Tag: books

An Accurate Review

In which a reviewer of fantasy books tries, and quite understandably fails, to finish reading the award-winning masterworks of one N.K. Jemisin:

I believe that the Broken Earth Trilogy specifically the fifth season which is the first book is so bad
that it’s essentially unreadable. I don’t remember a book that I’ve read that I believe personally is as bad as this one, and it shocks me that not only is this book extremely popular, but every single book in the trilogy won the Hugo award for the best book. This is a beloved series that many people claim
this is the best fantasy series of all time and I could not have a more contrary opinion to my feeling about
this book.

The fact that a third of this book was written in the second person is a ridiculous, ridiculous thing. The second person does not work when it comes to books, it works in some other forms of media, it works in video games, it works quite well in video games where you can picture yourself into the main character and people are talking to you in that way, but in a book it comes off so odd that it’s off-putting and difficult to suck in. There is a reason that virtually no books utilize the second person, and it’s not because they’re not as smart as NK Jemisin that they haven’t been able to pull it off, it’s because it doesn’t work.

I believed, constantly, as I read this book, that Jemisin was trying to be too smart and it came off as ridiculous. The second person is horrible, the way that she writes is atrocious. At times where she uses these italics and bolds and all caps within the text to really drive home a point, to really make this strong emphasis, you shouldn’t have to rely on that to make a really strong point. It comes off as kind of crazy.

I thought the twist that was in this book, and there is a major one, and I still don’t know if it actually occurs because I didn’t finish the book. I got 95 percent of the way through, and I said ‘I cannot bear to finish this book’ but I’m about 100 percent confident that there is a major twist that happens at the end of this book that is so obvious that it becomes one of the most telegraphed and poor choices for a twist that I’ve ever read. I can’t say what it is, but I can say that myself, and I suspect a great many readers figured out what it is within the first 50 or so pages. It’s not so much that the twist is ruined, you know. I’ve figured out twists before and it’s disappointing, it doesn’t happen a lot for me. I’m not the smartest guy in the world, I’m oftentimes the last person to pick up on these things, and I really do like it that way. I prefer to be surprised, I don’t want to figure stuff out, I don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. I want to be, you know, the dummy that is the last one to get it, but man, it’s obvious.

The problem is that the way that the book is structured with this bouncing around in a timeline is ruined
because of the twist. It’s a really poor way to tell the story and the story would have been much preferable to be in a more cohesive, clear, linear fashion, and I don’t think that’s true for all books. I think some books that use time jumps and these different point of views and these things can be very very good, some of my favorite books utilize that, but I think the book sacrificed a great deal in quality to do this and it didn’t work. The twist did not achieve its stated goals.

Now when I’ve said this before, I heard a lot of people in the comments say ‘you’re supposed to figure it out.’ No, you’re not! That is a retrospective retelling of the events to try to justify what occurred in this book. Now the last thing I’ll say about a major reason that I disliked this book is the way that characters move on from traumatic events. I think it’s horrible, some horrible things happen in this book, and this book bills itself as being a tear-jerker and just very depressing and these bad things happen, and that
that’s true for the large part, but the characters have these horrible things happen and they reminisce about them for a moment, and they take it in, and then they just move on. That’s crazy, that’s not real life. When horrible things happen people sit with them for great amounts of time, and maybe in later books they reinvestigate this, but in this first book, man, it didn’t work well.

So I can’t say enough negative things about this book and I am absolutely floored at how popular this book and this book series are.

The secret is that the book and the book series are not even remotely popular. By her own admission, N… K… Jemisin can’t making a living off them. This is the problem with manufactured “success”. It simply isn’t real, and no amount of fakery and propping up pets, poster children, and other imposters is going to fool anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about.

And yes, the reviewer is correct. One of the cruelest things I have ever done is inspire the SFWA crowd to demolish their own awards by handing a Best Novel award or two to N… K… Yes, I knew “the indirect backlash and overcorrection” would happen. Yes, it was intentional. But no, I never imagined that they would do it THREE straight years in a row. That really exceeded my expectations.

