Author: VD

A Legacy Destroyed

VDH is naturally inclined to lionize the so-called “Greatest Generation”, but he’s too good a historian to be unaware of their greatest failing, which was being unwilling, or unable, to successfully prepare the Boomers for the mantle of preserving and passing on Western civilization:

Governor Ronald Reagan, in his 1967 inaugural address, famously remarked, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Reagan today might have expanded on his theme by declaring that civilization itself is both fragile and can lost by a generation that recklessly spends its inheritance while neither appreciating nor replenishing it—if not ridiculing those who sacrificed so much to provide it. Such is the noxious epitaph of the Baby Boomer generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence and whose Jacobin agendas have nearly wrecked the nation they inherited…

Americans did the impossible in less than a year—from the Normandy beaches to well across the Rhine River. That same generation went on to save South Korea, build an anti-totalitarian world order, defeat Soviet communism, and pass on to the Baby Boomer generation the strongest economy, military, and political system in history, or, to paraphrase the poet Horace, “monuments more lasting than bronze.” Or so we, the inheritors, thought.

And what are the now septuagenarian and octogenarian children of the veterans of Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima, leaving as their own legacy?

The self-infatuated and do-your-own-thing generation that gave us the Sixties and the counterculture has left the country $36 trillion in debt, now borrowing $1 trillion nearly every three months. Worse, there is not just no plan to balance budgets, much less to reduce the debt, but also no intention to stop or even worry about the borrowing of some $10 billion a day.

The U.S. military is almost unrecognizable to that of just a few decades ago. It was humiliated in Kabul. In surrealistic fashion, it abandoned some $50 billion in lethal weaponry to the Taliban—along with our NATO allies, American contractors, and loyal Afghans. And our supreme command labeled that rout a brilliant retreat. Meanwhile, the military suffers from depleted inventory of key munitions while being short 45,000 annual recruits.

The Pentagon is torn by internal dissension over DEI, woke, anti-meritocratic promotions, and a politicized officer class—well, apart from now also being outmanned and outgunned by the Chinese. Many of the world’s key maritime corridors—the Red Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, the Black Sea, and the South China sea—are apparently beyond our navy’s ability to ensure the world safe transit.

For perceived cheap political advantage, the Baby Boomers destroyed the southern border, most recently allowing in nearly 10 million unaudited illegal aliens. With the disappearance of our national sovereignty, so too was lost the once-cherished idea of a melting pot of legal immigrants arriving in America longing to assimilate, to integrate in self-reliant fashion, and to show gratitude for the chance of something far better than what they left.

The nation isn’t “nearly wrecked”. It is defeated and subjugated. The Melting Pot idea, however cherished it might have been, was always a self-serving foreign lie and it never happened anyhow. But the fact that people now recognize that it’s not happening now is a step forward, as is the acknowledgment that the Boomers were so awful that their predecessors are being blamed for not preventing them from destroying their legacy.

If elderly historians are already condemning the Boomers, imagine what the historians of the future will say of them!

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46 Billion

Sometimes, I can almost empathize with the clowns whose job it is to suppress the various Unauthorized creators and prevent us from becoming mainstream figures. It’s got to be frustrating to keep us off all of the mainstream platforms, and yet see our ideas still winning out over all of their ticket-takers and approved, algorithm-pushed, and well-funded pet intellectuals. From Wikipedia:

Sigma male
Sigma male (or simply sigma) (/sɪɡmə məɪl/ ⓘ) is a term in internet slang used most often to describe archetype of a male who is a “lone wolf”. The name is a product of the manosphere message boards in the 2010s, the term has gained widespread prominence within internet culture, and since the early 2020s, has become an internet meme. Commonly regarded as the “rarest” type of male, a sigma male is typically denoted as an archetype of a male who is similar to the alpha male. Unlike an alpha male, sigma males are more introverted and seek to dominate themselves, in other words “self-mastery”. On social media, the term is often used to describe the idolization of masculine characters from films and TV shows, or celebrities.

