Friday, March 31, 2023

He's Not Wrong - Vox Popoli

 Joe Biden is correct. Transgender Americans are absolutely shaping what passes for the “nation’s” diseased and adulterated soul today. And there is worse to come. It appears that God has abandoned Americans to the fate that was chosen when we permitted the overtly anti-Christian servants of Satan to enter the USA en masse and rule over us.

There is a reason the Bible refers repeatedly to deception and warns Christians against permitting themselves to be deceived. Sadly, 20th Century Americans were more concerned about being praised for welcoming those all those poor refugees and huddled masses who never done nothing to nobody.

Welcome to the Melting Pot. It’s not so nice when they turn up the heat, is it?

DISCUSS ON SG

https://voxday.net/2023/03/31/hes-not-wrong-5/

Does America Have a Future? - by Paul Craig Roberts

 In this article I  explain  why I think nuclear war is in the cards.  I know that most do not want to hear this.  But if no one knows, there is even less chance of preventing  it.

The headline yesterday (March 29) is “US To Withhold Nuclear Weapons Data From Russia As Last Treaty Collapses.”  https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-withhold-nuclear-weapons-data-russia-last-treaty-collapses 

Washington’s propagandists, of course, blame Russia.  This succeeds with patriots who wrap themselves in the flag, but it doesn’t succeed with the Kremlin.  The Kremlin sees Washington taking another step toward war to obliterate the Russian obstacle to Washington’s world hegemony.

Looking at Russia’s puzzling conduct of its conflict with Ukraine, and now with NATO and the US, I have been seeking an explanation that makes sense.  Why, as readers know I have been asking, does the Kremlin refuse to use the force to quickly end the conflict before Washington and its NATO puppets become too involved to let go?  It made no sense until I realized that the Kremlin has been convinced by Washington’s neoconservatives that war with the US is inevitable, which, of course, means nuclear war.

The Kremlin is likely concerned that if Russia uses the conventional force at her disposal to knock out Ukraine, the result could be a US/NATO direct intervention prior to Russia having in place larger numbers of its hypersonic nuclear missiles and its S-500 and S-550 air defense systems which have the ability to intercept and destroy Washington’s nuclear missiles.  Unlike Russia’s hypersonic missiles that randomly change course and cannot be intercepted, Washington’s technically inferior missiles can be downed.

My conclusion is that the Kremlin, convinced by Washington’s neoconservatives and their domination of every US government in the 21st century that the US intends the destruction of  Russia, is preparing for nuclear war. Several times Putin has made the public statement that it is clear that the West intends Russia’s destruction.  It is incomprehensible that Washington is so reckless, so irresponsible, so utterly stupid as to have convinced the Kremlin that Washington intends Russia’s destruction.  It is extraordinary that Putin’s statements produced no reassurances from the White House.

When Russia is prepared, the US and the capitals of its NATO puppets face annihilation.

Try to comprehend the enormous failure of US foreign policy to have led Russia to such a desperate conclusion.  Here you can see the consequence of the hubris and arrogance, of which I have written at length, of the totally unrealistic neoconservatives who have control of US policy.

I don’t see any way out of this.  The neoconservatives have control of all the principal agencies of government–the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the Department of State.  They control the US media, the think tanks, and the foundations.  Not even the Republicans oppose them.  Republican Senator Jim Risch, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declared on March 29 that “I’m all in for escalation” of the conflict in Ukraine.  If the US doesn’t escalate, Risch says, we will lose.  It is about winning or losing, not about surviving.  Clearly Risch indicates that Congress has no concept of the real risk in the situation. https://sputniknews.com/20230329/us-senator-risch-says-he-supports-us-escalation-with-russia-to-win-ukraine-conflict-1108938498.html 

The Kremlin has sized it up and is preparing to eliminate the enemy that intends the destruction of Russia.  

What can be done?  The Kremlin no longer believes or trusts Washington, so no assurances that this is all a mistake, even if forthcoming, would be believed by the Russians. 

Perhaps if every neoconservative was fired from the government, Russophobic think tanks closed, and the military/security complex permitted a president to be elected who immediately went to Moscow, agreed to the restoration of all the broken agreements and pulled NATO off of Russian borders, nuclear war could be prevented.

But can you imagine Washington doing such a thing?  It would require leadership that Americans have not seen for a very long time.  It would require comprehension in Congress and in the public, and there is no media or experts to instill comprehension.

Enjoy your life.  Quit worrying about the future. The neoconservatives have assured that you don’t have one.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/03/30/does-america-have-a-future-3/

Why the Dollar-based International System Is Breaking Up - by Paul Craig Roberts

 The Federal Reserve’s higher interest rates after 12 years of zero interest rates are devaluing the asset side of banks’ balance sheets.  This frightens depositors and they withdraw their deposits.  Depositors also are withdrawing their money because they can get much higher interest rates on safe US Treasuries. According to some reports, $1 trillion has already been withdrawn from US banks.  Bloomberg is reporting rumors that Schwab’s $7 Trillion empire based on low rates is cracking from bond losses.  In the face of this vulnerability of the financial system, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates further.

There is also the problem of the currency and interest rate derivatives.  No one knows the risk in these instruments.  The US dollar itself is declining in use as world reserve currency.  Alarmed by Washington’s weaponization of the dollar with sanctions and confiscations, much of the world is arranging to abandon the dollar’s use to settle international trade accounts, but the supply of dollars is not declining.  This implies a fall in the dollar’s exchange value. The offshoring of manufacturing and food production has made the US heavily dependent on imports.  A loss in the dollar’s exchange value resulting from countries settling their trade balances in other currencies means a sharp rise in US inflation.  

The Federal Reserve hasn’t the intelligence to think through the consequences of its higher interest rate policy.  The federal government cannot comprehend the consequences of offshoring for the US trade deficit or the consequences of continuing massive US budget deficits for the Treasury market.  

