Author: VD

A Turquoise Tide

The two-party system in Britain is on the verge of collapsing.

A turquoise tide has risen. The opinion polls were not wrong. Across the country, a large section of the electorate has abandoned both Labour and the Conservatives and thrown in its lot with Nigel Farage’s Reform army.

The trend was seen most spectacularly in Cheshire, where Reform’s Sarah Pochin overturned a Labour majority of almost 15,000 to win the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. Yes, the margin of victory was a tiny six votes. Yes, Labour was not helped by the fact the contest was triggered when their former MP was forced to resign after assaulting a constituent on a drunken night out. But the big picture is that Labour has lost one of its safest seats to an upstart party less than a year after Sir Keir Starmer’s landslide election win. And the Prime Minister himself is so unpopular that Labour strategists did not dare send him to Runcorn for fear of making things even worse.

Reform’s surge is by no means limited to Cheshire. In early results, the party seized control of the Lincolnshire mayoralty, pushed Labour hard in a string of other contests in heartland areas like Doncaster and North Tyneside, and came a strong second in the West of England, which had been depicted as a straight fight between Labour and the Greens.

By the end of the day, Mr Farage’s party will have won hundreds of council seats and for the first time taken control of major councils like Staffordshire and Lincolnshire. With the Lib Dems also set to do well and the Greens poised to add to their strength in local government, the results add weight to the growing sense that the two-party system is disintegrating.

Unfortunately, Nigel Farage appears to be more gatekeeper than genuine nationalist, so it’s likely that a considerable amount of the momentum will be wasted, and there is no sign that Reform will begin the mass repatriations that Britain so desperately needs. But it is still a good sign that the British people are rejecting the siren song of Clown World and the two major parties that it controls.

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The Consequences of Convergence

This is why we are correct to laugh at the intellectually-challenged elites of Clown World. They’re literally too stupid to read books:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

Of course, this inability to perform a simple intellectual task doesn’t prevent them from believing in their own superiority as well as their right to tell everyone else how to live on the basis of something they dimly recall a professor saying in class once.

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In Which the Cancellers are Cancelled

Worldcon’s death-spiral toward extinction continues apace, as chronicled by Fandom Pulse:

Worldcon used to be the gold standard of science fiction conventions. Creators like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, and more would get together every year to share ideas, build community, and help the genre altogether. It’s a good idea, in theory.In its past, of course, it’s also been mired with controversy, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen using convention rooms as places to rape children, something that long-stained its history when it came out in recent years.

Beyond this, Worldcon had turned its back on conservatives for an extreme-leftist agenda that reared its ugly head in the mid-2010s with the Hugo Awards, when they prioritized politics over good storytelling to the determinant of the award. It never recovered its prestige. It resulted in 2018 having a protest against pedophilia outside of the convention where, oddly, many of the panelists counter-protested against the protest. The implication is that several of those people apparently stand for pedophilia.

In recent years, they’ve had more controversies, such as having the weapons’ manufacturer Raytheon sponsor the convention, heading to China to have the CCP dictate who could be nominated for their awards, and then using their platform to urge that travel to the United States is somehow dangerous as an attack on President Donald Trump and America—despite the convention being in Seattle this year and Los Angeles in the next.

Now, they have posted a blog that turned their entire leftist community on them, not because of pedophilia or extremist political causes, or supporting weapons manufacturers that bomb children in Middle Eastern countries, or for bowing to the human-rights violating CCP, no, the line they’ve drawn is that ChatGPT was used to vet potential panelists for their ever-shrinking convention, as the science fiction landscape has grown so niche that the con organizers simply didn’t know who most of the people were who applied for spots.

At this point, the “science fiction community” as it was known and loved by the likes of Roger Zelazny and Jerry Pournelle is effectively dead. The material being published by the genre publishers is no longer science fiction, the authors are complete nobodies whom nobody either knows or reads, the magazines are no longer being published, and the one healthy subgenre, military science fiction, is entirely written and read by people who have nothing to do with the tattered remnants of what was once a vibrant sub-literary genre.

It’s really remarkable to read Zelazny’s comments on the community in which he lived and the genre he loved, and see how far from his expectations for the future both of them have fallen.

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Russia Ready for NATO

An explanation for the huge increase in troops being mobilized and new arms being produced that have not shown up on the front lines is finally explained by Russia’s preparations for a direct confrontation with NATO:

The U.S. estimates that around 30,000 Russians are signing up each month, up from about 25,000 last summer. Some Eastern European intelligence officials say the ranks are now swelling by some 40,000 soldiers a month. The extra manpower has allowed the military to rotate new troops in and out of Ukraine, and to build new units trained and housed in Russia, according to some European intelligence assessments.

