Author: VD

Building a new culture

Conservatives love to talk about the need to build an alternative culture.

The culture leans sharply left, and in our current, highly-polarized political climate that means conservatives in the arts tend to be treated as outsiders at best and pariahs at worst. Listen to the personal experiences of conservatives in Hollywood, for example, whether “above the line” (the stars, producers and directors) or below it (the rest of the crew), and you will understand why most keep their politics in the closet to avoid bad vibes, ostracism, and/or outright hostility. The left, of course, dismisses complaints of blacklisting and bias as paranoid whining, but they are very real indeed.

The publishing world is not exempt from this state of affairs. When conservative author Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left appeared at Number seven on The New York Times bestseller list, despite actually having outsold all fourteen of its competitors on the list, D’Souza called out the Times on Twitter: “In what alternative universe do Jeff Flake’s 7,383 book sales for this week (BookScan data) top mine at 11,651? Thanks @nytimes fake list!”

This was far from the first time conservative authors had called foul about their books’ rankings on the Times’ all-important bestseller list. Cortney O’Brien at Townhall pointed to another noteworthy recent example: Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer, by co-author couple Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney. A horrifying exposé of the dark(er) side of the abortion industry, the top-selling Amazon release was perceived by some as an attack on the left’s sacred cow of abortion rights. The New York Times did have the book at Number 13 on its “Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction” list, but did not place Gosnell at its deserved Number four slot among bestselling nonfiction titles.

“It’s not only an insult to the people who have bought this book,” McElhinney said “but an insult to the readers of the New York Times who buy the newspaper and think they are getting the truth about book sales across America but instead get false facts disguised as a neutral list.”

A Times spokesman insisted that the “political views of authors have no bearing on our rankings, and the notion that we would manipulate the lists to exclude books for political reasons is simply ludicrous.”

Ludicrous? The Times says its list is based on “surveys” of “a wide range of retailers who provide us with specific and confidential context of their sales each week. These standards are applied consistently, across the board in order to provide Times readers our best assessment of what books are the most broadly popular at that time.”

Confidential context? Best assessment? Broadly popular? This sounds suspiciously unscientific and non-transparent, and does not address the evidence of the sales figures themselves.

Guess how many times a conservative media organ has reviewed, or even mentioned, a Castalia House book? Zero.

The conservative media talks a lot about “the culture”, and complain about the Left’s behavior in relation to it, but as is so often the case, they do absolutely nothing proactive about it. Conservative billionnaires don’t invest in culture, because they’re frightened of what they consider to be a “hits-driven business”. They’d rather blow millions on politics and television ads, even though, as Instapundit noted, all the money spent on political ads in the last presidential campaign would have been better spent buying up all the women’s magazines.

Legal Legion update

There have been a number of developments on the defamation front. First, a member of the Legal Legion of Evil has filed the petition in Travis County and the county clerk has approved the filing. Today a hearing will be scheduled, at which we will seek to be provided with the identity of 14 individuals presently identified only by username, and ask to depose a representative of Gab concerning matters related to the identity of said individuals.

According to other members of the Legal Legion who have been reviewing activity at Gab, there have been a considerable number of additional defamatory attacks, directed at me as well as at others, and we will be amending the petition accordingly to add additional examples and usernames until the hearing actually takes place.

Now that we have actually gone through the process, it is evident that Gab’s recommended path of “get a court order” is simply not viable for the average individual who doesn’t have lawyers and paralegals at his immediate disposal. The process is simply too expensive for most people; the court filing alone is over $300.

As one individual has already discovered, it is much easier and more cost-effective to simply contact the Australian registrar, Asia Registry, at abuse@asiaregistry.com. Unfortunately, rather than address the individual’s concerns, news that the abuse on his site was being reported led Andrew Torba to publicly threaten a campaign of harassment of the gentleman concerned.

Andrew TorbaPRO · @a
If our registrar requires us to remove something again we will publish it here and let everyone know that you whined to them because someone hurt your feelings with mean words on the internet.

However, in Australia, defamation is both a civil and a criminal offense, and Asia Registry’s terms of service say a website owner must ensure that the website, “is not comprised or is not used for any unlawful purpose or activity.”

So, if you have reason to believe you have been defamed on Gab, you can send me the link to the defamatory Gab post along with your real name and the username of the offender with the subject LL-ASIA. I will pass your email along to a member of the Legal Legion of Evil, who will review it and decide if it rises to the level of defamation, defamation per se, or criminal defamation according to Australian standards. If, in his opinion, it does, you will then be provided with an appropriate template that can be sent to the woman responsible for handling abuse-related complaints along with her email address.