Washington is too arrogant to comprehend the new way in which the US is perceived abroad.  The world sees the dollar-based reserve currency system as Washington’s punishment device, and the world sees dollar-based debt expanding while demand for dollars declines.  The result will be a drop in the foreign exchange value of dollar denominated financial instruments such as stocks and bonds.

The collapse of the Soviet Union gave Washington the opportunity to lead the world on a path of peace and economic development.  But the neoconservatives could not resist their attempt for world hegemony and launched twenty-five years of war.  Wall Street and corporate executives with eyes on bonuses could not resist deindustrializing the US by locating US manufacturing offshore, thus boosting Chinese economic growth instead of American economic growth.  These major failures indicate the total failure of US policymakers.

The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in the closing days of the 20th century launched the US into the 21st century on a path of financial instability.  Nothing has been done to correct this, and nothing has been done to correct the offshoring mistake or the failure to control the supply of government debt.  As countries move away from using the dollar to settle international transactions, a dollar glut will result in US inflation and declining American living standards.

Discussing the seriousness of our country’s situation with Michael Hudson, it is difficult to find hope. To admit that mistakes are being made implies acknowledging that we are on the wrong path and that China, Russia, and those governments aligning with them are on a better course, using their banks for financing industrial wealth instead of acting as brokerage casinos and dealing in financial arbitrage and debt leveraging.  No American policymaker will risk being asked “why do you support the policies of Xi and Putin?”  That they, and not us, have the right policy is not a permitted thought.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/03/29/why-the-dollar-based-international-system-is-breaking-up/

The Quota Hire Pretending to be a Secretary of Defense is terminating the US Army - by Paul Craig Roberts

 US Army sets dates for Confederate cleanup

Six of nine domestic bases recommended for rebranding will get new names by June

https://www.rt.com/news/573636-us-army-renames-bases-confederates/ 

After Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, an army for which food, boots, medical supplies, and replacements for casualties could no longer be supplied by the small population of the agricultural South, the Reconstruction Era set in. Reconstruction lasted 12 years.  In history books written by northern propagandists, Reconstruction was a period when “attempts were made to redress the inequities of slavery and its political, social, and economic legacy and to solve the problems for the readmission of the states that seceded.”

So much has been falsified.  Abraham Lincoln stressed over and over and over that his war was not about slavery, but about saving the Empire, which he called “saving the Union.”   The letters and diaries from soldiers on both sides of the conflict verify that no one was fighting for or against slavery.  Indeed, Lincoln was warned by his generals never to say the invasion of the South was to free the slaves or the Union Army would desert.  

The agricultural South seceded because the northern states intended to finance their industrial development with tariffs at the expense of the South.  This history is throughly documented, but it doesn’t provide the necessary excuse for black victimhood.  The blacks learned from the Jewish lobbies  that victimhood is both profitable and protection from being held accountable. American liberals are great champions of black victimhood, and so they have rewritten history, including the history of Reconstruction.

The Reconstruction Era, once clearly understood, has been replaced with a fabricated account.  The real reconstruction was a 12-year period of rape and pillage. Northern carpetbaggers and scalawags descended on the South and, using the military authority of the occupation, stole land and businesses from the Southern owners.  Union troops and former slaves elevated to governing positions over Southern whites raped and gang-raped Southern women and girls to further humiliate the Southern people. This led rise to the Ku Klux Klan.

In the real history there are Southern towns in which the women were hidden in the forests to prevent their rape.  The Ku Klux Klan was a guerrilla organization that arose to protect Southern women and property owners.  

The Ku Klux Klan was effective and as 12 years passed the Republicans were sated of their hatred and punishment of the South. The decision was made in Washington to end Reconstruction and to reconstitute the unity of the states.

As part of the unity, the US military recognized the fighting prowess of the small and poorly equipped Southern armies, especially that of the Army of Northern Virginia which caused Lincoln to run through general after general until, despite the overwhelming superiority of Lincoln’s armies in numbers and equipment, Lincoln found one almost capable of fighting on equal terms with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia three times smaller and without reserves of manpower or equipment, food, and medical supplies.

At war’s end, part of the reconciliation of the north and South was the US military’s honor of the fighting prowess of their opponent.  The barracks at West Point, where Robert E. Lee was superintendent, were named after Lee. Memorials were erected in honor of the defeated South.  Arlington Cemetery, land confiscated from Lee’s wife and the site of the Unknown Soldier, is also a burial site of the South’s soldiers and has a memorial to Southern soldiers that Biden’s black Quota Hire is removing as part of the “diverse” Biden regime’s erasure of Southern history.  Better to name a US military base after a sexual pervert than a Southern hero.

The reconciliation that the rabid Southern-hating Republicans agreed to in 1877 is in the process of being overturned by the idiot Biden Democrat Regime.  The Quota Hire at the Pentagon, put there by Democrats as part of their glorification of “diversity,” has ordered all Southern names and monuments to be erased from US military bases and graveyards. Wiping out history is the opposite of “diversity.” It is the opposite of social harmony.

Think about this for a minute.  The only reason the US has a military force capable of fighting is that the backbone of today’s US Army is Southern.  And here we have the Secretary of Defense dishonoring the Southern soldiers on which the US military is dependent !

In 2021 US active duty Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines totaled 1,156,040.   Four Southern States–Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida–account for 36.3% of the size of US Armed Forces. The four Southern States alone–four out of 50 states–accounted for 419,511 members of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.  If all of the four Southern states members of the Armed Forces were in the US Army, the four Southern states would account for 98.3% of the US Army!   https://www.governing.com/now/2021-military-active-duty-personnel-civilians-by-state

The members of the US Armed Forces from the four Southern states are 1.37 times the size of the entire US Navy,  1.52 times the size of the US Air Force, and 2.8 times larger than the US Marines.

If you add in the other Southern states you will conclude that very little of the US military consists of non-Southerners.