The only thing that would have been funnier would have been if they’d actually followed through on their rhetoric and given an award to Chuck Tingle. But even that would have been less damaging than what they actually did.

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Clown World’s Best Intellectuals are Retarded

Don’t get me wrong. I LIKE Victor Davis Hanson. A lot. I own several of his books. I genuinely admire his work. But there is no way to escape the obvious. At the end of the day, VDH is totally fucking retarded about the decline and fall of a West that has already been infiltrated, subverted, subjugated, and functionally disarmed by the global satanists:

VDH: I don’t think the average American understands that the Chinese are producing four ships per year to our one ship. Or that if you took any of our $15 billion carriers and you put them in the straits between Taiwan and China, they wouldn’t last more than an hour given the Chinese have developed missile batteries where they could launch 5,000 or 6,000 small missiles that would go about 6 inches above the water and hit the waterline at night. And you couldn’t stop that.

They are building nuclear weapons at a phenomenal rate. They’re working on anti-missile defense. They’re back up to probably 250,000 students in the United States; if 1 percent are engaged in espionage—and the FBI says it’s more than that—you’ve got thousands of people who are appropriating technology.

I don’t think anybody understands that it’s going to take us six years to replenish Javelin stocks and maybe we can’t. North Korea is producing more 155-mm shells than we are. At least they sent 2 million of them to the Russians.

So we are not armed, and yet, our strategic responsibilities, our strategic confidence, our arrogance has not lessened commensurately with our reduced defense capacity.

We’re 40,000 recruits short now in the military—never happened before. And when you analyze who is not joining the military, it’s not blacks, it’s not Latinos, it’s not gays, it’s not women, it’s not trans people, all of those numbers are the same … the largest group are white males from the lower and middle classes whose families fought in Vietnam, first Gulf War, Afghanistan, but this third and fourth generation are not joining up.

And unfortunately, for the military, if you look at the casualty or the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, that demographic dies at twice their demographics—72 percent to 74 percent of all the dead in Afghanistan, in Iraq are white males from the middle and lower classes.

And yet, this is the very demographic that [retired Gen.] Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and [Defense Secretary] Lloyd Austin, in testimonies, have suggested suffer from white rage or white privilege. And the Pentagon was investigating just those kind of slanders about that demographic, and they found, of course, in December, they quietly issued a report, there was no cabal of white supremacists.

But the point is, you can’t really have a successful military when you’re 40,000 recruits short in just a year.

Mr. Bluey: What do you suggest that societies today, including the United States, learn from those historical examples you gave us earlier in the interview to maybe mitigate some of the risks that we might find ourselves in in the future?

VDH: I would not put much confidence in international bodies or even in so-called close allies. The Spartans came all the way up to the Thebans and they heard the Macedonians, they turned right back. On the last day of the existence of Constantinople, they were looking out at the walls at the Hellespont thinking that Venetian galleys en masse would come up and save them.

So … I support NATO.

NATO? NATO is supposed to be the answer to the complete destruction of industrial capacity across the post-Christian West? That’s not a viable strategic analysis by a military historian, that’s Salvador Dali multiplied by Jackson Pollock on mushrooms.

I’ll definitely read his new book. It appears to be ominously relevant, particularly in light of VDH’s own prescriptions.

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Bad Literature as Predictive Model

We know that movies and television shows have been used as a revelation of the method by the wicked in order to avoid occult karma for their actions by openly confessing them in a plausibly deniable manner that the public will not believe. But six decades after it was written, this section from the dreary, Gamma-infested slog that is A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES, written by an author who was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 11 years after his suicide, tends to strike the modern reader as ominously predictive of the current state of affairs in the increasingly degenerate nations ruled by the evil inverts of Clown World.