Alternatively, the term has taken on an ironic and satirical meaning, mocking the concept of the manosphere and the sigma grindset.

In 2023, #sigma gained over 46 billion views on the social media platform TikTok.

I find it more than a little ironic that a) it is deemed a “contentious topic” and b) despite it having its own page, there is no reference to it on the Wikipedia page about me. It appears the Wikipedia admins would prefer to believe that I am known for imaginary things I’ve never said than for genuine things I have.

Anyhow, this is why you should contemplate subscribing to UATV if you haven’t already. It will put you somewhere between ten and 20 years ahead of the curve, depending upon the topic.

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The End of the Petrodollar

In January 2023, Alex Macris wrote a book entitled RUNNING ON EMPTY: How the Imminent Collapse of the Petrodollar System sets the Stage for World War III.

America’s global hegemony is based on the petrodollar system and the Russo-Ukraine war is rapidly bringing that system to an end. The end of the petrodollar will be the end of the world order as we have known it since 1945. Though the U.S. petrodollar system is perhaps the most important economic structure in the world, it is almost never discussed in mainstream sources.

In RUNNING ON EMPTY, author Alexander Macris traces the circumstances by which the petrodollar system came into being; the disastrous effect that the system had on US domestic and foreign affairs, ranging from deindustrialization to foreign wars to widening gaps between the 1% and the rest of us. With that background in place, the book explains the geostrategy of the major powers on Earth today, how those strategies lead inexorably to the Russo-Ukraine War, and how that war will usher in the end of the petrodollar system.

Yesterday, it was reported that Saudi Arabia is not renewing the 50-year petrodollar agreement with the US that expires on June 9, 2024.

What this means is that BRICSIA is increasing the economic pressure on the United States, by further reducing its ability to find buyers for its debt and thereby shift the effects of its debt-generated inflation to the rest of the world. Business Insider describes what it anticipates will result:

A movement away from the dollar—even in slow motion—will mean a rising cost of living for Americans. With fewer foreigners holding on to dollars, the US regime’s current runaway monetary inflation will create more domestic price inflation. In other words, movement away from the dollar will mean the US regime must engage in less monetization of the nation’s debt if it wishes to avoid runaway inflation. It also likely will lead to a need to pay higher interest rates on US government bonds, and that will mean a need for more taxpayer money to service the debt. It will mean that it will become more difficult for the US regime to finance every new war, program, and pet project that Washington can think up.

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Russia 1, Pride 0

No wonder Clown World is raging about its ongoing defeat at the hands of Christian Russia:

The US-based company behind the popular language-learning application Duolingo has agreed to remove content potentially violating Russian “LGBT propaganda” laws, the country’s media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has announced. The watchdog said on Tuesday it had received a letter from the company on the matter, confirming its compliance with the nation’s legislation.

“The Duolingo company sent a response letter to Roskomnadzor, in which it confirmed that it had removed materials promoting non-traditional sexual relationships from its educational application,” the watchdog told TASS in a statement.

Roskomnadzor handed Duolingo a notice in April about its potential violation of Russian legislation and warning it “about a ban on publication of any materials promoting non-traditional sexual relations.” Failure to comply with such demands results in hefty fines for companies operating in Russia, and further non-compliance could potentially lead to their online services being blocked by the watchdog.

That’s how easy it will be to rein in the satanists in the post-WWIII world, now that the falseness of the “free speech” rhetoric has finally been fully revealed. There is no such thing as free speech, the only disputable element is who defines what speech is permissible and what is not.

Free speech is the inversion of a factual observation by Martin Luther, who said that a man’s thoughts are free precisely because they remain unspoken, unheard, and therefore unknown to anyone but God.

