Reading List 2019

Five Stars
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. I, Charles Oman
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. II, Charles Oman
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. III, Charles Oman
A History of the Peninsular War, Vol. IV, Charles Oman
1Q84, Haruki Murakami
The Seville Communion, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu

Four Stars
Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami
Wellington’s Army, Charles Oman
Warwick the Kingmaker, Charles Oman
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
A Hymn to Old Age, Hermann Hesse
In the Beginning Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Count Zero, William Gibson
Mona Lisa Overdrive, William Gibson
Zero History, William Gibson
The Master of Go, Yusanari Kawabata
What We Become, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Nautical Chart, Arturo Perez-Reverte

Three Stars
Klingsor’s Last Summer, Hermann Hesse
Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe
A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe
A History of England, Charles Oman
Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
The Jews, Hillair Belloc
Captain Alatriste, Arturo Perez-Reverte
Purity of Blood, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Sun Over Breda, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The King’s Gold, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet, Arturo Perez-Reverte
The Children of Hurin, JRR Tolkien

Two Stars
Fall, or, Dodge in Hell, Neal Stephenson
The Trojan Mouse, Sam Lively
The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe
From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe

One Star
The Right Side of History, Ben Shapiro
House of the Sleeping Beauties, Yusanari Kawabata

If you’re interested in a discussion of these books and why I rated them the way I did, you can watch it on Unauthorized if you are a subscriber there.

Terry Pratchett knew the Gamma

From his very good NIGHT WATCH:

“You couldn’t trust either of them. But they hated Keel with that gnawing, nerve-sapping hatred that only the mediocre can really bring to bear, and that was useful.”

Novelists are, first and foremost, observers of human behavior. This is why one can clearly see Gammas described and portrayed, though obviously not identified as such, throughout the literature of cultures that range from Heian Japan to modern America.

What happened to “our greatest ally”?

If Israel is a good and faithful ally to the United States, why is it reportedly hiding an alleged pedophile and child rapist from the FBI?

An explosive new report has asserted that deceased sex criminal Jeffery Epstein and his alleged ‘madame’ Ghislaine Maxwell were foreign intelligence ‘assets’, and that she is currently hiding in a safehouse in Israel.

‘Ghislaine is protected. She and Jeffrey were assets of sorts for multiple foreign governments. They would trade information about the powerful people caught in his net — caught at Epstein’s house,’ a unnamed source told Page Six.

Maxwell, 58, has been accused in lawsuits of procuring underage girls for Epstein to sexually traffick among his wealthy and powerful friends, and is reportedly the subject of an ongoing FBI probe…. ‘She is not in the US, she moves around. She is sometimes in the UK, but most often in other countries, such as Israel, where her powerful contacts have provided her with safe houses and protection,’ the source said. 

If the report is true, it would appear to directly contradict that whole “greatest ally” narrative. And, of course, raise the question why any nation would want to offer safe harbor to a sex trafficker. Now, perhaps the report is not true. One would hope it is not. But given its potential significance, it does need to be addressed in a transparent and forthright manner by the Israeli government.

Traffic report 2019

If 2018 was an unusually challenging year, 2019 was a year of almost non-stop crushing by the Evil Legion of Evil and the extended blog community. Like the previous year, it was full of deplatformings and bannings, disruptions and disqualifications. Unlike the previous year, it also saw the Legion striking back with a vengeance, including a resolution of the Indiegogo deplatforming and a multi-pronged replatforming campaign on behalf of the Big Bear and others directed at Patreon that is still in process.

And while 2019 unfortunately did not see the publication of A Sea of Skulls, it was witness to the creation of Castalia Deluxe and a stupendously successful campaign to bring the Junior Classics back into print. The Castalia crew also managed to get the 31+ hour audiobook for A Throne of Bones out, which was unexpectedly successful as more audiobooks were sold in five months than the ebook and print editions combined had sold in five years. And 2019 also saw the long-delayed publication of Corporate Cancer, which despite its short length was two years in the making.

In 2019, Vox Popoli had 32,757,068 Google pageviews. The blog is now running at an average rate of 89,745 daily pageviews, up a modest 1.5 percent from an average 88,384 last year. The running annual pageview totals are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757
2009: 4,414,801
2010: 4,827,183
2011: 5,422,628
2012: 6,098,774
2013: 9,340,663
2014: 11,236,085
2015: 16,211,875
2016: 25,817,343
2017: 31,216,357
2018: 32,260,094
2019: 32,757,068

I mentioned that readers should look for further advances on the video front in 2019, but I had absolutely no inkling of the massive enthusiasm that would greet the establishment of Unauthorized.TV. What started as a backup plan in the event of a possible YouTube deplatforming has somehow been transformed into one of the more significant activities in which we are involved. Unauthorized ended the year with 15,032 registered users while the Darkstream closed out 2019 with 33,484 subscribers and 698 channel members. And then, of course, there is the smashing success of the Rebel’s Run fundraising, about which you will no doubt hear considerably more in 2020, as well as SocialGalactic 2.0.