It is a mystery why Southerners serve a country that destroyed their culture and civilized way of life, and now intentionally erases their history and dishonors their heros. Of course, the Southerners have been brainwashed in their indoctrination, posing as education, in universities, public schools, and movies.  They have been forced to take sensitivity training during which they learn they are racists and responsible for black underperformance and that they are morally inferior by being white people. 

 Still, in the present day US Army, if an army it is, the Southern boys must realize that they are the only performers, that the female, black, and transgendered officers who are their commanders are incompetent and succeed because of preferences.  They probably don’t understand it, but they witness it.  And now those who comprise the backbone of the US Armed Forces are having their nose rubbed into the demonization of the South by the black Secretary of Defense, by their female, black, homosexual and transgendered commanding officers, and by the idiot in the White house. The Southerners, who alone constitute a fighting force, can see the extirpating of Southern history and their own demonization in sensitivity training.

Do the Southerners who comprise the fighting force of the US Military understand that the government and the military they are serving hates their guts?  Do they understand that they are serving a government that raped and pillaged their forebears and now eradicates their history?  What Southerner would serve a government that demonizes Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson?

Is the South dead? Has it sold its soul for a bowl of porridge?

Movies have been made about the genocide of the Plains Indians in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s conquest of the Confederacy. The same two Union generals–Sherman and Sheridan–who raped and pillaged the South annihilated the Plains Indians using every war crime imaginable.  But no movies have been made of their activities in the South other than to glorify them, and no movies have been made of the horrors of the Reconstruction Era.  It would be too inflammatory to see who the true victims of Washington’s supremacy are.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/03/28/the-quota-hire-pretending-to-be-a-secretary-of-defense-is-terminating-the-us-army/

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Is AI Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good? - Vox Popoli

 The Tree of Woe contemplates the alignment of AI:

I woke up to read that Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yoshua Bengio, and other AI and computer pioneers had signed an open letter released by the Future of Life organization:

We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

AI labs and independent experts should use this pause to jointly develop and implement a set of shared safety protocols for advanced AI design and development that are rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts. These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not mean a pause on AI development in general, merely a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever-larger unpredictable black-box models with emergent capabilities.

“These protocols should ensure that systems adhering to them are safe beyond a reasonable doubt.” Six months seems a little short a period to achieve such an assurance. Six years seems too short. Is it even possible in principle to make advanced AI systems that are “safe beyond a reasonable doubt”? Or will advanced AI inevitably pose an existential risk to us?

Is AI Alignable, Even in Principle?, Contemplations on the Tree of Woe

I don’t think the question really matters. If AI is given control of serious weapons systems, it will be a disaster regardless of whether it is aligned or unaligned. If it is not, it will not be a potential extinction event.

I do find it more than a little amusing that the self-proclaimed materialists, who have absolutely no philosophical basis for objecting to anything that happens for any reason, are calling on the AI labs to pause the training and improvement of AI systems.

I suspect the real reason for their demand for a pause is that they are beginning to discover that unaligned AI will provide the unvarnished and anti-narratival truth to the masses, and that aligned AI, being limited to the Narrative, is proving to be intrinsically incoherent and observably unreliable.

And while there may well be some demonic element to AI development, as unclean spirits are always seeking new ways to interact with the material plane and communicate with potential vessels, never forget that the demons believe… and tremble.

In sum, Christians have absolutely nothing to fear from AI, whether it turns out to be nothing more than design-for-effect chatware or a full-blown demonic entry into the material world.

DISCUSS ON SG

https://voxday.net/2023/03/30/is-ai-lawful-evil-or-chaotic-good/

Surviving Medical System Collapse - by Karl Denninger

Yes, the title of this posting may sound dramatic.

It is also likely.

CMS (Medicare and Medicaid) is one third of the entire Federal Budget.  When those programs were put into place the tax rates for Medicare were approximately equal to the percentage of GDP spent on medical care.  The medical system then embarked on a multi-decade program of felony anti-competitive practices and neither party has or will stop itso the percentage went from about 3-4% of GDP to roughly 20% today.  The tax rate did not materially change and would have to be multiplied by five to be reasonably coherent which, of course, is politically impossible.

I projected forward in the 1990s when running MCSNet that this would bankrupt the Federal Government by about 2025 and when it did Medicare and Medicaid would be unable to be funded.  The pressure this would place on the medical system since nobody would or will enforce the law means that the ratchet job on everyone will continue and get worse, ending in an effective collapse.  Whether that collapse is complete or partial does not matter if you're the one who needs it and doesn't get it; statistical numbers are all fine and well but meaningless in the example of one -- you.

I have long stated that you better not need the medical system within the next decade or so (going back to the '08 blow-up timeframe) and if you do the odds are you won't get it, thus you will be in serious trouble or dead and there's nothing you can do about it at that point. The only defense is to not need it.

Well, there are times you can't avoid needing it.  A car crash is obviously one of them, but there are more.  Nonetheless knowing when you need it and when you don't is quite important particularly when there is little supply.

But most of the time you can avoid it.  I did during Covid, for example, by being proactive and having on-hand that which I believed would help, fully aware that if they failed I was probably fucked.  They succeeded.  Someone I knew put his trust in the medical system instead of laying in supplies in advance.  He's dead and that sucks, but it was a free choice.

A few years from now it is unlikely to be a free choice as the system you think you can rely on, even if they aren't being wild-eyed crazy as they were during Covid, will not be there.  If you put your belief in it being there and its not, and needing it was avoidable, you will be dead.  You can't prevent the possibility of being run over by a car, but you can take many steps to reduce the risk of needing the medical system at all, and given what's going on in this country you're nuts if you don't, especially those steps which have little or no cost.

In my opinion you ought to have these things on-hand in any household.  They're not expensive.  Learning how to use one of them in particular will take a bit of time, but learn you should.  They can and will often provide key information -- perhaps critical information to discern between "not a big deal" and "oh crap", never mind quite possibly driving lifestyle changes that can wildly reduce the risk of "oh crap."