Again, I will point out that it is not my intent to harm Gab. We are not requesting any damages from Gab and we do not anticipate any further legal action against them once we obtain the requested information about the parties responsible. As a number of VFM and Dread Ilk have noted, I am handling Gab with kid gloves, in part because they are young and inexperienced and they do not appear be receiving appropriate legal counsel. But I have made it very, very clear that the defamatory attacks on me are going to be removed, one way or another, and as always, I am not bluffing.

At this point, it should be clear to everyone that the Legal Legion of Evil is real. As it happens, the LLoE has over 200 years of collective experience practicing the law in various states in a surprisingly wide range of specialties. Including defamation.

I understand that not everyone is happy with my actions, and I understand that a few of my supporters are extremely unhappy with them. To them, I would merely point out that this is a problem Gab was always going to face. I first warned Andrew of Gab’s need for some form of moderation back in early November 2016. And contra the opinions of the free speech purists, extortion, treason, fraud, defamation, and death threats are not free speech, as the court process should suffice to make abundantly clear.

I am not at all unfamiliar with the way in which some individuals simply refuse to take the easy and obvious way out. I once spent three years to resolve a situation that could have been resolved, at vastly less expense, by sending me a simple one-paragraph letter. I hope it won’t take three years to resolve this one, but if it does, that possibility doesn’t bother me at all. I’ve been through it before, and if I have to, I will go through it again.

Mailvox: The Origins of the Alt-Retard

A Generation X reader sent me this analysis of the Fake Right Clown Posse, which somehow manages to be both sympathetic of the plight being faced by the young men of today and contemptuous of what some of them have become in response. I think he is largely correct, and explains why their attempts to defend their race and their nations so often go awry.

We have no choice but to help them. The challenge is that the only answer to ignorance is information, and as we know, as we have witnessed, there are some who cannot be instructed by information.

The Origins of the AltRetard

I’ve been pondering the origins of the AltRetard. Who are they, and why are they? They are, by and large, young white men, probably middle to lower class, who are the products of the environment and culture that they have been raised in. They know that this environment and culture is broken, is pozzed, and they are seeking an alternative. They are seeking health and well-being in a sick world, and this is good. But they haven’t found it yet.

I have some sympathy for these young men. Their condition is largely not their fault. As a GenXer, my own working class childhood situation was far from ideal, and things have only gotten worse for this demographic since then. We all stumble around in search of knowledge and wisdom that we don’t have, because they have not been passed down to us as they should have been.

“Tradition” means “that which is passed down.” The Western tradition – Christianity and Greco-Roman philosophy – teaches us how to be in the world, teaches us what we are and what to do with what we are. But this tradition has been systematically removed from the education system for the vast majority of Americans and Europeans. Only those whose parents have the foresight and the money to send their children to private schools that still teach the Classics and the Bible have learned much about it. And those men, because they have financial privilege, have mostly sold out for the sake of their own comfort. They have not handed down the tradition.

When my boomer parents and GI grandparents were young, they had to take Latin in high school. They had prayer in school. They learned about the history of Western civilization, its principles, its heroes, its triumphs and tragedies. The average public high school graduate from 1960 knew more about Western civilization than most graduate students today.

As for me and my GenX classmates, not so much. We had the beginning of today’s anti-Western education, not quite as bad as now, but bad enough. As for Millennials and Gen Z (or whatever they’re called), what have they got? Those that are “woke” are only awakened to just how bad things have gotten. But because they have been cut off from their native tradition, they do not have the intellectual tools with which to think things through and find solutions. They are not grounded in anything real.

So they become extremists. Partly because the problems are extreme, and the times themselves are extreme, but also because they lack the wisdom, gleaned from a knowledge of history, that extremes seldom produce good results. Extreme reactions to extreme problems often just become a new problem.