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Magical Thinking and the Impotence of Mammon

The self-appointed gods of Clown World are having trouble understanding the difference between power and influence, and that no amount of influence – which is what money always and ultimately amounts to – is an effective substitute for actual material power:

We come back to the question of why anybody believed $60 billion could move the needle for Kiev’s cause in the first place. But this question is, alas, difficult to answer because policymaking in Washington is enshrouded under a thick fog that consists of two dominant components: magical thinking and political imperatives. For those who earnestly believed that $60 billion would turn the tide of the war, it is more of the former; for those aligning themselves with the political winds and pretending to support Ukraine much as a mime pretends to be trapped in a phone booth, it is the latter. In many cases it is both, and it is difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends.

Magical thinking is a recognizable symptom of that particular moment in time when an erstwhile great power is in decline but events have not quite yet forced it to come to grips with that decline. It is also a time of diminished scope for action. In times past, perhaps Washington would have solved a crisis such as Ukraine through crafty diplomacy or orchestrated a formidable proxy war with its industrial might and military expertise. But the US now seems incapable of sophisticated diplomacy and its industrial base has badly atrophied through decades of offshoring and financialization. After mostly fighting insurgencies in recent times, it now has no idea how to fight a peer war. About all that it can muster is aid bills with large dollar figures. If all you have is a hammer, the old saying goes, every problem looks like a nail. If all you have left is a printing press for dollars, then every problem must be solvable by an infusion of money – even if it’s not entirely clear what that money can buy.

But here we have stumbled onto something interesting: a belief in the omnipotence of money. Perhaps not a sincere belief; are there any sincere beliefs in Washington? Let’s think of it more as an ingrained pattern of thought for confronting a wide range of problems. In that sense, it is a framework suspiciously reminiscent of the approach used to combat financial crises. It doesn’t seem like so much of a stretch to imagine the entire Ukraine aid discussion framed as something that has become very familiar in recent years: a financial bailout.

A too-big-to-fail financial institution called Ukraine is teetering on the edge of failure and a bailout is needed. Although the bank is far away from the heart of Wall Street, there are fears of contagion – if this one fails, others will follow and soon no bank anywhere will be safe. The bank’s owners may be crooks, but that is not what is preoccupying policymakers. They are nervous about a spread that has suddenly moved against the bank: it is supposed to trade at 1:1 but has blown out to 1:10 (the ratio of artillery fire by Ukrainian and Russian forces). Shoving a $60-billion bailout into the bank should at least put out the fires and calm markets.

Zoltan Poszar, the legendary former Credit Suisse chief strategist who needs no introduction in finance circles, made a fascinating observation on the topic of the reflexive response of throwing money at a problem. Poszar was speaking narrowly about how a certain group of people approach a certain problem and was not talking about policymaking, much less Ukraine, but his conclusion traces the contours of something deeper.

When the specter of inflation reemerged in 2021, Poszar made the rounds of portfolio managers and, after talking with them, reached an interesting conclusion: nobody knew how to think about inflation. Nearly everyone on Wall Street is too young to remember the last serious bout of inflation, which occurred way back in the 1980s. So, according to Poszar, they all thought of the spike in the inflation charts as just another spread that blew out on their Bloomberg screens that could be solved by throwing balance sheet at it – a “crisis of basis” as he calls it. The formative experiences for today’s denizens of Wall Street, Poszar explains, are the Asian financial crisis of 1998, the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, some spread blowouts since 2015, and the pandemic. In all of these cases, money was pumped in and eventually the dislocations disappeared.

To put this in plain English, Poszar’s clients hadn’t encountered a problem that couldn’t be solved – or at least swept under the rug – by simply adding money, in whatever form, whether via an emergency loan or quantitative easing. This is of course a bit of an oversimplification, but it captures something of the essence of the prevailing pattern of thought.

The seeds of failure are sown by the blooming flowers of success. The current generation of clowns have literally never encountered a problem that could not be solved by throwing money at it. All of their theoretical and practical knowledge points to the same solution: more money.

This is why the rise of the BRICSIA alternative to the USD, the CRIPS alternative to SWIFT, and the Belt and Road alternative to the IMF loansharks are potential death blows to Clown World. They have, in three fell swoops, essentially disarmed Clown World by taking its only weapon out of the equation.

