From the Maine to the Maddox

The stage has been set for another Gulf of Tonkin-style incident. Remember, from the USS Maine to the USS Morton, false flags and fake enemy attacks at sea is how the USA customarily justified its foreign wars. The following is from a book about baseball, of all things.

While Ralph Houk and Johnny Keane were carrying out their embarrassing charade [with the New York Yankees], in Washington, DC., President Johnson, running for reelection after finishing John Kennedy’s term, was leading an unsuspecting American public into a devastating war with a charade of his own.

In late September it was reported by the State Department that two American destroyers, the Richard Edward and the Morton, were fired upon by four attacking North Vietnamese gunboats, seemingly all poor shots as no damage to the American ships was reported. The Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, proclaimed, “As sure as the sun sets, we are at war.” The North Vietnamese swore that none of their ships attacked anyone. Johnson, firm, told the American people that the Vietnamese were lying.

The Pentagon had some doubts as to whether the attacks ever did take place, and there was censorship of letters from American seamen on the two ships who tried to write home that they had not been attacked. One sailor, whose letter got through the censorship, wrote that North Vietnamese ships were sighted. We shot at them, the sailor wrote home. “They didn’t shoot at us. Johnson, gearing the country for war, coerced Congress, citing the attack on our ships, into backing his escalation of the fighting in Vietnam.

Before the Tonkin Gulf incident, only 190 U.S. soldiers had been killed. “Before I send American G.I.’s into war,” Johnson said, “I must consider every facet very carefully.” After Johnson’s term, 25,000 American soldiers lay dead in the hostile rice paddies of a devastated country.

In fact, the USA staged not one, but two Gulf of Tonkin incidents in order to justify its war in Vietnam. Two days prior, the USS Maddox had also had a confrontation with North Vietnamese torpedo boats after repeatedly intruding upon Vietnam’s territorial waters in an attempt to provoke the Vietnamese into firing at it.

So don’t fall for whatever naval event is being staged in the eastern Mediterranean in the coming weeks, or the solemn pronouncements about how “we are at war”.

The Pentagon has dispatched a second US Navy carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean in a move that will deliver additional American firepower to the waters near Israel as fears mount that its war with Hamas could worsen and spiral into a regional conflict. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group is moving into the area “as part of our effort to deter hostile actions against Israel or any efforts toward widening this war following Hamas’s attack on Israel,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement on Saturday. The strike group includes the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, and guided-missile destroyers USS Gravely and USS Mason.

UPDATE: A note about the two USN carriers sent to the region from a reader.

Something worth noting about the two carriers sent to Israel. One is the oldest nuclear carrier on the east coast, nearing end of life. The other is the newest carrier, which has been plagued with expensive technical issues. One being sunk would spare the Navy the hassle of decommissioning and defueling down the road. The other being sunk would spare the headache and hassle of trying to fix a badly designed carrier.

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It is a Mystery

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this latest round of the Israeli-Gaza war is that so many Jews in the USA and Europe are observably astonished at the way in which nearly the entire world is supporting the Palestinians despite the vast litany of horrors, both real and fake, that are being repeatedly shoved in the public’s faces by the mainstream media.

It’s as if they’ve forgotten what they’ve quite literally been saying since 1965 1908.

Now, it may be that the time has finally come for Israel to take its chances with alienating the rest of the world. The US military, while degrading rapidly, is still extremely formidable. The mainstream Western media is either wholly-owned or sufficiently leashed. China and Russia are otherwise occupied. Iran is only going to become more formidable over time due to the failure of Clown World and decline of the the imperial dollar. The Arab-Israeli population delta is widening. And the invaded nations of Europe are not going to become more friendly as their Clown-controlled governments are replaced by increasingly hardline nationalists.

But it’s a hard call. I’m not at all surprised that Netanyahu and his IDF generals appear to be hesitating before giving the orders to begin the ethnic cleansing of the northern half of Gaza. For good or for ill, no decision of such magnitude should be made lightly, and despite all the theatrical posturing on the part of both sides, the outcome is highly uncertain and there will be no return from committing to such a horrific and hypocritical path regardless of the provocation.

