The Finding in the Folio

Dennis McCarthy offers further proof that Ben Jonson, and a number of his colleagues, knew very well that Thomas North was the original author of most of the Shakespeare plays.

As we shall see in this article, Jonson’s celebrated ode contains a shocking secret—a dead giveaway to the true origin of the canon. In other words, the answer to the most significant literary question in history—who was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays?—has been sitting prominently in the front of the First Folio for the last 400 years. Jonson was not being remotely subtle…

As I frequently point out with no hyperbole: the second greatest plagiarist in history has not borrowed half as much, perhaps not one-tenth as much, from another writer as Shakespeare has from North.

Shakespeare never had a “witty friend” help him write plays? Not only did North aid him in the chore; scholars involved in authorship studies point to at least half a dozen plays—1 Henry VI, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, Macbeth, Henry VIII, for instance—that were collaborations. All of Digges’s counter-claims are false.

In brief, Jonson, who knew the North-Shakespeare story and had scoffed at Shakespeare before, saw the poem he would write for the First Folio as an opportunity to memorialize his view of Shakespeare. Of course, he knew he couldn’t explicitly attack Shakespeare—as it would never be allowed in the front of a collection meant for fans of the Stratford dramatist. Shakespeare was the only one then known to London playgoers—and his name and reputation helped ensure the First Folio would be a successful publishing venture.

But even Jonson’s title clues you in: “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us.” It doesn’t refer to what Shakespeare wrote or created—but what he hath left us. And as Digges and Dryden both knew, the poem does not really commend Shakespeare; rather it stands as a sobering rebuttal to the idolatry that the volume would arouse. And in the middle of this ode, the poet identifies the playwright who was the true, original author of Shakespeare’s plays. Jonson’s “tribute” to Shakespeare was his last act of vengeance, a carefully framed reprise of his previous denunciations of the crow cum swan. And it is one of the last pieces in the puzzle that exposes North as the true genius behind the Shakespeare canon.

It’s interesting to see how long ago writers were having to skirt the mainstream narrative in order to avoid getting canceled.

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The Racism Police

Rape, assault, and theft aren’t considered crimes in the UK anymore, not when they’ve got emergency racisms to stop!

The furore over two-tier policing intensified last night after a supermarket boss accused officers of treating a false claim of racism more seriously than rampant violence by shoplifters. Iceland founder Sir Malcolm Walker says ‘two-tier policing isn’t just happening on the streets’ as he revealed cops rushed to one of his stores three minutes after a phoney accusation of racism was made against a shop supervisor.

The entrepreneur made a formal complaint to Scotland Yard after the Asian supervisor was handcuffed and dragged to a police car by officers who rushed to the scene when a black customer made a complaint of racism after being caught tampering with milk bottles.

In contrast, Sir Malcolm said, police often did not attend even when staff had been seriously hurt or threatened with violence by shoplifters.

He said he was moved to speak out following the furore over the murder of Henry Nowak, who was handcuffed by police as he lay dying after his killer falsely accused him of racist abuse.

Sir Malcolm said: ‘There is two-tier policing. It isn’t just happening on the streets. We had an incident in a store in Enfield. This guy is taking milk bottles out of the fridge, opening them and putting them back, so a staff member remonstrated with him. The next thing the guy is on his phone claiming he has been racially abused. Three minutes later a police car arrives and they immediately handcuff our member of staff. This member of staff was taken away for two or three hours before the matter was dropped.

It is becoming increasingly obvious to people in countries everywhere from China to the UK that “racism” is nothing more than a people’s attempt to survive and live by their own rules. Which, of course, what it has always been; “anti-racism” quite literally means the destruction of the targeted race. Racism genuinely means being “pro human-diversity”.

Never forget, the first “racists” were the American Indians, who were labeled racists by Americans for wanting to preserve their own language, religion, and clothing after being military conquered and having their way of life targeted for extinction. There is a certain amount of irony in the idea that only those of European descent can be “racist” since they are far from the only people on the planet who want to survive and live amongst their own kind in the way that they collectively prefer, although it is true that they are the only people in the USA and in Europe whose historical religion and way of life have been targeted for extinction.