The German National Socialists of the 1930s could only have emerged from the Weimar era – in other words, from a thoroughly pozzed and degenerate environment. That’s why they had so much degeneracy within their ranks, in spite of their public opposition to much of it. The Nazis were not a traditionalist movement, and they were not a Western movement. They were not pro-European, but were German chauvinists, at the expense of many other European ethnic groups. They were not pro-Christian, but were either outright pagans or embraced heretical versions of Christianity such as Alfred Rosenberg’s gnostic-Catharist ideas. Lastly, they were not truly based upon the Greco-Roman tradition and Western history, but upon a dubious, revisionist version of European history that was cooked up by the Ahnenerbe in order to be used as propaganda, a kind of Tacitus-inspired We Wuz Kangz pseudohistory which even Hitler found embarrassing, and wished that Himmler would knock it off already.

You can see the continuation of this sort of non-thinking in much of today’s Alt-Reich, which embraces all kinds of strange conspiracy theories, up to and including the Flat Earth theory of Eric Dubay.

Similarly, the extreme elements within the Alt Right, who openly espouse Nazism and Fascism and any other extremism that they think will get a rise out of people, are the result of a thoroughly pozzed and decadent society not unlike Weimar (hence the oft-used Weimerica theme). They are a reaction to it – an understandable reaction, but not a healthy one. Since they have no moral or philosophical grounding (which, again, is not their fault) the only thing they can think to do is the opposite of whatever the culture is doing. So the solution to anti-fascism is necessarily Fascism. The solution to Jewish influence and power is blanket anti-Semitism. The solution to anti-white racism is white chauvinism. The solution to feminism is “white sharia” misogyny. And since Nazism is held by the dominant culture to be the supreme evil, it must, ipso facto, be the supreme good.

But it isn’t. It wasn’t the supreme evil either, and to that extent it’s the (((media’s))) fault for creating such a powerful taboo in the first place. But while it may feel good for hopeless young men to meme out images of Schutzstaffel Pepes gassing hooknose rabbis, at the end of the day it’s just reactionary child’s play that produces nothing and leads to nothing – nothing for the young men themselves, and nothing for the Western civilization which needs to be not only defended, but first rediscovered by generations of miseducated young men that have been denied their birthright and their spiritual home.

There Will Be War Vol. II

An excerpt from my favorite story in my favorite TWBW volume, Vol. II, which is free today. Those who have read my story in Forbidden Thoughts, “The Amazon Gambit”, will no doubt recognize from whence the inspiration came. But don’t worry about spoilers no matter which you read first. Although the setups are similar, the plot twists are entirely different.

“Cincinnatus” is an excellent mil-SF short story written by one of my early writing heroes, Joel Rosenburg. As it happens, my first attempt at a novel was an imitation of his Sword and Flame books. Spacebunny and I had the good fortune to go shooting with him and his wife one evening, after which we had dinner, and he roared with laughter when, after a few glasses of wine, I shamefacedly admitted as much to him.

The log cabin was drafty, and cold; I moved a bit closer to the open fireplace, and took a deep draught from the stone tankard. It was real Earth coffee, black and rich.

The old man chuckled, as though over some private joke.

“What the hell is so funny?” I didn’t bother to keep the irritation out of my voice. I’d travelled for over seven hundred hours to reach Thellonee and find Shimon Bar-El; and every time I’d try to bring up the reason I’d come from Metzada, the old bastard would just chuckle and change the subject, as though to tell me that we’d discuss business at his pleasure, not mine.

“You are what is so funny. Tetsuki. Nephew.” Bar-El sat back in his chair, shaking his head. He set his mug down, and rubbed at his eyes with arthritis-swollen knuckles. It’s kind of strange, that: I bear the first name of one of our Nipponese ancestors—Tetsuo Nakamura, my g’g’g’g’g’grandfather—but he has the epicanthic folds. Me, I look like a sabra.

“And why am I so funny? Uncle?” You traitor. There isn’t a nastier word in the language than that. Metzada is dependent on credits earned offworld by the Metzadan Mercenary Corps, the MMC, and that depends on our reputation. There hadn’t been any proof that Bar-El had taken a payoff on Oroga; if there had, he would have been hanged, not cashiered and exiled.

Although, the argument could be made that hanging would have been kinder—but, never mind that, the suspicion alone had been enough to strip him of rank and citizenship.

I would have given a lot if we didn’t need him now.


“Well,” he said, setting his mug down and rubbing at the knuckles of his right hand with the probably just-as-arthritic fingers of his left, “you’ve been here all day; and you haven’t asked me if I really did take that payoff.” He cocked his head to one side, his eyes going vague. “I can remember when that was of some importance to you, Inspector General.” The accent on Inspector was a dig. Unlike Bar-El, I’ve always been a staff officer; the only way I could get my stars was through the IG rank— there simply aren’t any other generals in the MMC that don’t command fighting forces.

