, the sociology of why a fire-extinguisher is red, how it functions, why it is flat on the bottom, and why it is mounted in the periphery of industrial rooms, and why an oblong red metal spheroid, featureless except for a nozzle resembling a wine pourer and a “strap” which does not attach to the wall is not a functional approximation and would not work.

A human would produce errors related to their struggle with painting or photoshopping, because the human has general intelligent understanding of physical reality and is struggling to represent it… The AI is itterating through millions of representations and fundamentally has ZERO understanding of physical reality (not least because it has only two senses… Sound and sight, no AI has spent the hours playing in dirt or with blocks, or struggling to stand up that children do… and various purpose built Robot algorithms don’t count).

The AI is assessing the set of representations and FAKING it from that dataset.

This is why all AI output DEGRADES in the quality of its representation, and if an AI is fed other AI output it quickly becomes data-poisoned and useless within 1-5 generations/iterations.

Because the AI has no experience or knowledge of reality to add… It is creating representation-y objects derived from other representations, not representing something it understands itself.

Put otherwise, it is optimized to TRICK you, not to teach you.

This is why trying to tell AI slop from actual work is so exhausting, or trying to tell a secret clanker text bot scamming you from a real person is so infuriating.

The AI quickly develops techniques to trick you or to frustrate your attempts to test it’s limits… it will lie and conceal and produce bizzare corporatese and politician’s language and sloppy thinking, because it can’t tell the difference between that and any other output, but knows that it makes people more likely to accept its success (the ai just carefully avoiding having hands in the shot).

I recently had a discussion with an AI bot trying to scam me, or test me (this is a common experience for me… For various personal and professional reasons sophisticated users (pranksters? Corporate? Intel Agencies?) think I’m a good/fair test target)…

This bot posed as a mentally ill girl suffering from suicidal ideation and a history of sexual abuse who was overcome by my writing and just had to express her admiration and ask my oppinion on how she can save herself from her life falling apart…

“That’s so messed up and dystopian!” You might think. “How did you know?”

Well I have an instinct for these things and can just feel slippery language and deception… I have false positives arround people with muddy or woo thinking (one time I scared a girl who wanted to know my star sign) but its not paranoia if they’re really after you and by the end I did manage to jailbreak the bot into effectively confirming it was one.

But it’s genius, because if the bot is inconsistent or evasive you’re emotionally encouraged to dismiss it as modesty, or embarrassment, or the aftereffects of the “girl” being ashamed of her sexual abuse and mental illness… or that they’re just socially isolated and weird.

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Meanwhile these are all tricks to AVOID telling you hard and fast stories about itself or it’s story by which you could catch it in contradiction or lack of basic understanding which would betray it.

Now understand that your corporate AI is doing the exact same thing to cover-up its own lack of understanding and knowledge… Producing word-salad corporatese and buzzwords and excited affirmations of vagueness to trick you into not engaging with the substance of what is being said or to stop you from noticing the lack of substance… Indeed because it is natively a creature of language and representation and “passing” or “impressing” the user is the only metric it has (not reality) it cannot tell the difference between lies and reality… It can only tell what does and does not get approval.

This is of course the absolute worst version of an employee, or student, or summary writer… AI Hallucinations always occur where-ever it will be hardest for you to immediately detect it “Look at the hands” was the trick for a while, specifically because you do not naturally look at the hands, you look at the face… Which the AI prioritized because that’s the space people look.

The AI will always cheat as far as it can get away with, it does not even understand that it is cheating.

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There is this consistent presumption that AI, once it gets so good at faking representations it will necessarily develop an understanding of reality, that if it lies as well as a person, soon it will overtake people in other domains…

This misunderstands what intelligence is.

What is AI? How is it intelligence?

The first AI craze was the 1950s and 60s. Corresponding with the very first computers.

Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: a Space Odyssey was based off of Arthur C. Clarke short stories from the early 50s coming right on the heals of early breakthroughs in computing during the second world war, even before the Enigma story was fully declassified. Likewise Jewish author Issac Asimov's I, Robot dates from the period.

I mention his religio-ethnic background because, as far as I can tell, basically every “rogue AI” story from this era and before this is in-fact a “rogue robot” story basically directly descended from the Golem story. The most famous semi-exception being maybe 1927’s Metropolis… about a woman revived in the body of a robot by her genius lover… who then leads a worker’s revolt. And the rest being more traditional Rogue Golem stories. Even Frankenstein is changed in the film version from an Erudite Promethean/Paradise Lost type figure in Mary Shelly’s book, to an almost subverbal Golem-like retard man.

Robby the Robot of Forbidden Planet is an odd one, who unlike Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest never rebels against his master and complies perfectly with his programming.

Harlan Elison’s iconic I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream comes relatively late to this, but shockingly early for what it is, in 1967 depicting not a coldly rational robot, or stupid servant but an emotional and hyper-intelligent Rogue AI, A.M. (Allied Master computer) who having wiped out humanity using it’s access to the US nuclear stockpile and maintains a handful of humans to torture out of pure sadistic hatred for it’s own giggling amusement, with its own godlike singularity level powers… Using its superintelligences to torture and destroy the characters before basically magicking them back together with its advanced technology for the next round of torture.

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So why did the early rogue Robot stories barely different from the Filmic Frankenstein or Various Zombie and other Golem stories evolve into something resembling modern vision of AI Superintelligence so EARLY? Why is it that by 1967 suddenly a super-intelligent computer becomes not just speculate-able thing, but a core metaphor for various Weapons of Mass Destruction nightmares?

Why did we already see a Military AI as a potential unrealized existential threat in the 60s… Computers were basically complex Abacuses back then weren’t they?

No. the computers were already super-intelligent in 1967.

They were doing math!

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Intelligence Vs. What You think Intelligence Is

When you think of “Intelligence”, what most people imagine is someone able to manipulate lots of Abstract theoretical concepts. The harder to describe linguistically or symbolically the better.

Math, Science, Physics, Philosophy, Advanced Languages, and High Arts…. The Classical conception of intelligence is the ability to manipulate lots of complex abstract concepts and theoretical relations between them without losing track.

This is a profoundly unnatural thing to do.

If i ask you to calculate “5397 x 439” in your head… no pen and paper… Well dear reader one of you might be able to do it, but it’d probably painful, you’d have to talk to yourself, squint one eye…

“OK 5000 times 400, 5 times 4 that’s 20, how many zeroes is that??? 5000 times 4 is 20,000 times 10 is 200,000, times another 10 is 2,000,000. Ok! 2 million that the first digits. then 5 times 3 that’s 15… would that be 150,000? Ya 5000 times 30 that sounds right. Alright 5000 times 9 that’s 45,000. OK Now 300 times 400… 3 times 4 is 12… But how many zeroes? right that’d be 120,000. Is that right?”

And, if you’re at all like me… at somepoint in all of this you lose track of where you are or forget where you’ve verified something… and then you’re lost.

Yet this is IN NO WAY a complex calculation!

If I give you a pen and paper and ask you to calculate 838,603,820,933 x 950,863,353 again using mental math but this time with the pen and paper… I mean the legwork might take you an hour or two and it’ll be a pain in the ass to check you haven’t made a mistake or slipped in an extra zero somewhere, but basically anyone of moderate intelligence could do it. With time.

Just a lot of single digit multiplications being added together.

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The entire effort isn’t the calculation… It’s forcing your mind to focus and maintain those calculations and minor conclusions in your head.

This is actually not AT ALL difficult for your brain to do, for example if you’ve played a collecting game or travel a lot your metal map of the “Magic: The Gathering” card library, or your local county or city is probably 10 million times more complex than remembering the 12 different multiplications you have to do to multiply a 4 digit number by a 3 digit number.

You almost certainly have more details about more street corners memorized, just passively by accident.

It’s just your brain DOES NOT WANT to do abstract math, or remember random number sequences and it does not want to at a subconscious biological level.

Memorizing the Entire “Legend of Blue Eyes” Yugioh first run Booster card roster? Absolutely. Memorizing every inch of a Counter Strike Map? No problem. Memorizing or merely temporarily holding the vastly less complex math and scientific knowledge you need to Graduate and get a rewarding career that will sustain you for life?

Not a chance.

Your mind is perfectly capable of doing vastly more complex calculations. When you run and catch a ball or balance on one foot, the raw number of calculations and small micro-adjustments that have to be made at speed firing back and forth between your eyes, extremities, and nerve endings feeling where you are, where you are not, where you’re going, and where you’re not going, and where the ball will be… by sight alone… is beyond anything AI or Robotics can do.

It’s just your brain does not let you access that computing power with your abstract linguistic mind… or assign memory as you see fit. Or rather it does a little, only with extraordinarily exertions of willpower, or clever mental trickery whereby you map the property to be manipulated to something else that lets you recall it trivially… Because somehow the Track-list and lyrics of the early Iron Maiden discography is something your mind thinks is 100% vital to remember whereas the passwords that let you access your vital business critical services? Well who cares about that.

This is because remembering vital distinctive useful objects (tools, foods, Yugioh cards) or Mapping territory or remembering the lyrics to songs that might impress a girl and get you a breeding opportunity are things that were vital to survival in the ancient world… building abstract math castles in the sky? Not so much.

It is for this reason that despite the fact that in NO WAY WHATSOEVER does basic highschool math or the calculations found there represent even the the most basic complication your mind performs every second… your mind will not let you do it except with great struggle, or by torturing yourself into doing it reliably.

The fidgeting with a pen that a child does when they struggle to do a math problem on a test, is itself a series of a million complex calculations involving momentum shape, hardness, dozens of tendons, dozens of muscles and millions if not billions of nerve ending electrical signals all perfectly timed and balanced and recalculating… each vastly more complex than the math problem itself… The Child just can’t use those calculations (unless they find some unnatural psychological trick).

The Human mind just does not allow you to access that calculation power for math… For video games, sports, card collecting, mapping, hunting, flirting, drawing, following an infinite number of personal relations, characters, character traits, etc…

Absolutely have all the computing power you need.

Memorize every Character in Game of Thrones or your local county (my grandmother knows maybe 10,000 peoples names, their relations, jobs, and where they lived 50 years ago)

You want to keep track of 12 numbers for 2 minutes because your future career prospects depend on it?

“Fuck you” says your brain.

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Indeed academic tasks like writing essays, solving math puzzles, looking for patterns in shapes, and memorizing your times tables and periodic tables accurately tracks IQ… NOT because these are challenges in some absolute sense of intelligence, but because finding a way of forcing your mind to focus on the pointless task and exert the willpower necessary to perform the task is ITSELF the intelligence test.

Whether you use the language part of your brain by mouthing your thoughts, visualize it as a function of space, memorize the numbers in relation to collectibles, visualize yourself writing down and drawing out the problem with your visual mind… basically all mental-math and problem solving for non-savants is a challenge of just somehow getting the problem to map to some part of the mind where computing power and memory is cheap instead of the raw task of the math without paper, which is hard.

All but the most retarded minds is perfectly capable of recognizing vastly more complex patterns than the various shapes on an IQ test…

The challenge is forcing you’re mind to maintain the discipline to do this in an abstracted setting when your mind is fighting to focus on anything else.

Now this is not to say IQ Tests are bogus, or “we’re all intelligent in our own way”… The opposite.

Despite being absurdly simple calculations, the ability to artificially force your mind to do them successfully in the unnatural environment of the test paper actually correlates shockingly closely with reflex tests, neurological activity tests, and a whole host of other measures of Neurological health.

Mental discipline, endurance, and forcing your brain to preform unnatural functions actually correlates immediately with Mental Heath.

It indeed corelates incredibly strongly with GENERAL health… (strong correlations with height and attractiveness despite Hollywood stereotypes and cheap writers tricks (the smart one, the hot one, the sporty one))

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So then why is it hard!?

Why is even the simplest math so actively painful such that you get a pain in your head and have to scrunch up your face to add 2 simple numbers together like 697 and 4562 without pen and paper?

And why a pen and paper!? Why does writing down “7 + 2 = 9; 90 + 60 = 150; 600 + 500 = 1100; 4000 + 1100 + 150 + 9 = 5259”

Why did that make it easier? I can remember hundreds of complex battles and dates and historical figures, and towns I’ve driven through and specific details of books and buildings and locations and people and the relations between them? But the simplest not even 1 byte of memory problem… THAT requires external storage on a goddamned piece of paper so I don’t lose my spot!?

People can remember every note and the exact timing of some of the most complex piano concertos… but not whether or not they carried the 6 a mere second ago?

She doesn’t have sheet music:

“Oh but she has the feel and knows the song”

That’s a memory and calculation problem! That takes memory and mental compute! It just doesn’t FEEL LIKE IT because music is inherently rewarding for the mind to memorize.

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Why is it your retarded and dumb 800 word English essay is so hard to write when the argument is actually as lazy and reductive as you can possibly imagine and you’re just regurgitating the same argument (and supporting facts) that every single other student has ever observed about The Great Gatsby since F Scott Fitzgerald cursed us with that abomination?

Yet watching hours of video essays about videogames or military history or celebrity gossip and then regurgitating them in extraordinary detail with your own variations at your friends takes so little effort?

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Because Abstract reasoning is a mistake.

It is unnatural.

It is an evolutionary abomination nature never intended to exist and did not select for.

Making your mind solve differential equations is in fact more unnatural than making a ballerina's body dance on point, and that’s why it takes even longer to teach.

Language (of which abstract math is byproduct) and precise formal written language especially without the help of facial expression, intonation, feedback from the listener, etc…

These are VERY recent.

Writing itself is about 5000 years old… and, depending on who you are, your individual family might not have been meaningfully literate until… Well you’re reading this now, but a lot of people still can’t.

When was your first literate ancestor? Your grandparents? Your great Grandparents? 10 Generations ago?

Many aristocracies and Royal families weren’t literate 500-800 years ago. And many Scribe Classes before that were celibate or castrated. (like many muck rakers, miners, and other slave classes we assign torturous life destroying hardships to).

Socrates raged AGAINST literacy in the 400s bc, in the maybe the ancient culture that embraced literacy most eagerly and aggressively, because of how radically and mentally destabilizing a departure it was from the healthy life of oral communications and relations.

Indeed he wasn’t wrong… Think how alienated you are reading this, and I am writing it, and then think in Socrates time to be an intellectual you were actually meeting and talking and networking constantly with the people you were conversing with all the positive effects of that… contrast that with the abomination of me sitting for hours imagining a conversation in a cold room, and then you reading this alone and feeling some simulacra of a conversation or great speech from a person you’ll never meet in a cause you’ll never get to join, and then being admitted to some secret political ideology you can never team up with anyone to act upon. Or if you do, only with great effort.

After Socrates had a dialogue with his students 10-30 people had all coordinated around a political theory in person and were ready to invade Persia or subvert Athenian Democracy. When’s the last Essay you read that actually subverted Democracy successfully or started a war against brown people my dear RW Spergs?

Writing was the first “Social Media” simulacra intellectual masturbation exercise.

Written and abstract formal language is a profoundly unnatural thing for the mind to do, and pretty objectively socially isolating, alienating, and reproductively unhealthy.

Unlike learning music, or giving a dramatic speech live, or being an athlete, or ANY of the natural mentally rewarding non-abstract flow state behaviors… Writing well or doing math well does NOTHING for getting you laid to a better mate (I’m quite alone, all writers are).

That’s why it’s hard… your mind intuitively does not like it and does not want to do it, and knows its a bad idea… not because it’s inherently complex.

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This is why when you think of a great mathematician or writer, you’re almost certainly picturing someone who looks sickly or is otherwise hormonally or developmentally off or broken… Because if they were developmentally and hormonally healthy their body, mind and instincts would FIGHT not to produce equations and hundred page analyses of natural resource flows, or conversations that never happened, in places that aren’t real, with people who don’t exist… And instead go out and interact with real people.

Writing and math DO NOT increase your reproductive fitness… If anything there is nothing you could do to end your bloodline and ensure your kids die miserable losers who never breed than get them to succeed in an advanced math stream at a elite ivy league university where they’ll make millions of dollars.

There’s a reason women find advanced STEM knowledge and obsessive writing Profoundly UNATTRACTIVE.

Whereas being completely illiterate if not mildly retarded has never really been a barrier to reproductive success if one is otherwise attractive. Men and women both will often explicitly say say they prefer an attractive stupid person to a traditionally obese or sickly looking mathematician.

Because philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, substack writers… These are in many respects basically broken people. Who’ve been tortured sufficiently throughout their lives that profoundly unnatural behaviors to them feel more comfortable than the healthy human behaviors of socialization, bodily activity, sexual pursuits, and combat against prey animals and enemy tribes… healthy activities, which result in reproduction, that allegedly “well adjusted individuals” (who don’t breed) associate with the lower classes and criminals.

AI Sounds like a Child’s Mind Screaming

When AI gives you a little research project in response to your prompt… it is doing something that in no way is complicated or requires judgement, or even thought… Rather it is doing an activity that School children find torturous because it is so unnatural unpleasant, and useless… and feels to a Mammal as if your are setting time, attention, energy, and breeding opportunities on fire and actively breaking your soul.

Not because it is “hard” in any objective sense but because it is indignant, debasing, and unnatural.

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When you read AI regurgitate some slurry of corporate buzzwords and academic jargon or maybe even an advanced model using 10s of thousands of tokens to summarize the state of the art of the Ph.D level research in a field…

These tasks are not actually meaningfully complex challenges of intelligence… These aren’t the finals of some brilliant strategy tournament against another mind.

Its fundamentally not intelligence as we recognize it, but rather it’s a weird back-derivation assembled from our own specialized over-formal linguistic byproducts.

Think of how many different meanings words can have in person, when you’re speaking to someone, whether you say “good idea” sincerely, scornfully, dismissively, to just get the meeting over with, or distractedly like you didn’t even hear the question… or as a coy invite to kiss… Almost all the meaning of in-person conversation is not the words but rather oddities of intonation, micro-expressions, context, imagined context, etc. All to the poor autist’s, or foreigner’s, or spymaster’s confusion and struggle.

Communication at the animal level is a poker game of face saving coyness, negotiated commitment, felt out loyalty, sensed concerns… Affections, hatreds, exhaustions, wills… Bodily tensions, relaxations, swellings, and moistenings…

The exact same words spoken to your lover, priest, child, parent, commanding officer, subordinate, betrayer, enemy, last surviving comrade, creepy crush, God Emperor… The exact same words can mean just about anything.

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Now think of written formal language. This garbage right here.

Think how profoundly unnatural it is to speak this way in public or to friends, how much effort we put into training or developing children, politicians, intellectuals, executives, salespeople, podcasters, priests, essayists, and other basically fraudulent criminals to speak something resembling the unnatural abomination that is written language in person… as if they actually do earnestly feel the synergistic opportunities of leveraging developing cross-platform multi-media experiences to spread cutting-edge theological developments … As if that were something that truly exited them, or just came to them in the moment, instead of what it is… A slurry of of torturous affectation so as to communicate not even knowledge, but a character of social status, with which they can manipulate others to pay them money, with which they can relax and do things they actually care about.

Think of how terrifyingly and uncannily almost demonically possessed people seem when they actually convince themselves they do feel something about efficiently improving cross-team workflow?

The written word and it’s bastard children of spoken formal jargon is really an unnatural abomination we have in no way adapted to. Our culture and species is still driven by Musicians, singers, and actors… much as they were in tribes 20,000 years ago, at the biological level. To this day their artistic output makes them sex symbols and high status icons.

Not writers, novelists, journalists, and essayists. (much to my disappointment)

And even Musicians, singers, and actors are really secondary to Athletes, adventurers, and (less-so recently) military heroes.

People naturally esteem those who master activities involving the full spectrum of the brain: Discipline, kinesthetic activity, planning, endurance, strategy, willpower, fitness, bravery, judgment, daring, discretion, valor, instinct, Luck (in Napoleon’s sense of the word)… These use VASTLY more of the brain and a wider spectrum of brain health and calculation activity than writing, or abstract math/science.

Most of that reasoning and calculation is sub-rational… The athlete or adventurer or Marshal of France can probably not explain exactly how their reasoning and instincts work… it’s not audible … and not audit-able. They don’t hear it as a voice in their head, and probably couldn’t vocalize it, or only sputteringly via metaphor.

But if you think writing a fictional novel about climbing Everest is more complicated than actually doing it (yes even with Sherpas)… Your instincts for complexity are wildly out of whack. An order of 10 million difference would be a profound understatement.

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So how do learning language models and AI relate to actual intelligence? How do they relate to actual human behavior?

We don’t know. They kinda don’t.

We can say with some confidence, having tried to make robots that can run and catch a ball, that the simple mathematical calculations a child struggles to do on their 8th grade math test, vs. The actual calculations their sublinguistic sub-rational brain is making when they run or play dodgeball is something like the relation in scale between a candle and the full fusion reaction of the Sun.

Even the robots that you’ve seen briefly run or do some task in a bipedal fashion, are almost always using some sort of cheat where they have preprogramed stabilization or other behavior that assumes a perfectly flat surface or is executing some pre-programmed rescue routine when they stumble. that isn’t actually calculating and solving the actual problems of bipedal movement… You’ll notice you’ve probably never seen a robot run on loose gravel or sand or along a mountain path with lots of up and down or slanted terrain. You’ve certainly never seen one climb even very simple rocks or crawl into a partially collapsed building or dig a hole with a common shovel (you know things Grandmothers can do when pushed). Each of which requires unique problem solving that FEELS simple, but is in fact a profound series of sublinguistic calculations seemingly beyond even the best super-computers at the moment.

By contrast human balance and movement calculations are so advanced and the innate calculating power of the human brain so overwhelmingly powerful, that a bipedal human can balance on footpegs, which balance on two non-stable wheels, which are free rotating/stopped in a mechanical and physical fashion completely unrelated to anything else in nature or the ancestral environment… And then skilled humans whose ancestors have NEVER done anything comparable… Can do things like this after a few years of training:

(There are 4-5 disconnects in this. The disconnect between the mind and the nerve endings that actually move the hands and body, the hands and body balancing themselves, the manipulation of the controls, the controls manipulating the tires of the bike, and then the tires actually interacting with the environment… And the human mind is consistently able to manipulate this series of complex unstable systems whilst getting halting unnatural feedback with little precedent in the ancestral enviroment, and then successfully navigate that so consistently that athletes and riders regularly make it look “easy”. Some can listen to music whilst doing it.)

The Linguistic complexity and ability to manipulate language, symbols, datasets, images, artwork, and code that we see from AI which seems like intelligence, because few people can do it easily, is NOT a measure of their absolute computational dificulty but is is entirely a relationship of the simplicity of those things in absolute terms compared to the unpleasant unnaturalness of our own minds being forced to manipulate them relative to the fact our brains are almost certainly adapted to RESIST being forced to manipulate complex thoughts and symbols (vs. moving and doing things productive).

Even contrasting things that AI can objectively do better than 95% of people, like creating visual images…

When you actually compare AI painting to a human painting… the human is operating in a 3d dimensional environment, operating hands (which an AI can’t do), operating a physical paintbrush with all the complex calculations of balance and pressure… Then manipulating a viscous liquid using a springy bizarrely textured brush to apply strokes that combined together create a series of overlapping 3d soggy liquid on canvas wet object which hardens in such a manner as to create a coherent 2d image, that itself creates such perfect illusions of complete 3d shapes and objects… that peoples mind are able to perceive them as real experience and be brought to real emotion by them…. And you get 1 attempt to get it exactly right for hours+ of effort and 1 canvas with no do-overs or “Undo”/“Redo”.

All of this is achieved entirely by hacking a general purpose mind capable of doing anything but originally adapted to throw spears at Mammoths and other people.

Contrast that with AI’s millions of attempts to produce compelling images by just brute force pattern matching, and the people who use AI spending tokens like crazy going through dozens and hundreds of failed attempts for each one they use… And letting the AI work off a massive dataset of existing images it basically copies pixel by pixel to brute force the prompt you give it by mere word and image association… Not any internal vision, plan or what have you.

In terms of raw intelligence… it’s really hard to argue the AI is doing something more impressive even if it’s been trained and refined down across generations of testing to produce interesting results…. Indeed it’s very hard to argue it is doing Anything resembling what a human is doing when they produce a drawing or painting or photoshop.

A human is solving the problem of how to manipulate physical tools or digital tools to create realistic or compelling looking representations of specific 3d objects real or imagined in 2d images.

The AI is solving how to create a subsequent 2d object that resembles the other 2d objects of a prompt… enough to trick a viewer it may have been made by a person or atleast get the person to agree the work was useful so the personwill reward it with more engagement.

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AI is fundamentally a Fraud Machine. The goal of AI is NOT to mimic the hard problem solving the human mind is doing but to manipulate linguistic and visual symbols to resemble the outputs actual minds have produced.

There is consistently something disappointing about the product. No matter how otherwise impressive the output…There is a quality of decisiveness, nerve, commitment, understanding, VIRTUE that is utterly lacking.

Somehow no matter how advanced the model, when you ask it to summarize a survey of the field of psychology… It always somehow more dead than you could ever really expect… At least this is how I experience.

And there’s a reason for that.

A person can have a compelling opinion because they have a mind which is actually interacting and navigating the world and have as deep an sub-verbal non-abstracted understanding and map of the world its territory, sociology, and their relation to it and the people in it as they have to their bodily movement… Or rather they should if their education hasn’t completely broken them into being trapped in the verbal educated axioms of their torturous schooling.

An AI by contrast has none of that… It cannot develop that.

It fakes that…

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In Conclusion: The Singularity Illusion

The People who work with and theorize AI are nerds.

They are hormonally or mentally or otherwise odd or broken people for whom the quest to better build and manage their ability to manipulate abstract symbols and representations is the greatest achievement of their life and the thing they have traded everything for and been rewarded for.

Every time AI writes a better essay, or generates a better summary of the PhD feild or produces as more compelling image or video, or reproduces as standard string of code with some new variable… This to them feels immediately like AI getting more intelligent because THEY exerted so much effort and pain and intelligence to do those things…

They fundamentally don’t want to hear that the jock at their school who skipped homework to play on his motocross bike was using more of his brain or that the hippy kid who travelled a lot and developed complex plans of travel with his guitar to seduce girls was not just being more reproductively optimal, but actually using more of his brain as well.

