Author: VD

The Book of the Week


Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West and What Can Be Done About It, by Martin van Creveld, is the Book of the Week. Martin is always a must-read for anyone interested in military history or strategy, whether he is published by Castalia or, as in this case, not.

We’ll have a pair of new books out from him in the near future, but in the meantime, this book about the decline of Western military power should tide van Creveld fans over nicely.

The “West,” a term which from this point on will refer to the countries of Western Europe and North America while excluding Russia and Japan, reached the peak of its power just before 1914. Later, owing partly to the casualties sustained in World War I and partly to a loss of self-confidence, it found that its rule over subject peoples became harder and harder to sustain. During the interwar period several colonial countries in the Middle East, including Egypt, Iraq and Jordan, gained at least nominal independence. Translating that into real independence took longer; but by the second half of the 1950s that, too, had been achieved.


Here we are concerned with the strategic aspect of the matter, not the moral one. Still staying in the interwar period, struggles such as the one against the Rif of Morocco, when some 250,000 well-equipped, highly-trained, French and Spanish troops took several years to defeat a loose coalition of mostly barefoot, mostly illiterate, Moroccan tribesmen, pointed to the direction in which things were moving. By 1939 many colonial peoples around the world were preparing to challenge their masters. Although, in the event, it took World War II, in which those masters tore each other to pieces, to set the stage for the conflagrations that followed.


Since then almost the only time Western countries gained a clear military victory over their non-Western opponents was during the First Gulf War. In 1991 NATO, as the most powerful military alliance in history, had just emerged triumphant from the forty-five year struggle known as the Cold War. But its members had not yet begun to dismantle their armed forces as the European ones in particular were to do later on. As a result, they were free as never before or since to send those forces to any spot they wanted to wage any war they wanted against any opponent they wanted. Though few people realized it at the time, in retrospect to challenge NATO, reinforced by several other countries, with a conventional army, as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein did, represented the height of folly. Even so the US and its allies did not complete the job. With good reason, as it later turned out.


This episode apart, practically every time the West, or some country that was part of it, fought the rest it was defeated. Conversely the wars in question, and the people who waged them and fought in them, succeeded in liberating—whatever that might mean—entire continents with populations numbering in the hundreds of millions.

Smack my atheist up

In which Stickwick and I tag-team a pair of godless self-appointed wonderboys. First up, DookerT:

On people like Sam Harris. I don’t know how anyone can really debunk anything he says, you can just make your own subjective moral arguments of why you think he’s wrong and you’re right. As far as the final word goes, it’s in the eye of the beholder. The Christian will generally see people like Vox as being correct and an atheist might generally agree with Harris . There simply are no certainties in this realm of debate, at least in my opinion.

It’s quite easy to debunk much of what he says, as it happens. Sam Harris makes many arguments that are based on objective assertions. They can be, and have been, conclusively debunked by the simple mechanic of showing those assertions to be factually false. There is nothing subjective about it. A very good example can be found in the appendix of On the Existence of Gods.

The ironically named Mr Rational picked the wrong blog to try to dazzle with pseudo-intellectual posturing when he responded to a statement about the Big Bang theory:

You do realize that the current model of cosmology is a creationist theory, do you not?

That statement utterly discredits you.  Creationists may have tried to claim Big Bang/Inflation theory as their own, but it is utterly without theistic implications.  If you are listening to people who claim it does, you are listening to liars.  The left has its own liars telling lies which support its dogmas; if you commit the same errors you are no better than the left.

I am moderately familiar with the theory of inflation (far more than most readers here, I’m certain).  The fluctuations in the temperature of the Cosmic Background Radiation associated with quantum density variations frozen in the cosmic fireball as space expanded too fast for them to reach equilibrium again is predicted by WHAT holy book in WHAT passage, precisely?  If it is fair for Vox to demand a specific list of mutations to turn organism X into organism Y, it is eminently fair for me to demand this specificity in theological claims and pronounce the theology worthless if it fails.

