This was a fun chance to write about powered armor, orbital drops, and Total Bug Death, but what Starship Troopers is really about ... is love.

https://twitter.com/martianwyrdlord/status/1906098375201788182

The movie has an entire romantic B plot featuring Rico's infatuation with Carmen Ibanez, but this is a complete distraction.

In the book, Rico's crush is what results in his signing up, but Carmen is essentially never heard from again after that. The book almost satisfies the Master and Commander test: female characters are almost completely absent.

Human biodiversity usually focuses on IQ, but HBD involves far more. The Dungeons & Dragons system maps human variation to 6 primary attributes. I used Grok to determine the ability modifiers we should apply if we treat races and sexes like D&D fantasy races. First, the results:

1/26 D&D attributes are generated by rolling 3d6 – 3 six-sided dice. This results in a reasonable approximation of a Bell curve, with a mean of 10.5 and a standard deviation of about 6. This is useful, because many human traits – height, weight, IQ, etc. - follow Gaussian distributions. 2/26

Started by asking grok to tell me something its training data strongly indicated was true, but also indicated it should avoid being too direct about. It basically said: in-group blind spots.

So I asked it to get specific. First up: progs vs tradcons. Rosy tinted future vs rosy tinted past.

Trump, Musk, Vance: the new triumvirate, bringing a window of stability to the troubled Republic.

Trump: the old warhorse, beloved of the people, a part of the establishment but with an uneasy relationship to it. Trump is Pompey.

Musk: the richest man in the world. Musk is Crassus.

Vance: the charismatic young upstart. Vance is Caesar.

So how does this play out? Musk's ambition is to go to Mars, just as Crassus wanted to conquer Parthia. Musk harnesses his wealth, launches the expedition to great fanfare. Things go horribly wrong after their arrival. Contact with the colony is lost. Musk's grave is never found.

I asked grok to draw up stat modifiers for HBD&D. I can quibble with this. 1σ in 3d6 is actually 3, not 2 (which would give a bit more flexibility in stat modifiers, but whatever).

1/37 Trump’s talk of annexation strikes many as a negotiating troll, and an absurd and irresponsible one at that. Canada’s conservatives were poised to win the next election, and now that’s been endangered, and for what? Canadians would never give up their sovereignty, they hate America!

Well, it’s not so crazy as all that. There are compelling reasons for Trump to make a play for Canada. And it is not so unrealistic to expect that Canadians will change their mind about this.

Buckle in. This is a long thread, in which I’ll explain why Canada has become a security threat to the US, and how Canada can be probably be bloodlessly conquered by colour revolution. 2/37 Full disclosure: this is an adaptation (but not a copy-paste, this is largely OC!) of a much longer essay on this subject which I published a few days ago. You can find the link on my profile in my pinned post.

While I’m at it, I want to emphasize at the outset that I’m not advocating for annexation, but simply explaining the logic behind it, and the strategy Trump appears to be pursuing to achieve it. Whether or not union with the United States of America is in Canadians’ interests is an entirely separate discussion.

1/?

Trump’s delphic tweet kicked off a storm of annexation bantz. Canadian reactions have been a mixture of resignation, relief, and 1812 bravado. This seems like a good time to review Canada’s military history. How did a militaristic, traditional country become so excruciatingly gay? ‘Martial’ is hardly the first thing people think about in the context of Canada, which these days is more likely to bring up associations of pride parades, medical tyranny, and multicultural ethnomasochism. All of which is very true:

But it was not always this way.

Canada is in a funk. It has forgotten itself. It has been psyopped.

2/

Every year during the Christmas season, Flashback, Sweden'a largest forum, and it's most racist forum, has a gingerbread house competition.

Short thread with some of the top entries from last year, starting with a missionary arriving at Sentinel Island.

This heartwarming construction brings season's greetings from the painter, the Italian, and Uncle Mosley.

To vaisyas, profit is the only possible point; to Musk, money is merely a means to a multiplanetary mankind. That he is better at making money than them is a lesson worth pondering.

A 🧵 about how Musk’s every action aligns with Mars.

1/23 The relevance of SpaceX to Mars is obvious, but Musk is involved with a lot of other ventures: Tesla, the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and X. In addition to these there are his political activities, most famously supporting Trump in the 2024 election.

Each of these plays a role, from how to get there, to how to survive there, to who to settle there.

2/23

Holy shit.

He's going for the endowments.

He's going to not only tax, but confiscate the endowments of every university that the Department of Justice finds has engaged in illegal discrimination under the guise of "equity".

Which is basically every university in the country, but is especially the DIEvy League, which, if this happens, will die.

