Tag: history

Xi’s Delicate Warning

It’s always interesting to see how far ahead of US politicians the Chinese leaders are, particularly President Xi, who is fully cognizant on the discussions of Western intellectuals, while I doubt any US politicians, with the possible exception of JD Vance, have ever heard of Wang Hunin, much less Qiao Liang or Wang Xiangsui

Inside the Great Hall, Xi opened the talks with an ominous reference to the so-called Thucydides Trap, the ancient Greek historian’s account of Athens and Sparta, and the danger when an established power feels threatened by a rising civilization.

‘The world has come to a new crossroads. Can China and the US overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm?’ Xi asked Trump across the table.

During their two-hour summit, Xi warned Trump that if Taiwan is ‘mishandled’ the US and China ‘will clash, or even come into conflict, pushing the entire relationship into a very dangerous situation,’ state media channel CCTV reported.

Now, the Thucydides Trap is a bit midwitty these days since it was popularized by Graham Allison in 2015; it’s the sort of history that journalists can understand and recognize, so it makes them feel smart and educated. But it’s not irrelevant, as the Tree of Woe pointed out back in 2021:

Point 10 of Xi Jinping Thought acknowledges that achieving all these other points puts China at risk from those who would prevents its rise (the unstated foe is, of course, the United States). The implacable tendency towards war that occurs anytime a new hegemon arises against an old is called a Thucydides Trap (named for the Greek historian Thucydides and his account of the Peloponnesian War between mighty Sparta and rising Athens). Xi here is codifying the need to prepare for this war to come.

So, it’s interesting that Xi is laying out the problem directly for Trump, as he’s making it very clear that China is the rising power and the USA is the fading one, which directly contradicts all of Trump’s bombastic rhetoric.

The problem, of course, is that there is an X factor involved, which is Clown World. The Thucydides Trap was avoided when the center of power was transferred from London to Washington DC because the same satanic powers remained in control. But Xi prevented the plans for a similar transfer from Washington to Beijing because the Chinese do not wish to be ruled by itinerant devil-worshippers; they had their fill of that following the Mongol invasion, to say nothing of the Century of Humiliation they recently endured at the hands of that very ruling elite.

So, there are two obvious paths, although there may be more. One, the USA accepts China’s rise embraces American nationalism, and throws off Clown World rule. That would be the desirable path, and most likely the one that Xi would support. Two, the USA continues being ridden by Clown World until it expires, defeated and bankrupt, and breaks apart, as I first publicly predicted in 2004.

I think we’ll have a pretty good idea which path has been chosen after Trump returns from China and we see if the USA continues fighting Israel’s war against Iran et al or if it withdraws from the Middle East and allows China to force a peace settlement in Iran’s favor.

UPDATE: Larry Johnson notes the US delegation is receiving second-class treatment. Perhaps because Xi knows he’s not meeting the real Donald Trump.

When Trump arrived in Beijing the plane was met at the airport by China’s Vice Premier and other senior Chinese officials rather than President Xi Jinping himself; U.S. and Chinese diplomatic representatives and an honor guard were also present. This was the same configuration that met Trump in November 2017 during his first trip to China. Compare that to the honors accorded to Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinping personally greeted him on arrival rather than leaving the welcome to lower‑level officials. Reports of Putin’s 2024 and other state visits say Xi received him with full ceremonial honors and met him on arrival in Beijing.

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The Alien Hoax is Coming

Werner von Braun warned of this nearly 80 years ago.

Influential pastors are claiming that they have been told to prepare their followers for shocking revelations about UFOs which may upend belief in the Bible.

Perry Stone, a well-known evangelist, author and Bible teacher from Tennessee, warned that fellow pastors were recently invited to a secret meeting with US intelligence officials to prepare for the release of secret files on extraterrestrials.

According to Stone, the officials warned a small group of pastors with a large reach in the Christian community that the government was about to release reports and possibly videos of aliens and spacecraft which were not from this planet.

In the April 27 video posted to his YouTube channel, the evangelist claimed that pastors were told about the existence of ‘reptilian’ creatures, UFOs and materials from a non-human origin and ‘other things that almost sound like something out of a sci-fi movie.’

On February 19, President Trump ordered the Pentagon and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to release all information the government possesses regarding UFOs and alien life. Last week, Trump said that the first files would be released ‘very, very soon’ and would contain some ‘very interesting’ things for the public.

You know it’s a psyop because they constantly talk about how this will somehow threaten the Christian faith. Which is absolutely absurd, given that Christianity literally requires the existence of beings from other dimensions interacting with humanity on the material plane.

The purpose of the revelation will be nefarious, of course, but what else is new on what is, after all, a fallen world. If they dislike the name of Jesus Christ, then it really doesn’t matter what they call themselves or where they say they’re from.

