“We are Forerunners. Guardians of all that exists. The roots of the Galaxy have grown deep under our careful tending. Where there is life, the wisdom of our countless generations has saturated the soil. Our strength is a luminous sun, towards which all intelligence blossoms… And the impervious shelter, beneath which it has prospered.”

Monday morning turning points

by | Aug 12, 2024 | Mondays | 1 comment

Well, all I can say is, thank God last week ended. As you can see, it was an extremely punishing one, which resulted in a complete lack of new poasts for over a week. This was as inevitable as it was regrettable – being a function of both the extreme stress of an apartment move, and a truly . On the plus side, though, that means this week’s Great Mondaydact Browser Buster doubles down on all the stuff you missed.

So, if it genuinely does crash your web browser… you’ll know why.

This week, we look at the concept of the Strauss & Howe Fourth Turning, which is, as far as I can tell, an expansion or remix of the Hindu notion of the Kali Yuga cycle of death and rebirth. In a more prosaic sense, it comes down to that old saw about how:

  • Hard times create strong men;
  • Strong men create good times;
  • Good times create weak men;
  • Weak men create hard times;

It is a simple, useful, and reasonably powerful explanation of the current, disastrous, situation we all face now. So let us explore it in a little more detail:


The Mighty God-Emperor

His Most Illustrious, Noble, August, Benevolent, and Legendary Celestial Majesty, the God-Emperor of Mankind, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus Astra, the First of His Name, the Lion of Midnight, may the Lord bless him and preserve him, showed us all, yet again, that he is the ALPHA among Alphas when discussing his “ear boo-boo”, as it were:


#BasedTucker is Based


Dawn of Battle

The Male Brain gets us off to a quick start this week, with a video from everyone’s favourite busiest bald YOOTOOBER, about what a potential Second Civil War in Amerikhastan would look like:

Here’s a hint – it will look NOTHING like that silly “non-partisan” movie we saw released earlier this year. It will be EXPONENTIALLY worse, and vastly more bloody. If you want an idea of how bad things could get, read this book.

The Honest Ads guys tell you the truth about college degrees, and it is ugly:

Another from the same guys about so-called “Freedom of Information” laws:

I have some experience with those. The idea is great, in principle, but in reality, governments and their agencies can find all sorts of ways around them.

And here is one about the Laff-A-Lympics:

PsycHacks gives you solid life advice about how to avoid the bloody, and painful, results of your woman trying to test you by getting you into a fight with her:

Another from the same about the inevitable and unavoidable process of “ageing out”:

Moon discusses how Amerikhastan became the real-life embodiment of Idiocracy – the only movie in history, that I know of, which started out as a comedy, and rapidly turned into a documentary:

One could argue that Network was the same, but that was not really a comedy, that I know of.

Another one from the same channel about why San FranSicko is such a shithole now (try saying that 5 times fast):

And one more about how Hollyweird destroyed a formerly great comedian (who also probably was, and remains, a ROARING asshole):

Prager U talks about Critical Immigration Theory:

Unsolicited advice explains why people hate their jobs these days – because companies have pulled a serious inversion on the concept of “work”:

As TMB noted – work is not a virtue, nor a vice, it is merely a means to an end. Companies that try to turn work into a virtue, a passion, and a calling, are doing the wrong things.

One from landokalriz about supervillains, who are not really known for common sense – or their ability to avoid monologues:


Mind-Expanding Drugs

Veritasium explains why it is a VERY bad thing for robots to look and act like humans:


Death Smiles At Us All…


Poli-Ticking Off

Mark Dice simply cannot contain his mirth at the new Daemoncrat Veep pick:

I would not be quite so sanguine about things, personally. Yes, the Heels-Up Walz ticket is a clown-show, but let us never forget that there are NO free and fair elections, at the Federal level anyway, within the FUSA any longer.


The very-thoroughly-married couple at Redacted uncover some rather disturbing new details about the attempted assassination against the TRUE President, Donaldus Triumphus Magnus:

They also have a particularly worrying piece up about how NATO will start enforcing lockdowns:

On the other hand… given NATO performance in Banderastan, we probably do not need to worry that much at all.