Existence and collective self-defense has never been a sin and it cannot be a crime. The crime here is being committed by the Clown Worlders, who have openly admitted they are trying to stamp out the existence of specific peoples, religions, and cultures. And remember that every single individual who has been accused of “racism” and “white supremacy” has been set up and falsely accused by the most evil creatures on the planet, literal demons and cannibals, who are anti-human and in whom Jesus Christ himself declared there was no truth.

Equality is a lie. Racism is an inversion. Civil rights are neither granted by God nor guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The Enlightenment was constructed upon an equivocation. Do not be deceived.

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10 Readers Wanted

If this cover image particularly appeals to you, and if you’re the sort of reader who really likes to read a certain style of book and has read the entire series, preferably multiple times, I’d like to run a rough draft we will be publishing soon past you. So get in touch, please. But only email if you’ve actually got the time to read it this week and you’re willing to send back a pre-publication review with suggestions about what you think works, and what you think doesn’t. I’ll freely admit that I don’t know enough about this specific genre to be confident about my impressions.

Don’t worry about typos and inconsistencies. That sort of thing, I can handle. It’s more what works, what doesn’t work, and so forth.

In almost completely unrelated news, VERIPHYSICS: The Recovery of the Real will be released in hardcover and paperback this coming week. It’s the two ebooks combined, plus a significant paper.

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Why Chicago Lost the Bears

I very much doubt that Chicago is going to be the last minority-dominant Blue city to lose its professional sports franchise. This is nominally about economics, but it’s actually about immigration and demographics.

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that’s been in the city since 1921.

They didn’t lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they’d rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year. Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move. They lost them for two reasons. The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they’re bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack. Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn’t even exist yet. That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn’t reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois. Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting. So now it’s all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything. Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they’re “an $8.5B valued business” that doesn’t need propping up. But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works. Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team. And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: “I wasn’t willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team.” There it is. “Billionaire-owned.” That’s how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you’re saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line. Meanwhile they’re running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You’re living in it. Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that’s $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances “the point of no return.”

When you run things this badly, you sell what’s left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect. Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check. But a fixed property tax rate for a team that’s been here 106 years? That’s “propping up billionaires.”

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn’t outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren’t a disaster. Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero.

Immigrants and minorities are intrinsically parasitical in Western societies. This isn’t to say they can never be beneficial in certain circumstances, or that they are inevitably negative, but they can never be, in the favored language of the AI systems, “load-bearing”.

There are no societal systems as such. The Chinese implement communism very, very differently than Russian, or German, or South American communists. So changing the demographics necessarily means changing the societal structure and the society itself. Different peoples have different priorities, as they should and as they always will; no one would ever mistake the way Real Madrid and FC Barcelona are run for an NFL operation.

NIL is going to compound this effect. Already universities in California are suffering badly in the recruiting process because no 18-year-old athlete wants to throw away 13.3 percent of his income. The Big 10 schools are presently riding high because their massive alumni bases allow them bigger budgets, but it won’t be long before the state income taxes begin to penalize them as well.

Chicago may be the first to lose its professional sports team over taxes, but it will not be the last.

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Work, Brothers

Russia appears to be gearing up for something, if Putin’s coded message to her soldiers is any guide:

Rather than engage with Zelensky’s proposals, Putin turned away from the letter entirely. He said the ones to be addressed were Russia’s combatants and soldiers at the line of contact, telling them:

The country is proud of you and places its hopes on you. We should address not the authors of this letter, nor lovers of the epistolary genre, but our fighters on the front line.

He then closed with the phrase: “Work, brothers!”

To understand the import of that phrase you need to be introduced to Magomed Nurbagandov:

Magomed Nurbagandovich Nurbagandov (January 9, 1985 – July 10, 2016) was a police lieutenant serving in the National Guard of Russia, stationed in Kaspiysk in the Republic of Dagestan. He was a Dargin by nationality, born in the village of Sergokala. By all accounts an exceptional student — he graduated from lyceum with a gold medal and then with honors from the law faculty of Dagestan State University.

