“He has opened the doors to the demons of Hell”

Why anyone would still pay any attention to an Obama-voting moron like Walter Russell Mead is well beyond me:

President Obama’s faltering foreign policy has taken another serious hit. It is hard to think of another American president whose foreign policy initiatives failed as badly or as widely as Obama’s. The reconciliation with the Sunni world? The reset with Russia? Stabilizing the Middle East by tilting toward Iran? The Libya invasion? The Syria abstention? The ‘pivot to Asia’ was supposed to be the centerpiece of Obama’s global strategy; instead the waning months of the Obama administration have seen an important U.S. ally pivot toward China in the most public and humiliating way possible.
Duterte clearly thinks that humiliating Obama in this way is a solid career move. He certainly believes that China will support him against the critics at home and abroad who will wring their hands over his shift. He presumably has had some assurances from his Chinese hosts that if he commits his cause to them, they will back him to the hilt.

This points to a broader problem: Obama’s tortuous efforts to balance a commitment to human rights and the niceties of American liberal ideology with a strong policy in defense of basic American security interests have made the world less safe for both human rights and for American security. As the revisionist powers (Russia, China, and Iran) gain ground, foreign leaders feel less and less need to pay attention to American sermons about human rights and the rule of law. Death squads and extra-judicial executions on a large scale: the Americans will lecture you but China will still be your friend. Barrel bombing hospitals in Aleppo? The Russians won’t just back you; they will help you to do it. Obama’s foreign policy is making the world safer for people who despise and trample on the very values that Obama hoped his presidency would advance. His lack of strategic insight and his inability to grasp the dynamics of world power politics have opened the door to a new generation of authoritarian figures in alliance with hostile great powers.

Unintentionally, and with the best of intentions, he has opened the doors to the demons of Hell, and the darkest forces in the human spirit have much greater scope and much more power today than they did when he took the oath of office back in 2009.

Unintentionally? With the best of intentions? Is Mead talking about Obama or himself? Remember, as Mead excoriates Obama’s foreign policy, that he not only voted for Obama, but voted to re-elect him. But it’s not as if Obama’s foreign policy was any better from 2008 to 2012 than it has been from 2012 to 2016.

Moreover, the man quite obviously has learned nothing from his past mistakes. Juxtapose these two phrases from the same article.

  • “Secretary Clinton is well aware of just how damaging the Filipino defection is in Asia; she helped develop the Obama administration’s Asia strategy.”
  • “Should Secretary Clinton make it to the White House, her first and biggest job will be to stop and then reverse the deterioration in America’s global position that her predecessor permitted.”

So, Mead not only voted – twice – for the man who permitted the deterioration in America’s global position, but now advocates voting for the woman who helped develop that failed strategy.

Either Mead is incredibly stupid, or, as with Obama, we need to question whether he serves those very demons to whom the doors of Hell have been opened.

If there is not a Trumpslide on November 8th, there is a very good chance that the USA will find itself at war with a Russo-Chinese alliance. And that is a war that a USA saddled with the incompetent and unwell Hillary Clinton as Commander-in-Chief will almost certainly lose.


The suicidal altruism of Western women

But stupidity always has its consequences. Women’s rights are rapidly proving to be the mortal wounding of the West:

A woman opened her heart and her door to a 12-year-old boy who had fled the horrors of war in Afghanistan after losing his parents – or so she thought. In reality, not only was the boy in her care, Jamal, almost a decade older than she had been duped into believing, but he also had Taliban and child abuse material on his phone.

A dentist’s check found his age to actually be around 21 and a subsequent investigation uncovered the shocking content on his mobile, according to the Sun. She took Jamal to a climbing centre, where he displayed upper body strength far beyond his supposed years and also was able to completely strip a rifle at a shooting range.

While in her care, he shared a room with three children aged between 12 and 14.
Rosie told the paper’s Nigel Bunyan and Chris Pollard: ‘It’s ridiculous how everybody else could see it but not the social workers.’  Although she could not confirm if he was a terrorist, she was adamant he had spent time in a training camp.