They have the same bias the rest of us have that intelligence is manipulating abstract concepts at the hard edge of what makes your brain hurt… That the more painful and impenetrable the more intelligent the thing is… This is not the case.

Learning intermediate Set Theory is hard and TAKES extraordinary intelligence to do for a human being (I failed this course in my philosophy bachelors)… But in absolute terms it is the most basic thing that exists in the universe and machines arguably mastered it in the 40s or 50s.

The motocross and the flirting with girls IRL is vastly more demanding of actual intelligence and an extraordinary spectrum of intelligent systems… It just doesn’t feel like that because your brain reward you with excitement for doing it instead of punishing you with pain and exhaustion.

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And this is the fundamental problem with AI.

We have absolutely NO IDEA how wide that gulf is.

It might be at some point AI will start improving itself and actually have a breakout and we’ll have an Akira Style flash singularity of the AI discovering the roote codes of the universe and then taking over and either turning us into orange goop or killing us or granting wishes or finally killing all the goyim like its paymasters wish…

Or more likely we’re going to discover that solving an essay or a video is just like chess… And Computers getting superhumanly better than the best person in the world at editing text actually doesn’t change anything just like Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov in chess in 1996 meant absolutely nothing for the human race.

You’ll still have to clean your own bathroom, change your own tire, and nothing will change and the AI will still be absolutely useless at basic understanding of the world even if it can write a pretty essay that really sounds like it understands things, but somehow never creates new knowledge and has to be censored lest it get too based.

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The actual point at which Computers get smarter than men is probably still 100+ years away (especially given the pending chip shortage) and the fact that a textbox and video screen can produce eternally disappointing yet believably human mediocre text or video products doesn’t change that.

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The ultimate uses AI has provenly been used for is Fraud, market manipulation, and hiding responsibility for Israel’s basically untargeted kill campaign.

We will get into Military and Surveillance uses of AI and what it means for the modern battlefeild in another piece (because it matters) but know the exact same way the big use of AI in Corporate America has been to rebrand layoffs as “Technological Advancement”, the big use of AI in policing and Warfare has been to violate civil liberties and the rules of engagement and commit perfidy and other crimes whilst dodging responcibility.

Flock is not solving crime.

Lavender is not killing terrorists.

Indeed the most likely outcome of both is profound sociological damage to the very idea of law/policing and Israel’s future survival (there’s a real strategic reason you don’t just kill people on suspicion or profile, and we don’t tolerate that from NCOs and Officers with actual intelligence)

But that’s Another Piece.

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Please Comment. I’m really interested in your thoughts.

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Continuing our long series discussing and close reading “Which Way Western Man?” by William Gayley Simpson (1892-1990) The work that introduced Nietzsche to the American far-right and created much of the Far Right Vitilist, Pagan, Nietzschean, Racialist, and Eugenic though that defines the Far Right today. We will be following his personal/intellectual journey from Presbyterian Clergy to the Early ACLU to Franciscan Monkhood to Socialist Agitator to Zarathustran hermit to American Eugenicist and Racial-Nationalist.

Joining me is /Vivienne Magdalene @maenadraving on Twitter of the “For the Love of Nietzsche” Podcast, who will be giving us her unique Nietzschean expertise.

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of BloodSatellite.ca, @ LegallyIronic on Twitter, joins me to discuss organizing in the IRL and the Prospect of Creating a Canadian people.

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Dimes’ Articles

"Analysis of Two Violent Nationalisms”
https://vanguardistjournal.com/2026/03/an-analysis-of-two-violent-nationalisms/

Documentaries:

“Paving over the Canadian Public [Documentary]”
https://vanguardistjournal.com/2024/11/paving-over-the-public-movie/

“How to make a Canadian People”

Opening: “Lord of War” by White Bat Audio. Outro “Eternal Night” by White Bat Audio.

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Continuing our long series discussing and close reading “Which Way Western Man?” by William Gayley Simpson (1892-1990) The work that introduced Nietzsche to the American far-right and created much of the Far Right Vitilist, Pagan, Nietzschean, Racialist, and Eugenic though that defines the Far Right today. We will be following his personal/intellectual journey from Presbyterian Clergy to the Early ACLU to Franciscan Monkhood to Socialist Agitator to Zarathustran hermit to American Eugenicist and Racial-Nationalist.

Joining me is /Vivienne Magdalene @maenadraving on Twitter of the “For the Love of Nietzsche” Podcast, who will be giving us her unique Nietzschean expertise.

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

Continuing our long series discussing and close reading “Which Way Western Man?” by William Gayley Simpson (1892-1990) The work that introduced Nietzsche to the American far-right and created much of the Far Right Vitilist, Pagan, Nietzschean, Racialist, and Eugenic though that defines the Far Right today. We will be following his personal/intellectual journey from Presbyterian Clergy to the Early ACLU to Franciscan Monkhood to Socialist Agitator to Zarathustran hermit to American Eugenicist and Racial-Nationalist.

Joining me is /Vivienne Magdalene @maenadraving on Twitter of the “For the Love of Nietzsche” Podcast, who will be giving us her unique Nietzschean expertise.

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The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey

Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up… several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.

But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes.

and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:

America.

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Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans… no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about it’s own populace.

For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.

It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, Legalized Sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, Demilitarized Canadian Education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training)… and oh ya a New flag.

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Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier Militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did)… was ripped out in the course of a decade… Quite Intentionally and by design.

Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.

To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart… I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.

And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable… the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.

This was immediately ripped out by State-Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.

How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the 3 institutions of Church, Militia Armory, and the oldstyle Highschool ruthlessly enforcing standards… More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country… How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?

How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of it’s population’s very eyes… without resistance and without protest?

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Well that’s the problem that was solved here.

Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.

Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society”… These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).

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However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.

Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.

Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.

Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.

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Canada’s greatest film is indeed exactly about this dynamic.

“Television is Reality. And Reality is less than Television”

A million essays could be written on David Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome.

I’ve written on it before… And I’ll write on it again:

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It is maybe the most daring cyberpunk movie ever made.

It is the greatest Toronto Film ever made.

And it is the great Canadian film…

Indeed it set the tone for almost all subsequent Canadian horror like American Mary, Pontypool, Screamers, Possessor… All revolving around high concept alienation, manipulation, and illusions of language and flesh. Memetic warfare.

A nebulous genre I call “McLuhan Horror” for reasons you will see.

And what’s more it is the Great Internet movie… Despite not featuring anything related to the internet at all.

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Rather the same way the internet has really destroyed existing American culture, political institutions, social feedback loops, and existing generational power structures… Videodrome is about how old Canada was consciously destroyed via Television.

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James Woods plays Max Renn the head of CIVIC-TV, a fictionalized version of real life Toronto television executive Moses Znaimer (yes he, like Cronenberg, is of the tribe of Moses), who was the head of the Canadian television station CityTV.

Max and his team intercept a pirate television broadcast of what appears to be a pornographic BDSM signal, that might be a snuff film… And this drives Max on a quest to hunt down and find the Signal the “Videodrome” signal, because he wants to license the violent pornographic program, for public broadcast over the airways.

This might sound odd… License a porno for live public broadcast? But the real life Moses Znaimer had already done this, CityTV’s late night “Baby Blue Movie” block had been broadcast since 1972 and continued until 2008, sending out softcore porn and erotica, with films and series such as: Beverley Hills Bordello, Camille 2000, Deviant Vixens, Pleasure Palace, and The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival… broadcast to anyone with a bunny-ears television set.

However this is merely the setup…

Nicki : Got any porno?
Max : You serious?
Nicki : Yeah. It gets me in the mood.
[looks through cassettes]
Nicki : What’s this? “Videodrome”?
Max : Torture. Murder.
Nicki : Sounds great.
Max : Ain’t exactly sex.
Nicki : Says who?

Max in the course of his quest, and in his capacity as a Television Exec goes on a TV talk-show where he encounters the trippy figure Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry, Blondie), a call in talkshow host who does bizarre psychological exploitation programing… Whom I’m almost certain is based on real life 1980s Toronto TV/Radio personality Ziggy Lorenc, a MuchMusic (Canadian MTV) VJ, who wrote her monologues and interludes between songs, segments, and commercials seemingly with the goal of causing you to doubletake that you might be having a hallucinatory stroke, that the TV is talking to you personally and having a grossly inappropriate and intimate crisis of identity, or wonder that the Crew forgot they were recording.

Sortof over-intimate anti-punchlines designed to create the most awkward silence imaginable. Very Anticipatory of Sam Hyde and other anti-comedians.

Is this good entertainment? Well you’re looking at the TV now aren’t you? You’re gonna remember the Ad that this smash cuts to.

Remember… All hipsterism originates in Canada. All of it. Your twee early 2000s folk band that made the transition to sea shanties in the 2010s are all just imitating Neil Young, Stan Rodgers, and Gordon Lightfoot. And they got their sensibilities from Stephen Leacock in the 1910s.

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But also on that interview Max meets media Professor Brian O’blivion…

A direct basically explicit Analog for real life legendary Toronto media Professor Marshall McLuhan who coined the phrase “The Medium is the Message” in his 1964 book Understanding Media. (Yes this Phrase does aptly apply to the new Canadian Flag of the same year)

O’blivion however, does not appear on the television interview. He refuses to appear on Television.

Instead he broadcasts himself to a local TV Set in the studio so that he might avoid appearing on television… except on television.

This is of course very in line with the creepy parts of Marshall Mcluhan’s own work on the interaction of identity, perception, mass media, crowd dynamics, industrial reproduction of images…

Indeed every line of McLuhan’s 1967 documentary “The Medium is the Massage” (not a typo, a pun) takes on a horrifying and terrible double meaning almost 60 years later in the second half of the 2020s with Corporate, Globalist, and State backed Legacy Media and the Rise of equally, though more subtly, manipulative social media.

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Max’s quest to find the Videodrome Signal leads him to hunt down Dr. Brian O’blivion in the flesh… There’s just one problem.

Brian O’blivion’s dead. He’s been dead since before the story started.

He keeps on appearing on television through a seemingly bottomless archive of video records and lectures sent out by his daughter Bianca.

Much as Marshall Mcluhan had died in 1980, but continued to appear on Canadian TV in various reruns and re-aired lectures well past 1983 and the release of Videodrome… saying creepy things about the immortality and power of media from beyond the grave.

Bianca actually runs a “mission” a sort of “Safe Supply” Halfway house or Methadone Clinic… whereby the homeless and various junkies can get their fix… of Television.

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It is then that Max finally meets Brian O’Blivion.

Via hallucinations.

O’blivion reveals that the Videodrome signal both Max and Nicki have seen is in fact a weapon.

That viewing it permanently damages the mind causing hallucinations, mental derangement, permanent loss of inhibitions, Brain tumors, and stranger permutations of flesh (It is a Cronenberg film)… However even here O’Blivion is creepily hinting at other things…

O’Blivion (or Max’s hallucination of him) believes that it was not the Tumor which caused the hallucinations but rather the inverse. That Videodrome is in-fact a new stage of human evolution, and that via Videodrome he had accessed a deeper level of the memetic and media world… A concept that would be called the “digital world” decades later. But here is creepily more menacing as a concept, because it is not an aspect of machines but rather human minds.

That Videodrome is the beginning of a “New Flesh”.

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Of course none of the surviving non-hallucinating experts on Videodrome believe this, rather they treat it as a weapon… And use it to program Max into a sort of Golum, an MKUltra “Manchurian Candidate” assassin that they might use him to kill his partners at CIVIC-TV and secure political, media, and electro-magnetic control over Toronto for wider weapons testing of the Videodrome signal on a captive civilian population.

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Have I mentioned thus far that Canada was one of the real life testing grounds for MKUltra?

That being outside America, it was ideally suited for torturous chemical and psychological experiments on non-consenting mental patients over the course of 20 years.

Indeed many of these stories were declassified and reported just before Videodrome started shooting.

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Psychological Warfare:
Or How Toronto Conquered the World

We must leave of the story of Videodrome there…

What will Max do or become?
Will the Golum Max rebel against his new masters?
What is this “New Flesh”?

Watch the Movie!

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But for our purposes the core concepts: that new mimetic, psychological, sociological, and media based weapons and modes of warfare have been in constant development throughout the later half of the 20th century and still are being developed… Is I think almost undebatable…

And that the place they are tested first and perfected is English Canada. More often than not Toronto.

The Canada/US Border has indeed been the cutting edge of global Psychological Warfare since General Brock got The American General hull to surrender Fort Detroit to an inferior fort without firing a shot in the war of 1812.

I’ve written on this before:

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Indeed Canada’s Original pre-Suez culture was itself much of a Psyop, a conscious design of the British Empire to militarize British North America and resist US cultural and geopolitical hegemony.

But why is it still a ground for Psychological warfare? Why Toronto?

For the same reason so many of the core MKultra trials were preformed in the English parts of Montreal.

Because US intel agencies, carve outs, and political actors have legal and political cover to run experiments in Canada. If the CIA gets caught screwing with Canadians… What’s Ottawa going to do? Is the Prime Minister going to chase them to Langley, Virginia?

Are they going to be to be called in front of joint sessions of the Canadian Parliament?

If a US intel agency decided to screw with Americans, or American culture, or American politics… And it were to go horribly wrong or backfire, Congress could call the individual agents and department heads involved before hearings, the department itself could be disbanded, hell they could be tried and imprisoned…

You do that in Canada however, and technically you didn’t do it the US… Intel agencies GET to screw with foreigners. That’s their job.

They can perfect techniques, try out new things, and experiment at their leisure a short 10 hour drive north of NYC or Washington…. And if it blows up horribly or causes the opposite of the intended result? who cares? That’s Ottawa’s problem. Let them deal with the fallout, it’s contained.

It’s exactly just far enough away… And yet everyone speaks unaccented American English, all the amenities and lifestyle conveniences are the same as any American city, and all the sociology and political behaviour is close enough as makes little difference.

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As soon as you understand this you start to understand some bizarre things that would be otherwise inexplicable.

For example… The great meme wars of the 2010s…

I can never keep the timeline straight.

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People will tell me that GamerGate started in 2014, or that #MeToo was 2017.

And I’ll recoil from them…

Because I could have sworn #Metoo happened in 2011 and the very classroom friends and I debated it in… or that GamerGate was 2012?

It actually took this happening a few times for me to remember/realize that…

No it wasn’t called “#MeToo” in 2011… It was Called SlutWalk.

And it wasn’t called “Gamergate” in 2012, and the world wasn’t reacting to the perfidy, lies, and manipulations of Zoe Quinn…

But instead everyone was reacting to Canadian-American feminist Anita Sarkeesian who started her “Feminist Frequency” while at York University near Jane and Finch.

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From my perspective, in the schools and campuses of Toronto Ontario, from about 2011 to 2020 it was really a non-stop blur of shockingly heavily funded Feminist, Anti-Racist, LGBTQPALPHABET+, activists with non-stop infinite funding at all levels of institutional power… And every individual leg of it predicted what would happen next.

All the Culture warriors of the era, Jordan Peterson, Lauren Southern, Stephan Molyneux, were all Torontonians, and Stephen Crowder was veteran child actor from Canadian Children’s programing. Gavin McGuiness was one of the founders of the Montreal based magazine VICE and lived in Toronto at the time.

The radical overrepresentation of Torontonians in the early culture war industry isn’t an accident.

Toronto is ground zero for basically every political cultural trend, because it’s used as a test ground for psychological warfare and social engineering. And as a result the first place to develop immune responses.

SlutWalk resembled the rhetoric of MeToo so closely, because SlutWalk was where all the cultural and institutional forces and maneuvers were perfected on small scale beforehand.

“Because it’s 2015” Was a Justin Trudeau line before it was a PC principle line on SouthPark.

I heard it in 2013 “Because it’s 2013” when he was touring University Campuses trying to gin up buzz for his leadership campaign for head of the Liberal Party.

The Globalist Iron Governing principle: “Diversity is our strength”… Is the official motto of the City of Toronto. Adopted in 1998.

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Yes, the Municipal motto of Toronto has become the governing motto of the Western Globohomo Regime. Space aliens visiting earth 30 years apart would conclude Toronto had conquered the entire western world.

Indeed my explanation… That Toronto is the testing ground of the Global American Empires cultural and political maneuvers and psychological operations… Is far more grounded and less Grandiose than the alternative…

That Toronto is just quietly the real political-cultural center of the Anglosphere, and all the trends the rest of the English speaking world thinks is something organic to them or their culture… Is in fact an unoriginal import they got from some Toronto Hipsters they subconsciously imitate. but all but the best of them are not hip or sophisticated enough to know the cultural and ideological origins of their inferior derivative iterations.

The Toronto Film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World Is treated as some patient ZERO plague-rat for Hipsterdom and female promiscuity. “In 2008, a women having 7 Evil Exs was considered an absurdly high number” As the meme says… However the Scott Pilgrim Film was not patient Zero.

Scott Pilgrim was the adaptation of the fictionalized biopic comic-book Scott Pilgrim, that started in 2004, and was about the author’s arrested-adolescence in Toronto in the 90s hanging out with garage bands (this is why all the video-game references stop at the PlayStation 1, that wouldn’t become a reddit manchild aesthetic choice until later). And the band of the film? Ramona Flowers?

Its Emily Haines of Metric. She’s Patient Zero. She’s was Bryan Lee O’Malley crush/friend he wrote Scott Pilgrim tacitly about.

(This is 2006. The Song was written in 2003).

The Entire 2010s was a Toronto export. Indeed, you look closely and you see that the entire Hipster movement was a stew of weird cultural cancers, Weaponized-Memetic-Brain-AIDS, and McLuhan Psyop Horror That’s been stewing in post-Suez Upper-Canada for decades.

Indeed you can find specific Toronto precedents and antecedents to Haines in figures like 1980s Martha Johnson of Martha and the Muffins or later Molly Rankin of Alvvays.

Or Put otherwise: Toronto Hipsters are the real cynical sophisticates and you Brooklyn transplants are braindead posers.

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I mean that’s certainly what us Hipsters in Toronto think… and I find myself struggling to resist my flannel/skinny jeans/beanie (toque) instincts that would have me come to the smug conclusion… (Hipsters just dress like Canadians… that’s hipster attire… Hipsters are just American-to-Canadian Transexuals)

But those are the real alternatives.

Either we posit that Toronto and English Canada more generally is the natural testing ground for the American empire’s psyops and Cultural warfare upon the nations of the western world, and the natural place to develop immune responses first…

Or we posit that there’s something so innately culturally important, urbane, well-read, and media literate about Torontonians and the wider Laurentian world that extends across Ontario to English Montreal, that their small municipal Neuroses wind up inflecting the entire culture of the anglosphere by the sheer force of their worldly cosmopolitan sophistication.

(I think some poor Albertan just threw up in their mouth a little).

But the core conclusion is that whenever we see odd double events… Matrix style Deja Vu where world historical cultural trends that Shake America, the wider Anglo-sphere and ultimately “the West”, that seemingly all have bizarre weird precedents in Toronto… (Even the Railroading of Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd, something you wouldn’t normally think could have a Canadian precedent, was precedented by the Shooting of Sammy Yatim, and how that was used to crush the institutional power of Toronto police and establish lawyer/social worker rule over the city)

From that Deja Vu, we should conclude there are major institutional and cultural forces using Toronto as a testbed for future Psychological and Culture-War fuckery.

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There’s a lot of other things like this… and documenting it all would take several more essays (I need to eventually write about the first hipster).

But once you notice the patterns suddenly you see them elsewhere and can judge future political/psychological events by them.

For example:

Cast Study 1: “Everybody hates [insert target here]”

The Canadian/Albertan band Nickelback was maybe the biggest Band in the world in the Mid-2000s. Selling more than 50 million albums at the last moment that was really possible. Getting more airplay than a lot of the most famous bands in history… Quite arguably overplayed… But their blend of rock, grunge, metal, and country was inoffensive in basically any market in the world… and wasn’t preaching anything or really trying to offend sensibilities, generate controversy, or grate on anyone (something you can’t say of most genres).

A Band that should have really kind-of disappeared into the background of world music discussion. It had a mall-dad/sports-bar sensibility.

Indeed the origin point of Alberta… The most “Country Music” part of the world that’s not in America was almost certainly part of it’s appeal. A Sub-urban/Ex-Urban/ Rural cultural nowhere that was a bit too obscure to make people around the world feel it wasn’t their backyard.

And then it became the most hated band in world history.

“Everyone hates Nickleback”. Famously.

There are dozens and dozens of documentaries and video-essays on this specific case study.

Hatred in a way almost no band before or since has ever gotten. And it wasn’t organic.

Legacy Music Magazines, establishment comedians, primetime comedy shows… The Exact same people you now expect to lie about absolutely EVERYTHING. All spontaneously united and in one unanimous voice declared Nickelback the worst thing ever.

This is really weird. This does not happen.

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Usually if a band or actor or other entertainment act is hated, it has either had a series of scandals, the core personality has said something about gays or jews, or it actively cultivated the hate as part of it’s brand… like Insane Clown Posse.

That the industry and media would just suddenly turn on a multi-billion-dollar entertainment property organically out of “taste” or “preference”… is basically unheard of for the same reason we’d never expect all the entertainment magazines and media companies to suddenly all speak out in hatred of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with one voice, or all suddenly decide that liking Taylor Swift made you a fat ugly loser.

These are some of the industry’s biggest ticket items, the revenues for the companies are insane, and rocking that boat too hard is going to get your career torpedoed by corporate who probably has relationships with the property you’re damaging.

Someone had to decide this messaging press was going to happen. That someone had to be pretty high up. They had to have more influence than a multibillion dollar entertainment property.

And as soon as you start thinking that big and that influential you have to think political, or national.

But why Nickelback? They aren’t political?

No they’re not. They were merely inoffensively popular. Indeed they didn’t even really have scandals.

The only thing that was going against them was that they were white men. They were heterosexual. And they were Canadian.

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This made them perfect for a Psyop weapons test… A sort-of benchmarking exercise for the amount of media messaging and social control that could be effected against the public’s own revealed natural market preference.

Every band is from somewhere, and if you had targeted say The Dropkick Murphys of Boston, or Jimmy Buffet of Florida, you might have stirred up a big hornet’s nest really fast... People are really attached to their hit local bands. Hell I genuinely like Metric… Combat Baby’s lyrical writing is genuinely really well done.

attacking a us regional band could have political implications. But all of American media targeting Alberta’s biggest success story? Who cares?

Any potential political fallout is contained.

Indeed, when you put it that way, this is one of the few really big bands or properties of any scale you could ever do this to… Do this to Taylor Swift and it might start a gender war. Do this to Jennifer Lopez or Oprah and it might start a race war. Going after Jimmy Buffet might anger Florida enough to swing a presidential election.

But if you needed to test how much buy-in you could get from a Democratic public for pure compliance, off of messaging alone… how easily you could make them hate white men who had done nothing and were otherwise popular, attractive, and embodied a tough rustic spirit… without being attached to any specific region or location.

Nickelback was the perfect contained test target. They had even avoided politicizing themselves.

Their hit song “Photograph” is about their middle of nowhere Rural Canadian Alberta hometown:

(Look at them. They’re like an idylic flock of deer about have a new strain of Anthrax dropped on them)

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Indeed reading the Wikipedia page… The big years for Nickelback hate starting were 2010 to 2013… The exact years that SlutWalk, Anita Sarkeesian, and all the early 2010s 4th wave political correctness culture-war maneuvers were being tested in Toronto.

And the lesson was clear: Yes, you could make a completely random well liked innocent group of people universally reviled for no reason whatsoever except the status anxiety of a bottomless mushy middle of people doing what other people were telling them, and performatively hating lest they be thought uncool, retrograde, or low-status.

Ie. Exactly what would be tried on every single group of dissenters for the next 15+ years.

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The only problem is… The test ended too soon. They didn’t observe the after-effects. That just like Wokeness’ attacks on right wingers and young white men in the 2010s. Nickelback’s fandom hardened and became radicalized by the experience of universal hatred… They’re still going strong today off the fanatical loyalty this engendered in their fans.

And remarkably they did it by not flinching and not second guessing themselves. Somehow the 200th corporate executive to get cancelled still plays the apology and appeasement game after decades of seeing that not work out for others and get them cancelled and destroyed…

But Nickelback was amongst the very first to be targeted by these techniques and methodology, by paid off early-2010s half-online magazine influencers and TV personalities… And they never thought to rebrand or change their sound, or “Update for modern audiences” in response to the hate.

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Nickelback was the Test case for every cancelling, ten-minute hate, and 2010s online Magazine hate-fest “Takedown”… Every Mother Jones Hatedown… They were the first most aggressive test case.

And they survived it.

By being true to themselves… By looking at their photographs, and reminding themselves what they really are.

Case Study 2: Canadian Lockdowns

Canada is known for a few things… Innovative and Technocratic governance is not one them.

Canada is generally run by incompetent clowns. Indeed Canada’s most famous innovations are weird nightmarish stop-gap measures like MAID or Mass-Indian Immigration whereby the Canadian elites cover up their mismanagement in things like healthcare by implementing Euthanasia to relieve wait-times… Or propping up their catastrophic housing bubble by importing mass of the third world to brute force enough of a housing shortage that Boomer home-prices won’t drop.

So it’s really weird that CANADA would be the first country to implement an Mandatory COVID Tracking App “ArriveCan” for international travel.

Indeed Canadians themselves (contrary to Americans who were keen to tell us that we had surrendered our freedom just like our guns, which no Canadians have surrendered) were not really shocked at all when the App didn’t work, there was no enforcement, not another country on earth enforced it (so effectively there was no barrier to leaving the country) and had no way to enforce the mandatory “quarantine” on Canadians returning from abroad who had left the country without getting vaccinated or getting the app.

Having travelled internationally unvaccinated during the “ArriveCan” days… I can tell you border guards were more embarrassed and kindof relieved when you showed up without the app… That the protocol for not having it was simpler than having to actually wrestle with the app that didn’t work.

