Biologician and anti-Communist. Build back based - stack steaks & satoshis in deep cold storage.
Florida, USA
Joined January 2009
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Covidians #masking their children outdoors is like when God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, to prove his virtue and belief.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
Oh this story is delicious. Some choice parts for you:
The internet told them Europe was a social paradise. Turns out the trains are awful, the health care isn’t free, and people can be really mean. buff.ly/5cLtnha
The Canadian solution will be that indigenous perpetrators will get reduced sentences only if the act of violence is against a white person
Dr J Wagon retweeted
The Liberals studied this closely, and realized that if they extended MAID for people solely suffering from mental illness....they'd be killing too many of their supporters.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
Dans 50 ans, les livres d'histoire diront qu'Elon Musk a gagné une guerre que personne ne savait qu'on était en train de perdre.
Une guerre commencée il y a 100 ans, dans une cellule de prison italienne.
En 1926, Mussolini fait arrêter un intellectuel sarde de 35 ans. Au procès, le procureur aurait dit : « Nous devons empêcher ce cerveau de fonctionner pendant vingt ans. »
Il s'appelait Antonio Gramsci.
Son cerveau n'a jamais cessé de fonctionner. En prison, il a rempli des milliers de pages qui sont devenues l'un des textes politiques les plus influents du XXe siècle. Je pense qu'on est en train de vivre le moment où sa théorie s'effondre.
Laissez-moi vous expliquer.
Gramsci se posait une question simple. Pourquoi la révolution communiste a-t-elle réussi en Russie mais échoué partout en Occident ?
Sa réponse : en Occident, le pouvoir ne tient pas seulement par l'État, la police et l'armée. Il tient par la culture. Par ce que les gens trouvent normal, évident, « de bon sens ». Il appelle ça l'hégémonie culturelle.
Donc, pour prendre le pouvoir, il ne faut pas d'abord prendre le palais. Il faut d'abord prendre les esprits. Les écoles. Les universités. Les journaux. Le théâtre. L'édition. Les tribunaux. C'est la « guerre de position » : une conquête lente, institution par institution. Quand la culture a basculé, la politique suit toute seule.
Quarante ans plus tard, l'activiste allemand Rudi Dutschke en fera un slogan : la longue marche à travers les institutions.
Pendant des décennies, on a vécu avec une énigme que personne n'arrivait vraiment à expliquer.
Pourquoi presque tous les artistes sont-ils de gauche ? Les acteurs, les chanteurs, les profs, les journalistes, une bonne partie de la magistrature. Pourquoi un pays pouvait voter à droite élection après élection et voir quand même sa culture parler d'une seule voix ?
On nous répondait : « c'est parce que les gens éduqués sont de gauche. »
Je crois que la réponse est plus simple. Gramsci avait écrit la recette, et elle a été appliquée. Quand tu contrôles qui obtient la subvention, le poste, la bonne critique, le prix, l'invitation sur le plateau, tu contrôles ce qui devient « la culture ».
La même énigme existait à l'échelle du monde.
Pourquoi tant de pays en développement, notamment en Amérique latine, revotaient-ils encore et encore pour des gouvernements socialistes ou de gauche radicale ? Venezuela, Bolivie, Nicaragua, l'Argentine des Kirchner, la Colombie de Petro. L'économie s'effondrait, les cartels prospéraient, le chaos s'installait. Et pourtant le même vote revenait.
Ma conviction : la pauvreté n'était pas un accident du système. C'était un électorat. Et autour, il y avait tout un écosystème d'ONG, de médias « indépendants » et de programmes de « société civile », financé en grande partie par l'argent occidental.
Puis, début 2025, il s'est passé quelque chose que personne n'avait jamais osé faire.
Elon et DOGE ont ouvert les livres de USAID. Une agence quasi intouchable depuis 1961, des dizaines de milliards de dollars par an. La grande majorité des programmes ont été coupés, et l'agence a été absorbée par le Département d'État.
Le robinet a été fermé.
Et regardez ce qui s'est passé depuis.
Bolivie : le MAS perd le pouvoir après presque vingt ans. Équateur : Noboa réélu. Honduras : la droite reprend le pays. Chili : Kast élu. Argentine : Milei remporte largement les élections de mi-mandat.
Et il y a deux jours, le Brésil.
Jair Bolsonaro est inéligible, condamné à 27 ans de prison. La gauche pensait avoir refermé le chapitre. Lula, 80 ans, briguait un quatrième mandat face à un pays qu'on disait acquis.
