“Not really.” Yet you proceed to acknowledge that my saying so on July 27

I started here about a decade ago. IMO, you’ve omitted a critical factor in TUR’s decline: the publisher’s bizarre hostility to any “anti-vaxx nonsense” about the COVID crapshots. Some of the skeptical columnists and better commenters are, for various reasons including banishment, no longer here. Others of us who were censored or otherwise disrespected remain, but I doubt that the current roster would hook me like what was on offer pre-2020.

in a discussion among those noticing the website’s deterioration is what triggered you. No warning was issued, but that’s when the squelching commenced.

You’re also wrong about the range of my history, which speaks for itself. Anyone at a glance can see that I’ve posted thousands of “substantive” comments about many other things before and even since the limitations were imposed. Hundreds have commended the work of various authors, including Ron Unz.

Pride, sir, has overwhelmed your free speech principles and sense of fair play.

It just seems extremely odd that the only quote any podcaster has attributed to me was something that I never said, and instead regard as totally unsubstantiated conspiracy-nonsense.

That guy James Li clearly reads this site and correctly cited you in a good Kirk video a couple weeks ago (8:30 in), which I linked in the Unz news feed then, as you can see in my comment history. I saw this one and my guess is he made a mistake in not citing the author of the piece, instead of just this site. He is one of the few covering the Suchir Balaji murder and interviewed the parents multiple times, so I doubt he’s compromised.

Btw, Tucker mentioned this site last week on his show (1:10:47 in), not sure if you caught it, Antiwar7 linked it in the news feed, which is how I knew about it. Clearly these worthwhile investigators know of your site and your writing, you should be happy that independent podcasters are citing you. 🙂

Israel lost the long game way back in 2023 when a golden opportunity for it to marshal international support and consign the cause of Palestinian self-determination to near oblivion escaped it, never to return.

This is one reason we can state with confidence that Israel is finished, whatever the apparent outcome in the next year or two. Where it once successfully deceived much of the world about the ground reality in Palestine, the new era of spontaneous, amateur journalism has made such containment utterly impossible.

Even the Charlie Kirk maneuver has backfired. It’s now come down to false flags, and a large swathe of the population is prepared to blame Israel for these as well.

Should be interesting to see what comes of this.

I’m afraid Johnstone underestimates the stupidity and ignorance of the western public. What will spur change is when their debt-laden govts finally collapse or try to go to war to distract from their bankruptcy, following the Netanyahu playbook in Israel. Until then, the masses will do nothing.

What’s with this idea that the Mossad killed him? America is under complete Zio control, they don’t need to send Mossad assassins to USA if they want someone dead. The US government is perfectly capable of assassinations by itself. All Israel had to do is order the hit, the US government did the rest.

You want to find evidence that Israel ordered the hit? Good luck with that.

It’s qute obvious who benefits and who had the biggest motive. The guilty dog barks first and the loudest, just as we saw from Israel, starting from Netanyahu and including all Israel shills in the West in MSM and alternative media. But sure, keep waiting for evidence that Israel ordered the hit.

As to Tyler Robinson providing so much incriminating statements when he was texting his lover after Kirk’s death, I’m not so sure that this proves they were false. In fact, it seems quite possible given the situation that Tyler found himself in.

Yes, that’s what everyone with IQ below room temperature believes. Those texts might be the fakest shit the world has seen this century. One of the most obvious examples of fakery ever. It’s been discussed so much and so many ‘anomalies have been highlighted that if you still can’t see it, I guess there’s just nothing that can help you (except for medically assisted dying).

Might be a good next American Pravda article for you, along with the suspicious elements of the Kirk killing and the Suchir Balaji murder, a former OpenAI employee and whistleblower who was found killed in his own apartment and ruled a “suicide.” For more info, watch his mother talking about his mental state and crime scene details to Tucker Carlson, then Carlson’s recent interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, where he asks him about Balaji’s death at the 34 minute mark, and Altman creepily and fantastically claims the evidence shows suicide, when it clearly doesn’t, suggesting he ordered the hit.