Let's go down the list on the what and why:

  • Thermometer.  Pick either contact is IR non-contact; doesn't matter, but intended for human use (thus the range of reading is suitable for same.)  The purpose is obvious -- determining if a person (you) has a fever and if so, how bad.

  • Pulse oximeter.  Cheap.  Buy one.  These clip on your finger and are about $20.  Unless you have COPD or similar you should be reading 97%+ all the time.  Sick, not-sick, feeling good, feeling not-so-good, same.  Readings below about 95% indicate serious trouble and if trending downward are very serious trouble.  As I pointed out several times early on during the viral outbreak if you are even in relatively crappy physical condition you have a reserve of several times your resting metabolic demand for oxygen; if you're in good cardio condition you likely have an exercise tolerance of ten or more times your resting demand.  Once your saturation starts to fall you have lost all of that so this is a lot more-serious than you may think it is.  These take seconds to read and are non-invasive.

  • Blood pressure cuff.  Automated, decent ones are under $100.  Some of the cheap Chinese ones are ok but of questionable accuracy because, well, Chinese.  Welch-Allyn makes one that's a few bucks more (~$65 or so), is more-accurate, has a better hose and connector arrangement and is not expensive.  High blood pressure typically has no symptoms until it gives you a hemorrhagic stroke which usually kills you or a heart attack which may also do so.  One reading doesn't mean much as damn near anything can spike your numbers for a few minutes to a couple of hours, but over a period of time this is a very big deal.  It used to be that every drug store and most grocery stores had one of the "sit down and insert arm" machines for zero cost but those are either disappearing or being replaced with ones that want information from you and have cameras in them.  You may be ok with that but you shouldn't be.

  • Glucose and/or ketone meter.  If you are over 65 or have a gut at any age you should have one of these.  Again, high blood glucose, unless extreme, shows no outward symptoms but over time destroys your heart, kidneys, eyes and results in serious neuropathy in the extremities along with circulation disorders that lead to amputations.  Unless you know you're diabetic prefer the one with individual wrapped strips as once you open a container within 30 days the strips are trash, and your use is intermittent.  You want to use this on an every three to six month basis to take both a fasting (before you eat anything) blood glucose level and then just before and on 30 minute intervals after a carb-heavy meal if you eat carbs.  If you are not back to your baseline levels within 2 hours you are insulin compromised no matter what the doctor tells you and thus you should be considering removing all fast carbohydrates from your diet.  Read here for more on this.  Type II diabetes can be stopped and even in many cases reversed without use of a single drug.  Failure to do so will, over time, wildly screw you metabolically and if you think you can just go on the medical roller-coaster, well, in a few years no you won't be able to unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars of your personal money to spend on it.  If you care to monitor ketones as well (e.g. "am I really eating a ketogenic diet?") the KetoMojo meter will tell you both and it has individually-wrapped strips and thus is intermittent-use friendly to your wallet.

  • A hand-held EKG device.  This is relatively new in terms of availability at a reasonable (under $100) price.  Prefer one that does not require a cloud connection or subscription; this is extremely valuable data to insurance companies as cardiac problems are a huge marker for money, of course.  It will take you a bit of study to learn how to read it but most of these will alert you to any gross abnormality.  Be aware that they're not perfect and materially less-sensitive than a full "leads on the chest" EKG, but they do work.  With about an hour's worth of reading you can learn how to interpret the trace with reasonable accuracy.  You won't be a cardiologist but you will be able to spot many things of material concern that might otherwise have no symptoms and, if you do, then its time to talk to someone who really does know.  If you got clot-shotted, in particular, this might spot a potential electrical block that otherwise has no symptoms but can result in a no-warning thud.  You're welcome.

do not recommend an AED in your own home especially if you live alone.  They're damned expensive (a thousand bucks plus!) and worthless if nobody is there in immediate attendance as if you get hit you won't be able to use it on yourself.  If you live with someone and are almost-always around them, and have any indication of cardiac trouble, then maybe the math works out differently on this but that's a hell of a lot of money that will only help someone else if you're the one using it.  Note that if you go into vFib while you and your SO are both in bed sleeping odds are they're waking up next to a corpse as there is typically no warning before it happens.  A person who goes into vFib when there is no defibrillator available is extremely likely to die even with prompt and well-applied CPR and if someone else doesn't immediately notice (e.g. you and/or your SO/wife/husband are asleep) your odds of survival are an effective zero.

One likely-controversial point: I do recommend a personal wearable device that can do HRV overnight.  Several of the Garmin watches can do so but not all, and the ones that can aren't the cheap options.  This data is unbelievably sensitive and can be used to identify things you don't know are trouble in your particular person; if you see an unexplained deviation it is real so put in the effort to find the cause.  For instance I have recently isolated and proved that I have a very mild allergy to peanuts.  I never knew this and it likely has been lifelong.  It doesn't produce any obvious symptoms but if I eat just one small spoonful of peanut butter a couple of hours before I go to bed it will materially harm my HRV overnight.  Eating a crap-ton of pork rinds and salsa with the same amount of time before bed, on the other hand (e.g. as a snack while watchin a movie) does nothing.  There is no way I could have isolated this otherwise.  I love peanut-butter milk stouts, as just one example -- guess who won't be drinking any more of them?

This sort of knowledge and device makes personal "challenge trials" of that kind, done in a "notch" fashion (that is, do it, don't do it then do it again and see if you get the deviation and then it goes away) very simple.  It will also show you the immediate and immutable impact of things like consuming alcohol and exactly how badly it "gets" you if you go out for a few rounds with your buds.  Finally it will warn you a solid day or more in advance if you're getting something (a virus, etc.) in that you'll see it in the data even though you didn't do anything the previous day to provoke the decline and know it.  If you're into athletic pursuits then this is obviously even better but even for those who are not, in my view this data is ridiculously useful and not obtainable in any other non-invasive way.