I responded to this myself, by pointing out that a) the Big Bang Theory and expansion were conceived by a Belgian priest, and b) the Big Bang Theory is a necessary, though not sufficient requirement for the Bible to be true, but Stickwick’s response is better. She is, by the way, a very well-regarded astrophysicist with a bibliography of published scientific papers on esoteric cosmological matters that is much longer than my list of publications:

I can’t decide if this is the stupidest thing ever said here or the funniest. Others have done a sufficient job explaining to you why this is wrong, but I’ll add one thing. A few years ago, I was present as a Nobel laureate and one of the greatest living physicists explained to a group of non-scientists that the multiverse hypothesis was developed at least in part because of the theistic implications of the big bang.

You’re doing something very annoying, which is attempting to dazzle people with the details of science instead of addressing the heart of the matter. Unless you’re an expert, this is a bad idea, because not everyone is going to be bowled over by your ability to parrot this information. I’m certainly not, because you’ve failed to realize that inflation is not yet a theory with any predictive power. The recent BICEP2 results that supposedly confirmed it were disproven. Inflation is a nice idea, and one that I think is probably correct, but let’s be honest — so far there is no conclusive evidence supporting it.

In any case, it’s absurd to say that the theistic implications of a theory hinge on whether a holy book mentions one particular unproven detail of the theory. It’s like the idiot biologist I talked to who said Genesis was bogus, because out of the dozens of scientifically-testable statements made by Genesis 1, she could find no mention of bacteria. The theological implications of a theory do not hinge on whether it contains every possible detail of the theories of the natural development of the universe, but on whether it says anything that confirms or denies a central tenet of a religion.

As Vox already explained to you, the big bang confirms the first three words of the Bible. The Bible begins with Genesis 1, because, among other things, it establishes God as the sovereign creator of all things. Without this, the Abrahamic religions are meaningless. If the universe is eternal, that’s obviously a big problem for Christianity. Scientists in the 1950s and 1960s understood this very well, which is (partly) why there was so much initial resistance to the big bang and why physicists continue to try to find loopholes in the theory that imply the universe is de facto eternal.

Now, before any atheist gets his panties in a bunch, I hasten to add that I know perfectly well that neither DookerT nor Mr Rational speak for all atheists nor are representative of the best that they have to offer. There are atheists I like, respect, and even admire.

But I think it would be wise for the average Internet atheist to understand that not only are there Christians who are better-educated and more intelligent than they are, but that there are actually more highly intelligent Christians than there are highly intelligent atheists. According to the GSS, in the United States, there are 11.4x more +2SD theists who either know God exists or believe God exists despite having the occasional doubt than there are +2SD atheists who don’t believe God exists.

And if you don’t understand why that is, you’re really not equipped to even enter the lists here.

This would be why

From Wikipedia Talk: Vox Day

In what sense is Vox Day a philosopher? The article only lists some half-baked (and eminently controversial) positions on race. It does not appear that he has been published in any academic journals or contributed anything to the philosophical discourse.
 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.232.78.130 (talk) 21:07, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Concur; removed. The “philosophical views” section was a political views section, so I’ve also renamed that accordingly
– David Gerard (talk) 21:44, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Meh. I think it could be included due to his publication of The Irrational Atheist, which is a philosophical work. Kelly hi! 11:20, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

I believe his work on Social Justice Warriors was the #1 seller in political philosophy for quite some time.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:182:C902:479A:ED91:3D5B:56A6:2252 (talk) 02:01, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Per the section immediately below this one, you can get #1 in an Amazon section with literally three sales. It’s not evidence of any sort of notability
– David Gerard (talk) 18:38, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

It’s not evidence of notability, unless, of course, the category happens to be the one that contains every philosopher from Aristotle to Machiavelli and Rousseau. It’s been a year since SJWAL first became the #1 bestseller in Political Philosophy. And do you know what, it still is!

