Michael Malice mentioned a good post he made on secession 4 years ago to dunk on David French.

This brings to mind an important point which occurred to me over the last few years. If I can live my life with essentially no contact of any meaningful kind with people living in the same city I live in, what business of mine is it that they:

• Get Fair Trials
• Don't live in squalor
• Live in Peace
• Share my cultural or ideological or religious values

This might seem heartless for people not but 10 miles away (I live in a big city), but if I never ever meet them (and statistically, I won't)... How are they different to my life from people in say, Congo who most certainly don't have any of said things. Should I want the bureaucratic systems which have the power of life and death over me to have anything to do with them? Or would a more sane social order to have an arms-length relationship with them as is common of international relations?

The answer should be self evident. Cities like I live in are simply too large to even pretend anyone has (or should have!) a say in the systems which have power over such huge masses. The same is true of the state it resides in and the nation said state is subordinated to. No amount of voting can change the fact that the dilution of stake disenfranchises as effectivelly as any other type of tyranny.

The only meaningful solution in the end is fragmentation to the point that people have something remotely resembling a meaningful stake in the outcome of politics. Even a 1/250,000 stake such as in the case of most large cities is so small as to guarantee some other means of influence must become dominant for the outcome to be anything but cacophony. In practice this means "political parties", which in reality is just centralization; pledging your votes by proxy to people who you do not know and will never meet. This is little different from having a king, nobility or warlords, aside from it actually being made less effective due to "design by committe".

This insight makes one realize the only meaningful question in politics is one of organization; are we to be:

• Centralized - Top-Down: This is what the monarchies of the west spent generations making happen, until they caught the virus of "democracy" from the french.
• Decentralized - Multipolar: This is what resisted the monarchs, but was smashed. It was this network of small polities, the church and the nobility that kept the monster of total war chained for a long time.
• Distributed - Bottom-Up: This is the actual "Liberal" program; e.g. Subsidiarity. Only the Swiss are even close to this.

So where does secession fit in?

All it does is de-centralize which paints a big fat target on your back to get thumped on by Big Daddy Centralizer. It is more effective to simply sieze local control over enough things the state cares little about influencing until it's too late. This is probably why Agorism has turned out to be the most effective strategy. Just start doing what accomplishes your goals by hook or by crook. The laws, formal relationships and all that are all nonsense anyways. This is actually how the church in the early days actually achieved the influence (and international freedom!) it had.

Enjoy the decline. It is in crisis that the major institutions actually fail to grasp opportunity. Which is where "the meek" (better translation: those who kept their powder dry) finally get their chance at the brass ring.

Apparently you can leverage vaporware and break delivery promises all the way to being the most valuable automaker on the planet, so why not?

“We knew that the Mitkus et al. paper modeling aluminum clearance had to be inaccurate since it was assuming that injected aluminum kinetics were the same as the kinetics of aluminum acquired through diet. Now, in addition, we see that they did their modeling based on using the incorrect level of aluminum absorption. What is particularly striking is that despite all these errors, since 2011, Mitkus et al. is used by CDC and other entities as the basis for claiming that aluminum adjuvants are safe.”

oops

The large corporations are indistinguishable from GSEs at this point

Yet more evidence it is 1000% hokum.

BONUS: Yet another analytics firm runs the numbers and finds out the lockdowns were worse than worthless.

At this point the preponderance of evidence is massively against mandated restrictions on the healthy and business. I have posed this question repeatedly to people: what are you doing to prepare for a catastrophic meteor impact? If they say anything but "nothing, as there's nothing anyone can do" I immediately know they put feels before reals. Nobody stopped screwing because of AIDS, they damned sure ain't gonna stop socializing for a cold.

The rona' lockdown has an epidemic of teeth grinding happening.

The emergency measures and lockdowns will however remain.

I might actually think about voting if there would be real peace in Afghanistan and a full withdrawal. It won't happen though.

As you might have guessed given the introduction to the last post here, our journey to enlightenment has not been a quick one. However it seems that it's all starting to fit together in a way that comprehensively makes sense thanks to one of the core "Red Pilled" insights about human nature. Which is somewhat ironic, as that's sort of how our journey into heterodox thinking started -- getting rather brutally exposed to the darker sides of human nature that society downplays during our parents' contentious divorce right as we came into adulthood.

In any case, it's the conception of "mental models", "covert contracts" and ego investment / aspirational self image that ends up explaining most of why the words and actions in all realms don't add up, and when they do add up why that is so. It is quite well trod ground around here as to what the situation actually is -- you live in anarchy and the rules are all made up and ignored for the most part. Rian Stone likes to compare dating to "calvinball", and I've realized that essentially everything is this way. We are all just a mob of individuals making it up as we go along. The reason we make up the rules that we do and then barely follow them is immensely interesting as it completes the praxeological science.

