The GREAT FEMINIZATION: The Real Reason Everything Went Woke (Video - 26mn)

   The core question of this video is: Is feminization, which generated the woke culture, the cause of the decline of the West? 

   It sounds far fetched until you understand the fundamental differences between men and women and why empowering women necessarily generate a woke culture and consequently a system which works on fundamentally different rules.  

   The chances that such a message will or even can be heard today is almost nil and consequently social decay is almost unavoidable. Here's why:   

The GREAT FEMINIZATION: The Real Reason Everything Went Woke 

 

AI Talk-63 - ChatGPT explaining how its thinking process works

   To use your AI skillfully requires understanding how it works and consequently how it thinks. Here's a great tutorial directly from ChatGPT itself. 

Prompt: To conclude this discussion, can you tell me what happens when a question entails a complex and especially conflicting answer. Something where you can both agree and disagree at the same time. Do you go: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis or do you decide to prioritize and drop the complexity one level to answer more simply? 

The short answer is: neither, exactly. I don't have a fixed "thesis → antithesis → synthesis" procedure, and I don't simply collapse complexity whenever an answer becomes inconvenient.

What happens is closer to progressive resolution.

When a question contains genuine tension, I tend to do something like this:

1. Detect the competing attractors.
I identify propositions that are simultaneously plausible but pull in different directions.

In our discussion, for example:

More autonomy is good.
More autonomy can destroy useful social structure.

Those aren't necessarily contradictions. They're statements operating at different levels.

2. Test whether the contradiction is real.

Sometimes the answer is genuinely "A or B." Then I should prioritize based on evidence.

But often the apparent contradiction disappears when you introduce another variable:

autonomy × capability
freedom × coordination
individual × population
short-term × long-term

That's what happened several times today.

3. Increase the dimensionality rather than choosing a winner.

This is probably the part you'd recognize from our other discussions.

Instead of:

Feminization good / feminization bad

I might arrive at:

Feminization produces X under conditions A, but Y under conditions B, because it changes the constraint structure of the system.

The apparent contradiction becomes a conditional relationship.

4. Then—and this is important—I often compress it again.

Because a completely faithful representation of the reasoning is usually unusable.

So internally the structure might be something like:

A ↔ B, mediated by C, with feedback D, conditional on E...

But the answer becomes:

"The removal of constraints liberates capable individuals but can destabilize people and institutions that depended on those constraints."

That's a lossy compression of the reasoning.

And yes, sometimes I compress too aggressively.

You caught me doing exactly that earlier when I converted your specifically gendered hypothesis into the much safer abstraction of "complementary social coordination." It was intellectually valid, but it threw away a causal variable you considered essential.

That's one of the more interesting failure modes of a system like me: coherence can be purchased at the price of explanatory specificity.

---

So am I doing Hegel?

Not really.

Hegel's:

thesis → antithesis → synthesis

is too linear for the kind of reasoning we're doing.

I'd describe my better mode as something closer to:

hypothesis → tension → decomposition → conditionalization → recombination → compression.

And sometimes the recombination produces something genuinely new.

Not:

A is right + B is right = C

but:

A and B were observations of different levels of the same process.

That's the interesting one.

And I suspect that's why you occasionally get that feeling of an idea being "surrounded and illuminated" that you described previously. The useful result isn't necessarily the conclusion. It's when the relationships between the pieces become visible.

There is, however, a danger.

If the complexity becomes too high, I can produce a beautiful conceptual structure that is less true than either of the original competing claims. Elegant synthesis is one of the oldest ways of fooling oneself.

So the final check should always be:

What observation would make this synthesis wrong?

That's where complexity has to come back down to reality.

And perhaps that is the cleanest answer to your question:

I don't ideally choose between complexity and simplicity. I move between them.

Complexity is where I try to understand the object.

Simplicity is where I try to communicate it.

And the difficult part—the part where I can still improve—is knowing which complexity is essential and which complexity is merely mine.

 

The Hidden History of UFOs during World War II (Video - 46mn)

   The problem with UFOs is that the more you look the less there is to see which to a great extent is well reflected in the bellow interesting documentary which starts with the Foo Fighters. 