Dear Reader,

Nature has sometimes made a fool; but a coxcomb is always of man’s own making. —Addison

As I was wearing the soles of my desert boots down to a mere sliver of crepe rubber on the old flagstone banquettes of the French Quarter in my fevered attempt to wrest a living from an unthinking and uncaring society, I was hailed by a cherished old acquaintance (deviate). After a few minutes of conversation in which I established most easily my moral superiority over this degenerate, I found myself pondering once more the crises of our times. My mentality, uncontrollable and wanton as always, whispered to me a scheme so magnificent and daring that I shrank from the very thought of what I was hearing.

“Stop!” I cried imploringly to my god-like mind. “This is madness.” But still I listened to the counsel of my brain. It was offering me the opportunity to Save the World Through Degeneracy.

There on the worn stones of the Quarter I enlisted the aid of this wilted flower of a human in gathering his associates in foppery together behind a banner of brotherhood. Our first step will be to elect one of their number to some very high office—the presidency, if Fortuna spins us kindly. .Then they will infiltrate the military. As soldiers, they will all be so continually busy in fraternizing with one another, tailoring their uniforms to fit like sausage skins, inventing new and varied battle dress, giving cocktail parties, etc., that they will never have time for battle. The one whom we finally make Chief of Staff will want only to attend to his fashionable wardrobe, a wardrobe which, alternately, will permit him to be either Chief of Staff or debutante, as the desire strikes him. In seeing the success of their unified fellows here, perverts around the world will also band together to capture the military in their respective countries. In those reactionary countries in which the deviates seem to be having some trouble in gaining control, we will send aid to them as rebels to help them in toppling their governments.

When we have at last overthrown all existing governments, the world will enjoy not war but global orgies conducted with the utmost protocol and the most truly international spirit, for these people do transcend simple national differences. Their minds are on one goal; they are truly united; they think as one. None of the pederasts in power, of course, will be practical enough to know about such devices as bombs; these nuclear weapons would lie rotting in their vaults somewhere. From time to time the Chief of Staff, the President, and so on, dressed in sequins and feathers, will entertain the leaders, i.e., the perverts, of all the other countries at balls and parties. Quarrels of any sort could easily be straightened out in the men’s room of the redecorated United Nations. Ballets and Broadway musicals and entertainments of that sort will flourish everywhere and will probably make the common folk happier than did the grim, hostile, fascistic pronouncements of their former leaders.

Almost everyone else has had an opportunity to run the world. I cannot see why these people should not be given their chance. They have certainly been the underdog long enough. Their movement into power will be, in a sense, only a part of the global movement toward opportunity, justice, and equality for all. (For example, can you name one good, practicing transvestite in the Senate? No! These people have been without representation long enough. Their plight is a national, a global disgrace.)

Degeneracy, rather than signaling the downfall of a society, as it once did, will now signal peace for a troubled world. We must have new solutions to new problems. I shall act as a sort of mentor and guide for the movement, my not inconsiderable knowledge of world history, economics, religion, and political strategy acting as a reservoir, as it were, from which these people can draw rules of operational procedure.

Boethius himself played a somewhat similar role in degenerate Rome. As Chesterton has said of Boethius, “Thus he truly served as a guide, philosopher, and friend to many Christians; precisely because, while his own times were corrupt, his own culture was complete.”

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A Bold Beginning

Thanks to one of our international men of mystery, I’m able to bring you the opening remarks from the chairman of the 1966 Philadelphia symposium on the mathematical challenges to Neo-Darwinism that long preceded my own conclusive mathematical disproof of evolution by natural selection, regardless of the Dawkinsian “probably” that has recently been appended to what is now more formally known as the Theorum of Evolution by (probably) Natural Selection, Sexual Selection, Biased Mutation, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow.

