#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Ode to the Small Creature Who Takes Refuge in My Boot
The winter is hard, that I know,
What with cold winds and ice and the snow.
And I do not dispute
That you should decide
To seek out my boot
And take shelter inside.
‘Tis the season of cheer
At this time of the year;
That you should keep warm, I don’t mind.
But when I am shod, I do not wish to trod
Upon items that you leave behind.
Donald Trump has a convert, and then some, in Larry Kudlow:
I’ve Changed. This Is War. Seal the Borders. Stop the Visas.
I know this is not my usual position. But this is a war. Therefore I have come to believe there should be no immigration or visa waivers until the U.S. adopts a completely new system to stop radical Islamic terrorists from entering the country. A wartime lockdown. And a big change in my thinking.
ISIS and related Islamic terrorists are already here. More are coming. We must stop them.
Until FBI director James Comey gives us the green light, I say seal the borders.
Here’s what we must do: Completely reform the vetting process for immigrants and foreign visitors. Change the screening process. Come up with a new visa-application review process. Stop this nonsense of marriage-visa fraud. And in the meantime, seal the borders. I agree with Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, who argued many of these points in excellent detail on the National Review website on Friday.
Again, why am I taking this hardline position? In the past, I have been an immigration reformer, not a restrictionist. But we are at war. That changes everything.
This is an expected, but delightful, development. It won’t be long before the American mainstream endorses mass repatriations. That is the best possible outcome; a widespread resurgence of peaceful nationalism that is not unlawfully resisted by an anti-democratic internationalist elite.
You may have thought that Castalia House was done for 2015 following the release of its most recent Political Philosophy bestseller
earlier this week, but nothing could be further from the truth. Not only are we hard at work getting several audiobooks out before the end of the year, but we are less than two weeks away from reviving a series that has lain dormant for 26 years since the end of the Cold War.
That’s right, for the first time in nearly three decades, Jerry Pournelle’s legendary There Will Be War anthology series of military science fiction and military fact, which served as the inspiration for Castalia’s Riding the Red Horse series, is back! Dr. Pournelle has been hard at work putting together a collection of the best of the new breed mil-SF writers with the best of the old guard, and the result is one of the most formidable collections of talent since the second in the series, the epic There Will Be War Volume II, which featured Poul Anderson’s “Time Lag”, Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus”, William F. Wu’s “In the Shadow of a Phosphor Screen”, and Eric Vinicoff’s “‘Caster”.
Only time will tell if Volume X will prove to be similarly memorable, but the lineup of contributors would be hard to beat. In addition to an introduction by Jerry Pournelle, the new volume features:
The much-ballyhooed End of History and the permanent triumph of democratic liberalism has proven to be a mirage. As Dr. Pournelle has repeatedly warned us, There Will Be War.
If you still haven’t signed up for the New Release mailing list, you’re definitely going to want to do so for this one, as the bonus book offer is even better than the one we offered earlier this week. The book will initially be out in ebook, in audiobook early next year, then in a hardcover omnibus edition with Volume IX sometime in Spring 2016.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the first interesting thing Ben Carson has said since he started his quixotic campaign:
Ben Carson on Friday blasted the Republican National Committee following a Washington Post report that nearly two-dozen establishment party figures were prepping for a potential brokered convention as Donald Trump continues to lead most polls.
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus held a dinner in Washington, D.C., on Monday, and, according to five people who spoke with the Post, the possibility of Trump heading into the Cleveland convention with a substantial number of delegates was a topic of discussion. Some attendees suggested the establishment lay the groundwork for a floor fight that could lead the party’s mainstream wing to unite behind an alternative. Carson rejected this approach.
“If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning,” Carson said in a statement released by his campaign.
Carson said he prays the Post’s report is incorrect and threatened to leave the GOP. “If it is correct, every voter who is standing for change must know they are being betrayed. I won’t stand for it,” said Carson, who added that if the plot is accurate, “I assure you Donald Trump won’t be the only one leaving the party.”
The retired neurosurgeon said that next summer’s Cleveland convention could be the last Republican National Convention if leaders try to manipulate it.
“I am prepared to lose fair and square, as I am sure is Donald,” Carson said. “But I will not sit by and watch a theft. I intend on being the nominee. If I am not, the winner will have my support. If the winner isn’t our nominee then we have a massive problem.”
Good for him. He may not be a serious candidate, but it’s good to see the lesser players calling out the corrupt Republican establishment.
Paul Krugman may call it “ugliness”, but he nevertheless does a better job of explaining the massive shift in American and European politics to frightened American left-liberals than one might have expected. Unfortunately, he omitted the most important element, which is to say, immigration:
My European friends will no doubt say that I’m oversimplifying, but from an American perspective it looks as if Europe’s establishment has tried to freeze the xenophobic right, not just out of political power, but out of any role in acceptable discourse. To be a respectable European politician, whether of the left or of the right, you have had to accept the European project of ever-closer union, of free movement of people, open borders, and harmonized regulations. This leaves no room for right-wing nationalists, even though right-wing nationalism has always had substantial popular support.