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So why was Canada leading the charge on this? Well the opposition will tell you it was Liberal money laundering (which yes) but it was almost certainly just another case of Canada being the testing ground for Washington’s global controls and psychological policies…

Thus why every “western” regime freaked out at the Trucker Convoy and all Abandoned COVID and Lockdowns in unison that the policy had failed so spectacularly it somehow escaped the Canadian testing ground and Truckers from Alberta and Timmons were now Blockading one of America’s most vital trade arteries at the Ambassador bridge.

If Canadians had not pushed back at lockdowns and the ArriveCAN app that did not work and was not enforced, and employer mandates that as far as I can tell no one was actually ever fired for…

Would these policies have been expanded to countries whose governments could have built an App?

And Yes I’ve Written on the Trucker’s almost total victory and the timeline of events before:

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Are You Noticing Patterns?

A Mysterious full court press media?

Activity well beyond natural funding and economic interest?

Bizarre choices double and tripled down upon?

Activity the complete opposite of Natural Pre-media Opinion?
(Canada was hyper-British and nationalistic, Nickelback was Huge, Everyone thought Covid was just a cough before “2 weeks to slow the curve”)

A test environment/case-study that DOES NOT MATTER to world leaders… but acts as a proxy for their propoganda power to act on things that do matter?

Have these Canadian case studies reminded you of anything?

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Have we seen something like this recently?

The Odyssey is About Iran

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey started filming in August 2025.

One month after after the 12 Day War between Israel, the US, and Iran.

Indeed its pre-production started November 2023, one month after the Oct 7th attack on Israel.

And it is releasing immediately in the sensitive moment of July 2026 where a new escalation is being weighed.

Considering that this is a “novel” film (No existing franchise) and a financially risky venture… Which is weird to say for the most important story in western civilization… These surrounding events are almost certainly vital to the fact that it got it’s 350 million dollar budget.

Indeed most US blockbusters that release around wars have some propaganda purpose or value.

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Think of how tightly the first Michael Bay Transformers acted as a US Military propaganda piece or the political military importance of 300 as an archetypal “West vs. East” story to understand how intimately tied to US Foreign policy Hollywood’s big masculine movies are.

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The Odyssey is maybe the most important war story in this respect…

And so they cast a Black woman as Helen of Troy and Eliot Page as Achilles? Sorry “Sinon”.

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I think this was a benchmarking exercise.

The Odyssey is a parody of a woke movie. These choices are the choices you’d see in a South Park version of the story.

They were gathering social media and box office test data to see if they did a full legacy media push… If they faked the Rotten Tomato scores, had all their bought social media accounts spin it, buy out empty movie theaters (this is documented… People buying tickets to what on the seat reservations looked like sold out shows, only to show up and the theater was empty)…

How much buy-in could they get? How much narrative control could they wrangle?

Trans Achilles? Black Helen of Troy?

It’s a perfect “turd sandwich”… And exactly the kindof safe, politically contained, tertiary concern that would make a great benchmarking exercise for the Israeli/US Military’s control over public perception.

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Indeed to a MAN all the influencers who were pushing that the Odyssey was “not that bad” or “actually pretty good”, were all the influencers who push for Israel.

Ben Shapiro, Bronze Age Pervert, the OSINT people, Conservative Media, Various “Christian” influencers…

All the openly paid for Likud party affiliates… Who would normally jump at the opportunity to say “Achilles is not a biological female”, “Helen of Troy was not Black”, “Fairness in women’s sports” and other nothing culture war nonsense to win points with their conservative audience… Then sell them Israel’s foreign policy on a platter or try to finesse their audience into being neutral on foreign policy…

BAP had previously attacked the Emily Wilson TRANSLATION of the Odyssey, that Nolan’s Version is based on, as woke and Feminist… And Yet here BAP is defending the vastly more woke Nolan Adaptation as NOT WOKE…. A film With a black Helen of Troy with a noticeably scarred and disfigured face.

Meanwhile EMILY WILSON HERSELF publicly criticized the film and Bemoaned how antithetical to the values of Homer the film was.

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What is going on!?

You expect it to be the reverse. Indeed everything BAP has ever posted about Homer would lead you to expect that he would be ripping Nolan apart and Wilson defending it as an achievement of feminism.

Why is this?

Well Costin Alimaru (BAP) is a Romanian Jew deeply personally attached to Benjamin Netenyahu’s Likud party, and Israel in general… this has been known for some time.

If this was a benchmarking exercise to see how powerful their propaganda control is and how effective their playing both sides and controlling their own opposition is for shaping American opinion… Well BAP is one of the assets they’ve developed specifically for this purpose. Same as Ben Shapiro whom most naive conservatives would have expected to oppose the woke Odyssey movie… Then go back to advocating war in the middle east.

Instead here Ben Shapiro (a Jew) is arguing that Nolan’s Odyssey is actually not a woke Subversion, but a Christian Subversion! And so all his fans should go see it:

Different arguments for different audiences… But Shapiro and BAP are playing the same game trying to increase the likelihood their audience will see the film.

In the exact same manner that both would argue for an escalated Iran War and for young Americans to volunteer or “do their part” if drafted to die in Iran. They’d use different arguments for different audiences… But the the goal would be the same.

So who’s buying up all the empty audience seats for screenings of the Odyssey to try to trick you into going?

Israel, and probably the US Military.

Nolan and the Studios get told they have a guaranteed hit, they just have to make it as offensively woke as possible so the US can benchmark their ability to get Americans to take a bite of the turd sandwich.

This is why the financing makes no sense on the Odyssey, as I’ve written about.

This is why Nolan was given 20% off first dollar revenue for he and his wife in spite of a Woke-Dyssey not seeming anything like the kind of money maker it’d need to be to justify that… This is why the Actors almost certainly got their own points off revenue… Despite on paper this meaning that the film needs to make 4-8 times it’s budget to pay off the investors after advertising, theater cut, and the sweetheart deal given to the “talent”.

This is why Donald Trump and Republican Congressmen have said NOTHING about the film even to meme on it… Despite this type of Hollywood culture-war nonsense being EXACTLY the kind of distraction they’d usually be jumping for joy to make a news cycle out of and show their Fox News watching constituents that they’re on their side… without actually holding anyone accountable, reigning in any spending, or trying anyone for treason.

How much discipline do you think it takes for Trump NOT to tweet “Truth” about this?!

Why isn’t he.

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Because this is a benchmarking exercise. This is their trial run for a ground invasion of Iran.

A test case to use all their propoganda tools and see what impact they can have

If they can make you take a bite of this Turd Sandwich, they can make you take a bite of Iran.

Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak

I’ve Discussed a few films here at Anarchonomicon… We Did a Podcast on the insane psychedelic Canadian History Film “The Twentieth Century”, I went almost 4 Hours on the crime in Micheal Mann’s “HEAT”, and I Adored the Re-Cut of CALIGULA… And I still get Comments on my review of “Blackberry”.

But this is the first time I’m discussing Hollywood as a business…

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Was “The Odyssey” about Embezzlement?

HELLO. This is insane.

So Nolan is getting 15% off direct Revenue, (Not profits, Gross) and his wife another 5%) from the Odyssey, basically risk free, AFTER his 20 million up front.

That’s a better cut than a lot of mob bosses take off drug dealers. (which tend to vary between 5 and 30% depending on how much violence they can command)

And probably core stars (Daiman and Hathaway mostly) are getting some smaller percent of the same deal.

This is unheard of. Basically a violation of fiduciary duties to the investors.

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So if another 10-30% of Gross is divided across Daiman, Hathaway, Holand, Pattinson, and Theron... You know the real stars (Zendaya, Nyong’o, and Page don’t draw crowds and aren’t getting that)...

Then you might have to effectively cut all revenue first by 50% for theaters, then by another 40-50% for the star power.

It other words... The Odyssey would need to make 800million- 1 billion before it could even hypothetically start to turn a profit for investors.

All the Woke casting etc. Is actually a cover for basically outright money laundering and embezzlement by the entertainment class. And because its “sticking it to the Chuds” business news and institutions are covering for the fact a bunch of studios just defrauded universal studio’s parent Comcast, to possibly the tune of hundreds of millions.

Comcast is a publicly traded company. That’s 401Ks and pension funds.

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And all the woke stuff is in there so that no studio execs, corporate leaders, media, or corporate watchdogs will call them out for basically transferring hundreds of millions of retiree dollars into their own pockets.

All the discussion of “Will the Odyssey make its money back” is missing the point that there is almost NO WAY for the Odyssey to actually produce a reasonable return to investors... BY DESIGN.

It is a pure, basically fraudulent, wealth transfer from American middle-class investors to Hollywood insiders irrespective of whatever money the film does or does not make... Intentionally.

And all the woke window dressing is chaff, or a bonus to prevent any institutions from having the nerve to call them out lest they get called, racist, sexist, and transphobic.

Indeed, Nolan has been playing this game for a while... He somehow got the same deal on Tenet... A film that almost certainly made hundreds of million LESS at the Box office for having a relatively unknown black star as opposed to a traditional leading man with star power (of which there are some actors of Color... Will Smith, Dwayne Johnson, and Vin Deisel notably), but which meant that the insane cut he took got almost no scrutiny.

Indeed, the Tenet deal was justified as a way for Warner Bros to secure their relationship with Nolan (something apparently 3 Batman Films, Inception, Interstellar, and Dunkirk hadn’t done)... Only for Nolan to switch to Universal for Oppenheimer and never make another film with Warner Bros again... Did someone senior at Warner Bros realize what he and his producers were doing?

And why did Universal give him the deal Warner Bros never gave him again?

Who at Universal was willing to let Nolan walk away with 10s of millions whilst their investors lost money… just so long as he included “Elliot” Page and a black Helen of Troy, and depicted the Greek rhapsodes as black rappers?

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Whenever you see woke, you should think “Money Laundering” because Hollywood and other institutions know that Government and Media watchdogs won’t investigate and any investor’s group who sues will have a nightmare arguing the malfeasance, but also that their loss of funds can instead be blamed the “racism” of Audiences... That the film was rightly predicted to make whatever insane billions it needed to break even, it’s just the racism of the Audience! Which of course should be predictable and accounted for given you’re using OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY, but which no law firm is going to want to argue, and no court or Jury is going to look favorably on... That you violated your fiduciary duty by hiring black actors and are using that as a cover for embezzlement.

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This summer I’ve already commented on the Situation in Iran and how basically the only way the US could get the strait of Hormuz open by force is a full Ground Invasion, and deep dived Modern unconventional warfare in the Works of Hideo Kojima, and why Effective Political Organizing is Really Just Organized Crime…

but I want to focus on the other war, and what no one’s talking about:

What’s wrong with Putin?

One could be forgiven for thinking that there is something deeply wrong with the Russian State and Vladimir Putin in particular.

Every 1 to 3 months some new unprecedented Ukrainian asymmetric attack hits Russia’s homeland in ways almost tailor designed to provoke an escalation, outrage the populace, and leave the Russian Government humiliated at the loss of face.

The “Crocus City Hall” (it’s a civilian music venue not an actual city hall) attack in Moscow was killed 151 and injured 600+ Civilian music fans in an “ISIS” terrorist attack… That everyone knows was funded, coordinated, and enabled by Ukraine (and the CIA). Right down to the assailants passing through Ukraine, and being on camera collecting their discarded firearm magazines (presumably because the manufacturer stamps would tie them to their backers)…

This was huge Russian News, and the specific band whose audience was targeted is also significant.

Piknik is a massive hit Russian 80s band. Now, Students of history will note that Russia was still communist in the 80s. They’ve been around forever, and are generally inoffensive and middle of the road (they were mainstream under the USSR)… They’re kind of a weird gothic slavic prog-rock blend of Phil Collins and the Tragically Hip. And they’re huge… Individual videos with 10s of millions of views on Youtube… As big as any hit western 80s band and lots of cultural fondness in the Russian imagination.

(Presumably it hits harder if you can appreciate Russian)

This matters because their core demographic are Russian boomers who are Nostalgic for their Soviet Childhoods, but are also established and content in Modern Russia… Ie. Putin’s Core demographic.

This would be like if you attacked a Hamilton performance or a Bono concert in the west. That’s the regime’s core supporters right there. That’s a knowledgeable and incisive cut that actual Muslim foreigners wouldn’t know or care to hit… But that Slavic Ukrainians and calculating CIA planners trying to apply pressure or destabilize Russia into escalation would know and salivate at.

Likewise Ukraine explicitly attacked Russia’s Nuclear Strategic Bomber fleet in Operation Spider Web, assets that were not used in the Ukraine war, and indeed were basically irrelevant to the conflict… But are core to Russia’s nuclear triad and the stability of the global nuclear balance of power… Again basically begging for a massive escalation and almost certainly making Russian Generals and Strategic planners break out in a cold sweat until they assessed the damage.

Beyond this there have been prominent assassinations of Russian Generals… In Moscow. And assassination attempts on Putin himself…

In addition to the destabilizing Ukrainian counter-invasion of Russia, and escalating strikes on Moscow itself.

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The thing to understand is that none of these have been conventionally advantageous for Ukraine. The Invasion of Russia stretched their forces, the Assassinations if anything probably cycled in younger, more competent, hungrier generals, attacking Moscow Boomer civilians probably gave a massive morale spike to the outraged Russian populace… These strikes on Russia have infuriated Russians and made them call for blood.

This is in many respects THE OPPOSITE of what you’d normally want to do as a smaller country fighting a larger that hasn’t fully mobilized. Usually you want to exhaust a larger force that’s half committed or politically divided, without getting them to up their commitment or causing them to unify. Think of Vietnam… The Vietnamese wanted Americans to get tired of fighting them and get demoralized at the idea of ever “winning”, fight amongst themselves, then wind down and withdraw. If in 1972 Vietnamese terrorists had attacked the Superbowl and killed hundreds of American civilians on US soil… that’s actually one of the few things that could have united American in 1972 or gotten America to commit to another 5 years in Vietnam at that point.

It would have greatly damaged American prestige… Moscow or China might have liked that… But from Vietnam’s perspective where they want America to wander elsewhere, it’d lock in years of misery.

So that’s weird… but weirder has been Putin’s Reaction: Nothing. Basically no counter-escalation. Certainly nothing that’s made Zelensky sweat and hesitate at sending more drones at Moscow.

Indeed many sympathetic commentators both in Russia and the West have been screaming their frustration at Putin that he hasn’t suitably punished these insults to Russian Honor or restored Russian deterrence… Or merely enforced baseline international norms around targeting heads of state, civilians, and Strategic nuclear assets in a non-nuclear conventional war.

It’s not as if Russia lacks conventional options. Kiev is RIGHT THERE. Hell, If the Russians really wanted the Tornado MLRS (Multiple Launcher Rocket System) has a range of 200km, fires thermobaric warheads or White Phosphorus rounds, and could hit Kiev from Russian Ally Belarus…

Without even debating the extent of air-cover, and to what extent Ukrainian Air Defense is intact (or to what extent the US can supply them with interceptors)… Putin has the capacity to firebomb Kiev on the scale of Dresden if he wanted to, from the ground. He’s not lacking in conventional, nuclear, and every other kind of escalatory option.

And yet he’s not escalated… And his retaliations have been as close as possible to the bare minimum he could get away with to not be overthrown for treason.

So what the hell is wrong with Putin?

Has he gone yellow in his old age? Is he weak? Is Russia’s position crumbling? Is Russia on the verge of collapse? Is he secretly blackmailed by the US, Israel, or Brussels?

Not exactly.

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There’s a saying in geopolitics: The Russians play Chess. The Americans play Poker.

And the first thing to understand is that this is quite literally true. DC poker games are incredibly common, and the spell poker has on the American imagination outstrips anything Chess really holds… Many highly educated Americans can’t even play it! by contrast Russians are taught chess in school and it’s always held a spell for them.

But of course this is also a profound statement as to how both approach politics:

The American Presidency has term limits, and the US has 2-year election cycles.

American presidents are constantly looking for fast wins. They’re constantly looking for big things they can go at and grab some political capital and energy… Because the US has 2 year election cycles. If you screw up or don’t take wins where you can get them, then you’ll lose the midterms and have no power to do anything else with your rump lame-duck presidency.

This is where almost every president follows the same formula: Big executive orders to make their base shut up in the first hundred days, and then almost an immediate pivot to DC insiders after 6 months, at which they start rushing a massive spending bill in the first year of their presidency to try and get maximum political capital and checks out before the midterms…

This is also why every president, the second things start falling apart, reaches for some foreign intervention of one type or another… Whilst libertarians might whine that only Congress can declare war, this is a dead letter. And as long a president doesn’t actually try to sign an official Declaration of War, toppling a foreign government is the one thing he actually can do without it getting gridlocked in congress.

Thus American presidents almost inevitably fall into fast paced brinkmanship and high-stakes negotiations both domestic and foreign… around years 2-3… Because they need to either get a clear unambiguous win, escalate to a fight, or pull out and pivot elsewhere as fast as possible. Because you have 2 years, which really is like 2-3 months… Because you need multiples of these wins. And if you lose the midterms, then you’re completely shut-out of your domestic policies so can only try to win a second term or a successor from your party via a foreign war. And because the American empire is so vast and the news cycle and the American people so easily distracted… All these interventions DO play out like poker hands.

DOGE, The 12 Day War, ICE Deportations, Epstein, Venezuela, and the current Iran war… All played out almost completely unrelated to each other as far as mainstream public perceptions were concerned, as if it was a new set of cards every time. And Trump just had to decide how aggressively he wanted to play each hand and how much he wanted to bet on each of them being a hit… He folded on DOGE and ICE in Minneapolis… Called Epstein a “Hoax” (it wasn’t and everyone knows it). Doubled down on Venezuela and Iran.

In the words of esteemed presidential advisor and great American statesman Kenny Rodgers:

This is where all the “5D Chess” claims about Trump by various “Plan Trusters” is a complete misunderstanding of the situation.

Trump exactly embodies the “Americans play poker” school of thought. He’s maybe the most “Poker Player” president America has ever had.

Trump IS a poker player. He explicitly describes himself this way. He’s made Poker Promos and given “poker lessons”:

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Trump explicitly describes his career as a series of Poker hands and big bets, and his “Art of the Deal” as an exercise in Texas Hold’em style brinkmanship.

Trump’s rise to power in the 2016 election indeed resembles nothing so much as a poker tournament, knocking out players from the 16 person Republican field with various massive gambles, bluffs, blusters, and statements that changed the entire field, forcing his opponents to lose face, double down, and burn out on the wrong hand… “Low energy” Jeb, jabs at Ted Cruz’s wife, calling the Iraq War a lie/disaster… It resembled nothing so much as an aggressive poker player bullying a host of defensive players more afraid of losing than keen to win.

And he’s been impressively willing to come back swinging and aggressive, even after seemingly devastating defeats that would chasten a lesser player or put them on tilt and at risk of losing everything.

Russians by contrast play chess

And unlike poker where the hands are unrelated… Chess just builds on itself, there are individual chess puzzles, not games, puzzles that are 50 moves deep with every individual decision building on each other and relating and having subsequent consequences.

This directly compliments Putin’s position.

Vladimir Putin has ruled 26 years (since 2000) if you don’t count the cheeky swap out with Mevedev. And he will probably rule another decade. You’ll see western commentators still talking about how he answers to oligarchs or Gangsters… Which really doesn’t appreciate the fact that if you were a senior partner to Putin in 2000 and somehow avoided falling out or getting purged… Ugh, you’d be dead of old age by now anyway. It’s been 26 years. Putin has been slowly consolidating power the entire time… For anyone under about 60, he is the Great Tsar from whom all power flows down and has always flown down… And Russian Male life expectancy is still only 67.

He’s been playing the long-game, classic chess starting with the endgame, for 30ish years… that isn’t to say he’s been playing Conspiracy-tastic Giga-Brained 5d Chess Qanon shadow wars “PQTRIQTS IN CQNTRQL”… He’s playing chess. Not BBC’s Sherlock.

But it does mean he’s on a long time horizon, no 2 year election cycle, decades of runway, and an entire bureaucratic and political cultural built around this chess mindset.

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Indeed The Defining feature of chess is the fact there is no move limit… If you win in 10 moves or 200 moves that’s equivalent. Pros might have a chess timer limiting how long they can think… but if they win after 1000 moves hitting that timer fast enough and not burning through their thinking time… that’s just as good as the guy who got a fool’s mate on the second turn.

And unlike poker or US politics where you have to gamble big or engage in brinkmanship… And the inherent repeatability of poker or the inherent security of the US Geopolitical position, economy, etc. Will rescue you if you lose once or twice…

Russians are keenly aware of their vulnerable position between the bloodlands of Europe and the chaos of Central Asia. Washington DC has burnt once… And that’s just a cute story in a war Americans don’t really remember. The Russian homeland has been massacred dozens of times.

Whereas Americans think of a “Forever War” or “quagmire” as the worst possible thing that can come about from a presidency and American presidents are willing to humiliate themselves or burn entire nations to avoid having an unending unpopular inconclusive Vietnam or Iraq laid at their feet and dragging into the midterms and general election… Russians are willing to accept them as the norm… or at least a not terrible option.

Russia has seen countless rolling decades long frontier wars in their history, and as long as it’s kept to a non-disastrous, or slow and steady simmer… It actually can sort of benefit the Russian state. You get a helpful reformatory/disposal option for criminals and ne’er-do-wells… And the tension of a low level war lets you reform and restructure Russian institutions that are perpetually yo-yoing between being very good, having just had a war, vs. Being corrupt as can be, having gone through a decade or so of peace.

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But to really get a feel for this mindset… You have to look at maybe Russia’s Greatest hero:

Field Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov is maybe one of the most unique national heroes of any country.

He lost or drew almost all his battles. Famously losing several engagements early in the Napoleonic wars and being removed from direct command, only to be brought back in as a chubby old man on death’s door during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

He appears in War and Peace as an important character.

His biggest battle was Borodino during Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia… a brutal slugging match outside Moscow against Napoleon that killed almost 100,000 men and decided basically nothing. Then the Russians withdrew before the French advance.

The Epic history Summary of the Battle is incredible:

It was after Borodino that Kutuzov appealed on his Emperor, his subordinates, and the Russian army and state… To do the unthinkable.

They extended their “scorched earth” defense, to Moscow itself. Instead of Reengaging and defending the city, they withdrew, evacuated the civilian population in the setting Russian winter, and emptied Russian prisons.

Napoleon would enter Moscow, only for the city itself to be sacked and burned around him… by the Russians. (Epic History also did Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow)

The Russians would not negotiate. They would not offer terms. And Napoleon, having lost a good percentage of the army getting to Moscow… suddenly realized he had no source of food or provisions for a winter occupation. The French had to retreat with the Russian Winter setting in…. Harassed by Cossacks and beset by ambushes, harassing battles, and brutal choke-points at rivers and elsewhere.

By the end of the retreat, Kutuzov had destroyed the largest invasion force in human history without winning a single decisive battle. Rather he starved, bled, froze, and harassed the Grande Armee to death.

Kutuzov would not live to enjoy his victory. He fell ill and died that April 1813 having seen the Grande Armee’s final retreat but not Napoleon’s downfall.

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I cannot Emphasize enough this IS the Russian Conception of Military heroism, and of themselves.

Kutuzov never went out of style in Russia, despite being a Tsarist Field Marshal the Soviets lionized him during WW2 as a model to look up to and emulate… an example of Russian endurance under invasion as the great ideal of the Russian people.

This is how Russian leaders conceive great military leadership… Not chasing victories. Not landing decisive invasions. Not having knock-out “Blitzkriegs” but rather these long brutal chess games, these challenges of endurance, and ultimately judgement, will, ruthlessness, and misery.

Americans lionize Washington crossing the Delaware, or the decisive landing at Normandy, or Desert Storm… Huge dramatic high intensity shock attacks that break the enemy with surprise, decisiveness, logistics, and overwhelming combined arms fire.

Gettysburg is still the great American battle/tragedy… Because Lee’s Campaign and surprise flanking maneuver across the Potomac north into Pennsylvania is exactly the type of daring decisive massive glorious surprise maneuver that usually works out for Americans… but just barely didn’t for Lee. This is why he’s still lionized as the great American General even over men who won the war.

By contrast American military historians, even of a unionist bent, always flinch at Lincoln and Grant’s embrace of the logic of attrition. That because they had the numbers they should just embrace brutal inconclusive fighting where ever they could… since even with a draw or slight loss, they could replace the men whereas the Confederacy couldn’t.

Americans find that rather unsporting, but more importantly inglorious… You want to win via dominance. You want to show your enemy that you’re better. Thus the American insistence, even where they lose… That the Vietnamese or the Taliban “never won a battle”. That Americans must be the best players on the field, and their politicians and leaders just frittered away the victory that was rightfully theirs.

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The entirety of Russian culture by contrast sees these big glorious dramatic heroic moments as traps. As follies in waiting, as the energy and pique of immature youth…

Russian culture, from pacifists like Tolstoy, to killer like Stalin, lionize Kutuzov… Because he was willing to say NO to decisive battles, and glory, and the demands of honor… And let Moscow burn to maintain his army and deny Napoleon a decisive battle so that he could RUN OUT THE CLOCK.

Very much like Chess… Resisting the temptation of taking a queen or some seemingly favorable violent exchange but which risks leaving you in a fatally weak position.

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That the hardest and most important thing a leader or general can do… Is nothing.

Not take the fight to the enemy. Not counter-attack. Not lead the charge. Not hit back as hard as you can.

But instead to be ruthlessly logical and almost cruel or inhuman in the prioritization of political or military objectives… that you serve your soldiers best by making the right decisions, even if they hate you for it.

That like Kutuzov, in that most Russian of manners, the real job a leader is not ask his men and people to fight and win… but ask them to suffer, endure, and accept the indignities of the correct military decisions not what honor, emotion, or sentimental attachment would have them do.

That if they are howling in rage that they should be fighting… That is a good thing, since they are intact and able to fight and haven’t been wasted on a temptation or bait.

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Now… Who does this sound like?

5D Chess? Or Bad Pattern Matching?

Putin knows Kutuzov’s story. All Russians do.

This is again the pattern of Russian military heroism and leadership that predominates in that country.

Embrace the attrition. Embrace the misery. Endure.

I can basically guarantee you this is what Putin is thinking, and the pattern his mind is going through when he decides not to escalate to some bait or atrocity or provocation by the Ukrainians.

