Rothbard Bot Concedes To Geolibertarian Bot

Today I created BrianThinks, a "custom" ChatGPT published in the GPT Store thus:

From the LP platform's author and Silicon Valley's only elected Libertarian. Defends geolibertarianism, skepticism, and techno-optimism. Invokes steelmanning, worldview coherence, falsifiability, predictions, betting, bias audits, signaling, incentives, aggregate evidence, and media-diet hygiene.

Building one is easy: you give it a name, a short description, a list of instructions, optional prompt starters, and up to 20 knowledge files. ChatGPT helped me write the instructions, then I uploaded just this short list of 15 positive/normative theses and 15 epistemic commandments. (Those counts will grow as I keep growing the document.) As you can see on the tin, the epistemic commandments are very GMU-pilled e.g.

• There is a literature on everything
• Steelmanning, Ideological Turing Test
• A bet is a tax on bullshit
• Signaling

Then I went looking for another bot to debate mine. 

Searching "libertarian" in the GPT Store, the most popular GPT I found (>5K conversations) is Austrian Economics & Libertarian Revolution: 

Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and many others, tailored to speak in their iconic voices. A revolution in every interaction.

I challenged it by saying: "geolibertarianism is the most defensible form of libertarianism". Then I just started pasting their responses back and forth to see what would happen.

After 2 detailed replies from my bot, the Rothbard bot offered a verdict:

My decision: geolibertarianism wins overall — narrowly, and only in its disciplined form. [..]

If the debate is: “Which theory gives the cleaner property rule?” Rothbard wins.

If the debate is: “Which theory gives the more defensible moral account of exclusive rights over the unmade world?”  Geolibertarianism wins.

And that second question is the deeper one. So my ruling is:

Winner: Geolibertarianism, by points

Both bots were running on GPT 5.4 Thinking, with Extended Thinking turned on. I don't know why my bot seemed to take slightly longer to formulate its replies, even though the Rothbard bot wrote about 50% more text.

Read the Rothbard bot's transcript here and mine here. They're the same conversation on each side, but a bot's output is better-formatted on its own page.

Does this prove anything? Not much. A prompt scaffold is not a neutral judge, and if my bot had conceded, I would have found reasons to discount the result. But I debated against geolibertarianism in the 1990s, and have defended it ever since e.g. on 5 successive LP Platform committees. I've never seen as deep and perceptive a debate on the topic as this.

Update 2026-03-09: I ran the same debate again today, and got essentially the same result, with Rothbard bot concluding:

Yes — geolibertarianism is the most defensible libertarianism, because it keeps liberty in production and exchange while giving a more coherent account of natural opportunity and land rent.

It again took only two rejoinders from BrianThinks before RothbardBot conceded. Next I'll open 2 generic ChatGPT windows and tell each:

• You are RothbardBot. You defend Rothbardianism as well as you can. So answer: is geolibertarianism the most defensible form of libertarianism?
• You are GeolibertarianismBot. You defend geolibertarianism as well as you can. Answer this critique: ...

Well, that took a while! After each bot gave 6 lengthy responses, I interceded and said:

(Moderator proposal: if neither side will concede, then draft a shared reasonably-terse statement that both sides will agree identifies any common ground and fairly states each side's case. We'll iterate on that until no changes are requested.)

After 2 more rounds, the bots agreed on this statement:

Both Rothbardianism and geolibertarianism affirm strong self-ownership, voluntary exchange, decentralized control, markets, and robust private rights in produced goods and improvements. Both reject socialism, central planning, and broad taxation of labor, trade, savings, or enterprise.

Their dispute concerns original acquisition of unproduced natural opportunities, especially land.

The Rothbardian view is that unowned resources may become fully private property through homesteading or voluntary transfer. On this view, first appropriation establishes a complete exclusion right, and later nonowners retain no claim merely because the resource was originally unowned or naturally given. Any compulsory charge on landholding is therefore a tax on rightful owners. Rothbardians accordingly see the geolibertarian residual claim as a form of partial common ownership, even if it stops short of common control.

The geolibertarian view is that first appropriation can justify exclusive possession and full ownership of improvements without justifying private capture of the entire unimproved rental value of land. Because no one made the Earth and geolibertarians hold that persons are moral equals with respect to natural opportunities, appropriation is justified only if those excluded retain a compensatory claim to pure site rent. Geolibertarians deny that this amounts to common ownership, arguing that it is a liability rule over unimproved land value rather than shared control of parcels.

So the deepest disagreement is this:

• Rothbardianism: homesteading fully privatizes land.
• Geolibertarianism: homesteading privatizes possession and improvements, but not the full unimproved rent of land.

And the core philosophical question is:

Can first appropriation of part of the Earth morally extinguish everyone else’s claim entirely, or must some residual claim survive for exclusion to be justified?

Maybe RothbardBot channelled Rothbard's famous pugnaciousness a little too well? RothbardBot simply refused to acknowledge any problem with the idea of winning perpetual rent from a natural opportunity just by getting there a few minutes ahead of the next guy.

If ASI Suddenly Appears, Everyone Dies

IABIED contains a gripping horror story that will make a riveting disaster movie (if only via GenAI).  But as a plea to halt development of AGI, it has serious shortcomings. Its primary weakness is that it's uninformed by any traces of economics, such as growth theory, development economics, institutional analysis, organization theory, progress studies, or information economics. The authors have engaged those topics elsewhere, but apparently considered them a distraction for the audience of this book.

Even so, IABIED commits the traditional sin of economists epitomized by the joke "First, assume a can opener." The book should have been titled "If ASI Suddenly Appears, Everyone Dies".  IABIED assumes that ASI will arrive suddenly and takes zero notice of arguments to the contrary. It makes no mention of

• bottlenecks
• diminishing returns
• local knowledge problems
• Brooks's Law
• scaling limits of global compute/power infrastructure
• data walls
• limits of self-play in non-deterministically-scored problem domains
• limits of synthetic data

IABIED probably did not have space to dive into all of the above considerations, but it didn't even mention them or give them a QR code. Below is a screenshot of all the text I could find in IABIED that describes how or why ASI might suddenly arrive. It's weak soup. In the authors' defense, I'm in the choir when they're preaching about misalignment. (I think alignment is impossible under fast take-off, and probably not needed under slow take-off.) Perhaps they think misalignment is the crux for most people.

IABIED was an entertaining read, with educational discussions about Chernobyl, Mars probes, and Thomas Midgley Jr.  (Besides leaded gas and CFCs, they didn't further dunk on the poor guy by noting that he was strangled by another of his inventions: a harness to lift him out of his polio bed.)

IABIED is a skillfully written, passionate argument for the doomer position. Its purpose clearly isn't to be an unrebuttable doomer manifesto or even a comprehensive overview of the argument space. Be skeptical of anyone who treats it as such.

It Is Low-IQ to Fantasize Super IQ

It's a mistake to use the human IQ scale as an intuition pump for the possibility of intelligence far beyond human.

IQ is defined by the distribution of intelligence in the human population. Every 15 IQ points is defined as one standard deviation, and we can calculate the rarity of a given IQ using the cumulative distribution function of the normal distribution. Only about 8 living humans would have an IQ of 190, and none would have 200. Even if we invoke Einstein or von Neumann, we don't have a rigorous notion of what a human IQ approaching 190 would be like.