So, not only do they confirm that Russia is regenerating 30,000 men per month, and even 40,000 according to some sources, but the biggest bombshell of all is made which fully redeems my reporting over the past year and a half: Russia is siphoning some of the newly recruited troops into new units stationed in the rear of Russia proper; i.e. reserves.

This should once and for all conclusively put to bed theories around where the Russian 30k+ monthly troops are going: a portion is replenishing hard losses, a portion replacing contract non-renewals, and a portion is going directly to the rear to stand up new armies meant to prepare Russia for a much bigger clash against NATO proper…

And if they do fight NATO, they’ll do so with more than 200,000 North Korean troops fighting with them.

“Our source reports that DPRK soldiers will take part in the war on Ukrainian territory (previously they fought only in the Kursk region) if Trump’s peace case stalls. The source points out that if the war escalates, then by the end of the year more than two hundred thousand North Korean soldiers will be fighting in the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces using their own equipment. Such an “infusion” threatens the collapse of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ defense.

President Trump would do very well to put leashes and muzzles on Kiev, Brussels, and most of the European leaders and force a peace settlement to Russia’s liking or Russia is going to simply decide the fate of Europe without any input from the USA or anyone else.

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Heating Up in Kashmir

Pakistan believes India is going to attack this week:

Pakistan has alleged that India is planning a military strike on its territory, signaling a further escalation in tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors.

“Pakistan has credible intelligence that India intends to launch a military strike within the next 24 to 36 hours, using the Pahalgam incident as a false pretext,” Islamabad’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar wrote on X on Tuesday evening.

“Any act of aggression will be met with a decisive response. India will be fully responsible for any serious consequences in the region,” Tarar added.

His statement came after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave his country’s armed forces “full operational freedom” to determine the mode, targets, and timing of a response to the recent terrorist attack in India’s Jammu and Kashmir union territory, which left 26 people dead, mostly tourists.

It will be interesting to see if any of the lessons of the NATO-Russian war have been understood and applied by either the Indians or the Pakistanis. I tend to doubt it, but we’ll see.

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The Lessons of War

North Korean troops have gained valuable combat experience in Russia, while NATO simply refuses to admit that it needs to learn anything despite the changing face of the battlefield:

I saw these guys several times in business. And every time I caught myself thinking that they were preparing for another war. Which looked a little strange. Still, North Korea is a military state. For 70 years they have been de facto at war. Huge budget funds go on national defense, and a meeting with the Ukrainian army made Koreans think and reconsider their views on the war.

Very soon, they realized that you can’t stumble, and attacking with a line is not a good idea. And they heard the REB and the UAV, but they did not understand the true meaning.

Once again, I note that in order to learn from the war, you need to lose your soldiers on the battlefield. Koreans have paid their price and will now process this valuable experience. Commanders mouths grow to the generals. And all their careers they will remember the nasty buzzing of the FPV drones, and will do everything to minimize their threat.

All military personnel of this world are watching the SVO. But true conclusions will be available to only a few. Most will make decisions based on objective control materials and dry intelligence reports. And I am sure that most generals will not be able to draw the right conclusions from the experience of the SVO. Which, however, is in our hands. The time is now dashing, and only a few armies can boast of combat experience.

There is an old saying that generals always prepare for the previous war. Which is why the US military is mostly geared up for police occupations and counter-insurgency operations. Neither it nor any of the European militaries are even remotely ready for a war with Russia, with or without popular support.

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Solar Power = No Power

The worst thing is that solar power is failing in the springtime in one of the sunniest places in Europe:

Spain’s grid operator admitted today that solar power could be to blame for the blackouts that brought chaos to much of the Iberian peninsular on Monday.

Red Eléctrica’s System Operations Chief Eduardo Prieto told a news briefing the electricity system was hit by a dramatic power generation loss in southwestern Spain, that caused instability in the system that led to its disconnection from the French grid. He said it was quite possible that the affected generation was solar, but it was to early to say for sure. Prieto said the system was now stable and working normally.

The partly state-owned operator’s preliminary assessment ruled out cyberattack as the cause of the outage, he added – after officials had tentatively suggested on Monday it was still a line they were exploring. Criticism has been mounting on the Spanish government to explain the blackouts, which saw planes grounded, trains stopped and traffic brought to a standstill in major cities.