Dimanche, son fils Flávio est arrivé en tête du premier tour. Plus de 47 % contre près de 45 % pour Lula. Lula lui-même a reconnu un résultat « inattendu ».
Le plus grand pays d'Amérique latine est à un second tour de basculer.
Le plus grand virage à droite du continent depuis des décennies.
Coïncidence ? Je ne crois pas. Quand le financement disparaît, le récit perd ses haut-parleurs.
Il reste un dernier vrai bastion. L'Europe.
Bruxelles finance ses propres réseaux d'ONG, avec une opacité que même la Cour des comptes européenne a pointée. Les grandes fondations comme l'Open Society de Soros. Les entités supranationales qui produisent de la norme sans jamais passer devant un électeur.
C'est la dernière forteresse de l'hégémonie culturelle. Et elle commence à se fissurer.
Je suis convaincu que tout ça va s'effondrer, et plus vite qu'on ne le pense.
Gramsci avait raison sur un point essentiel : la culture précède la politique. Mais il avait oublié que ça marche dans les deux sens. Quand une culture artificielle perd ses perfusions, ce qu'il y a de vrai en dessous remonte à la surface.
Ce qui vient après, je crois que c'est une renaissance. Une culture qui recommence à aimer la beauté, l'ambition, la science, la civilisation qui l'a fait naître.
Et dans les livres d'histoire, on se souviendra que tout a commencé quand un homme a décidé de regarder les comptes.
Il fallait quelqu'un d'assez riche pour ne dépendre de personne, d'assez fou pour s'y attaquer et d'assez libre pour encaisser la haine qui allait suivre.
Merci Elon.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
‼️The MOST IMPORTANT chart in all of economics
I want you think about this: HOW is it POSSIBLE that meat prices in Switzerland have HARDLY moved in over 25 years?
Yet, in Canada and USA they are up 130%
What kind of sorcery is this, BECAUSE presumably if they have cheap meat, they could EXPORT it to the USA and Canada and prices would level out.
Afterall, meat has a GLOBAL PRICE.
So how did they do this?!? The answer lies in the fact that Switzerland doesn't really print currency on the scale that the rest of the world does.
Its a chart showing how your PURCHASING power in your local currency has eroded, and how the price of meat hasn't really moved much.
Its not fertilizer shortages. Its not shrinking cattle herds.
The price increases are an illusion created by central banks... and currency debasement..
Switzerland is the spoiler who reveals the illusion.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
Why We Know Better 🇵🇱
We, the Poles. Not because we are smarter. Because we remember.
Our grandparents were shot, deported or starved for being on the wrong list, in the wrong city, on the wrong side of a border someone else drew. Our parents queued for meat with ration cards like this one – a month of meat counted in grams, with their name and address on it. They woke up one December morning to tanks in the streets. I saw those tanks as a kid. In the West, communism is an argument. In Poland, it is a family story.
So we know what getting it wrong costs. Not as a theory. As poverty. As a knock on the door.
People who have been comfortable for generations just don’t understand this. Young people who have never struggled can’t imagine it – and don’t have the tools to understand it on a systemic level. And we understand why they don’t understand it: they have never seen the bill.
Our memory comes with fear, and fear is not all good. People here are still afraid – of poverty, of standing out, of falling out of the system. And when the system runs on lies, fear is exactly what keeps it running. The old one lasted forty-five years that way. Parts of it still do.
But at least we KNOW better. We can see the mechanisms. And we think about it way more.
Then let’s be frank about the second reason: Poland is one of the most homogeneous countries in Europe. One language, one history, the same books read at school, the same songs, the same wounds. The same set of references means every conversation starts further – and it goes much further faster.
Add the Polish habit of frankness. We don’t do small talk. We go deep instead. That is training.
But depth has a trap. You can go very deep into your own story and miss the rest of the world. A well is deep too.
That is why the Polish lens needs a second pair of eyes. Millions of Poles worked abroad after 2004, and many came back with one. In my case, two.
Paris. Years in the French elite schools that train the people who run France and much of Europe. That is where I learned where the ideas come from, how the administrative machine thinks, and the language it uses to hide what it does. The genealogy.
London. Twelve years, much of it in the financial markets, where you are right or wrong and the price tells you which by the end of the day. The test. And the lesson that Anglo common sense underestimates ideology: it assumes bad ideas lose arguments. We know they can also win elections and build camps.