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Distrust the Science

A partial chronicle of how trusting the science will reliably kill you.

If you trusted “settled science” throughout history, you’d have:

  • Taken heroin for your child’s cough (1890s)
  • Had your healthy teeth pulled to cure mental illness (1910s)
  • Drunk radioactive water for vitality (1920s)
  • Smoked cigarettes for your throat, on doctor’s orders (1940s)
  • Eaten lead paint chips as a calcium supplement (1940s)
  • Lobotomised your sister for being unhappy (1940s)
  • Sprayed DDT on the children in the playground (1950s)
  • Used asbestos to insulate your child’s bedroom (1950s)
  • Taken thalidomide for morning sickness (1960s)
  • Eaten margarine for your heart (1970s)
  • Avoided all fat and eaten carbohydrates to lose weight (1990s)
  • Replaced butter with trans-fat spreads on the doctor’s recommendation (1990s)

Every generation has its medical catastrophe dressed up as health advice. Endorsed by the experts. Printed in the textbooks. Recommended by your doctor. Featured on the front of the magazines in the waiting room. Future generations will look back in horror. Just like we look back at radioactive tonics and cigarette prescriptions and wonder how anyone fell for it.

Now we are told to take statins, vaccinate our children, inject experimental RNA-modifying spike protein factories into our bodies, avoid nicotine and alcohol, and cure cancer with chemotherapy.

One guess how the probabilities are going to turn out over time. Never forget that peer-reviewed published science from reputable journals has proven to be less reliable than a coin toss.

DISTRUST THE SCIENCE. Because scientists and doctors are not only fallible, but their primary incentives are intrinsically corrupt.

Remember, we have a word for science that is reliable. And that word is “engineering”.

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John Scalzi Killed Science Fiction

That’s something of a stretch, but there is a surprisingly good case to be made for it. Back in 2015, around the time SJWs Always Lie was #1 in its Amazon category for 18 straight months, Tor Books surprised everyone in science fiction by signing John Scalzi to a multi-million-dollar 13-book deal, as per The Guardian.

American science fiction author John Scalzi has signed a 10-year, 13-book deal with publishers Tor, which will net him $3.4m.

Scalzi is the author of 19 novels, including the highly-acclaimed Old Man’s War, the Star Trek-esque, Hugo award-winning satire Redshirts, and his latest, the near-future apocalyptic medical thriller Lock In.

All three of those works have been optioned for TV and film adaptations, and the title of his most recent novel is perhaps pertinent, as the author – who has a long-running blog and a strong online presence – now finds himself effectively working for Tor (part of Macmillan and one of the biggest science fiction and fantasy publishers in the US) full-time for the next decade.

The deal was reported at the weekend via the New York Times and has been signed and sealed in fairly short order.

This was very surprising, since Scalzi was, in most people’s eyes, a third-tier writer at best, not a legend like Jerry Pournelle or Larry Niven, and definitely not an author capable of filling the shoes of former Tor Books authors like Robert Jordan or the various game tie-in novels that had been providing Tor with bestsellers for years. Scalzi himself once noted how modest his career had been:

Debut: The $6.5k and $2k advances, signed when I was brand new and no one knew what would happen;

Developing: The $13.5k, $25k, and $35k contracts, after Old Man’s War hit commercially and critically and Tor realized there was possible headroom to my career, but I was still building an audience;

Established: The $100k and $115k contracts, when I had hit the bestseller lists, won awards, and had a series (Old Man’s War) that was spinning off serious money;

Franchise: The $3.4M deal, when Tor decided to go all in and lock me up long-term, both to continue momentum in new releases and to extract value out of my profitable backlist.

The problem is that Scalzi was never more than a mediocre mid-list writer who was a) very good at marketing himself, b) a ripoff artist who wrote pastiches rather than original fiction, and c) shamelessly dishonest. He managed to convince everyone that he was far more popular than he actually was – we all genuinely believed he had the biggest blog in science fiction when his site traffic was actually a fraction of mine – and he managed to parley that false perception into lead author status with Tor Books, the biggest publisher in science fiction.

Now, signing a lead author who can’t deliver and creates massive opportunity costs is an existential problem for the publisher. Tor Books could have, and should have, been pushing Brandon Sanderson and Charles Stross as lead authors, signing Larry Correia away from Baen Books, keeping John C. Wright in the fold, and locking down the best up-and-coming writers in the field at the time.

Instead, they gambled on this guy. And, as is evident from his latest offering, they gambled and lost. Here is a review of his latest novel, which can’t even bother to pretend to be science fiction.