Thanks to everyone who continues to read VP and to everyone who supports one or more of the various penumbras that have emanated from it. Thanks especially to the Infogalactic Burn Unit, the Alt★Hero backers, the Castalia authors and volunteers, the Brainstorm crew (about which more in 2020), the Unauthorized subscribers, the Reprehensibles, the Replatformers, and the Arkhaven team, all of whom have come together in a spirit of creative cooperation to make these various projects viable. Your participation in these things is invaluable and very much appreciated, regardless of what form it takes. 2019 was a fantastic year. 2020 is going to be epic.

Sadly, due to the capitulation of John Scalzi, who apparently has given up posting no longer posts his blog traffic numbers, the comparison of VP’s annual traffic to that of the Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction is no longer possible. Sometimes victory is bittersweet.

Regardless, the ride never ends.

UPDATE: I am informed me that there were also 625,200 downloads of the podcast derived from the Darkstream in 2019, which was up from 500 downloads in 2018. I am skeptical that we can maintain that rate of growth in 2020, but then, you never know.

Mailvox: confidence and courage

The Dread Ilk are not intimidated by the challenges to come in 2020. A reader writes about the implications of Christian nationalists becoming the strong horse again.

American Thinker had a piece a couple days ago that it is Donald J. Trump’s election to lose in November at this point.

The hysteria of the past three years is almost indescribable. The meltdown by liberals, leftists, progressives, and cultural Marxists has been been both irritating and entertaining. Their inability to deal with reality has been sobering to watch. I have had a few friendships that ended since 2016 due to my inability to think progressive in our now bifurcated society.

A thought did come to me. In the likely event that DJT is reelected, will this shock some left of center to reality? People by nature back the strong horse. This is how Islam and later socialism and communism have spread. As you have pointed out, Conservatism Inc. has failed to conserve anything. People decide see weakness and therefore lack of faith in the beliefs of the so-called conservatives. An average person wants to be on the winning team.

You have the end of eight years of the Obama centrally-directed economy with growth close to zero. At some point, jobs and hopefully general prosperity will sink into most except the most muddle headed millennial skull. As the dissonance between indoctrination vs. reality becomes more apparent, will we see a cultural shift?

Holding steadfast to beliefs, acting on them, punctuated with intermittent acts of boldness rolling back Obama’s legacy and cultural Marxism in general over eight years should cause a fair portion to jump ship and move back into the ranks of Western Civilization. All it takes is courage.

Courage, confidence, and a crusading faith in Jesus Christ is how we will move forward into 2020 and beyond. Deus vult!

Corporate America took the ticket

Not that most of it hadn’t already done so, but it’s useful to understand that much of what is publicly considered to be “success” in the United States has nothing to do with competition in the marketplace, but rather, secret government funding:

By midway through the Obama administration, the CIA and FBI were creating “extensive digital legends with increasing sophistication,” as one former senior official puts it, with cooperation from key government agencies like the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services and the IRS.

U.S. intelligence agencies also work with “friendly digital companies,” like commercially available ancestry databases, to alter personally identifying information, say former officials, and also backdate work histories. Concerned about digital leakage, and cognizant of the need to strictly quarantine deep-cover intelligence officials from their organizations, U.S. officials have adopted a strategy of “eclipsing” these individuals slowly into their cover identities before they are allowed to undertake their missions.

The CIA and FBI both concluded that every person connected to these organizations’ “black side” undercover programs had to be completely sealed off from the rest of their colleagues, say former officials. This firewall is an immensely complex undertaking in a world where electronic emissions from a single cellphone traveling, say, from CIA headquarters in Virginia to an unmarked office building nearby could blow multiple undercover operations. The FBI has also struggled with this transition. As of a few years ago, “none of this was completed yet, and none of it was even remotely being done easily,” says a former senior official.

The CIA, at least, had its own past practices to draw from, especially in its training of NOCs, say former officials. Years ago, the school for NOCs was entirely quarantined from that for normal future CIA operations officers, who undertake rigorous instruction at “the Farm,” a Williamsburg, Va.-area base, say two former senior officials. NOCs “never came to the East Coast” and were trained at separate secret facilities, says one of these former officials. But because of their often “rebellious” attitudes in the field, and in order to “increase their behavioral consistency,” senior CIA officials decided to move their instruction to the Farm. This move produced better-trained NOCs but also increased the threat of exposure. As of recently, the programs were sealed off from each other again, says a former senior official.

The pressures of the digital age have led the CIA to favor flexibility and deniability. The agency has formed a new reserve officer program to allow spies to work in the private sector, especially the tech industry, says a former intelligence official. The program is designed to allow those operatives to maintain their clearances so they can return seamlessly to the agency after a few years, says this person.

Another measure the CIA has used involves paying companies to gather intelligence for the government without even knowing it. In the last several years, the CIA has ramped up its use of “cutouts” to pay third parties to gather intelligence for them unwittingly, posing as data brokers looking into trends in the oil and gas industries, for example, says the same former official.

That’s how Facebook, Google, and other companies became so dominant. They possessed an advantage similar to the one that state-owned corporations have in communist companies; they didn’t need to actually sell anything to anyone in order to generate income. As would-be competitors to YouTube have learned, it’s very difficult to compete with companies that can afford to operate hundreds of millions of dollars in the red every year without being forced to shut down.