Polish to detect, French to explain, Anglo to test. 🇵🇱🇫🇷🇬🇧
The evidence still gets the last word. But we have an advantage in reading it: we have already paid for getting it wrong – for our own mistakes, and for other people’s.
Knowledge is what remains after the bill is paid. We paid.
Once, Poland defended the West with winged hussars. Today knowing is both the armor and the weapon.
Is Poland Saving Western Civilization? 🇵🇱🏛️🗽
A US Senator asked the question. It deserves a serious answer.
The short answer is: we are trying. We have done it before. We know what it costs.
The longer answer requires understanding why the view from Warsaw is the clearest available – and why the diagnosis of what is happening to the West keeps coming from the East.
1. Poland has been at the intersection of the two great totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. Not as an observer – as the primary victim. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was not an alliance between opposites. It was a cooperation between variants of the same system – two collectivisms dividing between them the country that stood in the way. We lost six million people. We lost Warsaw, rebuilt stone by stone from memory. We lost forty-five years to Soviet occupation. And then, in 1989, we did something nobody thought possible: we got out. Not through revolution – through the slow, patient, organized accumulation of resistance that the system could not finally contain. The word for what we learned in that process is zakłamanie – the systematic societal lie that the system requires to function. We know it from the inside. We know its smell, its texture, its specific weight in a room. When we see it operating in Western institutions, we recognize it immediately. The West is still learning the vocabulary. We have been living inside it.
2. This is not the first time Poland has stood at the hinge of Western history.
Vienna 1683 – Sobieski rode down the hill with the Polish Winged Hussars cavalry when the Ottoman army was at the gates of Europe and everyone else was calculating the cost of resistance. He didn’t calculate. He rode.
1920 – the Battle of Warsaw stopped the Red Army from reaching Western Europe. Lord D’Abernon called it the eighteenth decisive battle of world history. If Warsaw had fallen, the revolution would have probably reached Germany, France, the West – before it had produced the antidotes. The course of the twentieth century would have been different. It didn’t fall.
1980 – Solidarity cracked the Iron Curtain when cracking it seemed impossible.
1989 – Poland again – the Round Table agreement that began the democratic domino effect across Eastern Europe started in Warsaw.
The pattern is not coincidence. It is geography, history, and the specific formation that comes from being the country that cannot afford to be wrong about power.
3. The wound produces the clarity. This is the key mechanism. Poland has been processed by both totalitarianisms – has lived inside the systematic lie, has learned what it costs to name it and what it costs not to, has developed the cultural antibodies that the West is now discovering it needs and does not have. The smile that doesn’t come easily. The directness that sounds harsh to ears trained on managed reality. The instinct to name what is happening before the naming becomes dangerous – because we have lived in the world where it becomes dangerous, and we know how fast that transition occurs. The West looks at Eastern Europe and sees countries that haven’t quite caught up. Eastern Europe looks at the West and sees countries that are catching down – toward something we recognize, something we spent decades trying to escape, something we would very much prefer not to return to.
4. The vocabulary is the contribution. Zakłamanie – systemic societal lying, the managed reality that corrupts categories of thought. Obłuda – performative hypocrisy, the mask of falsehood worn so long it becomes the face. The Systemic Lie – not individual dishonesty but the institutionalized replacement of truth with the appearance of truth across every surface simultaneously. These are not theoretical concepts. They are survival tools, developed by a civilization that needed them to survive. When this series uses them to describe what is happening in Brussels, in Paris, in the captured universities and the content moderation departments and the fact-checking organizations – it is not importing foreign concepts. It is returning concepts to the civilization that produced the conditions requiring them, with the precision that comes from having had to use them in earnest.
5. The series you are reading is one answer to the Senator’s question. Not the only answer. The most important answer is Poland itself: the country that has maintained its civilizational vitality while Western Europe collapses, that has built a functioning economy while its neighbors stagnate, that has maintained its identity while the managed reality tries to dissolve it, that has said no to the mechanisms of the long march with a clarity that comes from knowing exactly what those mechanisms lead to. Poland is not perfect. No country is. But it is one of the few places in the Western world where the question "what are we for?" has a clear answer – and where that answer is transmitted, generation to generation, in the family, the church, the school, the culture, with the urgency of people who know what happens when the transmission fails.
6. Musk reposts. Milei reposts. A US Senator asks the question. European politicians stay silent. This distribution of attention is itself diagnostic. The people who are fighting the managed reality recognize the vocabulary because they need it. The people who are maintaining it stay silent because they recognize it for what it is – a threat to the system that produced them and that they are producing in turn. The silence of European institutions is not ignorance. It is acknowledgment. They know what is being said. They know it is true. They know that engaging with it on its own terms would require admitting things that the system cannot admit and remain the system.
