Author: VD

The Verdict of Mars

Success always contains the seeds of failure. Unfortunately, Donald Trump doesn’t realize that his strategic bluffery has been comprehensively called by Iran and its allies.

US President Donald Trump has declared the fragile ceasefire with Iran “over” after the US military conducted a series of strikes on the Islamic Republic over alleged attacks on three tankers that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. On Wednesday, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said it hit dozens of Iranian ground and navy targets “in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz,” denouncing Tehran for “aggression [that] was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire.”

Iranian media reported that one of the tankers – which was linked to Qatar – was attacked as it was sailing through the strait and “ignoring repeated warnings.” A government source told Press TV that any traffic through the chokepoint should be approved by Tehran.

As tensions escalated, the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) said it launched strikes on dozens of US military assets in Bahrain and Kuwait, adding that it downed an American MQ-9 drone.

Speaking on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye, Trump lashed out at the Iranian leadership, calling them “scum,” “cuckoo,” “sick,” “vicious, [and] violent people,” and confirmed that the ceasefire is “over.”

“I don’t want to deal with them… I’ll speak to our negotiators that want to negotiate… [but] as far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars,” he said.

So when the economy implodes, understand that it is Netanyahu and Trump who are the two primary individuals responsible. They chose to fight this war. And it looks like every deranged leader in history who couldn’t bring himself to accept the verdict of Mars and throw in the towel before defeat became undeniable, they’re going to take the ship down with them.

Remember, Iran defeated the Epstein Alliance with only a small amount of assistance from its allies. Even if the US and Israel up their antes, Iran will be able to call them and raise. And I don’t think the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia are going to stay onside for long.

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How to Stop Corruption

China has a less-corrupt government system than any government in the West these days.

A court in eastern China has sentenced a former city official to death for taking more than 2.2bn yuan ($325m; £243m) in bribes over 30 years.

Yang Youlin, who served in various positions in Nanjing city from 1993 to 2023, was also convicted of embezzlement, abuse of power and money laundering, with his ill-gotten gains amounting to one of the highest in recent years.

The 69-year-old exploited his roles to help others secure engineering contracts, land transfers and financing, in exchange for money and valuables, said state media.

Yang was investigated as part of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown which has cut through military ranks and high-level banking, among other sectors.

Yang, who spent much of his career working on economic and technological development in Nanjing, had committed offences “of an extremely serious nature” and “caused exceptionally heavy losses to the interests of the state and the people”, a court in Changzhou city said on Monday.

Since coming to power, President Xi has launched waves of anti-corruption drives, which critics say have also been used as a tool to purge political rivals.

Death sentences for white collar crimes however remain rare, though they are meted out occasionally, typically if the cases involve large sums exceeding 1bn yuan.

For instance, former finance chief Lai Xiaomin was executed in 2021 for taking 1.8bn yuan in bribes over a 10-year period.

Li Jianping, a former Inner Mongolia official, was executed in 2024 for embezzling and taking bribes totaling more than 3bn yuan.

In many other cases, the courts handed out jail terms or suspended death sentences, which get commuted to life imprisonment after a specified duration.

If your political rivals are corrupt, then obviously an anti-corruption campaign will purge them. That’s a feature, not a bug. The difference between Xi and the ineffectual Trump could not be more obvious than the former’s massively successful war on corruption and Trump’s total failure to arrest or convict, let alone execute, a single traitorous and corrupt government pedophile.

There’s no excuse for that. Waging a stupid and disastrous war on Iran while failing to make peace with Russia is always going to be a major stain on his legacy. But that’s how things go for big-talking cowards. Sooner or later, the rhetoric has to become real, or it just looks ridiculous.

Trump isn’t a terrible president. But he had a real opportunity for greatness, and for one reason or another, he failed to seize his moment. Now, barring the possibility that there are things going on that we can’t presently see, it appears he’ll go down with his friends in Clown World.