“I… don’t really care. Not anymore.” I had trouble getting the next words out. “Because we’ve come up with a way for you to earn your way back home.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I doubt that. You’ve never understood me, Tetsuo Hanavi—but I can read you. Like a book. There’s a contract that’s come up, right?”

“Yes, and—

“Shut up while I’m speaking. I want to show you how well I know you—it’s a low-tech world, correct?”

I shrugged. “That’s your specialty, isn’t it?”

He smiled. “And why do I think I’m so smart? Let me tell you more about the contract. It’s high pay, and tough, and it looks like there’s no way to do whatever the locals are paying the MMC to do.”

I nodded. “Right. And we’re short of low-tech specializing general officers. Gevat is off on Schriftalt; Kinter and Cohen are bogged down on Oroga; and my brother’s still home, recovering from the Rand Campaign. So—”

Concern creased his face. “Ari’s hurt?”

“Not too badly. He took a Jecty arrow in the liver. It’s taking a while to regenerate, but he’ll make it.”
He nodded. “Good. He’s a good man. Too good to be wasted on quelling the peon revolts.” Bar-El snorted. “Did you know that Rand was settled by a bunch of idiots who wanted to get away from any kind of government?”

I didn’t, actually. I’d just assumed that the feudocracy there had always been there. Ancient history bores me. “No—but we’re getting off the subject.” I spread my hands. “The point is, that you’re the only one who’s ever generated a low-tech campaign who’s available.”

He pulled a tabstick out of a pocket, and puffed it to life. “If I’m available. What’s in it for me?”

I tapped at my chest pocket. “I’ve got a Writ of Citizenship here. If you can salvage the situation, you can go home.” I waved my hand around the room. “Unless you prefer this… squalor.”

He sat silently for a moment, puffing at his tabstick. “You’ve got my commission in another pocket?”

“A temporary one, yes.” I shook my head. “I’m not offering to have you permanently reinstated, traitor.”

Shimon Bar-El smiled. “Good. At least you’re being honest. Who’s the employer?”

“The lowlanders, on—”

“Indess. So, Rivka manipulated them into asking for me.”

“What do you mean?” He was absolutely right, of course, but there was no way that he should have known that. The Primier had kept the negotiations secret; outside of the lowlanders’ representatives, I am the only one who knew how Rivka Effron had suckered them into a payment under-all-contingencies contract, with Bar-El in command.

He shrugged. “I know how her mind works, too. If anyone else were to fail—regardless of what the contract says—it’d be bad for Metzada’s reputation. But, if they’d asked for Bar-El the Traitor, insisted on him—at least, that’s the way the transcript would read—it’d be on their own heads. Right?”

He was exactly right. “Of course not.” But my orders were specific; I wasn’t to admit anything of the sort. Shimon Bar-El was a sneaky bastard—it was entirely possible that our conversation was being taped, despite the poverty of the surroundings.

Bar-El drained the last of his coffee. “I’ll believe what my own mind tells me, not words from a staff officer.” He said that like a curse. “Of course, it’s out of the question. I’m sorry that you had to come such a long way, but I’m happy here. No intention of leaving; not to be the sacrificial lamb.” He set his tankard down. “I don’t bleat any too well.”

“You arrogant bastard.” I stood. “Think you’re unique, that I’ll offer you a permanent commission if you’ll take this one on.” I picked up my bag. “Well, we’re going to take this contract, anyway. The offer’s just too good to pass up—I’ll handle it myself, if I have to.”

He spat. “Don’t be silly. You don’t have the experience. A lot of soldiers would die, just because—”

“Shut your mouth, traitor. You’re wrong. Maybe I don’t have any field experience, but nobody does, not against cavalry. And—”

“Cavalry? As in horses?”

“No, cavalry as in giant mice—of course it’s horses.”

He chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t see the problem— you just set up your pikemen, let them impale their critters against your line. Take a bit of discipline, even for Metzadans, to hold the line, but—”

I sneered. “That’s fine for a meeting engagement, where they have to come to you—but how about a siege? All they have to do is use their cavalry to harass our flanks, and we can’t ever get the towers up. And we’ve got to use towers: there’s no deposits of sulfur available, so there’s no way we can make gunpowder. Not with what the Thousand Worlds will let us bring in. Low-tech world, remember?”