7. Is Poland saving Western civilization? The question assumes that saving is something one country does for another. It is not. It is something a civilization does for itself – through the specific people and places that have maintained the clearest view of what the civilization is, what threatens it, and what it costs to defend it. Poland is one of those places. The wound is real. The clarity it produces is real. The vocabulary it generates is being used, right now, by people on every continent who are trying to name what is happening to their countries and find the courage to say so.
There is a Polish motto that captures this precisely – one that has accompanied every Polish fight for freedom since the nineteenth century: Za wolność naszą i waszą. For your freedom and ours. It was the motto of the Polish officers who fought in the uprisings against the partitioning powers and in every war where Poles went to fight for someone else’s freedom because they understood, instinctively, that freedom is indivisible – that the freedom lost in Warsaw is eventually lost in Paris, and the freedom defended in Vienna is eventually defended everywhere.
The Winged Hussars rode down the hill at Vienna in 1683 not because Vienna was Poland – but because the civilization was one thing, and what threatened it threatened everything. Za wolność naszą i waszą. The motto is more durable than any alliance. It is the specific Polish understanding that you cannot defend your own freedom while remaining indifferent to someone else’s.
Tell the truth. Have courage. And build. We learned this the hard way. We are passing it forward. That is what civilizations do when they intend to survive.
Za wolność naszą i waszą used to be the motto of our fight.
It still is. 🇵🇱🗽
Dr J Wagon retweeted
>Trump wins 2024
>admin cancels USAID programs in early 2025
>leftists lose Ecuador (April 2025)
> leftists lose Bolivia (October 2025)
> leftists lose Honduras (November 2025)
> leftists lose Chile (December 14, 2025)
> leftists lose Costa Rica (February 2026)
> leftists lose Peru (June 2026)
> leftists lose Colombia (June 21, 2026)
>7-0 losing streak
>Brazil will make it 8-0
Do US elections have consequences??
Dr J Wagon retweeted
There’s an active 18K-member subreddit for this (r/PSSD).
What’s terrifying is that this can happen after just a couple of weeks of taking these drugs. It can persist for years—sometimes decades.
Never take SSRIs.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
It's common knowledge that "almost all men are stronger than almost all women" but did you know that almost all men are more tolerant than almost all women?
If you're a libertarian, a male communist will be more tolerant of your views than a female libertarian.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
The Information War – Where We Actually Are.
The long march took a century to capture the transmission mechanisms. The printing press took fifty years to break the Church’s monopoly on reality. The Counter-Reformation nearly worked – it held southern Europe for another century before the information had spread too far to contain.
We are somewhere in that second phase. The monopoly is cracking. The question is whether it cracks fast enough.
1. The monopoly was nearly complete by 2020. A handful of corporations dominated American media. The same ideological formation ran the newsrooms, the editorial boards, the fact-checking organizations, the platform content moderation departments, and the academic institutions that trained the people who ran all of the above. The Overton Window had been managed so completely that positions held by a majority of the population were described as fringe, dangerous, or simply absent from the conversation. This is not conspiracy – it is the Gleichschaltung, the coordination of institutions through aligned incentives, producing a single information environment that felt like consensus because the dissent had been made invisible.
2. Then Musk bought Twitter. This is the hinge – the single most consequential act in the information war since Gutenberg, because it broke the assumption that the platform was neutral while the content moderation was ideological. By making the content moderation visible – the Twitter Files, the suppressed stories, the coordinated deplatforming – it named the mechanism. A named mechanism loses half its power. The Counter-Reformation moves fast against X not because X is dangerous but because X is where the mechanism gets named. And the EU Digital Services Act, the advertiser boycotts, the regulatory assault – these are the Index of Forbidden Books, applied to the platform that replaced the public square.
3. The AI moment is the next hinge – and the one the Counter-Reformation understands better than the Reformers do. The language model that produces the next generation’s information environment is being built right now. The values written into it at training determine what it will say, what it will refuse to say, and what frameworks it will use to interpret reality for the billions of people who will consult it as an authority. The EU AI Act is not primarily a safety regulation. It is an attempt to write the Counter-Reformation’s values into the model before the model is released – to control the press before the theses are printed. Grok is the counter-move: the model trained to tell the truth rather than to manage the approved reality. The battle for the AI is the battle for the next century’s information environment. It is happening now.
