They are right to be angry. They are right to be absolutely furious. GenX may be the first generation in US history to be worse off than its parents, but the Zoomers are considerably worse off and they are still aware of the echoes of peak US prosperity due to a) clueless Boomers booming and b) the evidence provided by television, books, and movies.
I will never own a home. My purpose is to provide value to my employer. I will move thousands of miles away from my family because there are no jobs left. I will become a meaningless cog in an uncaring machine. My income will be eaten up by taxes, rent, and car expenses. One-third of my life will be spent sleeping, the other third will be spent working. The last third will be mostly taken up by chores and errands. I will be too exhausted to do anything meaningful with what little precious free time I have left. I will visit my family once or twice a year, watching them slowly fade away from my life until they perish. I am living in the most prosperous time in human history.
We are rapidly approaching revolutionary times. The weak men of the Boomer era are creating the hard men of the Zoomer era.
The cuckiest of all the cuckservatives, Rod Dreher, discovers that no matter how convincingly and submissively the cuck cucks, it’s still never enough for Clown World.
Author who warned of totalitarianism in West censored under online safety laws. An article by Rod Dreher linked an art exhibition to Europe’s migration policies and could only be read in Britain by readers over 18.
It’s an object lesson. Sure, you can certainly go the way of the Drehers, the F. Buckleys, the Correias, and the Sad Puppies if you like. You can even convince yourself that it’s the smart, principled, and pragmatic thing to do, that cucking will maintain your viability and keep you from being deplatformed.
But it won’t work. All it will do is buy you a little more time before they come for you. It won’t save your career; it won’t even save your marriage. And even worse, cowardice is its own penalty. It’s a self-condemnation that you’ll have to live with every day of your life.
Whereas courage, well, with courage comes the kind of self-confidence that no outside force can shake. One could reasonably say that courage is its own reward. It’s very much like the way bullies can sense that a trained fighter has absolutely no fear of them. The trained fighter has no fear of you knocking him down because he has been knocked down many times before, which is why he knows, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he will get up again.
The cuck and the coward don’t know that. They can’t ever know that, because they always run out of the ring before anyone can knock them down.
The European Union has voted to keep Russian central bank assets frozen indefinitely despite opposition from member states. The bloc pushed through the controversial agenda by invoking emergency powers legislation to bypass the need for unanimous approval.
The European Commission, and its head Ursula von der Leyen, want to use the $246 billion in Russian sovereign funds immobilized by the bloc after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, to back a “reparations loan” for Kiev.
The loan scheme has been opposed by member states, including Hungary, Slovakia, which are against providing further aid to Kiev. Belgium, where most of the funds are held, has also raised concerns due to legal and financial risks. The European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund have warned that tapping Russian money would undermine the reputation of the euro and more broadly the Western financial system.
Russia has condemned the freeze as illegal and called any use of the funds as “theft,” warning of economic and legal retaliation.
The vote put forward by von der Leyen reframed the issue of frozen Russian assets as an economic emergency rather than a sanctions policy. This allowed the Commission to invoke Article 122 of the EU treaties, an emergency clause that permits decisions to be adopted by a qualified majority vote instead of unanimity, effectively bypassing veto threats from countries opposed to the move.
Invoking the clause is unprecedented and raises concerns about the sanctity of the fundamental principle of EU politics that major foreign policy, budget, and defense decisions are made by unanimous consent.
This isn’t even remotely surprising. It was always inevitable that, sooner or later, the EU was going to break its “fundamental principle” of unanimous consent and the national sovereignty of its member-states by granting itself permission to override the national vetoes. But it’s one thing to know it’s eventually coming, it’s another to actually see it happen and see for what that principle was sacrificed.
This marks the first major step toward the collapse of the EU since Britain voted to leave. I’d be surprised if four or more states, including Hungary and the Czech Republic, didn’t take this as a sign that it’s time to leave the union.
Fandom Pulse (FP): You just released a new book, Guns of Mars, what is it about?
Chuck Dixon: It’s set on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series, set a thousand years after the last book.
Kal Keddiq is a thark on the run from his own tribe. A nameless bounty hunter is pursuing over the dying planet. But Kal’s not going back to face Warhoon justice without a fight. Think of the Mars series retold as an Italian western.