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The Introduction of Inspector Toda

Castalia House is introducing both a new imprint and a new series. Today marks the launch of KURO NOIR, also known as 黒書房, which is our line of books focusing on Japanese crime literature, including both English originals and original translations. We’re pleased to announce the Inspector Toda series, written by Masashi Sato, which introduces the detective from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police in TOKYO TOKURYU.

TOKYO TOKURYU

When a retired widower is found beaten and stabbed in his home in one of Tokyo’s most exclusive old neighborhoods, Inspector Keisuke Toda has every reason to believe it’s just another in a series of home invasions targeting the elderly. The method appears to match. The victims are consistent. The cross-departmental task force investigating the crimes is satisfied that it is no different than the previous ones..

But Toda isn’t.

The first four robberies left their victims alive. The fifth left an elderly man dead on a tatami floor in a way that tells a different and more insidious story. As Toda’s team works the series alongside a separate investigation into a papa katsu ring exploiting teenage girls, a pattern begins to emerge in the architecture of both operations. The same anonymous recruitment pipelines. The same disposable teenage labor. The same invisible hierarchy.

And gradually, Toda begins to see what no one else on the task force has observed.

Written in the tradition of Keigo Higashino’s masterful procedurals, TOKYO TOKURYU is a novel about the difference between what a crime looks like and what it is, and what happens to the survivors when the truth finally emerges.

In addition to the publication of the first Inspector Toda novel, the second one, THE PLATINUM TRIBE, is now available for preorder and will be released on August 5th.

EXCERPT

He went home that evening at a reasonable hour for once. Asako had made nikujaga, and for the first time in a week the four of them sat down to dinner together. Sōta was talking about a baseball game at school. Yuki was quieter than usual, stealthily glancing at her phone in between bites until Asako finally told her to put it away.

“Something at school?” Toda asked.

Yuki shrugged. “A girl in my class got in trouble. She answered a job listing she found online. It was supposed to be easy work, like handing out flyers or something. They told her to send a photo of her student ID.”

“Sounds sketchy.”

“Yeah, another girl told her it was just a scam, so she stopped.”

Toda set down his chopsticks. “What kind of listing?”

“I don’t know. It just said ‘easy work, same-day payment. ¥30,000 for a few hours.’ It looked like a regular part-time job ad.”

“Where did she find it?”

“I don’t know. Some messaging app. I don’t remember which one. It’s not that unusual, Dad. People post stuff like that all the time.”

She said it matter-of-factly, the way a fifteen-year-old states something about the world she lives in that her parents don’t fully understand.

“Well, I hope you don’t answer anything like that. It sounds like one of the ways traffickers recruit young—”

“Keisuke!”

Asako broke in and interrupted him before he could say ‘prostitutes’.

“Ah, young people,” he shifted gears lamely.

Toda looked at Asako and nodded ruefully. The warning in her dark, beautiful eyes was perfectly clear. Not in front of the children!

He didn’t raise the subject again that evening. After dinner he sat in his chair in the living room and tried to read. The book was a collection of Matsumoto Seichō’s short crime fiction that he’d been working through slowly for the past two months, but tonight the sentences didn’t seem to want to connect to the next one. He found himself reading the same paragraph three times in a row and still couldn’t have told anyone what it was about.

Temporary. No fixed membership. Jobs posted on messaging apps. Kids recruited with the promise of easy money, asked for ID photos that became leverage. A girl in his daughter’s class had almost walked into it, whatever it was, and had been saved only because her friend recognized the trap.

He put the book down and stared at the wall. Somewhere between what Ōnishi had told him and what Yuki had mentioned at dinner, there was a shape he couldn’t quite see yet. The robberies were connected, somehow, but the people involved weren’t, necessarily. They were connected by a method that was being distributed, like a product, to whomever was willing to carry it out.

Toda didn’t know how to describe the situation. There wasn’t a word for it. But he was beginning to understand that his four cases were not a series of crimes in the way he’d originally believed them to be, crimes committed by a crew, or even two crews, working a territory. They seemed to be something more subtle, more insidious.