On the morning of July 10, 2016, Nurbagandov was vacationing with his family near the village of Sergokala when he was attacked by five armed militants. Having learned he was a policeman, the militants forced him and his brother into the trunk of a stolen car, drove them away from the recreation area, and then shot them. The murder was filmed on a mobile phone and posted on an extremist website. Wikipedia

The militants’ goal was psychological — they wanted him to appear on camera and call on his fellow officers to quit the police and stop fighting. Instead, looking directly at the camera, Nurbagandov urged: “Keep on working, brothers” (Работайте, братья) — an act which took tremendous courage.

The militants had uploaded an edited version of the video where they cut out Nurbagandov’s last words. His defiance was suppressed — until fate intervened. Several militants from the group were killed in September 2016, and when examining the bodies, the mobile phone that had filmed the original, unedited video was found. The full footage — with his final words intact — was then released by Russian authorities. The phrase went viral on September 12, 2016, and became a nationwide sensation.

By invoking it in front of the international audience at SPIEF, Putin was making a layered statement: that Zelensky’s letter was an enemy propaganda exercise, that it deserved to be treated with the same contempt Nurbagandov showed his captors, and that the only people worth addressing are those doing the actual fighting. Putin’s visage was grim when he spoke this phrase.

Now the limits of the US military have been clearly established, it makes sense that Russia no longer feels the need to maintain the holding pattern it has been in for the last three years. And unlike his people, who are primarily focused on Ukraine, and to a lesser extent the European Union, Putin understands that their real enemy is Clown World.

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Comprehensive Failure

No wonder Iran sees no reason to rush into a peace deal. The US military failed in every aspect of the recent war:

CNN found that Iran has now unblocked 50 out of the 69 tunnel entrances struck by the US and Israel at 18 underground missile facilities. Iran has repaired other parts of the bases as well, including roads that the US and Israel bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them. Satellite images show almost all these craters have now been filled, and at two sites, even repaved.

Now the cat’s out of the bag, and the world is exposed to the embarrassing reality that the months of US strikes did virtually nothing to Iran’s military capability, with Trump forced to cover up and save-face by claiming that he “spared” the Iranian military proper because that was somehow favorable to his post-war vision—sure.

The truth is that all the new revelations have unsealed the true aim of US strategy: it was never to totally destroy Iran’s military capability—the US itself never possessed the ability to do so. The aim was to create a brief window of degradation that would allow the Israel-fronted “plan” of overthrowing the Iranian regime to work. The hope was to temporarily slow down and hamper Iran’s military just long enough for the various psyops and false flags to stir up unrest in the country and lead to a Venezuela-style overthrow—but Iran had prepared well, and was not fazed by either prong of the failed operation.

So let’s look at the way the US lost the most recent round of its war with Iran:

  1. Regime change failed
  2. Nuclear prevention failed
  3. Defense of Arab bases failed
  4. Defense of Israel failed
  5. Destruction of military capabilities failed
  6. Strait of Hormuz blocked

About the only thing the US did successfully was to not lose any warships. Which, one notes, could have much more easily been accomplished by not sending them to the Persian Gulf in the first place. And not only did the USA fail in its objectives, but it ended the conflict worse off than when it began.

That is, by every historical measure, a defeat. It’s not an existential one, nor is it necessarily the last word on the international conflict. But the history books will record this as being a defeat of the USA by Iran.

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RIP Giles

Actor Anthony Head, best known for his roles in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Ted Lasso, has died at the age of 72, his family has announced. A statement from his daughters, actresses Emily and Daisy Head, said: ‘It is with heavy hearts that we announce the death of our extraordinary father, Anthony Head. He passed away peacefully of complications due to pneumonia, surrounded by his family.

It’s a pity he won’t be around for the 4th season of Ted Lasso. I thought he was one of the best parts of the show.