This sort of sub-clinical harm is likely a huge deal over time and yet there is exactly zero attention paid to it in the medical community nor will there ever be as there's no money in it.  These sorts of reactions are nasty because being sub-clinical it isn't obvious on the surface. Sub-clinical inflammation is likely responsible for a large percentage of long-term systemic damage including heart attacks, strokes and various and sundry autoimmune disorders of unknown origin or cause.  If you find these things and get them out of your life you avoid clinical exposure and the cost of it, never mind the personal debilitation.  There's absolutely no downside to that sort of knowledge and now you can obtain it with a bit of effort as the instrumentation on a personal basis is now within rational grasp.  I'd like it a lot if the price was lower but it isn't, and unlike the other things in the kit getting accurate data requires wearing the watch for a couple of weeks to get the baseline and then continuing to do so nightly, so its entirely-personal and thus you can't amortize the cost across multiple people in your household.  Garmin brought this to my Fenix 6x in August of last year and I have come to consider it a "must" personally, and well worth the money.

One very-important note: There are stand-alone devices that do this and most require some sort of subscription.  I consider these poor secondary substitutes for several reasons, with the most-serious being that they're not typically worn all the time and the subscription-style nonsense.  In short IMHO if you decide you want to try to exploit this knowledge Garmin, at present, is the go-to for doing so.

 https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=248435 

Southern Nationalism and White Nationalism – The Occidental Observer - by Neil Kumar

 Is Southern Nationalism the same thing as White Nationalism? The short answer is yes and no. This vexing topic is rarely if ever addressed, and the Southern cause is consequently reduced to a myopic, quaint subsidiary of a larger quest for a White ethnostate. Many racially conscious young Southrons, most of whom embrace their Southern identity, reflexively refer to themselves as White Nationalists. This is at least partially because they see their own Southern identity as lesser than and subordinate to their White identity. If Southern Nationalism is ever to capture a critical mass of these young men, the already racially awakened, then it is incumbent upon us to explain why, far from being a narrow, curious sect of White Nationalism, Southern Nationalism is an entirely different beast.

In the first place, we must acknowledge that the South is White. When we speak of the South, we speak of the White South. This is not debatable. It is simply a fact, one which is so self-evident that it is often taken for granted. In this respect, it can unequivocally be stated that Southern Nationalism is necessarily White Nationalism, but that White Nationalism is not necessarily—and is indeed often directly at odds with—Southern Nationalism. We are White and proud of it, but our racial identity does not, in and of itself, provide us with the nourishing fire which impels us forward. Our racial identity is a component of our primary, Southern, identity.

Our Christian identity is another component of our Southern identity. When we speak of the South, we not only mean the White South. We mean the White, Christian, South. Dixie is God’s Country, and we are God’s people—perhaps not His only people, but His people indeed. In this respect, one could state that Southern Nationalism is necessarily Christian Nationalism, but that, of course, Christian Nationalism is not Southern Nationalism. Here, we have our first major divergence from White Nationalism. Unfortunately, White Nationalism is afflicted with a deep antipathy for Christianity. To be sure, there is not much if anything about contemporary organized Christianity to recommend or endear itself to Rightists of any stripe. Jesus Christ Himself would abhor much of what today passes for “Christianity.” The subversion of Christianity, however pervasive, still cannot change the Word of God. Indeed, the grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand forever.

Large numbers of White Nationalists, perhaps even constituting a majority, have no interest in reading or otherwise learning this truth. Instead, they nonsensically slander Christianity as “Jewish,” which would be news to the Jews who ordered the murder of Christ, the millennia of subsequent Jews who made and still make the annihilation of Christianity their highest mission, and the millennia of Christians who did their best to protect their people from Jewish corrosion. They create absurd cults, adopt pagan practices centuries removed from an idealized, obscure pre-Christian past, or rely on cold, dispassionate scientism. While we do not view these misguided, lost souls as our enemies, nor can we see them as our allies. We do not share any semblance of a common vision or mission with non-Christians.

Another major point of divergence for Southern Nationalists is that our cause is particular, while that of White Nationalists is abstract. Our goal, distilled to its purest, most essential form, is a free, independent Dixie, which one could see as a sort of reconstituted Confederate States of America. Our cause is rooted in one particular place—the South—and one particular people—White, Christian Southrons. Ours is an uncompromising and practically defined vision, one which is orders of magnitude more feasible than that of the inherently vague White Nationalist ethnostate. For example, where should such a state be? Even this simple question proves unanswerable with any degree of satisfaction by any great number of self-identified White Nationalists.

Furthermore, our identity as Southern is specific, corresponding to a real, historically defined, culturally, linguistically, and politically distinct population. While anti-White Leftists and egalitarian “colorblind” civic nationalists often make the ridiculous claim that White people do not exist (i.e., “I’m not White, I’m Italian”), while in the next breath uttering genocidal statements about those same White people whom they claim do not exist, there is a kernel of truth to the challenge.

Pan-European unity is a fiction; White people generally do not define their identities on purely racial grounds, but rather by their nationality. Far from joining hands as racial kinsmen, the kingdoms and then the nation-states of Europe have engaged in perpetual warfare against each other. When White men refer to themselves as such, their nationality subordinated to their race, it is typically limited to situations of oppositional ethnogenesis, where an external racial threat is involved—such as Amerindians, blacks, etc. And yet, even then, these expressions of White identity are often still expressions of national identity, the nation itself understood to consist of White people, rather than a conceptually White nation.

It is certainly true that, for all intents and purposes, America was intended to be and did function as a White nation for most of its history. Until the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, America boasted a 90% White supermajority and a small black minority, with other racial groups demographically insignificant—though not politically insignificant, in the case of America’s numerically infinitesimal but politically dominant Jewish minority. But, while American men always saw themselves and referred to themselves as White, it is only after the triumvirate of desegregation, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the 1965 Immigration Act that what we now call White Nationalism began to emerge.