This usefully demonstrates, by the way, why you can never take anything an SJW says at face value. Even when he tells the absolute literal truth, he is often doing so in a deceptive manner to cloak an obvious falsehood. For example, it is absolutely true that one “can get #1 in an Amazon section with literally three sales”, at least as long as that category is Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Movements > Transpersonal, where a bestseller only needs to hit #70,000 on Amazon to reach #1.

On the other hand, to hit #1 in Romance, you need to hit #3 overall. So, Mr. Gerard’s statement is clearly false, as a #1 Amazon category bestseller may, or may not, be evidence of notability. It depends upon the category. So, does the Political Philosophy category suffice to establish notability? One would presume so, particularly if one is attempting to determine whether the author is a philosopher or not.

The SJW will not hesitate to substitute the general for the particular, or the particular for the general, depending upon what he is trying to prove or disprove. It’s a standard trick upon which they rely heavily. Don’t fall for it.

Hillary’s handler

Mike Cernovich asks the crucial question: who is this man and why does he keep closer to Hillary than the Secret Service?

Michael Jackson, Prince, and Elvis would travel with a personal doctor who could administer needed life-saving drugs and attention during a crisis. Remember when you thought famous people like Michael Jackson and Elvis had good medical care? What’s Clinton on?

Hillary appears to travel with her own Michael Jackson/Elvis style doctor. Who is he?

We saw this first “doctor” or handler during Hillary’s recent freeze-up. You can see Hillary’s handler, who at first glance would not be considered the alpha male of the group, reassure Hillary, speak to her using hypnotic language, and then move the Secret Service Agents out of the way. This handler is not an ordinary SS agent.

Reactions to the first video were similar. This is a weird situation, and clearly the handler is not ordinary Secret Service.

Hillary’s handler is part of her inner circle.

Huma Abedin is the only person closer to Hillary than this man who handles her, pictured on the left.

The Ralph Retort has more, noticing that the man carries a device that appears to be a delivery system for an anti-seizure drug called Diazepam.

Twitter detectives found a new picture of Hillary’s handler — a mysterious man with what looks like a medical lapel-pin that follows Clinton everywhere she goes, helps her up stairs, and calms her down when she’s seizing up because of stress.

Knowing what we know now, and looking at the above video, it looks like after Hillary seized up like a deer in headlights, the medic tries to calm her down, but was having problems because the Secret Service members on stage were freaking her out.

The medic must have realized he wasn’t going to calm her down until Secret Service got off stage, so he went up to each of them individually, telling them to go away.

Now, check at 18 seconds. It looks like a different Secret Service guy pulls out a syringe out of his jacket, and was getting ready to inject her if the seizure got worse. It seems like stress can cause Hillary Clinton to have seizures, which is why her medic ordered all the Secret Service to get off the stage, in order to calm her down and end the seizure she was having.

All of this leads to the obvious question: is Hillary literally unfit for office? Because it certainly looks that way.

It’s more convincing if you don’t lie

Some of Donald Trump’s critics don’t realize that being “a man of the people” is about supporting those people’s interests, not lying about your background and pretending to have worked your way up from the bottom:

Wall Street Journal deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens told CNNs’ Fareed Zakaria that Donald Trump’s campaign is “increasingly a vision of the privileges of a white ethnic bloc.” Stephens warned Trump has turned the Republican party into the “white party” and is doubtful the it can reclaim the principle of opportunity and the “right to rise” following a Trump loss.

“It’s basically increasingly a vision of the privileges of a white ethnic bloc who he is speaking to,” Stephens said of the Trump campaign. “If the Republican party essentially becomes the white party, it is going to be the death of it.”

Stephens fought back against the argument that anti-Trump Republicans are elitists living in a bubble.

Stephens said he wished he was born into a rich family entrenched in New York real estate and the privileges that comes along with that. Instead, he said, he “started at the bottom” and any achievements he has made were based on merit.