PJW explains, as an actual Limey – whose unseen wife/partner/girlfriend/whatever just gave birth to their son – what the heck is going on with the riots in PommieBastardLande:

And a bit more on the same:


Lord Razor of the Fist Clan watched and whistled as the markets took an almighty nosedive after Heels-Up Harris somehow managed to become the Daemoncrat nominee for POTUS, without getting her lip-balm and knee-pads out:


Rulings from the Bench

Judge Nap was busy as ever for the past couple of weeks. We start with a pair from Col. Douglas Macgregor:

LTC Tony Shaffer is back too:

Maj. Scott Ritter had a rather unpleasant run-in with the Fibbies last week, and this might have something to do with the reason why they came a-knockin’:

Capt. Matthew Hoh comments on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address to Congress, and on other matters:

Alistair Crooke explains what is happening with Lebanon and the Middle East:

Larry Johnson & Ray McGovern give us the weekly rundown:


Дед Сварливый Говорит!

Grandpa Grumpuss grumps, grumpily, about the seemingly insane Ukrainian attack on Kursk, which makes literally no sense from any kind of sane military perspective:


Timeo Danaos Et Donna Ferentes…

The good gentlemen of The Duran discuss the riots in PommieBastardLande, and the power grab that has come out of them:

They also talk about the hilariously awful rise of Heels-Up Harris:


Bad Medicine

Dr. John Campbell is not in the least bit amused by the latest news around global excess deaths:


Dr. Suneel Dhand was as delighted as the rest of us were to watch Novak Djokovic win Olympic gold:

I do not like Djoker’s playing style, personally. I have always been a Federer fan, and I am deeply saddened by the fact that we will NEVER see that graceful, flowing, classical style of play ever again.

But there is simply no denying that Djokovic, who plainly is a man of firm and deep convictions, is the greatest ever. You just cannot get past the stats the man has posted up.


Warriors of Faith

Tha Dizzle shreds through Izzlamist delusions about their own ridiculous doctrines:


Dr. Jay Smith from PfanderFilms and Al-Fadi from CIRA International explain how, contrary to what most Moose Limbs believe, their Koran actually exists in many different Arabic versions – and Izzlam’s own top scholars have known this, for centuries:

Truly, without lies, Izzlam dies.


Christian Prince has a lot of fun dealing with a particularly unpleasant Moose-Limbah:

Female Moose Limbs are often much worse than male ones. The male ones are just stupid. The female ones are both stupid AND shrill.

I have nothing but contempt for almost everything Mo’Lester the Paedophile Profit said (supposedly – I am not convinced he actually existed), but when he wrote that women have half a brain, and are deficient in reasoning… he might just have been onto something, given the way Izzlamist women act.


Sam Shamoun explains the Nephilim and the Watchers:

And he has a lot of fun explaining to a particularly stubborn Talmudic Jew that the Trinity does, in fact, exist in the Tanakh:


Manly Men of Manliness

Terrence Popp tells you to hide your wife, hide your kids, because they are coming for your homeschooling:


Joker from Better Bachelor watches his own videos 5 years on, and realises that very little has actually changed:

This can be a depressing thing to comprehend. It does not change all the good that men like Joker have done.


Burn Paedowood to the Ground

Midnight’s Edge looks at Marvel’s “cunning plan”, a la Baldrick, in the wake of the massive global success of the new Deadpool film:

And they also watched Borderlands, so you didn’t have to:


Overlord Dicktor Van Doomcock reviews Batman: Caped Crusader, and it sucks, exactly as I said it would:


Gary from Nerdrotic does yet another post-mortem of Dem RANGZ O’ Powah!!!:


The Critical Drinker reviews a Netflix-based Korean zombie drama period piece, which is really rather good:

And he explains why very little is likely to change at the House of the Devil Mouse, now that Queen Karen Kennedy might kind of sort of perhaps maybe just about be on her way out:


Reading Too Much Into Things

Your Science is F***ing Weird moment of the week is from The Male Brain, and looks at how we might actually go about making a real holodeck – y’know, like in Star Trek:

3D simulated environments play a critical role in Embodied AI, but their creation requires expertise and extensive manual effort, restricting their diversity and scope. To mitigate this limitation, we present Holodeck, a system that generates 3D environments to match a user-supplied prompt fully automatedly. Holodeck can generate diverse scenes, e.g., arcades, spas, and museums, adjust the designs for styles, and can capture the semantics of complex queries such as “apartment for a researcher with a cat” and “office of a professor who is a fan of Star Wars”. Holodeck leverages a large language model (i.e., GPT-4) for common sense knowledge about what the scene might look like and uses a large collection of 3D assets from Objaverse to populate the scene with diverse objects. To address the challenge of positioning objects correctly, we prompt GPT-4 to generate spatial relational constraints between objects and then optimize the layout to satisfy those constraints. Our large-scale human evaluation shows that annotators prefer Holodeck over manually designed procedural baselines in residential scenes and that Holodeck can produce high-quality outputs for diverse scene types. We also demonstrate an exciting application of Holodeck in Embodied AI, training agents to navigate in novel scenes like music rooms and daycares without human-constructed data, which is a significant step forward in developing general-purpose embodied agents.

