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Che Cavalo!

In further confirmation that Italy remains Italian.

  • Paolo Maldini and Leonardo have resigned from their FIGC positions following disagreements regarding the selection of Italy’s new head coach
  • The duo’s tenure lasted just 16 days, having been officially appointed on July 11

I’m not going to lie. I was genuinely excited about the possibility of Maldini and Guardiola joining forces to return gli Azzurri to international prominence.

Efforts to name the next head coach encountered difficulties when Carlo Ancelotti and Pep Guardiola, both leading candidates, declined the opportunity. Andrea Pirlo emerged as a subsequent option; however, his candidacy was swiftly dismissed due to his role as a global brand ambassador for Russian betting company Fonbet. This connection posed both moral concerns and legal complications, since advertising gambling is outlawed in Italy. Reports indicate that Giovanni Malagò intervened to veto Pirlo’s appointment, despite opposition from Maldini and Leonardo. The ongoing disagreements on coach selection reportedly intensified strain within the leadership group.

(makes Italianate hand gestures)

Meanwhile, in France…

Zinedine Zidane Announced As France Men’s National Team Manager

This juxtaposition suffices to explain a disturbing amount of European history.

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Those Who Gnaw

From the recently translated and published GERONA by Benito Pérez Galdós.

Political passion, my friends! I know no baser or more contemptible sentiment than this, which drives men to hate their own countrymen with greater fury than the foreign invader. I was appalled to witness the outrages committed against some and the savage invasion of the houses of others. And we may be thankful they escaped with their lives from the hands of that idle, shrieking mob! In a word, the whole affair was among the most degrading things I have seen in my life, and if the Junta Central was worth little, the men who in Seville and afterward in Cádiz gnawed, like restless and parasitic reptiles, at its foundations, do not occupy, for all their bustling and all the various postures they assumed, any visible place in history.

Their smallness makes them vanish in the long perspectives of the past, and their echoless names awaken neither admiration nor rancour. They belong to that common herd which, common as it is, has shaped the destinies of the country from the first revolution to the present day: people without an ideal, who would be lost in the crowd like raindrops in the ocean, if the deplorable political neutrality of those Spaniards who are honest, decent, informed, and patriotic, and who are the majority, did not allow them to act in public life, treating the country as an object of exclusive property given them for their amusement.

The end of empire is always marked by national enervation. We tend to blame television, or video games, or social media, but the truth is that this torpor that permits those Galdós describes as restless and parasitic reptiles to gnaw at the societal foundations as they rule over the placid NPCs has always been a phenomenon of late-stage empire.

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TRANSLATION: Gerona

GERONA by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It is the seventh of the first series of the Episodios Nacionales and was translated from the original Spanish by Vox Day. The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

A DESPERATE AND GLORIOUS DEFIANCE

In May of 1809 the French army arrived before Gerona: a Catalan city of narrow streets and stacked houses, held by a garrison far too small to hold it, under a governor who did not regard that as a reason to give it up. Seven months later, after eleven thousand nine hundred bombs were exploded, eighty thousand rounds were shot, and twenty thousand men lost in the assaults, the French were still outside the walls.

Andrés Marijuán was inside. An Aragonese private billeted with a locksmith’s family, he watched the city eat its horses, then its cats, then its rats, and at last nothing whatever. He watched the children of the house go out hunting through the rubble for anything with meat on it. He watched a physician, unhinged by grief, forge newspapers full of relief columns that were never coming, so that his daughter should not learn what had become of the world. And he watched Mariano Álvarez de Castro, dying on his feet, return the same answer to every summons to surrender that the greatest generals of the age sent him.

The way Galdós describes the siege of Gerona is the bleakest book in the first series of the Episodios Nacionales, and the most unsparing: an account of civilian endurance carried well past the point where endurance means anything, told by a survivor who cannot understand how he survived.

About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.

There is an excerpt available to read on Castalia Library. Tune in to the Darkstream tonight to learn more about this, see the new Byronics video, and hear some exciting news about the Byron AI project.