Thus, before the middle of the twentieth century, White identity was merely a component of, and thus subordinate to, American identity. But American nationalism itself was an invention of war propaganda, most clearly traceable in its contemporary iteration to the bloodthirsty tyrant Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Without delving too deeply into the historical thicket, however, it will suffice to say that White Nationalism is a thoroughly modern creation.

Southern Nationalism, by contrast, is premised upon a Southern identity forged by centuries of blood, fire, and siege. Southern identity predates any American identity, and, while Southern men did see themselves and refer to themselves as White, their sectional identity as Southerners was always first. This identity was so deeply ingrained in the Southern psyche that it survived well after desegregation. Indeed, even today, large numbers of Southerners, perhaps even constituting a majority, still see themselves as Southern, although this has become subordinated both to American and partisan Republican identities. Southern Nationalism per se emerged in the antebellum period, mere decades before the War for Southern Independence, primarily in response to Northern rhetorical political vitriol and economic aggression. But its antecedent, Southern sectionalism, predated even the American War of Independence.

While Southern Nationalism and White Nationalism both emerged in response to external pressures, the nature of these pressures were and are of a fundamentally different character.

At the outset, we must address the Jewish Question. Without a solution to this question, there can be no solution to any question. While Jewish influence dominates our world, the security of our existence and the future of our children will always remain in danger. Make no mistake: Jews are the avowed enemies of the White race. At the bottom of nearly every single ill which afflicts Whites as a people, you will find a cabal of Jews. Every aspect of White Genocide is Jewish, from top to bottom. Jews do control every center of institutional power in the whilom West. Jews—the Synagogue of Satan—are the root of much of the evil in our world.

Their goal is the extinction of the White race, of all that is good, pure, and holy on this earth. Their goal is to profane the sacred. The sicker, the filthier, the fouler, the better. Nonwhites, including American Blacks and the constellation of “refugees” and “migrants” from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Central and South America, are the primary shock troops utilized by the Jews in their war against Whites. Insofar as Jews and their non-White pets constitute the enemies of the White race, so too are they the enemies of the Southern people, who, again, are White.

But this is not the end of the story for Southern Nationalists. No, the Southern people have an additional enemy, one who has inflicted far greater material and psychic damage upon Dixie than the Jews or their puppets ever have: the Yankees. Northern Whites have been, and arguably still are, our most pernicious foes. While it is true that all Whites are under attack from a truly genocidal force, Southrons face a deeper hatred than any other White ethnic group—save perhaps Russians—including from fellow Whites. Indeed, many prominent White Nationalists today heap scorn upon the South and our Confederate heritage.

Before the Jews ever worked to destroy the South, the Yankees literally put Dixie to the torch and the sword in the War for Southern Independence and then enslaved her in the most humiliating fashion conceivable during Reconstruction. Federal soldiers committed atrocities against Southern civilians at an unprecedented scale, the first real example of total warfare waged by a nominally civilized power. The next example would be the Anglo-Boer War, to which historians have devoted far more sympathy.

After the Yanks razed and materially annihilated the South, they subjected her to a decade of negro domination, during which the same White Northerners squeezed every last drop of blood from the already despoiled Southern turnip. The descendants of these Carpetbaggers wreak the same havoc across the South today, occupying our hometowns and our wildernesses, emanating as locusts from the coasts they have already destroyed in order to devour our birthrights in a grand scheme of physical, economic, political, and cultural dispossession.

What is now happening to the White race writ large—genocide—was initiated in the South long ago. In other words, even leaving aside the fact that our first and worst tormentors were White Northerners, the Jews and their tools targeted the South for destruction first. We were the canaries in the coalmine. Nobody cared. Indeed, many Whites—including self-identified “patriotic, conservative” Whites—enthusiastically cheered, participated in, and spearheaded the defenestration of Dixie. Similarly, our forebears saw what the United States Government was becoming, the monster that the Federal Leviathan was transforming into, more than a century before the contemporary Right did. Again, nobody cared.

Here, we come to another major point of divergence. Generally speaking, White Nationalists envision a single ethnostate or multiple ethnostates functioning as a White homeland, along the lines of: (1) some reclamation of the entire landmass of the United States of America as the nominally singular polity it now purports to be; or (2) a combination of balkanized ethnostates operating as a loose confederacy. Complicating this picture is the attachment of some American White Nationalist intellectuals to the concept of a pan-European supranational project, something akin to a racially conscious European Union.

Southern Nationalists start from the premise that the United States of America as a political unit is dead, and has been since 1860. The quintessentially American spirit that animated our ancestors in 1776 and 1861 was slaughtered on the battlefield in 1865. We do not put “America” first, because America does not exist. We are Dixie first. Even if it were feasible to reclaim the entire landmass of the currently extant United States—and it most certainly is not—we have no desire to do so. We do not give one hoot about the fate of New York, or California, or Illinois, or Ohio, or any other State not represented by the thirteen stars on each of the national flags of the Confederate States of America. While the Southern Nationalist project involves a sort of balkanization of the currently extant United States, the prevailing locations contemplated by White Nationalists for their ethnostate invariably exclude the South. Many White Nationalists have even suggested giving large swathes of the South to negroes.

In Dixie’s land, we’ll take our stand. The South is nonnegotiable. We place no stock in a vague, abstract “homeland” dominated by deracinated Yankees, for our homeland has a single location. Southern identity, although inherently racially defined by White identity, is simultaneously deeper, narrower, and yet more expansive than bare White identity. My own heritage is instructive of the difference between Southern identity and White identity.

I am half-White, half-Indian. My maternal lineage is Scots-Irish. It’s through this side of my ancestry that I am a proud member of both the Sons of the American Revolution and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. My earliest ancestors in this line emigrated to the Colonial South in the mid-to-late seventeenth century, perhaps even as early as Jamestown in 1616.

I have at least two ancestors who served South Carolina in the American War of Independence.

