“Second guessing Elon Musk is a fool’s game”
—Jordan Peterson
GUNS OF MARS
I’m very pleased to be able to say that like Easton Press and Franklin Library before them, Castalia Library is finally in the Signed First Edition business. Over the next month, we are offering no less than THREE Signed First Editions, beginning with GUNS OF MARS by Chuck Dixon.
GUNS OF MARS: A Thrilling Return to the Red Planet
Chuck Dixon delivers a masterful homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic Barsoom series with “Guns of Mars,” a tale that captures all the adventure and wonder of the original while bringing fresh energy to the dying world of Mars.
Like Burroughs’ timeless stories, Dixon transports readers to a harsh but magnificent Barsoom where water is more precious than gold and survival depends on strength, cunning, and an unbreakable will. The novel follows the unlikely partnership between a mysterious human bounty hunter and Kal Keddaq, a fierce Warhoon thark fleeing the consequences of his own choices.
Dixon expertly recreates Burroughs’ signature blend of high adventure and exotic world-building. The Martian landscape comes alive with all its deadly beauty – from the vast canal systems of a forgotten civilization to the savage creatures that prowl the wastes. What sets GUNS OF MARS apart is Dixon’s grittier, more realistic approach to survival on the red planet. While maintaining the romantic adventure spirit of the original series, he grounds the action in believable consequences and genuine peril. The central quest drives a plot that builds to a spectacular confrontation between man, thark, and the monstrous guardians of Mars’ greatest treasure.
Dixon, known for his work on BATMAN and THE PUNISHER, brings his talent for character-driven action to create protagonists who are both heroic and deeply flawed. The evolving relationship between the bounty hunter and the exiled thark forms the emotional core of a story that honors Burroughs’ legacy while standing as a thrilling adventure in its own right.
For fans of the original Barsoom novels and newcomers alike, GUNS OF MARS offers everything that made Burroughs’s Mars irresistible: exotic locales, deadly creatures, ancient mysteries, and the kind of two-fisted adventure that belongs among the classics of planetary romance.
For more details about GUNS OF MARS, including an excerpt and information on where to buy it, visit the Castalia Library substack.
FBI Raids John Bolton
Allegedly, anyhow.
FBI agents raided former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton’s DC-area home this morning in a high-profile national security probe. The raid began at 7:00 AM and is continuing as of the publication of this story.
That was certainly unexpected. Maybe we’ll get those treason trials after all…
UPDATE: Confirmed by the New York Post.
FBI agents raided the DC-area home of President Trump’s former national security adviser John Boltonon Friday morning in a high-profile national security probe, The Post can exclusively reveal.
Short-Term Leaders
Tell Me How This Ends observes a curious phenomenon among the so-called leaders of Clown World. The executive chair never even gets warm before they’re off again to “lead” yet another organization into disaster.
Something I’m seeing over and over again in the bios of “leaders,” especially of the girlboss-in-obnoxious-glasses variety, and read the “previously served” paragraph closely:
Julie Felss Masino was named President and Chief Executive Officer for Cracker Barrel in July 2023 and assumed the position, along with an appointment to the Company’s Board of Directors, November 1,2023. Ms. Masino previously served as the President, International of Taco Bell, a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc. (NYSE: YUM) from January 2020 to June 2023. From January 2018 to December 2019, she served as President, North America of Taco Bell. Ms. Masino served as the President, SVP and GM Fisher-Price at Mattel, Inc. (Nasdaq: MAT) from April 2017 to January 2018. Prior to her service at Mattel, Ms. Masino served as the President and then the Chief Executive Officer of Sprinkles Cupcakes from 2014 to 2017. From 2002 to 2014, Ms. Masino served in various leadership roles at Starbucks Corporation (Nasdaq: SBUX). She began her professional career in corporate positions at a variety of retail companies, including Godiva Chocolatier, Coach, J. Crew, and Macy’s.