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Why Everyone Hates the Boomers

Never, ever, imagine for one second that a single drop of all the intergenerational hate directed at the Boomers is unjustified. Frankly, at this point, I’m a little shocked that they’re not all being forcibly euthanized for their assets while any still remain.

Antiques Roadshow

Boomer w/ a 60s Fender guitar: “Cost me $383. My grandkids can fight over it when I’m gone.”

Appraiser: “This guitar is worth about $12,000.

Boomer boomingly: “Weh-heh-hell! I guess the grandkids won’t be getting it!”

They aborted their children and bankrupted their grandchildren, and remain proud of their philosophy, their behavior and their self-identification to this day. On the plus side, we now understand why the Israelites were not allowed to enter the Promised Land until every member of the wicked generation had died off. The New Testament is perfectly clear on how this all-too-typical Boomer behavior is “worse than an infidel”.

And if you’re a Boomer who is behaving like every normal generation previously did and leaving your children and grandchlldren better off than you were, do try to keep in mind that this is what everyone was always supposed to do!

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Immigration Economics

In which Germany demonstrates, again, that mass immigration is not, and has never been, actually good for the economy:

Friedrich Merz’s desperate attempt to appear tough on migration took another blow this week, after it was revealed that close to half the taxpayer cash spent on the Bürgergeld (citizens’ allowance) continues to go to individuals without German citizenship. Figures show that the Federal Employment Agency handed out almost €47 billion in benefits in 2025, and that 46.6% of this went to foreigners.

Right-wing news site NIUS on Wednesday reported that “the massive influx [of migrants] from non-European countries”—especially since 2015—“is increasingly pushing Germany’s social welfare system to its limits.” That is despite German Vice-Chancellor Lars Klingbeil (SPD) insisting last month that “the migration of recent years has significantly stabilised the German social security system—even if some give the impression that the opposite is true.”

Payments cover basic income support, as well as housing and heating costs.

The devil, as always, is revealed in the contradiction between the theory and the subsequent numbers. The idea that immigration boosts the economy is trivially true because it is a tautology dependent upon a definition of the economy as something measured by Gross Domestic Product.

C + I + G = GDP.

So, if you allow 10 immigrants and the government gives them money to spend, both C (consumer spending) and G (government spending) automatically go up. It’s financed by increasing the debt. The economy “grows” and the immigration is “good for the economy”. This is true whether there is one immigrant or one billion; if economists actually believed their own nonsense, then they would advocate for encouraging the entirety of India to immigrate.

And yes, it’s just possible that Canadian economists are actually that dumb, which would explain a lot about the current state of Canada.

The problem is that because immigrants primarily consume and do not produce anything except crime – the service industries in which the employed minority predominantly work is, by definition, not productive – they observably, inevitably, and structurally weaken the economy. As the sclerotic economies of all the countries that immigration has theoretically enhanced are now beginning to show.

All that mass immigration has really accomplished in economic terms is provide new debtors, thereby allowing the banks to remain pseudo-solvent for an additional decade or two. But not only has it not solved any problems, it has significantly exacerbated the existing ones.

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Guns or Gas?

Larry Johnson thinks he’s figured out why the President and Pentagon called off this weekend’s expected attacks on Iran:

The New York Times published a piece by Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan that offers one explanation for Trump’s latest TACO. They write:

President Trump has set aside, at least for now, plans to sharply escalate the American military assault against Iran, with particular concern that intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East.

The threat to interceptor stockpiles is one of many considerations that has made a return to major combat operations a hugely risky endeavor, administration officials say. Mr. Trump and his top aides are also uneasy about the prospect of a widening war in the Middle East, the alienation of key Gulf allies who are vulnerable to Iranian attack, a global economic crunch, and growing energy and refugee crises.