Ladies and gentlemen: I want to make just a few introductory remarks. I think it is the distin­guishing mark of all true biologists as opposed to mere sectarian specialists that they are deeply interested in the mechanism of evolution. As Dr. Kaplan has explained, the immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought of as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian Theory. This dissatisfaction has been expressed from three quarters and is not only scientific.

First of all, religious: Where once the complaint was that evolution happened at all, now the complaint generally is that it happens without Divine motivation. Many of you will have read with incredulous horror the kind of pious bunk written by Teilhard de Chardin on this subject, if Professor Schultzenberger will excuse my putting it that way.

Then, there are philosophical or methodological objections to evolutionary theory. They have been very well voiced by Professor Karl Popper — that the current neo-Darwinian Theory has the methodological defect of explaining too much. It is too difficult to imagine or envisage an evolutionary episode which could not be explained by the formulae of neo-Darwinism.

Finally — and these are really, I think, the only objections that should concern us — there are objections made by fellow scien­tists who feel that, in the current theory, something is missing, and we look forward to hearing their formulation of what, precisely, is missing. These objections to current neo-Darwinian theory are very widely held among biologists generally; and we must on no account, I think, make light of them. The very fact that we having this conference is evidence that we are not making light of them.

Sir Peter Medawar, National Institute for Medical Research, 24 April 1966

It’s rather remarkable that within ten years of these professional biologists publicly declaring that they must, no on account, make light of the mathematical objections to their pet theory, my high school biology teacher was telling me that the science was settled and no intelligent, educated person would even consider doubting the sacred Neo-Darwinian dogma.

How things change! Thanks to developments in genetic science, we now have conclusive mathematical evidence of the absolute impossibility of both Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian evolutions. The hoary old dragon of Darwin has been slain, once and for all. It may not have stopped twitching yet, and the faithful are still hoping against hope for a revisionist third coming, but any impartial and sufficiently numerate observer will admit that it is clearly pining for the fjords.

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The Decline of the Literary West

Reader’s Digest is shutting down in the UK:

Reader’s Digest’s UK edition has closed down after 86 years due to ‘financial pressures, as the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief shares a touching tribute. In an honest and heartfelt tribute, the iconic magazine’s editor-in-chief Eva Mackevic said ‘the company just couldn’t withstand the financial pressures of today’s unforgiving magazine publishing landscape’.

The closure comes 14 years after it fell into administration because of a £125m pension fund deficit.

Founded in the the US in 1922, Reader’s Digest – whose motto was ‘Articles of enduring interest’ – was first published in the UK in 1938. Back in 2000 Reader’s Digest UK was selling more than one million copies a month.

I loved Reader’s Digest. My grandparents were subscribers, and whenever I visited them I would read several of those thick little magazines a day. Laughter the Best Medicine was all right, but I preferred the more subtle humor to be found in Life in These United States. And the abridged novels it contained often provided exposure to interesting authors to be explored more fully in the the future.

But diversity doesn’t read. And increasingly, neither does the three-second attention span crowd. Books are in the process of returning to the elite status they once held prior to the release of the dime novel and the mass market paperback, which is not a bad thing for deluxe leather book binders, but isn’t a healthy sign for society.

With more than 3 million subscribers in the USA, the original magazine should be around for a while. But the failure of the once-powerful UK edition is a good reminder of the vagaries of time. Yesterday’s success not only doesn’t guarantee success today, it often plants the seeds for tomorrow’s failure.

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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

We’re very pleased to announce that both editions are now bound and shipping to the warehouse. We printed 250 more than usual knowing that there would be additional demand. If you want to pick up one of these magnificent reproduction of the spectacular Peacock first edition, you can do so at Arkhaven.

There are more pictures of both editions at the Castalia Library substack. And speaking of which, I would be remiss if I did not mention the amazing adventures of the celebrated Major Grant, the scout whom Wellington declared was worth more than a brigade of troops, which are being serialized there and are very well worth reading.