That would be quite epic if it ever actually happens.

Another one from TMB as well, about the identity of a 2,200-year-old skeleton found in a rather mysterious tomb:

Archaeologists in Italy were ecstatic last year after discovering a 2,200-year-old tomb decorated with stunning murals, including paintings of the three-headed hellhound, Cerberus, and of ichthyocentaurs — sea centaurs with the head and torso of a human, the front legs of a horse, and the tail of a fish.

Now, archaeologists have analyzed more of the burial, known as the Tomb of Cerberus, in Giugliano, which is near an ancient necropolis from Roman times. These excavations have revealed the skeleton of an individual who was covered in a shroud and surrounded by various grave goods, including jars of ointment and a strigil, a Roman personal hygiene tool used to scrape off dirt, perspiration and oil before a person bathed.

The deceased, who was in an “excellent state of preservation,” according to a translated statement from the Italian Ministry of Culture, had been buried on their back. It appears that the “particular climatic conditions of the funerary chamber” had mineralized the shroud, according to the statement.

Researchers are collaborating across fields — including archaeology, chemistry, paleobotany and anthropology — to learn more about the individual, who was possibly the “progenitor of the family for which the mausoleum was built,” according to the statement. The interdisciplinary team plans to study the shroud to see if they can determine where its yarn was manufactured.

Meanwhile, ancient pollen samples from the tomb suggest the deceased was treated with creams containing absinthe, as well as Chenopodium, a genus of herbaceous, flowering plants also called goosefoot, according to the statement.


Your long read of the week is a lengthy one from F. Roger Devlin, reviewing Stephen Baskerville’s book about who lost America, and how it happened:

Since the early months of 2020, what Stephen Baskerville fittingly describes as “a junta of amateurish, semi-adolescent ideologues” has been able to seize control of America while millions opposed to them were “forced to sit by, virtually helpless.” In rapid succession we witnessed a manufactured epidemic accompanied by demands for compliance with absurd response measures, orchestrated rioting in America’s larger cities, government-led censorship of the internet, the elimination of electoral safeguards and a stolen election, mass incarceration of citizens who protested, staged trials of opposition politicians and their supporters, the abolition of the nation’s border controls, and a reckless response to the Ukrainian crisis that risks plunging us into nuclear war. It is the closest thing to a revolution this country has witnessed since the radical phase of reconstruction.

Some good accounts of these events have already been written, but Baskerville claims his new book is the first to try to explain why they occurred—or more precisely, why they were not prevented. For the motives of those who carried out the coup are less important than the inability of wiser men to stop them.

The author begins from what he calls the Iron Law of Washington: People who are paid to solve problems acquire a vested interest in perpetuating the problems they are paid to solve. In other words, ineffectiveness is a consequence of the perverse incentives created by professionalization: “We are now experiencing the culmination of the long tragedy of Americans delegating and abdicating their civic responsibilities to a professional political class.”

Most efforts to influence policy are now the business of “public interest” lobbying firms staffed mainly by attorneys. The resulting mindset is typified by conservative columnist Rod Dreher; after bemoaning the decline of religious freedom, he exhorts his readers: “We have to fight!” But how does he suggest we do this? “If you aren’t donating to the Becket Fund and/or the Alliance Defending Freedom, please consider it.” Citizenship now means writing a check to a bunch of lawyers.


Linkage is good for you:

And some more from Dawn Pine:


MUH RUSHIAN KAHLOOOOOOOZHUN!!!

The Neo-Tsar gives a VERY firm opinion about how to deal with the Banderites, now that they have been stupid and insane enough to invade sovereign and indisputably Russian territory:

Also, via The Male Brain, here is a short clip about all of The Putin’s alleged wives/lovers/mistresses:

Of those 5, only 1 and 3 have any sort of basis in fact, as far as I am aware. He was indisputably married to Lyudmila, and he does have two daughters with her – both of whom, for various reasons, stay out of the political limelight, and one of whom is a professor of mathematics, I believe.