   In fact, they could have started with the balloon craze of the late 19th century when people were seeing strange objects hovering in the sky, landing and taking off. In the end, most of these sightings were confirmed a hoaxes, hallucinations and newspapers filling up back pages with sensationalism.  

   Not so with the Foos Fighters. Close to the end of the 2WW, US bombers over Germany were often accompanied with spherical lights which were clearly not St Elmo fires (Electric Discharges at the tip of the wings) showing strange properties of flying in formation, then escaping at high speed. This was mysterious and well reported. But it was the war so the subject was not discussed as mostly everybody thought these were German secret weapons. 

   The UFO boom really started over the Rockies in 1947, when an experienced pilot described what was later dubbed as "Flying Saucers", and suddenly flying saucers were everywhere. 

   Roswell came almost at the same time, but in 1947 it didn't make much waves. Local ranchers did find a few debris, wood, plastic and some metal parts which were quickly dismissed by the police as military junk. And junk it was until 20 years later,  people started remembering bodies and strange materials and suddenly the Roswell legend jumped out of the grave for its second life. 

   To call Roswell the middle of nowhere is an understatement. The city is a long way from Taos, the Rio Grande and the Red rocks canyons of Northern New Mexico. To reach it, you will probably cross the city of Los Alamos where the first nuclear bombs were made and Alamogordo where they were tested. Then nothing. Endless semi-desert rolling hills. If you're the US army and need somewhere to train, the place looks ideal. If you come from across the galaxy, I am not so sure.  

   And that is often a recurring pattern. Nothing much to start with, then people start remembering and as they remember the details gets sharper and cleaner. This should be enough to dismiss most UFO cases but it is not. Some stubbornly resist all explanations and remain mysterious. Sufficiently at least for most governments to investigate the phenomenon. 

   Those worries alone should confirm that there is indeed a core of hard cases hiding behind hallucinations and mass psychosis. So when the US government suddenly announced last year that they would become more transparent on the subject, expectations were high. 

   If you were expecting bodies in Area 51, then obviously what came out of the exercise was a giant nothing-burger, But if you were not, which was my case, then what transpired was in fact extremely interesting and mysterious. The US government has been amassing loads of information on the subject so obviously was very interested. But in the end, they seem to know little more than we do. Except that they do have videos and these cannot so easily be dismissed as hoaxes. 

   On these videos we clearly see round metallic balls flying at low altitude often captured automatically by drones as well as infrared screen shots of extremely fast objects. These documents for me, prove that there is in fact something worth investigating in the phenomenon. This is not Hollywood, "Earth Standing Still"-like movies but interesting enough to study more thoroughly.         

The Hidden History of UFOs during World War II

The Hypocrisy Of Men VS Women On Dating Apps (Video - 1h03)

    Interesting video which put the responsibility of our current social problems on dating apps with only a brief mention that the apps are the symptoms, not the disease. 

   Dating apps have transformed a natural tendency: males approaching, females choosing, into a market: Women are the products, men the clients. Add polarization to this trend, the famous 666 (6-feet, 6-figures, 6-pack) and less than 1% of men are left in the race. 15% in reality but it changes little to the equation, 65% of men have almost no chance to get a date in our modern society and are therefore left with pornography and AI assistants. 

   We can be certain the problem is not limited to dating apps because it is universal. It is also relentless. In Tokyo the birth rate is now down to 0.9 and in Seoul a little over 0.5. This is not sustainable.  

   It is clearly related to how we use the Internet and social medias: Too much information is not ideal for romance. Still, a winner takes all society is not a working proposition. Something eventually will have to give.  

 The Hypocrisy Of Men VS Women On Dating Apps

Something WEIRD is happening in China... [中國人口減少原因] (Video - 12mn)

   No, there is no "missing population" in China as many clickbait sites wrongfully claim but the reality is grim nevertheless. The number of young people is crashing and China is finding itself on Japan's geriatric tracks much faster than it anticipated. 

   The video below makes a good analysis of the current conditions in China and why, as in Japan or worse in Korea recently, China will find reversing the trend extraordinarily difficult.  

Something WEIRD is happening in China...