These documents took one back at once to one of the most daring escapes of a British prisoner which can be found in the annals of the Napoleonic Wars—an escape carried out with an almost absurd nonchalance and readiness of wit. The tale was known to Napier, who thought it so curious that he spared four pages for it in a chapter of his fourth volume. And Mr. John Buchan made an excellent story out of it in one of his volumes of miscellaneous adventures, with confirmatory detail out of his fertile imagination, and an exciting account of Grant’s dealings with Spanish guerrilleros, who sought to rescue him, and were refused his permission to carry him off.

What really happened I can give from the memoirs of Colquhoun Grant’s brother-in-law, Sir James McGrigor, who devoted a chapter to the exploits of his evasive and resourceful relative.

Colquhoun Grant, of the IIth Foot, was one of four officers whom Wellington employed on special reconnoitring and Intelligence duties. They were all good horsemen, good linguists in Spanish, French, and Portuguese, and noted for resourcefulness and cool heads. Whenever the French were on the move it was their duty to hang about the advancing army, on its flank sometimes, not infrequently in its rear, and to report to headquarters all important developments. These officers were Colquhoun Grant, Waters of the Portuguese Staff, Leith Hay of the 29th Foot, and Charles Somers Cocks of the 16th Light Dragoons. The pitcher that goes often to the well ends by being broken, and all these gallant Intelligence officers came to their day of ill-luck; it was impossible to foresee all possible dangers. Waters was captured on the Coa in April 1811, Leith Hay near Toledo in April 1813, Somers Cocks was killed in action (not while scouting) at Burgos in October 1812. Of Colquhoun Grant’s extraordinary capture and escape this screed must suffice to tell the tale.

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A Man of Sound Opinion

One of the greatest science fiction grandmasters of his generation shares his very sound opinion of some popular works of genre fiction, including two of his fellow grandmasters.

I was crushed on the Wheel of Time like a hindoo sacrifice being crushed by the great god Juggernaut.

Why could I not finish? This one is also hard to explain. The characters theoretically should have been a lovable as the picked-upon orphan-boy in HARRY POTTER, or the smart-but-shy Hermione. I mean, come on, a farm boy with a dread destiny, his honest blacksmith friend, and their friend who is good with dice. Not to mention Aes Sedai and way-cool ninja swordfighting moves and magical gateways and Dark Lords galore. But it never clicked with me: I was slogging halfway through the fifth or sixth book (yes, I stayed with it that long) when I realized that I wanted the main character to die because he was out of his mind, I wanted the gambler fellow to die because he was turning all dark and crooked, and I did not care of the blacksmith fellow lived or died, because he was spinning his wheels not doing much of anything. Somewhere along the way, I had lost all sympathy for all the heroes and all their goals–if they had goals. I mean, I had clambered up a mountain of thousands of gray pages, and I was still waiting for that “Council of Elrond” moment when Some Wise Mage tells Frodo-lite what the quest is. No one seemed to be doing anything and no one had a plan. And I wanted all of them to die.

Now, in all fairness, this last might not have been a fault of the author. I am a cruel and sadistic man, like many readers, and I only read when I am a foul mood, either right before a gladiatorial game or an afternoon of kitten-stomping. So maybe it is just me.

But Rand-al’Thor really did get on my nerves after a while. He seemed a character simply too small for the role. If Ranma Soatome has been the Dragon of that world, the Dark Lord Bumbershoot (or whatever his name was) would have at least been booted in the head before five books ground wearily by. If Paul Mu’ad-Dib had been the dragon, by then would have at least disrupted the spice production. SOMETHING would have happened.

I, too, hated THE WHEEL OF TIME. Hated, hated, hated it, and finally gave up partway through book seven. To this day, I still harbor a perfectly rational and well-merited hatred for Rand al-Thor, who is arguably the very worst protagonist in all of fantasy fiction, and the question is only arguable because I have not read, and will not read, anything by SuperMegaGamma Patrick Rothfuss, although based on the descriptions and reviews of others, it is possible that, as difficult as it is to imagine, the protagonist of Rothfuss’s work is even worse than Robert Jordan’s loathsome lead character.