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Diversity Victory Lap

It’s not white supremacy that is going to cause massive violence across the West. It’s diversity doing victory laps:

Xbox Indian CEO Asha Sharma just announced firing 3,200 Americans.

She filed for 5,000 H-1B visa hires this year.

Asha was appointed CEO of Xbox in February by Indian Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

How is this not a matter of national security? Why are any corporations being permitted any H-1B visa hires?

What happened to the real Donald Trump?

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The Zero Literature Campaign

We know about Clown World’s Zero History campaign. We can see signs of it everywhere from Fructidor to the Khmer Rouge. But it was also accompanied by a Zero Literature campaign. This is not just our imagination at work. You can still see it in action. But the campaign to disappear traditional literature with historical Western values began at least a century before the ALA was cancelling Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A division of the American Library Association has voted to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s book award over concerns with how the early-to-mid 20th century author portrayed blacks and Native Americans.

The Association for Library Service to Children’s board made the unanimous decision Saturday at a meeting in New Orleans. The name has been changed to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

The association says the work of Wilder — best known for her Little House on the Prairie novels — “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values.”

The first award was given to Wilder in 1954

I have no doubt that if Laura Ingalls Wilder had published a century before she did in a language other than English, we would never have heard of her. Both Benito Perez Galdos and Zenaide Fleuriot were much more significant in their native languages than Wilder was in English, and yet somehow, the English publishing world never saw fit to translate them despite producing dozens of editions of far less popular, far less marketable, and far less significant works.

This is why it is absolutely vital to stop blindly supporting those things that the mainstream feeds you, and go out of your way to find those things and support those things that are in line with your values, and not the “core values” of things like the ALSC.

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Defense is Not a Spectator Sport

That was some impressively bad defense over the last two days, first by Brazil, then the USA.

Gabriel is not capable of going toe-to-toe with Erling Halland physically. He knows this from their Premier League battles. He just got overpowered on Halland’s first goal.

Both Gabriel and the other Brazilian were a little lazy on Halland’s second goal. He was obviously going to shoot, but he wasn’t far enough out for them to be content with that. Gabriel just waited in the box and the other defender didn’t go down to one knee to block the shot, which is what allowed Halland to put it right through his legs. But you have to commit to blocking the shot at that range, especially when you’ve got a man behind you for support in case it’s a fake and he is going to break into the box.

I only saw the first half of the USA-Belgium game, but Tim Ream was terrible. Not only did he stand around and watch the Belgian forward score the first goal, but he jumped too early and took himself out of position for the second one. And every time he had the ball, he’d hold it too long, then pass it backwards.

I really don’t understand these coaches who just love passing the ball backwards and are content with one single shot per half. Do they understand that you don’t get any points for possession? The primary correlation with winning in soccer is shots on target, not time of possession. Anything you’re doing that reduces shots on target is reducing your chance of winning. The USA had 56% possession, lost the shots on target contest 7-2, and lost 4-1.

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The Consequences Cometh

  • Cuba has been hit by another island-wide blackout, leaving roughly 10 million people without power. Officials say the cause is under investigation as the country’s aging electric grid continues to struggle and fuel reserves run low. It’s the second nationwide blackout this year.
  • She said nothing new is coming in and some tanks are shut down and the rest are running out. I asked how much longer it’ll last for New Jersey, and she said nobody knows. She said nobody at work wants to talk about it at all, its like people can’t face what is coming and are just blocking out reality. She also mentioned that motor oil is gone. She is in the section for giving rebates on past huge taxes on motor oil, but there isn’t any more being bought.
  • The first report has come in claiming 60% of the pumps at Buc-ee’s in Melissa, TX are SHUT OFF and “most Diesel pumps are closed.”
  • A nationwide power outage occurred in Zimbabwe today, Monday 6 July at 1824 hours.

Further evidence that trying to fight Israel’s war with Iran was the dumbest idea of the Trump administration since the decision to renege on the promise to release the Epstein files.