“This is the standard line of the Trump side of the party, that us who oppose him are just a bunch of elites who live in the Acela corridor in this bubble of unimaginable wealth,” Stephens said to his co-panelist, Trump surrogate Emily Miller. “I wish I had been born into an extremely wealthy New York real estate family and been given multimillion dollar loans to get my start in life. I started at the bottom like so many of us did and to the extent that I achieved anything I think it’s on merit.”

Stephens, however, was born in New York to a chemical company executive and attended boarding school at the Middlesex School in Massachusetts. He later attended the London School of Economics.

Stephens is not only lying about himself, he’s wrong. The only hope the Republicans have of survival is to become the white party, shut down immigration, and start deporting the post-1965 wavers. Due to the combination of demographics and white people opposed to white interests, it’s entirely possible that if Donald Trump does not win, no Republican will ever be president again.

Not all whites favor small government. But look around the world. White Americans are the only people who favor it. That means the Republican Party, with its current ideology, cannot possibly win in any polity that does not consist of predominantly white American voters. It would have to become party more akin to the British Tories or Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, or accept permanent opposition status.

Being a good cuckservative, Stephens probably favors the latter. What could be more satisfying than the certainty of knowing you can remain perfectly principled, secure in the assurance of your noble defeat.

CORRECTION: I stand corrected. Stephens (((Erlich))) is not a cuckservative, he’s just another media Jew who is opposed to a white Republican party because a white Republican party would reliably prioritize American interests over Jewish interests. As I’ve repeatedly predicted, ideology is dead. It’s all identity politics now.

On a tangential note, we’ll know America is no longer the premier global power when the Erlich-Stephens of the world start changing their names to Wang, Li, and Zhang.

The intellectually fearsome atheist

For some reason, Google occasionally emails me comments that people are making about Stefan Molyneux’s videos in which I’ve appeared. This one, by ismelljello, was particularly amusing.

Read the reviews of his book. It honestly compelled me to make a video series where i debunk his tired old arguments. If you’re going to peddle other peoples ideas, at least make sure they haven’t already been trounced.

He made a video series to debunk the tired old arguments of a book he hasn’t read. That’s… an interesting approach.

I have the distinct impression that he has absolutely no idea that The Irrational Atheist cannot possibly contain “tired old arguments” because they are new critiques of the arguments put forth by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Michel Onfray, among others.

It should certainly be interesting to discover how he proves that religion causes war and is worse than child molestation.

This is the danger of intellectual posturing. Sooner or later, you’re going to strike a pose that will catch the attention of those who actually possess the information you’re pretending to have. Never pretend to know what you don’t.

When the Pope is not the Pope

What does that make him? Ann Barnhardt explains that, resignation or no resignation, Benedict XVI is still the Pope, not the Pope Emeritus, which makes the so-called Francis, what, exactly? I’m neither Roman Catholic nor an expert on Vatican law, but there is no question that Mr. Bergolio’s behavior has been worrisome, even to many Protestants and non-Christians:

Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger submitted an invalid resignation in February of ARSH 2013, predicated upon the error that the Papacy could be bifurcated or in any way shared or expanded.  The relevant Canon is Canon 188, which states very plainly and succinctly:

A resignation made out of grave fear that is inflicted unjustly or out of malice, substantial error, or simony is invalid by the law itself.

Last week, one of the most prestigious Vatican journalists, an Italian named Sandro Magister, published a piece called “A ‘Pontificate of Exception’. The Mystery of Pope Benedict Against the Antichrists who are undermining The Church.”  In this piece, the VERY influential and respected Magister quotes Italian Canon Lawyer Guido Ferro Canale at length, who honed-in on a very specific German term used by Pope Benedict’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Ganswein in late May: “Pontificate of Exception”, or “Ausnahmepontifikat”. Canale argues persuasively that Ratzinger may have thrown the Petrine Office into a suspended state of juridical emergency.

Magister also quotes Ganswein at length showing that Ratzinger STILL BELIEVES himself, and RESIGNED WITH THE INTENTION of continuing to BE THE POPE….