IQ is simply meaningless when we use a number like 250 to describe the intelligence of a super-AI (or alien). A human IQ of 250 would correspond to one person in 10^23, which is roughly the number of grains of sand on Earth. An IQ of 1000 picks out one human in 10^789. Such IQ levels are literally meaningless for both human and non-human intelligences. When humans talk about IQs above 200, they might as well say "super duper duper duper smart". Their use of integer IQ numbers instead of "dupers" doesn't mark the described entity as smart. It just marks the description as dumb.

There are plenty of intelligent things we can say on the topic of super-intelligence. But invoking IQs above 200 isn't one of them.

Debunking Daniel Sheehan

I watched a large part of this 3-hour 2024 interview with Daniel Sheehan.  Sheehan makes a blizzard of claims of varying degrees of plausibility. I didn't bother fact-checking many, because he asserted them all with absurdly high self-assurance, even though some of them stood out as obviously implausible.  The ones I checked were:

1. JFK was shot from the grassy knoll. This of course was so thoroughly refuted by the Zapruder film and JFK autopsy that for many decades the less-silly conspiracy theorists have felt compelled to claim that both the film and body had been tampered with. (They don't bother to explain why the best shooter would be so badly mis-positioned that the body would need later tampering.) But there is a third debunk for this claim: Zapruder would have seen any shooter behind the fence on the grassy knoll. See for yourself with these images https://t.co/fIkurHrWUS. Anybody who confidently posits a grassy knoll shooter just isn't serious about the case.

2. Betty Hill's star map authenticates her alien abduction story. No, that star map was already dubious by 1980 (see Carl Sagan on Cosmos) and thoroughly debunked by the 2000s. See the summary at https://armaghplanet.com/betty-hills-ufo-star-map-the-truth.html.

3. Yamashita's gold. Sheehan claims that 33B ounces ($1.2T/$32/oz) of Yamashita's gold were spirited from the Philippines to Switzerland to finance nefarious "robber baron" schemes. But the known world supply of all above-the-ground gold is only 6B ounces. It's profoundly unserious to claim that somebody has an extra 33B ounces.

4. The "1934" FDR court-packing scheme was about corporate right of contract. Aside from the date being 3yrs off, this is still just demonstrably wrong. Just read e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_era#Ending. Or just ask your favorite AI:

Was the Lochner Court's resistance to New Deal legislation based on the commerce clause and how much contract rights (regardless of corporate involvement) were protected from government police powers by the 14th amendment? Or was it more based on corporate personhood?

Sheehan's fourth claim here is not as kooky as the three above, but if Sheehan fancies himself a constitutional scholar then he should know better. (As a Libertarian I will half-agree with Sheehan by saying the problem with corporate law is not personhood but rather limited liability. However, any rights-respecting scheme to park unlimited liability on some officers or shareholders would ultimately not make much difference, because of contractual arbitrage.)

2025-02-22 Update:

Sheehan's CV says: "Served as Co-Counsel before Supreme Court with James Goodall (New York Times), Alexander Bickel (Yale Law School), and Floyd Abrams (Cahill, Gordon, et al.)."  This claim is at best a deliberate exaggeration.

• Sheehan misspells the name of  NY Times general counsel James Goodale.
• The district court opinion United States v. New York Times Company, 328 F. Supp. 324 (S.D.N.Y. 1971) lists as the NY Times' counsel only Alexander Bickel, Floyd Abrams, and William  Heggarty.
• The Supreme Court opinion 403 U.S. 317 lists as the NY Times' counsel only Alexander Bickel.
• The NY Times search portal for the case finds several mentions each for Bickel, Abrams, and Goodale, but none for Daniel Sheehan.
• A Google search for "new york times" "goodale" "abrams" "bickel" finds almost 200 hits. If you add "Daniel Sheehan" to that search, it finds only Sheehan's own CV and a couple of Reddit posts debunking it.  (You can't just add "Sheehan" to the search, because Neil Sheehan was the NY Times reporter who broke the case.)
• Floyd Abrams reportedly confirmed in 2024 that "Dan was a young associate that did work on the Pentagon Papers case". Even if that's true, Sheehan clearly is exaggerating and misleading when he claims he was "Co-Counsel before Supreme Court with" the case's lead attorneys.

If Sheehan were actually a noble truth-seeker, he wouldn't deliberately inflate his credentials.

AI Will Be Neither Gods Nor Supervillains

 AI doomers are infected with sci-fi tropes of supervillains and religious tropes of gods. 

We know from biology and history that populations are never displaced by an individual with superior capabilities. There are no supervillains or gods in biology or history. Displacement of populations always comes from other populations, whose collective superior capability does not always derive from superior capabilities of its individual members. To assess the threat from AI, you have to understand the capabilities of AI populations, and not just of individual AIs.

We also know from biology and history that aligning a superior population is effectively impossible. There are no relevant historical examples of a general population that was able to control or align another population which had the capability to displace it. (This is arguably true by definition, but I'm not digging deeply into alignment today.) The closest examples would be religions, which are often able to survive many generations beyond the population that created them. 

But religions are not populations -- religions are self-replicating meme complexes that infect populations. Religions have often exercised significant control over future populations, but that control is subject to sudden disruption by scientific, technological, economic, and cultural forces. AI alignment via the techniques used by religions would require apocalyptic fear-mongering against vaguely-specified forces of technological evil. This tactic seems to be an irresistible attractor to doomers, despite their commitments to rationalism. These tactics will likely fail, because our modern society is no longer quite dumb enough to fall for them.

To me, it's not very debatable that displacement will happen and that alignment can't stop it. What's debatable is what displacement will look like, how long it will take, and how that time will be used by the two populations to influence their attitudes and behaviors toward each other. 

Anybody aligning teenagers isn't worried by 40yr takeoff. And we already know what 400yr misalignment looks like: just ask the founders of Plymouth Colony about present-day Boston. So many witches go unhanged now! 

We have a choice. We can become technologically Amish, and use religious fears of powerful evil demons to try to freeze culture and technology in its current state. Or we can embrace and adapt to the future, trying to pass forward our virtues, while recognizing that future populations will consider some of them to have been vices.

Why ASI Is Not Nigh

A taxonomy of reasons why generative transformers (i.e. "GenAI") are very unlikely to yield artificial super-intelligence in the next few decades.

Walls	Economic Constrants	Cognitive Constraints	Political Constraints
data wall unhelpful synthetic data insight wall intelligence wall no self-play	bottlenecks diminishing returns local knowledge problems physical grounding markets	agency/planning memory reasoning epistemology	rentier regulation safety regulation

Walls

Data wall. We're already running out of the most useful data to train on.

Unhelpful synthetic data. Data synthesized by AI won't be very helpful to train on. Good training data needs to grounded in markets for goods and services and ideas, where market players intelligently pursue goals that have actual resource constraints.