If we count the two Taco Bell jobs as one job, that’s at least eight companies and jobs in about three decades of work. Leading a brand “from April 2017 to January 2018” strikes me as a warning signal, not a sign of strength. If you name this person to lead a business, she’s going to do it for…a couple of years? Maybe? You’re not going to get stability and a sustained market strategy that takes your company forward over the course of the next decade or two; you’re going to get fourteen to twenty-three months of buzzwords, and then a parachute. I’ve worked for people like this. We’ve all worked for people like this.
See also the current Superintendent of Police in New Orleans, who came from a short tenure as the police chief in Oakland, California:
Prior to her tenure in Oakland, Kirkpatrick served as Bureau Chief in Chicago, where she was the liaison to the Department of Justice (DOJ) while the Chicago Police Department was under investigation for patterns and practice of civil rights violations, resulting in a consent decree. Kirkpatrick also served as Chief of Police in the cities of Ellensburg, Federal Way and Spokane, all in the State of Washington, as well as serving as Undersheriff of the King County Sheriff’s Office.
A cop who works as a senior leader for seven different police departments: a sign of maturity, depth, and commitment? Or a wind that blows through the office on its way to somewhere else? Why on earth does a mayor say, Oh, I want our city to be this person’s seventh police department!
Here’s a fawning profile of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson:
In the 17 years following her graduation from law school, Jackson held a variety of legal jobs. She attained three federal clerkships, worked at four elite law firms, and served two stints with the Sentencing Commission. While much of that experience is typical for a Supreme Court short-lister, one line on Jackson’s resume is not: her mid-career decision to spend two years as a public defender.
It’s really impressive that she “worked at four elite law firms.” For example, “Jackson then snagged a highly sought-after spot as an associate at Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, a Washington litigation boutique…Jackson left Miller Cassidy after a year for a third clerkship.” She often served at law firms, or in government jobs, for as long as two years. She was just that good, you see, so she never lasted anywhere.
This is the pirate class. These are Clown World’s mercenaries that it uses to keep the corpocracy and other organizations in line, moving from job to job and instituting insane policies that can’t possibly work and making radical changes to brands that will only serve to reduce their value.
These are not successful people, to the contrary, they are every bit as manufactured and propped up as their counterparts in the media. When you talk to executives of this sort, it’s less their lack of intelligence that strikes you as their level of ignorance concerning things you’d assume they have to know just to even do their job. It wouldn’t even be remotely surprising if Ms Masino not only didn’t know how to write a business plan, but couldn’t even read a balance sheet.
And these are the people who will always get the job over the qualified candidate who has worked his way up from inside the company or the police force. Because it’s not about competence or organizational success anymore, it’s about having a proven willingness to follow even the most ridiculous and obviously destructive orders.
The SEC Antes Up
The Big 10 was calling out the SEC’s outdated 8-game conference schedule that allowed it to schedule one more cupcake game every season. Now the SEC has stepped up to compete on an even playing field between the two power conferences.
After a meeting with athletic directors this week, the SEC has now adopted a nine-game college football conference schedule that has been looming for the last few years, thanks to a vote by presidents on Thursday.
All it took was the possibility of extra money, along with a push from the college football playoff committee to finally get them over a few hurdles. Now, it will come down to university presidents to make the final decision on whether to switch from an 8-game to 9-game schedule after this week’s meetings.
But, athletic directors don’t make potential decisions without their bosses knowing about what’s going on during these meetings that took place this week with conference commissioner Greg Sankey.
“Adding a ninth SEC game underscores our universities’ commitment to delivering the most competitive football schedule in the nation,” said SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey. “This format protects rivalries, increases competitive balance, and paired with our requirement to play an additional Power opponent, ensures SEC teams are well prepared to compete and succeed in the College Football Playoff.”
While this has always been the correct path, there were times over the past year when the situation looked as though it would continue to be pushed down the road. That was until the thought of ESPN adding monetary stipulations to the move was discussed further.