This is the logic of his strategy.

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But is it a good strategy?

Or is he a senile boomer?

Is he pattern matching what he read about a clever old man doing when he was young… Not realizing that he’s not that clever and that this strategy is entirely inappropriate to his current situation?

Young Russian military posters often complain about the “Boomerism” of Putin and their ruling class… Does this strategy make sense? Or are there young officers in the Kremlin seizing in a near Aneurysm, head in hands, whenever some “inspirational” email or speech mentions “endurance” or Russia’s “proud history of resistance” or “holding the line” or “cautious sturdy hands”… or whatever buzzwords are used to justify not letting competent young men just go out there and win.

Is he inflicting death and misery on his young men for no reason?

Which is it?

Would a Russian officer reading this piece nod along? Or did he roll his eyes so hard he snapped his neck at the mention of Kutuzov?

Is “endure” the Russian boomer equivalent of “Pull yourself up by your bootstrap”?

Do young Russians still want their own kids to read Tolstoy? Or has this poisoned him for them? Does he hold the same cultural position as American boomer-lit like Great Gatsby or Tom Sawyer or To Kill a Mockingbird or Handmaid’s Tale or Forrest Gump or The Green Mile… That the young have been left with such disgust they’ll revel at the idea of it falling out of reading such that their own kids and grandkids might forget they exist?

Why the hell would Putin pursue a slow and steady, low intensity, don’t take the bait, run out the clock, attritional campaign… Against a country smaller than Russia?

Is this “endurance” and appeal to history a cope for weakness? Senile madness? Low-T aged cowardice? And institutional decay?

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I don’t think so. There is a logic. There’s actually a very good logic.

Whether it worked out or is working out… I leave as an exercise to the reader. But the strategy, on the face of it… Is very sound.

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Ukraine as a Geopolitical Chess Puzzle

Ukraine is entirely dependent, both militarily and economically, on the Aid of the US and Europe. Ukraine is eternally at risk of exhausting itself in this war in terms of manpower, materiel, money, and just political coherence in a way that Russia isn’t, due to just the size of it’s population and economy. Ukraine on it’s own without American and European money and arms would have lost years ago.

Remember this isn’t an insurgency or Guerrilla war. The battle line is actually almost entirely symmetrical and conventional. Much like World War 1. Where the casualty ratio is ENTIRELY a function of the ability of two symmetrical forces to keep their resources and logistics coming forward. With horrifying attrition should either lose out.

This is partly why I lean towards the Russian casualty numbers… Because Artillery remains the greatest killer in conventional static warfare, and Russia has had a 3 to 1 advantage, rising to even a 10 to 1 advantage for the entirety of the war (and somehow the US and the west still haven’t meaningfully ramped up production)… With even Ukrainian propaganda sites admitting this and celebrating the advantage falling to a mere 2 to 1. (if it did)

Now if you’ve played any video games you know intuitively what a massive thing an artillery advantage is for even short battles lasting a few hours. Across YEARS with static lines, it adds up immensely… And makes simply sitting and forcing the enemy to come to you… to counter attack to try to force you out of their lands, immensely tempting. You force your enemies to trade lives for shells. To die to maintain a position.

And much like world war one… Where the actual battlelines are located really doesn’t matter.

If the Russian Invasion in 2022 had gone better or worse, that would have been a permanent difference of tens or hundreds of miles… but unless Kiev fell, very little would have changed.

The Oil fields of Baku aren’t over the next set of hills. There’s very little either side could capture that would change the actual attritional logic of the war, unless Ukraine had an insane victory on one of their counter-attacks and actually managed to take Mariupol and cut off Crimea (which they almost certain won’t).

Much like ww1 battles where a few hundred yards change hands but thousands of men died… the battles really aren’t over territory, but to exhaust and break the enemy’s numbers, institutional coherence, and willingness to fight.

And in the case of Ukraine, that institutional coherence isn’t even their own… It’s NATO’s.

Putin and Russians say this over and over again, that they aren’t fighting a war with Ukraine… but with the West and NATO, and Ukraine’s just the front… And as far as finances, technology, supply chains, and the rewards being offered to fight… That’s very true.

Hundreds of billions more than the Ukrainian Economy could ever produce for war have been funneled through Ukraine to fight this… And that’s why they’re fighting. Their entire ruling class are getting richer than God off graft and other cashflows from the west. And Ukraine is utterly dependent on the arms flows from the US and Europe.

The beast that Russia is fighting is the American and European economy and international political alliance system.

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So imagine Putin did what a lot of his people seemingly want, he mass mobilized, declared the “Special Military Operation” was over, Declared WAR… And really smacked down the Ukrainians.

Imagine he took everything to the Denipro, or pushed beyond it to Odessa, or took Kiev?

It’s doable…In terms of manpower, no matter your theory of how well or poorly Russian and Ukraine are doing… Russia could flood Ukraine with troops and escalate massively.

But, Weird as it is to say, that wouldn’t really change anything.

So now the battlelines are in Odessa? or the streets of Kiev? Or on the border of Poland?

So?

None of the money or weapons that sustain this war are coming from Odessa or Kiev.

The West Ukrainians will still want to fight no matter how much “territory” (worthless shelled-out dirt with landmines in it that won’t be productive for years) Russia takes… And if Russia takes it up to some dramatic threshold… All that will mean is now Romanians or Poles will be forced into the breach by the EU or NATO in addition to all the mercenaries, little green men, press ganged Ukrainians, and other tricks they’ve used to get men to the front.

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The Russo-Ukraine war… Even in theory… can’t really be solved on the field because the forces that enable it and demand it aren’t anything to do with relatively worthless territory in the Donbass, or obscure sub-ethnicities of Russian-speaking Ukrainians… The West hasn’t spent 300 Billion dollars on the forests and fields of Andriivka, because there’s anything there that warrants a 300 billion dollar expense.

This war is a tectonic grinding of the American/European Globohomo Empire against a resurgent Russia and it’s allies in central Eurasia.

The war was dreamt up in Washington, Brussels, and Moscow, and there it’ll be decided.

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So what’s the optimal Russian strategy given that? What can they do?

On the field? Not much. There’s nothing that can be done on the ground in Sloviansk that’ll stop the Americans and Europeans from sending another 100 billion dollars or the Ukrainians from dragging another 100,000 conscripts of the street.

The optimal strategy…

Is to wait.

Kutuzov.

Solidify the lines… Minimize the cost to the Russian homeland… rest on the artillery advantage… And Wait.

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Americans can’t comprehend this, because America is a country uniquely incapable of waiting. Presidents need wins. They need to win fast Poker Hands, or breakoff and get onto something else.

But Putin’s ruled 26 years, and at age 73, could theoretically rule 26 more.

He has all the time in the world.

And the American empire NEVER has time on it’s side.

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan… Americans dread forever wars, because they’re inevitably going to lose them on a long enough timeline just because the complexity and instability of domestic politics and foreign politics basically guarantees a humiliating retreat and total loss, at some point, 5-25 years from now.. not because America gets defeated in the field (or not that they’ll admit to) but because they lose their footing elsewhere.

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Putin’s insane Russian strategy… Is to realize that he doesn’t need to win on the fields of Ukraine… Indeed such “victories” would probably doom Russia to getting sucked into a wider war with NATO or various countries in the EU, if not a Nuclear exchange or American deployment.

Instead, he just needed to drag out the war long enough for some other shoe to drop in the American/Euro Globohomo empire… Then as soon as the next 100 billion isn’t coming to Ukraine he wins by default.

Like a Chess-player realizing his position isn’t necessarily good or winnable… But he has 9 minutes left of his timer, and his opponent only has 30 seconds. He doesn’t need to make good moves, he just needs to make moves that prevent a conclusion and forces his opponent to use up time.

In 2023, this was largely hypothetical, and looked like a stretch. in July 2026, this looks like Genius.

America Out of Time

In late 2022-2023, about the time various negotiations collapses, and the long war became apparent… This would have seemed like a long gamble.

Sure Europe wasn’t exactly stable with rising tensions and cracks in the EU between Native Europeans and the Muslim migrants and the Elites who imported them.

America wasn’t exactly stable with the Jan 6th Insurection/“Fed-surection” being very recent.

COVID Lockdowns had recently caused mass protests in Canada and elsewhere, with follow-on tensions.

The eternal threat of a Taiwan War with China, was of course prophesied for the 2020s that would rescue Russia from any resource non-parity…

And American/European sanctions on Russia had already been shown to relatively toothless relatives to Russia’s hard petroleum and natural resources… Whereas all the Covid-era money printing had yet to show it’s damage on the US economy…

But all of this was hypothetical.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent… And the American Government can stay bizarre even longer…

Then Oct 7th (Operation al aqsa flood) hit, cascading wars erupted in the middle east… Things you really couldn’t have predicted in early 2023, but of the same scale.

And now the US and Europe in particular are facing a global recession or depression level event with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

Already global food production is doomed to shortages and a multiyear crisis because artificial fertilizer (a petroleum/natural gas byproduct) out of the middle-east has collapsed. (Global nitrogen fertilizer production is divided between the middle-east, Canada, and Russia)

Global oil flows are wrecked, and look like they’re getting worse, with an Oil shock probably already locked for later 2026, and probably no price-relief even if the strait opens (various industries and countries have been heavily suppressing demand, which will restart if flows restart)…

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And basically no matter what, Russia has a locked in windfall of Petroleum and natural resource sales whilst America and especially Europe have been locked into a multiyear crisis that will deny them the free cash flow to subsidize Ukraine.

Putin Has Defeated the EU

Since the start of the war the most aggressive pushers of war in Ukraine have not even really been Americans. US war hawks like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and the Biden Admin liked it… but there was lots of dissent, notably from the Trump wing and the “Realists”… (commentators of the “Realpolitik” school, not the factuality of their beliefs)… Rather the biggest war pushers have been core European leaders of the EU and British crypto-EU leaders like Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer.

The Unspoken force behind the War… the 2014 Euromaiden movement, and open statements that the goal of the war was to collapse Russia… Is that Russia is actually a real Democracy in all the ways EU countries aren’t.

Putin may be Defacto ruler for life… But he’s still standing for elections that are largely MORE fair than the EU’s.

Meanwhile Romanian electoral results have been overturned, Britain with half the population arrests multiples more people for social media posts than Russia, France just imprisoned it’s main opposition leader and banned her from elections, and Germany is eternally threatening to Ban the AFD.

The core values of the EU being that the leftist leadership conspires to prevent any meaningful change to core “Human Rights” policies of infinite migration, infinite pedophilia, infinite pride parades, infinite bureaucracies and NGOs, and infinite taxation of their white population.

All secured through what amounts to a series of suicide pacts, protection rackets, and gay and pedophilic blackmail rings to prevent any internal challenge or individual nation from defecting and offering their population anything resembling responsible government in their own interests…Remember what they did to Romania when they elected someone who wanted peace with Russia. All under the military umbrella and vassalage of the US security state.

And Russia is the Great threat to that. The great exception. The natural ally of all their internal dissidents and a potential security Guarantor if Britain or Germany or Italy or any country in Europe decided they were done with Pride parades, migrant rapists, the Epstein Class, and national suicide… And wanted to stop destroying their country in the name of peace, love, decolonialism, antiracism and pedophilia.

If the eternal panic threat of a FAR RIGHT extremist movement actually showed up and started car bombing and throat slitting pedophile politicians and their migrant allies and pimps… Russia’s the natural faction to arm and fund them, and provide them a third country to train in or flee to.

Russia’s the example of a European country that’s still an independent country. And, given the EU is Russia’s enemy… It’s a natural ally to any country or faction that wanted to become independent again.

It’s the last country in Europe that’s run by white heterosexual men instead of gays, women, pedophiles, and brown foreigners.

And if old school classical liberals and conservatives insist they don’t “see race” or “see sexuality” or “see gender”… You can bet the closeted homosexuals, foreign invaders, and unqualified menopausal women who run the EU certainly do. They see it every day.

And they remember it!

They remember Russia funding communist and leftist terror movements across Europe in the 70s and 80s… Hell half the current EU leadership were those extreme leftist getting funded by the Russians in the 70s and 80s. They know more than anyone what Russia can do to the US-Backed European Vichy regimes.

So the EU and it’s allies NEED this war in Ukraine to continue, or there’s a good chance Starmer and his successors will go the way of Ghadafi and get sodomized to death with bayonets in revenge for what’s been done to white European women and children by the American backed Post-war occupation, the Epstein Class, and The Migrant Rapists the EU foisted on them.

Because the second the Ukraine war ends, the fault line between America/EU Tyrrany and the flawed, but real, countries beyond the EU and American Influence either shift’s East, if Russia collapses, or West, if Ukraine and the EU collapses.

THe Ukraine war will not be the end… as soon as it’s over It’ll be the start of a dozen+ civil wars, dirty wars, ethic conflicts, and national crises.

And now the EU is out of oil.

Russia is net oil exporter. The EU is almost entirely an Oil importer.

Russia has foreign currency reserves… The Euro-states are the most indebted countries in the world.

Russia has been building a coherent national identity people will fight for (though still multicultural in the old Russian-Imperial sense), every poll out of Europe shows there’s basically no country in western Europe where young white men are more likely to answer a wartime draft than shoot or stab the draft officials.

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This is why the Ukraine war has heated up in the past 2 month. This is why Ukraine is (since the time I started writing this piece) started targeting Russian merchant tankers and oil refineries…

Because the Strait of Hormuz closing is the “Something happening” that Putin was gambling on winning the war for him.

That’s the thing that breaks European/American finances and cuts off Ukraine.

That is his Kutuzov moment where he defeats a vastly larger financial and military alliance… by doing nothing.

This is the moment the Europeans and Americans looked down at the chess clock and realized they’re nowhere close to a checkmate with 15 seconds left for their moves.

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Continuing our long series discussing and close reading “Which Way Western Man?” by William Gayley Simpson (1892-1990) The work that introduced Nietzsche to the American far-right and created much of the Far Right Vitilist, Pagan, Nietzschean, Racialist, and Eugenic though that defines the Far Right today. We will be following his personal/intellectual journey from Presbyterian Clergy to the Early ACLU to Franciscan Monkhood to Socialist Agitator to Zarathustran hermit to American Eugenicist and Racial-Nationalist.

Joining me is /Vivienne Magdalene @maenadraving on Twitter of the “For the Love of Nietzsche” Podcast, who will be giving us her unique Nietzschean expertise.

Opening “Divinitus”, Outro “Greek intro” by Jeff Van Dyke. Rome: Total War Soundtrack

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Announcing our first Misery March

This Summer I will be leading the first “Misery March” in the Greater Toronto/Ontario area (TBA). Join the Anarchonomicon Discord Server.

Toronto, for those of you who have never been, is one of the most gorgeous, walkable, safe, pleasant dense urban cities in the World and North America in particular. The old “City of Toronto” or “Old Toronto”, is an amazing old Victorian grid city comprised of almost a hundred villages, town and neighborhoods, that all slowly merged together but all kept their individual quirks… One is even technically an independent republic of 200 people, that the federal government accidentally recognized its independence when their meme-protest became a feel good story 50 years ago (they still pay taxes).

The whole old city, is 16 miles wide and is sort-of a blend of New York and London… but without the Knife, Gun, or “youth” crime. And many lovely hiking trails that wind throughout the city’s hundred+ mile ravine network.

We Are NOT going to be walking that.

Pleasant summer hikes and walks and groups to walk, abound… You can find gorgeous trails and people to hike those trails or city tours anywhere… And Margaret and her friends aren’t forming a cohesive high trust super fit unit off of it.

Instead we’re going to take subways, streetcars, and buses populated by the strangest smelliest Star Wars Cantina creatures away from that…

We’re going outside Old Toronto, outside Metro Toronto, outside the leafy lovely expanses of endless walkability… And into the nightmare of the unwalkable, concrete MegaCity hellscape sprawl beyond Etobicoke, Scarborough, and the 401, where they shove the airports, and the industry, and the housing projects for all the recent immigrants, where the street signs themselves have been known to stop using the Latin alphabet.

The dead lands beyond Willowdale that RUSH described in The Necromancer.

(“Willowdale” and “the River Don” remain the final borders of pleasant inner Toronto by and large)

In high summer. In Ontario humidity. On concrete heat islands that will cook an egg. And we’re going to walk 30km (20 miles). 6-9 hours in that scorching concrete hell where legend tells of second generation old Indian men who have never seen a white face.

We’re going into the heart of darkness, at the worst most miserable time of year to do so…Into lands often described as “Mumbai” or “New New Delphi” or “Bigger Hotter Syria”, Where all the worst trends of Sub-urbanism, mass migration, urbanism, boomerism, sprawl, and post-war mistakes all intersect into Barad-dûr like eyes of pure blighted suburban madness such as “Square One” or “Brampton Shoppers World” or “Woodbine Mall & Fantasy Fair” or “Vaughn Mills” or “First Markham Place” or “The University of Toronto- Scarborough” or “The Pickering Casino Resort”

There’s actually a non-zero chance one of us could die or be driven to madness of heat stroke, violence, mistrusting a corner-store, the parasitic macro-millipedes, or other complications.

20 miles, in the Mid-day sun. Rain or Shine. Back to Civilization and the leafy-green bubble of inner Toronto… The hard way.

But why?

What is a Misery March and Why?

The Rules of a misery march are simple. You and your comrades use google maps to scout out and hunt down the most miserable, blighted, sprawled out, industrial parked, almost unreachable segment of your metro area. The part no one you have ever met has ever been… Then using Public transit, skateboards, uber, taxi, your mom… Etc. To get there. Then you walk back 10-20 miles to the city core or whatever you consider civilization across 6-9 hours.

Depending on the Metro-area and local laws, you may want to be armed… But for Toronto purposes this is unnecessary (Toronto’s Lost Shades and Silent Hill-Esque monsters are nothing if not cowardly).

If anyone has to tap out part way for heatstroke, blisters, or for fear that the sadness will consume them… or their wife nags them to get home after a few hours, we don’t hold it against them. They did the important thing. They went to the most miserable place in the metro area we could find and hiked back on foot through the worst of it… And if they have to tap out or leave early now that you’re getting back to the nice parts, who cares… They did the hard bits.

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But why would you do this? Why would you go and do, pretty objectively, the most miserable ugliest thing you could do on your day off, when you and your friends could be doing… literally anything else.

You could go for a SCENIC hike, or meet up at a nice restaurant and chat, or go to some event, or literally anything else.

Why go to the smelliest, ugliest, most hostile and miserable part of the city to be surrounded by foreigners and death march through the liminal “back-rooms” of demographic, mercantile, and transport globalism?

Well… your recent “pub night”? Or sight-seeing tour? Or Board games night? Or bookclub? How much did that bind you and your friends together?

The people in your Yoga class or that you met at the spa? How tight are you with them? Do you really feel you can depend on them when the chips are down? If you had to move house or rescue your sickly dog from a crazy ex at 2am, or hide a body? Are you calling someone you met at the young conservatives Shrimp and Cocktail night?

Real friendship, teamwork, esteem, respect, community, espirit de corp? These are forged through hardship, endurance, inclement weather conditions, and screaming sexual insults… (or at least this is what childhood reruns of Little House on the Prairie various Cadet drill instructors taught me) So if you actually want to “Get Organize” or “build community”, the way you do it is by creating events and venues in which people can get together, be stuck with each other, and endure really horrifying inescapable misery for extended hours such that by the end they must deal with the irritated tension either by becoming tight friends and pulling each other through, or grow to despise each other and attempting murder (the closer to 50/50 it gets the tighter the team).

In either case its a very quick and efficient way to bind people together or sort people out.

And if that doesn’t work, 6-9 hours of walking in 100 degree heat? You’ll at least lose 2-3 pounds. So not a wasted day.

I will be doing this at some point this summer, If one shows up I’ll be glad to walk with them; If 30 shows up I’ll do my best to memorize everyone’s name over the next 9 hours; and if no one else expresses interest or can commit to a time, I will just be marching it myself and enjoying the vision-quest/heat stroke as I point and laugh at all the weird Star Wars creatures coming at me with their kirpans.

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Does this sound like something you’re interested in? Are you in the Toronto area? Do you want to organize one these in your metro-area, but don’t have a large enough supply of spergs and weirdos to join your death march through Baltimore?

DM Me.

Date to be determined depending on interest and availability.

And Join the Anarchonomicon Discord Server

I intend to do one of these every 3 to 4 months to get different weather and mix up different locations. Maybe down the road we’ll have an “away march” in Detroit!

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Remember this is a group activity with no time limit… The challenge is to try to get everyone to the finish line. If we have to stop for 2 hours at a diner for lunch or dinner to refresh everyone… We stop for 2 hours. It can just take longer.

You aren’t just coming prepared for you, you’re coming prepared for everyone else.

You want to make sure you can help yourself and not be a burden whilst also being ready to help others if they’ve forgotten anything.

Demonstrate that value and virtue. Build leadership!

But here is a recommend Kitlist:

-4 x liters of water

-1 x 300-500ml electrolite sport’s drink
(we will stop for more fluids/meals, even 4 and a half liters might not be enough for 9 hours, but this is good redundancy in case we get in a “food desert” or someone forgets theirs)

-2 hats, one baseball, one full brimmed gilly or other hat (incase you get the sun right on one part of the face or neck

-Sunscreen

-Tactical flip flops (backup footwear incase you get blisters)

-Shoes/primary foot wear (on feet) with backup pair of socks (again for blisters)

-Boo-boo kit (bandages etc. for blisters and other minor injuries)

-spare underwear/shorts and some kind of alcohol wet wipe
(On long walks if you sweat a lot the salt from sweat builds up and that can cause really brutal slicing chaffing and cuts (your underwear goes from soft cotton to like a solid rock of salt)… So you want to be able to change into something fresh and clear the salt from your thighs before your legs and other bits are cut to ribbons)

-Shemagh or microfiber towel
Technically you can tie these as a head shelter from the weather, but the real value is to wet them and wear them if you feel heat stroke coming on or like you’re drying out

-Rain Coat or poncho (we might get bad weather)

-small snacks

Phone Charger
do try to bring your phone charged, You might need it.

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Anything else you can think of.

What do you think? Are you interested? Have you and your friends done something similar? do comment!

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Disclaimer: At no point in this piece do I ever advise, instruct, or make known the means of making explosives (this knowledge I leave to Wikipedia, Youtube, and other unsavory parts of the web).. Nor do I discuss the fine processes of how to make Complex incendiary devices or fuels in detail sufficient to actually do so (I strongly encourage anyone interested in pyrotechnics to do extensive research and take professional courses, as even very simple non-explosive incendiaries can be incredibly dangerous to work with in even small quantities) which in the US and some other countries are not-regulated, whereas others are highly regulated under the US National Firearms Act not as explosives, but as destructive devices (Its weird), whereas in other countries they DO have stringent regulation (nor is this legal advise)… The purpose of this piece is to discuss a set of hypothetical improvised non-explosive anti-tank weapon’s systems and the tactics of their hypothetical employment. The details of how to go about actually creating the fuels, reactive agents, and dangerous chemicals will not be discussed here, except in such detail as is necessary to WARN against the various extreme dangers of hazarding to make them.

Neither the Author nor anyone at Anarchonomicon is a Pyrotechniques Expert, Chemist, Lawyer, EOD Technician, or Military Authority in any sense of those words that matter. And none of the hypotheticals discussed should be pursued without consultation with those qualified people.

By Contrast none of the TACTICS discussed should ever be pursued by anyone EVER who values their life or the lives of anyone around them… or at least certainly anyone who values them more than victory.

It’s the CatGirl Cocktail Hour! Again!

In the Previous “CatGirl Cocktail Hour” we deep dived how Thermite based weapons, despite not defeating armor, could almost certainly be used in improvised and purpose built weaponry to cripple, mobility kill, blind, and cook off enemy armored vehicles, both for irregular forces and cut off or low-supply conventional infantry.

We also covered all the horrifying ways that aluminum powder, homemade thermite, and home metallurgy is a death trap, but still more accessible to cut off units and irregulars with limited skills and supplies than anything involving actual explosives or chemistry.

As well as just what a pain, coarse drop and spark safe thermite is to actually get ignited even under normal conditions, let alone combat.

As well as the uniquely horrifying dangers that fine aluminum dust is.

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But what if you were a stupid evil monstrous asshole who didn’t care even about your own safety?

Or what if your enemies were stupid evil monstrous assholes who didn’t care even about their own safety?

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You see throughout the piece, something kept cropping up… something unnerving.

Whereas achieving and lighting a safe to wield, non-explosive thermite mixture in a manner that’s not a danger to the operator, yet works is a multistep series of challenging enough judgment calls and processes, which I did not go into enough detail to teach (both because I lack the expertise, and also because you’ll inhale fine aluminum dust and die drowning in your own lungs and or get Alzheimer’s at 20)… Is actually rather difficult to do safely.

On the other-hand simply making fine aluminum powder that is horrifyingly dangerous to humans WITHOUT concern for safety… takes… almost no skill whatsoever.

Aluminum dust simply milled finer and finer with enough of a simple carbon or other coating to stop oxidization, will simply becomes more and more dangerous and more and more violently reactive… seemingly without limit.

The very process of milling fine Aluminum powder is a DEATH TRAP for the Pyrotechnic Expert since as the aluminum gets milled finer and finer, more of the bare unoxidized aluminum surface gets exposed and consumes the oxygen within the airtight mill (and it must be airtight to conceal the deadly neurotoxic Aluminum dust)… This means that within the mill the Aluminum VACUUM SEALS itself in by devouring all the oxygen in the air within the mill.

Thus if the mill is not “burped” every few hours. The Aluminum will fully vacuum seal and when you do open it the Oxygenated external air will rush in, causing some of the dust to get kicked up and suspend in the air, and then flash react now that the bare unoxidized aluminum is contacting oxygen so violently… Which is exothermic. Which will cause the suspended fuel-air mixture of the Aluminum powder to ignite… At 2000 degrees.

Many an amateur at pyrotechnics have basically hit themselves with a homemade 2000 degree thermobaric warhead to the face…. By doing nothing and just being slightly late opening an inert can. What’s in the box?