I strongly suspect the fine hand of Wang Hunin in this long-term strategic approach.

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MIDNIGHT’S WAR on Amazon

First, the gold-logo backer’s editions arrive at the warehouse today and the tracking numbers should start going out to the backers later this week. This was delayed from when we first finished them because we did a second round of revisions in order to correct some color profiles that had printed a little darker than we preferred. Second, both the hardcover and paperback retail editions are now available direct from the Arkhaven store at NDM Express and on Amazon. All of the editions are printed in the larger 8 x 10.88-inch size we introduced with MY SISTER SUPREMA and GHOST OF THE BADLANDS.

Third, regardless of where you happen to buy the book, or even if you’ve read the comic on Arktoons, it would be good to see some reviews for it up on Amazon.

Nothing beats a good book.

WELCOME TO THE MIDNIGHT WORLD

In the year 8466 of the cainite calendar, in the aftermath of a catastrophic global economic crisis, the vampire tribes came out of the shadows for the first time in more than 2,600 years and revealed themselves to an unsuspecting humanity. With near-complete control of the media, the national governments, the global financial system, and most of the major international institutions, humanity was helpless to resist the vampiric bid for power. A dark world order was established. The global monetary system was replaced with a new currency backed by human blood, and a global tax was introduced to ensure humanity’s new rulers that their endless thirst would never again go unslaked.

The Great Concord of Gomorrah was established to secure the rights and duties of Man and Vampire alike. Under the protection of the Concord, an astonishing array of famous, infamous, and downright notorious figures emerged from the annals of history and were revealed to have survived their apparent deaths through the Rites of Cain. But as an ocean of blood flowed freely through the new global economy, long-dormant vampire rivalries were reborn in new forms.

But not all humans submitted to the Great Concord, and more significantly, not all human blood proved to be palatable to Mankind’s cruel overlords. For some of the ancient legends turned out to be true. Drawing inspiration from the crusading orders of the Middle Ages, twelve young men joined together in a new military order, The Knights of Saint Michael and of the Catacombs of Rome. Armed with little more than their faith and blood that is poison to their enemies, The Knights of Saint Michael wage a desperate war against the vampire lords of the Midnight World.

UPDATE FROM ARKHAVEN SHIPPING:

You know the drill. It’s time to send out the paperback and hardcover omnibus Vol 1-6 to the backers and while we do have an email and the backer number, we have neither names nor mailing addresses. So what I need is for you to respond to the email that will be sent to you later today. The good news here is that we are upping our crowdfund game and it looks like we can integrate our shipping software directly into the crowdfund platform. So while we are still cleaning up the previous crowdfunds, going forward the delivery system should be top notch. That being said, for the time being we will need you to respond to the email sent to you in order to be sent your copy of Midnight’s War.

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Convergence is Anti-Christian

10 percent of the United Methodist Church just left the organization this week:

United Methodism’s largest overseas jurisdiction has voted to quit the denomination in response to the church’s divorcing sex from marriage at its governing General Conference earlier this month.

American “progressive Christians” are pushing their Western sexual values on African churches and have alienated an entire continent of Christians.

1.2 million in a single day, gone. 10% of the church, gone. Just like that.

Methodism in Africa, which outnumbers Methodists in the US for the time being, is thriving. But now it will have to thrive away from the United Methodist Church and take the form of either independent Methodism or join the conservative Global Methodist denomination.

In their efforts to be inclusive, the UMC has driven away now more than 20% of its members in the last few years.

To be clear, this destruction of the organized churches, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant alike, is entirely intentional. The various priests and pastors who have led the progressive charge to converge their own churches are not and never were Christians at all, they are the subversive wolves in sheep’s clothing of whom the Apostle Paul warned.