What will this look like each year? Well, each team will play three annual opponents
- The SEC will continue with a single-standings, non-divisional structure;
- Each school will play three annual opponents focused on maintaining many traditional rivalries;
- Each team’s remaining six games will rotate among the remaining conference schools; and
- Each team will face every other SEC program at least once every two years and every opponent home and away in four years.
- Also of note, the SEC had this to say about how teams will be scheduling future opponents, and which conference they must come from.
“SEC teams are required to schedule at least one additional high quality non-conference from the Atlantic Coast, Big Ten or Big 12 conferences or Notre Dame each season. The SEC will continue to evaluate its policies to ensure the continued scheduling of high-quality non-conference opponents.”
A lot of people are down on the recent changes to college football. But aside from solving the obvious moral problem of not paying the players who are producing all the revenue, most of the changes, including the influx of money and the transfer portal, have actually been really good for the competitive side of the sport.
It’s no longer possible for a recruiting powerhouse or a cheating booster base to stockpile the top two or three players at a single position anymore. A player can not only get playing time, he can actually make more money as the starting quarterback at a bottom-feeder team in a power conference or as a contender in a second- or third-tier conference than as a backup at Ohio State or Alabama.
Ironically, one of the things that people most hate about the changes, such as the near-death of the Pac-12 Conference, is actually the result of the conference leadership failing to accept the changes soon enough. Remember, all of this started with two UCLA basketball players rebelling against the unjust and unfair, and, as it turns out, illegal way they were being treated.
I haven’t had much interest in college football since I was in my early teens, but I found myself drawn into it as a result of the more balanced distribution of the talent over the last two years. And I very much doubt I’m the only one.
Ukraine Must Surrender
We knew it was bad, we knew it was very bad, but we didn’t know it was this bad. The true wickedness and inhumanity of the UK and the European Union can be seen in their determination to force the Ukrainian Armed Forces to continue resisting the Russian victory that was already known to be inevitable back in February 2022.
Ukraine has lost 1.7 million servicemen during the special military operation, these are killed and missing in action. The information comes from the database of the Ukrainian General Staff, which was hacked by killnet.
Over three years of the special military operation, the Ukrainian army lost 1,721,000 people killed and missing in action.
118.5 thousand in 2022
405.4 thousand in 2023
595 thousand in 2024
621 thousand in 2025A total of 1.7 million files — with full names, descriptions of circumstances and places of death/disappearance, personal data, contacts of closest relatives, and photos.
If the war isn’t ended by an unconditional surrender that provides Russia with whatever it wants, the total KIA and MIA in 2025 alone will approach one million. This has been one of the bloodiest wars in European history; the infamous 30 Years War that is cited as one of the great evils of religion only accounted for 450,000 combat deaths in 30 years.
To put this into historical perspective, by the end of the year, Ukraine will have lost as many men as Japan did in WWII. It has already lost FOUR TIMES more men than the USA lost in WWII.
It is absolutely unconscionable for President Trump to permit even one more dollar to go toward such a lost, lethal, and pointless cause. And now that the degree of losses are known, I can’t imagine that the Ukrainian people are going to suffer the Kiev regime much longer.
The reported figures far exceed official estimates. In February, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky told CBS News that 46,000 of his soldiers had been killed since 2022, alongside about 380,000 wounded – numbers questioned in Western media. Moscow has also claimed higher Ukrainian losses, putting the toll at more than 1 million killed or wounded as of early this year.
UPDATE: By contrast, total Russian losses are independently estimated to be around 165,000. This should suffice to explain why Russia has been content to take as much time as it takes to execute the Special Military Operation, as the 10-1 kill-ratio is astonishing, particularly considering that Russia has been on the offensive without much of a numerical advantage until recently.
If these numbers prove to be more or less correct, then the SMO has essentially been the Battle of Cannea writ large and is one of the greatest strategic accomplishments in military history.