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Fake Patriots Proved

I’ve told you from the very beginning that the Patriot Front was obviously fake, definitely Fed, and probably gay. All of which is true, but now we know that it is an offshoot of the SPLC thanks to Razorfist:

Charlottesville was organized by paid informants for SPLC. Every organization directly involved were therefore tainted by SPLC funding.

American Vanguard was one of those groups.

After Charlottesvile, they changed their name.

To Patriot Front.

It was always obvious that it was fake because there were never any of the usual police obstacles, doxxings, media hit pieces, deplatformings, permit issues, or any of the other things that always target genuine resisters.

And yes, a few people who were fooled by the organizers were arrested. Look, I know how this works. because those SPLC-paid informants tried repeatedly get me to come and speak at Unite the Right. I wasn’t interested because I’m neither a public speaker nor a political activist, but I had already smelled a rat in Richard Spencer by that time.

No organic group is going to be allowed to grow in Clown World’s Union of Satanic Affiliations. There are a panoply of controlled opposition groups and gatekeepers, while organic individuals and groups are either a) infiltrated and converged like the Tea Party or b) banished from the platforms that would permit their rise to popularity.

It’s not always going to be this way because Clown World is collapsing. The good news is that the reason these fake groups keep being constructed and offered up as false opposition is because the terrible truth about Clown World is gradually penetrating the mainstream. And I can pretty much guarantee that there is a very good reason the clowns are so desperate to conceal the truth, because it is almost certainly much worse than any of us, including me, are fully capable of imagining.

Remember what Rome did to Carthage and Jerusalem, and what the Conquistadors did to Technochtitlan. That’s what they fear.

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Translation: THE LITTLE DUCHESS

When twelve-year-old Alberte de la Rochefaucon is pulled from her convent boarding school by her fashionable older sister, she tumbles headlong into a world she is entirely unprepared for: the drawing rooms, dinner parties, and dressmakers of Faubourg Saint-Germain society. Her sister Madeleine, the young Marquise de Valroux, means well but lives for pleasure, and her formidable great-aunt the duchess inhabits a crumbling mansion where the clocks seem to have stopped sometime before the Revolution.

Alberte is bright, proud, restless, and bored. She is bored at the convent, bored in society, bored with the professors hired to continue her education. Her companions have nicknamed her “the little duchess” for her haughty ways. But when a journey south to Cannes brings her into the orbit of a dying young soldier and a neglected Anglo-Indian boy, Alberte begins to discover what none of her tutors could teach her: that purpose is not given but chosen, and that the hardest freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself.

First published in Paris by Hachette in 1876, La Petite Duchesse was one of the most beloved novels by Zénaïde Fleuriot, the Breton author whose works shaped a generation of young French readers. Translated from the French by Summer Charrette, this is its first appearance in the English language.

A story of sisterhood, stubbornness, and the slow education of a strong will, The Little Duchess is a lovely story for readers who appreciate the works of Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Charlotte Yonge. The ebook has already been delivered to the subscribers. Now available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

I was wondering how such a bestselling author’s works could have vanished into history, untranslated, when La Petite Duchesse alone had 14 editions. Then I read her biography, and like Perez Galdos, Fleuriot was not only a devout Christian, but a Catholic and a Royalist. So I think we’re beginning to see a pattern here with regards to socialist academics on both sides of the linguistic divide having attempted to bury a significant percentage of some of the best and most popular works of the Christian nations.

But, as we know, Jesus Christ never stays buried.

Zénaïde-Marie-Anne Fleuriot (28 October 1829 – 19 December 1890), was a French novelist. She wrote eighty three novels, all aimed at young women. She was born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany to a devoutly Catholic and Royalist family, faithful to the Bourbons. Her parents had sixteen children of which only five survived. Her father, Jean-Marie, having lost his mother as a child, was brought up by his uncle, a priest, who was shot by the Revolutionaries in Brest in 1794 for refusing to sign the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Her background gave her a deep respect for traditional Christian and family values, which infused her work. This helped to make her work very popular among the Catholic middle class.

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