I can write a book's worth of content on this subject, so I suppose I'm gonna be a professional blogger for a while. This means I'll also finally get around to finishing tCMS and making all the features of a CMS that nobody else does because programmers don't generally blog. It seems that solving the "getting de-platformed" problem is still something of an open question without a centralized solution for content creators as well, so maybe there's some opportunity there. In any case, it means big things are coming for this site after 14 years of doing this. Here's to another 14.

Amounts to nothing, because the government never gives a damn about their own rules. Those are for the plebs. The only reason they ever will obey a restriction on themselves is because the individuals doing the enforcing have an ego investment in the whole "rule of law" myth.

Just don't respond to most things. Most correspondence is really just demands for validation and the fact is they could actually figure their problems out for themselves if starved of such validation.

If you want to be surrounded by effective people, this is the best way to winnow out the ineffective, as they value validation over accomplishment.

Now that the markets have figured out it was just jawboning, its reacting like Samson hit them with the donkey's jawbone.

So maybe the radical left's attack on restaurants and looting will knock some out of their anti-cop trance (which is really an anti-civilization) but I suspect that this is what the Marxists behind the curtain want. They want the people to be fearful, so that Trump is re-elected to "fix things." The Marxists know a Trump victory will continue the recruiting of socialists to the cause.

Bingo. Look, there's a reason we generally get 8 year swings. It takes a while to get people fired up enough to lose objectivity and actually get motivated enough to vote, despite the screaming evidence that it has 0 impact on public policy. The entire electoral system is nothing but an elaborate smokescreen giving the bureaucrats the cover they need to keep doing what they want to do.

This won't stop it from being rammed thru. The zeitgeist is currently "looting is ok because they're insured", so "permanent adverse reactions and killing people with a vaccine is ok because they're insured" shouldn't be a hard pill to swallow for the world-improvers. I hope the neocons take the reductio and start saying "Global Nuclear War is OK because we're insured!!!!"

10% of UK companies likely to shutter. WINNING

A journey of disillusionment. It's interesting how many are coming to a similar conclusion about nearly all large bureaucratic organizations regardless of profession.

As the “defund the police” movement gains momentum, police officers are leaving the profession in droves. My agency is no exception. Soon, very few people, if any, will apply for this job. In order to fill vacancies, agencies will have to eliminate written tests, lower hiring standards, and look the other way on questionable backgrounds. This has all been tried before in the name of “diversity,” and led to incompetent, untrustworthy, corrupt officers. This is a disaster for any society.

It's of course gonna be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The incentives surrounding all bureaucracies guarantee this is the outcome. All police agencies succumb eventually, everywhere. Government is always and everywhere eventually filled by those who simply cannot be employed in any useful profession. That is the essence of the political means.

Good chaser to Black Lives MAGA. If more people black and white just focused on doing better for themselves and not being world-improvers the would could actually be better.

I have been harmed far more by white people in this country who hold to radical liberal and neocon values than by black people.

Damn straight. The fools empowering Mordor on the Potomac and our local tyrants are a far worse menace to the world. Be they white liberals or race hustlers it's all the same.

As always, the bureaucrats are in the drivers' seat

Continues to be one of the realest libertarians out there

As expected. In the interest of justice, the mother country needs to grow a sack and tell the colonies to pound sand. Escobar's Prometheus Bound is worth a read on this.

UPDATE: One of the defense witnesses cuts to the core issue:

Lewis then said that in Stafford Smith’s written evidence paras 92-6 he had listed specific Wikileaks cables which related to disclosure of drone policy. But publication of these particular cables did not form part of the indictment. Lewis read out part of an affidavit from US Assistant Attorney Kromberg which stated that Assange was being indicted only for cables containing the publication of names of informants.

Stafford Smith replied that Kromberg may state that, but in practice that would not be the case in the United States. The charge was of conspiracy, and the way such charges were defined in the US system would allow the widest inclusion of evidence. The first witness at trial would be a “terrorism expert” who would draw a wide and far reaching picture of the history of threat against the USA.

This alone ought to be lethal to the extradition. Nobody has a reasonable expectation that upon extradition the USA will restrict itself to prosecution of the crimes for which Assange is purportedly to be extradited for. The record of the USA giving 0 shits about their lawful treaty obligations is miles long.

They're no better than the NSA or FIB using dubiously legal or correct data pervasively.

I suspect this has applications in supercavitations.

Why would anyone want one? Coddling bottom feeders like this is stupid; they had to deal with much more expensive drives not but 5 years ago which were slower.

Still up to no good

Quantum is an edifice of sand. Penrose will not be able to solve his theoretical problem; If they resort to an explanation which cannot be proven without a proof it cannot be proven they have failed. Which appears to be the situation.