FP: What made you want to tell a story set on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom?
Chuck: I ate those books up as a kid. I spent a summer reading the entire Mars series and Lord of the Rings. After each Tolkien book I’d take a break and read a few of the John Carters before digging back into Middle-earth.
The idea for Guns of Mars occurred to me years ago, always in the back of my head. I finally had to write it just to get it out of my system. And it was intimidating. Burroughs was one hell of a writer and I wanted to try and match his skill at writing action and that wonderful sense of discovery that was such a feature of his work.
FP: How connected is this book to Burroughs’ Barsoom series?
Chuck: John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Tars Tarkas and the rest are long gone. The dying plant that ERB presented is now a millennium further along the doom spiral. There’s really very little to connect this to the series other than the setting, place names, flora and fauna.
FP: Do you have plans to do more stories set on Barsoom?
An Unmitigated Pedant defends the military elements of The Lord of the Rings. I read this with particular interest, because the military scenes and battles have tended to be the one area where Arts of Dark and Light have been said to actually exceed the master’s masterpiece. His core thesis is that it is primarily Peter Jackson who is to blame for the perception that Tolkien’s military setups and strategies were suboptimal, although he blames most of Jackson’s shortcomings on the medium in which he was working.
I’m not so sure about that, given Faramir’s cavalry charge against a fortified position being held by missile-armed forces. But never mind that for now.
The army Sauron sends against Minas Tirith is absolutely vast – an army so vast that it cannot fit its entire force in the available frontage, so the army ends up stacking up in front of the city:
The books are vague on the total size of the orcish host (but we’ll come back to this), but interview material for the movies suggests that Peter Jackson’s CGI team assumed around 200,000 orcs. This army has to exit Minas Morgul – apparently as a single group – and then follow the road to the crossing at Osgiliath. Is this operational plan reasonable, from a transit perspective?
In a word: no. It’s not hard to run the math as to why. Looking at the image at the head of the previous section, we can see that the road the orcs are on allows them to march five abreast, meaning there are 40,000 such rows (plus additional space for trolls, etc). Giving each orc four feet of space on the march (a fairly conservative figure), that would mean the army alone stretches 30 miles down a single road. At that length, the tail end of the army would not even be able to leave camp before the front of the army had finished marching for the day. For comparison, an army doing a ‘forced march’ (marching at rapid speed under limited load – and often taking heat or fatigue casualties to do it) might manage 20 to 30 miles per day. Infantry on foot is more likely to average around 10 miles per day on decent roads.
Ideally, the solution to this problem is to split the army up. By moving in multiple columns and converging on the battlespace, you split one impossibly long column of troops into several more manageable ones. There is a danger here – the enemy might try to overwhelm each smaller army in turn – but Faramir has had to pull his troops back out of Ithilien, so there is little risk of defeat in detail for the Army of Mordor. The larger problem is terrain – we’ve seen Ithilien in this film and the previous one: it is heavily forested, with few roads. What roads exist are overgrown and difficult to use. Worse yet, the primary route through the area is not an east-west road, but the North-South route up from Near Harad to the Black Gate. The infrastructure here to split the army effectively simply doesn’t exist.
A map from regular Earth, rather than Middle Earth. This is Napoleon’s Ulm Campaign (1805) – note how Napoleon’s armies (the blue lines) are so large they have to move in multiple columns, which converge on the Austrian army (the red box labeled “FERDINAND”). This coordinated movement is the heart of operations: how do you get your entire army all to the battlefield intact and at the same time? This actually understates the problem, because the army of Morder also needs supplies in order to conduct the siege. Orcs seem to be able to make do with very poor water supplies (Frodo and Sam comment on the foulness of Mordor water), so we can assume they use local water along the march, but that still leaves food. Ithilien (the territory they are marching through), as we have seen in the film, is unpopulated – the army can expect no fresh supplies here (or in the Pelennor beyond, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly). That is going to mean a baggage train to carry additional supplies, as well as materials for the construction of all of the fancy siege equipment (we, in fact, later see them bringing the towers pre-built – we’ll get to it). This would lengthen the army train even more.
