Forum Log

" Once God is subtracted from life, Man is starved of significance. His life no longer makes sense, and he is stricken by the absurdity of his condition of being born to die between two oblivions. ... man’s appetite for identity and transcendence can be satisified, said the liberals, by the packaging of liberal politics as the higher spiritual purpose of mankind. ... This is the reason these viral cults of feverish zealotry seize the minds of millions in hypnotic cycles of mass hysteria. They are not only partnered with the State - they are the means of the production of belief. ... The liberal system ... is a total system, seeking to reform man within and without, and everything around him. All that was, is and will be is to be recast in the liberal image. It is the attempt to replace reality with a permanent illusion of utopia. ... Under these terms and conditions there is no reality but that of the manufactured consensus. " https://substack.com/home/post/p-177004462

Reader: How difficult is it to build an internal ledger system? My impression is that you are discounting that as an option, but I have no feel for how hard it might be to do. - Fairly difficult. A double-entry ledger system is a complex piece of equipment. Building one requires knowledge of both bookkeeping and software. Maintaining software is costly, and the costs increase with time. Code grows to support many user actions, data pathways, dependency versions, and external APIs. Future changes must attempt to add new capability without breaking an ever-larger number of existing features. The goal of an experienced software developer is to write relatively little code, and for that code be as meaningful as possible. So: When faced with the prospect of learning how to build and maintain a complex component, the experienced developer hesitates, and looks for existing solutions first. I'll keep looking for a while. However, atm, it does seem that I will have to build it myself.

Chuck Prince, Citigroup CEO, 2007: 'As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing. When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated.’ ---- I see that happening in front of my eyes with AI. Companies are developing internal chatbots at great expense; employees are getting CoPilot licences. At the same time, I hardly use it. I hardly see a need for it. Outputs are unreliable, and require so much reviewing you're often quicker writing it yourself. The uses of gen AI, in my professional experience, don’t come close to justifying the investment that’s put into it. And the time invested in compulsory training programmes. But… everyone else is doing it. All the big companies, all the big professional services firms. The music is playing. And we have to dance. And when the music stops playing we will look like idiots.

" In the 1950s, there was a great cult of Progress in the West. We've beaten the Nazis. We've got all these scientific advances. We're going forward out into space. Mankind is being drawn together through communications. Modernity is bringing all sorts of gifts. And the old paradigms don't work. We're having extreme unction in the face of laser surgery. We're having blessings of cars while we're sending people to the moon. This is an easy trap to fall into: to think that because things have changed so much in the immediate, that somehow the realities have changed. " - Charles A. Coulombe is an American author and historian. "Symposia | Ep. 4: Fish With Their Heads On" (00:37:39), The European Conservative YouTube: https://youtu.be/Tnx_830VlMI?

" To act violently to draw out an opponent’s efforts while manoeuvring under cover to destabilize their centre of gravity and resolve the action with minimal confrontation. Making it so an opponent feels intellectually and morally defeated before they are materially defeated. This means conceiving action based on a few basic parameters: what our adversary expects us to do, what we want to achieve, how we make them believe they are in the right, and how we resolve the dilemma of the use of force. It is a constant exercise in Go, the popular and ancient Chinese game cited by Confucius more than 2,500 years ago. " Francisco Gan Pampols on Sun Tzu's recurring idea of "occultation" or the simultaneous undergoing of several actions to disguise one's true purpose in war In 'The Art of War', Sun Tzu (with commentary by the Lieutenant General Francisco Gan Pampols) (2025). Translation is ChatGPT’s & mine.