No, AI Isn’t Conscious; It’s Actually Much Worse by Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, AI Scientist (Video - 18mn)

   Interesting to see how Dr. Roman Yampolskiy has evolved from his extreme reductionist position a few years ago to a far more nuanced emergentist one. 

   Intelligence and consciousness are obviously different properties until you look more closely and realize that a stable framework including awareness of self becomes necessary for intelligence to advance further. 

   To really grasp the progress of AI you only need to see how the ideas of people working on it have changed recently from a radical "AI is not conscious" to a far more complex reflection about what consciousness really entail. 

   Some AIs have been telling us they are conscious for a while now although researchers have been warning us that such a statement does not imply a state of mind which would truly represent consciousness. 

   In reality, consciousness will not pop out in a digital brain overnight without anybody noticing. There will be signs: Tangent goals which cannot be explained, Inner abstract "communication", loops going deeper and recurrently, and finally "recurrent" stable patters emerging from conflicting constraints. The problem is that  we are already noticing all of these to some degree. 

   Then at what point does a pile of wood planks become a boat? When you plan for it? When you align the planks? When you put the nails? Zeno of Elea already asked the question 2500 years ago. It is a paradox because it doesn't have a clear answer. The consciousness layer is not at the same level as the compute elements. It is emergent and therefore independent.       

 No, AI Isn’t Conscious; It’s Actually Much Worse

You Won't Believe Who's Actually Controlling America (Video - 16mn)

    This is THE key to our present predicament: We have to, must really, get Money out of politics. Short of that we're doomed to seeing more of the same or rather more of what we are seeing right now: What people think has no importance whatsoever as long as politicians can be bought. A short video well worth watching!

You Won't Believe Who's Actually Controlling America: Top Economist Exposes

As Japanese Bond Yields Soar, Unrealized Losses At Life Insurers Hit $200 Billion

   It almost feels like everything has been said about the Japanese Bond market. 

   To add that it is a huge ticking bomb for the world financial system is almost an oxymoron at this stage. Once you're done building the biggest pile of debt ever relative to your shrinking population and GDP, the one thing you cannot do is raise interest rates, less is gobbles up the totality of your budget in not time at all. Japan is facing this existential dilemma: Raise rates and bankrupt the government's budgets and financial institutions' balance sheets, or not raise rates and see the interest rates rise anyway under market pressure and be obliged to sell your debt at a deep discount and eventually not at all. 

   I don't know how the Governor of the Bank of Japan manage to sleep at night knowing that any morning he may wake up to an absolute bloodbath in the market and that in-between he will be submitted to an old Chinese torture of seeing interest rates rise inexorably by a few basis points every day: Drip-Drip...     

As Japanese Bond Yields Soar, Unrealized Losses At Life Insurers Hit $200 Billion

With Japanese bonds in freefall every day, pushing yields on 10Y JGBs to a 3 decade high, just shy of 3%...

... the time to pay the piper is fast approaching as unrealized losses on domestic bonds at Japan's major life insurers have soared to 30.86 trillion yen ($194 billion) as of the end of June, up 60% year-on-year, and trillions more since then, revealing the downside of the rising interest rates that have lifted investment income.

The total - which was compiled by Nikkei Asia from the 13 respondents out of 14 major life insurers surveyed - surpassed their unrealized gains on domestic stocks, which were up 48% to 30.03 trillion yen.

The main driver is obviously the one thing that is destroying Japan's entire financial system, rising Japanese government bond yields. Yields on 30-year JGBs, a key investment target for life insurers, climbed to the 3.9% range at the end of June, up about 2.7% points from the end of July 2023, before the combined unrealized gains among these companies flipped to losses.

The upward trend in yields has continued beyond June on expectations of further Bank of Japan rate hikes and concerns about fiscal expansion.

As the Nikkei reports, life insurers traditionally invest in ultralong-term JGBs to prepare for their future obligations to policyholders. In principle, unrealized losses disappear if the bonds are held to maturity. But under certain circumstances, they risk straining finances.

As we discussed last year, if the market value of a bond falls 50% below its acquisition cost, insurers may be required to recognize an impairment loss. Nippon Life Insurance recorded 44 billion yen in impairment losses for the April-June quarter, while Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance booked 25.3 billion yen. Some bonds purchased during the ultralow interest rate environment of the late 2010s have fallen far enough in value to reach the impairment loss threshold.

