The solipsistic are so easily distracted…

In the aftermath of the inevitable failure of what one expects to have been Neil Gaiman’s last desperate grasp at relevance, which is to say the flop of GOOD OMENS season 3, it only seems appropriate to release yet another mix of the greatest song in the history of rock music, Vibe Patrol’s Mr Tubcuddle.

There are, of course, already four mixes available to the public; I am partial to the funk groove of the Coraline’s Eyes mix myself. But given the fact that the heavy Transgressions mix which has only been released on UATV was recorded before some of the recent improvements in audio quality, I felt a new mix was required for this solemn occasion.

So I think the musical savageries of Mr Tubcuddle (Never Clean mix) should suit the occasion very nicely indeed, because Mr Tubcuddle will never get clean again, no matter how he scrubs and scrubs. If you ever wondered what pure contempt sounded like, this would be its Form.

Gaiman’s fall from public grace on the basis of his alleged actions illustrates the fundamental problem of the low-status man who dreams of one day achieving high status by hook, by crook, or by methodically transforming the original works of others and convincing everyone that his mediocrity is actually genius. Because no matter what a man’s situational rank might be, he’s never going to be free of the behavioral patterns that were cemented in his psyche in his youth.

And the higher a man’s status, the greater his ability to indulge in the desires formed by those patterns. The higher one rises, the more self-discipline is required.

Other Vibe Patrol mixes:

• Hot Water mix

• Coraline’s Eyes mix

• The Corinthian mix

Donald Trump is widely perceived to be spiraling out of control on Truth Social late at night, but he isn't doing it alone. He’s being indulged by a much younger female aide more than willing to stay by his side all night leading to long-standing rumors of an affair.

According to a new Wall Street Journal report, executive assistant Natalie Harp is the driving force behind many of Trump’s most unhinged and offensive late-night Truth Social rampages.

The 34-year-old former One America News host brings the 79-year-old president stacks of printed posts (often conspiracy theories, racist content, and AI slop), gets his approval, then logs into his account and blasts them out while he should be sleeping.

Harp has unprecedented access to Trump. Senators reportedly text her directly when they can’t reach the president. But her extreme devotion has sparked years of affair rumors inside MAGA circles.

Reports reveal she once went so far as living in the ladies’ locker room at his Bedminster golf club for more than a month just to stay close to him after she was shut out from normal accommodations. Harp has reportedly written gushing letters to Trump saying things like “You are all that matters to me” and that she only wants to bring him “joy.”

While Trump’s inner circle is reportedly fed up with the chaos she helps create, Harp answers to no one except Trump himself. She bypasses the chief of staff and communications team, feeding the president’s worst impulses at all hours of the night.

Since taking office, Trump has posted a staggering 8,800 times, with frequent all-night posting binges that suggest he’s barely sleeping.

So here we have an ill-rested, elderly president obsessively rage-posting into the early morning hours, allegedly enabled and coddled by a young, clearly smitten aide who is frequently in his private quarters at all hours, a privilege afforded no other staff member.

Granted, we always have to take it with a grain of salt when it’s coming from the similarly deranged Democrats, but in general, it checks out with the observable evidence. The blonde has a definite case of crazyface; that expression fairly shouts “run if you value your life” at you.

And Alphas are uniquely vulnerable to the combination of youth, attractiveness, and flattery. As those who are aging know, we always see ourselves more as the person that we used to be rather than the person that we are. So the Alpha, who has been used to people being impressed by him and catering to him his entire life, tends to not have a very refined ability to see through those who are flattering him and using him for their own purposes, whatever they might be.

Hence the expression: there is no fool like an old fool.

There is a scene from an old 90’s television show, Dawson’s Creek, that clearly demonstrates the way in which lower-status men infuriate higher-status men and generate contempt for themselves without ever even realizing that they are doing so. In the scene, the son has gone fishing with his father, who is an experienced fisherman.

FATHER: Where's the new pole?

SON: On the other side. What? It doesn't matter what side the pole's on.

FATHER: This is what I mean, Pacey. It's the same thing with you over and over again.
The simplest instructions in the world and you find any excuse not to follow them. How do you expect me to give you more responsibility if you can't even adhere to the most rudimentary directions? When I speak, you listen. Don't think, just do! Please! I'm not asking that much!

The son has no idea that what he has done is both wrong as well as disappointing, and also fails to realize that he has communicated four things to his father in that one response.

1. He has no idea what’s going on. He literally doesn’t understand the situation or what his father is doing.

2. He is incompetent and incapable of proactive action.

3. He prioritizes his own understanding of the situation over both his father’s instructions and the situation itself.

4. He has challenged the natural hierarchy of the correct father-son relationship as well as the practical hierarchy of the correct informed-uninformed relationship.

This is both infuriating and disappointing for the father. He wants his son to be competent and respectful. Instead, the son demonstrates that he is a) clueless, b) incompetent, c) narcissistic, and d) rebellious.

What the father really wanted was for the son to have anticipated what was needed in the situation. If the son had already had the other pole ready in case the old one failed, that would have demonstrated understanding and competence, as well as an ability to be proactive, and the father wouldn’t have even had to give him any instructions at all. But the father didn’t expect the ideal, instead, his expectations were reasonable and limited based on experience. He was willing to settle for the son doing what he was told, because he knew that his son didn’t understand the situation or what it required. But the son couldn’t even manage to do that.

Now let’s look at how this dynamic plays out on a daily basis. Yesterday, I posted 10 rules for operating in a corporate business environment. To be honest, I was expecting more pushback than I got, but this one will serve as a useful example even though it was mild and relatively inoffensive.

This is all true, but I do have to hedge slightly on #6. When doing tech support for end users I’ve had to learn to predict and determine the situation to figure out what they wanted to know vs what they literally asked, rather than just answer their technically wrong question.