Jorge Bergoglio is NOT the pope. Joseph Ratzinger is the pope – Pope Benedict XVI.  “Pope Francis” is a fiction, and thus all of the scandal and damage that this wicked man Jorge Bergoglio is wreaking is, at its core, a function of the fact that we are calling him by a false name. We all know that it is a wicked lie to call Bruce Jenner “Caitlyn”, because to do so is to assent to a lie.  If we can all understand the gravity and scandal of a z-list celebrity and madman calling himself a woman, how much more grave is it to call a man who is NOT the Vicar of Christ, “the Pope?”

What it is high time people start discussing openly is the distinct possibility that Antipope Bergoglio is the False Prophet Forerunner of the Antichrist.  Students of End Times prophecy tell us that The Antichrist will neither be the pope (obviously), nor even APPEAR to be the pope.  BUT, the False Prophet Forerunner of the Antichrist could certainly APPEAR to be “a pope”.  And if one thinks about it, it makes perfect diabolical sense for the False Prophet Forerunner to be precisely that – an antipope.  He would wield the authority of Peter, auto-destruct the institutional Church, and even establish a false, apostate church, a “one world religion” with himself at its head, all in preparation for the coming of The Antichrist, who will be a secular leader that attempts to deify himself.  And if the False Prophet Forerunner were an antipope, the Holy Ghost would be “kept out of the way” with regards to the graces and protections of the Petrine Office.  This is why Bergoglio spews heresy on a near-daily basis.  It isn’t because The Holy Ghost is failing, or has forsaken the Petrine Office or the Church.  It is because Bergoglio is not the pope.  It really is that simple.

What I am now convinced Antipope Bergoglio is doing is attempting to draw “all peoples unto himself” and coalesce his power in preparation for the unveiling of a “one world religion” which will ultimately be the client of a “one world government”.  This has been the stated goal of Freemasonry for these last 300 years, manifested in the United Nations, the European Union, and the regime now occupying Washington D.C., and now we see the open and aggressive drive to dissolve all international borders, both conceptually and physically, with Antipope Bergoglio as its primary propagandist.  This has also been foretold in countless prophecies.

Now, having grown up in the shadow of various Christian eschatologists, I am extremely disinclined towards the paranoia of the Left Behind crowd, who see the Revelation of St. John playing out every time Russia sends a gymnastic squad to a competition, someone shoots someone else in the Middle East, or a Democrat is elected President. I have heard more candidates for “the Antichrist” than I can recall, from Jimmy Carter to an up-and-coming political player in Uzbekistan.

So, I don’t take this sort of Christian fretting about the End Times seriously at all. And yet, it’s impossible to deny that there is some seriously freaky stuff taking place behind closed doors in the Vatican at the same time the globalists are going off the deep end with their one-world policies.

All I can really say is that this is really not the world I envisioned when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed.

Was the US behind the recent coup attempt?

There are more and more rumors floating around that the US was responsible for the recent “Gulenist” coup attempt in Turkey:

The new evidence of the US participation in the coup attempt in Turkey emerged. Greek press published a photo made a day before the coup. It shows the US ambassador in Turkey John Basse together with the Turkish senior officer, who looks like one of the leaders of the coup Col. Ali Yazıcı (former military adviser to President Erdogan). They had  a private meeting in Cengelkoy café the day before the coup.

The image demonstrates the US involvement in the coup and its close ties with a part of Turkish army, before the upheaval. Recall, that physical elimination of Erdogan was one of the goals of the coup attempt.

The next move by the Turkish government will be to ask the expulsion of the American ambassador from the country which will cause further disruption to the US and trigger process of Turkey leaving the NATO.

We’ll see, but if the Turks do kick out the US ambassador, that will serve as virtual confirmation that the US was behind it. Let’s face it, there is no organization more likely to be behind a coup attempt than the US government, which has overthrown more than a few governments in the last two decades alone.