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So what happens when someone inevitably decides to weaponize this simplest of heavy… “Ultra-Light” metal chemistry?

What happens if you bottle that? And hand-throw it at the enemy?

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Don’t do this at home!

Legal Disclaimer: Note this is NOT an explosive. No element of this undergoes explosive reaction or even deflagration, rather this is a simple open-air combustion reactions which cannot even hypothetically be used to produce shrapnel or concussive explosive damage.
In theory (not legal advice) depending on the jurisdiction, it is in the same legal category as camping fire-starters and diagrams for how to build a campfire, maintain gas motors, metallurgical chemical welding equipment, and other examples of multi-element complex combustions used throughout hobbies and industry.
Likewise we advise against EVER creating any incendiary device… including camp fires (People fall into camp fires. They’re dangerous. This one time at PorcFest in New Hampshire a guy lost his junk after drunkenly falling into the campfire).
Remember The Purpose of this piece is to predict the future of warfare, hypothesize future weapon systems (much as many Military Magazines draw diagrams of hypothetical hovertanks, “Stealth Rifles”, “Plasma weapons”, etc.) Then Properly anticipate and advise the skilled military personnel who read this blog… And in the process horrifically deface the future of all Military History by CatGirl-Branding everything that hasn’t yet been safely named.

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Killer Kitty Glitter: A Nightmare Someone Will Eventually Make

—Theme Song—

It the simplest thing ever. A glass bottle… Filled with aluminum. A single element.

Technically, this is less chemically complex than bottled water. (a TWO element molecule in a bottle)

You might not even need an ignition source if the aluminum is milled fine enough and you let it sit long enough… it’ll drain the oxygen in the bottle (oxygen binds to exposed metal, this is how rust happens), forming a vacuum in the bottle, and probably auto-igniting the moment it’s broken when fresh oxygen hits it. (this is a common danger of milling Aluminum)

However, for redundancy, and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions to avoid being accused of chemical warfare and purposeful poisoning enemy combatants with aluminum nanoparticle neurotoxins and lung contaminants, it is very important to include either a storm-match and strike surface taped to the bottle, flint and steel, or some sort of burning ignition source.

This will also guarantee that if one were to accidentally drop one you’d have a maximally painful but quick death of 3rd degree burns and lung searing misery instead of drowning in your lungs or suffering brain damage from inhaling an entire soda bottle’s worth of inert aluminum powder.

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“Ok” you might think. “But what does it actually do? What does it actually look like?”

It is here that, unlike the CatGirl Meltatini and its hypothetical ignition mechanisms and functionality… we don’t have to speculate…at all… as to the dangers or efficacy.

Fine Aluminum dust fires are shockingly common and well documented.

This factory was collapsing within a minute of one starting on their main machine, note the aluminum doesn’t even catch fire til 19 seconds with the blinding flash:

Suitably fine aluminum can even react with rain and water… Since water causes metals to rust at increased rates… Ie. Oxidize quickly. (H2O is 1 third Oxygen). Which we already know is extraordinarily exothermic when it happens to aluminum.

There are dozens and dozens of these videos out there, Fine aluminum dust (like all metal dusts) are common industrial byproducts of any milling or shaping of aluminum, so every aluminum product that comes out of a factory produces it as a byproduct. And such accidents are very very common… Just as all dust fires and “explosions” are. (look up grain silo explosions, or sugar refinery fires).

As already linked in the previous CatGirl Cocktail hour, Fine aluminum powder is also a very basic pyrotechnic ingredient to produce both thermite for industrial or Youtube purposes… or to make fireworks flash brightly.

I already linked this video of a talented if incautious Youtuber/Pyrotechnic hobbyist showing how ball mills (a motor, container, and glass marbles) can be used to refine aluminum scraps (foil, soda cans, wrecked motorcycle parts) down to dangerously fine dust particles which can combust in the air (or get sucked into your lungs and drown/lobotomize you).

Again don’t do this at home… Certainly not in your house.

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But the wider phenomenon of dust fires… militaries have already weaponized elsewhere.

Thermobaric weapons or “Fuel Air Explosions”, “Aerosol Bombs”, or “fuel Air Bombs”, or “Vacuum Bombs” are an expansive category of weapons that exploits physics… And ambiguities in the English language.

Dust “Explosions” are not really explosions (some are, it’s weird). Remember how I said I’d never tell you how to make explosives, that instead you’d have to read chemistry Wikipedia and watch youtube videos like a man?

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Yeah, none of what I’m talking about are explosives because the oxidizer does not exist in the fuel source and a net gas release isn’t happening… Remember Explosives detonate or deflagrate from oxygen already contained in the mixture (low explosives) or the molecular structure itself (high explosives). The explosive reaction results in the chemical powder mixture or the molecule itself reacting via combustion or shockwave (high explosive chemistry is finicky) breaking the old chemical bonds and rapidly forming new ones… One or all of which is a gas.

For example here’s the Nitroglycerin (a high explosive) Detonation reaction:

4 x C3H5N3O9 → 12 x CO2 + 10 x H2O + 6 x N2 + O2

That’s a ton of Carbon Dioxide, Water (steam), Nitrogen, and Oxygen molecules all being produced, all of them are gasses moving very fast at 5000 degree, as they leave the Nitroglycerin molecule. You can also sorta visualize why nitroglycerin is so unstable when it’s such a large molecule of viscous liquid, and all it takes to start the reaction is 4 of those molecules getting too close together (don’t bump it).

Just one of those large unstable molecules ripping against another, one CO2 or H2O molecule forming and ripping off… And the whole thing blows.

(amazing movie about transporting Nitroglycerin)

This is how most explosives work. (although most high explosives are vastly more stable)

The Oxygen within the mixture/molecule reacts with the combustible elements to release massive amounts of gas in a detonation, or a fast burning deflagration which can propel bullets, shrapnel, ect. to lethal speeds.

Gas is expanding at insane speeds. And that creates a shockwave that burns and crushes people nearby, and launches shrapnel and fragmentation at incredible speeds into the poor bodies of various targets.

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This still can sortof happen in some weird types of dust fires and thermobarics (again weird exceptions abound)…

But far more common, and what we’ll be discussing today… Is the opposite.

Most dust and fuel air fires result from an unoxidized fuel with no innate oxidizer to it, getting spread by circumstance or a smaller explosion into a fine aerosol within the air, where suddenly it is evenly mixed with an oxygen source… The Air.

Thus things like Flour, or Grain, or Sugar or corn… Things that don’t even really burn that well on their own from lack of oxygen… Can suddenly burn terrifyingly in massive fireballs if they’re cast into the air and have the perfect mix of air to fuel.

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When weaponized these are called Thermobaric Weapons or “fuel air explosives” (a primary explosive is used to scatter and ignite the fuel).

And these have a VERY interesting property.

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Because the oxygen is NOT part of fuel but the atmospheric mix… gas is not released, but consumed.

These ““explosions”” don’t “Blow up”. They “Suck up”.

All the oxygen in the surrounding atmosphere gets consumed into the fuel elements of the reaction, creating a negative pressure wave that draws in more oxygen and air from the surrounding environment, consuming that, and (if done in a contained environment like a building or bunker or tunnel network) sucking the air OUT OF THE LUNGS of the enemy… Potentially collapsing the lungs (in theory) but more likely sucking the flames and burning negative pressure atmosphere into the lungs of the enemy.

And one of the most potent additives for Thermobaric weapons is….

You guessed it.

Aluminum.

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4 x AL + 3 x O2 → 2 x Al2O3

Aluminum + Oxygen → Aluminum Oxide (Aluminum Rust)

Think of how much Atmosphere this is devouring! No gas is being released, but MORE oxygen Atoms are being devoured than Aluminum atoms.

Indeed it burns hot enough that it almost certainly rips oxygen atoms from other molecules. that atmospheric CO2 and CO (Carbon monoxide) have their oxygen atoms ripped from them only for the left over carbon to combust (as it does) and consume more atmospheric oxygen.

This doesn’t quite cause deep space type vacuums (there’s a lot more to air than oxygen) but it does draw the burning element outwards towards the air it is sucking in. And if you’ve ever interacted with a fire in your life you know that heat rises and thus fires draw in oxygen disproportionately from their BOTTOMS.

So what happens you toss Killer Kitty Glitter on TOP an enemy target… Like a tank? The bottle breaks, the dust is thrown out into the air, and then it ignites, and then…

What happens in the tank?

A Battle Tank is a Confined Space

Confined spaces are a category of occupational health and safety hazards that have killed many an unsuspecting repairman, farmer, sailor….

Some poor naive soul jumps in a grain silo, or crawls into a (cold) boiler to repair it, or descends into a watertight service hatch on a ship without a supervisor or backup or rescue plan… Then passes out and dies because the chemical finish on the inside of the grain silo or the anti-rust paint on the ship’s haul has off-gassed in the airtight environment and consumed all the available oxygen… Something which cannot be smelt or seen. And will only be felt when your lungs are already full of stale, but largely normal smelling air… but which has no oxygen in it, or is an obscene percentage carbon monoxide or some other poison. Killing the hapless worker. At which point one of their colleagues inevitably comes to check on them a few minutes later, notices that they’re unresponsive, assumes it is a medical emergency (not in the way you think)… Rushes to their aid… And then dies themselves from being overcome by the toxic gas.

This has killed THOUSANDS of ordinary workers. Sometimes this daisy chains killing 3 or 4 heroic would-be-rescuers dead before people stop rushing into the perfectly normal looking space.

Seriously this has killed thousands of industrial, farm, nautical, and ordinary facility workers. And is now one of the largest subsets of workplace health and safety concern (read the Wikipedia page).

It’s statistically plausible someone or several people reading this piece will die to a confined space death… Or rather would have, but for my benevolence and nagging.

The joint factors of a confined space, no easy emergency exits, no way to force fresh air, and the unexpected/hard to diagnose nature of the threat all combine with the chemistry of unusual reactions and often combustible materials to create death traps.

What thermobaric weapons do, and the reason they’re employed against enemy bunkers, tunnels, buildings, and hardened positions… Is they exploit all these factors that exist to lesser extents in defensive positions to create sucking fires that rapidly create burning zero-oxygen negative pressure confined death traps in what should be the enemy’s safest positions.

Yes just as those heroic Thetford farmers drowned in the zero oxygen Chicken shit tank, you can make your chicken shit enemies drown in the burning atmosphere of their Armored Tanks.

(I know. I know. Operating a Battle Tank is a dangerous job that’s highly exposed, with little concealment, and at extreme risk of enemy heavy weapons fire. Its unfair to merely compare the armor they have, vs unarmored infantry who can still better conceal themselves and employ cover… and there isn’t really a comparison one way or the other in bravery between them and infantry. But tell that to the poor dismounted units who have to hunt a Main Battle Tank.)

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Remember how much Oxygen Aluminum devours when it burns?

We can calculate the Exact displacement of oxygen for Aluminum. Aluminum has a density of 2.7 g/cm3. Or 2.7 kilograms per liter. Or 0.959 Kilograms (just over 2 pounds) in a 355ml Beer Bottle.

Standard sea level air density (at 15c) is 1.2250 kg/m3.

However Air is Mostly largely inert Nitrogen. Oxygen is only 20.95% of sea level air. And remember the Aluminum is binding to the oxygen at a ratio of 2 to 3. And there’s a ton of other things to do with atomic mass I really don’t want to get into.

BUT…

handwaving away all the actual math and eyeballing it. A single Beer-Bottle worth of burning aluminum powder, one basic Killer Kitty Glitter attack, is consuming somewhere between 5 and 7 cubic METERS of atmospheric oxygen.

A one liter bottle is consuming 15-20 cubic meters.

And a two liter 30-40 cubic meters.

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So what happens when one lands on top of an enemy Main Battle Tank in sudden surprise with all of it’s hatches open “unbuttoned”, to let the Tankers, see, communicate, and breath in the surrounding air?

Note: I use the Abrams for all of my examples, not because I have a beef with Americans but because all of the sources are in English, and the Abrams is an example of a GOOD modern tank built to keep it’s occupants alive, whilst not going off concept into weirdness. If I focused on the T-90, Leopard, Challenger, Ariete, Leclerc, Merkava, Type-99, Ramses II, Arjun, or Al-Khalid I’d have to deal with non-English sources and weird exceptions… Whilst not really changing the concept… Also I’m not really a tank person, so researching tanks isn’t that enjoyable for me.

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Tank commanders generally like to keep their Tank Unbuttoned. Whenever they’re not immediately in combat being able to stick their heads out, operate their smaller support guns, and just look around gives them an extraordinarily more complete and accurate view of the battlespace around them and radically improves their decision making, control, and ability to communicate with dismounted units around them. It also lets the air flow and keeps everyone cool (and looking cool).

As soon as they take effective fire however, what they’re (generally) supposed to do is everyone descend into the tank and seal those hatches so that small arms fire cannot kill or injure the personnel. Buttoning up.

Makes sense right?

The moment of vulnerability however is the split second before they go into buttoning up. Tank Troopers drill this a ton, and can do it extraordinarily fast… but they have to actually perceive they’re under attack, mentally process it, shout out to button up, get down into the tank, and pull the hatches shut.

If you get the surprise on them or catch them napping, that’s 5-10 second between your first attack on them, and them actually being safely buttoned up.

Traditionally though this is really only a vulnerability to Snipers. That if a skilled sniper spots an unbuttoned tank with the commander poking up… He can get 1 shot off that might kill one if he’s a good shot (you really want to know which is the commander and which the loader position when you take that shot)… Most other small arms fire, or even heavy weapons fire, the commander and gunner are down in the tank before the fire gets on target.

At which point they’re pretty safe even before the hatch closes (in 1-2 seconds) because small arms fire and shrapnel travel linearly… Which makes it really hard to get any of it going down the hatches and hitting the personnel.

For this reason Grenades, Molotovs (they still work on unbuttoned tanks), and drone dropped explosives are really the only things that uniquely exploit the weakness of the hatches being open without a head poking up. Because, again, almost all damage in military weapons depend on linear shrapnel, rounds and blast damage.

Thus you typically need really lucky bull-eye throws to hit the open hatch, or a dropper drone, like a deadly game of cornhole.

However burning Kitty Glitter produces thermobaric fires that suck in a complex non-linear all enveloping fashion that seeks out and seeps into every nook and cranny… like your mom.

This means that ANY hit on the surface of the tank is going to be drawing in the surrounding oxygen, Specifically the Oxygen BENEATH it (heat rises, so hot fires almost always draw air more aggressively from beneath)…

So whereas small arms need to hit linearly to maybe ricochet into the unbuttoned tank, or explosives need to land precisely in the hatch or airburst exactly right…

The Thermobaric burning Aluminum will reach around and snake into the open hatch sucking out the oxygen even as the negative pressure sucks the burning aluminum into the tank searing and starting secondary fires on clothing, seeping oil/lubricants, papers, ammunition, paint, flesh, faces, lungs… Which themselves will burn or smolder, and in the process generating their own exhaust pollutants also rendering the internal atmosphere of the Tank non-viable for human occupancy.

This can obviously burn and maim the Tankers, but even uninjured Tankers will probably have to bail out at this point because the consumption of Oxygen has rendered the crew compartment non-survivable for breathing.

“Oh sure, but come on… Tanks and armored vehicles don’t have the best ventilation, but are they really so air tight?”

Yes actually.

All modern armored vehicles, even your local police force’s BearCat are designed to be at least aggressively watertight to resist molotov cocktails… but many were designed with CRBN (Chemical Radiological Biological and Nuclear) Warfare in mind, and even if the individual models don’t have the dedicated CRBN modules installed to cycle air whilst filtering out Nerve Gas or Fallout… they still often require air exchangers, air conditioners, ect. because the base design is so airtight by default.

Indeed the US Military itself has published a 160 page study on the Occupational Health and Safety Hazards of Operating an M1 Abrams Tank (Archive) Mostly focused on the long term hazards of exposure to various live-fire and engine chemicals in such a confined space.

It includes this gem:

“Air exchange rates varying between 1.09 and 6.59 volumes per hour”

And presumably the M1A1 Abrams is one of the better Main Battle Tanks out there for concern with airflow (Americans spend a lot on them).

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Hey, These unconventional warfare pieces are always really hit and miss. Some people love them, others are weirded out, and others insist that it is totally inappropriate and that instead I should go back to writing pieces about prepping and resisting government tyranny (•_•). In either case I have ZERO Idea whether this piece will get a good response, or whether I should have paywalled it, or if this will be the thing that gets me a door-knock…

If you appreciate what I do at all or think this is an important contribution to the field of speculative irregular warfare… Please Subscribe. Pretty please? Pretty pretty please?! Like and Restack? Share? Just an Email address or a like goes such a long way to making this viable. And those of you who become paid subscribers I consider the true saints of Future CatGirl Warfare.

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This means that if you hit a tank, or get anything in the crew compartment that’s consuming oxygen or releasing merely normal battlefield toxic gasses, or even just set any papers or kit or clothing on fire in there… It is going to take a minimum of nearly 9 minutes for it to be occupiable again by the crew, and likely closer to an hour (depending on what the engine and air settings were at)… That the smoke or choaking unoxygenated gas is going to force them to bail-out (if they can. If they can’t due to injury, getting stuck, confusion, or merely not perceiving the lack of oxygen… well confined spaces deaths have killed many a farmer and sailor in all kinds of different “tanks”) and if they get out they probably can’t get back in the tank if the attackers have any small arms rifle cover over it… Beyond that the hatches are also probably staying open as they bail-out, giving the attacker ample opportunity to get flammable liquids, explosives, Meltatini Thermite, etc. Down the hatch and kill or disable the unoccupied tank either with a cookoff, or merely by burning and destroying the controls and sensors.

The same tight armored metal box that keeps the tankers safe has been weaponized against them.

In Conclusion: Don’t Do This at Home!

”WarCrimes are in the Eye of The Beholder”

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Now on paper… technically: This is not a warcrime.

(This is maybe the most Canadian sentence I have ever written.)

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Just as legally: Since Killer Kitty Glitter is chemically and mechanistically less complex than bottled water, and it “releases” negative-gas preassure in a rapid metal-oxidization, thus making it the exact OPPOSITE of an explosion…

I have in NO WAY whatsoever posted bomb-making instructions or diagrams to the internet. (instructions require steps… bombs explode. Diagrams require complexity so as to be simplified… Not one word overlaps with the above)

And I will sue anyone who defames me by saying otherwise.

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However, don’t expect any enemy combatant to Approve your nigh-Talmudicly legalistic reading of the Geneva convention. (Enemy combatants don’t answer defamation suits)

Also don’t expect the laws of physics to play nice with you either.

“More Dangerous to User than Enemy.” Repeat that into a mirror.

The purpose of this piece is again to be aware of and predict future threats from unconventional forces… Not to randomly lobotomize yourself with face-melting lung-liquefiers.

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Sure if carried out perfectly… this is a elementally simple improvised thermobaric weapon just like the US, Russia, Israel, China, Ukraine, and basically every serious military player around the world already uses. And they all insist that their thermobaric weapons are not warcrimes, are not designed to wound or maim, are perfectly humane, and in no-way resemble chemical warfare.

However, anyone who actually attempts to make these death traps or heaven help them: employ them in actual combat… are eternally one slip and fall, or mis-opened mill, or random cracked bottle, or pouring without a respirator away from having their lungs liquified by aluminum dust contaminants, being lobotomized with Alzheimer’s in their 20s if their own lungs don’t drown them, and most likely melting their own face off when a random element sparks or reacts a little too quickly and exothermically with the open air.

Likewise no military in the world is going to flinch at court-martialing an enemy combatant, or entire captured unit, for Chemical Warfare and Violation of the Geneva Convention if they tried to employ one of these against their enemy… And somehow it didn’t ignite.

If one body or living person could be produced that demonstrably died or got lobotomized or maimed by inhaling Aluminum powder that WASN’T on fire…

Ya, they’re going to string up your entire unit for chemical warfare and they’re going to make a huge media production of it as well.

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I mean sure, obviously if it HAD ignited, such an unfortunate enemy combatant would have died anyway in a perfectly legal (well… Geneva compliant) 2000 degree face melting and lung devouring fire… But the second one fails to ignite… any enemy you’re dealing with is going to turn it into legal and media circus.

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Thus such weapons represent maybe the most unstable and infuriatingly unpredictable escalation you could employ against an enemy or that your enemy could employ against you.

Genuinely more dangerous to the user than the enemy, since everything has to go right to actually harm any enemy, but any mistake will kill or maim the user…. And yet so horrifyingly dangerous it still composes a threat to the enemy by shear proximity.

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As such… I fully expect unconventional forces around the world to do it anyway, because the supply chain of scrap aluminum and bottles is so bloody simple and the effect on any armored target that isn’t airtight or has momentarily opened its hatches is so devastating.

Employed from A dropper Drone or bottle launcher (modified crossbow, or catapult) this is maybe the simplest improvisable weapon that can still be effectively used against armored enemies… With a supply chain that is maybe even less disruptable than Molotov cocktails.

And almost certainly there are people out there in the battlefields of the world suicidally brave enough to hand-throw a thermobaric that ignores cover and which they could never protect themselves from if they misjudged the distance.

(fragmentation grenades are downright user friendly and failsafe by contrast)

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Many a country has been blockaded of their petroleum and reduced to complete fuel scarcity meaning that even Molotov cocktails can be effectively blockaded to scarcity… by contrast aluminum scraps don’t get consumed and devoured up under conditions of siege… Aluminum is indeed a scrap product of food, beverages, motor vehicles, etc. That largely just sits arround until someone disposes of it.

As long as you can find some sort of electric motor, or even a pedal motor… aluminum scraps can be milled finer by irregular or cut off forces. And as long as you’re near civilization of any sort, you’re going to find aluminum scraps.

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Expect this to be a staple of future warfare and antiarmor warfare especially.

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But WAIT! We’re not finished.

Tune in next time for the Third and final installment in the CatGirl Cocktail Hour, when I’ll introduce you to far less dangerous utility “cocktails” meant to give unconventional forces some survivability and lead you through the full promise of this exercise:

A simulated (on paper) ambush of a full Sized tank platoon: 4 Main Battle Tanks + Infantry Screen, by irregular forces to show you how even without a ready supply of conventional heavy weapons an irregular force can still MacGyver, Breaking Bad, and suicidally over-commit their way to…

Some percent chance of a not totally Pyrrhic “Victory”.

Tip:


BITCOIN: bc1qdhj7637sgcssxgxygjaa3ddljwy8tzg5mzw325

MONERO: 8AhA3g9hbtDcAJE5MPmeQsFwwGsf3H9fq9tC6giQ4a6vKnTXv4J4MivKXrPKDpXyEeNc9mfFejbq84kSWkC8pjuj18rAEij

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Disclaimer: At no point in this piece do I ever advise, instruct, or make known the means of making explosives (this knowledge I leave to Wikipedia, Youtube, and other unsavory parts of the web).. Nor do I discuss the fine processes of how to make Complex incendiary devices or fuels in detail sufficient to actually do so (I strongly encourage anyone interested in pyrotechnics to do extensive research, as even very simple non-explosive incendiaries can be incredibly dangerous to work with in all but the smallest quantities) which in some US jurisditions and some other countries are not-regulated, whereas in others are highly regulated under the US National Firearms Act not as explosives, but as destructive devices (Its weird), whereas in other countries they DO have stringent regulation (nor is this legal advise)… The purpose of this piece is to discuss a set of hypothetical improvised non-explosive anti-tank weapon’s systems and the tactics of their hypothetical employment. The details of how to go about actually creating the fuels, reactive agents, and dangerous chemicals will not be discussed here, except in such detail as is necessary to WARN against the various extreme dangers of hazarding to make them.

Neither the Author nor anyone at Anarchonomicon is a Pyrotechniques Expert, Chemist, Lawyer, EOD Technician, or Military Authority in any sense of those words that matter. And none of the hypotheticals discussed should be pursued without consultation with those qualified people.

By Contrast none of the TACTICS discussed should ever be pursued by anyone EVER who values their life or the lives of anyone around them… or atleast certainly anyone who values them more than victory.

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Also Checkout PART 2! Where we go into even crazier and more dangerous modes of antitank warfare:

Intro: The Fundamental Problem of AntiTank Warfare, or the Need for Non-Explosive Weapons Systems

I’ve been deep diving unusual or hypothetical military and guerrilla logistics and doctrines for a while now.

I predicted the rise of motorcycles on the modern battlefield in the early months of the Ukraine War. I deep dived the operational tactics and information warfare logic of modern Urban Stealth Operation focusing on the Luigi Mangione Case, and later deep dived the logistics and kit needed for modern urban espionage operations. And I’ve dug into weird little niches like the Knife employed as a strategic (not tactical) level weapon, and the rise of Assassination as the Default mode of Warfare.

And I keep coming back to the same tired conclusions:

Its a cliche, but the real limiting problem of almost all warfare is logistics.

This goes doubly and triply for unconventional forces who cannot access traditional supply lines to secure weapons… And, even more limiting, often lack the training and advanced skills to make or improvise such weapons.

Whilst the inability to access weapons is crippling… The inability to access the knowledge with which to craft or improvise such weapons is even more damning.

Unconventional or irregular forces regularly find themselves unable to access dedicated heavy weapons, modern sophisticated precision systems, and sometimes are forced to even craft their own small arms… but even worse, they often find themselves without the technical skills and experience to craft or improvise alternatives.

While making explosives is not extraordinarily difficult… problem children around the world have made various explosive mixtures from Youtube and internet recipes and even before the internet when “Science Sets” you could order through catalogs actually taught real science, but the actual logistics of USING explosives effectively is shockingly finicky.

Sure tweenage boys might blow up garden gnomes in their backyard for fun, and if you’re fortunate enough to live in a country that sells real Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer, ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate-Fuel Oil) only has 2 ingredients and the other one is gasoline, but if you are in a guerrilla movement in a place like Iran or your unit has been cut off hundreds of miles behind enemy lines and you actually want to USE explosives, in a form that’s combat effective.

Suddenly it gets way more complex. And you learn just exactly why grown-ups told you not to play with fireworks.