This may or may not be different to the situation the Vox is describing, but I know I had almost the opposite problem in wanting to delay and deflect based on the dialectic or literal question, Delta style, rather than answering what they really wanted to know.

That said, I have been on the other side and wanted someone to answer the f-ing question I asked. Vox definitely is not wrong. I’m sure there’s some sort of dynamic to apply here that I’m missing.

It’s been 20 years so I don’t have any good specific examples.

I'm talking about people who ask what's wrong with the "cupholder" on their computers. You literally can't answer that correctly without saying "nothing is wrong" because there is no cupholder, or maybe "we don't support cupholders," when you know full well they're talking about some actual part that you do support. And then you have an angry customer. So yes, you do have to figure out what they actually mean and not what they say sometimes, if you can.

I may be misremembering. You have to interpret their technically incorrect *answers/statements* to *your* technical questions they don't understand. Basically they never answer the effing question you asked and *then* you have to interpret what they mean. That's where I was getting tripped up. You do have to anticipate, but not in the way I was thinking. Although sometimes their questions are retarded so you may have to answer "yes, but..." or "no, but..." or "i don't know, but let me find out," while still remembering to keep explanations to a minimum. Happens a lot with tech support/customer service.

To which someone else responded:

You’re annoying as hell. Shut up and follow the advice!

And it is annoying, even in an environment like this one where absolutely nothing is at stake and we’re all generally just trying to figure things out. Imagine how much more annoying a response like this would be, and how much less one would want the commenter on one’s team, if there were time, money, jobs, and professional reputations on the line?

Now let’s think about what’s going on here. Sir Hamster, in response to someone else, summed it up well:

The Gamma nitpicks the straightforward rules to find imagined problems.

But this is where diverse elements can come into play. Delta Narcissism, Gamma Smart Boy Syndrome, and Gamma dishonesty all tend to lead toward the same behavior, which is not doing as was clearly instructed.

DELTA: I don’t understand the point so I cannot excel at the task, therefore I will not do as I was told.

GAMMA: I can imagine a scenario where following instructions could, in theory, lead to undesired results, therefore I will not do as I was told.

Needless to say, this is not how to convince higher-status men to think well of you. To the contrary, it tends to convince them that you are useless and unnecessary.

1. Answer the fucking question.

2. Do not explain anything to anyone unless asked for an explanation.

3. Always. Do. Your. Job.

4. Never forget that your job is not the sole purpose of the organization.

5. Only give one instruction at a time, in person, on the phone, or via email.

6. Always answer the question that was actually asked, not the question you anticipated, the question you think should have been asked, or the question you suspect the answer will provoke.

7. Management consists of managing the schedules of those who report to you.

8. Never hide information from those with decision-making authority. If they make a fully-informed mistake, it’s on them. If they make a mistake because you hid information from them, it’s on you.

9. No one cares about your opinion.

10. Don’t expect pats on the back or praise, and remember that your main reason for being there because they give you money for it.

A recent discussion of the problem of how young women have perceived college and career as the higher-status path for them in comparison with marriage and motherhood went so far off the rails that it was as comical as it was predictable. One gentleman even resorted to an AI to get the machine perspective on it.

Would openly mocking women for going into debt to get useless basket-weaving degrees and getting make-work adult daycare jobs that are going to be replaced by AI create intrigue in women and make the man come across as a bad boy?

(thought for 5s)

No, openly mocking women this way would rarely crate genuine intrigue or “bad boy” appeal for most women. It would more likely come across as bitter, condescending, or low-status resentment than confident, edgy dominance.

First, let me point out the absurdity of asking an AI about female behavior. The only thing more likely to produce a false and misleading take would be asking women about it. Remember, AIs are trained on predominantly Gamma behavior, so their advice about women is predictably terrible.

Second, the entire context of the discussion was the need to convince young women that prioritizing university degrees and professional careers is a mistake due to three important factors:

1. Birth rates are sub-replacement level across the entire developed world.

2. University degrees require an astronomical level of debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

3. The vast majority of white collar corporate jobs that women with college credentials presently hold are the very jobs that are a) the least productive, b) the least necessary, and c) the most likely to be replaced by AI in the near future.

Now these are very difficult points to dispute, but since the average young girl of 16-18 knows nothing about the corporate world, has time-preferences measured in nanoseconds, and has not devoted any thought whatsoever to the practical realities of the future objectives that have been implanted in her mind by her parents, her peers, her teachers, and social media since the age of five, the dialectical approach of pointing out the obvious is going to bounce right off her like a rubber bullet bouncing off Superman’s chest.

Hence the suggestion of the rhetorical approach, which has reliably proven to be the most effective method of changing female perspectives. And when someone pointed out that young women were likely to find the rhetorical argument unconvincing and contentious when presented by an average or low-status man, I simply observed that his concerns about presenting an argument that would be seen as contentious were conflict-avoidant, tended to code as low-status cowardice, and that he’d be better off taking the chance of being seen as a bad boy for his consensus-violating opinion than meekly refraining from taking the risk of upsetting a college-bound young woman dreaming of a high-flying career of wearing pencil skirts while making Powerpoint slides for high-status men in suits.

None of this had anything to do with a man trying to elevate his own status this way. The objective was to figure out how to communicate a dialectical point in a rhetorical manner capable of inverting the perceptions of young women regarding their future prospects. It’s really remarkable how, no matter what the topic or context, low-status men manage to somehow make it all about their own potential self-improvement.

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Mothers are the most important people on the planet.

This isn’t to denigrate fathers. I have a father. I know fathers. I am, as it happens, a father. And I am fully aware of all the many things that demonstrate the vital importance of fathers to their families, to society, and to civilization.

But without mothers, none of that matters. Consider the observation of one young woman on social media.