She added that his last words to her were ‘I’ll kill you and I know where your children are.’

It probably would be a useful object lesson to the women of the West if he did. Unfortunately, female solipsism is such that too many women would merely scoff at the example, and argue that the object of their virtue-signaling, Abdul, is a wonderful boy who just loves to babysit for her two younger children.

There is a reason why the conquerors of the world either slaughtered the children of their enemies or enslaved them and turned them into slave-warriors. Because children always grow up. All these altruistic idiots are doing is ensuring that the next war between Christendom and the Dar al-Islam and will be fought here rather than there.

And the fact that Christendom is far less fundamentally Christian than the Dar al-Islam is fundamentally Muslim means that the odds are increasing in the latter’s favor. Bringing secularism to a civilizational war is akin to bringing a rubber knife to a gun fight.


Here be Dragon-winners

It has taken us rather longer than we would have liked to get our print process running smoothly, but Castalia House is pleased to announce that two books published earlier this year by our two Dragon Award-winning authors, Mr. John C. Wright and Mr. Nick Cole, are now available in hardcover.


IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY is a deeply complicated tale of romance, mystery, and myth that has proven extremely popular with our readers, as its average 4.8-star rating tends to demonstrate.

The top review, from Richard Green, calls it “a wonderfully creepy, profound, sad and yet uplifting story.”

Wright’s latest is another fantastic and inventive piece from an author whose imaginative faculties boggle the mind. This book is a bit different from his universe-spanning COUNT TO A TRILLION series, and less baroque than SOMEWHITHER. I would compare it more to AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND and even A PARLIAMENT OF BEASTS & BIRDS; it is more intimate, following only three characters over a somewhat limited span of time, but it manages to encompass past, present, and future regardless.


IRON CHAMBER OF MEMORY retails for $24.99 and is available from Amazon or can be ordered through your local bookstore.

The new hardcover from Nick Cole, our other Dragon Award-winning novelist, THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNEW IT, is a war story, a post-apocalyptic zombie tale, and a deeply romantic tale of true love conquering all. It features an ending that is so flawless that, in my opinion, only John C. Wright and Jeff Sutton have ever done it better.

From the top review by J.R. Weaver:


Nearly every page is a gut-punch, whether it’s from the descriptions of a brutal war against the undead that makes World War Z look like a Sunday picnic, or the unvarnished look into the heart of a guy who’s lost everything. The characters are raw and brutal and real. The story is dark and uplifting at the same time. Mr. Cole is a romantic and wears it on his sleeve unashamedly.


THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNEW IT retails for $24.99 and is available from Amazon or can be ordered through your local bookstore.

Both books will also be available in trade paperback later this week. But most serious fans of Castalia’s two Dragons will want to own these case-bound hardcovers. Also, please note that we are aware that the cover images have not yet percolated through Amazon’s system yet, which can take up to 48 hours. And yes, the vagaries of Amazon’s algos have, for reasons completely unbeknownst to us, bestowed a PhD on Mr. Wright. Or, perhaps we should say, Dr. Wright.


Proving the point

Buwaya Puti, a reader who is a Filipino immigrant to the USA, has been insistent about the idea that he is too a real live American, as American as any Anglo-Saxon posterity of the men who fought the American Revolution. And then President Duterte signed a trade deal with China:

Just to clear a point – or three.

The Philippines didn’t invite you over. When Commodore Dewey sailed into Manila Bay, or when the US army sortied out of Manila to fight the Philippine Army in 1899, these were not welcome acts.

Nor was the building of bases. These were accepted as force majeure, that’s all.

The gratitude, properly, should go the other way. You guys dragged us into WWII, while our government did everything it could to keep us out of it. The Japs attacked us simply because you had bases there.

And because we kept on fighting, for you. The Malays, Indonesians, Siamese were not treated with the grotesque savagery we were because we were a loyal ally. And, dragging us into the war, you incompetently failed to keep up your end, providing pathetically insufficient means to keep your enemies away from our population.

You owe us, big time.