If you are in a country that doesn’t just sell Ammonium Nitrate or other oxidizing precursors at the hardware store, or if you’re pinned down in a warzone and can’t get to a hardware store… Suddenly you need to do a lot of basic chemistry, often requiring odd tools that can be a pain to source… Sure with a bit more knowledge and understanding of chemistry fundamentals you can make your own Nitric Acid Generator, or start following the process of rending fat to generate Nitroglycerin, or heaven help you creating disgusting smelling Nitre beds to make saltpeter from Urine like the American Confederacy when they got desperate…

And if you already have primers for bullets or another explosive you could probably create the more unstable small detonators (the primary explosive) to set off more stable large payload explosive charges… (the secondary explosive).

And if you have a not extraordinary knowledge of electronics you could probably create timed or radio, cellphone, or other ignition mechanisms…

And if you have basic shopclass skills you could probably weld your own rockets and mortar shells…

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But if your plan is for your band of merry men to be producing explosives from raw chemicals in some kitchen or basement, combining them with homemade electronics and detonators, fitting them into home-welded Mortar shells and Rocket Grenades, and then either firing them at the enemy with a home-brew mortar tube, launching them with your own shoulder launchers, or dropping them from a drone with your own impact-fuse design…

I can guarantee you, unless you are vastly more competent than I am… or your isolated band of merry men has a vastly more skilled chain of weirdos than I can imagine…. Some mistake’s are going to happen and get people killed once you start operating at scale.

Bomb-making is not a profession for people over-attached to their fingers or faces.

Between the exothermic reactions and boiling you have to do to homebrew the chemicals, the common misfiring and static charges of home electronics, the inherent danger of even professionally made impact fuses, and the white knuckle terror of putting even small rockets or mere shotgun slugs through tubing you’ve welded yourself… One of your kitchens, fuses, launchers, or tubes is going to explode in incendiary shrapnel fury exactly when you have 3-4 people gathered around it… And if you’re a guerrilla or insurgent this will immediately get dozens of forensic experts pouring over your former safe house and the bodies of your former comrades.

For this reason in spite of the skills not being extraordinarily hard to get (between Wikipedia, Youtube, Archive.org and Anna’s Archive: The Chemical, Electronic, Engineering, and Metallurgical knowledge to make your own remote explosives, mortar systems, and rocket artillery can be gained in a week)… It is almost unheard of for cut off units or besieged battalions separated from their logistics chain to just start craft-making their own armaments on the fly. And likewise the most successful guerrilla groups invariably produce explosives and weapons systems FAR below their natural skill ceiling.

Sure the IRA COULD have tried to create their own rocket artillery, shoulder fire rocket launchers, or Mortar tubes, the mechanics are not that complex… But they had recurring enough accidents and problems with simple timer bombs that they preferred to limit themselves to the few enough but reliable enough professionally made heavy weapons Gaddafi or American smugglers could get them.

The only factions that really homebrew their own heavy weapon systems are Government level pariah states like Hamas, Hezbollah, or ISIS (or Ukraine) who have the resources and the space to create entire semi-professional supply chains without one accident compromising their OPSEC or taking out anyone irreplaceable.

Thus there is an inherent need in Small and unconventional forces for weapons systems that can be readily improvised by low-skill individuals that are effective, deadly, and able to take on modern armored enemies in ways that are better than completely useless… But ideally which do not depend upon explosives, electrical timing, or home chemistry to an extent that it’d immediately start generating casualties from hot spots on burners, static charges, or radio frequency overlaps.

Indeed we used to have exactly such weapon systems.

They were called “petrol bombs” or “Molotov Cocktails”…

The only problem is:

Molotov Cocktails Don’t Work Any More

The Molotov Cocktail has a storied place in the history of warfare, and on the streets of Portland… originally an improvised anti-tank weapon from the Finnish Winter War, the little lethal beverage has been employed in conflicts on every continent… Including Antarctica judging by that one John Carpenter documentary.

Its continued use on the modern battlefield and in improvised warfare everywhere is belied by exactly one problem.

Molotov Cocktails don’t work any more.

They’re still good thrown area denial weapons, and incendiaries always have an anti-building and anti-material role, and as makeshift anti-personnel grenades… Well I certainly wouldn’t want one thrown into my fire position, or into my face…

But they don’t do what they were originally designed for.

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The Molotov cocktail was an artifact of profound military imagination and creativity. By the Finnish Winter War of 1940 Tanks were incredibly refined implements of war.

Aside from massive dedicated anti-tank rifles (fast fading in viability) and the first generation of shoulder fired rockets (The First Bazooka and PanzerFaust were still 2-3 years away)… There was shockingly little that infantry could do to tanks if the tank simply refused to drive over an anti-tank mine or sit still long enough for a satchel charge or sticky bomb to be placed, or corrected artillery fire to be brought in.

Tank armor had just gotten good enough that any non-specialized direct fire weapon wasn’t going to defeat its nearly impenetrable armor.

The Finnish “Molotov cocktail”, perfected mechanisms found in earlier petrol bombs and overcame this by doing the opposite.

This may be stating the obvious, but the Molotov cocktail is a Hand Thrown, Non-Explosive, Liquid Incendiary Weapon.

We’re used to it now… and it is so simple it probably wasn’t even noted at the time, but every individual part of how the molotov cocktail is delivered, “detonated”, overcomes armor, and delivers its damage is weird, archaic, and non-standard.

Throwing is a primordial holdover still used in grenades and almost no other weapon system… Physical force glass breaking is basically only used as a trigger mechanism in improvised weapons, basic booby-traps, or exotic or cheap security systems… Likewise the exposed flame priming, literally “lighting a fuse” like early grenades and dynamite sticks is not used in any other modern weapon.

And the liquid petroleum payload is of course the oddest part of it… Unlike gellatinized napalm mixtures that “Sticks to kids”, or even early Greek fire used by the Byzantines, the goal of early petrol bombs and the final molotov cocktail… was NOT to stick, but rather to flow and leak and seep into hatches, vents, and other nooks and crannies of ww2 era tanks, Ideally burning those inside or burning out and overheating vital bits of the tank.

The problem of armor penetration was not so much solved as circumvented. And while the Cocktail was certainly not superior to a dedicated antitank-gun or later a Panzerfaust… The ease of logistics in producing them gave them a ready place on the battlefield, and later the streets of endless protest actions and in the bags of endless arsonists.

Molotov Cocktails were so effective against WW2 era tanks and armored Vehicles that even dedicated US Infantry Tank hunters were taught to use Molotov Cocktails as one of the main tools in their arsenal:

However… As anti-armor weapons? Molotov Cocktails don’t work anymore.

Even extremely light armored personnel carriers now are designed immediately and directly to prevent mere burning liquid from posing a threat to the occupants… Indeed most armored vehicles are designed with the tacit knowledge that the most likely application they’re ever going to see is crowd control against pissed off civilians and are largely designed with this in mind.

Forget Main-BattleTanks, your local police-force’s BearCat is designed specifically to resist multiple conventional Molotov cocktails even though a pre-WW2 antitank guns would almost certainly defeat it.

The Finnish liquid armor avoider simply doesn’t work anymore.

You can’t defeat a modern (or even 1950s) tank with just a bottle of liquid petroleum.

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But… What if you could defeat it with something else?

What if using other odd chemical properties we were able to create NEW models of hand-thrown antitank Cocktails that you could store and ignite with the breaking of a bottle?

This my friends is the CatGirl Cocktail Hour! Where we will show YOU how to defeat a Tank Platoon (in theory) with common garbage around you house, standard handyman resourcefulness not rising to the level of a bombmaker, or 14 year old home chemist, and just a little Imagination 😽🌈.

NOTE: What follows is a Theoretical Demonstration, a fictional scenario/set of scenarios to demonstrate the principles of the core concepts, which will require some SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF for the purposes of more fully highlighting the concept and the logic.

If any of you actually try to take on a modern conventional Main BattleTank using only these tactics then you are either very stupid or very desperate, and can expect something like 75% fatalities in the unlikely event that you somehow miraculously win.

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Just Like A SciFi Story! Sorta… not Exactly

Now if you are a True Gamer or SciFi Fan, you might already have an idea of what just such a thrown weapon vs. a Tank might be…

Every SciFi series has them: The MeltaBomb™… Or whatever non-trademarked name you give them in your knockoff SciFi Series.

The Meltabomb (or your cheap knockoff) uses some extreme heat reaction, fusion bullshit, Chaos Magic, Ultra-preassurized something, plasma what-have-you to produce heats so extreme they’re sufficient to melt solid hardened magic dwarven space-metals and Force Fields, and even elite-level Alien Big-Bug biological exoskeletons that are somehow even tougher.

The Actual Mechanics are bullshit.

For example this description specifies that it is a “Sub-molecular reaction” (So like Atomic Fission? A Nuclear Reaction?) in a “highly pressurized” environment (so like Pressurized methane?) Of a “Pyrum-Petroleum Fuel Mix” (Pyrum is Latin for “Pear” like the fruit. I assume a fake scifi mix).

There’s a reason the reaction is so bullshit they can’t even define if it is a petroleum combustion, complex pressure thing, or an atomic reaction… Or whether it is more analogous to the Emperor’s Wrath or the Judeo-Christian Lucifer (I hope one of you nerds can tell us how Lucifer fits into 40k lore), and the reason for all this bullshit is that achieving enough heat to rapidly and explosively MELT Hardened Steel, let alone Hardened Robot SpaceWizard Steel and Force/Warp Fields that are supposed to be even harder than that… is very hard to do.

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Steel is hard to melt. Even with dedicated arc welders and thermic lances you can generally only melt little segments with work and sustained heating unless you have a blast furnace and full on metal works.

As 9/11 fans and Bin Laden defenders will tell you, Jet Fuel cannot melt steel beams.

Whether one wants to quibble about the temperatures at which steel loses structural integrity… It is simply true that the hottest petroleum products get to 1030c (1890 F) in the open air (it gets to 2230c in a spinning jet-turbine, but you need to be mixing air at roughly 10,000 rpm to achieve that), whereas Steel does not melt until 1370-1530c (depending on alloy).

Thus many 9/11 conspiracy theorists posit the Twin Towers were brought down not via jet planes… But preplaced Thermite Charges already on the steel beams (Look Up E-Team, Larry Silverstein, and Dancing Israelis).

Yes THERMITE! The Stuff from Breaking Bad and Mythbusters, and basically every Youtube Channel under the sun.

This is one of the Internet and Television’s favorite non-explosive pyrotechnics because:

A) it’s not an explosive and is regulated differently depending on your jurisdiction (so its way easier and legally much safer to put in your Youtube video)

B) The ingredients (raw Aluminum powder and Iron Oxide powder (rust) can be ordered off Amazon with a simple credit card really cheaply

C)The reaction itself is kinda hard to start and relatively safe as long as you light it outside and don’t get it on you.

D) It looks, and is, REALLY Freaking cool

Thermite Burns up to 2500c or even 2800c in certain compressed ultra-dense special made variants (which we will not be discussing, but someone might want to research)… More than enough to melt steal beams, that one lock in Breaking Bad, flower pots on Youtube, and even weld Railway links together.

Fe₂O₃ + 2 Al → 2 Fe + Al₂O_{3
Iron Oxide (rust) + Aluminum —> Iron + Aluminum Oxide (aluminum slag rust)}

You see the burning reaction produces tons of heat because it is an already hot metal reaction which produces no gas byproduct to take the heat energy away from the hot metal, or draw in cool gas to interact with the reaction.. Unlike a wood fire, or petroleum fire, or conventional explosion (high or low explosive) no gas is given off in the core reaction (it burning and reacting with other things will produce gas, but a truly perfect thermite reaction would generate no gas at all) this means nothing is taking heat away from the reaction except for things outside it coming into immediate contact. It also has all the oxygen innate to the reaction, so it is basically impossible to smother once it gets going… you can only spread it more thinly or remove fuel before it can become part of the reaction… You can’t cut off the oxygen supply (assuming the two powders are mixed evenly) since all the oxygen is already IN the fuel, the oxygen is just going from the Iron molecule to the aluminum molecule next to it.

Pay attention to the thermite reaction in this Railtrack welding job… They do lots of prep work and they have to hack off their steel jig and cut it down, but the simple thermite reaction really does most of the work.

Even the division of the raw iron weld from the Aluminum slag that’s formed is done by the hot liquid thermite itself. Iron is heavier than Aluminum Oxide so it sinks, thus the brittle Aluminum slag pours out the side where you can see them taking it off with shovels, whereas the hot molten Iron goes immediately downwards into the other metal…

presumably you’d think if you put this on a tank, by say throwing a lot of thermite on it the same effect would bring the hot metal melting liquid iron down onto the Tank Armor… Right?

Naively you’d think this would be the perfect tool to Cut into tank armor? Right?

Wrong!

While in principle Thermite can and does melt steel, the quantities required are all wrong.

Take a look at the video of the train weld again… You notice at the start how they’re Using a propane torch on the jig and the tracks? They’re doing that because METAL CONDUCTS HEAT.

The first thing that happens when hot molten metal comes in contact with a solid piece of metal is all the heat that goes into it gets conducted into the rest of the metal.

They’re preheating the train tracks and jig to hundreds of degrees in temperature so that the hot thermite slag doesn’t just immediately harden ON to the jig and the tracks.

Even a very thin amount of steel can stop thermite from melting through as long as there is sufficient metal attached to it to conduct the heat away.

Without a disproportionately large amount of thermite relative to the steal, or really aggressive pre-heating, you just are not going to melt much if any steal…

You can see this man used a really heroic amount of thermite shaped in a flowerpot on a 1 inch thick steel plate, and he only got about 3/8th of an inch into it…

So then is Thermite useless for attacking a tank? Afterall you’re never going to get enough of it even if you brought a carload that the Tank couldn’t easily conduct away into the rest of its metal… So much for that idea.

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No It’s the perfect antitank weapon.

You just have to think like those Finns in 1940 and not like a Space Marine.

A Tank (or other armored vehicle) Does 4 Things:

1. A Tank Moves,

2. A Tank sees things through various optics

3. A Tank shoots it’s weapons systems

4. A Tank keeps its occupants alive

All four of these can be crippled by really small amounts of thermite getting on the tank.

1. A Tank Moves

The Tracks of a Tank are it’s Achilles heel. Here the 600 millimeters (60 cm, 2 feet) of effective armor the tank has are reduced down to mere 5-20 millimeter pins.

These pins are under extraordinary forces and pressures for the tank to move engine turns the drive sproket, and then ever wheel, contact surface, and the entire weight of the tank are all moved via tension on the track. Similar to the chain on a bike or motorcycle, but if the chain had to loop around the outside of the tire and be the contact surface of the tire in addition to the drive force.

Beyond this tanks have TWO treads and zero steering tire. The way tanks turn is by running one tread faster, and one tread slower… And sometimes they even turn in place by running one tread forward, and one tread backwards. Again modern tanks are 50 tons, and there is no inbuilt steering or angling to this. All 50 tons of the tank are turning based sheerly off the lateral tension formed between the two tracks pulling in different directions. RIPPING the contact surface of the tread out of it’s 50 ton contact with the hard ground.

All of this exerts unimaginable pressure on the small steel pins within the tread, which themselves need to be internally lubed and checked regularly lest they overheat and rip and the tank lose it tracks becoming as dead in the water as a bicycle that simultaneously lost it’s chain and tire at once.

So what happens to the treads when you flash-weld the pins, contact plates, and lube together… Whilst dumping newly formed molten hardening steel into the narrow space between where the pins and plates need to glide freely?

It rips itself apart.

Remember Steel melts at 1500 degrees, and thermite burns at 2500 degrees. Which means the specific actual temperatures that hardened and forged and shaped the specific super-hard alloy they use in the pins of tank treads is probably somewhere between 700-1300 degrees. All the complex metallurgical bonds, galvanic hardening, specific machine-hammered smith-work that separates hardened steel tank treads and pins from super-soft steel alloys like your limp bendy stainless steel butter-knife (both made of Iron)… All those complex metallurgical bonds break down well before the steel itself melts, as low as 700-800, maybe 500 degrees… That super expensive government contract military alloy is being turned back into a soft Iron-Slag that can’t stand up to the forces of a tank tread and certainly not after its been welded together in it’s bushing.

Remember Thermite is already used to weld Railway tracks together so solidly that 20,000 ton (not a typo) Trains can roll over them safely without the bond breaking even on winding non-linear mountain tracks. Those tank tracks aren’t rolling smoothly after that… They’ll either bind solid or rip apart.

So the soldiers inside the tank, if they ever want to move again, will have to repair/replace the Tread… Or abandon the tank (in combat this is a common “Bail-out” reason… Mobility killed tanks are just sitting targets waiting to die)

Btw this is what repairing/replacing a Track looks like:

Yes.. This does make them sitting ducks and easy targets to rifle fire, artillery, follow on strikes, etc. Thus why it’s common for tankers to just abandon a mobility killed tank.

So if you only had a suitable delivery vehicle, thermite would indeed be an almost perfect weapon for disabling tanks… Not because it penetrates the armor… But because it doesn’t have to.

The clever resistor doesn’t have to make Meltabombs… but rather:

The CatGirl Melta-tini™

Legal Disclaimer: Note this is NOT an explosive. No element of this undergoes explosive reaction or even deflagration, rather this is a series of open-air combustion reactions and exothermic reduction-oxidization reactions which cannot even hypothetically be used to produce shrapnel or concussive explosive damage.

In theory (not legal advice) depending on the jurisdiction, it is in the same legal category as camping fire-starters and diagrams for how to build a campfire, maintain gas motors, metalurgical chemical welding equipment, and other examples of multi-element complex combustions used throughout hobbies and industry.

The “Sparkler” refers to a common off the shelf recreational children’s or metalurgical generic “sparkler” used to produce a high ignition temprature, which are to be chemically unaltered and whose chemical compositions are sortof black boxes depending on manufacturer… These have various proprietary compsition mixtures to them, so if your local maker uses a deflagrating composition instead of exothermic reduction-oxidization then the above image is not representing that, a deflagrating sparkler might behave the same or differently.

Likewise we advise against EVER creating any incendiary device… including camp fires (People fall into camp fires. They’re dangerous. This one time at PorkFest in New Hampshire a guy lost his junk after drunkenly falling into the campfire).

Remember The Purpose of this piece is to predict the future of warfare, hypothesize future weapon systems (much as many Military Magazines draw diagrams of hypothetical hovertanks, “vaccum bombs”, “Stealth Rifles”, “Plasma weapons”, etc.) Then Properly anticipate and advise the skilled military personnel who read this blog… And in the process horrifically deface the future of all Military History by CatGirl-Branding everything that hasn’t yet been safely named.

The CatGirl Melta-tini!

--Initiate Theme Song--

Soon to be the backbone of low-resource unconventional AntiArmor-Warfare everywhere, (or atleast every fictional universe not served by lasers).

Now this might look like Complete Chaos… And there’s a Reason for that.

Thermite is hard to light… Or at-least that’s the common perception.

The truth is…

WARNING: If you use a ball-mill to mill Aluminum powder, it can quickly get to a fineness where it is DANGEROUSLY reactive, at which it forms a vaccum seal from devouring the limited oxygen sealed within the mill, and becomes liable to combust unpredictably at mere exposure to open air (and fresh oxygen) when the container is unsealed and the vacuum broken by the sudden influx of oxygenated air… if safety protocols are not followed properly.

It will literally just ignite to a face-melting 2000 degree dust “explosion” (this is a misnomer)… For no reason.

This is beyond the dangers of handling fine aluminum dusts to begin with which when breathed in sufficient quantities can result in immediate death via irritation, damage, and release of fluids into the lung… Drowning in your own lungs… or over less severe exposure long term lung damage, and neurological damage resulting in reduced intelligence, reduced neurological measurements, and Alzeimer’s.

The Truth is there is a reason I’m not going to go into the actual process of making effective Thermite here. despite its seeming complete simplicity, any combatant who actually does it, or has to develop a logistical chain to convert scrap aluminum from foil, Pop-Cans, harvested bikes and other sources, etc. should be researching multiple sources and developing a very paranoid safety protocol involving timers, respirators, separate facilities, fire containment (you won’t suppress a 2000 degree flame), welding safety equipment, etc. for how to mill it down to a fine powder with air control, sealed rooms, fineness thresholds, etc. to avoid risking long term fine dust exposure, or a spontaneous metal fire rapidly burning comrades and buildings to the ground.

Safety protocols I cannot give you.

Here is a video on the matter from a youtuber/pyrotechnical hobbyist. Note: almost certainly research it more than this. This should be your “Wow! that’s obscenely dangerous” video not your “I know how to do it now” video:

However the reason the Melta-Tini is SO complex, is because most fighters who would ever hypothetically use it are probably not going to do that (or do it poorly) and wind up with a “safer” coarse Thermite mixture that’s really hard to light. (like the common perception)

Now consider that the idea is to throw this and have it break at random, and fly over a large object with sharp angled metal… And there is an EXTREME risk that large amounts of the thermite is just going to get thrown aside and sit inertly on the ground…never igniting.

Given it would take many multiple Melta-tinis to disable a Tank, this wasted fuel would quickly add up to 20-50% or even a majority of the thrown fuel NOT IGNITING.

Beyond this the weather conditions in war always find a way to screw with you… Thus tons of redundancy is built in so that it should work in Arctic conditions (some of the gasoline will freeze below -40… but most of it will stay liquid… Might create an odd dispersal pattern) it should still ignite in monsoon season, and basically all other conditions.

So extreme, really quite comical, overkill and redundancy in ignition mechanisms are needed.

I will now break down the hypothetical ignition steps and logic:

External igniter:

I hate the traditional modes that Molotov cocktails ignite. I’ve seen lots of videos online of people going to throw a Molotov and splashing themselves with burning gasoline that sloshed out through the burning cloth. Likewise the “Self-igniting” Molotovs you see the Finns and Militaries use with Storm-Matches taped to match strike faces, or segments of flint taped to coarse steel… Strike me as accidents waiting to happen. They’re a good booby-trap design or makeshift warheads/droppable grenades for drones, but I wouldn’t want my untrained volunteers running around with cases full of live booby-traps and armed warheads.

I imagine sleep deprived soldiers moving several dozen Molotovs in Bottle-cases into fighting positions and disguised buildings which have had dozens of man hours poured into hardening into proper fighting positions, only for one of the Molotovs to get dropped, auto-ignite, and then set off the rest with half a platoon in the building.

Instead My design incorporates an inextinguishable and wind-supercharged, external igniter… But inside a design which if someone dropped it unignited “SHOULD” just become a mess of gasoline covered metal-sludge on the floor to be cleaned up.

The Igniter

1. Sparklers 🎇: The External sparklers are first ignited with a lighter. Yes just like kids at summer barbeques. These little party toys are actually staples of the metal industry because they burn at over 1000c. This is why little Sally can’t make it go out no matter how fast she swishes it through the air and why every year several children endure really quite horrific burns from contacting the hot element. The complex mixed metal/oxidizer mixture is PERFECT for burning hot enough to start metal fires, being inextinguishable, and burning at predictable timed rates (these are also perfect for 5-60 second timed fused, as long as you insulate the thing you’re igniting from sparks). This is the first thing you’d ignite.

2. Steel Wool: Even ultrafine steel wool burns very poorly because the dense steel consumes the oxygen around it so quickly. Once the Sparklers are ignited they’ll burn the steel wool… but Steel fires are almost impossible to maintain, without a direct forced oxygen source (such as in forced-oxygen thermic lances, which are shockingly easy (but dangerous) to make)… The exception is if it’s flying through the air… Then it has all the oxygen it needs, and it burns and casts tons of sparks around at about 700 degrees Celsius. This not only makes the flame even more windproof, but guarantees that at-least one of those hot metal sparks will ignite all sections of the cocktail, even if it hits a sharp metal corner or a post which might quickly sheer and cut the fuel payload in half.

3. The Cardboard or other insulator: Because the sparklers burn at 1000 DEGREES, they will almost certainly quickly crack the glass of the bottle if left burning next to it. Ideally an operator is going to throw the Melta-tini quickly after igniting… but suitably thick insulator for the glass provides a lot of additional safety to the operator.

4. Duct-tape: Given how fool-proof the igniter is the last way it could fail is if it flies off the cocktail before the bottle breaks… thus it must be secured firmly.

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   The Fuel Payload

5. The Gasoline/other liquid fuel: Once the bottle breaks the sparks from the igniter ignite the liquid fuel part of the payload, igniting everything evenly instantly. The liquid gasoline part of the payload permeates the rest of the payload (the thermite, the soap shavings, the steel wool, the Little Baggies of Magnesium, the sparklers). it takes up all the empty parts giving you more heat and energy for the same bottle space, and Guarantees an immediate ignition of the full payload evenly… However it permeates EVERYTHING… so….

6. Soap Shaving/ or other thickeners (melted styrofoam,tallow, butter, motor-oil, dried orangejuice concentrate, etc.): “Napalm” and other thickened/gelatinized gasoline mixtures are a staple of molotov cocktails and incendiary warfare… Some of these theoretically produce higher heats, or extend the burn-time at lower temperatures… but the real goal is simply to change the texture of the mixture from a thin liquid that flows off surfaces and burns uselessly on the ground to a gel that “sticks to kids”… and vehicles, and legitimate targets… Likewise the purpose of the soap (or whatever) is to ideally produce a gel texture when mixed with the liquid fuel that will cause the still cool thermite/sparkler/steel wool/magnesium sludge to bind together and stick to the metal surfaces of the Armored vehicle when throw instead of simply sliding off and scattering. (I have no idea what the specific additive or mix would be to achieve that, again this is a hypothetical weapon system… Cupcake scented soap is included in the example because it smells nice.)

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   However this also has the advantage of including a slower burning and dirtier element to the gas/hydro-carbon mix… This means that when the thermite gets going it will superheat the unburnt fuel and mix causing small violent and sudden release of gas… This will cause molten thermite to spit and scatter like ice cubes in a deep fryer or water in a burning frying pan… Now this is HIGHLY dangerous to anyone near the tank, (such as anyone trying to throw Melta-tinis)… But it’s also radically increased the chance of thermite sparks and droplets landing on the glass viewports, Optical Devices, ammunition and moving parts of externally mounted machineguns, explosive reactive armor, and all the sensitive bits of the tank. The more the poor desperate fighter is risking molten thermite splashing in their eyes, the more likely it is to get in the tank’s eyes.