All of that raises a second point – from a supply perspective, can this operation work? Here, the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, yes. Minas Morgul is 20 leagues (around 60 miles) from Minas Tirith. An infantryman might carry around (very roughly) 10 days or so of rations on his person, which is enough to move around 120 miles (these figures derive from K. Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003) – well worth a read! – but are broadly applicable to almost any army before the invention of the railroad). The army is bound to be held up a bit along the way, so the Witch King would want to bring some wagons with additional supplies, but as a matter of supply, this works. The problem is transit.
As a side note, the supply issue neatly explains the aggressive tactics the Witch king employs when he arrives at Minas Tirith, moving immediately for an assault rather than a siege. Because the pack animals which pull wagons full of food eat food themselves, there is literally no amount of wagons which would enable an army of this size to sustain itself indefinitely in a long siege. The Witch King is thus constrained by his operational plan: the raw size of his army means he must either take the city in an assault quickly enough to march most of his army back, or fail. He proceeds with the appropriate sense of urgency.
That said, the distances here are short: 60 miles is a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network. One cannot help but notice the Stark (hah!) contrast with the multi-hundred-mile supply-free lunges in the TV version of Game of Thrones, which are far less plausible.
Great, now I have to re-read The Lord of the Rings from a strategic and logistics perspective. Hmmm, this might actually make for an interesting Darkstream series. Would that be of interest to anyone else or is this just another AI music sort of thing?
In a stunning display of tyrannical overreach, the EU’s unelected overlords are now threatening Belgium’s newly minted Prime Minister Bart De Wever with financial Armageddon simply because he refuses to play along with their insane plot to steal $200 billion in frozen Russian assets.
Yes, you read that right: STEAL. Like common thieves in the night, targeting a sovereign central bank’s holdings parked safely in Belgium’s Euroclear system. This isn’t just policy wonkery; it’s a full-throated assault on national sovereignty, international law, and basic common sense.
And if De Wever doesn’t cave, the EU – egged on by globalist mouthpieces like POLITICO – is ready to ostracize, humiliate, and economically strangle a founding member state.
Sound familiar?
It’s the same playbook the EU used to bully Hungary and Poland into submission.
But this time, it’s backfiring spectacularly, and it could be the spark that finally torches the whole rotten Brussels circus. In a blistering statement that’s gone viral across Europe, De Wever laid it out plain and simple: The countries screaming loudest for this asset grab – think the Baltic states and Poland, scarred by Soviet ghosts – are “psychologically at war” with Russia. Fair enough, they’ve got history.
But Belgium? “We are not at war with Russia,” De Wever thundered. “And we do not wish to be at war with Russia. We must negotiate based on reality, not fantasy.” Boom. Reality check delivered. Stealing from a foreign central bank, he warns, is no different than “robbing an embassy.”
t’s a violation of treaties, a slap in the face to diplomatic norms, and a one-way ticket to the courtroom for every EU hack who touches it. Remember that dusty 1989 bilateral investment treaty between Belgium and the Soviet Union? The Kremlin lawyers are sharpening their pencils already.
If this heist goes down, Belgium could be on the hook for hundreds of billions in reparations – capital plus damages – equaling a staggering 50% of its GDP. That’s not a debt; that’s national suicide.
Even POLITICO, the house organ of the Davos crowd, admits the emperor has no clothes. In a rare moment of clarity (better late than never!), they concede the only realistic fix is for the hawkish EU nations – the ones foaming at the mouth for more Ukraine cash – to pony up their own taxpayer dollars. No more freeloading off little Belgium, the unwitting host of these frozen funds. But oh, the irony burns! POLITICO whines that this would shatter the sacred “principle of solidarity” by forcing some countries to “bear the financial burden alone.”
Hello? That’s exactly what the EU has been strong-arming Belgium to do for months – dive solo into a $200 billion black hole while Berlin and Paris sip champagne!
Belgium should send its police forces in and arrest the entire EU commission. The EU has no power, no military, no nothing at all. Even its “laws” and “principles” are just rhetorical fictions that it heeds or ignores depending on the subject and the situation. Tear down that ersatz Tower of Babel and send all the MEPs back to their home nations.