You have of course written about the killing of various conspiracy-related figures over the last century for awhile now, but this appears to be the next step in the fall of the American empire, where powerful factions now openly kill young people and up and coming political candidates and the media doesn’t report on the murder facts.

blah, blah..

the significant thing here is 9/11, on this anniversary of 9/11

it’s also significant that Carlson has figured out that continuing to shill the ZOG boilerplate vis-a-vis 9/11 will make him obsolete.

People must be dragged, kicking and screaming to the truth, because our collective futures, and the lives of our progeny all depend on it.

But it is a tough and harsh reality, to find out, and accept that, not just ‘the Jews’, but at the highest levels of ‘our’ government, (the people highly paid and empowered and trusted) to keep the American people safe from harm, are the very ones who will go along with the mass-slaughter of thousands of Americans, in order to foist unimaginable horrors upon the world, and all of it in fealty to Global Jewish Supremacy.

At base, we’re faced with the fact that George W. Bush, born into a dynasty of power and privilege in this country, was willing to cast thousands of innocent Americans to a hellish death, in order to foist endless wars on America, and subvert the American people’s Constitutional protections, all in service to an enemy regime that had managed to insinuate its agents into key positions of America’s power-structure.

President Bush’s betrayal, is historic, even Biblical in its enormity.

We are ruled by treasonous fiends, who consider the American people as less than insects, to be squashed at a moment’s notice, if doing so somehow benefits ‘our’ ruling elites.

That is the lesson of 9/11.

And that is what the American people must be forced to accept, if there’s any hope of reining in the psychopathic ambitions of this demonic regime.

No more wars for Israel! ~ Is a good start.

One theory that came to me while reading this post is the reason brand new culture doesn’t move to the forefront is that the money isn’t there anymore. The reason producers historically pushed big money into hawking cultural icebreakers like the Beatles or Nirvana or Top Gun or the Harry Potter books is because they could make fantastic sums in royalties by pushing these new cultural markers. However, internet piracy and fragmentation has largely killed those mass media businesses, while we’re still figuring out the business model for online media.

On the one hand, creating a digital product is significantly cheaper, so we now have thousands of youtube channels and bands online. But the massive profits from a mainstream hit aren’t there anymore, both because the mass broadcast channels like CBS or EMI have lost much of their audience and cheaper or free online options equate to nobody wanting to pay for them. Of course, this only means mass culture is frozen and dying: there are still tons of indie bands and podcasters hawking their wares online, some very successfully like Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson.

Once we finally figure out good online business models, like Substack is doing with paid subscriptions, the old media will be finally killed off. At that point, the anachronistic mass broadcast culture that Anglin grew up in will be dead and gone, after only ruling for a century because of broadcast print, radio, and TV, and a million cultural flowers will bloom again, as they did for millenia. The difference will be that those pre-broadcast cultures were geographically limited, versus online subcultures potentially have fans from all over the globe, united only by their interest in 3D-printing or introducing Korean food to non-Koreans.

This makes no sense.

On the one hand, there is no more overarching culture, yet we are all in a monoculture?

No, monoculture was in the past when everyone watched the same three TV channels and were all hip to the Beatles in 60s or Bee Gees in the 70s.

As for everyone being on the internet, that’s different from everyone watching TV. Everyone watched the same Johnny Carson show. Or the same documentaries on PBS.

But the internet is very fragmented, and people seek out different things. So, some might listen to just alternative rock on spotify and listen to certain podcasts while others do something entirely different.

There is no monoculture on the internet.

The US government is now paying about a trillion dollars a year in interest on our national debt, almost as large as our bloated military spending. If rates go higher, it could shoot up some more. That just doesn’t seem sustainable to me.

It’s perfectly possible that all my reasoning on all these matters is completely wrong, and that the rules of the world are different than I imagine them to be. But bubbles do sometimes take longer to pop than most people expect.