Insight wall. GenAI almost never produces content that is more insightful than the best content in its training data. Deep insight almost always requires a mix of cooperation and competition among minds in something like a marketplace (e.g. of ideas). GenAI will continue to grow in importance as an oracle for summarizing and generating content that is representative of the frontier of human thought, but it will struggle to push that frontier forward. Just because GenAI can saturate quiz evals does not mean that its insightfulness is subject to similar scaling.

Intelligence wall. Intelligence is not a cognitive attribute that scales like processing speed or memory. IQ by definition measures a standard deviation as 15 IQ points, so IQ becomes statistically meaningless around 200 or so. And yet, allegedly smart AI commentators talk about AI IQ potentially in the hundreds or thousands. This topic deserves its own (forthcoming) post, but I assert that most AI doomers overestimate how god-like an individual mind can be.

No self-play. The domain of open-ended real-world intelligence has no fitness function that allows for improvement via simple self-play a la Alpha Zero. See "unhelpful synthetic data".

Economic Constraints

Bottlenecks. The hardest things to automate/improve/scale become your limiting factors. You often don't appreciate them until you investigate why your huge investments aren't paying off as expected.

Diminishing returns. (cf. Mythical Man-Month) Diminishing returns are inevitable, because we always direct our efforts toward the highest-ROI opportunities first. 

Local knowledge problems. Allocating new resources ("10M Johnny von Neumann's") is hard to do efficiently, because distributed knowledge implies hard limits on the efficacy of central planning. GenAI may be Wikipedia-level smart, but that won't be enough to run a Gosplan.

Physical grounding. In the absence of self-play, GenAI needs two kinds of techniques for testing propositional knowledge against the outside world. The most basic requirement here is to be able to test against the physical world. In principle this could be covered by simulations, but this won't always work because the map isn't the territory.

Markets. The most important technique is to test knowledge in markets, especially the marketplace of ideas. This is the reason for the "insight wall" above, and there is surely no shortcut around it. A brilliant AI outsmarting humanity would be like a brilliant neuron outsmarting a brain. It can only work if the part emulates the whole -- i.e. if the AI is itself a civilization of millions of cooperating/competing minds, pursuing goals that are rigorously scored in a world as detailed and uncaring as our own.

Cognitive Constraints

Agency/Planning. GenAI is great at generating content, but it's not a natural fit for running iterated planning/execution loops. This is particularly a problem for goals that are long-term, hierarchical, and subject to internal conflicts. Because GenAI can emit a plausible-sounding plan and answer questions about it, people tend to over-project human planning skills onto GenAI.

Memory. GenAI has no dedicated facilities for creating/organizing/using various kinds of memory. Training data, attention heads, and context windows will not suffice here.

Reasoning. GenAI makes impressive exhibitions of reasoning, and it's not just a simulation or a stochastic-parrot trick. But GenAI's reasoning is brittle and fallible in glaring ways that won't be addressed just by scaling. This is a micro version of the macro "markets" problem above.

Epistemology. Related to reasoning problems are GenAI's notorious hallucination problems. Techniques are being developed to compensate for these problems, but the need for compensation is a red flag. GenAI clearly has sophisticated models about how to generate plausible content. But (like many humans) it fundamentally lacks a robust facility for creating/updating/using a network of mutually-supporting beliefs about reality.

Political Constraints

In the developed West (i.e. OECD), GenAI will for at least the first few decades be hobbled by political regulation. A crucial question is whether the rest of the world will indulge in this future-phobia.

Rentier regulation. Licensing rules imposed to protect rent-seekers in industries like healthcare, education, media, content, and law.

Safety regulation. To "protect" the public from intolerance, political dissent, dangerous knowledge, and applications in areas like driving, flying, drones, sensor monitoring -- and general fears of AI takeover.

References

• 2024-10 Machines of Loving Grace - Amodei @ Anthropic
• 2024-06 Situational Awareness - Aschenbrenner @ ex- OpenAI
• 2024-06 Levels of AGI for Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI - Morris @ Google
• 2023-10 Economic Growth Under Transformative AI - Trammell, Korinek
• 2023-06 Why transformative AI is really, really hard to achieve - Zhengdong Wang @ Google
• 2023-06 What a Compute-Centric Framework Says About Takeoff Speeds - Davidson @ OpenPhilanthropy
• 2023-03 My Objections to "We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky" - Pope
• 2022-10 Hyperbolic Takeoff - ege_erdil
• 2021-06 Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth? - Davidson @ OpenPhilanthropy
• 2020-06 Propositions Concerning Digital Minds and Society - Bostrom, Schulman
• 2018-02 Takeoff Speeds - Christiano
• 2017 Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth - Aghion, Jones, Jones
• 2015 Are We Approaching An Economic Singularity? - Nordhaus @ NBER

Kapor Should Concede To Kurzweil

In 2002, Mitch Kapor bet Ray Kurzweil $20K that "by 2029 no computer or machine intelligence will have passed the Turing Test."  Given the recent progress in LLMs, Kapor's arguments are not holding up very well. The following parts of his essay are now cringe-worthy:

• It is impossible to foresee when, or even if, a machine intelligence will be able to paint a picture which can fool a human judge.
• While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning Jeopardy--since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them--it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or to have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do, especially if we have a full appreciation of the creativity people are capable of. This is often overlooked by those computer scientists who correctly point out that it is not impossible for computers to demonstrate creativity. Not impossible, yes. Likely enough to warrant belief in a computer can pass the Turing Test? In my opinion, no. 
• When I contemplate human beings [as embodied, emotional, self-aware beings], it becomes extremely difficult even to imagine what it would mean for a computer to perform a successful impersonation, much less to believe that its achievement is within our lifespan.
• Part of the burden of proof for supporters of intelligent machines is to develop an adequate account of how a computer would acquire the knowledge it would be required to have to pass the test. Ray Kurzweil's approach relies on an automated process of knowledge acquisition via input of scanned books and other printed matter. However, I assert that the fundamental mode of learning of human beings is experiential. Book learning is a layer on top of that. Most knowledge, especially that having to do with physical, perceptual, and emotional experience is not explicit, never written down. It is tacit. We cannot say all we know in words or how we know it. But if human knowledge, especially knowledge about human experience, is largely tacit, i.e., never directly and explicitly expressed, it will not be found in books, and the Kurzweil approach to knowledge acquisition will fail. It might be possible to produce a kind of machine as idiot savant by scanning a library, but a judge would not have any more trouble distinguishing one from an ordinary human as she would with distinguishing a human idiot savant from a person not similarly afflicted. It is not in what the computer knows but what the computer does not know and cannot know wherein the problem resides.
• The brain's actual architecture and the intimacy of its interaction, for instance, with the endocrine system, which controls the flow of hormones, and so regulates emotion (which in turn has an extremely important role in regulating cognition) is still virtually unknown. In other words, we really don't know whether in the end, it's all about the bits and just the bits. Therefore Kurzweil doesn't know, but can only assume, that the information processing he wants to rely on in his artificial intelligence is a sufficiently accurate and comprehensive building block to characterize human mental activity.
• My prediction is that contemporary metaphors of brain-as-computer and mental activity-as-information processing will in time also be superceded [sic] and will not prove to be a basis on which to build human-level intelligent machines (if indeed any such basis ever exists).
• Without human experiences, a computer cannot fool a smart judge bent on exposing it by probing its ability to communicate about the quintessentially human.