The third lady, Alina Kabayeva, has long been rumoured to be The Putin’s secret wife, and mother of his other children. Most Russians that I know, openly acknowledge this.

The others are far more speculative, and in my view, rather unlikely. However, the pattern involved here is very clear – The Putin has EXCELLENT (and somewhat consistent) taste in women. He also prefers strongly to keep his romantic attachments a secret, thereby cultivating an air of both mystery and masculinity about him that goes down very well in Russian culture.

If ever you wanted firm confirmation that the Neo-Tsar is a Sigma male – there you are.


HALO Nation

Slayergod Remy aka MintBlitz does his thing while explaining why Bungie is totally screwed:

Keep in mind, Bungie isn’t in charge of HALO any longer. Microsoft is, and has been since about 2011. But Bungie has not done very much better – does anyone remember Destiny, or Destiny 2?

Also, the content updates for the latest season of HALO Infinite look great, but are they really useful?


BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!!

Here is a superb and very important one from Scholar’s Lore about the very important “War in Heaven”, that literally defined the current WH40K universe:


Oh No! Anyway…

Wazzocks gonna wazzock:


Comedy Hour

One from Dawn Pine:


Meme Warfare

We start with the usual dank memes from Dawn Pine:

Wrong. 2YK cost way more money
Reminder: He died afterwards
New Normal maybe
Sounds about right
Dude has a future
More like 3.2%
Can totally confirm
Makes sense
Been there
“And stay there!”
The latter
And with good reason
It’s a status, but not a “relationship status”
THAT MOVIE WAS AWESOME!
YES!
Good times
Good advice
They don’t need him anymore
Good call
Second that
MAGA!
Expect more
Humility required
Good question
Can’t relate, but know a few people that can
Why are you texting a 3???
And Obama, and Kamala. We can go on.
Quadruple facepalm
You go girl!
Good luck
“out with the old in with the new”
Let’s wait for the debate
THAT IS A GOOD ONE
Can’t relate, but banged at least one chick with that type of brain
This time it was the man
OR “Lack of interest”
Mental note: Take interest in your kids interest
Fact checked: It is from 3 years ago and the original article disappeared
Can confirm
“UK police on their way to arrest a Facebook mum for posting a meme”
Requires Excel and MS-Project training
Gen-X joke
Bro, we are still in 2024

And now, as LRFotS RobertW would say:


Animal Planet

Your aminules are adorkable moment of the week:

And also your animals are absolute DICKS moment of the week, to balance things out:


Those Who Are About to Make Gains…

Gym beast props this week go to Austin Perkins:


Ass-Kicking of the Eight Limbs


They See Me Rollin’…


Palate Cleansers

Axe Me Anything

Knives Out

Drumlines

MOAR DAKKA!!!

Mighty Wings

Jump-Starts

Gingervitis Injections


Livin’ in the Land of the Metal Gods

Also Einstein: “I fear that someday people will post my pic on the Internet with bogus made-up quotations in Comic Sans font”

Rock Out With Your Glock Out


Thot Shots

And finally, we get to the Instathots for this week. Seeing as how I missed out on last Monday’s instalment, you lucky bastards get a double-header, as it were. First up, we have one supplied by The Male Brain, who goes by the name of Luana Alonso, age 20 or so from Paraguay, who is (or was) a swimmist of some kind.

She made headlines recently at the Paris Laff-A-Lympics by getting herself booted out of the Olympic Village, for “inappropriate behaviour”. Shortly thereafter, having failed to hit the time required to make the semi-finals in the fish-pee competition, she announced her retirement from the sport.

Precisely what she did that was “inappropriate”, we leave open to speculation, but we are guessing it was of a somewhat racy nature – given, of course, how much bonking and outright weirdness goes on at the Olympic Village, as is very well known at this point. She would have had to make a pretty damned big mistake to get booted out of a libertine free-for-all like that.

Anyway, here she is:

And second is Kseniya Samoilenko (Ксения Саамойленко), age 30 (apparently), from Mordor. While she looks pretty good for one of those “Rashist Orcs”, as the idiot khokhols like to say (and, given her last name, she probably is at least partly Ukrainian herself), she lives in Dubai full-time, and does… well, no one knows quite what, exactly, but apparently it has something to do with TikTok and “finding yourself”.

In other words – Thot Quotient of over 9,000:

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1 Comment

  1. Robert W

    A triumphant return!

    Reply

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