Category: Uncategorized

We’re Number 20

I’m not sure exactly what these lists are supposed to represent, but according to Ron Unz and Similarweb, the popularity of this site has risen four spots, from number 24 to number 20, on his comparative list of 87 alternative media sites.

  1. ZeroHedge
  2. The Epoch Times
  3. National Review
  4. Daily Caller
  5. Infowars
  6. Daily Stormer
  7. Jacobin Magazine
  8. Reason Magazine
  9. The Unz Review
  10. LewRockwell
  11. Unherd
  12. Alternet
  13. Foreign Policy
  14. Moon of Alabama
  15. Conservative Treehouse
  16. Prager U
  17. Lifesite News
  18. The Daily Sceptic
  19. New Republic
  20. VoxDay

While the numbers upon which these rankings are based are an estimate piled on top of a guess added to a surmise, which is to say they are nearly entirely fictional, they are probably more legitimate than any numbers you see for the mainstream media. As Cerno and others have noted, even a massive headline article in a major magazine doesn’t move the needle by any objective metric, whereas a link from one of these sites is almost certain to sell a few books.

It would have been interesting to see where this blog ranked vis-a-vis the other sites before it was ejected from Blogger. As far as I can tell, pageviews dropped to one-quarter of what they were before, but I don’t trust either the Google or the WordPress numbers; other metrics appear to indicate that not much has changed in terms of the size of the community. Certainly there are more people on SG than before, but this blog is not the only conduit, so that’s probably not relevant. Regardless, we’re better off on our own servers.

The one thing that leaped out at me is the way in which many of the straight conservative sites such as American Conservative appear to be losing readers. This makes sense given the worse-than-uselessness of the conservative media and the Republican establishment. I expect next year’s list will be even harder on neocon sites like National Review and Prager U.

Speaking of writing, Castalia is about to publish the print edition of THE ALTAR OF HATE, my collection of non-Selenoth, non-QM short stories. If any established, published authors would be interested in having a look at the stories and writing a forward to it, please shoot me an email and I’ll get a draft epub out to you. I’m not looking for anything hagiographic, much less serious literary criticism, just the general perspective of an experienced and well-read fellow author capable of intelligently discussing the works for the benefit of the casual reader.

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How Doctors Create Customers

If you ever wondered why the learning of history is discouraged, or why Castalia History is so important, this anecdote from Chroniques de Genève by François Bonivard, finished in 1570 but not published until 1831, should suffice to explain it.

When the bubonic plague struck Geneva in 1530, everything was ready. They even opened a whole hospital for the plague victims. With doctors, paramedics and nurses. The traders contributed, the magistrate gave grants every month. The patients always gave money, and if one of them died alone, all the goods went to the hospital.

But then a disaster happened: the plague was dying out, while the subsidies depended on the number of patients. There was no question of right and wrong for the Geneva hospital staff in 1530. If the plague produces money, then the plague is good. And then the doctors got organized.

At first, they just poisoned patients to raise the mortality statistics, but they quickly realized that the statistics didn’t have to be just about mortality, but about mortality from plague. So they began to cut the boils from the bodies of the dead, dry them, grind them in a mortar and give them to other patients as medicine. Then they started dusting clothes, handkerchiefs and garters. But somehow the plague continued to abate. Apparently, the dried buboes didn’t work well. Doctors went into town and spread bubonic powder on door handles at night, selecting those homes where they could then profit. As an eyewitness wrote on these events, “this remained hidden for some time, but the devil is more concerned with increasing the number of sins than with hiding them.”

In short, one of the doctors became so impudent and lazy that he decided not to wander the city at night, but simply threw a bundle of dust into the crowd during the day. The stench rose to the sky and one of the girls, who by a lucky chance had recently come out of that hospital, recognized| what that smell was.

The doctor was tied up and placed in the good hands of competent “craftsmen.” They tried to get as much information from him as possible. However, the execution lasted several days. The ingenious hypocrites were tied to poles on wagons and carried around the city. At each intersection the executioners used red-hot tongs to tear off pieces of meat. They were then taken to the public square, beheaded and quartered, and the pieces were taken to all the districts of Geneva.

The only exception was the hospital director’s son, who did not take part in the trial but blurted out that he knew how to make potions and how to prepare the powder without fear of contamination. He was simply beheaded “to prevent the spread of evil”.

Apparently the Geneva doctors didn’t initially understand that excess mortality statistics would give them away either.

It is said that Bonivard’s work is not well-regarded by historians. I have no doubt that is the case. But that does not mean that it does not provide a faithful and true account of the events it relates. What historians believe to be credible is often a very false and unreliable metric. The abhorrent behavior of the sixteenth-century Geneva doctors is much easier to believe in the immediate aftermath of the Covid pandemic and the mass vaxxassinations of their twenty-first-century counterparts.

And it’s interesting to see how the hospital bureaucrats were in on the murderous Geneva scheme too.

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Spain 1, Lesbianesses 0

Spain won the Women’s World Cup despite its Football Association needing to crush a player revolt by 15 of its top female players by ejecting 12 of them from the national team.