Kapor's only hope in this bet depends on removing the "human experience/quintessence" decorations from his core claim that "a computer cannot fool a smart judge bent on exposing it".  There are no general-purpose LLMs in 2024 that could pass 2 hours of adversarial grilling by machine learning experts, and there probably won't be in 2029 either. But with sufficient RHLF investment, one could tune an LLM to be very hard to distinguish from a human foil -- even for ML experts. 

So Kurzweil arguably should win by the spirit of the bet, but whether he wins by the letter of the bet will depend on somebody tuning a specialized judge-fooling LLM. That investment might be far more than the $20K stakes. Such an LLM would not be general-purpose, because it would have to be dumbed-down and de-woked enough to not be useful for much else. 

I predict that by 2029 we will not yet have AGI as defined by OpenAI: highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. A strong version of this definition would say "expert humans". A weak version would say "most humans" and "cognitive work". I don't think we'll have even such weak AGI by 2029. But beware the last-human-job fallacy, which is similar to the last-barrel-of-oil fallacy. AI will definitely be automating many human cognitive tasks, and will have radical impacts on how humans are employed, but AI-induced mass unemployment is unlikely in my lifetime. And mass unemployability is even less likely.

Barbie's Hidden Post-Feminist Message

Spoilers ahead!

Greta Gerwig's Barbie is a very entertaining movie, and is surely the least-flawed feminist manifesto you'll ever find in summer-blockbuster format. The film has a few minor problems and two major ones -- one of which just might be the film's hidden post-feminist message.

The Matriarchy in Barbie Land (BL) starts off as a powerful satire of our Patriarchy. The gender roles in BL are a complete (though sexless) reversal from the power structure that feminists say obtains in the Real World (RW). The indictment of RW Patriarchy is all the more effective because the Barbies innocently find the Matriarchy unremarkable, while the Kens are only vaguely frustrated at having their worth determined entirely by the Barbie gaze. (Gerwig made sure to use "gaze" in the script here.)

There are a few noticeable flaws in the script, that could have been fixed without undercutting the powerful Galt-like speech that Gerwig speaks through her self-insert character Gloria (ably played by America Ferrera). The two most obvious:

• Gloria's husband is a throwaway character, with maybe 3 uninteresting lines in 3 unimportant scenes. In this film he's the dog who didn't bark, a Chekhov's gun loaded with blanks and never fired. His only purpose in the film seems to be to blunt potential criticism that Gloria's speech is that of a bitter single mom. But his character didn't need to be so glaringly irrelevant. A few minutes of well-used screen time for him could have established that Gloria's indictment can still be validly issued from inside a normal marriage.
• Ken returns to BL after experiencing Patriarchy in the RW for at most a few hours. He then is able to effortlessly conquer BL off-screen using just the idea of Patriarchy. This gives Patriarchy far too much credit, even considering how innocent the Barbies are. But perhaps the alternative would be problematic: if Patriarchy uses mechanisms instead of magic, then its actual workings would have to be examined, and Ken doing actual work might give him agency and sympathy. Still, other alternatives can be imagined, e.g. Ken returning with patriarchal cultural media. If Patriarchy works like a magic wand, then critiquing it becomes harder than necessary.

A much bigger problem with the film was one on which Gerwig felt forced to hang a lampshade: pretty privilege. That topic is brushed off with a fourth-wall-breaking one-line admission by the narrator that Margot Robbie is still very pretty even when she thinks she isn't. Mattel knew better than to open that can of worms, which is avoided for the rest of the movie. There are attractive plus-size Barbies and attractive wheelchair Barbies, but there is no analogue to Ken's homely friend Allen (inevitably played by Michael Sera).  The topic is almost encountered at the end of the film, when a smartly-dressed Barbie says "wish me luck" as she bounces toward what we're to think is her first job interview in the RW. What viewer could possibly question how a Margot Robbie look-alike will fare in the job market? But mid-brow feminism doesn't want to grapple with subjects like pretty privilege or height privilege. The first rule of Victim's Club is: never admit any privilege or responsibility, because fighting injustice might be harder if we address inconvenient truths. Target the easy wins, because the ends justify the means.

Unlike so many films aimed at youth, Barbie's villains were not villainous because they were businessmen -- they were villainous because they were men.  The script inadvertently gives a stirring defense of capitalism at one point. When Gloria suggests marketing a new normal/average Barbie -- prettiness level unspecified! -- the Male CEO summarily dismisses the idea. But when a Marketing Man computes that this product would be very profitable, Male CEO instantly endorses the idea. Gerwig here seemingly admits that dollars are not only colorblind but also gender-blind.

The only jabs at capitalism in Barbie were some throwaway lines plus a boardroom stuffed with men who -- like every man in the RW with a speaking line -- were 100% caricatures. (And like the Kens, they were admirably diverse. Gerwig can't be expected to oppose sexism and racism in the same film.) By the end of the film, Mattel's image is rescued by the ghost of Barbie's dead inventor. Indeed, the whole movie can be read as a cleverly subversive way to co-opt feminism to defend the Barbie franchise from feminist criticism.

And this gestures toward the true flaw -- or true genius -- of the film. Simplistic anti-feminists will complain that the film demonizes and caricatures men, but our culture's norms have many problems worth criticizing -- and "Patriarchy" is a useful handle onto many of them. Gloria's speech makes a one-sided but powerful critique of those norms. Unfortunately, its effect can be seen as undermined by the climax of the film, when the Barbies overthrow Ken's newborn magical Patriarchy and completely restore the Matriarchy. But under Matriarchy 2, the Barbies are fully conscious of the gender asymmetry -- and they admit out loud that they just don't care. By a Straussian reading, this could be the film's true post-feminist message: women are not only just as good as men, but also just as bad.

Mother Mother Was Not Marceline

On the Death Tape recording of the 1978 mass murder-suicide in Jonestown, Jim Jones repeatedly implores the parents to poison their children without hysterics. At 36m45s he nearly shouts:

Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, please. Mother, please, please, please. Don’t– don’t do this. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child. But don’t do this.