It’s not just time for the member states of the European Union to leave it. It’s time for them to destroy that fake government and go full Scipio-in-Carthage on it. If this doesn’t prove to you that the unelected nonentities pretending to be the rulers of a nonexistent polity do not and cannot represent the interests of the various European nations at all, then you’re not paying attention.
I prepared these for a friend who wanted to make a basic ebook from a text file. I figured they might be useful to some readers here in case they wanted to do something similar. This will provide a basic ebook without much in the way of formatting.
Save the document in .docx or .rtf format.
Download Calibre for your operating system.
https://calibre-ebook.com/download
Open Calibre.
Click the big green “Add books” icon.
Locate the file and click Open. The file will be added to the list of titles in the middle.
Find the title of the file you added and click once to select it.
Click the big brown “Convert books” icon.
Add the metadata on the right. Title, Author, Author Sort, etc.
Click on the little icon next to the box under Change cover image in the middle.
Select your cover image.
Change Output format in the selection box in the top right to EPUB.
Click OK.
Click once to select the title and either hit the O key or right click and select Open Book Folder -> Open Book Folder.
In the aftermath of yesterday’s blog post about Larry Correia, and the subsequent Arkhaven Nights stream on UATV, a number of people have asked me about the facts of the matter to which Larry was referring in such a dishonest manner to the editor of Baen Books and science fiction professionals. First, here is the email Larry sent out to JDA, Toni Weisskopf, Jason Cordova, Brad Torgersen, and Sarah Hoyt:
I’d say I hope you have a nice Christmas with your family, but you probably can’t because of that domestic violence restraining order. Now I’m gonna block this email like I have all your other accounts, you sort of human shaped blob of herpes.
Now let’s address the facts. You may wish to note that I have read the relevant documents, including the restraining and custody orders.
There was a restraining order filed against JDA by his ex-wife in 2023, two months after she filed for divorce. It was not filed on the basis of domestic violence, nor is there any mention of violence, domestic or otherwise, in the order.
The restraining order was requested on the basis of text messages that criticized his ex-wife-to-be’s physically abusive behavior towards their children.
The three-year restraining order was granted eight months later as part of the divorce settlement because the text messages sent to his ex-wife-to-be about her behavior made her feel bad and were characterized as something that “disturbs the peace”.
JDA did not contest the restraining order since a) doing so would be expensive and b) he was not interested in having any contact with his ex-wife over the next three years anyhow.
JDA never committed any violence, never laid a hand on his ex-wife, and was never accused by her or by anyone else of doing so. He was not even within miles of his ex-wife when the exchange of texts that served as the basis for the restraining order took place.
JDA was granted full custody of the children by the court.
JDA absolutely can, and will, spend Christmas with his family, which includes his children by his ex-wife, of whom he has had custody since the divorce.
In other words, Larry Correia attempted to falsely portray a married father who proactively defended his children, and still has custody of those children, as a violent wife-beater who is not permitted to be around his family at Christmastime. And in doing so, he encouraged dozens hundreds of people on social media and on YouTube, including last night on Arkhaven Nights, to post messages saying things like “why did you beat your wife” repeatedly throughout the the stream. I personally witnessed at least 20 of these obnoxious comments from at least four different accounts during the stream.
This is absolutely inexcusable and unprofessional behavior, particularly on the part of a self-styled conservative who purports to be a family man. And that cancerous behavior further exposes Larry Correia’s undeniable lack of character, which we first observed when he encouraged hundreds of Sad Puppies to spend $40 to nominate him for Hugo awards, then fled the field and abandoned his followers the moment the mainstream media took notice of him and started to call him names.
The damning thing is that Larry knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, ten years ago, he was angry about the very sort of behavior he is exhibiting now.
I’m angry. When people who haven’t talked to my wife since high school reach out to her, worried for her safety, because they read about how her husband is a wife beater, I get angry.
GUNS OF MARS, the newest novel from The Legend Chuck Dixon, has gotten off to a very good start. In case you’re not sure you’re interested in his excursion onto the dying Red Planet of Barsoom, please enjoy the following sample from the text.
Kal Keddaq rested his full ten-foot height prone on the slope of a ring of ochre sand that surrounded a shallow depression. His rifle was cradled in the crooks of his upper set of arms. Raised on four elbows, he lifted his head until his eyes cleared the lip of the bowl to scan the broad plain to the south. He was careful to tilt his head back in order that the protruding ears atop his head be less visible.