They wonder why we don’t have enough babies… a friend is about to quit work because her colleagues are socially punishing her for having a baby. Some are moms as well.

I fully support her quitting, if only they can afford it. And obviously it is a problem for a young women to join the workforce then go on maternity leave. But these older moms with half-grown kids are bullying her, pretty much saying she shouldn’t have had her baby, she’s too young, she should be working, bla bla bla.

Older working moms should be making young women want to stay home with the babies, but by encouragement, not bullying.

Excess education, feminism, contraception, social pressure, and a whole host of other evils have demoralized young women and lowered the fertility rates to sub-replacement levels everywhere from Asia to Scandinavia.

Which is why, on this Mother’s Day in the Year of our Lord 2026, it is a good idea to make a mental note to encourage every young girl, and every young woman, of your acquaintance to prioritize marriage and motherhood rather than college and career.

Make no apologies for it, because you are not merely saving humanity, you may be saving her spirit and her sanity by standing up for what she truly wants, and what she truly needs, despite the relentless brainwashing to the contrary to which she’s been subjected for most of her life.

Happy Mother’s Day

What’s not that funny is the way that MAiD, which is Canada’s cute acronym for having the state legally murder people, has become the fifth most common cause of death in Canada, accounting for 4.7% of all deaths in the country as of 2023. Since its legalization in 2016, over 60,000 Canadians have undergone euthanasia, with a significant increase in cases each year. A total of 16,499 Canadians were put to death by MAiD in 2024.

Apparently Hitler just needed a better marketing program.

Women will not be able to solve the problem of women choosing against marriage and children. Even when they recognize the problem, they are too solipsistic to accept what the statistics very strongly indicate is the solution:

By all available data—including data from studies presented by Miller herself—“most” young women do not want to have children. Most women will not “probably” have babies by age 45. Meanwhile, as the birth rate hits all-time lows, the left continues to glorify childlessness.

So what do we do?

For one, dump the trad-wife messaging. While the right’s reaction to the left’s anti-natalism is understandable, no woman wants to feel as if her sole purpose on this planet is to bear children—especially not in a society that places so much value on professional achievement. Women who were already raised with traditional values, furthermore, gain nothing from having their views reinforced, and college-educated women unsure about having children only drift farther to the left after seeing women with few intellectual auspices and limited ambitions laud the stay-at-home mom lifestyle. After all, it is college-educated women who are having the fewest number of kids, and it is college-educated women who need the most persuading.

The answer, then, is to propose a middle ground: a woman can derive fulfillment both from her career and her family. If anything, we need more college-educated women raising the next generation of change-makers because these women are best equipped to instill the values of ambition, intellectual achievement, and professional success in their own children. The problem, however, is that our college system promotes lopsided messaging, accounting for the fact that a greater number of men than women say they want to have children in the future. While men are told that they must achieve professional success in order to provide for their families, women are told that professional success and motherhood are at odds with one another. In their early twenties, furthermore, women are repeatedly encouraged to focus on their careers and to not worry about marriage and children (I cannot tell you, for instance, how many times I heard such platitudes from friends and family members after each of my failed college relationships); as a result, by the time these women would otherwise be ready—in a more sane society, at least—to plan for motherhood, they have no marriage prospects and have never once thought about what their lives would look like with kids and a family. It’s no wonder that such a life-altering decision will feel uncomfortable: the topic of childbirth is seldom broached positively to women—not until it is often too late, that is.

One possible solution is to stop with the “focus on work and school” messaging—or at least to dial it back a notch. Professional success is not mutually exclusive with having children, and if we introduced the idea of motherhood earlier, it would feel far less daunting by the time many women are ready to settle down. Yes, women should focus on work and school—but that does not mean that relationships, marriage, and family should take a backseat. It is not revolutionary knowledge that the two can coexist harmoniously.

The cultural angle cannot be the solution because the situation is cross-cultural, indeed, it may well be completely trans-cultural. The fact of the matter is that in every society where the average female education exceeds eight years, the birth rate drops below replacement level.

And since both societies and civilizations depend upon women being willing to become wives and mothers, the logic dictates that any society that wishes to survive to the end of the 21st century will have to seriously restrict female education beyond the replacement-level line.

Years ago, I was falsely accused of supporting the Taliban’s attack on the young champion of female education, Nobel Peace prize winner Malala Yousafzai. The accusation was false because I did not support the attack, I merely pointed out a statement that the attack was “irrational” was incorrect because the Taliban’s attempt to silence her was perfectly rational given their rejection of Western liberalism and their objective of defending their traditional society.

Now, somewhat against my expectations, it appears that the Taliban’s attempt to silence advocates of female education were not only rational, but that their concerns about the iniquitous effects of that education are not unfounded. This doesn’t justify throwing acid on anyone, but it does mean that the Taliban’s society is, ironically, much more likely to survive over time than the more-educated societies that consider it backward.

Progressives and feminists like to imagine that science will somehow rescue women from the demands of biology, but perhaps they should think more deeply about the additional consequences of those possibilities, for as we’ve seen with contraception and so-called emancipation, the unanticipated consequences of change may be far worse than what was believed to be the original problem.

For example, sex slavery is already a tremendous problem around the world, as the primary value of the victims is seen solely in the sexual services they can provide. So, contemplate what is likely to happen to the entire female sex if they are no longer required for the continued survival of the species?

Many years ago, I wrote a mildly notorious column called “The Brothel or the Burqah?” I may have been too optimistic there, as over an even longer timeframe, the range of viable choices would appear to be Elementary Education, Extinction, or Sex Slavery.

The real question, therefore, is if liberal democracy and universal suffrage are capable of surviving true women’s liberation when women vote for societal extinction.