I too believe that the bubble will pop, and that patience to wait on the sideline until it does pop is likely to be rewarded.

However, you have been around a long time, and your big run for California’s governorship occurred right in the middle of the H. Ross Perot era. Surely you remember Perot and his patriotic supporters as well as I do. They fervently believed that the interest on our national debt was unsustainable even then. (See here and here.)

I certainly believed it, yet the collapse never came.

I think that this is telling us that trying to analyze the nation’s financial position in the same way you would have analyzed, say, Wall Street Analytics’ financial position is just a fundamental mistake. It’s like asking how many touchdowns the referee scored last weekend: the question makes no sense.

The federal government issues the dollar, and sets the benchmark interest rate by fiat—see 12 C.F.R. § 204.10(b)(1). This does not imply that the federal government can act with impunity without consequence; for, as you yourself have pointed out, the American economy only produces so much in real, substantially worthwhile goods and services during a given year. However, it does mean that the national debt is kind of a made-up number. I mean, you have to have a growing national debt of some kind or another, don’t you, whether on the Treasury’s balance sheet or the Fed’s, or else how can the money supply grow to keep pace with productivity, except via a banking bubble—like the kind that popped during the Panic of 2008?

We owe the national debt to ourselves. (To China, you say? Not really, but that’s a different story.) It will be all right.

So if you owe taxes or have any debts to repay, you can do so with dollars. If someone refuses to take your dollars, you can ultimately have him arrested. If he resists too strongly, the army will shoot him.

If you have existing taxes or debts, sure, but any business can still refuse to take your dollars up front as payment for their goods or services, just as many currently refuse various credit cards.

Bitcoin doesn’t have a police force or a military to enforce its value.

Now that they are worth almost $2.5 trillion, what would stop them from starting either? 😀

I actually agree with you that Bitcoin will be worthless one day soon, but the guy makes a good point that the dollar and other fiat currencies are doomed also.

I think we’ve entered a rabid competitive phase for various payment and financial options with the arrival of the internet, and both national currencies and early, flawed digital tokens like Bitcoin will not survive that massive oncoming brawl.

It’s possible that some of Trump’s friends once again made gigantic profits in the markets by knowing ahead of time what Trump had decided to do. So maybe Trump’s idiotic, erratic policies are just being spurred on by a circle of shrewd inside-traders.

Huh, interesting point that the entire Trump campaign and Presidency may simply be one last blatant scam of the credulous American public.

Which brings up something I’ve long wondered, why don’t well-heeled, patriotic, non-jewish billionaires and other powerful groups fight back against the Neocons and the deep state, as Eisenhower implored them to? In other words, why isn’t there a Mega group for the USA?

The masses are hopeless, always have been, but why don’t more well-off and informed people, like you, fight back? Mearsheimer and others have been writing about the Israel lobby and other malign interests for decades- I was warning against Israel in the ’90s, when I was still a young man and didn’t know the true depths of their depravity- yet the US keeps slipping into oblivion.

In my opinion, Huawei is doing the right thing. If a country, organization, business, or individual wants to get something done: design, build, code, or operate. You are saying that doing without AI is fine, or even preferred. I am not sure designers, tech people, engineers, and managers that actually get things done would agree with that strategy. While still early days, AI tech has become a game changer in many areas. As we speak, a lot of effort is being put into finding the best strategy for this technology. If there were two teams at war with each other: team A that is planing on using a lot of AI tech, and you are on team B that had no interest in using AI: I can only say that you are putting yourself at a considerable disadvantage. I speak from experience, my productivity is much improved by using AI and I can tackle much more ambitious projects. And as the tech improves, I see the day coming where it becomes unthinkable to design something or to start a project without some level of AI help: in fact I think we are already there.

All you do, all around you, everything, from the movement of a CO2 molecule you exhale to your reading of this reply and your opinions about it, can be represented by time series of mathematically connected numbers, and when these numbers are collected and stored, they are data.

When states and companies started to collect and store that data from people, facilitated by digital records, that was called Big Data.