Despite the probable costs and consequences, the better strategic analysts understand why Netanyahu will probably roll the dice as his final act as Israel’s head of state.

Why now? Why do events seem to be spiraling into such biblical end times territory all over the globe?

For Israel, the answer is simple: they are actually running out of time.

You see, the Arab world is becoming incommensurately stronger every day. Arabs are no longer the weak pawns of the 20th century, to be used at whim by the British Empire, which itself now lies smoldering.

The most important dimension to this is the fact that Israelis are being outbred. Their TFRs cannot compete not only with Palestinians, but with the Arab world at large. Palestinians themselves are now upwards of 5 million in population while Israel only has 9 and a half, only ~7M of which are Jews.

But the bigger issue are Israel’s top historical adversaries. Egypt, for instance, had ~20 something million people during the Arab-Israeli wars of the 60s era. It now sports 110M and is set to be over 200M by 2050-2070. In that same time, Israel is projected to only be 13-16M or so. Even Palestinians will vastly outnumber their Israeli occupiers by then. Furthermore, the U.S./UK/Atlanticist Empire which has been the linchpin holding Israel together is now weakening more than ever before, and Israel will not be able to count on their unflagging support in the future, particularly reading the tea leaves of NATO and EU slowly crumbling—neither of which will likely exist past 2030.

Now Egypt has officially joined the BRICS, its tenure set to start on January 1, 2024. Combine that with a growing Turkey, Palestine, and many other states. The fact is, within another decade or two, Israel will stand no chance at “defending itself”, or rather at illegally bombing all of its neighbors. A future Arab-Israeli war could hypothetically pit 300-500M people against a country of 12-15M.

But more specifically Palestinians themselves are simply out-breeding Israelis and would begin to pose a major problem to Israel’s expansionist plans.

This is why the conflict now has eschatological and biblical dimensions—because Israel sees the writing on the wall, their very future is in critical danger. Only by fulfilling prophecy now, establishing a strong state on the totality of the land, can they hope to thwart the natural tide rising against them.

It also explains the uncharacteristic level of open hypocrisy and hysteria being exhibited by the likes of Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and others in the US media. While I never gave any credence to the idea of Ukraine as “the New Israel”, it increasingly appears there may have been some truth to it after al. But even if it was put down on paper somewhere, that plan appears to be dead in the water courtesy of the Russian special military operation, as is the neoclown plan to move to China. All that appears to leave, at the moment, is the original Zionist program for Greater Israel, updated in the 1990s by the neocons, which suggests that Gaza will be targeted for ethnic cleansing regardless of what the rest of the world thinks or does in response.

World War III began two years ago. I was hoping the Middle East would not be its second front, but it certainly looks like the most probable candidate at the moment. And remember, sooner or later, the Black Rider always throws his human servants from his high horse.

UPDATE: The threatened Gaza invasion is delayed again.

Israel has decided to put off the start of its ground operation against Hamas in Gaza due to adverse weather conditions, the New York Times has claimed. In an article on Saturday the media outlet alleged, citing anonymous Israeli officers, that the “invasion was initially planned for the weekend but was delayed by a few days, at least in part because of weather conditions.” These are so far precluding Israeli pilots and drone operators from providing ground forces with air cover, the NYT explained.

It’s been sunny, with no rain and little wind, all weekend in Israel. The forecast for the coming week is the same. Whatever the real reason for the additional delay, it isn’t the weather.

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YouTube Aims Left

The SJWs who have celebrated every demonetizing and deplatforming over the last nine years are suddenly beginning to realize that they will become targets when they fail to support the current Narrative too.

They thought it would never happen to them, but Reddit is just now waking up to the unbelievable censorship at YouTube that has been going on for the last 7 years.

The English-language Internet is being systematically erased by the Ringmasters of Clown World for the same reason that revolutionaries always declare Zero History. They don’t want to permit any evidence that contradicts or disproves their ever-changing Narrative to survive, and they couldn’t care less if the evidence that does so is of the Left or of the Right.

We live in a post-ideological age. Left and Right never made much sense anyhow, but now it is entirely irrelevant in the WWIII environment. It doesn’t matter what you call yourself, what matters is what you quite literally are. Nation matters. Religion matters.