Spain won their first Women’s World Cup final vs. England on Sunday 1-0 but did it without a handful of top players because of an ongoing protest against the Royal Spanish Football Federation.

In September 2022, 15 players sent the federation separate but identical emails asking not to be called up to the national team, citing a lack of professionalism that each player wrote had an “important effect on my emotional state and by extension my health.” They demanded “a clear commitment to a professional project with attention paid to all the aspects needed to get the best performance of this group of players” in the email.

The 15 players were Aitana Bonmati, Mariona Caldentey, Ona Batlle, Patri Guijarro, Mapi Leon, Sandra Panos, Claudia Pina, Lola Gallardo, Ainhoa Moraza, Nerea Eizagirre, Amaiur Sarriegi, Lucia Garcia, Leila Ouahabi, Laia Aleixandri and Andrea Pereira. Three additional players who did not send emails voiced their support for the others: Alexia Putellas, Jennifer Hermoso, and captain Irene Paredes.

According to The Athletic, among the players’ complaints was insufficient preparation for matches, from arriving to host cities too late and traveling by bus when planes would be considered the practical choice. The players also reportedly had issues with several coaches, alleging they were asked them to keep their hotel room doors open until midnight and inspected their bags after they went on excursions during camps. The players never explicitly asked for head coach Jorge Vilda or his coaching staff to be fired, but it was clear the relationship between them was fractured.

Instead of taking the players’ complaints seriously, though, the federation instantly backed Vilda and criticized those who protested. Ana Alvarez, head of women’s soccer at the federation, said that players would need to apologize before they were welcomed back onto the team, and added that “the federation comes first.”

It’s interesting to see how the players revolt – so celebrated in the early stages of the tournament when the team lost 4-0 to Japan in the last round of qualifiers – is being minimized here now that Spain, under the much-vilified Vilda, has won the tournament. Leaving 12 internationals out of the national team in a sport that starts 11 is hardly “a handful”. The media made a lot out of the current players turning their backs on their coach and refusing to celebrate a quarterfinal victory with him, but the observable fact is that there is no way the Spanish team, which had never even reached the quarterfinals before, would have won the World Cup without him.

Female teams are particularly fragile and are much given to self-destructive drama. I doubt it is an accident that Vilda didn’t select 12 of the 15 who initially declared themselves unavailable, as they were troublemakers and drama queens. And it was impressive that he didn’t hesitate to sit down the #1 goalkeeper when she wasn’t playing well, and that he left his star player, arguably the best in the world, on the bench for most of the tournament because she wasn’t 100-percent recovered from injury. Whether they like him or not, his players went on to dominate an English team full of the very sort of troublemakers and drama queens that he ejected from the squad.

A lot of NFL players don’t like Bill Belichick either. But there is no denying he gets the most out of them. Or that he wins championships.

It’s a bit amusing to see some of the bigger names who were left out whining about how they didn’t get the chance to win a World Cup. “What saddens me the most is that I really have to miss out on something when I could have earned it and contributed. It’s a shame.” But it’s not a shame, you didn’t earn it, you didn’t have to miss out, and your contributions were obviously unnecessary.

The lesson of the unexpected Spanish triumph at the Woman’s World Cup is this: the players are never bigger than the team.

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Republicans for Human Sacrifice

The neoclowns couldn’t care less how many Ukrainians are dying for what they call “democracy”. They need more blood for the Blood God!

Bill Kristol and other prominent neoconservatives are launching a $2 million ad campaign to urge Republicans to continue backing aid for Ukraine.

Defending Democracy Together, led by Kristol and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, launched Republicans for Ukraine to boost Republican support for Ukraine. The ad campaign precedes what will be a contentious fight over President Joe Biden’s $24 billion request for aid for Ukraine.

The ads will appear online, on billboards, and on television, including the first Republican debate on August 23.

I never imagined that the neoconservatives were actually more evil than the communists they opposed, especially since their opposition to communism was the only reason they were “Republicans” instead of Democrats in the first place.

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A Giant of the Internet is Gone

Cheems, one of the most famous dogs on the internet, is dead after a battle with cancer. The viral meme dog died Friday during a surgical procedure according to his owners, who say he fell asleep during surgery and never woke up. Cheems shot to fame way back in 2017 when an awkward photo of him went viral, sparking a meme that is still shared to this day.

May he sleep well in the bosom of Harambe.

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Don’t Make it Harder

At least, not any harder than it’s going to be. Karl Denninger, a genuine American hero who saved more lives than anyone else I’ve ever known, warns those under 40 that they’ve never seen the sort of economic challenges that are heading their way:

You’ve never seen tough.

I mean it.

No, 2000 wasn’t tough.

No, 2008 wasn’t tough.

If you’re 33 now you were ten in 2000. If you’re 40 now you were barely an adult in 2000 and not even born or beyond infancy in the last “actual tough” — the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I thought that what we face now was likely coming in 2008. I was wrong. People managed to “kick the can” another time, but in doing so we made it a lot worse. What we had to absorb then was about a late 1970s / early 1980s problem. What we did was greatly increase the seriousness of the damage by deferring it for another 10 or so years, and then we wildly added to that when the virus showed up. Maybe the pandemic response was in some part an intentional attempt to evade taking the economic medicine then and maybe not, but whatever the case may be you can’t go backwards and thus here we are.