Ukraine and NATO have not only lost this war, they appear to have lost it as comprehensively as any defeated military force in human history.
No, You Cannot Tell
I can tell. JDA can tell. But unless you are already an AI-adept professional author who is actively utilizing the latest technologies, you are demonstrably unable to distinguish between AI-generated text and texts written by accomplished, bestselling writers:
Mark Lawrence is a very successful fantasy writer. His PRINCE OF THORNS has sold more than one million copies. He is one of the many professional authors who, while disdaining the use of textual AI, is concerned about its eventual impact on his profession. He recently conducted a very interesting experiment in which he and three other very well-established professional authors wrote short stories on the same subject, and ChatGPT 5 was prompted for four short stories on the same subject.
You can read all eight stories here and see for yourself if you can tell which stories are human-written and which are AI-generated. You don’t need to vote, and you’ll have to keep track of what you thought of each story yourself.
A statistically-significant number of 964 people, who, being fans of Lawrence are much more literate on average than the norm, read the stories and rated them. The results are intriguing and will probably surprise most people who don’t read here regularly. On average, the readers were able to correctly identify the provenance of 3 out of the 8 stories. Not only that, but the story they rated the highest, and 3 out of the 4 highest-rated stories, were all AI-generated.
Read the whole thing at AI Central. And the next time you see someone going on about “AI slop” or how AI just can’t produce the same emotions and feelings that humans can, you’ll know that they’re just posturing in obvious ignorance.
The ironic thing is that AI is actually going to improve the level of writing, because most books are very mediocre and AI is already better than that.
The EU is an NGO
Fresh from her diplomatic humiliation in China, the unelected “President of the EU Commission” of the non-governmental organization called the “European Union” was correctly dismissed by President Trump and prevented from taking part in his meeting with European leaders this week for the obvious reason that she isn’t a national leader:
Bundestag Vice President Omid Nouripour said on Tuesday on the TV programme “Frühstart” that Ursula von der Leyen was made to leave the room during Trump’s meeting with European leaders in Washington. “In the middle of yesterday’s meeting … Ms. von der Leyen had to leave because the Americans said: ‘We only want to talk to leaders.’”
According to Nouripour, the EU Commission President was kicked out of the room because the American politicians do not regard her as an elected head of a state.
They shouldn’t. She isn’t a head of a state and she isn’t elected. Ursula von der Leyen has no more international diplomatic legitimacy than Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, or Mads Christensen, the Executive Director of Greenpeace International. She’s the equivalent of a retired member of a state legislature in the USA.
Von der Leyen last won an election in 2003 for the state parliament of Niedersachsen; her entire career since then has been a product of back room deals, internal party pecking orders and Angela Merkel’s patronage.
It’s good to see at least two of the world’s leading powers recognize that the European Union isn’t anything more than just another Clown World NGO. And I tend to doubt that Vladimir Putin takes it seriously either.
The fact that the EU likes to posture and pretend that it has “democratic values” simply shows what a collection of satanic inverts are running it.
The Transience of Attention
The Swan Throne contemplates two public figures, one famous, one increasingly forgotten:
The Transience of Social Media Metrics
The smarter the idea, the fewer that can follow it.
Social media rewards the lowest impulses. The more outrageous the performance, the more it spreads. The system favors anger, envy, and spectacle, not clarity or endurance. Metrics rise when a man panders to the audience’s worst appetites, and they collapse the moment that appetite shifts. This volatility is the core weakness of treating metrics as a measure of worth.
A politician can buy bots and inflate his follower count overnight. A platform can tweak its algorithm and bury a channel with a single update. A wave of coordinated harassment can erase visibility as though it never existed. None of this reflects reality. It reflects only the whims of code, the biases of moderators, and the fleeting moods of a distracted public. When importance is measured by such numbers, it becomes indistinguishable from chance.