And that’s about it, as Lee Kwan Yew had already informed us after decades of presiding over a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state.

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Defending the Narrative

Somehow, I doubt the UK police are going to arrest everyone who supports the Palestinians in the UK.

Thousands of pro-Palestine supporters are protesting across major UK cities, as police warned that anyone showing support for Hamas could face arrest.

Crowds holding placards demanding Israel ‘stop bombing Gaza’ have taken to the streets of London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle.

The Met Police said they have deployed more than 1,000 officers to police the London demonstration amid fears of clashes.

There are far more people across the UK and Europe who support the Palestinians than support the Greater Israel project that requires either the ethnic cleansing or the genocide of millions of Arabs. It’s much more balanced in the US, of course, partly because Israeli citizens make up a significant proportion of the government and media there, but more because tens of millions of Christian Boomers believe they’ll be raptured straight to Heaven so long as they fly Israeli flags in their sanctuaries.

Anyhow, the IDF appears to be serious about beginning the ethnic cleansing of the northern part of Gaza and the US is engaging in a minor show of force in order to sufficiently intimidate Iran into staying out of the conflict. But there are so many narratives and so many possible outcomes involved here that it’s impossible at this point to say what is real and what is not, much less how the whole situation is going to play out over time.

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Why You Don’t Sell

Less than five years after founder Aaron Schatz sold the popular Football Outsiders site, it’s dead, done, and dusted.

Football Outsiders was founded in 2003 by Aaron Schatz. What began as his passion project grew into a fully fledged website for advanced football analytics and statistics such as DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average). Football Outsiders went on to strike partnerships with ESPN and became a popular source for hardcore football nerds and casual fans alike. In 2018, Schatz sold Football Outsiders to a company called EdjSports. He stayed on as editor-in-chief, and, according to longtime Football Outsiders writer Mike Tanier, the site continued to operate as normal.

Then, in September 2021, Champion Gaming, co-founded by Simmonds and Hershman, entered the picture. It acquired EdjSports, and Football Outsiders along with it, in late 2021 as part of a “reverse takeover,” a way for private companies to go public quickly without having to go through an Initial Public Offering. As part of the deal, Champion Gaming merged with a shell company called Prime City One Capital. According to a news report from the time, “the group closed a funding round of $3.65 million (CAD $4.62 million), giving it a roughly $12.3 million post-money valuation, and it is on track to begin trading in a few weeks.”

Champion Gaming had ambitions to expand beyond NFL coverage. It struck a licensing deal with Inpredictable, an NBA analytics website run by Mike Beuoy, and partnered with SharpRank, a sports betting resource. The terms and status of these partnerships are unclear; Beuoy and SharpRank did not respond to queries. Champion Gaming also brought on Chris Spagnuolo to oversee content (for a particular microgeneration of sports media consumers, Spagnuolo is best known as the guy who left Barstool Sports after writing a blog calling Rihanna fat), and hired ESPN’s Katie George to be a brand ambassador and create video content. Spagnuolo declined to comment. Defector was not able to reach George for comment.

By the summer after the takeover, changes at the top of the company were underway. In June 2022, Simmonds took over from Hershman as CEO; Wickham took over as CFO; and the company’s president, Chief Innovation Officer, and director all resigned. The company framed the changes as an exciting new chapter. Of Simmonds’s ascent to CEO, Hershman said in a press release, “Given his previous experience as a public markets CEO and his extensive background in online gambling, the board of directors and I determined that his leadership of the Company would be both ideal and appropriate to steer us going forward as we build a leading sports content and data intelligence business.”

But by the fall there were signs that the company was floundering. According to financial documents filed in November 2022, which are publicly available through Sedar, Canada’s securities filing system, the company had little cash flow and was carrying significant debt, especially relative to its revenues. In the first nine months of 2022, Champion Gaming reported $969,789 in revenue and $5,619,803 in losses. (All monetary figures cited in the filings are in CAD.) As of Sept. 30, 2022, the entire company had only $55,776 in cash, with even less coming in. As of the same date, the accounts receivable, meaning revenue the company accrued, but which they still needed to be paid, was only $13,911. On page six of the same filing, the company wrote: “These material uncertainties cast significant doubt as to the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

The company’s main form of cash flow came from issuing equity and borrowing money.