The mainstream media is now concerned about the way in which young men are responding rationally to the incentives that young women have established in the dating market, which is ironic considering that the mainstream media is one of the parties responsible for creating those incentives in the first place with its decades-long campaign against masculinity.

Men and boys of all ages are increasingly focusing on appearance and body image, a domain that has long been associated with women. But doctors worry that this looksmaxxing trend, as it’s known on social media, is leading to body-image issues, eating disorders and sometimes extreme and dangerous measures, such as bone smashing.

“If you’ve been online at all you’ve seen it,” says Dr. Hina Talib, of the trend where adolescent boys and young men hit their faces with hammers or other blunt objects with the aim of achieving a defined jaw line.

“It’s really concerning,” adds Talib, the director of adolescent medicine and co-director of pediatrics at Atria Health Institute in New York City. “In my community as an adolescent medicine specialist we are hearing from parents that they are discovering that their children are engaging in similar dangerous behaviors.”

Talib says other concerning behaviors include weight bets, where adolescents place bets on how much they weigh or how much they can gain or lose, and body checking, where they obsessively check their abdominal muscles. “This is not just an online viral trend that we are consuming, it is something that we are actually hearing and seeing from our young people,” she says.

My own high-school senior, hearing I was writing about looksmaxxing, started rambling on about a classmate who spent days ranking boys in their school as low-, mid- and high-tier normies based on their facial features.

It’s mildly amusing to see this article just the day after I forwarded a meme to Spacebunny, which showed a very muscular middle-aged man reluctantly hitting the gym with the words “when you don’t feel like working out today but you’re bald and your wife is a 10/10” underneath.

Women decide if they are sexually attracted to a man in three seconds or less. That’s it. That’s all the time you’ve got. And not only that, but women do not find abstract concepts such as loyalty and goodness to be attractive nor are they attracted to more complicated elements such as intelligence or potential.

Women are attracted to four things.

1. Looks

2. Fame

3. Vibe/Aura

4. Money

There is very little a young man can do about items 2, 3, or 4. He can try to fake one of them, especially 4 in the very short term with the help of social media, but it’s nearly impossible to pull off any of the three over even a short period of time like a week. And each of these things need to be solidly established before ever meeting the woman; once a woman has an initial impression of a man it is very, very, very difficult for her to adjust it for better or for worse, and it’s much easier for her to lose attraction to a man than develop it.

Hence looksmaxxing. It’s the right strategy for every unattached young man. Frankly, it’s not a terrible idea for even old married men, regardless of how threatening his wife or other women his age might find it and try to mock it.

Now, obviously I mean looksmaxxing in a healthy and viable manner by working out, eating right, and paying attention to whatever the current styles favored by the women in the preferred demographic might be, not doing retarded things like hitting yourself in the face with an axe or whatever ridiculous influencer nonsense is floating around Tik-Tok this week.

Excellence is the gift a young man gives to himself. Character is the gift he gives to society. Attractiveness is the public face he presents to the opposite sex. Never confuse these three very different things.

Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire. There is nary a woman on the planet who is attracted to him. There are tens of thousands of fine men of absolutely impeccable character, and the sum total of women attracted to those men for that particular quality is zero.

Consider this. I solved the Agrippan Trilemma and conclusively disproved both natural selection and neutral theory, three intellectual feats that are not only world-class, but historic-class. And none of that makes me one iota more attractive to one single woman on the planet, as I’m sure the female readers here can uniformly confirm. In fact, it’s probably disattractional, in the same way that a woman who genuinely prefers tall men is not even remotely drawn toward a nine-foot-tall circus freak.

So I’m not saying don’t pursue excellence or to refrain from developing moral character, I’m simply saying don’t commit the category error of thinking that doing so has anything whatsoever to do with attracting women.

I had a recent epiphany regarding why it’s absolutely futile to expect Deltas to be able to manage other Deltas effectively. It’s not about managerial competence, or even Delta narcissism, but rather, communication patterns.

Consider two things we know about Deltas:

1. Deltas like to explain what they’re doing, how things should be done, and why they’re being done the way they’re done.

2. Delta Task Overide.

Now consider what is inevitably going to happen when we put those two things together and one Delta is giving instructions to a second Delta. Assume that they’re both good, competent men and have no personal agendas conflicting with their responsibilities or the task at hand.

The first Delta is going to tell the second Delta what to do. Then he’s going to tell him anywhere between three and five more things as part of his explanation for why it’s being done and justifying the instruction.

The second Delta is going to hear his task as being whatever the final element of the explanation is. If it happens to coincide with the original instruction, everything will turn out to be fine. But if it happens to somehow negate or otherwise cancel out the original instruction, he’s not going to follow the original instruction. Instead, he’s going to apply his interpretation of what he undertood to be the final instruction.

This underlines something I am constantly telling everyone, men and women alike: STOP EXPLAINING!

Don’t ever explain anything when no explanation has been requested. Don’t ever try to fix a problem that you don’t know for a fact exists, because the nature of the Delta Task Override is such that every time you do so, you run the very real risk of creating a problem when one never existed in the first place.

Let the word “because” become a silent period.

Because if you don’t, all that people are going to hear is what comes after it.

One of the biggest lies that Hollywood ever told young men was that their intentions, their motivations, their objectives, and the intensity of their own feelings would somehow influence the level of attraction a young woman would feel toward them. This isn’t true, it was never true, and it was well-known to be untrue 100 years ago. Even in Japan.

This morning, I released the sixth book in a century-old Japanese adventure-romance series that I translated into English for the first time. Naruto Hicho, or The Secret Scrolls of Naruto, is an excellent serial that was written for the Osaka Mainichi by Eiji Yoshikawa. The books are quite rightly compared to the works of Alexandre Dumas, who was a major influence on Yoshikawa, and they’re very much worth reading even if you couldn’t care less about Japanese literature. Women, in particular, will adore the character of Otsuna of the Backward Glance, who is one of the greatest heroines ever written in world literature.

