Year: 2023

Be Based, Young Man

An interview with Noor bin Ladin:

By turns, Noor blends optimism and pessimism about the future. “I walk through the streets sometimes and think to myself, ‘My God, so many of these people don’t realise the war we’re in.’” But it’s clear enough to me that her attitude is ultimately one of hope for the future. When I suggest that the pandemic response has been a “great filter” event – an event that decides, quite literally, whether people are going to make it or not – and that most people have failed abjectly, she rebuffs me strongly. However many people have accepted events at face value and gone along with what the good doctor Anthony Fauci has told them, enough people are aware of the “war”, and of the stakes involved, that a globalist victory is anything but assured. Despite the reversals of the last year, what she calls the “Great Awakening”, which began five years ago with the election of Donald Trump, is still going strong. “People are fighting back” – look at the protests in France, the Netherlands and even Australia, which people have been far too quick to write off as totally lost, she says. The increasingly desperate measures taken by authorities, especially vaccine mandates, are a clear sign for Noor that things are not going as planned for the globalists.

And, for all the talk of irreligion, decadence and degeneracy over the past hour – however “far removed from God we are”, as she puts it – she trusts, nonetheless, that “we all have an innate sense of morality” and “people know that what is happening is wrong.”

“But whatever happens,” she adds, “God wins at the end of the day.” This seems like a good place for us to end our conversation.

There’s one last thing, though. Given the gravity of everything we’ve talked about – from Auschwitz to xenoestrogens – it feels almost frivolous to ask Noor the burning question, the question that prompted this interview in the first place. But since we’re wrapping up, I think “what the hell?” and ask it anyway.

So what is it based women really want?

“Oh that’s simple,” Noor replies, with a smile. “Based women want a man who’s even more based than they are.”

The sooner both men and women accept that the entire “Enlightenment” program was the nothing more than the continuation of the religious program of the most wicked of the ancient pagan evils, the sooner they will turn back to Jesus Christ, back to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and the sooner Man can return to building civilization rather than tearing it down.

If you can’t fight for the Cross, perhaps you can at least summon the faith to fight for flush toilets. If you don’t believe in Rome, perhaps you can at least summon the will to delenda Carthage. If you can’t accept the Truth, perhaps you can see enough of it to reject the Lie.

And it’s a healthy reminder not to hide your intellectual light under a bushel in a futile attempt to avoid female rejection. Instead, give them something to which they can be drawn.

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Rangers Lead the Way

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine, June 27 (Reuters) – A Russian missile struck a restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing at least eight people and wounding 56, emergency services said, as rescue crews combed the rubble in search of casualties... The building was reduced to a twisted web of metal beams. Police and soldiers emerged with a man in military trousers and boots on a stretcher. He was placed in an ambulance, though it was unclear whether he was still alive.

From Twitter:

Kramatorsk. After an alleged tip off from local informants a hotel with AFU and foreign merc’s was hit. Survivors have being filmed talking with American accents. Perhaps they were on vacation.

A reader at AC’s points out that the tattoo looks very much like a historical Rangers Diamond. Which, in this case, suggests that the 3rd Ranger Battalion is already deployed in eastern Ukraine.

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“It’s Just Words”

When they don’t like words, it’s “hate speech” and justifies everything from murder to disemployment and prison. When they tell you openly what they’re intending to do, it’s merely a presentation of a stereotype and should not be criticized or even quoted:

Over the weekend, a short video circulated widely on social media of an unidentified person at a New York City march during Pride festivities saying, “We’re coming for your children.”

In the 21-second clip, circulated by a right-wing web streamer channel, dozens of people march in the streets and are clearly heard chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping.” But one voice that is louder than the crowd — it’s not clear whose, or whether the speaker was a member of the LGBTQ community — is heard saying at least twice, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”

To conservative pundits, activists and lawmakers, the video confirmed the allegations they’ve levied in recent years that the LGBTQ community is “grooming” children.

But to Brian Griffin, the original organizer of the NYC Drag March, if that’s the worst they heard, it’s only because he wasn’t there this year. “It’s all just words,” Griffin said. “It’s all presented to fulfill their worst stereotypes of us.”

The wicked are a) liars and b) even worse than their very worst stereotypes. Always take their words at face value, assume that is just the tip of the iceberg, and respond accordingly. And if “it’s all just words”, well, what are the criticism and the condemnation, if not words? Context is not a universal excuse for content.

Freedom of speech and freedom of expression were always satanic devices only intended to go one way.

But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them.