I will say that while Wright’s distaste for China Mieville’s PERDIDO STREET STATION is perfectly understandable and justifiable, I do not share it, and I consider Mieville to be one of Wright’s very few peers in the field. Very different, very much darker, and very much not on the side of the angels much less Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but a first-rate fantasy author nevertheless.

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The Comprehensive Failure of Milton Friedman

The author of Princes of the Yen, which presciently predicted the 2008 financial crisis, the current one, and the global currency goal as far back as 2005, was methodically demolishing all of the key narratives supporting Clown World’s economic structures eight years ago:

The first four pillars of the central banking narrative have collapsed: Banks create money out of nothing and thus reshape the economy in their image. Markets are rationed and the key factor is the quantity of bank credit. Bank credit creation for GDP transactions boosts GDP growth, no matter what interest rates do (they will follow GDP growth). Developing countries do not need to borrow from abroad, and in fact should not borrow from abroad, as this puts them unnecessarily at mercy of the foreign creditors.

As these pillars revolve around banks and money and credit, some economists may agree, but argue that economics has long focused on the real economy and purposely chose to ignore all the financial factors. In this real economy, they will argue, the most important principle is to allow market forces to act without being hampered by governments – then we will see economic growth and stability. Should this fifth pillar of the central banking narrative at least be true?

Judging by the publications of the central banks, as well as the IMF or the World Bank, one would expect so: When these Washington-based institutions send their teams of staff and hired consultants to developing countries, their job can usually be completed very quickly. Without much ado, a new country report complete with major policy conclusions is drafted. The secret of such efficient work: even before these foreign experts had travelled (first class) to the respective countries, the conclusions of their study had already been pre-determined, because they are always the same, no matter which country is concerned: The goal of the axiomatic-deductive neoclassical belief system is to find ex post justifications for the argument that government intervention is bad, and markets need to be unfettered by any form of intervention. This predetermined conclusion is then presented, in the form of ‘research reports’ or ‘studies’, to the leadership of many nations across the world, only vaguely connected to local facts and institutions.

In order to reach such conclusions, neoclassical and central bank economists worked backwards: What kind of model comes to such conclusions? Answer: A model that operates in a dream-like idealized world. What are the features that define such a world? A long list of assumptions needs to hold, creating a bizarre theoretical Neverland: perfect information, complete markets in equilibrium, perfect competition, zero transaction costs, no time constraints, perfectly flexible prices that adjust all the time, everyone is very selfish and does not care about others, and people are not influenced by others. Why do all these assumptions matter? Because neoclassical economists have proven that they all need to jointly hold true, for market equilibrium and efficient markets to exist, and for government intervention to be ineffective.

The next step in the sequence of using such models is the most important one: present in reverse order, by pretending that no pre-determined conclusions existed. Start by listing the assumptions – for sake of argument. Then present the model. Then pursue it to its conclusions, which happen to be… let’s see… Oh, amazing: this model happens to conclude government intervention is bad and only free and deregulated markets will work! Well, in that case, ladies and gentlemen, we shall need to recommend deregulation, liberalization and privatization!

That such economic charlatanry passes for ‘economics’ in leading journals, textbooks and university lecture rooms is a sad indictment not only of the economics establishment, but of academia and society at large.

But what about economies in our world, on the planet we live – as opposed to the bizarre planet described by the economic charlatans? Since none of these assumptions hold, we know that we can neither expect equilibrium nor will deregulation, liberalization and privatization trigger improved economic growth.

