In remembrance

In remembrance of Jerry Eugene Pournelle

I have been asked today to say his eulogy. From the Greek, as he would tell us, meaning true words, spoken in praise of the dead. And as the eldest of his children, presumed by age to know the most about his life, that duty falls to me.

But how is it possible to write truth in praise of a master of fiction? How is it possible to eulogize a man who rose to public acclaim while I was mostly away? Away to school, away to the Army, away to university, away to build my own career?

I cannot say truth about the personality—the public figure, known far better to many of you here than to me. I can only do my best to say truth about the person; about the man. About what I know to be true about the son, the husband, the father, the grandfather—and the loyalist of friends, to those fortunate to know him as a friend.

I begin with what we all know of him: his insatiable intellectual appetite. His breadth of subject was literally encyclopedic: as a child, alone on the farm, his parents away working, he entertained himself by reading the Britannica from A to Z. That reading foreshadowed an essential, but surprisingly inobvious, core trait of his character: iron discipline. Not imposed on others, but imposed on himself. The chaos we all observed around him, immortalized in the household epithet “Chaos Manor,” was actually symptomatic: the result of him making everything—absolutely everything—secondary to being done.

He quite openly expressed this sense of discipline about his writing: writing, he often said, was work. It was not difficult: you merely sat in front of a typewriter until beads of blood popped out on your forehead. Yet he did it, time and again: dozens of novels and anthologies authored and co-authored—eight of them bestsellers. Hundreds of columns, delivered weekly, on time, over decades.

But both his joking aphorism and prodigious output belie the other disciplines that lay behind them. First, his disciplined reading. He read voraciously. He read everything, on every subject. His walls at home are literally lined with enough books to fill a small library—and those are only the ones he kept. Thousands more no doubt fill others’ shelves today, donated to book sales or simply given away. And that’s the books: the breadth of periodicals, online and in print, is staggering.

Read the rest at Chaos Manor.

I only met Jerry Pournelle once, in my early 20s, at a computer trade show, possibly Comdex. It was a brief encounter, I merely shook his hand, told him that I enjoyed his Byte column and was a big fan of his There Will Be War series. There is no chance he would have remembered it.

But he was, and is, one of my few intellectual heroes. Like Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Guy de Maupassant, and Umberto Eco, I encountered his works at a key nexus in my life and they left an impression on me that has lasted until this day.

Just create. Just do it.

Davis Aurini commends those who go out and create rather than sit around and complain:

Rather than trying to distribute the ideas – and handing them over to the Obsessives and Extremists who turn them into a farce – we need to own them.  We need to implement them.

We must go out there and create.

Roosh V took this theory, and put together a series of books which explained it’s application to his audience.  He wasn’t lecturing about theory – he was writing about practice.  He created something useful and marketable, a solid base which he owned.  This expanded into his forum, a community which has taken on a life of its own.  It is worth noting that the RVF exists for its own sake, not as a counter-reaction against an ideological opponent.  While feminists are frequently ridiculed on its pages, those who comprise the membership would be just as happy if there were no feminists to oppose.  RVF members don’t derive their identity from being anti-X – their identity comes from their individual accomplishments, and they frequent the forum for the sake of intellectual debate, entertainment, and networking.  Any political actions which derive from this shared identity will be as organic as the community-group that participates in local politics.

Another prominent example of the Red Pill in application is Vox Day’s various endeavours.  Of note are Castalia House and InfoGalactic.  Upon realizing that the publishing industry and Wikipedia had been taken over by far-left interest groups who eschewed objective truth and good fiction in favour of ideological nepotism, he didn’t go on a quest to ‘raise awareness’ of the problem; instead, he saw an opportunity for action.  While both of these projects are still finding their footing, by all accounts InfoGalactic is not only providing unbiased information, it’s providing it at a superior level to the equivalent articles on Wikipedia.   Castalia House, meanwhile, is free to pick up the talented authors who are being ignored by the mainstream publishers due to their race or sex.

The truth is that the SJWs are creating more opportunities for us than we can reasonably pursue. The trick is to identify the institutional weakness and hit it hard. For example, one thing I’ve learned about the comic industry is that the artists are often not paid royalties, just a flat per-page rate. So, one thing we are going to do to ensure that we eventually secure the best talent over time is, in addition to the flat fee, pay royalties for an extended period of time on our comic book sales, just as we do on our regular book sales.