What’s coming is going to be worse than the late 1970s or early 80s. It is inescapable. Continuing to try to put it off will simply compound it more and increase the risk that we lose our society entirely. Jerome Powell, chair of The Fed, knows this which is why those who believe he will cut rates “soon” are wrong; he’s not stupid and he is fully aware of what has happened in other nations that kept playing this game one too many times, with no way to know in advance when the next time is “one too many.”

An utterly huge percentage of people I grew up with, who were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, are dead. They’re not dead because of a virus, or just natural “stuff” — they’re dead because they slowly killed themselves, usually with drugs or alcohol. This includes someone in my immediate family and a several more within my growing-up social circle — including people I was extremely unhappy to have to cut loose.

That’s significant because typically other than through accidents or violence (e.g. car wrecks and homicide) statistically nobody dies once you get out of childhood until you get into your late 50s or 60s and the diseases of older age start to catch up with your poor lifestyle or just bad luck and genetics. Yeah, there are exceptions — but not many.

You don’t want that to happen to you as it often comes with years of disability first and there’s still time — if you act now.

Hard times are coming folks.

Now, before the younger generation’s dismiss Denninger’s warning as the customary Boomer dramatics about walking uphill to school both ways in the snow, what he is talking about here is not the way in which the new normal is more difficult than the old normal. Yes, it’s much harder to get ahead now, it’s much harder get a college degree, to get a good job, or to afford a middle-class lifestyle, and the economic mean has observably declined steadily since real wages peaked in 1973.

He’s not talking about the current normal. What he’s talking about is genuine economic crisis, when people who own homes can’t keep them, when there are no jobs of any kind to be found, and when interest rates are not only in the double-digits, but the teens, so any kind of financing for anything is completely unaffordable.

Remember, we didn’t see actual credit deflation after 2008, but mere credit disinflation.

The point that he’s making is that since times are going to be difficult, don’t make them more difficult for yourself and your family by making stupid and short-sighted decisions, because the consequences are likely to be considerably more serious and long-lasting than the average young individual can reasonably imagine.

I’ve seen the casualties among my friends and family too. So be smarter than we were. Be better than we were. Because the one thing, perhaps the only thing, that you have going for you is that the GenXers are providing you with the sort of advice that we should have gotten, but for the most part didn’t get, from our predecessors.

So if you can avoid wasting the decade or so that most of us did, you might actually wind up ahead of the game in the end.

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The Opening of the African Front

It’s not a true world war until there is fighting on at least three continents. It appears the African Front will be opening hostilities soon.

The military chiefs of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have decided on a date for sending troops into Niger, the bloc’s commissioner for political affairs, peace and security, Abdel-Fatau Musah, said on Friday.

“We are ready to go anytime the order is given,” Musah told reporters after a two-day meeting of the bloc’s Committee of Chiefs of Defense Staff in Accra, Ghana. “The D-day is also decided. We’ve already agreed and fine-tuned what will be required for the intervention. Let no one be in doubt that if everything else fails, the valiant forces of West Africa, both the military and the civilian components, are ready to answer to the call of duty,” Musah said.

Niger has accused ECOWAS of acting as the proxy of France, the country’s former colonial ruler. Speaking on Friday, Musah insisted that the bloc is a “rules-based organization,” ready to intervene alone or with support of “other democracy-loving partners.”

According to the French broadcaster RFI, the bloc is mustering about 25,000 troops, mostly from Nigeria and Senegal.

Niger’s neighbors set ‘D-Day’ for intervention, RUSSIA TODAY, 18 August 2023

It’s interesting to see how the servants of Clown World all use the exact same zaubersprache. Everything now is “rules-based” and “democracy” despite the observable fact that Clown World never obeys any rules and is openly anti-democratic. All you need to determine who the bad guys are in any situation is to see who a) supports the Clown World Narrative or b) uses Clown World’s terminology.

Now that the US proxies are preparing for battle, the US is getting its own troops out of harms way. It’s one thing to have one’s proxies roundly defeated by mercenary light infantry, it’s another to have one’s regulars openly humiliated by them. Regardless of whether or not the US Army and Marine Corps can successfully take on Wagner and the Chechens, much less the Russian regulars, it’s in the interest of the US to maintain the illusion of military supremacy as long as it can.

That suggests the US will not commit its own troops to battle anywhere unless and until it cannot find any European, African, or Asian proxies to fight in their staid. Believe it or not, Clown World’s war plan for Asia actually involves trying to recruit Vietnam to fight China. Because it is already apparent that Japan, South Korea, and The Philippines alone are not going to suffice.

Planning is underway for a possible U.S. military evacuation from Niger, even though a top U.S. general says any final decision is still “weeks away.” The commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and U.S. Air Forces Africa told reporters Friday his headquarters is preparing for a range of scenarios that could force some 1,100 U.S. troops to abandon two airbases that have been critical to U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

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