Mailvox: the limits of ambition

In response to a previous Darkstream, a recovering Gamma asks about where the line between positive ambition and evil ambition is drawn:

How can one determine whether an ambition is just and for good, or the motivation is evil and subversive?

As a recovering Gamma, i have the core of success you mentioned and i am trying to channel it to bring glory to god.

I am crushing right now, but the concern of stepping out of line worries me.

The answer is pretty simple. Do your ambitions involve building up your own responsibilities and capabilities or do they involve inserting yourself into the activities of another individual in some capacity for your own benefit? The former ambitions are good. The latter are evil.

Riverboat Ron is a Redskin

Ex-Carolina Panthers head coach Ron Rivera was hired by the Washington Redskins. Rivera has already shown that he can transform himself, but can he transform the culture of losing imposed by Dan Snyder? It’s an intriguing post-season development.

Attack on a US embassy

The more things change in the Middle East, the more things stay the same:

The Pentagon has sent 100 Marines to the US Embassy in Baghdad to bolster security in the wake of an attack on Tuesday where hundreds of pro-Iran militia members stormed the compound, set walls ablaze and chanted ‘Death to America!’ in retaliation for American air strikes. 

US soldiers inside the embassy have fired tear gas, stun grenades and warning shots, wounding 62 of the hundreds of fighters who broke down the main door to the compound and set a fire in the reception area, according to the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella group for the militias recognized by the Iraqi government.

The ambassador to Iraq was on leave at the time of the attack and embassy staff had already been evacuated before the US Marine guard became besieged behind the bullet-proof glass and on the rooftops.

Tuesday’s attack on the embassy was is in retaliation for US air strikes on the Iran-backed Kataeb Hezbollah on Sunday night, which killed two dozen fighters. Those strikes were in retaliation for last week’s killing of an American contractor at a US base in Kirkuk.

I think I speak for most Americans when I say, “who the hell cares?” American troops shouldn’t be in Iraq in the first place. Sending in more Marines and risking them getting wiped out is not at all the wise course of action. And babbling about how “Iran will be held fully responsible” serves no purpose at all when everyone knows that the US cannot and will not win a war against the Iran-China-Russia alliance.

The age of the one global superpower is over. Leave the Middle East to the Middle Easterners.

The nature of The Storm

AC posits that the reason for the circumspection and concern about the public’s response to whatever the revelations about the Deep State turn out to be is probably a lot less esoteric than the speculation concerning sex crimes, occultism, ideology, and aliens:

Q said 4-6{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} would be “lost forever” in post 529. I am not sure he meant they were diehard leftists. Notice 4-6{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} is roughly what is probably in the covert informant/intelligence network, given TIPS was set to start at 4{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of the population, and it has doubtless grown since then. Those might be network members who will not want to give up the old system because they were raised in it, and like being in the preferred discount club. My guess is the revelation of what was being done to everyone will even shock the most diehard of liberals into support for Trump and Q, when they see what is in their files. This will be much more personal than you would think, with teh conspiracy giving real people who know you the ability to invade your most private sanctuaries. Even leftists will be outraged.

Notice also, Q says in post 586, “60{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} must remain private [at least] – for humanity.” That may mean he intends to keep 60{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} of what is in the files secret, because the trauma for everyone, of seeing schedules and descriptions detailing every nuance of everything from their private secrets like affairs, their bathroom activities in detail, drug problems, porn preferences, and other peccadillos, to the most intricate details of their sex lives with their spouses, including transcripts and recordings, would destroy people’s abilities to enjoy their lives, if it was made public for all to see and review.

That may also be what he meant by a full revelation would send most people to the hospital with panic attacks and leave them unable to function. Knowing how real people violated the sanctuary of your home, and could still be using technology to do it undetected, would send a lot of people over the edge, if all revealed at once. Even revealed slowly over years, it changes how you view the world, and your sanctuary, in a very profound way. Nothing feels secure.

“The choice to know will be your’s” may mean you will be able to request your own file, and see what was in it, and the details of how it was acquired, and how many people had access to it and were reviewing it for laughs.

We know that one in five citizens of East Germany were working as informants for the Stasi. We also know that the USA has been a secret surveillance state since the 1960s, and an open one since 2005 or so. I can still remember when NSA spying and surveillance software like the FBI’s Carnivore aka DCS-3000 were considered conspiracy theory around the turn of the century.

But the awareness that we are being spied upon is very different than actually seeing your full collection of sex tapes, upskirts, and shower videos, just to name a few of the privacy violations that have been amassed by people employed by the federal government, some of whom were almost certainly your friends and extended family members. Just think of how many divorces would result in the first month after the releases.

It would be cruel, and would likely cause a tremendous amount of crime and civil chaos, if all that information was simply dumped upon each and every member of the American public at the same time. Hence the measured and gradual preparation of the public for them as well as the limited release. AC’s theory may or may not be correct, but it does make sense and is in line with the developments we have been observing in the god-emperor’s war against the Swamp.