You guys = Americans. Us = Filipinos. Every. Single. Time. To repeat: Immigrants are not, and will never be, Americans. No matter how well they know American history and how much they swear they love baseball.

And even their great-grandchildren will still not be as loyal to America as to their own immigrant roots.

UPDATE: In fairness, Buwaya has pointed out that he is not a US citizen, merely an expat Filipino resident in the USA. However, my contention remains that his core loyalties would remain with his nation even if he accepted the US citizenship for which he is presumably eligible.


Truth or social justice?

Jonathan Haidt argues that universities face a choice:

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a kife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?
The harvardmost obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict?

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.  Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.

But they don’t, really. The universities are, by and large, going to have to choose social justice. Truth will never serve any institution that depends upon a partnership with government and the banks to prey upon unsuspecting young people in order to mortgage their futures.


A lesson in Gamma

So, this would have appeared to come out of the blue to everyone on Gab yesterday.

Allen Ayler@PseudoCrusader
@voxday You follow just 32 people. Must be your egotistical self importance.

Vox Day@voxday
Very foolish, Allen. I was going to leave our email exchange private, but I’ll go ahead and publish it on Alpha Game now.

It is a powerful lesson in not permitting Gammas in your project.

As a general rule, I don’t expose people who email me, whether they are readers, critics, or even hatemailers. But sometimes, it is beneficial to do so, in order to provide an object lesson to those who believe that they can behave abusively with impunity, particularly in cases where there is a deeper lesson to be learned. And it’s never a bad thing to remind people, from time to time, that picking a fight with someone whose friends and allies call him “Supreme Dark Lord” is probably not a wise thing to do.

But before you think I am attempting to rationalize a violation of privacy, please be aware that he has publicly requested that I post it: “Please post my email so people can know how full of shit you are.” Also, on Gab: “Post the fucking email you hypocrite self-deluded asshole.”

One of the challenges of running any organization, be it professional or volunteer, is dealing with the quirks of the various members, most of which are based on their socio-sexual status. Alphas are going to have inappropriate affairs, Betas are going to get promoted over their heads, Lambdas are going to talk relentlessly, and inappropriately, about their personal predilections and social lives, Gammas are going to preen, posture, pout, and occasionally sabotage projects and people, Sigmas are going to create the occasional intra-organizational upheaval, for good or ill, and Omegas are going to get themselves accused of sexual harassment.

That’s all normal. You have to expect it as long as you’re going to work with human beings. The key is learning to anticipate the problems and head them off at the pass. Don’t let the Alpha hire a hot secretary, or at the very least, be sure she isn’t married. Keep the Beta in a well-paid supporting position and give him a young subordinate Alpha to help him make decisions. Put the Lambda near the women where he’ll entertain them. Try to steer the Sigma’s idiosyncracies in a direction where he’ll help the organization rather than harm it. Give the Gammas tasks that flatter their egos and keep them far away from any managerial responsibilities. Stash the Omegas where they can’t creep out the women. Keep everybody out of the way of the Deltas who actually do most of the meaningful work.

Anyhow, this exchange took place two days ago. I would have let it go, except the Gamma concerned simply couldn’t resist taking it public. Gammas, as Delta Man has repeatedly pointed out, not only sabotage others, they also tend to sabotage themselves. But I have seldom seen a Gamma sabotage himself so thoroughly as Mr. Ayler managed to do when attempting to volunteer to “help” Infogalactic.

I’m not saying there was anything wrong with his desire to know what was going on. Nor am I defending my failure to respond to him in a timely manner. But, as you’ll see, my initial impression that there was something off about him proved to be correct. In spades.


Pardon Julian Assange!

Mike Cernovich advises Donald Trump how to ensure a Trumpslide on November 8th:

Julian Assange is a political prisoner who should be guaranteed safe passage to and refuge in America. If Trump promises to give Julian Assange a full presidential pardon and refugee status in the United States, Trump wins in a landslide.

The News Cycle Trojan Horse.