  • Matthew 15:18

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Last Chance at Landmark

A selection from The History of the Pelopponesian War by Thucydides, the Landmark edition of which is the first in the Castalia History series. From now until Friday, new subscribers will be subscribed from the first book, after which new subscriptions will begin with the second book in the History series, which will be announced on July 1st.

Due to the enthusiasm for the series, the print run for The Landmark Thucydides will be 500.

So bloody was the march of the revolution, and the impression which it made was the greater as it was one of the first to occur. Later on, one may say, the whole Hellenic world was convulsed; struggles being every, where made by the popular chiefs to bring in the Athenians, and by the oligarchs to introduce the Lacedaemonians. In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war, with an alliance always at the command of either faction for the hurt of their adversaries and their own corresponding advantage, opportunities for bringing in the foreigner were never wanting to the revolutionary parties. The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases. In peace and prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes. Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In fine, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was wanting, was equally commended until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations had not in view the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime. The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation, being only proffered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since, considerations of safety apart, success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence. Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first. The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their struggles for ascendancy engaged in the direst excesses; in their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard, and invoking with equal readiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of the strong arm to glut the animosities of the hour. Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape.

Thus every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries by reason of the troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. To put an end to this, there was neither promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all parties dwelling rather in their calculation upon the hopelessness of a permanent state of things, were more intent upon self-defence than capable of confidence. In this contest the blunter wits were most successful. Apprehensive of their own deficiencies and of the cleverness of their antagonists, they feared to be worsted in debate and to be surprised by the combinations of their more versatile opponents, and so at once boldly had recourse to action: while their adversaries, arrogantly thinking that they should know in time, and that it was unnecessary to secure by action what policy afforded, often fell victims to their want of precaution.

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The Logistics of Tolkien

An operational and logistical analysis of the Witch King’s attempt to storm Minas Tirith:

The goals here (operational objectives) of Sauron’s plan here absolutely check out. Minas Tirith contains most of Gondor’s military, and functionally all of its leadership and administration – its destruction could very well be war-ending. At the very least, control of Minas Tirith would open the rest of Gondor to raiding as well as enable Sauron to control the resource-rich Pelennor Fields. Delivering a powerful and effective siege (the operational objective) is very likely to lead to victory over Gondor and territorial control of it (the strategic objective). Now the question is Sauron’s plan to achieve that operational objective (we will talk about Gondor’s planning too – a little later in the series).

Now, as we’ve noted, operations are all about the problem of moving large armies. Late season Game of Thrones notwithstanding, armies do not generally teleport around the world, they have to march. That imposes all sorts of restrictions and costs on movement: where are the roads? Mountain passes? River Crossings? The terrain Sauron’s army must attack over is defined (as we’ll see) by a series of transport bottlenecks that have to be negotiated in order to deliver the siege. Then there is the issue of supplies – even orcs need to eat.

Logistics of the Army of Mordor
Looking at the logistics of moving the Army of Mordor to Minas Tirith is actually a great way to introduce some of these problems in more depth. They say ‘amateurs talk tactics, but professionals study logistics.’ Well, pull up a chair at the Grown-Ups Table, and let’s study some logistics.

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.

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.

I’d like to think that the logistics of Selenoth work out well, but I’ll have to leave that for others to decide. Regardless, it’s a much more interesting take on Tolkien than most, as far as I’m concerned. And the analyst is right, it’s not a siege of the city so much as an attempt to storm its walls.

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Alarm Bells

The great Martin van Creveld doesn’t like some of the historical patterns he has noticed are starting to play out:

In the Middle East, the alarms bells are ringing. There are several reasons for this, all of them important and all well-able to combine with each other and give birth to the largest conflagration the region has witnessed in decades. The first is the imminent demise of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, alias Abu Maazen. Now 88 years old, his rule started in 2005 when he took over from Yasser Arafat. Unlike Arafat, who began his career as the leader of a terrorist organization, Abu Mazen was and remains primarily a politician and a diplomat. In this capacity he helped negotiate the 1995 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Partly for that reason, partly because he opposed his people’s armed uprising (the so-called Second Intifada of 2000-2003) some Israelis saw him as a more pliant partner than his predecessor had been.

It did not work that way. Whether through his own fault, or that of Israel, or both, during all his eighteen years in office Abu Mazen has failed to move a single step closer to a peace settlement. Israel on its part has never stopped building new settlements and is doing so again right now. As a result, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli retaliatory measures in the West Bank in particular are once again picking up, claiming dead and injured almost every day.