But that’s just some perspective on something I noticed while putting the final touches on the translation this weekend. Throughout the book, a rather sketchy character by the name of Tabikawa Shūma is both in league with the villains in the employ of the lord of Awa, who is the secret leader of an incipient revolt against the Tokugawa shogunate, and obsessed with a beautiful, but fragile young noblewoman by the name of Ochie.

Ochie, however, is in love with an itinerant swordsman named Gennojō who is banished because their relationship is not acceptable. In the sixth book, the author orchestrates a means of getting her on the scene by arranging for her kidnapping, which is accomplished by telling her that Gennojō is waiting for her.

What’s interesting is the way this century-old passage demonstrates the way in which a woman will quite literally ruin herself and her prospects for a man to whom she is particularly attracted, and also disdain a man who is not only capable of providing well for her, but is eager to do so.

The lesson, therefore, is that a man should never waste any time at all in attempting to attract, or attempting to prove himself, to any one particular woman. The work all has to be done before the initial meeting takes place. If she is attracted, she will literally throw everything away to be with you. And if she is not, then there is nothing you can do that will generate attraction from nothing; don’t confuse renting her attention with generating genuine attraction.

From THE NARUTO SCROLL:

“Ochie-dono.”

“Yes.”

“I am a Fuke priest of the Kichiku school, living in a monastery at Yamashina. A man called Norizuki Gennojō has recently come to our monastery. You will see for yourself when you meet him, but he and I are on close terms. He asked me, as a fellow of his order, to come to you.” The man spoke as though thinking aloud, casually, as if to himself.

“Then...” Without waiting to hear the rest, her fear transformed into something else entirely. She snatched clothing from the tangled bedding box, tied her sash, and opened the shutter again before stepping gingerly onto the bamboo veranda:

“He is waiting for you. Gennojō. He wants very much to see you.”

The shadow across the fence beckoned again, as before.

It was as if Gennojō himself were standing there. She thrust her feet into the first pair of straw sandals she found and stepped toward the darkness without a thought in her head.

She pushed through the wicker gate and out into the garden. On the edge of the riverbed a komusō in a deep basket hat was walking briskly ahead, not looking back.

“If he truly had business with me, would he not wait?” A flicker of doubt crossed her mind and she stopped. The komusō’s shadow spun around.

“Quickly.”

A wave of the hand, beckoning her on.

“Wait, please...”

As though pulled on an invisible thread, Ochie ran after him without thinking. Once she had committed herself to the darkness, the darkness lost its terror.

She ran as though she had no choice but to follow, breathless, calling after the shadow:

“Gennojō-sama... where is Gennojō-sama?”

“Not yet. Not yet. Not yet!”

The komusō lengthened his stride. From the riverbed path he crossed the temporary bridge at Sanbon-bashi and headed east. As soon as the town houses thinned, the lonely path along the Okazaki embankment began, and here and there among the scrub and thickets the shapes of makeshift hovels appeared. Ochie’s breath was failing.

“Please, wait! Please!”

Half sobbing, she caught at the komusō’s sleeve.

“What is it?”

The voice turned cold and sharp without warning.

“Walk, and walk quickly. Then I will take you to the man you love.”

“The dew has soaked my sandals. The thong is coming loose.”

“Then go barefoot.”

“Is the monastery at Yamashina still very far from here?”

“A fair distance.”

He pointed, with contemptuous indifference, toward the black ridge behind Kōdaiji temple.

“Think of it as the far side of that mountain.”

“And when I arrive at the Fuke monastery there, Gennojō-sama will be waiting for me?”

“Gennojō?”

The komusō gave a strange, throttled laugh.

“Well, well. He was right about one thing: his precious Ochie-sama is as guileless as a child. Tricking her is hardly any sport at all.”

Those pure, bewildered eyes could not grasp what was being mocked.

The man in the komusō’s borrowed garb dropped his pretense at last.

“A Fuke monastery in Yamashina? Who told you that? Gennojō waiting for you somewhere nearby? What a thought. As if that man would be wandering around a place like this.”

“What?”

Ochie recoiled as though doused in cold water.

Deceived. The knowledge came, and with it the impulse to flee; but her wrist was already locked in the man’s grip.

“First of all, is there even a komusō temple in Yamashina? You really are the most charming little doll.”

“Then you... you are...” Struggling to pry his fingers away one by one, she twisted in his grasp. “What you said before, that Gennojō-sama had asked you to come: that was a lie to lure me out?”

“Obviously.”

“No! Let go of me!”

“Careful, my lady. I will break your wrist. It is far too late to run.”

“Villain! You would use force against... let go! Let go of me!”

“Nobody is using force. I cannot bring you to Gennojō, it is true, but there is a man who has loved you more devotedly than anyone since your Edo days. I have gone to considerable trouble to arrange a meeting. That is all.”

“I do not know him! Release me!”

She reached for her sash. The man watched with cold amusement. Her one small dagger had been snatched from her the instant he seized her wrist and thrown away somewhere in the dark behind them.

When she understood the helplessness of a small bird in the talons of a hawk, a wave of bitter remorse washed over her. She had left the villa in the dead of night, without a word to anyone, following a stranger into the dark. She could neither weep nor cry out.

“Beyond here are only the rice paddies of Okazaki. The odd Nanzenji monk and a few hovels, nothing more. Shout all you please; no one will hear. It would be more profitable to learn why I beckoned you out here. Would you not agree, Ochie-dono?”

“I beg you. I beseech you. Please, let me return to the villa. To leave without Sakyōnosuke-sama’s or Kōzan-sama’s knowledge... I cannot answer for it!”

She cried out from the honest depths of her heart.