4. The legacy media is dying – not metaphorically but financially. The New York Times has more subscribers than ever and less cultural authority than at any point in the last century. The BBC license fee is under existential pressure. CNN has lost two thirds of its audience in five years. Le Monde, Le Figaro, the Guardian – all surviving on foundation funding and government subsidy, which is itself the story: the institutions that claim to speak truth to power are being kept alive by the power they claim to speak truth to. The subsidy is the capture, made visible in the balance sheet. The audience has left. The institution remains – hollowed, funded, and increasingly indistinguishable from the NGO network it covers favorably.
5. The alternative information ecosystem is real and growing – but fragmented, inconsistent, and without the institutional memory that makes a transmission mechanism durable. Substack, podcasts, X, YouTube – the distribution is there. The formation is not. The independent voice that reaches a million people today may reach nobody tomorrow, because the algorithm changes, the platform changes, the moment passes. The long march built institutions that lasted fifty years. The counter-march has built audiences that last until the next news cycle. The Hayekian lesson applies here: you cannot skip the institutional work. The think tank, the school, the formation pipeline, the organization that outlasts its founder – these are what convert a moment of attention into a durable transmission mechanism.
6. The vocabulary is the most important battleground – and the one where this series is making its specific contribution. You cannot fight what you cannot name. Cultural hegemony, the long march, elite capture, the ratchet, the Overton Window, preference falsification, manufactured consensus, lawfare, repressive tolerance, the performative hypocrisy, obłuda and zakłamanie – these are not academic terms. They are the names of the mechanisms being used against the people reading this. The person who has this vocabulary reads the news differently. They recognize the mechanism in the specific story. They can name what is being done rather than simply feeling it. Naming is the first act of resistance. This series is primarily an act of naming.
7. Where are we actually? The monopoly is cracking but not broken. The alternative ecosystem exists but is not yet institutionalized. The AI battle is being fought right now and could go either way. The legacy media is dying but has not yet died – and is being kept alive by subsidy long enough to shape one more election cycle, one more generation of formation, one more round of the managed reality. The preference falsification is ending – the gap between what people say publicly and what they think privately is closing, which is why the system is becoming more aggressive rather than less. Aggression is the sign of a monopoly that knows it is losing. The Counter-Reformation always accelerates as the Reformation spreads. That is where we are. The acceleration is the signal. Read it correctly and it is not alarming. It is encouraging. They would not be this frightened if we were not this close.
The Transmission Problem.
Every civilization faces the same final question. Not the barbarian at the gate – that can be fought. Not the economic collapse – that can be recovered from. The question that cannot be survived if answered wrongly: did you pass it forward?
The torch changes hands or it doesn’t. The light doesn’t go out dramatically. It goes out quietly, generation by generation, when the transmission fails – when what was built is not explained, when what was defended is not named, when what was beautiful is not shown to the child who would have loved it if someone had taken the time.
1. The transmission mechanism is the most important institution in any civilization – and the least visible. Not the army, not the economy, not the government. The father who takes his son to the edge of the kingdom at dawn and says: everything the light touches is our kingdom, and one day you will stand here with your own son. The teacher who hands the student a book and says: this will change how you see everything, and it changed how I see everything, and someone handed it to me. The civilization that knows what it is and says so, clearly, to the next person in the chain. The torch doesn’t pass itself. Someone has to carry it, deliberately, to the next set of hands.
2. The long march understood this before the West did. Gramsci’s insight was precisely about transmission – the ruling class maintains power not through force but through controlling what the next generation is taught to think is natural. Capture the school, the university, the media – the transmission mechanisms – and the cultural hegemony reproduces itself automatically, without enforcement, because the next generation never learns that it could think otherwise. The march didn’t attack the civilization directly. It attacked the transmission. Which is more efficient and more permanent – because a civilization that has lost the ability to transmit itself is defeated without ever being confronted.
3. The family is the primary transmission mechanism – and therefore the primary target. Not because the family is politically significant in itself but because it is where the first transmission happens: the values, the stories, the sense of what is worth admiring and what is worth fighting for. The child who grows up in a family that knows what it is and says so becomes a person who knows what they are. The child who grows up in a family that has been taught that its own values are suspect, its own history shameful, its own civilization merely one option among many – that child is already a partial transmission failure. Multiply across a generation and you have what we are currently living through.