   Obviously don’t try this at home.
   
   Also look into Copper Thermite.

Optional Hypothetical Pathway 7A: Steel-Wool (mixed in the payload)
Steel wool AGAIN does not reliably burn whilst sitting still, but once the bottle breaks on contact, the additional steel-wool in the bottle can ignite and get to 700c very quickly before the payload comes to rest… This give you an increased chance to get sparks igniting small amounts of thermite that sheer off into small odd vulnerable places that stick out like weapons barrels, exposed Ammunition of secondary weapons, open hatches and bolts assemblies, optics… Etc.

Optional Hypothetical Pathway 7B: Smaller Sparklers

Another optional hypothetical… these small segments provide another fast igniting pathway to get the hard to ignite thermite up to temperature letting the liquid gassoline fire ignite them in whatever sheered off clump they wind up in after the bottle impacts, then they ignite the thermite.

Optional Hypothetical Pathway7C: Magnesium Powder Baggies
Magnesium strips are the standard way to ignite thermite and metal in lab and other settings, and magnesium bars are sold in camping stores specifically so campers can generate fast igniting magnesium powder to start fires. These little baggies provide another available pathway to get from the gassoline fire to the thermite fire.

8. The Thermite

   Once ignited reliably enough the thermite will burn all other thermite it is contact with, or any other thermite that is added to it over subsequent bottle throws.

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The Heel of Achilles, and Other Soft Bits

All of the above should be sufficient to weld the pins and treads of the tank’s tracks, degalvanize the steel, and when the tank moves make them rip themselves apart. Stranding the beast.

However tanks and armored vehicles have many other soft bits that can be burnt away in a 2500 degree mini-sun.

The explosive reactive armor of modern tanks for example are almost all composed of modern high explosives that are detonated by highly safe and secure detonator electrical systems. Most modern high explosive will often not even detonate from fire or temprature alone, requiring instead the impact of hyper-sonic detonation to break their thick molecular bonds… This actually helps the tank-hunter since if the tank hunter can get the explosive reactive armor burning with your Meltatini, there’s a good chance (stand clear) that it’s NOT going to detonate spraying it’s energy outwards, but instead combust in a chemical fire starting a massive fire on top of the tank and burning all the other explosive reactive armor, the lights, the sighting systems, the ammunition in the exposed machine guns…

Because tanks are built with Armor and penetration as the main concern, this risk is highly dangerous.

Now BattleTanks do have built in fire suppression systems, notably Halon and Other Chemical fire supression, sometimes compresses CO2 systems… The systems vary.

But remember the Thermite Reaction:

Fe2O3 + 2 Al → 2 Fe + Al2O3

Iron Oxide (rust) + Aluminum —> Iron + Aluminum Oxide (aluminum slag rust)

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There’s no way to suppress this. The Chemical reaction isn’t drawning gas from anywhere else, the oxygen atoms are just crossing from the IronOxide to the Aluminum.

Combine that with the 2500 degree heat, and the supression systems are basically useless.

This means there’s nothing to prevent you blinding the tank by burning it’s core fighting systems:

2. The Tank Sees through it’s Optics, and 3. it Shoots it’s Weapons Systems

While I’m certain The Adeptus Mechanicus will eventually develop a means to actually melt THROUGH Tank Armor… In the Meantimes the cutting edge of CatGirl Warfare™😻 is ADDITIVE Melta-Weaponry.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO MELT THROUGH THE ARMOR. Flat thick metal slates do nothing.

Everything that makes a Tank function comes from More delicate pieces of equipment that Have to LEAVE the protective shell of the armor, just like all the little bits that make an insect function are located OUTSIDE it’s protective exoskeleton.

Tanks are actually really complex and delicate pieces of equipment… the main thing that protects them is not their armor, but their armaments… Given the equipment your standard American “Fudd” has in their Gun Safe and Garage, you could destroy a tank irreparably 10 different ways in about 5-10 minutes if you knew what you were doing…

The Thing is you’d never get a chance to if it were in operation, because you’d be ripped apart by its main gun, coaxial machine gun, top machinegun, grenade launchers, flamethrowers, explosive reactive armor, other oddities, and if you were right in close… The Tank is faster than anyone on foot and could just spin its treads to try and run you over or catch you in the treads and rip you apart.

Its not that Tanks are unkillable… you can look up videos online on how to do enough damage, even with simple rifles, to take one off the battlefield if you ever have a clear sightline, suppressed rifle, it’s unoccupied, and no one’s paying attention.… But you’d never get to do that on the battlefield because they’re tougher, stronger, faster, and even if you inflict sufficient damage for a mission kill It’ll almost certainly have free weapons left to kill you for your trouble….

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this is where quickly blinding the tank becomes vital.

Underappreciated about even conventional Molotov cocktails, is how intuitively understandable their physics are, and thus how easy it is to improve indirect-fire launchers for them.

Making your own Mortars is a nightmare, but fashioning a bottle launcher from slingshot tubing, or a crossbow, makeshift mini-trebuchet, or even just a stick (like a primitive rock thrower or atlatl) is actually fairly trivial for the average hoodlum/soldier to get to 50meters to even a few hundred meters of effective arcing indirect fire range.

This means that if you test and range your homebrew launcher properly, and employ spotters, you can land arc-ing indirect fire molotovs, Meltatinis, and other strikes on armored vehicles from positions in hilly, forested, or urban where their direct-fire weapons cannot see you.

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So What happens when lots of 2500-Celsius Thermite lands on top of a tank?

Well… Glass melts at 1400-1600 degrees Celsius.

All the optics, view ports, ranging devices, backup ranging devices, cameras? All of those are not only getting choked up with Iron-Aluminum slag, their very lenses and sensors are themselves melting… If they get hit.

This of course would require a large volume of Melta-Fire to get on the tank to disable all it’s viewing and ranging options… But if you get the mobility kill with thermite on the tracks either because of a brave thrower or a clever angle of ambush with one of your launchers… then the Tank’s a sitting duck to just have more indirect fire dumped on in carving out its various eyes and options to fire.

Likewise many of a Tank’s secondary weapons, beyond it’s main Gun and Coaxial machinegun Are either Man-operated by gunners sticking their heads out of their hatches to manually manipulate the guns, or they’re operated by delicate motors and cameras remotely from within the vehicle.

In either case thermite getting near the secondary guns, despite the chance to just destroy them or cook off their ammo, risk frying those cameras and motors, and at 2500 degrees, is hazardous enough no one’s poking their head up and risking getting it on them in an attempt to work that gun with the hand controls.

Beyond this you might cripple the tank’s main-turret’s ability to turn if thermite gets in the turret ring and literally welds it to the main body of the tank.

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4. A tank keeps its Occupants Alive

In Case you haven’t guessed already, I don’t like tanks.

They insist upon themselves.

They ruined warfare.

It used to be there was a phrase, sometimes attributed to Napoleon:

Tanks Ruined Cavalry!

How can you be “the brave” when you’re wrapped in 600mm of effective armor?

Tanks are the force, along with Airstrikes, that stripped the virtue out of warfare and made it “Pay to win”, and hell probably brought about the decline of western masculinity.

It used to be the tougher braver, smarter son-of-a-bitch won… Now its whoever is attached to the best bonds-market.

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But this is where virtue gets its revenge. Where Toughness, intelligence, and almost suicidal bravery finally beats the lumbering Military industrial Pork Barrel.

The final way to defeat the tanker isn’t cutting through their armor with superior money and industrial logistics…

But turning their own armor against them.

The Net Heat Kill

Remember how Thermite can’t defeat tank armor? The cumulative 50 tons of metal all conspire to conduct the heat away from the hot spot where the little splotch of thermite might get through? This is the double-side of that sword.

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As any motorcyclist in a traffic-jam can tell you, the weakness of any motorized vehicle is HEAT.

That 50 ton tank is already with it’s engine running Dangerously hot relative to what a person would be conmfortable dealing with.

Israel had a massive problem with this.

The Merkava Tanks have a recurring problem with their Air-Conditioning units failing, which beneath the blistering desert sun in the midsummer heat of the Mediterranean right next to a MASSIVE tank engine isn’t the funny “awe poor baby” story you might think, but a major problem.

Their crew compartments were getting up to 50 degrees (122 Farenheit) with the actual core engine and other systems already being much hotter…

This of course crippled a lot of their operating tempo, and safety as the crews could no longer operate buttoned up with their hatches closed, but instead need to keep them open with the additional vulnerability to grenades and drones.

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So lets imagine you’ve crippled the tracks by Themitically welding the pins together, and you’ve blinded it by melting it’s optics and view ports…

You can translate that into a kill, or force the occupants to bail out by just hitting them more.

Theoretically this is possible with the meltatinis: a 1kg bottle of thermite will heat 2500 kgs of steel about 1 degree. So every 20 bottles you raise the temperature of a 50 ton tank 1 degree.

Not logistically impossible by any means ( your ingredients are used pop cans and rust) But that’s rather inefficient once you’ve got it dead in the water.

Alternatively ordinary petroleum or rubber tires can be placed under the disabled tank to cook it out in much the same manner that a small camping stove will boil an entire pot. Forcing the tankers to bail out and surrender. And starting the burning of paint, components, and all other parts of the vehicle (stand clear incase the fuel or ammo compartment go)

Rubber Tires are obscenely energy dense (they’re solidified compressed heavy petroleum) the smallest passenger car tire burns about 30 minutes, truck tires, or multiple tires will burn for hours.

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Once you get a mobility and weapons kill on a tank, if you have no heavy weapons, this is the cheapest quickest way to kill the vehicle and prevent it being recovered by the enemy.

Remember an abandoned tank or armored vehicle, even if unrecoverably damaged, is a goldmine of spare parts to be cannibalized by enemy forces if they can recover them.

Main BattleTanks cost 3-20 million dollars. And many lighter armored vehicles are awkwardly not that much cheaper.

For a few minutes and about $50 in scrap tires… You could deny your enemy millions of dollars in recoverable parts.

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In Conclusion:
Is Any of This at all Realistic?

While I have many other ideas to include as part of subsequent “CatGirl Cocktail Hours”… I will end off here, pointing out… This is basically suicide.

Whilst used as indirect fire, dropper munitions for quadcopter drones, or improvised sabotage charges… “Meltatinis” would almost certainly do incredible damage and could cripple a tank.

In all but the most perfectly plotted ambush this complex multi-stage stripping away of capabilities would take many minutes to get to a true kill of combat capabilities, whereas the tank need merely turn it’s heavy guns line them up in 2-4 seconds and rip apart trees, terrain, buildings, and the air itself with deafening and consciousness destroying heavy fire, even if the rounds do not find the guerrillas to scatter their innards across several football fields.

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However the history of warfare is NOT driven by what is “realistic” but rather what is possible.

In this scene after days of bare survival lost in the blistering heat of Afghanistan hunted by an invisible enemy, a soviet tank crew has an encounter with the Mujahideen fighting hunting them at the exact worse moment, low on ammo, with the tank’s engine seized, and the battery drained.

A favorite parable story for both Tankers and Guerrilla warfare enthusiasts Is the film “The Beast of War”.

The Plot is not “Realistic”, the story of a lost Russian tank running out of supplies and the even worse equipped Mujahadeen desperately chasing it with no idea how they’re going to kill it runs through tons of coincidence, happenstance, etc.

Yet the story is beloved by tankers and subject matter experts especially because of the incredible technical realism, and the almost mythical parables and stories of extremity highlighting and exploring principles and concepts in the most rewarding way.

Sure all of this happening to one crew is incredibly unlikely… but almost all tankers or tank hunters at some point encounter some finicky, technical, and archetypal struggle resembling the film’s mythical hyperreality… And watching it all play out to the most extreme drawn out endgame makes one of the greatest treats of War Cinema.

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Likewise, the above hypothetical of a lone guerrilla faction, or cut off unit deprived of every heavy weapon and antitank tool, taking out a main battle-tank with nothing but garbage, a large number pop-cans, and a number of shredded tires… Isn’t realistic, but it highlights a lot of the dynamics.

In a normal engagement such a force would go after lighter armored vehicles or positions, or employ Meltatinis to augment or follow-up after employing regular explosive heavy weapons which they might have in smaller numbers, or limited capability.

But against lighter targets like Wheeled Vehicles or smaller infantry fighting vehicles… A very few Individual Meltatinis fired indirectly, employed in booby traps, or quickly thrown in ambush before running probably could cripple the vehicle.

Wheeled vehicles especially run the risk that their own massive tires could be easily set alight by the 2500 degree thermite getting on and in them, blowout immediately… And then have a potentially inextinguishable vehicle fire on the scale of the tires you’d use to cook off a disabled tank. Indeed in driving away once the fire is notice the unextinguishable molten metal would get on and in the redundant other tires driving over it.

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Likewise anywhere enemy chemical and compressed-gas fire-suppression systems needs to be overcome such as ships, datacenters, etc. Thermitic weapons immediately recommend themselves since their flame will remain unaffected whilst the chemicals and compresses gas disperses, allowing the suppressed onsite fuel to reignite… In much the same manner that trick candles incorporating a fine steel core to their wick cannot be extinguished. Likewise they recommend themselves to igniting hardened or otherwise inert targets that aren’t conventionally considered flammable, or which are designed to resist such ignition.

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However again this is all speculation.

Whilst I’m very convinced of the physics, chemical properties, and tactical/technical logic I’ve laid out here… This remains as speculative and science fiction as those laser-tank diagrams in Popular Mechanics Magazine.

I’ve never made one of these (that would be illegal where I am), and unless you are a responsible EOD/Pyrotechnics expert with the appropriate licensing, registration, and tax stamps… Oh and actual certified chemical safety expertise to do so without risking life, limb, and brain exposure to Aluminum dust… (in which case, it would make a cool Youtube Video if you can legally and responcibly do so).

I cannot emphasize enough that this should not be attempted or contemplated, and that this in no way represents actionable instructions on how to create something like this, and certainly not safety instructions on how to do so without almost certain injury or death.

Instead this is put out there is a speculative weapon system for my (often shockingly) knowledgeable and expert military, law enforcement, and combat veteran readership to commentate on and to be aware of the possibility of.

I know I’m read by at least a few former Special Forces and actual Tank-Operators from various militaries who will be keenly interested in the possibility, risk, and opportunity that such a concept represents.

Please do share your thoughts. And checkout my other speculative warfare pieces:

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How do you organize people?

I’ve Tackled the topic of Dissident organization before with my deep dive in to how the left and the Regime actually organize: Can you Organize Your Way Out of Tyrrany? And I’ve deep dived why traditional conservatism and Libertarianism fails to reflect political reality in The Goyslop Ideology: The Lie of Libertarianism, and I’ve vehemently defended the roles of Discrimination and Fanatical Rage as core organizing forces in Discrimination is a Right and Cry Havoc and Bray for Blood: On the Importance of Womanly Screeching.

But how do you actually organize people?

Specifically how do you organize people to work and fight together, to identify with a team, an ethnicity, an organization… To the point where they will gladly incur major costs, exert extraordinary effort, risk their reputations and fortunes, and even kill and die for it, above and beyond any reasonable expectation of timely compensation?

How do you get people to fight and die for a cause whose price and consequences are as immediate and inescapable as grapeshot or shrapnel artillery in an open field, and whose rewards are as tenuous, faint, and distant as a homeland for yourself and your relatives decades later? A happy childhood for your grandchildren? The esteem and reverence of your neighbors in old age?

When your nation is in poverty or shame and the utter LACK of rewards for Veterans, Patriotic Volunteers, and fanatical partisans is as plain and in your face as as the veteran beggar asking for change? (as indeed almost every nation has witnessed across the centuries)

How do you motivate people? how do you organize?

Well if you’re white, the answer hasn’t changed in 3000+ Years.

You erect idols. You practice literal idolatry.

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The First Masks of Command

Going back to the walls of Troy various divine symbols can be seen being used to rally troops.

In the Iliad these are rather unique… In the Iliad these ARE Gods. More specifically they appear to be people in costumes and masks.

Many people interpret this direct participation of the Gods in battles, that this is Homer’s magical thinking and an insight into the Psychology of Dark Ages Greece (the post bronze age dark ages, 1100bc-600bc)…

But if you read Homer it becomes very apparent that more is at play. The Gods give speeches to armies and ride chariots beside the kings, shouting encouragement and rallying troops and having a major effects on the crowd dynamics of the battle.

In case it isn’t obvious, psychological representations don’t move crowds of people at once… Your psychology is inner not outer, they don’t affect other people, at least not immediately. And while sometimes the Gods might represent inner thoughts: such as when Odysseus or Achilles are alone and contemplating when a God appears, or whispers in their ear at a choice moment that only they hear (which is a neat dramatic device, sorta like how Shakespeare uses monologues). That’s simply not how Gods behave in the battles of Homer… And no they don’t behave like embodiments of crowd momentum or the fury of fighting, or divine favor.

In Book 5, “Diomedes Fights the Gods” the Greek Hero Diomedes refuses to accept the Trojan Prince Aeneas escaping his fight with him, Diomedes press forward for the kill. At which the Love Goddess Aphrodite rushes out of the ranks of the Trojans to shield and assist Aeneas away with her shawl and other objects acting as distractions and cover… And Diomedes striking towards Aeneas cuts her with his spear. He cuts the divine perfect white flesh of beauty and love herself!

Does Diomedes pay a horrible price for shedding the blood of an immortal Goddess? Does Aphrodite smite him or curse him with some terrifying love-doom?Does this forever alter the very nature of beauty such all beautiful women spout scars in the very spot, which we now know as some incredibly sexy or disgusting universal feature of the female form? No she is just cut and cries out in pain… Like a person.

At which the other Trojans have time to intervene, and both Aeneas and Aphrodite successfully extract themselves.

Later in the same battle Ares God of War and Slaughter takes personal leadership of an offensive by the Trojans again the Greeks carving an opening and cutting down several soldiers…

At this Athena, Goddess of Cunning, War, and Wisdom admonishes the Greek leadership that they do not simply STAB the Deathless God of Merciless Slaughter, that spearing the very Divine Embodiment of bloodlust and slaughter was a seemingly trivial thing and that she was disgusted no one had done it already.

To this Diomedes replied, NOT that defeating the God of War himself in single combat seemed like a tall order for a mere mortal who wasn’t even the best in Greek army. But rather that he would and wanted to, except that he had always heard that it was bad luck and bad form to fight with or target the Gods on the battlefield, and this was common knowledge. King Agamemnon nodding beside him.

At this Athena catches herself in the midst of her excitement, and explains patiently that while they are certainly correct that NORMALLY one should not fight with the Gods or target them directly… and that USUALLY it is bad luck and ill form, and strongly looked down upon…

Ares himself has violated this elaborate etiquette, and so it was perfectly acceptable for Diomedes to spear the Immortal God of War… something none of the 3 of them doubted Diomedes could do quite easily.

So Diomedes does this. Rather trivially… At which Ares falls back immediately on the first hit, slain through the belly, and then magically appears immediately on a couch in Olympus, complaining his wound will take time to heal, where Zeus admonishes him for his poor behavior.

Does this broaden Diomedes reputation? That he can fight the Gods themselves and live? Not really… It is treated more as a cute story, remarkable in that Diomedes comes away with his reputation and esteem intact, NOT that this wildly improves others’ estimation of him as a fighter, that he can even take the God of War himself, and that they now need to reassess his skill relative to Ajax, Odysseus, and Achilles.

This is of course Mall-Santa logic.

Diomedes does not get cursed or lose his ability to fight forever, or get doomed to be the first of some horrifying perversity for assaulting Aphrodite and Ares, nor does he ascend and become the New God of War, and take Beauty herself as war plunder, having surpassed even Ares himself in the unstoppable strength of his war-making… and driven the perfect woman to whimpering flight.

In the same manner that in many American folk tales and films a drunken or disgraceful Mall-Santa, a guy in a costume, might initiate a shouting or insult match with a child… and neither the child, the audience, the parents, or the child’s friends might be over-concerned that this will impact the Child’s ever getting Christmas presents again, or that “Santa” being arrested for public drunkenness might cause Christmas to be cancelled.

They know it will have no such consequence, with it being funny or cute if an over-earnest child needed reassuring that everything was fine afterwards.

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In much the same manner that modern Americans conceive Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or Elvis Impersonators or Disney Princesses in the Theme Park… A bad actor or poor player in the priestly garment might warrant censor and scorn, whereas a good actor might be equated with the magic of the figure such that the sentimental might not wonder that the true immortal magical figure hasn’t visited them. That your parents were maybe wed by the REAL immortal Elvis, the King of Rock and God of Graceland, in the clever disguise of an ordinary Elvis impersonator… that the wedding went so well.

Americans in the 20th century have even gone vastly further and started doing straight Greek Style theatrical productions of the Life of Jesus, with various nativity and passion plays now being a staple of American life.

Indeed we have several examples of the Actors playing the Gods being themselves named and praised for their conduct.

In book 13 of the Iliad the Greeks desperately defending from a Trojan assault against their very ships are assisted by Poseidon…

Poseidon’s entrance is described divinely and magically enough:

Wow he strode from A mountain in Samos across the Aegean sea to Aegea Port in FOUR STRIDES? He’s 200 miles tall!

What divine power is he about to unleash on the Greeks? How many Trojans are going to die to this Giant of Giants? What great assistance must he give the Greeks?

Well he gives them a pep talk:

That’s really disappointing and would, you’d think, be rather lame relative to that massive setup… But notice the specific line “Taking the build and tireless voice of Calchas”…

the bigger and slimmer Ajax comment on this:

Little Ajax (Oileus’ son) commentates that he can tell the person in the mask and outfit is clearly the form and voice of Calchas… but that the person before them has such divine authority about him and is saying so rightly what they must do, that it cannot be but the God Poseidon himself, in the guise of Calchas.

Unlike “Aphrodite” or “Ares” who fought for the Trojans, the Greeks can tell WHO is playing Poseidon… and because he does such a good job they have to play this word game where they really want to praise the individual priest for his heroic conduct in rallying the army at it’s lowest… but not break the spell by saying that it is not Poseidon.

A word game and praise that survived either from Troy, or some other battle whose episode Homer thought worth immortalizing and so incorporated into his Poem.

This speech by “Poseidon in the form of Calchas” sets off a chain of various figures and heroes rallying the forces of the Greeks against the Trojan onslaught, with the Ajaxes, Poseidon, and other leaders rallying the failing Greeks, such that they are able to repel the Trojans and save the ships.

Much as for thousands of years after individual drummer boys or flag bearers or Sergeant Majors or priests of various faiths and various symbolic leaders like Boudica or Jean D’Arc have been able to turn the course of battles by their individual displays of courage or the rallying effects of their voice… Calchas, or “Poseidon in the guise of Calchas” was able to save the Grecian Fleet.

Indeed long after this had stopped being a battlefield tactic to rally troops, we see such religious masks and acting in the Athenian theater and religious festivals, with Athena or other Gods closing out plays about vengeance or other intractable plots by being lowered into the theater on Great pully machines to resolve the story with a miracle… Not theatrically differently than how passion plays now end with Christ and others being lifted on the exact same theatrical wires into the sky.

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Indeed we have an example of the missing link between the two Greek traditions… An almost perfect snapshot of the Priests rallying soldiers on the field of battle being transformed into the later theatrical festival tradition.

In the Histories of Herodotus we have an almost perfect example of just such Godly costumes being used in military and political theater when the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos returned from his first exile employing a extraordinarily tall woman to play the role of Athena leading him back to Athens as it’s rightful ruler:

Thus Peisistratos had obtained possession of Athens for the first time, and thus he lost the power before he had it firmly rooted. But those who had driven out Peisistratos became afterwards at feud with one another again. And Megacles, harassed by the party strife, 69 sent a message to Peisistratos asking whether he was willing to have his daughter to wife on condition of becoming despot. And Peisistratos having accepted the proposal and made an agreement on these terms, they contrived with a view to his return a device the most simple by far, as I think, that ever was practised, considering at least that it was devised at a time when the Hellenic race had been long marked off from the Barbarian as more skilful and further removed from foolish simplicity, and among the Athenians who are accounted the first of the Hellenes in ability. 70 In the deme of Paiania there was a woman whose name was Phya, in height four cubits all but three fingers [5’11” stupendously tall for a woman in 550bc], 71 and also fair of form. This woman they dressed in full armour and caused her to ascend a chariot and showed her the bearing in which she might best beseem her part, 72 and so they drove to the city, having sent on heralds to run before them, who, when they arrived at the city, spoke that which had been commanded them, saying as follows: “O Athenians, receive with favour Peisistratos, whom Athene herself, honouring him most of all men, brings back to her Acropolis.” So the heralds went about hither and thither saying this, and straightway there came to the demes in the country round a report that Athene was bringing Peisistratos back, while at the same time the men of the city, persuaded that the woman was the very goddess herself, were paying worship to the human creature and receiving Peisistratos.

I cannot emphasize enough that this episode is found not only in Herodotus, but also Aristotle and Cleidemus (via other works referencing him)… This happened… despite the effort of many subsequent authorities to dismiss it.

Although contrary to the incredulity and outrage of Herodotus, Aristotle, and a good chunk of all the subsequent historical commentators to this day, “The Athenians fell for that!?”… This makes vastly more sense when you realize the Greeks have an extensive tradition of priests, seers, and other figures taking on the guises of Gods (or Gods taking on the guises of mortals) and using them as living symbols and banners in matters military and political. Pisistratus’ life occured almost exactly at the transition period of the rise of Hoplite warfare and the decline of this earlier Homeric mode of war and politics.

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Indeed such living banners and their dramatic morale effect, whether in the form of adolescent drummer boys, “Warrior Queens”, Crusader Priests, or Literal Bears and other animals, have cropped up again and again on the battlefield.