It’s long past time to begin discussing the implications of both climate change and clean energy being constructed on fundamentally false assumptions. How much further does civilization have to decline before we start taking on the challenge of shoring up the foundations that have been systematically weakened for the last 50 years?

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The Ports Shut Down

The once-busy port of Seattle has all but shut down.

The Port of Seattle on Sunday, April 27, 2025: EMPTY. This is the 4th busiest port in the nation. Inbound freight from China has STOPPED. Supply-chain disruption will now begin, nationwide. Anyone who has spent time in Seattle can tell you that these docks are always PACKED and the Puget Sound is usually overrun with waiting cargo vessels.

Here is the Marine-Tracker for Seattle: Waiting ships: ZERO. Inbound ships: ZERO. There are presently ZERO cargo ships docked or en-route. There are ZERO containers in the yard, and there are ZERO trucks waiting to haul cargo.

Even if this global trade war is ended tomorrow, it will take a minimum of 30 to 55 days, but more likely at 7-9 months, to normalize supply chains and have available product again. And that’s if everybody calls it off immediately. 40% of cargo vessels leaving China today (vessels that were already paid to make the journey, whether there is a reason to or not) are traveling completely empty. Inbound Shipping container volume is down 80%.

There were always going to be trade disruptions. This is a good time to get stocked up, top up supplies, and avoid travel and unnecessary expenses.

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Green Energy Blackout

Spain, Portugal, and parts of France have been without electricity all day:

Panic buying has swept Spain and Portugal as nationwide blackouts paralysed both countries, shutting down transport networks and prompting people to clear supermarket shelves amid fears the chaos could last for days.

Huge queues formed outside shops and banks as residents and tourists desperately sought to stockpile essentials and take out cash as much cash as they could amid the uncertainty.

Rows of cars were pictured lining up at petrol stations as people hoped to fill up their vehicles and fuel cans, with ex-pats detailing how they have tried to power generators to keep their homes going.

Airports have also been hit by the outages, with flights delayed and cancelled and holidaymakers in Portugal warned by the country’s flagship airline TAP Air not to travel for their flights until further notice.

A British holidaymaker in Madrid described the situation in the city centre as ‘carnage’, telling MailOnline: ‘People are starting to panic. It’s going to get really bad if they don’t restore power quickly.’

Madrid’s Mayor urged people in the city to stay where they were as the disaster unfolded, while the president of the city’s regional government called for Spain’s prime minister to activate an emergency plan to allow for soldiers to be deployed.

Power outages gripped Spain at around 12.30 local time, plunging millions into darkness. Spain’s nuclear power plants automatically stopped, but diesel generators were activated to keep them in ‘safe condition’, officials said.

Trains and metro services were shut down in both countries, with people stuck in tunnels and on railway tracks, forcing evacuations.

Portugal’s electricity grid operator warned that it is ‘impossible’ to say when the power supply would be fully restored, adding that while ‘all resources’ were deployed to resolve the issues, it could take up to a week to fix.

The power cuts come just days after Spain’s power grid ran entirely on renewable energy, including wind, solar and hydro power, for a whole day for the first time on April 16. 

Spanish officials are urgently investigating the cause of the outages and have said they are looking into the possibility of the blackouts being triggered by a devastating cyber attack. 

Videos online show railway networks in Spanish cities plunged into chaos, with people being evacuated through tunnels as blackouts hit underground stations and halted trains.

The centralized power grid was always a foolish idea, with little redundancy and a natural tendency to get pushed beyond its limits. But attempting to go entirely to so-called “renewable” energy – as if oil isn’t a naturally renewable resource – was always likely to result in something like this.

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Spring Library Sale

First, Castalia Library is announcing a surprise Spring Library sale made possible by our finally merging the warehouses and getting an accurate count on our entire stock. We also knew we had some additional books in Alabama, but in the aftermath of losing our good friend at Cryptofashion, we didn’t know how many we had and which books were there until everything was shipped to the current warehouse and counted correctly.

The sale has only been announced here ahead of being announced publicly Monday on VP and elsewhere, so if you want to make sure you obtain one of the less-available books, you should probably take action pretty quickly. All of the books are in stock at the warehouse and available for immediate shipment.

The 11 books that were previously out of stock, all of which are cowhide Library editions, are:

The sale price on all 11 volumes is $79.99 while supplies last. No subscription or coupon is necessary. The sale price includes shipping. It’s a good opportunity to round out your collection if you’re missing anything, or pick up an additional volume of interest or two.

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