Now, how to connect/analyze all that Big Data to produce useful applications?

Slowly by human geniuses developing mathematical models of cause and effect (human intelligence), OR, fast by empirical models discovered by machines running billions of regressions (artificial heuristics).

The latter is AI in a nutshell.

So, you’re not completely wrong: there is some value in collecting data, examining it, and running it through models, and these new ML models appear to do better on some kinds of unstructured data.

The problem with your argument is that we’ve run the experiment and “Big Data” SaaS companies lose money hand over fist, as do these new ML companies. We’re now approaching $1 trillion invested in this new ML market and so far the returns are horrendous, showing massive losses.

So whatever you may think of the potential of such numerical modeling, the business value has largely not shown up, and at least with “Big Data” we’ve had awhile for it to show, which is why many of these companies pivoted to “AI” in recent years, despite that not working either.

More broadly, there is currently a cult of “mathematical models” in the world, that try to take the limited success we’ve had in number-crunching current flow through a transistor or other highly controlled and well-understood domains and make broad and dumb claims, such as those you make, about much broader extrapolation and modeling that is possible, whether those claiming they can model something as huge and chaotic as the world’s climate with computer simulations or those claiming these LLMs are anything but statistical parrots.

Feynman had a great example in one of his famous lectures, against the silly mechanical determinism of those who claim that if we just know the location and speed of every gas molecule in a closed container, we could then predict all its behavior forever using adiabatic classic mechanics. He instead pointed out that even if we knew the exact position and velocity of the many quintillions of gas molecules in that container at one instant, we would very quickly lose track of all their positions, because of all the rounding and imprecision introduced into the mathematical calculations over time.

Perhaps you don’t understand what he’s talking about, depending on your technical background, but I’m an engineer who has run many such numerical simulations back in grad school and I do. Regardless of your background, and he was arguing with many technical people too at that time, you are greatly mistaken if you think we can use these computers to model anything but fairly limited domains. Those domains can be highly useful or valuable, like a factory floor, but the problem today is that many idiots are extrapolating that out to CO2 molecules and the like, as you just did.

That is never going to happen, and these silly ML models are beyond idiotic for most of the uses they are being put to. Read that Rodney Brooks post above to actually learn something.

Huawei started off by selling bootleg copies of US routers…

The company started out producing switches for telephony, first sourced from Hong Kong, then reversed engineered domestically. This was in the early ’90s. Their routers didn’t come along until 2000 or so. You really need to get away from the YT click bait.

As far as copying tech? That’s pretty much standard business practice. Think of Microsoft. How much of their stuff was developed in-house, on their own? Not much. Xenix, MSDOS, OS/2, the GUI concept, their compression program Double Space (in DOS 6)… all came from elsewhere. Some paid for. Some questionably hi-jacked.

What really matters in tech is not so much who came up with the first idea, but who makes the best use of it.

Huawei is a genuinely impressive company and much of that tech looks great, but it is not a great sign that they’re jumping on this stupid AI bandwagon too. This AI bubble is going to come crashing down, because its uses are fairly limited, then Huawei will have wasted billions on worthless tech, the flip side of having all that money to spend.

The big problem moving forward for Huawei, and all Big Tech companies like google or whoever, is that software is fundamentally different than previous technologies, much more about ideas and with very low capital costs. That is why even free-priced, open-source software like linux or Chromium dominates the world today.

However, people always recreate the past, so they’ve built large software conglomerates by following the industrial model of Ford or GM, with software tech that fundamentally isn’t suited for that.

This cannot hold and all the Big Tech software companies, whether Apple or Huawei or Microsoft, will fail in the coming years, when faced with guerrilla competition online from the few software engineers who finally figure that out, similar to how the guerilla linux kernel is now vastly deployed more than the previously dominant corporate Windows software.

That is the real problem that western Big Tech will soon face, and it will take down much of Huawei and Tencent too.