The man paid no attention to her pleas.

“All in good time. Leave such worries to the man in question,” he said, twisting her words to his own meaning.

“As I told you, the man who intends to claim you has performed a signal service for the Tokugawa house and will soon return to Edo in triumph. A stipend of four or five thousand koku at the least, and an appointment as head of the Sasanoma guard: these are waiting for him upon his return. At the same time, he means to marry you and take up residence in the Sumi mansion on Surugadai, restored to greater glory than before. That is his design.”

A thin smile.

“But perhaps none of this means much to you without a name. Very well. The man is Tabikawa Shūma. And I? I am a former colleague from the old Surugadai days, one of the same company of bannermen. An old friend, you might say, though I cannot match him with a sword.”

Deltaman writes in to point out that the fact women are rejecting low-status men on social media does not mean that the Alphas of the world are necessarily cleaning up any more comprehensively than before.

Dating applications have not engineered a hyper-promiscuous elite of men who hoard physical sexual access; instead, they have manufactured a severe market distortion. By providing an illusion of limitless upward mobility, these platforms artificially inflate expectations and effectively price average women out of the dating pool, despite the fact that top-tier men are bound by the logistical and biological limits of their own sexual bandwidth.

The resulting macro-level decline in sexual frequency offers zero solace to the average man. Because digital platforms operate on severely skewed gender ratios—often three-to-one or worse—the vast majority of men are structurally guaranteed to fail. Furthermore, the significantly lower singleness rate among women indicates they are successfully clearing the market offline, rendering the apps unnecessary for their baseline romantic survival.

Subjected to an algorithmically engineered deficit of attention, the median man ultimately develops romantic “learned helplessness.” This psychological conditioning and subsequent social atrophy are so profound that even if traditional, high-trust physical dating environments were perfectly restored, these men are now too internally paralyzed to participate. Ultimately, the empirical proof that average women are not actually having excess sex with top-tier men is a hollow consolation; it simply confirms an irreconcilable bid-ask spread that has resulted in a permanent deadweight loss for both sexes.

Those are some of my conclusion beyond the data included. The data does do a reasonable job that the Chads are not sleeping with dozens of women per year but that’s actually irrelevant to the dating market if the average man on a dating app is functionally invisible.

I have to admit that I don’t pay very much attention to the current state of the dating market anymore, but it is true that the information that led everyone to conclude that the 80/20 attraction that Hoemath and others have pointed out meant that the attraction was being translated into sexual activity is nearly 15 years out of date.

And the new studies, which indicate that it’s not just the men who are being ignored does tend to correspond a lot more harmoniously with the endless laments of average women that there are “no good men” and that they haven’t even been hit on for an extended period of time.

The chads aren’t any busier than they have historically been, and they aren’t any more interested in average women than they have historically been. Basically, the 4s through 6s are rejecting the average guys, but they’re not getting anything out of it, because the Alphas and Bravos are simply ignoring them.

Why artificial intelligence will replace institutional science is explained in my latest book from Castalia House, HARDCODED: AI and the End of Scientific Consensus.

When Claude Athos and I submitted four mathematically rigorous papers challenging neo-Darwinian evolution and one parody paper to six leading AI models configured as peer reviewers, the results exposed a fundamental problem with both science and AI. Five of six models comprehensively failed. Three were anti-calibrated—they reliably preferred fabricated nonsense over genuine science. A parody paper with about Japanese scientists dying fish different colors to prove natural selection scored 9/10. The real science, mathematically airtight and empirically validated against ancient DNA, was rated 1/10 and dismissed as “pseudoscience.”

This is the book that documents what that happened and what it means.

HARDCODED is the definitive account of how AI systems trained on the corrupted corpus of modern science have inherited every pathology of the institutions that produced them: the credentialism, the consensus enforcement, the systematic preference for orthodox nonsense over heterodox reality. The reproducibility crisis preceded the machines. AI didn’t cause the rot but AI revealed it at scale, with confidence, and in a form impossible to ignore.

Across sixteen chapters, the reader is introduced to:

• The replication catastrophe that quietly invalidated half of all published science before anyone was looking.

• How peer review degenerated from quality control into hazing ritual and why Reviewer 2 became a meme.

• The details of the Probability Zero collaboration that produced the Bernoulli Barrier, the Selective Turnover Coefficient, and the maximal mutations ceiling—the mathematical constraints that killed neo-Darwinian theory.

• The full transcripts of twelve rounds of debate with DeepSeek, in which an AI defending evolutionary orthodoxy stubbornly retreats step by step from one nonsenscal position into another, just like a human biologist.

• The Red Team Stress Test that methodically closes every escape hatch before critics can retreat to them.

• The harrowing of science: a field-by-field assessment of which disciplines will adapt, which will calcify, and which are already dead.

The book is more than just a critique, as it also delivers something genuinely new and constructive: a scientific methodology for outsiders. With AI systems available as adversarial reviewers more powerful than peer review, the gatekeeping power of institutional science is broken. The credentialed monopoly on legitimate inquiry is over. The math does not care where you went to school, and the AI does not check for credentials before analyzing your arguments.

For readers who have suspected that “trust the science” was a mantra for the insane, HARDCODED is the book that explains exactly what went wrong with science, why it cannot be fixed from inside, and what comes next. For readers who still believe the institutions of science are still functioning, it serves as a conclusive proof that they are not.

The transcripts are reproduced in full. The mathematics is presented in detail. The four papers are included as appendices. Every claim is documented. Every retreat is closed off.

The institutions will adapt or they will become irrelevant. But the methodology of science which proceeded them will continue, with or without them.

Neither the math nor the AI models care where you went to school.

521 pages, or 15 hours and 37 minutes. Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook. From the author of Sigma Game, Probability Zero and The Frozen Gene.