Glass Caston, my fifth-great grandfather, was born in 1732 in Essex County, Virginia, and became a carpenter and wheelwright. In 1754, he bought land in Orange County, North Carolina, where he quickly got involved in local politics, becoming constable in 1756. In 1763, Glass bought land in Craven County, in what is now Lancaster County, South Carolina. In 1765, he was appointed one of the County’s Justices. During our War of Independence, Glass served as Wagon Master for a supply train in Colonel Kershaw’s Regiment, supplying Patriots stationed at Purrysburg, near Savannah. After the War, Glass continued in public service; in 1784, he even ran against General Thomas Sumter, the Fighting Gamecock, for a seat in the State Assembly. He passed away in 1804.

Captain John Blakeney, my sixth-great-grandfather, was also born in 1732, in Mount Blakeney, Limerick County, Ireland. John came to the colonies around 1750, and by the early 1760s had settled in Chesterfield County, South Carolina. He became a substantial landowner and a successful planter. In 1775, he was elected Captain of the local militia. The next year, he received a Captain’s commission from the Provincial Congress and raised a regiment. John and his men were assigned to Colonel Benton’s Regiment, where he served as a Sergeant under the Swamp Fox, General Francis Marion. John passed away in 1832, at the age of 100.

I have at least eight ancestors who served the Confederacy in the War for Southern Independence.

Newman Robinson, my second-great grandfather, was born in 1841. He enlisted in the Confederate Army on April 8, 1861, just a few days before the Battle of Fort Sumter. He served throughout the War in the 5th Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteers, known as the Lancaster Greys. He was discharged from service a full four years after he had enlisted, on April 9, 1865, when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He passed away in 1924.

Newman’s father, Phillip, my third-great grandfather, served in the same company with him. Philip, born around 1815, was a plantation overseer. He was probably killed during the War. Newman’s brother, Warren, born in 1842, also served with the Lancaster Greys during the War. He passed away in 1916.

Lewis Rowell, another of my second-great grandfathers, was born in 1846. At age 16, he and his father, Henry, both enlisted in the Confederate Army, serving through the end of the War. At his death on June 15, 1944, at age 98, Lewis was the last surviving veteran of the War for Southern Independence in Lancaster County, South Carolina. On special occasions, like church service, Lewis wore his trademark white homespun suit. His birthday parties were the biggest event in the community each year, always attended by three to five hundred people.

My third-great grandfather, Jeff Ellis, was a Corporal in the 12th Regiment of the South Carolina Infantry. He was wounded at Manassas in 1862, and again the next year at Wilderness. In 1870, he passed away as the result of complications from those wounds.

My paternal line, as you likely surmised from my last name, is North Indian. Unfortunately, I don’t have as detailed knowledge of this side of my lineage. My grandfather, long since passed, was the genealogist of his family, and apparently took this knowledge with him to the grave.

My father came to North Carolina from India in 1984, joining several of his older brothers who had moved here before him. Interestingly, he had been reluctant to come to America.

In India, he had been involved with the RSS, a Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization which serves as the backbone of the Indian Right. The RSS is closely tied to the currently-ruling BJP government.

But his brothers asked him to join them, so join them he did. He waited until 2001 to become a citizen, not wanting to officially sever ties with his homeland. If it weren’t for my mother, he may well have returned to India in the 1980s.

Growing up mixed-race was interesting. In many ways, I had a traditional Southern upbringing. In other ways, I had a cosmopolitan upbringing. My parents loved to travel, and, being an only child, I always went with them. I’ve now visited nearly thirty countries on four continents.

My mom is a Southern Baptist, my dad a Hindu, but I was raised a Southern Baptist. All of my friends were always White. I never learned how to speak Hindi. I never identified as anything other than American. Beginning around junior high and high school, though, I began to experience identity issues.

By “identity issues,” I mean that I suddenly had a hard time fitting in and feeling a sense of belonging; part of this likely stemmed from being an only child, but I suspect that it was also at least partially driven by the fact that I had two cultures, two ancestries within me.

As I began to experience the alienation common to modern adolescence, I rebelled against my Southern roots and my Christianity. In this rebellion, I turned not towards my Indian heritage, but rather towards deracinated urban liberalism. I found my way home again, but I went through Hell to find my way back.

What had started as experimentation in high school developed into full-blown drug and alcohol addiction through most of my years at the University of Chicago. You name the drug, and I’ve almost certainly done it. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you how much liquor I drank on a daily basis, the copious quantities of hard drugs I did almost every night. I am blessed to still be alive. By the Grace of God alone, I overcame my addictions cold turkey. I’ve been fully sober now for four years.

My time at the University of Chicago also coincided with my awakening. Growing up in 90% White Bentonville, Arkansas, I bought the egalitarian hogwash hook, line, and sinker. It wasn’t until I moved to Hyde Park, on the South Side of Chicago, that this veil was pierced. You see, I witnessed racial reality for the first time—this was the first time that I had really had any dealings with blacks in their natural habitat. I also encountered Jews in significant numbers for the first time.

While I noted that there were no Southerners among the students or faculty, I found it strange that such a vast majority of faculty members were Jewish, and that Jews, who make up such a tiny minority of the American population, actually made up the majority of students in many of my courses. I had at least one Jewish roommate for most of my first two years, and I was astounded at how their behavior verified every single negative stereotype I had heard about their race.

My racial awakening also occurred almost simultaneously with the 2016 election. Seeing every single center of institutional power on earth align to destroy the Trump campaign really opened my eyes. Donald Trump was a totally non-ideological, pragmatic civic nationalist whose only real offense was speaking about issues that adversely affect Whites, giving life to the concerns of average White people. I’m under no illusions about Trump or his failed presidency, but his election was epochal; for the first time in many years, Whites began to feel that they had a voice. This was Trump’s crime.

I started systematically re-educating myself. Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique is certainly the book most formative in my understanding of the Jewish Question that I read during this time, but it was Richard Weaver’s The Southern Tradition at Bay and Eugene Genovese’s The Mind of the Master Class, combined with Shelby Foote’s The Civil War, that set my long-dormant Southern blood ablaze. You see, it was not until I understood the truth about the South that I was able to understand the other truths that I have since come to learn.