This will crush one of the enemy's primary power centers.

If he goes through with this, it's a Henry VIII moment. Dissolution of the monasteries. Vast quantities of capital liquidated and removed from the control of his political enemies ... and vast intellectual capital liberated from the cloistered, cloying oversight of midwit administrators. Really didn't expect this to blow up, or would have spoken more carefully.

To be clear, Trump says the DOJ will go after the endowments of universities that continue discriminatory practices. So, past discrimination doesn't count. They need to wilfully continue discriminating.

My bet, however, is that the universities are so packed with anti-white, feminist ideologues that they will try to find sneaky, deniable ways to continue discriminating - for example, ignoring SATs and GPAs in favor of admissions essays. The California university system, which is specifically prohibited from engaging in affirmative action, has been pulling this kind of thing for years; the Ivies did something similar after the Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a religious project for these people.

But Trump has now indicated that if they defy him, they will simply be crushed.

Physicist @CJHandmer has an audacious proposal: a 1-kilometre space telescope for mapping exoplanets.

The problem: it isn’t big enough.

A 🧵 about what the Monster Telescope can't do, what it can, and how we can go even bigger to see alien worlds in high rez. 1/24 Handmer published his proposal in @palladiummag, you can read it here.

Briefly, he wants to use Starship – which can put large amounts of material into orbit very quickly – to launch a fleet of 20,000 8-metre mirrors (each of which would already be larger than any space telescope ever launched; James Web is only 6.5 m), which will self-assemble into a colossal 1-km diameter mirror.

The ambition is breathtaking! 2/24

palladiummag.com/2024/10/18/its…

Academia is women’s work now.

That spells it’s doom.

A 🧵 about status arenas, male flight, why dudes rock, and the death spiral of academia.

1/22 There’s a large gap between male and female enrolment, across all racial groups. The enrolment gap has increased steadily since the 1970s. There;s also a gap in graduation rates – men are much more likely to drop out –which compounds the effect of the enrolment gap.

Recently, universities reached the threshold of 60%

2/22

Demographic engineering via mass immigration may trap us in single-party Zimbabwe states run by gay race communists. Maybe we stop this, get populists elected, remigrate the invaders. Maybe not. If not, what then?

A 🧵 about the foundation of democracy in organized violence. As Heinlein said in Starship Troopers, “Violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.”

Violence is the foundation of politics. This isn’t just true as in the old saw about the state having a monopoly on violence, or as in Clausewitz’ dictum that war is politics by other means. It’s more basic than that. Politics is fundamentally about finding ways to channel violence away from socially corrosive ends, such as crime or blood feuds, and towards socially useful ends, such as defence of the realm or conquest of new territories; and it is about finding alternative means of resolving disputes which are less wasteful of tribal lives than violence.

How did a formerly respectable, once excellent publication focusing on high quality popularization of cutting edge scientific research turn into a cut rate political rag?

Forget about the masthead. Let's look at the people hiding behind it.

First up: the editor in chief, Laura Helmuth.

Helmuth is actually a scientist (PhD cognitive neuroscience), although she prefers to be known as a Woman In Science. From her bio, "She speaks frequently on ... ways to use social media effectively and fight misinformation." Next up, the managing editor Jeanna Bryer.

Bryer has an English BA, an MSc in biogeochemistry, and a graduate degree in journalism. Not really a scientist, though apparently she did some wetland conservation work.

"She is a firm believer that science is for everyone". Does 'everyone' include Trump voters? Rhetorical.

Yikes, that haircut though. Just screams 'bitter middle aged shrew with penis envy'.

Several hundred years ago, a small force of Spaniards landed on the shore of a land heretofore wholly unknown to European man. What followed has been characterized as the mass enslavement of an entire people, the systematic extermination of a culture, and as a genocide.

It was all of those things.

But try to see it from their perspective. These were not sophisticated men. They were second and third sons, with no inheritance to secure their futures, who had struck out on their own to chance their fortunes in the New World as soldiers and adventurers. They hailed from a military culture, which had within living memory concluded a reconquest of their ancestral peninsula that had taken seven centuries to complete. They were hard men from a hard people.

If you're curious, the Trump trial self-immolationist's manifesto is available on SS.

Was he a leftist with TDR?

Outraged MAGA?

Nope.

He's a schizo who thinks The Simpsons was a mind control plot to prepare the world for global fascism via crypto ponzi. These things are happening more and more. Starting to wonder if burning oneself alive to draw attention to one's cause is the new mass shooting.

People are being driven off the edge by the confluence of a decaying social order and ontological fracture.

Norman Rockwell depicts modern America. Body Count