If our theoretical assessment of the theoretical claims is correct, we should also be able to muster empirical support for it. And it exists in abundance. In order to test these neo-classical policy recommendations of deregulation and market supremacy, we can compare the market-oriented and shareholder value-focused US and UK economies with those economies known to have always placed an emphasis on government intervention, non-market forms of resource allocation combined with social welfare systems, namely Germany, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. Of course we should not be influenced by the business cycle, and thus need to consider a longer time period, such as half a century. Considering therefore the half-century from 1950 to 2000, we would expect the best performance in those economies that are more market-oriented, and the worst performance in economies that have chosen to practice intervention, ‘guidance’ and the use of production cartels. What is the empirical result?

The neoclassical thesis has been rejected by the empirical evidence. In the 1950s, the designers of the Japanese economic system intentionally increased the number of cartels, in order to improve economic performance (Werner, 2003a). As we can see, as the number of cartels almost doubled to over 1000 by the late 1960s, while economic growth accelerated to double-digit figures. When, under US pressure, the number of cartels was reduced in the 1970s, growth dropped. The drop in cartels is accompanied by weaker and weaker economic growth. The deregulation drive culminated in the entire abolition of cartels by the end of the 1990s – and economic growth equally reached zero. A similar picture has been painted by the performance of many developing countries, including Argentina and African nations, which followed the economic advice of the Washington-based institutions. We conclude that the fifth of the central bank claims – that deregulation, liberalization and privatization enhances economic growth – has also been revealed to be fraudulent.

Do we Need Central Banks? RICHARD WERNER 15 January 2017

What’s intriguing about both his book as well as his paper is that it explains why both China and Russia are economically routing the bank-controlled economies of the West as well as why Japan is behaving so erratically and in such an uncharacteristic manner of late.

The great deception of liberals, libertarians, conservatives, and independence-minded Americans in general is the idea that corporate management is good and government management is bad. But the so-called Invisible Hand not only doesn’t exist, it perpetuates a gargantuan lie that directly serves the interests of the globalists, who delight in transnationalist unaccountability.

I haven’t read the book yet. But I will, especially since he is obviously far ahead of the game on the realities of how money is actually created in a modern credit economy. Ian Fletcher and I have proven Ricardo was completely wrong. Steve Keen has proven Smith was generally incorrect. So, it should come as no surprise that someone of our intellectual generation would eventually prove that Friedman was wrong as well.

At this point, it’s hardly arguable that none of us are actually free to choose very much of anything at all.

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The History of the Byzantine Empire

If you’re a Castalia History subscriber, you just might want to visit the Castalia Library substack today, as there is an announcement there concerning the fifth book in the Castalia History series, the April-May-June subscription book.

Also for Castalia History subscribers: there are about 20 Annual subscribers who still need to renew their subscriptions manually since we are not permitted to do so automatically in this particular situation. If your subscription has not been renewed, or if you need to make a catchup payment, you will receive an email shortly informing you of the need to do so.

And since we’re talking about Castalia History, I strongly recommend the daily excerpt from STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, as the chapters on the tales of the secret services feature stories worthy of an action-adventure movie. The recently completed chapter on Brother James, who travelled through the enemy empire searching for a missing Spanish army that found itself surrounded by allies turned enemies in the aftermath of Napoleon’s decision to replace the Bourbon King of Spain with his brother Joseph, really has to be read to be believed.

In April La Romana had begun to be perturbed at the way in which the stream of dispatches and private letters from Spain, which had hitherto arrived regularly, had suddenly dried up. An officer who got through from Madrid with details of the accession of Ferdinand VII brought a complaint that the Home Government had got no dispatch from the expeditionary force for many weeks. Napoleon had stopped the post at both ends. This caused much alarm and evil surmises. They were more than fulfilled when on June 24th there was delivered to the Marquis a dispatch from Bayonne, announcing that the Bourbons had abdicated, that Joseph Bonaparte had been proclaimed King of Spain, that he had been acknowledged by the whole realm, and that he was to transmit the news to his army, and order the regiments to swear allegiance to their new sovereign.

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