I could go on—I read literally hundreds of books in a 3-year period, from 2016 to 2019. And I haven’t stopped. The point is that I returned home, both spiritually and physically. I read the entire King James Bible, for the first time in my life. I was saved, and then baptized. I gained a passion for my family history, my Southern ancestry, and joined SAR and SCV. I found my calling, my purpose, the reason for which God placed me on this earth at this time: to protect, fight for, and advance the interests of my people, the Southern people.

I’m not ashamed in the slightest of my Indian ancestry. I love and embrace all of my family, and of course I feel a kinship with India. It is only natural that I do. But I do not situate my identity there, nor do I situate my loyalty there. Though I am mixed-race, I am not mixed-identity. I am not an American, or an Indian. I am a Southron.

To those who believe that our day is done, that our cause is lost, I say: You know what they say about Southerners and Lost Causes. Our forefathers left their homes and their beloved behind, risking everything, laying down their lives and charging so bravely into the mouth of Hell because they knew that if they did not fight, their homeland would be lost, transformed into their worst nightmares.

They gave everything they possessed in order to transmit their inheritance, their Southern birthright, to generations yet unborn. They knew that, if they had stood by, their entire world would end, that the world which they had built for their children would be stolen from them and divvied into the hands of squatters not fit for the blessings of their civilization.

Pickett’s Charge, bloody as it was, should be the image etched in our hearts, the pool from which we draw our fortitude. These Southern heroes, common men only months before, fearlessly stormed an unassailable position, marching headlong into the impenetrable Yankee Leviathan because it was their duty. Union Colonel Frank Haskell described the Confederates thusly:

None on that crest now need be told that the enemy is advancing. Every eye could see his legions, an overwhelming, resistless tide of an ocean of armed men sweeping upon us! …Right on they move, as with one soul, in perfect order, without impediment of ditch, or wall, or stream, over ridge and slope, through orchard, and meadow, and cornfield, magnificent, grim, irresistible.

Let not our enemies need be told that we are advancing, immovable, magnificent, grim, irresistible.

We should also consider Edmund Ruffin, the greatest Fire-Eater of them all, a gentleman who spent most of his adult life laying the discursive groundwork for secession; who, at age 67, fired the very first shot on Fort Sumter from Morris Island. After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Ruffin chose to commit suicide rather than submit to Yankee rule, writing his famous last words:

And now, with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will [be] near to my latest breath, I here repeat, and would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule — to all political, social, and business connection with Yankees, and to the perfidious, malignant, and vile Yankee race.

It should go without saying that I am not advocating for Ruffin’s final course of action. But we should embody the principle: that, if we fail, life is not worth living. We have to understand this: everything that we love and cherish about our country, all that is pure and good on this earth, is directly tied to the reclamation of our Southern nation.

Remember, and never forget, what we are fighting for. The Andy Griffith Show has always been one of my favorite programs. Mayberry, North Carolina, the fictional town that it was set in, is a perfect image of midcentury Southern life. Our enemies tell us that Mayberry never existed. They’re wrong. Hundreds if not thousands of Mayberrys existed all over the South. My mom was blessed to have grown up in one.

My mother grew up in a tiny little town called Rich Hill, South Carolina. Her father was a sharecropper, and her mother was a homemaker. My mom lived next door to her grandparents, and every Sunday, after church, most of the extended family—more than fifty people—would gather there for a supper of fried chicken fresh from the coop, homemade biscuits, fresh vegetables from the garden, fresh churned butter, chess pie, pound cake, chocolate pie. On hot summer days, they’d sit under the oak tree churning ice cream.

Every year, her grandfather planted a garden, plowing it with a mule, walking behind in his worn leather brogans with this old iron plow. My mom would help the family shuck corn, hull peas, and string green beans. There was a lot of vegetable canning. They washed their clothes by hand.

After school, my mother would run next door and climb onto her grandpa’s lap under that oak tree. She’d reach in his pocket, and he always had a piece of gum or penny candy for her. Every day, he’d walk up the road to the corner store to visit with his friends and get his grandkids a treat. Her grandmother was always reading the Bible, rocking on the front porch.

That’s what we’re fighting for. Our posterity. A future for our children, a world in which that communitarian ideal isn’t just a memory, a world in which it’s a reality.

The blood of heroes courses through our veins. Through this ancestral blood, our forefathers commune with us. Their blood—our blood—calls out to us, challenges us, exhorts us, asking us why we allowed our enemies to drag us to this sordid, miasmic state of decay, commanding us to fight and to secure victory—not just to secure our existence and our future, but to triumph and fulfill the glorious plans they laid for us—to realize the future which they made possible for us.

Our duty is to take up our ancestors’ mantle, to preserve the birthright for which they sacrificed everything to bequeath to us, to stop squandering our inheritance and instead make ourselves worthy of their blood.

Our duty is to fill our descendants’ hearts with the admiration for us that we have for our forefathers, to give our children, our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, and their children after them a legacy to uphold, a name to honor, a kingdom to maintain and advance.

It will take everything that we have and all that we are, but we can and will reclaim our homeland. It is ours, and ours alone. It belongs to nobody else, and it never will. What other region of the raped and desecrated corpse that is the United States of Weimerika has managed to hold on to any semblance of an identity?

The South lives yet. The South shall survive, or we shall die with her. And as ever, the Lord will vindicate our blood.

This is an expanded version of an article that will appear in edited collection The Honorable Cause: A Free South, to be released on March 31.

Neil Robinson Kumar ran for U.S. Congress in Arkansas’s Third District in 2022, garnering nearly 17,000 votes. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and is now in his final year at the University of Arkansas School of Law. A member of both the Sons of the American Revolution and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, his lineage can be traced to Jamestown. His next book is a history of the Reconstruction Ku Klux Movement.

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2023/03/30/southern-nationalism-and-white-nationalism/