The men who have mattered most to the world have almost always been out of step with the crowd. They did not flatter their followers but forced them to confront truths. Their importance could not be captured in likes or shares, because those very metrics would have been turned against them. Plato’s Academy, Aquinas’ Summa, or Burke’s Reflections cannot be reduced to the applause they received at the time. They endured because they held structures of thought that outlived the moment.
The man who mistakes social metrics for real significance plays with shadows. When the crowd moves on, his numbers vanish, leaving him where he began: irrelevant, not because the crowd says so, but because he built nothing beyond it.
What Endures Beyond Metrics
It’s simple math: Nick Fuentes – Noise = 0
What lasts is not the rise and fall of trending graphs but the deeper architecture of culture. Values, language, ideas, institutions, and elite influence form the skeleton that endures when the noise of platforms fades. These are the measures by which true importance is weighed.
Values set the moral direction of a people. When they shift, entire movements tilt with them. Language provides the tools of thought itself; to coin a term is to shape the way others perceive reality. Ideas supply the patterns that give coherence, allowing men to order their experience and chart a course. Institutions anchor those ideas in the world, giving them a physical presence that resists decay. And elites, though often despised in populist rhetoric, are the carriers of continuity. They determine what is preserved, what is discarded, and what is advanced.
The older I get, the more I come to value the historical minds that focused on the Good, the Beautiful, and the True instead of whatever their daily reality happened to be. Not that there isn’t real value in the latter, as without them we simply wouldn’t know anything about what life was like during their times. But the more an author focuses on today’s issues, today’s politics, today’s public figures, the less readable and the less relevant his work tends to be over time.
This is true of fiction, of course. The imaginary landscape of Tolkien hold up much better than, say, Mack Bolan’s never-ending battles with a mafia that no longer exists or even Hollywood’s interminable retellings of that one bad thing that happened during that one war.
Not everything one does has to be significant, of course. One of the beautiful things about AI-generated text is the fact that writers can now accelerate our writing processes and increase our literary output to the point that we might even begin to approach the superhuman levels of John C. Wright and The Legend Chuck Dixon.
However, the writer is correct to observe that which is most popular is seldom that which lasts. One has only to peruse the bestseller lists of 100 years ago to recognize that.
Off to Never-Never Land
An high-ranking pedo was not only released and allowed to leave Nevada after being arrested and charged, but was even permitted to flee the country:
A senior Israeli official was arrested in the United States earlier this month and charged with seeking sexual conduct with a minor, only to be released on bail with no conditions or monitoring, allowing him to flee to Israel. The case involving Tom Artiom Alexandrovich in Nevada is now stirring controversy, with politicians and social media commentators accusing the government of interfering in the judicial process to allow the cybersecurity official to return home without facing justice.
Court records from Nevada’s Clark County show that Alexandrovich was charged with luring or attempting to lure a child online to engage in sexual conduct – a felony that carries up to 10 years in jail in the case of a conviction. He was released on a $10,000 bond, but no monitoring appeared to take place.
Richard Davies, a criminal defence lawyer in Nevada, told Al Jazeera that the apparent lack of conditions on Alexandrovich’s release despite the seriousness of the charges was “fishy”.
“Average Joe gets arrested, he would appear in front of the justice of the peace within 24 hours. The justice of the peace in that county would issue bail conditions, which very typically would include a GPS device, restrictions on movement, not being allowed to leave the state,” Davies said.
“So the fact that this individual was not only allowed to leave without an ankle bracelet or a GPS device, not only to leave the state, but also leave the country, is highly unusual and suspect.”
This is why no more dual-nationals can be permitted to vote or hold office anywhere in the world. Whether they are Jewish or Somali, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that the only thing they really care about is their fellow nationals, which most certainly does not mean Americans even when they happen to be U.S. citizens. Dual-nationalism shouldn’t even be legal, and at least in the USA, it’s not even actually law.
If it’s true that the U.S. government was not involved, then Occam’s Razor would focus attention on the nationality of the judge who let the pedo run away to what is apparently a sanctuary zone for child abusers.