The good news is that the true Christian church, the ad hoc unorganized body of genuine believers, has always been strongest when under pressure. And while we can mourn the loss of Christian culture, which led humanity to its greatest heights, we should never forget that the faith is far more important than the culture.

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Neoclowns are Getting Sporty

The State Department seized Scott Ritter’s passport to keep him from travelling to Russia:

The US State Department has seized the passport of former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, he told RT on Monday. Ritter was on his way to Russia for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) when he was pulled off the plane and had his documents confiscated.

“I was boarding the flight. Three [police] officers pulled me aside. They took my passport. When asked why, they said ‘orders of the State Department’. They had no further information for me,” Ritter told RT. “They pulled my bags off the plane, then escorted me out of the airport. They kept my passport.”

Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, who later served as the US and UN weapons inspector in Iraq.

Land of the free… On the bright side, it appears the State Department has finally realized that they are not, in fact, winning their proxy war in Ukraine.

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In Praise of the Library

The Band reviews Castalia History’s THE LANDMARK THUCYDIDES as well as the significance of the historical author.

Some time ago, we posted about a prestige copy of Dante purchased from Castalia Library. High-quality bookmaking is something of a declining art in the carcass of “the West”, so it was a pleasant surprise to see an initiative like this. Even more so to see the quality given the start-up nature of the project. We haven’t commented since because Castalia works mainly on a subscription basis and while we are appreciative, we aren’t subscribers. That’s not a criticism, just personal budget priorities – we read very little fiction at all. If you’re interested in quality books that are only getting better at an unbeatable price, that’s the place for you. The Divine Comedy was bought out of interest – excess copies are sold individually, but prices are considerably higher and they do sell out. Prestige publishing is expensive because the materials are costly. Print on demand or large inventories aren’t economically viable, so when a run is all sold, that’s it unless there’s a second edition.

Things changed with the launch of a second subscription line called Castalia History. This focuses on the sort of significant historical works worthy of prestige treatment. The books cost a bit more, but are larger on average, so the good value remains. And the content was something we were willing to commit to. Since the launch, the decision has only gotten better.

We aren’t prestige market collectors – as noted before, we have a huge library, but it was built for content volume. But book collecting is a real thing, and CH has sold out its first three volumes without any outreach or promotion in the collector market at all. The Cambridge deal came out of the blue as far as subscribers are concerned – and is really the first sign of mainstream exposure. And you don’t have to be a collector to appreciate inevitable increase in the value of your possessions.

This post will look at The Landmark Thucydides, the first volume in the Castalia History series and the book that made us decide to sign up. It precedes the Cambridge deal but represents the same kind of enduring resource that never goes out of vogue. The goal this time isn’t a big comparison, but what makes Thucydides culturally and historically significant – in reality and the House of Lies, an assessment of this edition, and thoughts about the arts of binding and cultural revival. The tl,dr is that as subscribers we’re not impartial, but are extremely happy with the books we’ve received.

We’re very pleased that our subscribers are as happy with their books as they are, but we are by no means content to rest on our laurels. Next week, the techs arrive to commission our new machines and train us in their use, which will mark the beginning of the next phase of the Library as it will significantly expand our productive capacities.

Without naming any names, it might amuse our subscribers to know that one publisher has already declared it will never work with the Library due to a certain dark lord whose name must not be mentioned. Of course, when cooperation is not possible, that leaves only competition.

Snicker-snack!

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The Price of the Wrong Target

The policeman whose attempt to subdue the unarmed German, and not the knife-wielding Diversity, has spawned many a meme, is an obvious metaphor for the West.

A 29-year-old police officer who was repeatedly stabbed during a frenzied attack at an anti-Islam rally in Germany has died. Five others – including a well-known German Islam critic – were wounded when a knifeman launched the rampage in the city of Mannheim on Friday. The policeman was ‘stabbed several times in the area of the head’ while trying to intervene, local police said in a statement. He underwent emergency surgery following the attack and was put in an artifical coma but died of his injuries on Sunday.

Live by the Diversity, die by the Diversity.

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