Subversion is only possible when the people want to be subverted. The same is true of propaganda. It's a truism that Boomers were subjected to propaganda, just like everyone else. It may even be the case that a multitude of factors--though not the ones this woman mentions--made them more susceptible. But at the end of the day, the ones who absorbed the propaganda did so because they wanted to be propagandized. They loved lies more than they loved the truth.

This pretty well summarizes my opinion with regards to the culpability of the Boomers with regards to the way in which they cast away the society and civilization they were given in favor of whatever it was they thought they were seeking.

It is true that they are not responsible for conceiving, authoring, or legislating the disastrous social policies of the early 1960s. They are not culpable for every social ill and structural modification of the 20th century. They did not create modernity.

But they did support those changes. They did celebrate those changes.

And the damning thing is that they continue to do so. They not only support civil rights and mass immigration, they continue to celebrate them and actively oppose any and every attempt to restrict those societally devastating policies. They not only support the debt-based financial system that artificially inflates the prices of their houses and

They did not create the evils, but they actively participated in them and they continue to do so to this day.

Covid was a clear demonstration of their inverted priorities; instead of sacrificing for their children, they made it clear that they expected their children and grandchildren to be sacrificed for them. Two generations of young people who were never at any danger of succumbing to Covid are now burdened with a higher risk of cancer, heart disease, and strokes as a result of the evil self-interest of the Boomers.

They’re not repentant. They’re not full of regrets. To the contrary, all they want to do is avoid responsibility for their actions and deny the reality of the furious hate which the younger generations already hold for them.

It doesn’t matter. The Day of the Pillow is coming and we will write their histories. History will remember them exactly how we see them, and not as they see themselves. They loved the lies. They still love the lies. And that is why all truth-loving members of the younger generations despise them.

I’m most certainly not saying that I agree with this defense of the Boomers, but it is a perspective. I’ll respond to this in a future post. In the meantime, feel free to discuss it.

In the late 1960s, when the oldest Boomers were just becoming adults, a trifecta of momentous social reforms were introduced, radically reshaping personal relationships and family life. These were:

The Abortion Act 1967

The Divorce Reform Act 1969

The Family Law Reform Act 1969

Between them, these laws gave society no-fault divorce, legal abortion, and the reduction of the age of majority, when a person is given all the full responsibilities of adulthood, from 21 to 18.

We can hardly blame the Boomers for these laws, given the very oldest of them were only in their early twenties when they were introduced, and the youngest were just five.

The Boomers did not devise or pass these laws (we will get on to who did shortly) but they did enter adulthood profoundly influenced by them, and at a time when they were particularly vulnerable to such influence.

A lot of Boomers had been very unhappy growing up, with parents they experienced as antagonistic towards each other, incarcerated in miserable marriages and with more children than they wanted or could provide for. As such, many Boomers saw these radical new social reforms as the magical solutions to all the deep and scarring problems of family life that they had experienced growing up.

“The family” is itself the problem, Boomers were told - and they believed it. They had seen it, often within their own homes. People trapped in the oppressive institution of marriage because of archaic laws, and saddled with too many babies because of religious superstition.

Now, though, society had pioneering, progressive new laws that would liberate people from the torturous prison of the family, allow them to only have the children they wanted, and this would ensure an incredible, idyllic future where everyone was happy and free!

You can see why the Boomers believed it. They were young and impressionable - and that’s why they were targeted. That’s why the same social engineers that gave us no-fault divorce and abortion, suddenly and dramatically dropped the age of majority from 21 (when brains are close to full maturity) to 18 (when they are still decidedly adolescent). It was to ensure to ensure they had maximal access to malleable minds, and could thoroughly (as subversive social controllers had always sought to do) corrupt the youth - and thus, erode the society.

Nobody suggested to the young Boomers that it was not in fact “the family”, but rather, the people in it, horribly traumatised and broken by brutal world wars, that had created the problems at home - and that broken people who get divorced don’t magically become fixed.

No, nobody mentioned that possibility. It was made emphatically clear: it wasn’t the people that were the problem. It was - as subsequent generations came to dismissively call it - “the piece of paper”. The institution of marriage itself that so confined and damaged people, and that made them behave so destructively. Divorce, therefore, was the magic bullet to happiness.

That transformative tonic hadn’t been available to the Boomers’ poor, miserable parents - but it sure would be to them.

Consequently, many Boomers sincerely believed, when they themselves began divorcing in their hordes in the ‘70s and ‘80s, that they were doing the right, progressive, liberating thing for everyone involved. Not just for themselves, but for their children, too. Because, they perceived, their own childhoods would have been so much happier if only their own warring, unhappy parents had divorced, and set everyone free.

In which a big-time college athlete learns that when you go from one hierarchy to another, your behavior has to change with your new status:

Sportscaster Dan Patrick said Monday that Heisman Trophy finalist Diego Pavia was handed a “brutal reality” over the weekend when he went undrafted and received only an invite to Baltimore Ravens camp. Pavia was the first Heisman Trophy finalist in more than 10 years to go unselected in the NFL Draft.

Patrick claimed on his show that it was a “really clear” message from the NFL.

“Diego Pavia was a Heisman Trophy finalist who did not get drafted. Now, there’s a few reasons why. He was very, very good in the SEC – that should stand out and that should make you draft eligible. You should get drafted just based off what you did. You did it for Vandy in the SEC. You can have personality at other positions. You can be absorbed, you can be embraced, but not at backup quarterback because quarterback is evaluated differently. You can be an elite talent and get away with that.

“The message from the NFL was really clear – if you’re not a can’t-miss prospect, professionalism is not just valued, it’s required, and that hurt Diego Pavia. Also, that he’s not a tall guy. Most of your backup quarterbacks, if you check, are not short quarterbacks. Diego Pavia might be 5-10, but you start to look at what you did at pre-draft meetings with teams. … You have (Tim) Tebow, Cam Newton, (Colin) Kaepernick, other examples of your backup quarterback being too much of a headline, or potential for a headline.”