But there may be another consideration — one that does not exclude the reasons offered by the NY Times reporters — that involves the US fuel supplies. An economic brief prepared by Karl Miller investigates how the US military’s covert fuel procurement and export operations are depleting the nation’s diesel and jet fuel reserves, particularly during a period when domestic stocks are already critically low. The report details that from May to July, nearly 161 million barrels of distillate and jet fuel were exported, with the East Coast’s buffer falling to less than half its pre-pandemic norm. Much of this fuel is routed through opaque channels, such as the Rotterdam transshipment hub, where the final military or foreign allocation is not publicly reconciled, leaving the American economy exposed to shortage risks while military and foreign operations receive priority access.

A central finding is that the US government operates a parallel, largely unauditable military allocation system that siphons fuel from the civilian market. Public data merges commercial and military fuel categories, and certain military shipments are exempt from standard export reporting, making it impossible to track the true end-use of exported fuel. The report highlights that US taxpayers are subsidizing foreign military fuel needs, notably for Israel, through both direct and likely indirect channels, while the government does not disclose the full extent or funding split of these deliveries. Meanwhile, critical sectors like trucking, agriculture, and civil aviation are left with a diminished safety margin and increased disruption risk.

Miller concludes that the crisis is not due to a collapse in refinery output or a fabricated inventory, but rather a combination of structurally low inventories, high ongoing exports, and fragmented public reporting that obscures the military’s draw on national fuel supplies.

Americans are already angry about being forced to go to war again for Israel. And I suspect that even the great champions of antisemitism recognize that if they are deprived of their ability to drive as the economy gets further hammered by this insane, unnecessary, and ill-fated war, no amount of rhetoric, propaganda, and legal pressure is going to keep a lid on all that irrational, totally unprovoked hate.

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The Byron Project and Byronics

So the Byron AI project is proceeding apace. Due to UATV going down, I was unable to make the planned announcement, but thanks to the devs it’s back up again and so I will make it on the Darkstream Monday night. Thanks to the 86/88 backers so far; we’ve tripled our initial objective and there are still five Custom Novel slots left.

And speaking of George Gordon his own bad self, I finished a mix and a music video for a song which my late co-lyricist in Soulsigma wrote as a short poem called THERE BE NONE OF BEAUTY’S DAUGHTERS, and which I dubbed PERFECTION. If you’d like to see the video and learn a little more about the technology behind it, you can do so at AI Central. I think you will be able to see the steady progression from the first attempt at a video to this one; I’ll put them up on UATV soon.

Don’t skip reading the poem at the top of the post; it’s excellent, it’s not very long, and it will add depth to your appreciation for both the song and the video.

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Escalation in the Red Sea

The third front in the War of the Straits is heating up again:

After the Encelia attack (Wednesday) and a further strike Friday on the Saudi vessel NCC MASA (minor hull damage, continued to destination per SPA), the Saudi-led coalition struck Houthi-held Hodeidah late Friday July 24. Al-Maliki framed it as a “proportionate military response against legitimate military targets” — sites used to threaten commercial shipping — and pointedly insisted the port itself wasn’t hit and remains open. The Houthis see it differently: Al Masirah says the strikes hit state telecommunications facilities in Hodeidah city and Kamaran Island (one woman injured there), with explosions reported at the port by Reuters. The Houthi Foreign Ministry warned Riyadh has made “escalation for escalation” the defining feature of the coming phase and that the strike “will prove costly.”

And sure enough, within hours, the Houthis launched 5 ballistic missiles launched at the ARAMCO oil terminal at Jazan Port, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Aramco facilities in Jazan (also spelled Jizan) represent one of the company’s most ambitious and technologically advanced downstream projects — a fully integrated refinery, petrochemical complex, and power generation hub located in the far southwest of the Kingdom, on the Red Sea coast. The refinery is a full-conversion refinery, meaning it can process heavy crude into high-value light products rather than simply separating crude into fractions. Jazan is the largest gasification-based power facility in the world.