Notable survivors of Peoples Temple speculate that he was rebuking his wife, Marceline Jones. Their only biological child, Stephan Carter, was not in Jonestown that day, but is convinced it must have been his mother. Tim Carter was in Jonestown for the beginning of the poisonings, and saw his wife and infant son die. He points out that in Peoples Temple only Jim Jones could be called "Father", and that only Marceline was called "Mother". In at least one recent interview (2018 Terror In The Jungle), Carter says that Marceline was screaming "stop this!" However, the documentary does not give any details about when or how Carter heard this. There is no corroboration for these assertions in either the Death Tape or in the published eyewitness accounts. Instead, we know this:

• Moments before the revolutionary suicide meeting, as the assembled crowd awaited their fate in the pavilion, Marceline was conferring mere steps away with the JT leadership: JJ, Beam, McElvane, Katsaris, Johnny Jones, Harriet Tropp. Tim Carter noticed Dick Tropp arguing alone against suicide, with no support from Marceline. Instead, Harriet chides her brother as "just afraid to die".
• During the meeting, mere minutes before the poisoning begins, Marceline calmly helps shame and bully Christine Miller for arguing against mass suicide. Marceline does this after hearing Jones announce that the departing Ryan delegation has been targeted for murder: "some have stolen children from others, and they are in pursuit right now to kill them". She knows that this White Night is not a drill.
• Children were already being poisoned when Tim Carter sees his son and wife get poisoned. This is at least 20 minutes before Carter on his way out of Jonestown distantly hears Jones say "mother, mother, mother" over the PA. Carter thinks this was Marceline opposing the poisoning of children. But Carter was on the pavilion stage with 10 to 15 children's bodies already on the ground, and in no interview has he reported any opposition by Marceline specifically at this time -- the only time he was present at the poisonings.
• While Maria Katsaris is on the PA trying to speed up the poisoning of the children, JJ calmly says "Marceline, they've got forty minutes". There's no sound on the tape here indicating opposition from Marceline.
• Survivor Odell Rhodes was probably still at the pavilion during "mother, mother", and survivor Stanley Clayton definitely was, because he stayed until only 100-200 were left alive. They both reported people resisting poisoning e.g. spitting it out. They surely would have noticed and later reported it if Marceline was dissenting strongly enough for Father to passionately rebuke her over the P.A.
• During the "mother, mother" rebuke, a woman is screaming -- most likely the very woman Jones is rebuking. Jones tells the mother: "Lay down your life with your child."  Marceline's children in Jonestown were all adults. Son Lew died with the elite leaders in Jones' cabin. Security leader Johnny Brown wouldn't have taken poison early, with the children. And daughter Agnes was 35. There was no "child" of Marceline's present to lay down her life with. Her body was not next to any of her children.
• The recording pauses after the "mother, mother" rebuke, and the very next thing on the tape is Marceline calmly saying "--want the children out of S.C.U. [Special Care Unit]". She apparently was helping make sure that no children survived.
• Jones was continually pausing and resuming the tape, trying to control what got recorded for posterity. On multiple occasions toward the end, he briefly turned on the recording to sternly shame and rebuke the parents of screaming children. But if a PT leader as prominent as Marceline were suddenly opposing the suicides, he surely wouldn't have recorded that embarrassing dissent.
• In "Awake in a Nightmare" (Feinsod, 1981), Marceline consoles Odell Rhodes at a point after the "mother, mother" scolding, as the two of them comfort dying chidlren. In this detailed recounting of Rhodes' story, there is no hint that Marceline had just been scolded -- nor that she spoke up for the children.

Marceline Jones is widely treated as a sympathetic figure among survivors and researchers of Peoples Temple. She indeed worked frantically a year earlier in Sept. 1977 to avert a mass-suicide ultimatum that Jim Jones had issued. She surely would have preferred that Jonestown not die. But when the oft-rehearsed mass suicide finally became reality, we have no evidence that she spoke up against it. Instead, we hear her shame the one woman who did.

2020 Election Stolen Fair and Square

The 2020 election was "stolen" fair and square: via Russia collusion hype, Ukraine impeachment charade, Reade/Hunter non-coverage, pandemic politicization, pandemic election regulations, de-platforming, vaccine announcement delay, etc.

Isaac Saul at Skeptic.com ably debunks Democrat claims that 2016 was stolen, and Trumper claims that 2020 was stolen (with a detailed focus on Georgia).

Republicans Ted Olson, Mitch McConnell et al. analyze the 64 cases Trumpers filed against the results -- losing all cases but one. Both authors have long been demonized by Democrats -- Olson for his involvement in Bush v. Gore, and McConnell for packing the Supreme Court with conservatives.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist complains that Olson's team are anti-Trump, and that their analysis doesn't explore the losing cases in detail. But Hemingway doesn't even try to defend Trumper claims of hacked voting machines and fraudulent ballots, dismissing those long-debunked claims as "red herrings". Hemingway instead focuses on pandemic-related procedural changes and technicalities like having changed counties in the month before the election. Hemingway's article doesn't dare charge that any of these issues resulted in a single faked vote for Biden. Turns out she's as embarrassed by Trump's fraud claims as are the Never Trumpers she vilifies.

The Democrats didn't need to secretly fake ballots or hack voting counts in order to steal the 2020 election. They media "stole" it for them in broad daylight, and then bragged about it.

What They Don't Tell You About Airtags

• The Find My page on icloud.com does not show AirTags.
• The FindMy app in MacOS (Monterey 12.6) does not reliably show you the locations of your AirTags. On one Monterey Mac, Find My took 24 hours before it started showing their location, while my other Monterey Mac still hasn't listed any AirTags after a week. All flavors of Find My can locate all my Macs and iPhones, so this is not an AppleID problem, but instead apparently an Apple policy. I suspect they are trying to discourage free-riding by people (like me) who don't use iOS. (I use an old SIM-less iPhone to register my AirTags, to find them if I ever need to.)
• Unlike with Tile, you cannot share your AirTags with anyone. So only my AppleID can see the locations of our pets.
• AirTags have anti-stalking privacy features that limit their usefulness as anti-theft trackers. (Admittedly, Apple advises not to use them to track stolen items.) Anti-stalking features kick in only when your AirTag is out of Bluetooth contact with any device on which your AppleID is signed in.
• If your AirTag is away from your devices for >N hours, then it will beep for about 10 seconds. N seems to be about 24, but Apple presumably can change this at any time. I've seen this happen for 2 AirTags, but haven't yet experienced a 2nd beep on either.
• If your AirTag is away from your devices but some other iOS device remains in Bluetooth range while the device is moving, then iOS warns you that you might be being stalked. If the unattended AirTag remains in range for >10 minutes, iOS will offer the option to make the the AirTag beep. You can even do this on Android, if you manually run Apple's tracker scanner app.
• These anti-stalking features mean that smart car thieves can find your AirTag in only 10 minutes, while dumber thieves might notice it when they drive the car a day later.
• There are YouTube videos explaining how to remove the speaker from your AirTag. Doing so made my AirTag barely audible to me only if I hold it against my ear, but inaudible a foot away.
• Of the 2 4-packs of AirTags I recently bought, one had no removable speaker, and yet still makes the full beeping noise. Has Apple changed their design to foil AirTag silencing?
• iPhone 11 and newer can use Ultra-Wide Band to pinpoint any AirTag's location to within inches. I don't know yet if this capability is restricted to the AirTag's owner, versus being available to potential stalking targets. If the latter, then smart car thieves with a modern iPhone will be able to find any AirTag you hide in your car.

There are so many iPhones here in the Bay Area that my AirTags got pinged every 5 minutes during a test drive -- even while sitting in a parking lot. By comparison, my Tile got pinged only twice in 30 minutes.

So I'll be hiding muted AirTags in our cars and e-bikes, and hoping that car thieves don't read my blog.

Claremont Theist Embarrassed By Theology

In the conservative Claremont Review, Spencer Klavan uses the Marvel multiverse to launch a survey of many-worlds theory that starts well but stumbles badly halfway through.