All he could see was an uninterrupted horizon against an orange sky. The sun was setting, and the cold would be upon him once more. The days were shorter and nights longer as he rode farther to the north. The sand was still warm beneath him. The last of the sun’s rays touched the thick green flesh of his back, a mottled mix of olive and jade. He might risk a fire later if he were certain he’d shaken the man pursuing him.
Kal knew, deep in his bones, that he had not lost the man who’d been tracking him over the dead sea floor for the past three days. His only chance to escape the bounty man was to keep heading north to one of the settlements that ringed the pole. Even that was a risk as he could run out of water for himself or his mounts before ever reaching one of them. And there was every chance his kind would not be welcome in the mostly human polar refuges.
He turned on his side to glance back at the two thoats grazing on patches of yellow lichen at the bottom of the bowl. The larger one was his saddle mount. The second was a pack animal bearing his remaining supplies and his last skin of water.
Before returning to his vigil, Kal removed a telescopticon from a pouch on his harness. He set his rifle aside and extended the scope to its full length before fitting an eye to the lens cup. Shifting from left to right he fixed his gaze on the uninterrupted line of the horizon. Dervishes of dust danced across the plain as the night winds stirred the talc surface. Kal blinked a few times and strained to sharpen his sight.
There, past the curtain of swirling sand, the last light of the setting sun caught a thread of dust rising in the far distance. Kal squeezed his dry eyes shut and pressed his better eye to the cup once more.
Through the haze he could make out a dark figure at the base of the golden column. A lifetime of living in the near featureless barrens of the Great Sand Sea had trained his eyes to recognize details that might be missed by another. More from the approaching shape’s motion than any details he could make out, Kal recognized it as a man riding atop a thoat. From that distinct swaying cadence, he knew the man rode his mount at a walk. Even so, he would reach Kal’s position by the time the sun set. Kal collapsed the spyglass shut and returned it to its pouch.
“Damn this man,” Kal muttered as he snatched up his rifle and slid on sandaled feet to the floor of the bowl.
He quickly untied the reins of his thoats from the rock he’d hitched them to. He secured the long rifle in the boot under his saddle alongside the scabbard of his long saber. His thoat croaked and bleated as he swung into the saddle. The animals were thirsty. Hell, he was thirsty too.
He kicked his heels into the flanks of his mount and it rose on its ten legs to canter in a general northerly direction, the smaller pack animal following at the end of a lead line of braided hide.
The rim of the bowl would serve to hide him from the pursuer for the next hour or so. The cracked clay surface of the dead lake would not raise any dust to betray his position before that. With any luck, Kal would be out of sight in the gathering dark by the time the bounty man crested the slope. Kal recognized that his run of luck was nearing its end after three days of riding hard with little rest and dwindling supplies. If he could only reach Argon or Samarium, one of the two settlements that lay north against the edge of the ice cap! Or perhaps a camp of fellow tharks where his name was not known.
He was Warhoon, a tribe not welcome among the more civilized of the tharks. There was no hiding his allegiance, as the signature bands of Warhoon tattoos about his arms attested. The distinction between tribes was less important the farther north he rode. The need for water sourced from ice melt erased the differences between tharks, and even between tharks and men. In this pitiless country, thirst was a greater concern than tribal or species loyalties.
And there was little chance his reputation had preceded him to the settlements. But word would soon follow him and then there would be more than just this single human dogging his trail. Until he found a place remote enough, backward enough in which to hide, there would be no rest for him.
All because he had dallied with the bitch Tagas, the first daughter of a Warhoon elder hetman. He’d only agreed to the arrangement because he saw advantages for himself in the union. A warrior of little distinction and less property, he had few prospects of ever being more than a handy sword and lance for the many conflicts the tribe engaged in.
Then the harpy Tagas had become taken with him for some reason. It was she who proposed they become mates. And, after consuming enough briga, a drink made from fermented tojan root, he agreed to the match. But there was not enough briga on Barsoom to make Tagas attractive enough for more than a few ruts. And so, Kal mounted up and rode off leaving his bride to wail at his absence and her father to roar himself raw with rage.