The Jazan complex is not merely a refinery — it is a fully integrated energy ecosystem that converts crude oil into refined products, petrochemicals, electricity, hydrogen, and industrial metals, all while minimizing waste and emissions. It represents Saudi Aramco’s vision of a smarter, lower-carbon downstream future and serves as the economic anchor for one of the Kingdom’s most ambitious regional development initiatives. In other words, the Houthis hit an extremely important Saudi Arabian energy asset.

The ball is now in the Saudi court. Will they escalate and attack the port facilities at Hodeidah or will they decide to call a halt to military operations and seek a diplomatic resolution? The smart move will be to go the diplomatic route. If they choose to strike more targets in Houthi-held territory then the Houthis’ next logical target would be the oil terminals at Yanbu.

Rather like Hitler in the Berlin bunker, Clown World is so desperate to keep its claws on the controls that it is not only risking its own fate, but the entire economic fate of the West on wars that are objectively unwinnable. And it appears that they will be attempting their own run for Argentina before they throw in the towel.

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The EU is a Pirate State

Send in the Marines…

European states have developed a mechanism that allows them to sell confiscated Russian oil without transferring the proceeds to its rightful owners, according to a decision in the official journal of the EU. European countries intend to dispose of seized Russian oil without transferring the proceeds to its owners; the corresponding decision was published in the official journal of the European Union, reports RIA News.

Before the adoption of the new package of sanctions, the embargo prohibited the purchase, import and transportation of Russian energy resources, but there was no mechanism for selling goods without transferring profits to the owner. The new amendments introduce this possibility for the first time. The mechanism will allow European countries to remove confiscated products from the ban, sell them to third parties and keep the proceeds for themselves.

I seem to recall something about “the shores of Tripoli”. The US Marines were sent there to deal with a piracy problem, and now we’ve got the European Union literally operating as an oil-pirating operation.

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The Addition of Economic Attrition

Instead of accepting the reality of its military defeat, Ukraine has tried to create political pressure on Russia by targeting the civilian population. To which, of course, Russia has responded by escalating and expanding the economic pain on Ukraine and Europe:

Ukraine is trying to redirect part of the cargo flow from the Odesa region. Due to the strikes on the port infrastructure of Odesa and ships in Ukrainian territorial waters, the largest container shipping operator, Maersk, has suspended operations at the Black Sea Fish Port and redirected ships to the Romanian port of Constanta. On July 27, Ukraine initiated an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council due to the cessation of ship traffic in the Odesa ports.

In addition, there is a slight increase in the volume of rail traffic of grain and oilseed cargoes, redirected from the Greater Odesa area, to the western railway border crossings (key stations: Chop, Uzhgorod, Mostyska, Rava-Ruska, Yagodin, Batievo, Vadul-Siret) and the Danube ports (Izmail, Reni, Kilia). The early involvement of the Moldovan port of 🇲🇩Giurgiu and the Romanian 🇷🇴Constanta (to which barges can be delivered from the Danube ports) is expected.

In the scheme of increasing rail transportation to the west, large grain storage facilities, located directly at the border stations or within 5-30 km of them, will play a key role, due to the need to transship from the broad gauge (1520 mm) to the European gauge (1435 mm).

However, land routes are not capable of completely replacing sea exports: their combined throughput is estimated at only 1-1.2 million tons per month, compared to the required 5-6 million tons. And this is under the condition that strikes on the railway infrastructure will not increase.

It is clear that the Russian side has finally found a truly sensitive vulnerability of the enemy and its sponsors, and pressure on them needs to be increased. The importance of Ukrainian agricultural products for its European sponsors will increase significantly this season – according to estimates by European industry associations, the June heatwave in Europe led to a loss of almost 9 million tons of grain.

This is why one has to have serious questions about the reality of war, especially when foreign leaders, or national leaders owned by foreign interests are involved. Ukraine can’t possibly win. The people are suffering greatly. And yet the leadership remains as bellicose and belligerent as ever.

And it’s not only Ukraine. Germany should be surrendering now too; its energy costs are skyrocketing and its economy is practically dehydrating. And yet, the so-called “leaders” keep banging on their war drums.

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