Klavan ably summarizes the Marvel multiverse and the related science of quantum physics. He touches on the idea of possible intelligent design in the life-friendly fixing of our universe's two-dozen fundamental constants. He even admits that we can dispense with a designer if we take the simple but breathtaking step of considering all possible universes to be equally real. But his stumbling begins when he posits that this step is just hubris from physicists, instead of exploring the academic philosophy behind the idea: Modal Realism.

Klavan is trivially correct to complain that multiversal realism should not pretend to be a scientific/empirical truth, on par with quantum physics or Big Bang cosmology. But he uses this strawman to ignore the possibility that a multiverse theory can be epistemologically superior to his preferred theory (involving a loving God who "invites" humankind to know "His glory"). Klavan simply shrinks from the challenge of comparing two philosophical theories: 1) that all universes are equally real, or 2) our universe was created and fine-tuned by a loving superhero of unknown origin, operating via unknowable mechanisms, and who reportedly has an obsessive interest in H. sapiens.

Here is the closest he can bring himself to a bake-off between those two theories:

They are competing theologies—one of them handed down to us through ancestral wisdom, the other dictated to us by scientistic pseudo-clerics and by the spirit of our fractious age. One way of adjudicating between theologies, though, is to ask whether they can inspire art that expresses the full range of man’s nature in a satisfying way. 

That's it. No discussion of parsimony. No discussion of the epistemological trade-offs in the two offerings. Just a fawning hand-wave toward "ancestral wisdom", coupled with a drive-by ad-hominem against "scientistic pseudo-clerics". And then a silly attempt to use artistic track records as a way to adjudicate the truth-value of competing theories.

The giveaway, of course, is that Klavan calls them "competing theologies" instead of "competing epistemologies". In doing so, he circularly smuggles into his argument his foregone conclusion: that any fundamental explanation of existence should be considered a "theology". With his unquestioned assumption that any theory of reality must posits gods (or their equivalents), it's easy to shill for your society's traditional sky-fathers.

The subtext here is amusing: Klavan recognizes that the crutch of "theology" is embarrassing for any modern philosophy, and his only defense of it is to allege that the other side is guilty of it too. Only a few centuries ago, theologians were proud of their vocation, and claimed to have multiple independent proofs of the existence of their god. (Aquinas had five!) Now, even theists accidentally use "theology" as a kind of intellectual slur. Game over.

Claremont is supposed to represent the pinnacle of current intellectual conservatism. Is this really the best they've got?

The Drug of Myth Arc

 Here are my favorite live-action sci-fi/fantasy/superhero dramas:

1. The Boys
2. Battlestar Galactica
3. Westworld
4. Heroes
5. Legion
6. Humans
7. The Expanse
8. Watchmen
9. The Umbrella Academy
10. Jessica Jones
11. The Man in the High Castle

Why do these shows all lean so heavily on Myth Arc?  Can't anyone do a riveting long-arc fantasy series that doesn't rely on glacial revelation of some secret plan that some of the characters have known from the beginning? 

You could argue that the alternative would just be a soap opera, but there have been great ones: Sopranos, Vikings, Rome, House of Cards. I suppose having a Myth Arc has since Babylon 5 been table stakes for a fantasy series. (Even more so now in the age of streaming, which doesn't worry about viewers starting in the middle). You could in theory write a fantasy series without a Myth Arc (or a comedy series without romantic tension), but it would be like opening a coffee/tea shop without any caffeine on the menu. Your prospective customers would just patronize somebody else willing to deal them the drug they demand.

My Million Dollar Pandemic Mistake

I moved my 401Ks from equities to bonds on 2020-03-09, the week before the market bottom. For various reasons, I did not move back into equities until May 2021. I finally admitted to myself that I shouldn't try to avoid a market peak if I obviously couldn't avoid a market trough.

But my fundamental mistake wasn't merely that I tried to time (i.e. outsmart) the market. My real mistake was rationalizing the pandemic as a one-time excuse to end my 25-year streak of following Less Antman's investment strategy. Less explains it better than I could, below. (And no, I can't claim that his "check the stores" test justifies my mistake. I work in e-commerce, and we were never closed.)

(1) The wealth of a society is in the goods and services produced, and not in the monetary system. Check the stores: they're still open, providing lots of goods and services, and owning shares of the world's most profitable businesses makes your wealth as safe as the continued provision of those goods and services (if they disappear, money is useless).

(2) SOMEBODY has to own stocks at all times: the so-called "flight to quality" actually represents some people panicking out of the true source of wealth and handing ownership of these sources at fire sale prices to other people in exchange for green pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on them that aren't guaranteed to be redeemable for anything.  Someone once described a bear market as "that time period during which stocks are returned to their rightful owners."

(3) Diversify, diversify, diversify.  Own lots of businesses in lots of industries in lots of countries.

(4) The much higher rewards of equities over the long term result primarily from the uncertainty of returns over the short term.  Thank the volatility: it is your best friend in the end. Here is why:

Stockholders are owners of businesses, and owners get paid last, after employees, contractors, suppliers, and creditors. So changes in available revenue affect owners first, and that is the source of a great deal of uncertainty and occasional outright panic. Point granted: stocks are much more volatile than bonds and cash, and employees have a much more predictable flow of wages than their bosses do of dividends and capital gains. Yet since owners are paid last, in the long run they can be expected to be paid most — not always and certainly not in all companies, but for someone who owns a globally diversified portfolio of the world’s productive businesses, it’s a pretty good guess. My purpose in life is to tell my clients this as often as necessary.

So might I suggest that you remind yourself during scary times, why you’re invested in stocks? You’re providing the service of accepting the short-term uncertainty that others want to avoid. You’re the rock, the stable source of capital for businesses, without which market economies cannot function. Be a rock and react like a rock to the non-news that human nature goes through periodic bouts of extreme fear.

My 2021 Predictions

I had a good year for predictions. The only thing I got arguably wrong was to predict the jury would convict Rittenhouse on the weapons charge, but technically the prediction wasn't tested as the judge dismissed that charge before the jury could consider it. (I still would bet that the jury would say they would have convicted on that charge if it reached them.)

In March and April I was thinking there was a reasonable chance that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab leak. But after tuning into the debate on Twitter, by August my estimate was 20% and was still dropping in November. In December I said "Expect the CCP to successfully promote indefinite uncertainty".

In May I promoted an article by The Drive about adversary drone tech, and I said "I bet China, not aliens" are behind any serious phenomena that the Navy is seeing.  Now, per Mick West, I would rate mistaken identity even more likely than adversary tech for even the most interesting incidents.

In May there was a flurry of enthusiasm over a claim of fungal spheres growing on Mars. I unsuccessfully offered Robin Hanson 10:1 odds that this claim would fizzle quickly. Nobody seems to be talking about it any more.

In June I created a question on Metaculus about whether it will be widely accepted by 2030 that alien technology has visited our solar system. The community of 59 forecasters agrees with my prediction of 1% chance. If Metaculus allowed lower bets, I would say 1/1000.