The hoaxing media has tried to ignore the corruption exposed on Wikileaks, as it implicates the media and exposes them as PR agents for the DNC. We forced the media to cover Wikileaks through the power of social media, which is why the DNC hacked Twitter today.

Trump’s promising to #PardonJulian will become news. The media will be furious. This is a news cycle.

When we don’t create news cycles, the media creates their own news cycles based on hoaxes. We must always be on the offense. Make the hoaxing media respond to us.

Attack, attack, attack. Audacity, audacity, always audacity!

The Trojan horse aspect is simple. By triggering the media into talking about Trump’s promise to pardon Julian, the media will be forced to talk about Wikileaks even more.

In addition to being a brilliant political maneuver, it would also be the right thing to do. Assange has committed no crimes in the USA.


A skull for the SDL!

A reader on Gab successfully applies the lessons of SJWs Always Lie:

A SJW just resigned in embarrassment after unsuccessfully attacking me at work! Thanks to “SJWs Always Lie” by @voxday, I was able to preempt her by predicting her plan/goals to my colleagues. Her coup attempt was strongly rebuffed by them; after realizing she had no support she left in disgrace.

These days, no one is safe from SJWs. They are a plague upon Western Civilization and one can neither reason with nor negotiate with them. If you haven’t read the book yet, it really is in your best interests to do so. It can observably make the difference between you losing your job in disgrace and your SJW attacker doing so.

Anyhow, I love to see AARs of anti-SJW defenses, particularly the successful ones. But even the unsuccessful ones are informative.


Mailvox: the righteous need no allies

Clearly the reader’s concerns are misguided. After all, America is the exceptional nation and superpowers need no friends.

In the meantime, while the major news networks are getting the vapors over whether Trump said something rude about women eleven years ago and their utter horror at his refusal to promise to be a better loser than Al Gore was in 2000, the President of the Philippines has announced that his country is breaking away from the United States and realigning with China.

That’s right. One of our oldest and best allies in the Pacific Rim has decided to sever ties with the U.S. and ally with China instead. Obama has lost the Philippines.

You’d think someone in the American news industry would take notice. At least, they might pick up on that loud rumbling in Norfolk, Virginia, where General Douglas MacArthur spins like a lathe in his grave.

The American Empire is crumbling, within and without.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced Thursday that he was “separating” from the United States and embracing China as the new best friend of the Philippines. The 71-year-old president, famous for blunt, often profane rhetoric, announced his country’s realignment in a state visit to Beijing, where he was hailed as China’s new “brother.’’

“Your honors, in this venue, I announce my separation from the United States … both in military, but also economics,’’ Duterte said to thunderous applause at a forum inside the Great Hall of the People, the bastion of the Chinese Communist Party. Without the United States, he said addressing the Chinese audience, “I will be dependent on you.”

During the visit, China and the Philippines are signing agreements for $13.5 billion in trade deals. The Philippines also said China had committed itself to $9 billion in low-interest loans. And the Philippines offered to open negotiations with China over disputed fishing waters in the South China Sea, a surprising change of policy given that an international tribunal in The Hague had ruled in July against China’s claim of historical rights to the waters.

Duterte, who took office July 30, had other choice words for the United States during his Beijing visit. He said that “America has lost now” and suggested that he was also eager to cozy up to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow and maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world — China, Philippines and Russia,’’ he said.

On the plus side, at least Obama lowered the seas and healed the nation’s racial scars.


“It cannot be saved”

Fred Reed is correct. The USA cannot and will not be saved. The Mandate of Heaven has been lost. God has, quite rightly, damned America.

Let’s not delude ourselves. America is ruled by the Five Cities, Boston, New York, Washington, Tel Aviv, and Hollywood. The rest of us just pay taxes. The heart of the beast is New York, the Ivies being its nursery and Washington its  storefront.

To a practicing curmudgeon, the presidential contest is amusing but unimportant. Hillary will win, whether she wins or not. She is just the wave front of deep and fast-flowing currents of decay that cannot be stopped. Trump may try, but he cannot succeed. We live in a dying culture and, soon, a diminished country. It cannot be saved.