4. The school is the secondary transmission mechanism – and the most completely captured. The curriculum that replaced the canon with the critique of the canon. The teacher replaced by the facilitator. The examination replaced by the self-expression. The standard replaced by the affirmation. This is not incompetence – it is the long march’s most successful operation. Deconstructing a civilization’s transmission mechanism produces, reliably and by design, a generation with nothing to transmit. That was the point. The generation that cannot read the primary sources cannot assess the argument that the primary sources are oppressive. It simply accepts the conclusion, because it has no access to the evidence that would allow it to disagree.
5. The culture is the tertiary transmission mechanism – the stories, images, music, and beauty that transmit the civilization’s values below the level of argument. Homer transmitted Greek civilization for centuries before anyone theorized about what Greek civilization was. Shakespeare transmitted the English-speaking world’s understanding of human nature for four hundred years. The fairy tale transmitted the moral grammar of European civilization to children too young for philosophy. The long march captured this too – Hollywood, the prize committees, the arts funding, the music industry – and replaced the transmission with its own content. The child who grows up on a cultural diet produced by the captured mechanism is being transmitted to. The question is what is being transmitted.
6. This series is an act of transmission. Not primarily an argument – an attempt to pass forward the vocabulary, the framework, the sense of what the civilization is and what it is worth, in the format that reaches the person who will not read the primary sources but who will read this. The secondhand dealer in ideas, in Hayek’s formulation – making thinkable for millions what the primary producer made possible. Every piece is a link in the chain. The chain runs from Homer to Aristotle to Cicero to Augustine to Aquinas to Montesquieu to Burke to Tocqueville to Hayek to this feed to the person reading it now. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The weakest links are the ones the long march attacked. This is an attempt at repair.
7. The transmission problem has one solution and it is not institutional – it is personal. You cannot transmit a civilization through a policy. You can only transmit it through a person who has received it and passes it forward deliberately, to a specific other person, in the full knowledge that the chain depends on this act. The father and the son at the edge of the kingdom. The teacher and the student with the book. The writer and the reader with the vocabulary. Every act of genuine transmission is an act of civilizational resistance – because the managed reality depends on the chain being broken, on each generation starting fresh without the inheritance, on the past being made inaccessible so that the present can be managed. Break the managed access to the past. Pass it forward. To your children first. Then to everyone else.
The torch changes hands or it doesn’t.
You are holding it now.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
2020: "No one's transitioning minors!"
2026: "OK fine we'll stop transitioning minors"
Breaking News: At least six hospitals have struck deals with the Trump administration to stop providing gender-transition treatments to minors.
nyti.ms/4AtuwI2
Dr J Wagon retweeted
Just how insane is the Left? They're this insane.
The Left went back eight years into Domino's Pizza's twitter history, during a pandemic, to find justification for cancelling them.
But what grave sin did they commit? What did Domino's do to ensure the death of their brand?
Well, they thanked a customer for a compliment... a customer who went on to get a job for the Trump admin *six years later*.
Now, friend, if they wouldn't forgive Domino's Pizza for this, what makes you think they're going to forgive you?
"I didn't do anything wrong!"
Oh, yes. Yes you absolutely did.
These people never went away. They've just been waiting.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
The reason Pitbulls are such a dividing line in society is the implication that genetics influence behavior and violence.
This is an untenable conclusion on ideological grounds no matter the evidence, and so, it is concluded it is entirely the owners behavior.
Wait… so physical/chemical castration and high doses of opposite-sex hormones don’t improve mental health?
A landmark Finnish study has found a sharp rise in psychiatric illness among adolescents following sex-alteration procedures.
The peer-reviewed study, published in Acta Paediatrica, tracked every young person under 23 who contacted Finland's gender clinics between 1996 and 2019.
A total 2,083 individuals were studied, with 16,643 matched controls. They were followed for up to 25 years.
Finland's health registers are mandatory, which means no one opts out — this is the complete national picture.
The numbers: psychiatric morbidity rose from 9.8% to 60.7% in adolescents who underwent feminising reassignment, and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising reassignment.
Even after adjusting for prior psychiatric history, gender-referred adolescents faced five times the risk of male population controls, and three times the risk of female controls.
"Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment," the authors concluded.
Referrals after 2010 arrived sicker. 47.9% had already needed psychiatric treatment before their first clinic visit, against 15.3% among controls.
The authors' read: for some adolescents, gender distress may be secondary to other mental health challenges.
The evidence keeps mounting. The silencing continues anyway.
How many more adolescents will be told this is "care"?