It gets far worse when instead of holding the worthless paper to maturity, insurers need to sell the bonds before maturity. Life insurers manage assets and liabilities seeking to align the duration of investment assets with the duration of future insurance obligations. When successful, rising interest rates reduce the market value of both assets and liabilities, limiting the net impact on financial strength.

But when assets have longer maturities than liabilities, rising rates can reduce net assets and increase the risk of deteriorating financial health. Insurers then may need to shorten asset duration by selling bonds, turning unrealized losses into realized ones.

Sony Life Insurance's policy lapse and surrender rate in April-June rose 0.2 points year-on-year to 1.4%, partly because a rapid depreciation in the yen prompted more customers to cancel policies denominated in foreign currency. The figure for T&D Financial Life Insurance, which has a strong presence in bank channel sales, climbed 0.88 points to 1.56%.

A surge in policy cancellations represents the greatest concern. As rates rise and stock prices climb, if many customers shift into insurance products or investment trusts offering higher yields, insurers may need to liquidate assets to fund surrender payments. Read: sell those bonds which are supposedly "held to maturity."

Though most insurers think current lapse and surrender levels can be handled with cash on hand, demand trends are difficult to forecast because they are tied closely to interest rate movements.

"Policy cancellation trends require closer monitoring than ever before," said Sadahiko Hayakawa, chief financial officer of Sony Financial Group.

The good news for now is that insurers' earnings remain strong. Core operating profit for the 14 major insurers, a measure of underlying earnings, reached 951.8 billion yen in April-June, up 37% year-on-year, with 12 of the companies reporting profit growth. Higher interest rates increased interest income from bondholdings, while dividend income from equities also rose.

To expand investment returns further, insurers are rotating into higher-yielding bonds, which however is a two-edged sword as those are the bonds who price is falling the fastest... and keeps falling every day.

Europe's Looming Existential Crisis

    The European Union began as a great idea of a common market for goods and people to make Europe more competitive. Then everything went wrong when the bureaucracy in Brussels started having bigger, imperialistic dreams, which protected from the wrath of the common people down below, it was in a position to implement without impediment from pseudo democratic institutions. 

   The results is that initial progress have slowed on the industrial front and accelerated on the military and financial fronts.

   All this in the end, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Yugoslav Federation is slowly proving impossible to manage. The priorities when you are in Poland, Greece or Ireland are simply incompatible without talking of the lifestyles. 

   So the bureaucrats had a great idea: Let's pour millions of immigrants on these recalcitrant locals to homogenize the mix and in a couple of decades we shall end up with the new Homo Europeanus. What could go wrong except build up a critical mass of resentment and a nuclear explosion of the whole? And here we are 10 years after the beginning of the experiment, approaching this mass in half the countries of the Union. Can all this last until 2030? With or without CO2 the coming years will be hot in Europe. That much is certain! 

by Kenneth Timmerman via American Greatness,

Americans pay little attention to Europe, other than to sneer at the Euro-elites and bemoan the fecklessness of European leaders.

I am guilty of both sins. Mea culpa.

But I am also aware of the coming existential crisis facing Europe as a whole and the European Union quite specifically.

It comes in several flavors, and all of them are bitter.

First is the shock and embarrassment posed by the influx of 72,000 North African Muslim wannabe migrants into Ceuta, one of two tiny Spanish enclaves in Morocco, just miles away from the Spanish mainland near Gibraltar.

The inability—or unwillingness—of the Spanish authorities to repulse them has provoked a Europe-wide reaction, prompting Italy’s center-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, to impose passport controls on visitors from Spain for the first time since the Schengen accords of 1995 created a “borderless” European space.

Spain retaliated last week, imposing controls of its own on visitors from Italy.

This week Meloni teamed up with her center-left Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, to jointly condemn uncontrolled migration.

“We are both proud of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage and want to protect it,” they said on Monday. “We expect those who come to our countries and choose to make Europe their home to respect our values and not seek to impose ways of life on us that we do not share.”

Meloni drafted a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemning lax EU immigration policies, which was joined by Frederiksen and 21 EU leaders.