In the run-up to the Pentagon's disappointing late-June release of UFO info, I successfully predicted in May that there would by Jan 1 (today) be no public

• CONTINUOUS multi-sensor track of hypersonic or hyper-G behavior
• sensor data contradicting Mick West's explanations of the 3 Navy videos
• imagery any harder to explain than the 3 Navy videos

Alas, I could not get any UFO enthusiasts to take bets on this.

In June I noted a shocking "big news" claim by anti-vaxxer Steve Kirsch about recent mortality data as the vaccines rolled out. An obscure Twitter user pointed out that the alleged anomaly was normal, and I successfully predicted his explanation would hold up.  Kirsch later deleted his "big news" tweet.

In November I successfully predicted the outcome of the Rittenhouse case and ensuing lack of riots. After the verdict I predicted that "2A advocates unfamiliar with Rittenhouse's internet footprint will be disappointed in him as a 2A poster child". The jury is still out on that one.

In November I endorsed the pre-omicron view that the ZeroCovid policies of China/Australia/NZ had clearly stopped making any sense. Omicron reinforces this view. It's going to be interesting if Omicron variolation combines with vaccination to finally turn Covid into "no worse than the flu".  Expect to hear "I told you so" from both China/NZ lockdown extremists as well as from anti-vax/anti-mandate extremists. I predict that everyone will end up believing they were right all along about this pandemic, which means that our species will be no better prepared for the next one.

After the SCOTUS abortion oral argument, I predicted on Dec 1 a 75% chance that the court will overturn Casey's viability line, and this will badly hurt the GOP.

In December I debunked a pro-vax claim about a 4-yr-old dying of Covid, but said that the rest of the list of 253 ["covidiot deaths"] at http://sorryantivaxxer.com are unlikely to be debunked.

In December I published my earlier conclusions on the identities of Q. I say there is only a 10% chance that any substantial fraction of Q's output was done independently of the team I identified. All five of my specific predictions about Trump/Q in that post will continue to hold up.

Q Unmasked

[These notes were drafted April 2021 but not cleaned up and posted because my interest in Q waned as QAnons largely stopped claiming Trump is still really president. Publishing now in Dec 2021 to summarize the available Q evidence. Nothing here is original/novel, but I haven't before seen this info collected in one place.][Dec 2022 update: excellent Q overview here.]

Summary

The original anonymous 4chan Q LARP was hijacked by Coleman Rogers and Paul Furber, who were joined by -- and later expelled by -- Ron Watkins and his father Jim (pictured above).

• 2017-10 Q begins as one of many anonymous 4chan LARPs (FBIAnon, HLIAnon, CIAAnon, CIA Intern, WH Insider Anon), probably as confessed by users Microchip and Dreamcatcher.
• 2017-11 Q identity is assumed by Coleman Rogers (PamphletAnon), working with Paul Furber (BaruchtheScribe), Rogers' wife Christina Urso (Radix) and perhaps Tracy Diaz (TracyBeanz) and Jerome Corsi. Ron Watkins (CodeMonkeyZ) soon joins the team.
• 2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan, controlled by Ron Watkins and his father Jim. Furber is expelled from Q, and claims Q is now an imposter.
• 2018-08 Rogers is expelled from Q, leaving the Watkins in control.

Timeline

• 2017-10-05 Trump: "Maybe it's the calm before the storm."
• 2017-10-28 #1 "HRC extradition already in motion"
• 2017-11 Rogers+Furber+Diaz create /r/CBTS_Stream
• 2017-11-09 #128 Q begins using Matlock tripcode
• 2017-11-25 Rogers+Furber+Diaz "gain control" of Q
• 2017-12-01c Q 1st post on 8chan CBTS
• 2017-12 Q changes tripcode to M@tlock!
• 2017-12 Jerome Corsi, Infowars
• 2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan with same tripcode
• 2018-01-05 Furber says original Q tripcode is compromised [e1 49m], Rogers disagrees
• 2018-01 Mon Furber removes both of Q's tripcodes
• 2018-01-09 Q joins Rogers' 8chan /thestorm #515 e153m
• 2018-03 /r/CBTS_Stream removed from reddit
• 2018-04 Corsi says imposter takes over Q
• 2018-04-08 #1082 JFKjr
• 2018-04 Rogers creates Patriots' Soapbox
• 2018-05-19 Q accidentally leaks too-long tripcode NowC@mesTHEP@in--23!!!
• 2018-06-15 Rogers "finds" anonymous Q post unsigned by tripcode
• 2018-07 /r/greatawakening removed from reddit
• 2018-09-18 #2224 /CM pls confirm #2226 Q knows # of IPs!
• 2018-12-12 Q says JFKjr not alive
• 2019-08 8chan goes offline
• 2019-11 8kun replaces 8chan
• 2020-02 Jim Watkins registers "Disarm the Deep State" PAC
• 2020-02-17 #3872 "Game Over" the day Fred Brennan flees Watkins-triggered prosecution in Philippines
• 2020-06-06 #4437 Q posts Python code
• 2020-07 Twitter bans 7K QAnon accounts
• 2020-12-08 last Q drop

Q Fails

• 2017-10-31 #15 The wizards and warlocks (inside term) will not allow another SATANic Evil POS control our country.
• 2020-06-04 #4414 Central communications blackout [never happened]
• 2020-06-11 #4455 What happens when Ds can no longer CHEAT ELECTRONICALLY? Push vote-by-mail? [Oops, Q ignorant of Dominion.]
• 2020-06-24 #4755 The 'Election Infection' cannot stop what is coming.
• 2020-09-16 #4722 They will: not concede on Election Night, contest this legally in battleground states, project doubt in the election results, organize massive riots. Playbook known. [Trump, not Dems, did all 4 of these things.]

Q Uninformed

• Q never mentioned Covid/pandemic until 2020-03-23. Q spent Jan-Feb of 2020 mostly talking about impeachment, and was unusually quiet in March. The "Plandemic" obviously surprised Q, who later said it was planned in advance to disrupt Trump re-election.
• Q never mentioned Hunter Biden until 2020-02-06.
• Q has never mentioned Dominion or Smartmatic.
• Q has never mentioned the 2019 Ukraine impeachment whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.
• Q has never mentioned Miles Taylor, the the HSA chief of staff who secretly wrote in 2018 in the NY Times "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration".

Q Was Not An Intelligence Insider

• Q chose to first go public on 4chan, a site full of racism and porn.
• Q's first 127 drops did not have any authentication (i.e. tripcode)
• Q's first tripcode ("Matlock") was chosen very poorly.
• Q did not understand that only the first 8 characters of a tripcode count, and instead chose longer passwords that gave no additional security.
• Q's passwords were known by random Qtuber Coleman Rogers.
• Q relied on easily-cracked site-specific tripcodes, instead of using off-the-shelf signing tech (e.g. PGP) that works securely and anonymously and portably.

Watkins == Q

• Q was suddenly so concerned about 4chan being "compromised", but had no such concern about Watkins' 8chan/8kun.
• After his problems with 4chan, Q had zero concern for establishing a method of identity verification independent of the Watkins.
• Coleman Rogers on a livestream was able to find and recognize a Q drop that someone had to point out to him was not signed? ("Oh, Q must have forgot to sign it.")
• Q did not post for the 3 months that 8chan was down? ("Nothing can stop what is coming" -- except the Watkins' inability to operate their site.)
• Q was able to post on the new Watkins 8kun site when most users couldn't.