“You’ve got the tech reports in your bag?”

“Of course I—”

“Let me see them.” He held out a hand. “We’re both going to have to study them.”

“Both?” I didn’t understand. Then again, I’ve never understood my uncle.

“Both.” He smiled, not pleasantly. “Me, ’cause I’m taking this. And you, because you get to be my exec.” As I handed him my bag, he took the blue tech report folder out, and started spreading papers around on the floor. “We’re going to get you some field experience, we are.” He studied the sheets silently for a few moments. “I’ll want all the equipment special-ordered, make sure it gets through inspection. You got that, Colonel?”

“Colonel?”

“You just got demoted, nephew. I don’t like to see stars on anybody’s shoulders but mine.” He picked up a topographical map. “Cavalry, eh?

Announcing VOXIVERSITY

To support Voxiversity, please visit the Voxiversity project at the new crowdfunding site, Freestartr, which combines the functionality of Kickstarter, Patreon, and Indiegogo, but without the SJW thought-policing. There are six levels of support, each of which comes with different rewards.

  • Subscriber
  • Supporter
  • Advocate
  • Champion
  • Brainstorm
  • Foundation

Voxiversity is a series of educational video lectures by bestselling political philosopher Vox Day.

Castalia House reaches tens of thousands of people through the medium of books. The ideas first presented in books such as SJWs Always Lie, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook, and The Irrational Atheist have penetrated even those institutions most converged by social justice, such as academia and the media.. But Castalia’s reach is limited to an audience of people who enjoy reading books.

Video offers the ability to reach millions of people in a very short period of time. But the distribution of video is entirely different than book-selling, as most people who watch videos expect to do so for free. Video production is also more expensive, and the combination of those two factors is why it is necessary to crowdfund the production of videos containing the same kind of viral information that one so often encounters in Castalia’s non-fiction books.

The videos will be 20-minutes long, and subjects that require more detailed analysis will be addressed by multi-video series. The videos will also be released as podcasts for those who prefer audio to video.

Voxiversity will change the way people think.

UPDATE: Thanks very much for the staunch support. Our objective is to exceed expectations. In the meantime, I think this was the most amusing reaction.

I suspect that your success will be proportional to your ability to restrain yourself from telling people how much more intelligent you are then them when you fail to explain something clearly. Having said that…I wish you the best of luck ? 

Magic Dirt Fail in LA

Carolla: Those people have done their best to fuck up everything they can. School system is fucking unusable. Barbed wire around every freeway side. Gangs tagging fucking Nature, rocks and trees. It’s a traffic nightmare. Basically, the stuff that God did, several million years ago? That’s the good part of LA. Everyone else is getting their head kicked in at Dodger Stadium. But as far as the city planners, and the mayor and all that, you guys have fucked up everything you’ve touched. Plate tectonics gets an A+ from two-whatever Zooic era, when everything shifted, and turned, and we thawed. I’ve lived here my whole life and it’s now shit. 

Rogan: I’ve only lived here since 1994, but it’s been a big difference. 

Carolla: It’s essentially turning into Mexico, which is a shit place. No one wants to talk about this, but Mexico is a shitty place to live.

Rogan: It’s the worst. It’s one of the worst places in the world.

Carolla: So the deal is, we can absorb, as a society, X amount of folks from Mexico a year before we turn into Mexico too. If we turn into Mexico, then we’re a shit joint too.

Magic Dirt does not work. The real Alt Right, the nationalist True Right, is inevitable.

The failure of click-marketing

The CEO of Restoration Hardware reaches the same conclusion as the CEO of Proctor & Gamble: online advertising accomplishes nothing. More at Zerohedge.

I’ll share a little anecdote with you on this point.

We had our marketing meeting in the company several years ago and the online marketing team was pitching to double their budget, right, and at the time, say, look, nobody in the company is doubling their budget. But tell me why you believe that’s the right thing to do. And they said, well, look, our customer acquisition cost and our ad cost is the lowest in the company. And I said, well, tell me about the data, show me how. And they said, well, people who click through the words that we buy on Google, the ad cost was lowest. And I said, how do you know that they’re clicking on the word and going to the website because of the word you bought versus they saw a store or they received a source book? They said, oh, we know.

I said, well, how many words do you buy? They said 3,200. 3,200 words. I said, well, what are the top words? How are they ranked, the ranking of the words? Oh, we don’t have that, right. And I was getting the look at like, oh, Gary is kind of one these old brick-and-mortar guys. He just doesn’t get it.