You can’t start at the top, but you can come up with a plan to get there eventually. The Castalia House team goes over every print book carefully; if you compare our earliest print editions to the latest ones, you can see that we’re continually trying to improve the product. Creation is a dynamic process, and so the more you focus on improvement, the more you will gradually improve, until one day people suddenly blink and say, “Hey, you know, that’s actually rather good.”

Ever notice that no one calls Castalia House my vanity publishing house any more? I never had to say one single word to convince people otherwise. We just keep working on improving our offerings, one ebook or print edition or audiobook at a time. (I’ve always said that we’ll know that Castalia, or Infogalactic, is truly successful when the SJWs start denying that I had anything to do with it.) There is no magic plan for success and no easy path. You simply have to choose your path and walk it as tirelessly as you can.

Speaking of Castalia House, it turns out that today is a dual-release day. THE LAST WITCHKING & OTHER STORIES is now available on Amazon and Audible. Narrated by Jeremy Daw, our wonderful new narrator, it is 9 hours and 13 minutes of epic fantasy set in Selenoth. It includes “The Wardog’s Coin”, “Qalabi Dawn”, and “A Magic Broken” as well as the three stories from the ebook edition, “The Last Witchking”, “The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro”, and “Opera Vita Aeterna”.

The next Selenoth audiobook will be Summa Elvetica & Other Stories, which will also be narrated by Jeremy Daw.

Trump nails down Pennsylvania for 2020

The only Steeler to stand for the national anthem, Alejandro Villanueva, a former US Army Ranger.

Alejandro Villanueva was the lone Pittsburgh Steelers player who appeared on the pitch and sang while the rest of his team remained in the locker room as part of a silent protest that’s sweeping the country’s football pitches. The player, who has served in Afghanistan, has become a simple of patriotism — and now sales of his jersey have gone through the roof. It jumped the Steelers jersey sellers league on Fanatics.com, and now stands at one of the top sellers for the entire league, behind Carson Wentz and Aaron Rodgers.

This will not end well for the NFL. It’s going to be very interesting to see how the Week 3 TV ratings play out. Based on the hints from things such as Villanueva’s jersey sales, I would guess we’ll see a decline of 20 percent or more.

The Right rises

As I have been saying for several years, the rise of the Nationalist Right around the world is absolutely and utterly inevitable. Communism has failed. The Neo-Liberal Global Order has failed. Multiculturalism has failed. Diversity is a curse, not a blessing or a strength. Immigration is war.

The only promise of order and civilization is now with the Right, not the moderate conservative Right of the Conservative Party and the Republican Party and the Christian Democrats, but the Alternative Right of Alternativ fur Deutschland, the True Finns, Jobbik, the Sweden Democrats, the Front National, the Swiss People’s Party, Brexit, and, to a certain extent, Donald Trump. They are collectively the real AltRight, the genuine alternative, the true Right.

Chancellor Angela Merkel clinched a fourth term in Germany’s election Sunday, but her victory was clouded by the entry into parliament of the hard-right AfD in the best showing for a nationalist force since World War II.

Merkel, who after 12 years in power held a double-digit lead for most of the campaign, scored around 33 percent of the vote with her conservative Christian Union (CDU/CSU) bloc, according to preliminary results. It was their worst score since 1949.

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Its nearest rivals, the Social Democrats and their candidate Martin Schulz, came in a distant second, with a post-war record low of 21 percent.

But in a bombshell for the German establishment, the anti-Islam, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) captured around 13 percent, catapulting it to become the country’s third biggest political force.

Commentators called the AfD’s strong performance a “watershed moment” in the history of the German republic. The top-selling Bild daily spoke of a “political earthquake”.

As I have repeatedly written, the chief ideological divide is no longer Left versus Right, but globalist versus nationalist. And by nationalist, I most certainly do not include pan-white, transnational imperialists. There is no longer any intellectual space for the soft globalism of pan-ethnic imperialism, which in both theory and practice serves the globalist interests.