What the European establishment may not have realized, however, is that its ability to define the limits of discourse rests on the perception that it knows what it is doing. Even admirers and supporters of the European project (like me) have to admit that it has never had deep popular support or a lot of democratic legitimacy. It is, instead, an elite project sold largely on the claim that there is no alternative, that it is the path of wisdom.
And there’s nothing quite like sustained poor economic performance – the kind of poor performance brought on by Europe’s austerity and hard-money obsessions — to undermine the elite’s reputation for competence. That’s probably why one recent study found a consistent historical relationship between financial crises and the rise of right-wing extremism. And history is repeating itself.
The story is quite different in America, because the Republican Party hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes.
But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.
Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel — especially because these days much of the party’s leadership seems inbred and out of touch.
What the liberal-left elite tends to forget is that a lot of liberals and left-wingers are still nationalists at heart. They may want a liberal, or a left-wing France, or America, or Britain, but they still want it to be identifiably France, America, or Britain. That’s why Front National, Trump, and UKIP, among others, are actually drawing more heavily from the Socialists, the Democrats, and Labour than they are from the center-right parties.
Immigration is a cross-spectrum issue, and until you realize that, you cannot understand that it is the only issue that matters in Western politics now. Everything else is akin to worrying about the details of French pension payments when the Wehrmacht is blitzkrieging past the Maginot Line.
They lied, of course.
It’s Time to Ban Guns. Yes, All of Them.
Ban guns. All guns. Get rid of guns in homes, and on the streets, and, as much as possible, on police. Not just because of San Bernardino, or whichever mass shooting may pop up next, but also not not because of those. Don’t sort the population into those who might do something evil or foolish or self-destructive with a gun and those who surely will not. As if this could be known—as if it could be assessed without massively violating civil liberties and stigmatizing the mentally ill. Ban guns! Not just gun violence. Not just certain guns. Not just already-technically-illegal guns. All of them.
I used to refer to my position on this issue as being in favor of gun control. Which is true, except that “gun control” at its most radical still tends to refer to bans on certain weapons and closing loopholes. The recent New York Times front-page editorial, as much as it infuriated some, was still too tentative. “Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership,” the paper argued, making the case for “reasonable regulation,” nothing more. Even the rare ban-guns arguments involve prefacing and hedging and disclaimers. “We shouldn’t ‘take them away’ from people who currently own them, necessarily,” writes Hollis Phelps in Salon. Oh, but we should.
I say this not to win some sort of ideological purity contest, but because banning guns urgently needs to become a rhetorical and conceptual possibility. The national conversation needs to shift from one extreme—an acceptance, ranging from complacent to enthusiastic, of an individual right to own guns—to another, which requires people who are not politicians to speak their minds. And this will only happen if the Americans who are quietly convinced that guns are terrible speak out.
Every vocal would-be gun banner needs to understand that this is what they are trying to make “a rhetorical and conceptual possibility”. Their endorsement of disarming the people is every bit as evil and horrifically unacceptable in a civilized Western society as endorsing cannibalism, pedophilia, or necrophilia.
You can email your thoughts on Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s call for disarming you to her here: maltzp@gmail.com.
The coming Republican civil war on immigration:
“This is not conservatism.” With those four simple words, House Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entry into the United States until the federal government gets terrorism committed in the name of Islam figured out.
“This is not what our party stands for,” Ryan added, “and, more importantly, it’s not what our country stands for.”
That may depend on how the party is defined. While elected Republicans have almost unanimously distanced themselves from Trump’s Muslim gambit, one poll found that nearly two-thirds of GOP voters agreed with him. Another determined that more than three-fourths believe the United States is accepting too many immigrants from the Middle East.
There is a civil war in the Republican Party on immigration. Those on Trump’s side tend to see the enemy as including the party’s leadership, consultants, intellectuals and donor class. (The dust-up over Trump and Muslims is likely to bolster that perception.) But they’ve been courted by other GOP presidential candidates too, including Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Rick Santorum.
Walker is already out of the race and Santorum has stalled in the low single digits. But Cruz is ascendant and Trump has been leading in the New Hampshire polls for a longer period of time than Walker’s presidential campaign lasted.
Trump isn’t the most articulate or consistent spokesman for immigration control in the GOP. That distinction goes to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. And Trump’s Republican critics would be the first to point out he isn’t the most conservative. But his rise has fueled a family argument inside the party about how conservatives should view immigration.