And I said, well, what are the top 10 words? And they didn’t have the information. I said, why don’t we cancel the meeting and come back next week when you have the data? I’m sure that Google sales representatives who are taking you to the expensive lunches and selling you the 3,200 words have that data. So why don’t we get the data and then let, review the data?

And they came back the next week and we sat in a meeting and all of a sudden, I can tell you there’s a little change in the faces. They had to wear it kind of down. Everybody kind of came in. I said, so what did we find out?

And they said, well, we’ve found out that 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Immediately the next day, we cancelled all the words, including our own name. By the way, we are paying for the little shaded box above our words and said, oh no, we have to hang on to that because Pottery Barn might squat on top of us. I said, excuse me? I said, if someone goes to a mall or a shopping center and they’re going to Restoration Hardware and there’s a Pottery Bam there, they’re already squatting, okay? It doesn’t mean they’re going to go into their store. If somebody wanted to buy a diamond from Tiffany and just because Zale’s is sitting on top of them in a shaded box doesn’t mean they’re going to go to Zale’s and buy a diamond.

I mean, I can’t believe how many companies buy their own name and they’re paying Google millions of dollars a year for their own name, like maybe if this is webcast, right, a lot of people are going to go, holy crap. They’re going to look at their investments. They’d go, maybe we don’t need to buy our own name.

I’ve seen absolutely ZERO benefit to buying Google ads or Facebook ads myself. I’ve never bothered with Twitter ads or any other social media advertising. I’ve seen very, very moderate success buying Amazon ads. What has been far more successful is a) the Castalia House email lists, b) blogging about and excerpting books, c) the book carousels on the sidebar, and d) Tweeting about new books.

Of course, I’ve always been skeptical about digital advertising. Except for the way it can amplify word of mouth, it’s always struck me as a dubious proposition. You’ll notice that I’ve never been very prone to permitting anyone else to advertise here either, for just that reason.

Jerry Pournelle Week II

Jerry Pournelle Week continues with Glenn Reynolds’s tribute to Jerry Pournelle.

Jerry Pournelle died on Friday, peacefully in his sleep. With his death, America lost an important figure… But Pournelle didn’t just write fiction. His 1970 book with Stefan Possony, The Strategy of Technology, outlined a strategy for winning the Cold War (with among other things, an emphasis on strategic missile defense) that was largely followed, and successfully, by the Reagan administration. He was a driving force behind the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy in the 1980s that helped lay the groundwork for today’s booming civilian space launch industry. And, for me, his wide-ranging columns in Galaxy Magazine, back when it was edited by star editor James Baen, were particularly influential.

I was a kid in the 1970s, which was not a great era to be a kid. We had Vietnam and Watergate, the Apollo space program quit abruptly, oil prices skyrocketed and so did inflation. Even a hamburger was expensive.

And while that was going on, the voices in the media were all preaching gloom and doom. Stanford professor Paul R. Ehrlich, in his book The Population Bomb, was predicting food riots in America due to overpopulation. A group called The Club of Rome published a report titled The Limits to Growth that suggested it was all over for Western technological civilization. Bookstore displays were filled with books like The Late Great Planet Earth that announced the end times. And if that weren’t enough, most people figured we were heading for a global thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. It looked like we were headed for some sort of apocalyptic future in which Charlton Heston would be the only survivor besides a few apes or mutants.

But Jerry Pournelle never bought it. In his Galaxy columns — eventually collected and published in book form, and still in print — he actually did the math. The fact was, he reported, we could not only survive but, in his words, survive with style.

Castalia House is republishing The Strategy of Technology later this year. Also, today and tomorrow, we are giving away my favorite volume in the entire There Will Be War series, namely, Volume II. It is edited by Jerry Pournelle and features 19 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “Superiority” by Arthur C. Clarke, “In the Name of the Father” by Edward P. Hughes, “‘Caster” by Eric Vinicoff, “Cincinnatus” by Joel Rosenberg, “On the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen” by William Wu, and “Proud Legions”, an essay on the Korean War by T.R. Fehrenbach.

These stories are great and many of them remain relevant today. Just last month, Castalia House was contacted by a U.S. military war college and asked for permission to give out copies of There Will Be War Vol. II to the officers in the class, which permission we obviously granted.