Now, if your sole focus is money, it may make sense to literally sell out. Schatz probably made a nice bit from the initial sale, although he didn’t make the big score that would have resulted from the money guys going public or selling it to a big public corporation would have.

An operation like FO, despite its popularity, never makes all that much money. A million dollars sounds like a lot, but FO probably didn’t do much more than provide a reasonable living to its owners due to the need to pay for all the contract-based content produced. And as usual, the people who practically invented the NFL analytics game are about the only ones not profiting much from it.

“It’s just really disheartening to see this niche, special interest, really passionate sports blog that blossomed into a pretty influential sports analytics company, just get sucked dry so quickly,”

It is always disheartening to see how quickly, and how comprehensively, the financial parasites manage to destroy great little companies. So if you’re doing what you love, if it’s truly a passion, why sell out and run the very high risk of seeing your creation destroyed? For every sell-out that scores big, there are probably ten or more that end up dessicated, defunct, and forgotten. It’s amazing how many organizations that could have continued doing what they were doing almost indefnitely have disappeared as a result of cashing in and cashing out.

That’s one reason why Castalia subscribers need not worry about their source of world-class leather books going away, as long as enough people continue to subscribe to it. I am fully aware of the realities of the merger and acquisition market, which is why I won’t even agree to have “a conversation” with the financial pirates when they “reach out” to see if we’re interested in “exploring mutual opportunities”.

And speaking of Castalia, I would be remiss if I did not point out that CARAVAN OF THE DAMNED, Chuck Dixon’s Conan #2, is back in stock on Amazon.

Anyhow, at the end of the day, a man needs to ask himself: what is my purpose? And also, is money a necessary evil or is it the prime objective?

UPDATE: Caravan has also reached the fulfilment house for those who bought direct. The cover colors look brilliant.

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Import X, Become X

You can call the truth whatever you like. You can utilize rhetoric to make people fear to speak the truth. But none of that will ever change the fact that it is the truth.

Students have accused a Cambridge University professor of racism after he tweeted ‘Import the Arab World, become the Arab World’ in response to footage of pro-Palestinian protesters in London.

Dr James Orr, an academic at the Faculty of Divinity, made the comments on a video showing crowds of demonstrators outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington on Monday – two days after Hamas terrorists attacked Israel.

The footage showed protesters waving Palestinian flags and holding banners in Kensington High Street, where the air was thick with smoke from flares. At one moment it panned to men who were praying on the street.

It is racist for a people to wish to remain a people and retain their language, customs, religion, laws, and culture. That’s literally what the neologism “racism” was coined to describe by the US general who articulated it as part of his personal war on the American Indian, and it is what it has always meant despite repeated attempts to move the goalposts as required for the purposes of rhetorical effectiveness.

The only thing that has changed is that people have been deeply indoctrinated to believe that racism is bad, even that it is a sin. The important thing is to understand that it is not possible to a) prefer to preserve your nation, your language, your customs, your laws, and your religion and b) not be racist.

The sooner people stop running in fear from rhetoric, the better.

The correct response to accusations of racism is a simple question: why do you think racism is bad?

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Agreement Incapable

Iran discovers why neither Russia nor China are interested in talking substantively to the USA or making any deals with it anymore.

Washington has gone back on its promise to unblock $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets even after Tehran released five American citizens accused of espionage against the Islamic Republic.

Under the deal last month, the money was transferred from a South Korean bank to a bank in Qatar, where Tehran could access it under strict monitoring by the US Treasury Department to ensure that the cash is used only for humanitarian purposes.

However, on Thursday, the US and Qatar reportedly reached an “understanding” that Doha will ignore any withdrawal requests from Tehran, according to several officials who spoke to the media on condition of anonymity.

You know, the American Indians could have told them how pointless and self-defeating it is to make any deal with the USA. From 1772 to 1867, the US government signed 374 treaties with American Indian tribes. It broke nearly every single one.

The Russians are right. The USA is agreement-incapable, which is why it is incredibly stupid and short-sighted for any sovereign entity, be it friendly or inimical, to sign any agreement or come to any “understanding” with a representative of the US government.

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