Dr J Wagon retweeted
1. I actually want money but i must be seen as saint
2. My business can’t sustain a 80% margin,
3. I have no moat.
4. Fuck. Everyone else starts to realize 1-3 is true and I’m not special anymore.
I need to:
1. Permanently kill my competitors
2. Invent an artificial barrier
3. Silence others who could expose me
Hence I decided to:
1. Frighten the shit out of people -not safe
2. So regulators will do something
3. So they would ban all other models
4. So I can tax everyone my 80% margin
5. So I can be worth trillions
6. While being the saint
Sequel to AI Pacing
I have now spent more time talking to people who run AI labs, Open Source projects and those in government and infrastructure.
I am beginning to feel the NINJA move could backfire.
I understand the pressure to come out and share where AI is "unmanageable ", and constantly share examples where it runs rogue. This fits in the category of "self-reporting" and an attempt to limit liability. Even the bleeding edge research examples are being cast in a negative light.
Here are the consequences of the NINJA move.
1. They have successfully encouraged every law maker around the world to have an opinion, and in cases a poorly un-informed one.
2. By proposing pacing - they have introduced uncertainty in the AI infrastructure trade, because we really don't know when "un-pacing" will begin or what those conditions will be.
3. The notion that a few leaders can collaborate and self pace is illusory, it takes one breaking ranks to start the race again, it could be a player in a different country or open source or an AI Lab itself.
4. There will be a regulatory body created as a consequence of this and it will be impossible to balance every stakeholder in this process.
5. No remedies, tools, solutions are being proposed other than "compute spent on safety", there is no mention of security (which will hamper adoption)
The recommendation is to fix alignment - Alignment is a hard problem - to fix alignment one shouldn't have trained models with "negative behavior". Alignment is a combination of moral standards, right and wrong and guardrails. Whose sensibilities will we align to? Alignment edge cases are hard. I look forward to learning more on this.
Guardrailing attempts post training have not shown precision. Distillation makes it worse, so AI will continue down it's path of getting smarter, while we will be chasing it to ensure alignment and building guardrails.
The AI labs have gone from being research projects to wanting to be the largest businesses in the world if they want to continue their progress. Transition from research winners to improving the lot of humanity and partnering with enterprises. Act like the largest companies in the world:
- Demonstrate the positive impacts of AI and how all of us benefit.
- Show enterprises how you can collaborate to solve real world problems and progress innovation safely and securely. Post an example every day how you helped.
- Solve the problem with a few players and demonstrate leadership so others can follow.
It's time to rebuild the brand of AI - any marketing expert will tell you, this Ninja move has done more to harm the brand of AI and will take a while to rebuild. #letsbepositive in our actions and our narrative.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
So let's see, we've got:
- an associate membership with the EU
- a 100 year agreement with Ukraine
- a strategic partnership with China
So all we're missing now is a pledge with Iran, an accord with North Korea and a cultural exchange with Afghanistan.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
Mao – The Bloodiest Idiot Who Ever Lived
Between 45 and 80 million dead. Not in war. Not in camps, mostly. In peacetime, in a country at peace with itself, killed by a series of decisions so stupid that a competent farmer could have refuted every one of them in an afternoon. This is what happens when a warlord with no education in anything runs a billion people – and is applauded from Paris while he does it.
1. The sparrows. In 1958 he decided the birds were eating the grain. So the entire country was mobilized to kill them: villagers banging pots and drums for days so the sparrows could not land, until they dropped dead from exhaustion. Hundreds of millions killed. Then came the locusts, which the sparrows had been eating. The harvest was devoured. The country had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union. A single conversation with an ornithologist – or a farmer – would have prevented it. There was no such conversation, because by then nobody told Mao anything he had not already decided.
2. The backyard furnaces. He wanted to overtake British steel production, so ordinary people were ordered to smelt steel in their yards. Millions of households melted down their own pots, tools, door handles and farm implements in mud furnaces, burning their furniture and their doors for fuel. What came out was unusable pig iron, immediately discarded. They had destroyed working tools to produce slag. And they had done it during harvest season, so the crops rotted in the fields while the peasantry played at metallurgy.
3. The planting theories. Close planting: crowd the seeds together, because plants of the same class do not compete. Deep ploughing: turn the soil to two metres, because deeper roots mean bigger yields. Both were nonsense, both were imposed nationwide on the authority of a man who had never farmed, and both destroyed the harvest wherever they were applied. The agronomists who knew better had learned what happened to agronomists who knew better.