That is what real influence looks like. Most of the authors and the editor are gone now, but the beauty of the written word is that it provides the author with a voice even after death.

Real Alt Right

It’s incredibly informative that one of the most devastating accusations that the Fake Right Swastika Wearing Jackasses can imagine is that I stand by my friends and allies. Pop quiz: what can we safely conclude about the socio-sexual rank of people who consider doing so to be, not only a negative, but one so damaging as to be meme-worthy?

Milo stood by me when I made a media misstep that angered people at Breitbart. I stood by Milo when the media attempted to crucify him for his Joe Rogan interview and he lost his book deal with Simon & Schuster. That’s what friends and allies do, even when the other individual is flawed, imperfect, or behaves in a suboptimal manner. And only a fool or a social reject abandons people over mere differences of opinion or the occasional moral failure.

The responses were amusing.

Steve Autism‏@TruthNSausages
They DO know Vox was in the music business right?

Rusticus‏ @rusticusjunius
Wax Trax! Records for crying out loud.

To say nothing of TVT. Anyhow, it has become abundantly clear that we right-wing omni-nationalists are the Real Alternative Right, the True Right. Because the Fake Right Clowns are not of the Right, do not believe in the Right-Left spectrum, and even openly claim that the historical ideological Right is entirely irrelevant today. Which, of course, is precisely what makes them frauds and charlatans when they attempt to market themselves as “right-wing” in order to appeal to young conservatives and libertarians, as well as disenchanted young liberals and leftists.

The Fake Right is every bit as deceitful and false as CNN. And they utilize the same “guilt-by-association” tactics as the mainstream media.

As for me, you can always expect me to stand by my friends, allies, authors, and readers. Even when they make mistakes. Especially when they make mistakes.

Review: Six Expressions of Death

Peter Grant, the author of the Maxwell Saga, reviews Mojo Mori’s Six Expressions of Death. He calls it “an unusual thriller with some intriguing twists.”

I don’t particularly enjoy most thrillers or suspense novels.  I find most of them wanting in one or more aspects, failing to hold my attention.  This one is different.  It’s set in samurai-era Japan, and offers a fascinating insight into that culture in the guise of a murder mystery.  Added to that is an element of the mystical and spiritual, a supernatural twist to the classic whodunnit genre.

An excerpt from Mojo Mori’s debut novel:

A faint sound made the man freeze, his heart racing. Holding his breath, he listened intently. Utter silence prevailed for several moments. Then his ears detected furtive sounds—the soft, irregular noises of a living creature creeping through the grove nearby. The man rose to a crouch, laying his hand on his sword-hilt as he peered into the gloom.

Suddenly, the silhouette of a man glided stealthily between two trees not seven feet from where the traveler crouched! The fog provided a background against which a peasant’s wide straw hat appeared clearly. The fellow also bore a suspiciously long pole in his hands. A second and third, each carrying a similar pole, followed the first. A moment later, the traveler glimpsed the trio moving to his left, creeping methodically through the grove and thrusting the long poles into any place that might conceal a man. Hunters! But of men, not beasts.

The traveler immediately recognized his danger. The long poles were spears, and it was for him the men were almost certainly searching. He did not know if they were agents of his lord’s enemies, attempting to thwart his mission, or merely robbers alerted to potential prey by the innkeeper at the village.

Who they were mattered little at the moment. They would surely kill him if they found him. If he remained in the grove, they were certain to discover him soon. Though he was not unskilled with a sword, the traveler knew he stood little chance against three men at once, particularly men armed with spears.

The man climbed to his feet as quietly as he could, picking up his own straw hat from the forest floor. Easing himself through the trees slowly, and cautiously, the traveler moved away from the three men and in the direction of the road. He could no longer see or hear the hunters. His heart beat violently as he stole among the trunks, keeping one hand outstretched to feel any obstacles hidden in the murk before he stumbled noisily into them. His whole body was tense with the expectation of steel plunging into his flesh from the thrust of an unseen ambusher’s spear.

Soon he reached the far end of the grove. He would have liked to proceed more cautiously, but he knew that lingering even a moment too long might well prove fatal. Once clear of the pines and away from the hunters, speed would prove essential. A clump of small bushes stood between the road and the end of the grove, clinging precariously to a low bank. He clambered down through them carefully, trying not to tangle his legs with the thin branches and snap one loudly. Fortune remained with him, though, as he made his way through them without breaking any, and he was relieved to feel the road’s firm earth under his feet.