THERE WILL BE WAR Volume VII

THERE WILL BE WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It featured some of the greatest military science fiction ever published, such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I, Joel Rosenberg’s “Cincinnatus” in Volume II, and Arthur C. Clarke’s “Hide and Seek” in Volume III . Many science fiction greats were featured in the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg, Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova.

33 years later, Castalia House has joined with Dr. Jerry Pournelle to make this classic science fiction series available to the public again. THERE WILL BE WAR is a treasure trove of science fiction and history that will educate and amaze new readers while reminding old ones how much the world has changed over the last three decades. Most of the stories, like war itself, remain entirely relevant today.

THERE WILL BE WAR Volume VII is edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr, and features 20 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note are “The Tank Lords” by David Drake, “Test for Tyrants” by Edward P. Hughes, “The Last Article” by Harry Turtledove, “Remember the Alamo” by T.R. Fehrenbach, and “Consequences” by Walter Jon Williams.

It was Jerry’s wish to not only revive the series, but bring all of the old editions back in print so they could be read by the two generations of younger readers who only had access to the old ones through used bookstores. It’s one of my regrets that Jerry did not live to see Castalia House get the entire series back into print, but I take some solace in the fact that he did see us get most of them out again and he knew we would complete the task with which he charged us.

With today’s release of Volume VII, we have only one to go to finish the series, and we anticipate doing so in October.

Calling out the Pope

Although they stop short of calling him a heretic, a group of faithful Catholics are calling out the Holy Father and issuing “a filial correction” to the him.

A group of clergy and lay scholars from around the world have taken the very rare step of presenting Pope Francis with a formal filial correction, accusing him of propagating heresies concerning marriage, the moral life, and reception of the sacraments.

Entitled Correctio filialis de haeresibus propagatis, meaning ‘A Filial Correction Concerning the Propagation of Heresies,’ the 25 page letter was delivered to the Holy Father at his Santa Marta residence on Aug. 11.

The Pope has so far not responded to the initiative, whose 62 signatories include the German intellectual Martin Mosebach, former president of the Vatican Bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, and the superior general of the Society of St. Pius X, Bishop Bernard Fellay (he learned of the document only after it had been delivered to the Pope and signed it on behalf of the Society).

The letter begins by saying that with “profound grief but moved by fidelity to our Lord Jesus Christ, by love for the Church and for the papacy, and by filial devotion toward yourself” the signatories feel “compelled” to take this action “on account of the propagation of heresies.”

They cite in particular Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family, Amoris Laetitia, and “other words, deeds and omissions.”

They accuse the Pope of upholding seven heretical positions about “marriage, the moral life, and the reception of the sacraments” which, they say, has “caused these heretical opinions to spread in the Catholic Church.”

The clergy and scholars “respectfully insist” that Pope Francis condemn the heresies that he has directly or indirectly upheld, and that he teach the truth of the Catholic faith in its integrity.

The filial correction, the first to be made of a reigning Pontiff since Pope John XXII was admonished in 1333, is divided into three main parts.

In the first, the signatories say they have the “right and duty” to issue such a correction. They make clear the doctrine of papal infallibility has not been contradicted as the Pope has not promulgated heretical opinions as dogmatic teachings of the Church, but they maintain that Francis has “upheld and propagated heretical opinions by various direct and indirect means.”

The second part deals with the correction itself. Written in Latin, it lists the passages of Amoris Laetitia in which, they argue, the Pope insinuates or encourages heretical positions. They mention those who claim these texts can be interpreted in an orthodox way, but the correction lists examples of when it is clear “beyond reasonable doubt” that the Pope “wishes Catholics to interpret these passages in a way that is, in fact, heretical.” In particular, they say the Pope has advocated the belief that obedience to God’s moral law can be impossible or undesirable, and that Catholics should sometimes accept adultery as compatible with being a follower of Christ.

In the third part, the signatories highlight two causes of this crisis: modernism and the influence of Martin Luther. They argue that the embrace of modernism, which they define as the belief that God has not delivered definite truths to the Church which she must continue to teach in exactly the same sense until the end of time, means that faith and morals become “provisional and subject to revision.” Such thinking, they point out, was condemned by Pope St Pius X. Regarding Martin Luther, they show how some of the Pope’s ideas on marriage, divorce, forgiveness, and divine law correspond to those of the German Reformation monk, and draw attention to the “explicit and unprecedented praise” the Pope has given the 16th century heresiarch.