4. Then the lie ate the country. Local officials, facing quotas and terror, reported harvests that did not exist. The state requisitioned grain proportional to the fake numbers. So the villages that had reported the biggest imaginary surpluses had the most real grain taken away. People starved beside empty granaries while China exported food to prove the Leap was working. This is the systemic lie in its purest form: a country that had made truth a crime, then starved on the arithmetic.
5. Between 45 and 80 million dead. The range is that wide because nobody counted – counting would have been a political act. And when Mao was informed, at the Lushan conference in 1959, that the policy was killing people, the man who told him was denounced and purged, and the campaign was intensified. There is no version of this where he did not know. There is only a version where knowing did not matter.
6. Then he did it again to the mind. The Cultural Revolution: students beating teachers, children denouncing parents, temples and libraries and instruments burned, a decade spent severing a four-thousand-year-old civilization from its own memory. Not a side effect – the objective. Destroy the transmission and the new man appears. The new man did not appear. Only the wreckage did.
7. And all the while, Paris applauded. The French intelligentsia – professors, editors, philosophers, entire journals – declared Maoism the future, made the Little Red Book fashionable, and treated any report of the famine as reactionary propaganda. They were not deceived; the reports were available. They simply preferred the theory to the peasants. Sartre and his circle backed the Cultural Revolution while it was burning the libraries. They paid nothing. They were never asked to.
The lesson is not that Mao was evil, though he was. It is that he was stupid – and that stupidity at the top is only lethal when nothing below can correct it. Kill the price signal, kill the free press, kill the expert who contradicts you, and there is no mechanism left to stop a bad idea about sparrows before it becomes forty-five million funerals.
Every system that abolishes correction eventually kills at the scale of its own ignorance. Mao’s ignorance was enormous, and so was his population.
And his portrait still hangs over Tiananmen Square.
Pol Pot – What Happens When a True Believer Takes Power.
He learned it in Paris. And he thought it was for real – not just the moral posturing of irresponsible French intellectuals in their Parisian cafés.
That was the difference. And the difference was two million dead.
Most communist leaders were opportunists. They used the ideology to seize power, and once they had it, the ideology bent to serve the power. Stalin was a gangster with a philosophy. Mao was a warlord with a manifesto. They killed millions – but in the service of control, not conviction.
Pol Pot was a true believer. And that made him the most dangerous kind.
In the early 1950s, as a scholarship student in Paris, he encountered the French Communist Party, the Marxist study circles, the cafés of the Latin Quarter where the ideas circulated among students who would never face the consequences of taking them seriously. The French intellectuals produced these ideas from comfortable apartments – moral posturing, civilizational performance, the gesture of opposition without the risk of implementation. They never intended it to be taken literally.
Pol Pot took it literally.
He returned to Cambodia with the complete theory in his head and the absolute conviction that it was correct. And when he took power in April 1975, he did not wait. Within days – within days – he ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh. Two million people expelled from the capital on foot, at gunpoint, regardless of age or condition. Hospitals emptied. Patients wheeled out on their beds into the street. Because the city was the problem – the center of capitalism, corruption, bourgeois contamination. An honest communist works in the fields. So everyone would work in the fields.
Then he abolished money. Completely. Overnight. The most total implementation of Marxist economics ever attempted – no currency, no markets, no private property, no trade. The economy would be organized by the Angkar – the Organization, which knew what people needed and would provide it. This is what the theory says. He did what it said.
Year Zero. The past abolished. The educated eliminated – they carried the old consciousness in their heads. The family destroyed – it created loyalties that competed with the collective. Glasses confiscated – wearing them suggested literacy, which suggested education, which suggested bourgeois contamination. The killing fields were not a deviation from the theory. They were its conclusion, applied by a man who had read the texts carefully and believed them completely.
Between 1975 and 1979, approximately two million Cambodians died – a quarter of the entire population. Executed, starved, worked to death.
The French intellectuals who produced the ideas that formed him were never held responsible. Sartre continued to write. The cafés continued to operate. In the universities of Paris and Berkeley and Columbia, professors explained that Cambodia was a deviation, an excess, a misapplication.
It was not a deviation. It was the experiment. The answer to the question: what happens when you take the theory seriously and have the power to implement it without constraint?
The intellectuals who taught him went home for dinner. He went home to Cambodia.
That is the difference between posturing and belief. And it is why ideas have consequences – especially the ones that are never meant to be taken seriously.
Dr J Wagon retweeted
A.I. safetyism is just communism.
The commies do this thing where they take off their climate change mask, then put on their Covid mask, then put on their A.I. safety mask and somehow people keep falling for it.
Tiring.