The man moved off along the road as swiftly as he dared, his straw sandals making little noise on the damp, hard-packed dirt. Crouching low to make his silhouette less visible, he glanced warily from side to side as he fled. In the pre-dawn light, the road seemed lined with dark, mysterious shapes watching him in brooding silence. He found himself keenly aware of how far away he was from safety, and how close he still was to the men trying to kill him.

A sense of looming menace dogged the man, almost as if he could feel the breath of a pursuer on the back of his neck. The recollection of the innkeeper touching his shoulder as he slept returned to him with blazing clarity.

Is that how they tracked me so easily to the grove? he wondered, as a new fear tingled along his limbs. Did that man put a devil on my back, which rides there even now? If he did, then their witch will know which way I fled!

He had no choice. Better to deal with it now than after daybreak, when he could be seen for miles along the road. The traveler halted and reached deep into his garments. After a moment, his questing fingers found the small bag where he kept sacred salt from the shrine at Shiogama, which he had kept for just such a moment. After whispering a desperate prayer to Shiotsutsuno-oji-no-kami, he withdrew a large pinch of the blessed salt and threw it over his back. Immediately, he felt lighter, and freer, as the sensation of clinging menace left him.

Looking east, he saw that the line of pale light along the horizon’s edge was growing. Despite the fog’s uncertain protection, he knew he needed to put more distance between himself and the pine grove where danger had come stealing upon him on padded feet.

Once he had gone two hundred paces from the grove, the traveler stood more upright and picked up speed with longer, faster strides. He was still stiff from his night’s sleep, but he was refreshed too, and he could feel that he had the strength to run until noon, if need be.

As he ran at a relaxed, ground-eating pace, he listened for the sound of heavy feet running up behind him, holding himself ready to turn and fight for his life. But he heard no sounds, and when he occasionally looked back, he saw no human forms moving amid the gradually fading fog. He went on for half an hour before halting for a moment at the top of a slope leading down to a footbridge across a stony mountain stream. It was morning now, and the sun had fully risen, but silence lay over the lank, motionless grasses almost as thickly as the mist hovering over the water.

The man drew in a deep breath, released it slowly, then walked quickly down the slope towards the stream. Despite the meal the night before, the exertion had stirred his appetite and he wished he had bought food for breakfast at the village.

The traveler walked quickly through the fog, his hand poised close to the hilt of his sword. His ears detected no sounds beyond his heart’s swift drumming and a faint whisper of air breathing through the roadside grass, despite his urgent listening. The traveler’s eyes stabbed right and left as he walked, trying to pierce the solemn white vapor hanging sluggishly half a pace above the ground.

The man now felt grateful for the straw sandals he wore. He welcomed their presence even though they had become sodden from the wet road, with water soaking through to chill the soles of his feet. Normally he would have preferred the cleanliness of a pair of geta, that would lift his feet comfortably above the mud. But with peril skulking at his heels this morning, the filthy, water-logged sandals offered him what he now craved more than anything—silence.

The traveler descended a slope towards a stony creek, noting the wooden footbridge crossing the swift mountain stream, whose dark waters gurgled and splashed steadily in the deep pre-dawn hush. He glanced up at the facing hillside, his eyes questing for signs of danger among the pines that dotted it.

Well, perhaps they were only brigands after all, the man thought as he crossed the wooden footbridge and began to climb the facing slope. He looked back and saw there was still no sign of his pursuers.

The fog swirled for a moment as a soft breath of morning breeze rolled down from the green heights above. The white curtain parted, almost as if by human hands. The traveler looked out over the grassy slope falling away to the left, down to the curve of the stream he crossed moments before. Beyond it, a second, thickly-forested slope mounted towards the unseen sky. It seemed to him that the hillside next to him lay empty except for a few paltry shreds of mist that refused to dissipate.

The traveler took a few steps, then, feeling a sudden prickling along his neck, looked to his left again with a sinking feeling in his heart. The slope was no longer empty! Three men now stood on the slope ahead of him, perhaps fifty paces distant. All three were staring in his direction, their eyes dark pits under the wide brims of their straw hats.

Spider legs of horror stalked up and down the traveler’s spine. He knew of shinobi, the assassins who knew the occult secrets of the ghost world. Some said they could track their prey swiftly and surely with the aid of spirits, and bargained with terrible creatures from beyond the grave for even stranger powers. Were these hunters who had made him their quarry such men?