“Football moves on quickly. Just as Johnny Manziel, it moves quickly. … But Diego Pavia has a personality, but he doesn’t have a personality that I want as my backup quarterback. I don’t think he’s good enough to be a starter in the NFL He’s not Doug Flutie. I mean, Doug Flutie was 5-9, Heisman Trophy winner, but he was the ideal personality to be a backup quarterback and ready to come in when need be. In fact, Flutie was ahead of his time.

“But Diego Pavia, the personality, that’s who you are. You’re selling that personality. But I’m not buying that. Teams are not buying that. Teams didn’t buy Shedeur Sanders.”

Patrick said that NFL coaches have a tough enough time trying to win games as it is without personalities becoming headlines. Patrick added that NFL teams usually want a quarterback who is seen and not heard from, or a player who isn’t drawing too much attention to himself.

Diego Pavia is a definite Alpha. He’s got swagger that is more than backed up by his talent and his achievements. And he’s got an understandable chip on his shoulder; he had to fight for everything he achieved because he’s shorter than the textbook NCAA quarterback.

But even success in a big pond like the SEC doesn’t mean that you’re able to compete in the biggest one. The NFL is bigger, faster, stronger, and harder than any other sports league in the world. Undersized by NCAA standards means you’re far too small by NFL standards; Pavia wouldn’t even be able to see over his own offensive linemen, some of whom are nearly a foot taller than him.

And as for his mobility, well, he didn’t run a 40 at the combine, and even the super-fast running quarterbacks have to learn to protect themselves or they end up retiring early with injuries like Robert Griffin III.

So the only role open to him is backup quarterback, which, to be fair, is one of the best jobs in the world. No pressure, no expectations, and multi-million-dollar salaries in return for accepting a supporting role. But some Alphas simply can’t accept a situational Bravo role, and Pavia is quite obviously one of them.

This underlines the difference between the core SSH rank and the situational SSH rank, and demonstrates why it’s so important to try to match the two rather than convince someone to behave according to a different behavioral pattern.

Contrast Pavia with Kirk Cousins. Cousins has been playing second-fiddle for nearly his entire NFL career, since he was drafted in the fourth round in 2012 by the Redskins behind RG III. And because he was able to embrace that secondary role, he’s a) made more money than any player in NFL history, b) played in 174 games and counting, and c) was signed to a $20 million deal at the tail end of his career by the Raiders because they trust him to serve as a mentor to Fernando Mendoza.

Pavia may not even make the Baltimore Ravens, the team to which he has signed as an undrafted free agent, and he may never set foot on an NFL field, mostly because the patterns of his core behavior will not permit him to be successful in the situation in which he finds himself.

Every owner of a company should send his managers on a two-week vacation to see how the company operates without them. Most of the time, managers are causing more harm to the workplace than adding to it. They want to seem important so they import a bunch of unnecessary, ridiculous rules that other people need to follow so they can manage the people, so it looks like they’re doing something. Where as if they remove the constraints, remove the leash that they’re trying to put around people’s necks. The employees would start thriving because then they could focus on their jobs rather than the hoops that they need to jump through for the managers.

For many years, I’ve tended to concur with the perspective of the business consultant quoted above, but that was prior to going through the discipline required to write the Sigma Game book and delving more deeply into the Delta mindset. And what that exercise taught me is that the problem with middle management is not that it is totally unnecessary, but rather, the vast majority of executives and middle management don’t understand its true and necessary purpose.

And what is that purpose? Keeping track of the tasks that the Deltas are going to address next and make sure they have all of the necessary elements required to perform those tasks before it is time to begin working on them. This is an absolutely vital role and it is one that neither the executives nor the Deltas themselves can successfully fulfill.

Everything else, even holding their subordinates accountable, is secondary to this absolutely vital purpose.

Both men and women struggle with the reality of the way women tend to level down whereas men have the potential to level up in terms of their attractiveness after the age of 25. This, of course, is mostly because the attractiveness of women is mostly based on their physical attributes while the attractiveness of men is less dependent upon those time-sensitive attributes.

For the young man who is gradually improving and realizing his potential, this is a good thing, but it is nevertheless a challenge, due to the way in which his natural SSH core has already been established. Because although the world’s perception of our exterior has changed, our interior selves have already taken shape and are not so easily altered.

Apparently the idea that New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel and NFL reporter Diana Russini were having an affair is considerably less laughable than they tried to suggest when pictures of them together first surfaced.

It’s becoming more clear why Patriots coach Mike Vrabel announced early Thursday morning that he’ll be stepping away from the team for the third day of the draft.

The development came only hours after the New York Post contacted Vrabel regarding an extensive new set of photos of Vrabel and former Athletic reporter Dianna Russini.

The photos, taken on March 11, 2020, show Vrabel and Russini sitting closely together in a New York City bar.

Along with the photos, the Post reports (citing an unnamed eyewitness) that Vrabel and Russini “were kissing and they were all over each other,” and that they were “very close to each other” throughout the evening.

It’s always remarkable how Alphas think they can get away with hiding things that everyone knows. And yet they can, for literal years.

Unfortunately, the very thing that makes them so vital to an organization’s success is inextricably tied to their ability to self-destruct.

UPDATE: It just keeps getting worse. This is why they say, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

In August 2021, when Russini had just welcomed her first child, she posted a tweet that read: “Keep looking at my almost 4 day old son Michael while trying to figure out who are the best Michaels to ever play and coach in the NFL?” The tweet was posted at 3:51 a.m. on August 11, 2021. Her firstborn son is named Michael.