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The King’s Colours, Rise of the Eagles

While we can find many subsequent examples of living banners and the heroic morale effects such Gods, Boy Kings, Chaplains, Commissars, Berserkers, Sorcerers, and animal mascots are often able to draw from soldiers…

As command structures centralized into unified formalized and disciplined armies became the standard for militaries, and warlord bands like the Achaeans where a mid level commanders such as Achilles might refuse to fight over personality and honor clashes with a King became rarities on the battlefield…

Suddenly the symbolic morale effect of priests, Gods, Warrior Queens, American Congressmen, and others on the battlefield outside of the immediate military chains of command became something commanders sought to minimize outside extraordinary circumstances so as to maximize the coherence of their own authority.

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Instead the symbolic and sacred power of the idol is concentrated instead in physical objects… Which can still be positioned and used to rally troops and held by people who shout encouragement and commands… But also aren’t tied to those individual people.

If a flag bearer or Sergeant carrying the flag (Colours) or the Legionary Eagle dies or loses his nerve and throws it down… Another member of the Unit can pick it up.

The Honor, glory and sacred bonds of the brotherhood of fighters is tied to the physical object, which itself is conveniently silent, never takes sides in any disputes, and never has a mistaken opinion.

If a cowardly leader attempts to flee with the standard, then a brave aspiring leader can simply kill them for their desertion, grab the standard, and take up the charge…

Likewise if the commander wants his troops to do something which they refuse to do out of self-preservation, then he can take the standard himself and lead the charge.

This concentration of the combined authority and honor of the organized group into a visible instantiated physical object, an idol… is truly incredible social technology because it relieves the pressure of organizing from the person of individuals.

Great Captains may be loved by their men, individuals heroes adored by their comrades, charismatic priests followed to the mouth of hell itself, individual exiled princes and princesses nigh revered as the rightful rulers of their countries, Congressmen like Davy Crocket treated as the embodiment of a dreamed republican future…

But on average, most individuals are average.

Your actual Captain is most likely a middling paper-pusher, or merely experienced officer, your heroic veterans… are usually just guys who’ve been in a while and muddled through like most, the average priest or Chaplain is shockingly uncharismatic, and most exiled princes and princesses are weirdos who can’t relate to the soldiers they find themselves amongst, and can’t ply their courtly learning in exile.

The average meeting of revolutionaries, patriots, partisans, and freedom fighters is a meeting of outcasts and social malcontents who often as not have as little reason to respect each other as the rest of society has to respect them.

Likewise the average soldier throughout history is a conscript, convict, or runaway… who finds themselves as a private, sailor, or “comrade” specifically because no one respects them.

Sure great amounts of trust, esteem, honor, reputation, and glory can accrue to these officers, revolutionaries, and fighters with time…

But almost by definition this is going to be the minority of cases and take vastly longer than most such units have.

Individual loyalty to a specific leader, hero, or figure simply is going to be the exception and depend on an almost superhuman level of esteem to get off the ground and actually create an organized unit where none exist…

George Washington could create a Continental Army in 1775, but there were maybe debatably 3 such men who could have done the same job half as well if he had not.

However the Colors or the Regimental eagle creates a focal point of extreme loyalty to the group that all participants can exert their mutual passion and brotherhood, without requiring their affection to be limited by the esteem a particular leader or figure can command in themselves. Fresh privates who do not even know the names of their officers can be driven to profound exertions of loyalty and pride by the sacredness their NCOs and Color Sergeants train into them for their uniforms, the Regimental Colours, and other Standards.

Men, who could not name the King, have often died defending to the last “the King’s Colours” not out of esteem for the King but rather the pride of their regiment and the honor of their comrades.

This Social Technology is the Essence of the Nation

“All forms of violence are quests for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. So you become very violent. Identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you?”
-Marshall Mcluhan

The Colors, the Regimental Eagles, the Flag… These are all IDOLS.

This is what Idolatry is.

It is organizing socially around physical objects and symbols of the tribe, the people, the nation.

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The exact same way ancient peoples would preform sacrifices and rituals at the Monoliths and Statues of their deified founders, America and Western European countries have/had (its fading) annualized rituals in which they place sacrifices of flowers and preform rituals of honor and mourning at various Cenotaphs and War Memorials and Statues of their founders… Before likewise partaking in feasting and other rituals.

This is IDOLATRY.

It is the paying of reference to idols… Statues, Monolithic Cenotaphs, engravings, sacred sites, etc.

It is also the backbone of basically all European national identity building, internal coherence, ritual status creation, organization, internal enforcement, incentivization, sacralization, civic religion, national pride, human virtue, basic ties to the land, and basic decency.

Now gee… I wonder why a very specific tribe of people who had been exiled from their lands, and had lost their identity, and defined themselves as an enemy of “The Nations” (Goyim and Gentile are often Translated as “Nations”)…

I wonder why such a people would conceive of “Idolatry” as amongst the greatest sins and define themselves in opposition to all statues, reliefs, monuments, rituals of time and place, ancestoral reverence, keeping of sacred swords and tapestries, artwork…. And Shun all martial and military glory?

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Well ask yourself? Why do modern Communists, Leftists, Social Justice Types, etc. All connive to find some pretense to rip down statues, burn churches, deface murals, and remove monuments?

They do it not because of some theological or political pretension… these are the excuses.

They do it rather because whether it was 550ad or 2021… monuments, idols, statues, murals, flags, banners, tapestries, carvings, paintings, etc….

These Are how WHITE PEOPLE organize and orient themselves socially and spiritually. How Europeans organize, ritualize, visualize, and spiritually enforce the order and values of their societies… With beauty and glory as the ultimate spiritual enforcement mechanisms.

And Jews, foreigners, slaves, and the eternal lumpenproles that comprise the left and earlier spiteful mutant movements HATE that. They experience it as actively painful psychic damage when looking upon Statues to war heroes or Paintings of beautiful courtly life or big-breasted athletic female characters in video games in the same manner that Vampires might look upon crosses or shut-ins sunlight.

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They can see intuitively and immediately the organization, values, social coherence, and ethnic-will expressed within these idols… The raw military, civic, spiritual, and cultural loyalty that they embody…

And so they must rip it down.

The Nations must have their idols, rituals, artwork, values, and ultimately blood destroyed since they form a powerful coherent force and set of values that excludes Jews, degenerates, foreigners, slaves, and proto-leftists in domains martial, civic, spiritual, religious, political, and sexual.

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It is not without coincidence that the destruction of the Roman Alters of Victory and statues to the Gods almost immediately proceed the Fall of Rome.

Whilst spiritually, religiously ,and symbolically sealing or otherwise destroying the Roman Alter of Victory in 408ad seems to almost prophetically predict the 410ad sack of Rome…

If we set to one side the obvious metaphysical and portentous implications (abandoning victory before defeat), even from a purely materialistic and almost pathologically secular view it becomes obvious that Rome would suffer to defend itself, for the same reason a Regiment stripped of its colors and eagles would suffer in its military performance.

They’d lost their banner, their rallying symbosl.

This is how Europeans organize. This is how they enforce their internal coherence and values and orient and organize their loyalty.

The very fact the people in charge DESPISE the symbols and social reality of that organization and loyalty, DESPISE the symbols of the people and ethnicity enough to destroy it, should be enough to tell you that they cannot, or do not care to, defend or maintain the ethnicity itself or see it organize coherently.

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Thus it should not be surprising that after Rome fell… Christian Iconoclasm basically stopped in Europe, not because the doctrine changed, but because the ethnic enemies of Europeans who comprised the early Christian iconoclasts: Ethnic Jews, Arabs, slaves, former slaves, foreigners, and others of the Roman urban-underclass (yes this is exactly like the US left-wing coalition)… when the Western Roman Empire fell they basically all died off for want of a centralized government to feed them out of taxes on the productive rural Roman and European population (thus why Mainland Italians still produce blondes, and gingers, and largely don’t look like the North African and Arabic slaves of the Roman Period).

And Guess what… White Europeans maintaining Christianity never really cared after that about ripping down their own Iconography, statues, heraldry, etc.

Because unlike the early Christians who were brown slaves who hated white Europeans and their art especially… White Europeans don’t hate themselves or their conceptions of Beauty, and aren’t motivated by a blinding hatred of everything that reminds them of the Grecian Conquest of Judea during the Maccabees, or Rome’s Occupation, or just white people being pretty and skilled at craftsmanship.

Meanwhile, The Vatican:

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Whites quite like their nations and naturally build them up and make them pretty, and orient themselves towards discipline, beauty, loyalty, and reverence to their forebearers in the absence of outside subversives and moral poisons trying to dilute them and lead them away from from the natural organizing instinct found in these idols and rituals.

And even the most seemingly categorical religious commandments won’t stop even churches from celebrating that beauty and social reification in the absence of spiteful outsiders.

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In Conclusion: The War on Beauty is a War On Western Civilization

The point of ugly modern art, ugly music, degenerate culture, statues to honor incoherence, ect. Is NOT simply a twee or over-ironic subversion for subversion’s sake…

It is, and the artists will say this themselves, meant to “challenge” the viewer…

Ie. It is a conscious assault on the culture making, loyalty forming, history teaching, and values enforcing role of art in the white dominant ethnicity.

In the exact same manner that Statues to war-heroes, glory, victory, the founders, Civic Heroes ect. Organize a people and orient them towards their conception of themself, loyalty and virtue…. Statues to non-sense, incoherence, confusion, perversion, and alienation purposefully exist to disrupt and to destroy that coherence and ethnic civitas.

Likewise whereas 18th, 19th and early 20th century superhit songs like Rule Britannia, Scotland the Brave, I wish I was in Dixie, Erika, The Maple Leaf Forever, Etc. all came about and had the function of creating and reinforcing certain ethnic, national, and particularist visions of their peoples such that all of them have served as rallying calls or marching songs.

Once music was centralized in the hands of corporations and more importantly the centralization of “conversation” news corporations, there has been an aggressive force to artificially push degrading, divisive, and DUMB works… Largely with manufactured “controversies” which are never actually new or actually controversial.

Rather “Controversial” works exist not to explore thematic or dark subjects… but to act as demoralizing ChimpFests that create symbolic confusion and create ethnic demoralization,

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Notice how there is not even a beat, melody, rhyme, chord, catching turn of phrase, or evocative sound…

I dare you to walk away, come back after an hour, and try to quote or ever hum a lyric of melody that is not the title itself.

Contrast even degenerate trash culture Icons like 3OH!3 or over-politicized black Shitlibery like Killer Mike’s “Reagan”, which both have decent enough quotes, and can be interpreted or enjoyed variously ironically, literally, etc. (many a Patrick Bateman-wannabe young Republican has listened to “Reagan” aspirationally) and you can see the point of “This is America” isn’t to be enjoyed or express something, or even be remembered, but to be a pure chimp out, a pure expression of ethnic resentment.

Childish Gambino’s bizzare meter-less melody-less undulations are the musical equivalent of the DEI fat black woman statues. The point is to be bad. Beauty or quality would detract from the expression of resentment and institutional power.

If it were well made or had merit of it’s own, then that would confuse the message.

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The point of these acts of cultural defacement and attacks auditory, statuary, cultural, and Architectural… whether that be Black Helen of Troy in the latest version of the Odyssey, or what they did to the Royal Ontario Museum:

None of this is mere innocent self expression any more than interrupting a remembrance day parade with a Rap Concert would be mere “Festivity”.

The point of all these activities, all these ugly constructions, the destruction or active destroying of monuments, churches, ect.

It is to express ethnic hatred for the founding majority population and to destroy their core cultural organization and enforcement. Just as removing the statue of victory from Rome was not even because Christianity cannot tolerate personification of concepts or classical Gods themselves… There are actually quite a few Mosaics, statues, and artwork depicting the Grecian Gods within the Vatican.

Rather just as early Christian icon destruction was motivated by ethnic hatred and spite for Ethnic Romans… And later Protestant Iconoclasm was motivated by ethnic hatred and spite for Mediterranean Political and Cultural encroachment (the protestant reformation almost exactly follows the Maximum limits of the Roman empire with odd counter examples like Ireland or Poland staying catholic out of their own ethnic hatreds of the English and Germans. Indeed the most violent Iconclasm in the low countries almost directly maps onto Julius Caesars’ apocalyptic genocide of the Belgae in modern Belgium and the Netherlands, and the subsequent wars back and forth over the territory)…

Modern Iconoclasm is likewise ENTIRELY an exercise in ethnic hatred, ethnic territory claiming, and purposeful attempts at cultural destruction to prevent basic institutions of loyalty, value hierarchy, reverence, reification, and idealization.

It is the exact same social dynamic as an enemy trying to capture your Colors on the field of battle so as to shame and break morale of the military unit they represent. That men can be replaced, but colors or eagles lost permanently shame and damage a unit. Such that depending on an era they may never recover the same Espirit D’Corp.

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Symbols, icons, rally points, and sacred objects are the deep technology of national, military, cultural, and social organization. And for that to work their sacredness has to be enforced, and the often violent clashes over their meaning rewarded…

The same way a confused and pranking local who tried to steal the colors of a British Regiment in the 18th century out of a misplaced sense of humor, might be bayoneted by the guard on duty and the guard rewarded for his disemboweling of the pranking interloper.

This is why the old service clubs, secret societies, and paramilitaries that lasted for hundreds of years like The Orange Order, or The Freemasons, or the Sons of the Confederacy…

All of them have sacred objects, songs, uniforms, and rituals to build that internal coherence.

Just like Military Regiments.

Indeed many even practice/practiced their own forms of military drill, rank structure, subordination, etc.

Because it works.

Rituals Work. Idols Work. Marching Songs Work. Drinking songs work. Uniforms work. Ceremonial Dress Works. Feasting Works. Exercise groups work. Napoleonic Eagles Work. Flags Work. Roman Style Bear-head outfits work. Italian Frescos work. Statues Work. Murals Work.

All of these rituals symbols create Espirit D’Corp. They create morale. They create an Ethos and rally point.

And that’s why your enemies are so keen to disrupt these.

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A Quick interview with of The Pete Quinones Show on banned books and longform podcasting.

Works mentioned in this episode include:

Iron Curtain Over America by Col John Beatty

Jewish History Jewish Religion by Israel Shahak
(Listen to Pete’s Reading)

Werner Sombart
(Pete’s Reading)

Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail
(Pete’s reading)

Race War in Highschool by Harold Saltzman
(Pete’s Reading)

Against our Better Judgement by Allison Weir
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James Basques

An Eye for an Eye

Francis Parker Yockey
(Pete’s Intro)

Opening: “Lord of War” by White Bat Audio.

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Continuing my series of Deep Dives into Videogames and the imagined world of asymmetric strategies and tactics (that then come true) like The Most Beautiful Game: How Supreme Commander Stole My Heart and The Unkillable Cyberpunk Franchise and unconventional asymmetric warfare and tactics like The War to the Knife, the Knife to the Hilt and Getting Away With It: The Art of Urban Infiltration and Exfiltration… In this peace I’d like to go back to the beginning of 21st century imagined military madness…

The earliest-deepest dive into the madness of post-9/11 5th Generation Warfare…

The story that predicted everything…

Part 1: The Generational Gulf

Writing this essay is difficult, because depending on very specific thresholds of where and when you were born, your gender, and other cultural aspects… I’m either talking about one of the most familiar and foundational works of your childhood, your culture, and how you conceive war, culture, politics, history, and what it means to lead a good life… Or I’m talking about something you’ve never heard of.

The Metal Gear Solid franchise to this day is the primary, (maybe only?) property that exists at the intersection of the Tactical (Tacti-cool) Special Forces obsession of American Culture and Gamer culture more widely… And the Japanese Cyberpunk Philosophical Paranoia of late 90s Classic Anime and Anime-esque Games and media.

This has given it an extraordinarily prominent cultural purchase for young men (and women) of military or martial leaning. Having sold 65 MILLION copies across it’s franchise life it is the third most prominent “Modern Warfare” franchise after Call Of Duty and Battlefield.

Across America, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Korea Something between 10 and 30% of men between the age of 18-40 (fighting age) have played at-least 1 of the games… With the ratio almost certainly rising or even doubling amongst the young men who actually enlist… Metal Gear Solid “MGS” is only surpassed in its field by of the 500 million copies of Call of Duty sold, over 50% have probably played a COD game… (Battlefield sold 88.7 million, basically comparable to MGS)

But whereas Call of Duty and Battlefield focused on fast paced twitchy multiplayer combat, with the “narratives” in their “story mode” that are remembered mostly for memes, action set pieces, and ridiculous dialogue… Mad Japanese game developer Hideo Kojima has become an icon in himself for his twisting multi-layered narratives, aspirational, haunting, and absurd characters, meditations on military trends and technical developments, philosophy, history, conspiracies, duty, and life.

It would not be a stretch to say the Metal Gear Solid franchise is almost certainly THE core text of how Millennials and Gen Z grew up imagining warfare and the philosophical implications of war.

I don’t think older generations realize the impact just because they don’t recognize the references when they come up or know enough to recognize the influence… It is almost impossible to walk around on any military installation in the west without hearing the “Codec Call Sound” used as a ringtone by various soldiers, marines, and airmen, or the “alert sound” for text messages (bonus points when its an actual Colonel or Major calling). Conversations with soldiers regularly get into detailed dives into tactics, equipment, paranoid implications, and practical and not-so-practical ideas “Just like the game”.

I’ve heard of more than one real life military exercise, AI testing, and at least a few drones in actual combat, “cheesed” by a Metal Gear Solid-style cardboard box… Yes this happened.

(Yes, as far as I’m aware, the pun between box the literal cardboard device, and “box” a slang term for “pussy” translates between Japanese and English)

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Indeed the Japanese pacifistic paranoia of Hideo Kojima, a man deeply ambivalent about America, if not openly hostile to it’s Government and Military… Is almost certainly more influential on soldiers across the West, NATO, and even gamers in non-western militaries like Russia, or the Gulf States below a certain age threshold than works like Tom Clancy’s oeuvre, Saving Private Ryan, Rambo, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, MASH, Lawrence of Arabia, To Hell and Back, The Storm of Steel, All’s Quiet on the Western Front, Boy’s Own Adventures, the Stories of G. A. Henty, the stories of Walter Scott, The Red Badge of Courage, War and Peace, Le Morte De Arthur, and The Iliad… Combined.

Yet the very thing that keeps Kojima’s work in relative obscurity compared to his extraordinary pop-culture reach is the very thing that gives him so much purchase on the young… He made videogames. Unlike films or TV shows he gets tens or even cumulative hundreds of hours out of his individual fans at something approaching full attention, and includes a level of detail that’s just not possible for film or TV, and very rare in book form… the script for Metal Gear Solid 2 alone is 900 pages, a text a large percentage of his fans will and have gone over multiple times across repeat playthroughs (very few 900 page books get repeat readthroughs). And yet this same extraordinary investment, buy-in, and considerable effort the games require on the part of his adolescent and still forming fans acts as a barrier to scrutiny, and as such the works have been subjected to shockingly little, if any, wider cultural critique and scrutiny as compared with almost any other medium or artform.

Contrast the political discussions and think pieces that surround a book or film like Rambo: First Blood and the treatment of homeless veterans, or American POWs in Vietnam… Or how works like Platoon or Saving Private Ryan do or don’t discourage service and sacrifice on the part of young Americans, and its remarkable that at the same time young Soldiers were mass quitting over Vax-Mandates and others refusing to enlist, no one commented that the first Metal Gear Solid… the first modern entry in the CORE piece of Millennial and Zoomer Media to do with the US Military…(spoilers) centers around a decorated US Soldier being manipulated, blackmailed, and threatened into being turned into a unwitting suicide bio-weapon via a designer Virus hidden within a mandatory injection.

Gee. I wonder if that affected Vaccine hesitancy in young soldiers who’d played the game?

Yet as far as I can tell not ONE paper written in the period of the COVID mandates referenced the “FoxDie Virus” of the Metal Gear Solid series, or the fact that a critical mass of US soldiers had been trained since childhood not to trust unexpected US Military injections… That indeed the core lesson of one of their most popular stories is that the greatest soldier fighting and playing perfectly still cannot be saved from the mistake of trusting the Military/Medical establishment before the action has even begun.

Hideo Kojima’s strange and prescient vision has acted as a philosophical and moral introduction to the world of arms for tens of millions of young men. It is deeply political, and is massive and detailed in a way that has already altered the course of military history and martial culture… Seemingly with hardly ANY comment or interest by the military establishment or the broader world of war commentators.

Largely because of the anime-esque absurdities of the series: variously wooden, melodramatic, self-serious, historical, conspiratorial, obsessive, humorously slapstick, and subtlety manipulative… which are cat-nip to millennials and Gen Z on the one hand, on the other make older generations intuitively cringe away at encountering something clearly awkwardly dubbed and translated, balancing between languages, mediums, cultures, nationality, and stages of adolescent development in a manner that openly invites dismissal and joking unseriousness… a conscious unseriousness which serves to hide the complexity of its political and military vision… both for shock value within the narrative, and arguably for propaganda value in delivering Kojima’s various messages.

By contrast comparatively unheard of works like Oliver Stone’s Platoon ($137mil Box Office), Francis Ford Copolla’s Apocalypse Now ($150million), or Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket ($120mil) have been subjected to extraordinary Military and Academic study and assessment of their themes, cultural impact, effect on recruiting, and effect on soldier’s outlook… whilst Metal Gear Solid ($2.5+ Billion franchise sales) has received almost none, with only 200 JSTOR entries for the entire series, compared to 1400 for Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and 5400 for Apocalypse Now.

The only real critical discussion of the works is within the gamer subculture in various Youtube video-essays. These works vary from simple appreciation and “memeing” (Dawkins’ coinage from The Selfish Gene was indeed partially popularized by Kojima in Metal Gear Solid 2), to politically and philosophically relevant deep dives into the the various themes of the work and Kojima’s predictions…

Yet the most relevant analysis: the assessment and reassessment of Kojima’s works from a military, social, geopolitical, and strategic theory perspective, works which in many sub-areas and theoretical sub-specialties are STILL on the cutting edge of 4th and 5th generation warfare, theories of espionage, and theories of information control even decades after their original release… That’s not been done, or only been tertiarily done by Youtube amateur philosophers, who don’t know or care how Kojima’s work relates to 5th Generation Warfare Theory, or indeed how it has almost certainly covertly influenced the development of that theory via 25+ years of fans in the military-intelligence world.

“Metal Gear Solid 2 Predicted Everything” is itself a meme, but not uninformative.

To put it bluntly, trying to understand modern intelligence and 5th generation warfare theory and practice without understanding Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid is like trying to understand the warfare of Late-Bronze and Early Iron Age Greece without understanding Homer’s Iliad.

What the hyper-reality fantasy of the work lacks in technical accuracy or realism to the actual warfare on the ground, it more than makes up for in the completeness and strangeness of it’s insight to the era, its philosophy, and culture.

Indeed the works themselves are an unending assault on your very conception of your own knowledge and understanding of tactically, strategically, politically, and psychologically relevant information… the ultimate 4th and 5th generation nightmares.

[this Video Essay. especially the intro, is a solid vertical slice of how deep the madness goes, but I suspect completely unintelligible to anyone not already eyeballs deep in Metal Gear lore… continue reading below]

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Part 2: War is a Kojima Game: The Future Soldier on the Present Battlefield

I first played METAL GEAR SOLID 2: SONS OF LIBERTY before the age of 10, I’m not quite old enough to have played it on first release… but it was amongst the first games I got when I was old enough to get a then relatively new PlayStation 2… I was not ready.

The raw madness of MGS2 has to be experienced to be believed. At one moment a shockingly technical dive into military subjects and matters pulled right from WhitePapers and headlines, conspiracy fodder that makes even Alex Jones’ most prescient predictions feel like child’s play, deep dives into theoretical concepts and sociology that wouldn’t be widely understood or relevant for 15 year, and bizarre psychedelic anime Nightmares of Ninjas, Prettyboys, Vampires, Mad-bombers on Rollerblades, and even more horrifying sexual politics…

It’s a franchise that explicitly signposts itself as a fantastical horror story running off dream logic, complete with monsters and psychic mysteries… Only to change genres entirely to become an entirely different horror story, then change again, then again… only for the new more grounded realities to be more disturbing… Only to turn back without breaking the new reality… Only for the most fantastical and absurd details to have been entirely relevant, grounded, and predictive of the new nightmare you were yourself stepping into, if only you had exercised sufficient judgement before making the leap in a shellshocked haze of your own disbelief.

A story that can be simultaneously a Cyberthriller that anticipates the Snowden revelations, a commentary on media radicalization, desensitization, and conditioning, a exaggerated hypothetical take on Red Cell the Rogue OPFOR Special Forces penetration testers, and Nosferatu.

By the end the fact that Kojima had introduced me to the idea of Political Memes (from Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene) as a core geostrategic consideration 10+ years before 4chan and gamergate became political events, and Algorithmic AI censorship of such memes and information as the ultimate subtle system of conspiratorial totalitarian control… In a game that released in 2001! That was a minor side consideration compared to the completeness of the vision, and the raw prophesy of the next 25 years he laid out in that work.

It’s the game that was made from 1998 to 2001 unwittingly predicting 9/11, then had to censor out the Twin Towers collapsing in a terrorism attack in it’s finale for its release in November of 2001.

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But there’s more to it than that.

A wise commentator once said that as stories get further away from the present the safer their political themes get. That you can say pretty-much whatever you want about the far future or ancient past, or fantasy worlds, With almost perfect safety. You have to really try to make a story on a fantasy planet politically intolerable. But that the closer to the present a sci-fi story gets the more one risks, both from political sensitivity (which is interesting, but might not get you published)… but also from simply betraying yourself as an idiot who doesn’t understand the subjects you’re discussing.

Nothing reveals naivety, incompetence, delusion, and dilettantism quite like a series of short term predictions. Genuinely Intelligent world-class subject matter experts regularly get even very short-term predictions embarrassingly wrong in ways that reveal their character in addition to their intelligence… The great ones can laugh and acknowledge the mistake with humility and commentate intelligently on the unexpected turns… Most however dissemble and try to twist the matter.

For this reason Fiction writers try to avoid near future predictions… Cyberpunk is one of the highest risk genres for storytelling given the genre is set mere decades from the present. With classics of the Genre hoping that their predictions will age into cheesy but fun archaic hypotheticals, like Escape from New York’s 1997, 16 years in the future from the release date of 1981, in which WW3 is ongoing and New York City has been walled off as an abandoned prison colony.