The Great Fiction of 1989

It’s not hard to understand why the Chinese have absolutely no trust of Clown World or its pet media once one learns the truth of Tiananmen Square. And it does tend to call other Western media reports of China into question.

The US reportedly contacted key leaders among the protesting students and made them an offer—don’t wind down, go harder on the protesting and we’ll give you US passports, CIA-run safe passage out of China, a new home in the richest country in the world, and enrolment in top US universities—Harvard, Princeton, Columbia. Now that was an offer hard to refuse.

In late May, student leader Chai Ling gave her infamously puzzling interview/ talk, where she seemed to predict a Tiananman Square massacre in which she would die. She said she was speaking her last words, as there would be “a massacre which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square” – but she also included the information that she “would not be there” as her new plan was to move to the United States to study there! Years later, she wrote that her remarkable prediction of a coming violent crackdown which would lead to a Tiananmen Square massacre was something she had heard from Li Lu, not her own forecast.

Another person in the leading student group, Kong Qingdong, later recalled how he how he had come across undergraduates using a mimeograph machine to makes copies of personal documents, to give to the US Embassy in return for passports. Two of the top leaders, Chai Ling and Feng Congde, were getting them, he was told by fellow undergraduates.

Kong refused to join the rush to take US passports, saying that the protest was all about making China a better place.
Kong angrily declined to join them. He felt the protests were about standing up for China and enabling socialist modernization for the people—not grabbing passports handed out by a hostile foreign power.

Something else was troubling Kong, which he found hard to articulate. He later said: “I wasn’t fond of the way the forceful way the government spoke. But what they were actually saying was: ‘This is a complex situation. There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord.’ This was the truth.”

Think about that line of agreement between the students and the government: There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord. In other words, some protesters as well as the government knew what was really happening under the surface. But if things were calming down, what changed? How did violence break out? Kong’s answer to that question was cryptic. “When we were little, we watched movies like Guerrillas Sweep The Plain,” he said.

That answer would have meant nothing to a western audience—but it was clear to many Chinese. This was a reference to a classic 1955 Chinese movie in which there are tensions between two groups. They have disagreements but don’t fight. Suddenly, a hidden third body, the Eighth Army, opens fire at both sides and then quickly hides, triggering bloodshed.

And that is what happened. Soldiers and students were sharing food. But on June 3, mysterious thugs, some of whom were said to be from ethnic minorities, triggered a fight in Mu Xi Di, in the west of the city, attacking army buses with petrol bombs and setting them alight, burning the occupants to death. The perpetrators were never found.

Soldiers who managed to escape the burning buses were beaten to death. Other military men arrived and chaotic fighting broke out, with scores of deaths.

This was five kilometers away from Tiananmen Square.

At the Square, in the early hours of June 4, soldiers arrived and called on students to leave. Student leader Feng Congde worked to gauge protesters’ opinions, and concluded that the majority wanted to vacate the space. “So I announced the decision to leave,” he said. Students left peacefully.

Violence did break out, not in the square, but in the streets around it.

One witness, Larry Wortzel, watched protesters attack a military vehicle and noted how well it was organized—someone had definitely trained them. “This was clearly a tactic rehearsed and even practiced among the demonstrators, since it was used in the same way in separate places around the city,” he wrote.

“All verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully,” said the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews.

Now this is where it gets strange. The next day, a very different story appeared from a few foreign embassies saying that 10,000 people had been killed. This tale said the students in the square had not left. They had stayed and been massacred with machine guns, their bodies pushed into piles with bulldozers, and then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers. This gruesome horror story, supported by no evidence at all, is now viewed by eastern and western historians as entirely fictional.

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Hiding Hultgreen-Curie

From a keen-eyed reader: I’ve found a few articles that describe her as a trainee expected to earn her wings this month and other articles describing this as a training flight, but so far no articles that include both facts and none that confirm who was flying.

Yes, I noticed a very delicate avoidance of identifying the pilot responsible for the flying the helicopter in the news articles about the recent crash.