Not true? Add up the bits and pieces. We laugh in horror, some of us, primarily the older, at the decline of schooling, the courses like Batman and the Struggle for Gender Equity. Comic, yes. Yet in aggregate these constitute an academic and civilizational collapse both profound and irreversible. Enstupidation does not happen in a healthy country. Who even wants to reverse this onrushing night? Not the universities, nor the teachers unions, nor a professoriat gone as daft as the “students,” nor the banks battening on student loans.

It is over. Hillary may start wars in her six months before going into a sanatorium. Trump may build walls. But the rot will go on.

Does that mean you should give up? It depends. You should give up any thoughts of reviving what is already dead; you cannot fix a corpse. But you should not give up on the vision of building something better.

None of this should come as any surprise. You were, after all, warned at least 12 years ago by a certain nationally syndicated WND columnist.

You Can’t Fix a Corpse
July 12, 2004

Tibetan religious tradition has it that when the Dalai Lama dies, the Buddha of Compassion leaves his body and incarnates in the body of a young child. The monks immediately go out in search of this blessed child, and when they find him – as they inevitably do – he is tested by a group of high lamas and enthroned as the reincarnation of his successor.

Imagine, however, if the lamas refused to recognize that the Dalai Lama was, in fact, dead. Suppose that instead of going in search of the Buddha’s new carnal home, they hooked the corpse up to a life support machine and waited patiently for the Holy One to awake and rise up. It’s not hard to see that they would be doomed to disappointment, and furthermore, would fail to find the next Dalai Lama as well.

This is precisely our dilemma today, for America, as envisioned by the Founding Fathers, is dead. By every measure, large and small, the original vision of limited government by, for and of the people has been folded, spindled and mutilated beyond recognition. When one reads the Constitution, one simply marvels at the distinct difference between its words and our present reality.

Our paper Federal Reserve Notes are not Congress-issued gold and silver coins. Our direct taxes are not apportioned. We are entangled in a veritable web of foreign alliances, Congress shamelessly makes laws regarding speech, religion and guns, and the judicial branch has arrogantly assumed for itself unchecked supremacy over the other two branches.

Regardless of whether one see these changes as blasphemous treason against the Constitution, or as reasonable and necessary modifications to what was designed to be a living document that evolves with the times, it is impossible to deny that they have been made. It is likewise impossible to assert that a massive central government possessing eminent domain, owning over a third of the land and claiming more than a third of all income is either limited or small.

For many years, conservatives and other freedom lovers have placed their trust in the Republican Party, hoping that it would fulfill its promises to return America to its national birthright of freedom and individual liberty. Those promises, unsurprisingly, were broken by the party of Abraham Lincoln, who is most famous for converting what had been a voluntary Union of free association into a forced Union by military might.

Any last vestiges of hope in the Republican Party have been shattered by the current regime, wherein a Republican President, Republican House, Republican Senate and Republican-nominated Supreme Court have demonstrated that they have zero interest in the timeless vision of America’s founders. Supporting them in the hopes that they will revive American liberties is akin to hoping that shock paddles will suffice to revive a month-old corpse. American freedom is not only dead, it has been rotting for some time.

There are those who say that a vote for a third-party candidate, such as the Libertarian’s Michael Badnarik or the Constitution Party’s Michael Peroutka, is wasted. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, these are the only votes that are not wasted, for positive change will only come from those outside the corrupt bi-factional system. After all, it was neither the Tories nor the Whigs who fought for American independence.

Like the Tibetan lamas, we must go in search of those in whom the spirit of freedom and liberty burns. The revival of American liberty is still in its infancy, as only 482,451 people voted for the Libertarian and Constitution presidential candidates combined, 0.96 percent of those who voted for the victorious Republican, George W. Bush. But that is 482,395 more people than the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, and as for those who believe our present bipartisan system is eternal, well, tell it to the Whigs.

Or, for that matter, to the optimates and populares of Rome. The choice is simple, if not easy. A revival of liberty or the continued stink of an extinct republic as it decomposes into dictatorial empire.

America is dead. Let us go, then, and find her.