“None of these AI engines dispute that…”

When providing an answer, AI query engines tend to initially restate the question. One problem that AI query engines tend to have is that they will adopt the premises of a question even if they are provably false. I recently asked Grok3 a question pertaining to a mathematical graph related to spherical trigonometry and essentially had tricked the engine into going along with all the details of my stated supposition, which was mathematically impossible. Furthermore, it made simplifying assumptions that are often made when one value is significantly larger than another, in order to be able to use a less complicated formula, but in that case there was not such a significant difference for the simplification to have been appropriate. The point is that such engines are still not highly reliable in some instances and should be used professionally when the scope of the query is already understood and the issue is simply to execute a tedious task, such as writing code. Your comment suggests that you are giving blind trust to extended implications that you derived from their response. I do not think that AI engines are yet reliable fact checkers. Flawed adoption of AI is a shortcut that can have potentially adverse consequences.

Well, the world was decidedly habitable by 1965, and yet there were fewer truly mystifying technologies around. You could open a car hood and eventually ascertain what the problem was, given a few simple tools and a modicum of intelligence. A carburetor is perfectly comprehensible — and fixable. Planning on reprogramming the computer controlling a fuel injection system?

You raise a good point that as our knowledge has deepened over the last century, our tools have grown so complex that they are much more difficult to understand. That is partially an inevitable consequence of computers making everything work better but adding complexity, partially a result of greed and these companies trying to lock others out. There are attempts to fight that with open standards and open source software and hardware, but a certain amount of essential complexity is irreducible.

We are headed into a future where we’re unlikely to understand even enough to be able to react intelligently to developments.

I just think you overstate your case, as 1965 tech had plenty of “mystifying” consequences such as industrial pollution like lead poisoning or microplastics, and we’ve never been able to react intelligently to the chaotic world we live in. Those people in 1965 were coming off two of the greatest slaughters recorded in human history in WWI and WWII, while we continue to see millions slaughtered today because of foreign interference in Rwanda or Ukraine or the middle east.

Our more complex tech today makes the problem marginally worse, but we’ve always lived in a chaotic world that nobody really understands: nothing has changed in that regard.

There’s also the question of what happens to us… A.I. suggests a future in which the overwhelming majority of us will have about as much understanding of what is going on as the average cow in a feed lot does. We’ll be like the castaways in Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky — trapped in a universe devised by our ancestors but totally beyond our comprehension.

So the same ignorance as it’s always been for millenia, except not partially “devised by our ancestors” until recently? 😉

I suspect most of us are already there. Tell me how the microwave works.

Consider the alternative: would you rather spend all your time washing your clothes by hand and gathering wood for fires to cook your own food, just so you can say you marginally understand that process better? 😀

The world is a complex and chaotic place, just be happy that a few people understood it a bit better and built these ramshackle shelters and tools for you and try to apply yourself to fixing their many, many mistakes in what time you have. As someone who has devoted myself to learning as much as I can, both technical and otherwise, I can assure you that ignorance of how most everything works is our lot, both because you cannot possibly learn even a fraction of human knowledge but that our ignorance is still vast and so much of life is simply chaotic and unpredictable.

I’ve read some of the original full-length fact checks. To be honest, the quality is very low. It’s sounds academic, but the bot obviously doesn’t know what it is talking about. There are multiple instances of circular reasoning, where the bot cites the Unz article to confirm the Unz article, likely because the Unz article is the closest textual match to itself. This is beyond ridiculous and no quality control.

And do the western satraps really believe anyone will follow them into their wars for their Jewish masters?

You already are, as modern war is fought with missiles and surveillance, which you are funding. Did the west cut off funding for this Ukraine war that they started? They are trying to fund the Pentagon even more in the latest budget bill!

Did the Ukrainians rise up against their jew president and Azov commanders when forced to fight the Russians? No, a half million marched off to their deaths.

You are right that there is little appetite for war among the masses, but as long as all they hear in the media is propaganda about how Putin is the new Hitler, they are being herded into precisely those wars.