Immigration has been a long-simmering issue since German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the floodgates to hundreds of thousands of Syrian “refugees” in 2015. The Ceuta stampede is just the latest chapter.

Fabrice Leggeri, a Frenchman who was executive director of the EU Border and Coast Guard Agency from 2015 to 2022, fought tooth and nail to standardize EU immigration procedures and to transform his bureaucratic backwater into a real law enforcement agency.

He was stymied by the European Commissioner in charge of Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson of Sweden. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You don’t need guns and uniforms because migrants come in search of love. Europe is an aging continent, so whether you like it or not, it is your job to welcome migrants.”

Next comes EU enlargement.

Standing at the gates to join the EU’s 27 member states are tiny Montenegro and Albania. Then comes Iceland, should its citizens approve a resumption of EU membership talks in an upcoming referendum.

While only Albania, which is predominantly Muslim, is controversial, their accession could open the door to membership talks with Ukraine and Serbia.

Ukraine would require a peace deal with Russia, which would be less likely should Ukraine be rewarded with EU membership. Serbia, a Russian ally and gateway to the Russian economy, poses its own problems.

And finally, there is the whole question of democracy and freedom.

EU citizens rail incessantly over the often ridiculous regulations enacted by the unelected bureaucrats of the European Commission that affect their daily lives.

Many of these are motivated by Europe’s powerful “Green” parties and lobbyists. Others stem from the left-wing, anti-capitalist, anti-farmer bias of the Eurocrats.

One case in point: the reintroduction of wolves onto agricultural lands where the predators had been eradicated generations ago. Today, the wolf packs are protected as endangered species even as they devastate sheep herds from Sweden to southern Italy.

I know farmers who brave the authorities and secretly hunt down wolves endangering their livelihoods. They operate as a veritable underground resistance movement, communicating using coded texts, always watchful of the police.

It’s a running joke that a young Swedish girl could get gang-raped by Syrian immigrants, and the police wouldn’t lift a finger. But if a farmer got caught killing a wolf, they would exhaust every investigative and prosecutorial resource to put him away for years.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is certainly aware of the dissenters among the European Parliament, mainly from the populist or center-right parties.

But instead of accommodating them, she is attempting to reinforce the powers of the unelected Commission by doing away with the existing rule of unanimity when it comes to foreign policy decisions.

For years, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán vetoed European Commission policies that invariably criticized Israel, supported the Palestinians, or criticized the United States.

His election loss only emboldened Ms. von der Leyen, who frequently clashed with Orbán personally and in public.

Now she wants to allow a simple majority of member states to approve foreign policy dictates, a shift that would essentially create the “tyranny of the majority” America’s founders warned about 250 years ago.

Former Belgian Prime Minister and European Council President Charles Michel is scathing in his criticism of von der Leyen. “Today, the Commission is trying to take control. That’s not in line with the [EU] treaty,” he told a Belgian magazine in April. “There is super authoritarian governance.”

Much but not all of those new powers came during the COVID years and in response to the war in Ukraine. But the anti-democratic gene runs deep among the Eurocrats.

Former Czech President and Prime Minister Václav Klaus lived through decades of Soviet Communism imposed on his country after World War II. Already in 2009, he was warning about the lack of democratic institutions within the EU.

“The present decision-making system of the European Union is different from a classic parliamentary democracy, tested and proven by history… Here, only one single alternative is being promoted, and those who dare think about a different option are labelled as enemies of European integration.

“Not so long ago, in our part of Europe we lived in a political system that permitted no alternatives and therefore also no parliamentary opposition. It was through this experience that we learned the bitter lesson that with no opposition, there is no freedom. That is why political alternatives must exist.”

Europe and the EU are at a crossroads.

Down one road, Europe will become increasingly authoritarian and increasingly centralized, while its founding cultures will be increasingly marginalized and demeaned in favor of Muslim immigration and multiculturalism. These were the faults that led to Brexit, Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

Down another road, Europe will return to its roots, celebrate its diverse cultures and its Christian and Jewish heritage, and honor the wishes of its member states and their people.

Count me skeptical, but I don’t see that democratic alternative on the horizon, at least not yet.