I don’t pay much attention to Catholic theology or politics, but I will say that the Church has survived worse popes and worse leaders, so I expect it will survive this one too. That being said, I think Catholics would be wise to purge their SJWs and throw out all of the changes since Vatican II. It’s been pretty much straight downhill since that pernicious council took place.

SJWADD excerpt

Unearthed this beautiful example of an SJW tactic just today. Watching SJWs attempt to babble incoherently about logic is rather like watching monkeys chewing the covers off of books and bragging how they’ve totally got this “reading” thing down.

Andrew Flick‏ @AndrewFlick87
So many logical fallacies here.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Name them. Specifically. Is it Ambiguity, Amphiboly, Combination, Division… wait, is it Accent?

Andrew Flick‏ @AndrewFlick87
Btw False equivalence is a logical fallacy in which two opposing arguments appear to be logically equivalent when they are not.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Yes, but that does not apply here. Where does the equivalence fail? Moreover, you said there were “so many” logical fallacies. How many, 8?

Andrew Flick‏ @AndrewFlick87
Promoting hate speech and promoting upholding of civil rights are not equivalent. Also, suck a big fat cock and choke on it. Have a nice day

And… flounce! Perfect. Absolutely perfect. There is plenty of this sort of thing, and more, in the forthcoming SJWs Always Double Down.

Voxiversity update

First of all, thanks very much to everyone who is backing Voxiversity. It is much appreciated and we are genuinely stoked about what you have made possible.

Second, I am still in the process of acquiring the required equipment, which is not quite as accessible here as one might like it to be. I have the Lavalier microphone, which works well, but I need a little adapter in order to get the better quality that will entail from going through the FocusRite amplifier I already have instead of going directly into the PC’s mic-in input. The light is ordered and is en route, but we’re still trying to find a place that can provide the stand and diffusor.

None of this is a pressing problem, however, as my producer is presently occupied with finishing the video for Alt⭐️Hero, which I can already testify is awesome and more Professional Comics in appearance than I was expecting. Note to self: we’re going to need a Castalia House Comics logo. Or is that Castalia Comics? We’ll figure it out later. While we’re getting set up for Voxiversity 001: Immigration and War, he’s going to release a few more one-minute trailers akin to Know Thyself, in part because they’ve proven to be popular, but also because it is an ideal way for us to experiment with different ideas before getting in too deep to something that doesn’t work.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to do Darkstreams, including tonight’s on the NFL protests, and I’ll also be doing an interview with Cernovich Media tomorrow on the subject. But mostly, I’ll be finishing SJWADD, which comes out in 15 days. Once that is out, I’ll be focusing on Voxiversity and on getting the extended edition of A Sea of Skulls out in time for Christmas. I can also promise that we will be completing Jerry Pournelle’s There Will Be War series this year, with Volumes VII and VIII being released this fall.

NFL Week Three

Not a lot to say, except I’m not watching this week. The players understand this is about the cultural war. So does the President. I’m not sure what percentage of the NFL-watching public does, but it does appear to be statistically significant if Twitter is any guide.

This sort of calculated and specific disrespect is not incidental. It is intentional. Apparently all the Steelers but one boycotted the anthem. Yes, it’s just symbolism, but symbolism matters. The Right used to understand this. Bud Grant’s Vikings used to practice standing for the national anthem.

American football stars drop to their knees during national anthem at Wembley in protest defying Donald Trump after he said sportsman who ‘disrespect America’ should be SACKED. Players from Jacksonville Jaguars and the Baltimore Ravens dropped to their knees as national anthem played. No players were kneeling during the playing of ‘God Save The Queen’, which followed the US national anthem. 

Regardless, discuss either the protests or the weekend action, as you see fit.

How awesome would it be if Steelers owner Art Rooney released his entire team tomorrow, except for Alejandro Villanueva? Talk about making a statement! They could go winless for the next three years, and they’d still wind up ahead on the merchandise sales alone.

Skol Vikings! I am reliably informed that Minnesota Vikings are the only team to not have a single player kneel for the anthem thus far. The legacy of Bud Grant remains strong.