Nor is the West Bank the only region where Israelis and Palestinians keep clashing. Just a few weeks have passed since the death, in an Israeli jail and as a result of a hunger strike, of a prominent Palestinian terrorist. His demise made the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization in Gaza launch no fewer than a thousand rockets at Israel, leading to Israeli air strikes, leading to more rockets, and so on in the kind of cycle that, over the last twenty years or so, has become all too familiar. Fortunately Hezbollah, another Islamic terrorist organization whose base is Lebanon, did not intervene. It is, however, not at all certain that, should hostilities in and around Gaza resume, it won’t follow up on its leader’s threats to do just that. Certainly it has the capability and the plans; all that is needed is a decision.

To his concerns about Jordan and Iran, I would add the following. First, Syria is looking for revenge for the frequent air attacks of the last few years in support of the anti-Assad rebels. Second, and much more importantly, both China and Russia are more closely allied with the Arabs than they have been since the 1950s and the USA has never looked more impotent and less able to impose any sort of peace on the region.

While Israel has wisely held itself apart from the Kiev regime despite its many close connections to it, it is still part of the NATO bloc and therefore an enemy to both Russia and China. It’s not necessarily the best time to be the self-styled “greatest ally” of the United States.

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Monday Arktoons

WARDOGS INC. Episode 30: Cracking Cargo

THE WEIRD AND STRANGE Episode 3: A Not So Lighthearted MCU Rant

GORGO Episode 21: Distressed Roar

TREASURY OF TALES Episode 10: The Little Red Hen

RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 26: Totally Sunk

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BLACK JACK Episode 11: Severe Injury

Arktoons creators will be pleased to know that the Copy Episode feature is now fully functional. This is particularly useful for text episodes, as the various stable elements such as the cover panel, panel formattings, and summary link do not need to be uploaded again.

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Mailvox: Alpha Marriage

A man, presumably Delta or less, asked what he thought was a rhetorical question while erroneously assuming that he knew the answer.

Should the delta guy marry a woman who ran through alphas in college?

Yes. Of course. How clueless, how astonishingly ignorant, does a man have to be to not realize that all the alphas themselves uniformly marry women “who ran through alphas in college”. That has never, ever, been a dealbreaker for any Alpha who isn’t concerned about the unquestionable legitimacy of the heir to his throne.

Do these cretins really believe that Mick Jagger or Tom Brady or [fill-in-the-alpha-here] are marrying pure and virtuous virgin girls? Has anyone even heard of the Alpha CEO who prefers trad girls in long homespun dresses to femme fatales like Melania Trump? Do the rock stars marry sweet milkmaids and shepherds or models and video vamps?

The difference is that the alphas aren’t afraid to marry women with a statistically average amount of experience. To them, that experience is a rounding error by comparison, so it doesn’t even enter into their mind to be concerned about it. Meanwhile, the Deltas and Gammas are all terrified and insecure at the thought of a woman who will make a perfectly reasonable marriage risk.

The statistics are clear. There are three categories of divorce risk based on female sexual history.

  • Low: 0-1
  • Average: 2-14
  • High: 15+

Now, I’m not saying that Average risk is better than Low risk, I’m simply pointing out that Average is not High and most Average-risk first marriages will not end in divorce.

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Amazon in Decline

It’s not just Dem Rangz. Amazon’s other businesses are also in decline:

Here’s the big thing, Amazon is currently in retraction. This a company that bought everything on the internet it could get its tentacles on because they had all the money, and didn’t know what to spend it on, so they went with the Bezos default of, “Just throw some shit at the wall and measure what sticks.”

Those days are now over. The subsidiaries that were “loss leaders” were tolerable in the days of mega-money income for tax purposes but not anymore.

I had a conversation with a European publisher the other day. Their book sales are down 40 percent from 2021. This is remarkable because book sales usually increase during recessions, as it’s one of the most cost-effective forms of entertainment outside of video games that provide hundreds of hours of playtime. They put much of it down to Amazon, on whom they’d placed their bet for both ebooks and print editions, but Amazon’s A9 algorithm has pretty much destroyed the “bookstore” angle and replaced it with “these are the books the SJWs at Amazon think you should read.”

So, not only is it harder for readers to find the authors and publishers of interest to them, they’re being actively dissuaded from shopping on the site.

This is the inevitable outcome of the centralization of book publishing. Convenience kills.

Fortunately, Castalia saw this coming, which is why we’re building up our direct sales model in the aftermath of the Aerio shutdown. Based on the success of our recent experiments, we also anticipate adding a third leatherbound subscription later this year, albeit a low-cost one for pulp novels and comics designed to appeal to those who have not hitherto had any interest in collecting high-end books.

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