Britain’s only female Royal Navy commando was among three crew members killed in a helicopter crash in Devon – as they are pictured for the first time. Lieutenant Lily-Mae Fisher, 31, died alongside Lieutenant Commander Chris Gayson, 42, and Petty Officer Owen Green, 24, when the Merlin Mk4 came down in a field just before 4am on Wednesday.

Residents hailed the crew as ‘heroes’ who ‘saved lives’ by avoiding nearby homes and a Travelodge hotel. Defence Secretary John Healey said on Wednesday that the three, who were based in Yeovil, Somerset, were ‘dedicated and highly valued members of their squadrons who embodied the best of our Armed Forces’.

Lieutenant Fisher, one of the helicopter’s two pilots who served with 846 Naval Air Squadron, appeared on the ITV shows Take Me Out hosted by Paddy McGuinness and Ninja Warrior UK. She has been described by the Royal Navy as ‘an inspiration’ to women in the armed forces, whose death was a ‘huge loss’.

It’s theoretically possible that the other pilot was flying the helicopter at the time, but we all know that the odds substantially favor the scenario in which she was flying it, she did something wrong, and her actions crashed the vehicle. The very delicacy of the reporting tends to confirm the very fact that the media is seeking to hide, and we all know they’re trying to hide it in the interests of their false god of equality.

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A Refutation, Reviewed

The first review of THE REFUTATION OF KANT has been posted.

A refutation of Kant has to do one of two things: produce a counterexample the system cannot deal with, or locate the move inside the system that doesn’t actually argue for what it concludes. The second part of Day’s Veriphysics does both, and the interlocking of the two halves is what makes the book hard to answer because every defense of one wing concedes ground on the other.

The argument worth focusing on is the Master Amphiboly, and Vox is right about it. The “Thing-in-itself” runs two readings across a single word: that every cognizer is shaped by its apparatus, and that no feature of reality is in principle accessible to human cognition. The first is trivially true and Kant argues for it. The second is the load-bearing claim of the whole edifice and Kant never argues for it once, and instead moves to it under cover of the first. Once you see the slide, you can’t unsee it. Neptune is the cleanest empirical counterexample, though not the only one: Le Verrier worked an inverse problem through pure formalism and Galle confirmed the prediction within a degree, and the positron case is structurally identical: Dirac’s equation required it before anyone looked. If formal cognition cannot in principle identify features of reality not already given in experience, these events did not happen.

The mathematical half is harder to evade and simpler to state. Construction in Kant’s sense was tied to constructibility, which was already a problem with the irrationals in 1781 and decisively broken by Cantor a century later. The available retreat is to recast synthetic a priori as analytic, which costs the system the work it was built to do. The pincer is real and no version of Kant survives both jaws. One place worth pressing further is that the amphiboly used is portable. The slide from an apparatus-relative epistemic limit to an ontological claim about reality runs through Hume on causation, through Wittgenstein on private language, and through most of the strong-program science studies literature. Naming it generalizes the refutation.

Worth reading. Excellent work by Day

That is an intriguing observation about the potential portability of the Master Amphiboly. I shall have to examine the situation and see just how far the intellectual rot goes.

UPDATE: A second review has been posted.

I would like to thank Vox for writing this excellent book. Since Kant is the foundational philosophical thinker of the “Enlightenment”, its easy to see why many people cannot think straight these days. I enjoy reading St. Thomas Aquinas. Vox mentions that he may have called Kant a heretic and that sounds spot on.

Now if we could just convince the world to abandon Kant, things might improve. His notion of “…the thing-in-itself is unknowable by theoretical reason..” amazed me. Really??? Kant never did applied physics, medicine, or skilled trades, did he? That said, the world is heavily invested in Kant, just like Darwin, and seems to like to double down, not change its thinking. Indeed I enjoyed Vox pointing out that the current defenders of both have moved WAY beyond the original works in their defenses thereof.

Hegel’s thought confuses me too, perhaps he’s in the queue as well for a refutation? I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks an understanding of why we need a 21st Century philosophy that is actually workable.

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