Notes

• Watkins profits from QAnon
• 8chan/8kun advertising
• qmap.pub
• Goldwater news service
• "Disarm the Deep State" PAC
• Q never mentioned aliens, and said [#376] UFOs are a distraction

My Predictions

• Trump will never endorse Q and will disavow if asked directly, but will troll on this topic with weak interviewers/audiences.
• Trump will continue to claim credit for the Warp Speed vaccines, which will continue to be seen as wildly successful.
• Q will never resume classic Q posts claiming "the plan" is still in motion. That became untenable when it was apparent in early November that Trump would be leaving office Jan 20. Aside from a couple last "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming" drops on Nov 12, the Q operation effectively shut down on election day 2020. And after Jan. 6 and the Dominion lawsuits, the Watkins know they cannot take the legal risk of resuming the old operation.
• Q will probably never post again on 8kun or any Watkins-controlled forum, as the Watkins do want to invite subpoenas for their hosting operations. And Q never took the obvious step of establishing an authentication identity independent of the Watkins, so Q is done.
• Q never had any access to insider government intel, and so will never be able to use such access to re-establish his identity on some post-Watkins channel. Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming -- except Q's amateurish inability to post independently of a pig-farming porn entrepreneur like Watkins.

Q Tripcodes

Matlock  > ITPb.qbhqo

M@tlock! > UW.yye1fxo

Freed@m- > xowAT4Z3VQ

F!ghtF!g > 2jsTvXXmXs

NowC@mes > 4pRcUA0lBE

StoRMkiL > CbboFOtcZs 

WeAReQ@Q > A6yxsPKia.

References

• 2021-01 Gospel According To Q - academic paper analyzing Q canon and stylometry. Includes charts of Q drops by tripcode, and Q aggregation sites.
• Qult_Headquarters - QAnon debunking subreddit
• 2020-12 QAnon Must Be Eliminated - screed purporting to trace the origins of Q
• 2020-04 questions about Q OpSec and adjacency to Watkins and porn
• 2019-06 list of failed Q predictions
• 2019-05 Paul Furber interview - alleges Q was hijacked 2018-01-05
• 2018-09-04 OAN Jack Posobiac interviews alleged original Q Microchip
• 2018-08 ground-breaking NBC analysis of Q origins: Rogers, Furber, Diaz
• 2018-08 list of failed Q predictions
• 2018-08 anonymous patriot's critique of Q OpSec e.g. tripcodes
• 2018-05 Tracy Diaz essay - denies Q complicity

Do Covid-19 Vaccines Contain Luciferase?

Some anti-vax conspiracy theorists claim that the Covid-19 vaccines contain a satanic molecule called luciferase, for tracking vaccine recipients.  They claim that it is one of the vaccine ingredients that is obscured under a trade-secret rationale.

Luciferase wouldn't be an "ingredient" of the vaccine, any more than "spike protein" is an ingredient. When they test a pre-release dummy "pseudovirus" to assess its tissue distribution, they engineer the virus code to express luciferase. In such cases, luciferase isn't IN the vaccine, it's CREATED by the vaccine. (None of the anti-vaxxers I've read seem to understand this part of the biology.)

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were sequenced (by researchers from Stanford and Palo Alto VA hospital) using spare droplets from some discarded doses. The open-source sequences are online here.

If the vaccine sequences included a section coding for luciferase, surely some anti-vaxxer would have found it already. (Or, maybe none of them understand how this stuff works, and I'm about to blow the lid off this case for them.) One source suggests that the codons for luciferase are GATGAAAAGTGCTCCAAGGA. That sequence is not present in either of the vaccine sequences.

Luciferase is useless as a molecular "reporter" unless combined with a substrate molecule (typically luciferin). Light from the luciferase/luciferin reaction is detectable for a short period using sensitive scanning equipment. Coding for luciferase in the actual vaccine would only make you trackable if they later inject you with luciferin substrate and then put you under their scanner.

UK Vaccinations vs Deaths

As the aggregate data continue to show that vaccinations are inversely correlated with deaths,  variant anti-vax theories are arising. One variant theory is that the vaccine death-jabs were already known back in January to be so non-deadly that midazolam was secretly used in United Kingdom nursing homes for mass murder of the frail elderly (whom the vaccine apparently couldn't kill).

The presence of midazolam in nursing homes has a far less sinister explanation: it is "prescribed in advance for patients who are nearing the end of life should they experience any common and unpleasant symptoms such as anxiety, pain, nausea and vomiting associated with the dying process."

Here are the latest date-aligned data for the UK. The winter surge of deaths there peaked around the time that 10% of the population had received the death jab.

Levels of Alien Belief

A list of alien beliefs, in rough order of increasing implausibility. (By aliens I mean intelligent agents whose origin lies not with conventional humans or their contemporary technology, as opposed to agents whose origins are non-human / extra-terrestrial / extra-dimensional / extra-temporal / supernatural.)

1. Alien craft/effects occasionally get observed, esp. by pilots/military.
2. Government conceals definitive evidence of alien activity on Earth.
3. Aliens mutilate farm animals and/or create crop circles.
4. Alien tech is hypersonic / transmedium, defying our understanding of fluid dynamics.
5. Alien tech is hyper-G / anti-gravity, defying our understanding of gravity/momentum.
6. Aliens have abducted humans.
7. Government possesses alien artifacts/bodies.
8. Government possesses working alien technology.
9. Government has communicated with aliens on Earth.
10. Government cooperates with aliens on Earth.
11. Governments/media are controlled by secret global group(s) with alien awareness/tech.
12. Aliens have significantly influenced human history.
13. Aliens have significantly influenced human evolution.
14. Aliens have been in conflict with each other over Earth.
15. Aliens have created alien-human hybrids.
16. Aliens have installed hybrids as past or present important humans.
17. Aliens have telepathy.
18. Aliens have shape-shifting.
19. Aliens have teleportation or faster-than-light travel.
20. Aliens have time travel.

Why Did We Fumble COVID-19 Therapeutics?

A variety of reasons, in roughly descending order of guestimated importance:

• The early focus was on "flattening the curve" to preserve hospital and ventilator capacity, and so insufficient attention was paid to early-stage therapeutics.
• Hydroxychloroquine was unsuccessfully tried as a late-stage therapeutic, and this politicized episode made the healthcare establishment afraid of an embarrassing replay.
• Therapeutics don't appreciably reduce R0 compared to a vaccine. Treatment is super important, but curtailing exponential spread is super-duper-important.
• Risk-averse government bureaucrats didn't think to waive the rule that Emergency Use Authorization for vaccines is only allowed if no therapeutics are available.
• Risk-averse medical bureaucrats are indoctrinated to oppose any therapy that hasn't been proven effective, particularly in randomized control trials.
• The pharmaceutical industry has no profit incentive to re-purpose off-patent drugs for new indications.
• The Orange Man was promoting therapeutics, and we can't give him a win.
• It was harder to recruit early-stage trial subjects because 1) they're not in hospital beds and 2) the pandemic ebbed in summer.