Ryan’s position has a long conservative pedigree. He has followed in Jack Kemp’s intellectual footsteps. He can cite Ronald Reagan as well. The Wall Street Journal editorial page that championed Kemp and Reagan’s tax cuts also called for open borders. Republicans like Ryan tend to see America as a proposition or an idea, defined by the political principles laid out in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
In this telling, immigration affirms the truths we hold to be self-evident, particularly that all men are created equal and the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. The willingness of immigrants to come here is a testament to the success of those principles. “Immigration,” writes veteran conservative columnist George Will, “is the entrepreneurial act of taking the risk of uprooting oneself and plunging into uncertainty.”
Restricting immigration, according to these Republicans, isn’t conservative because it requires government bureaucracies to interfere in labor markets. Immigration is like free trade and restricting it is like protectionism.
Read that last sentence again. Those who have read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America
will now understand, if they didn’t already, why we addressed free trade and immigration in the Immigration and Economics chapter, because the latter, in its open-borders variant, is a subset of the former.
It’s interesting, is it not, that the cuckservatives are willing to fight fellow Republicans to the death, but they’re always eager to negotiate a genteel surrender with the liberals. Of course, as we showed when discussing the six conservative principles laid out by Russell Kirk, cuckservatives reject the last two.
The International Lord of Hate’s take:
Some Puppy supporters didn’t like how it was phrased, with “scandal” having negative implications. Personally, I like it. Especially the part where they used “Rocked”. Damn right. Rocked you like a hurricane. The scandal was the part where the CHORFs ran a lying media smear campaign, and handed out wooden butt holes, while block voting No Award to keep out barbarian Wrongfans having Wrongfun.
As Americans and Brits alike have are wringing their hands over Donald Trump’s very moderate, entirely constitutional, and woefully insufficient proposal, the French are actively hunting the jihadists in their midst:
Police investigating the Paris terror attacks have shut down three mosques in a series of raids to close the net on Islamic extremists, the Express reports. Police in France also arrested the owner of a revolver found during Wednesday’s raid, France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
Security officials found jihadist documents at the mosque where yesterday’s raids took place.
They have placed nine people under house arrest. Another 22 have been banned from leaving the country Mr Cazeneuve said.
France has been under a state of emergency since 130 people were killed in a series of terror attacks in Paris on November 13. Since then, some 2,235 homes and buildings have been raided, 232 people taken into custody, and 334 weapons confiscated.
Cazeneuve said the number of weapons apprehended so far is staggering. He said: “In 15 days we have seized one-third of the quantity of war-grade weapons that are normally seized in a year.”
All pro-gun advocates should strongly endorse the immigration ban and support the repatriation of all enemy nationals because the eventual alternative is a state of emergency and French-style crackdowns that will likely encompass the native population.
Now think about how many weapons are already stashed in the mosques across America.
The first fake review finally appears:
this book will just make you hate those people more
By Beamer on December 9, 2015Unsurprisingly, this book is preaching to its choir. Are you a straight white male terrified of the fact that, while white males remain the most powerful group in America, people other than straight white males are being represented more and more often? Do the thoughts of gay people being able to marry or, gasp, women being named CEO over a perfectly qualified male keep you up all night?
Then this book will completely back your worldview.
But if you aren’t a frightened, shallow, impotent straight white male, this book will just make you hate those people more. I happen to be a straight white male. I embrace new thoughts in our leadership, because let’s be honest, we haven’t done such a great job the past 50 years. But Vox Day disagrees, and very openly feels only straight white males should lead.
Either you’re a terrified, impotent straight white male and you love him, or you’ll find this book to basically be an excellent reason to move to Canada.
It’s a fascinating portrait in SJW rhetoric. I mean, there is no reason at all for gay men and women to be just little bit concerned about mass migration from the Muslim world, right?
The review is pure rabbitology. See, if you want to consider yourself brave and virile and deep, or if you’re female or non-white, or if you’re male and white and deeply apologetic about it, you must not read this book! It is Elil! Beware! Badthink and Thoughtcrime and Tharn await the unwary!
But at last, VFM, it’s Wild Hunt time! Beamer is male, has a dog, and likes the Repairman Jack novels of F. Paul Wilson. He’s a graduate of Boston College and Duke, and uses or used a Blackberry at work. His first name may be Mark and he had a relationship of some sort with a woman named Beth. First one to correctly identify him and provide contact details wins the free hardcover of his choice from Castalia House and gets a virtual skull for social media bragging purposes. Bonus skull for providing place of employment.
Duke University
MBA – 2010.
JD – 2007.
BA – English and Computer Science – Boston College.
Fan of hardcore music.
Soft spot for cheesy aquatic adventure novels.
Uses Blackberry at work.
VFM Rules: The SJWs take a shot and the VFM immediately apply the Five Ds in reprisal. Dig, Doxx, Discredit, Disemploy, and Devour. Better make that move to Canada now, Beamer. The Vile Faceless Minions are coming for you.
UPDATE 2: I can’t what it who even…. what is this?