A game to remember

I mentioned previously that I was invited to play in a friendly with the first team for the club to which Ender is now on loan. There was just one little detail that escaped me: while the second team plays in the fifth league, the first team plays in the fourth league. Ruh-roh.

This makes a pretty big difference, you see, as promotion and relegation means that the higher up you go, the better and more athletic the players are. Our first team was third league last year, and despite having some really good players, ended up getting relegated, so the challenge suddenly looked considerably more difficult. Having played against our own first team, then with them, in two scrimmages last fall, I knew exactly how in over our heads we were likely to be in a fourth-league game. While I was a member of a fourth-league team that won promotion to the third league, then spent a year playing in the third league, that was 15 years ago.

Ender and I were both substitutes, of course, but he went in at wing with about 15 minutes left in the first half and the team down 2-1. For the first 5 minutes, he looked like a little kid in the scuola calcio who’d joined three years late and had never played in a real game before; he was so obviously bad that I thought the manager might take him out immediately. He was out of position, reactive, late to the ball, and on the rare occasions he did manage to get to it, he didn’t kick it to anyone, he just blindly kicked it forward.

But he wasn’t the worst player on the field, as that honor went to the goalie, the young man to whom Ender had lost the starting position for the club’s junior team two years ago. I noticed, while taking warm-up shots with the kid, that he actually appeared to have regressed, and once the game started my suspicions were confirmed. While the first goal might have been saved and the second one was a really nice shot about which nothing could have been done, the third goal, on a free kick, was totally inexcusable. It was a high bouncer, one that could have been easily saved by either stepping forward or stepping back, but the goalie froze, and the ball bounced over his head and into the goal untouched. 3-1, and right before halftime too.

Needless to say, the halftime talk was not even remotely complimentary. The second-team goalie was substituted in, and, I suspect, has since been promoted to first-team starter.

In the second half, Ender was able to adjust to the speed of the game and the aggression of the players, got some positional guidance from the assistance coach working the sideline, and his play significantly improved. First the striker scored to make it 3-2 with him effectively serving as a decoy distracting the goalie, then he had a phantom assist on a nice cross that would have leveled the game if the goal hadn’t been called off, rather questionably, for some innocuous shoving in the box. About ten minutes later, he got an assist that counted on a slick 15-meter through ball threaded precisely past three defenders to the striker, who promptly put the ball in the net. 3-3.

He came off not long after that, thoroughly exhausted, but he’d put in a solid 35 minutes and the team was quite happy with his performance. He got applause from the team when he came off the field, and one defender shouted, in heavily accented English, “I love dees Americain!” while thumping him on the back.  After the other team scored to make it 4-3, the coach put me in at striker for the last 15 minutes, and I would have had the equalizer in an empty net if the right wing had simply crossed the ball square to me, but instead he pulled it back to the midfielder arriving at the top of the box, who hit the crossbar. Sfortunato, ma c’e calcio cosi.

I didn’t have any trouble running with the younger guys, mostly because I was fresh and they’re not in full game shape yet, but I wasn’t in sync with them either and was ineffective for the most part. Our midfield lost its shape as they increasingly pushed forward for the equalizer, leading to an easy goal on the counterattack for the other team to close out the game, 5-3. After the game, I was one of those criticized for not leaving the ball to a teammate in front of me who’d called for it – I didn’t bother pointing out that I heard the guy and ignored him because there was a defender right on my back who would have had the ball if I’d let it go.

I was actually rather glad to hear the criticism, misplaced or not, because, as I later explained to Ender, no one ever yells at the old guy who is only being humored because he can’t play. We were both invited to come back and practice with the first team next week, but I shook the manager’s hand and politely declined. It was a lot of fun, and it was a game I won’t ever forget, but the veterans’ season starts soon, and apart from a possible friendly or two with the second team, I’ll do better to stick with the guys my own age. More, or as is almost entirely the case, less.