The first thing to address after reading this cover to cover is the claimed genre: science-fiction. Most publications by Tor Books are in the fantasy or science-fiction genre. Most of Scalzi’s published works are in the science-fiction genre but Starter Villain is not a science-fiction novel by any stretch of the term. It is set in the present day and frequently references current things like the protagonist’s late father’s 2003 Nissan Maxima, Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Zoom and plenty of contemporary political and economic issues. There is some mention or special technologies but none that are considered beyond the realm of possibility. The only genuine science-fiction aspects are genetically modified cats and dolphins that are sentient and play a significant part in the narrative. There is no real explanation of how they became so and readers are just told that research was done and they exist. 

The novel is really more a parody of the James Bond movies (though not the novels) and I would place it in the same genre as the Austin Powers films. These films had time travel, characters being cryogenic frozen and “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads!” but they still weren’t science-fiction films. Nor really were the Bond films they parodied despite featuring unique gadgets and vehicles that were generally beyond the technology of the time. Unlike the Austin Powers films, this book isn’t funny at all. I’m sure plenty of Scalzi’s fans found it hilarious and anyone else who finds frequent profanity and snark funny might too.

The novel is written in first-person from the perspective of a character named Charlie. He is a divorced, out-of-work journalist who makes his ends barely meet as a substitute teacher. He’s in his mid thirties, living in his deceased father’s home and his only friend is a cat named Hera. This all changes when he learns his enigmatic and rich maternal uncle has died and that he is the heir to his fortune. All he previously knew of this uncle was that he owned parking garages but soon discovers he is in fact a villain.

The premise is something that could work really well if done right: what if a normal guy one day found out he was heir to a cartoon super villain’s fortune? Scalzi scuttles this promising premise almost as soon as the novel begins. One of his problems is he obviously doesn’t want to make his self-insert protagonist a genuine villain but still wants to call him one. Even his deceased uncle turns out not to be an actual villain but just an eccentric trying to stop real villainy through legal loopholes and other less evil methods… I chose this one expecting that he would have improved his craft in the twenty years he’s been writing. Yet, this was worse than I could believe and I’m confident that had Scalzi not already had a recognisable name, that this would never have been published. It reads much more like a young adult novel than proper science-fiction; only with a lot of cursing and general self-indulgence.

How very… tedious. It’s really rather remarkable. Can you imagine how many copies of ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT the publisher of Robert Jordan’s and Brandon Sanderson’s bestselling epic fantasies could have sold if they had published it and given it the kind of marketing push they gave imitative mediocrities like Redshirts, that feeble attempt at ripping off Asimov’s Foundation, and trying to push N… K… Jemisin’s second-person abominations on everyone?

Instead, the word from insiders is that Tor Books is in hard decline; it probably won’t die as soon as Baen Books, but it is unlikely to survive the disastrous Patrick Nielsen Hayden-era for long. This is what happens when institutions take their position in an industry for granted, forget what it was that put them in that position in the first place, and allow themselves to be run by employees who are more interested in pushing their personal agendas than actually running the business in a professional manner that permits future success.

I certainly don’t regret how it turned out. Castalia House regularly publishes category bestsellers on Amazon. Castalia Library is creating some of the most beautiful books in the world. We have our own bindery, our own translation machines, and we’re bringing forgotten books from foreign languages to the English-speaking world for the first time every single week.

But as a business professional familiar with the history of science fiction publishing, it’s hard not to look at how Tor Books has methodically demolished both itself and science fiction and wonder what things might have looked like if PNH had been able to understand that a) a midlist writer can never be a lead author, b) the author of a popular pastiche is not going to reliably produce popular original fiction, and c) a publisher should always seek to publish the best authors in the field, not the most politically-harmonious ones.

One can’t blame Scalzi for grifting. And it’s certainly not his fault that PNH and the other decision-makers at Tor Books were dumb enough to fall for his grift. But what began as a very bad business decision on the part of Tor appears to be heading for an ending in complete farce.

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A Millennial’s Observation

I hate to be “that guy”, but MAiD is going to become very popular as the Millennials age. There is no way to maintain dignity as you decline without adult children caring for you. Even money won’t protect you. MAiD will sadly be the reasonable choice for many single Millennials.

I suspect he’s correct. And it will likely be even worse for the softer side of Gen Z, unless the harder side revolts, goes full national survivalist, and forcibly removes every last vestige of Enlightenment philosophy from the West. It’s almost certainly going to be the leading cause of death in every jurisdiction where it is legal within 30 years.

Victimization culture + euthanasia = voluntary mass human sacrifice. Post-Christian culture, which is something very different than pre-Christian culture, is a satanic city of filth floating upon a sea of blood.

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The World Inside the World

This is a really excellent post on the reality of the hidden aspect of human history. I’ll be posting at least one more link to another part of the post tomorrow:

Father Chad Ripperger describes how demons besiege the imagination and emotions to such a degree that the person cannot think outside the perceptual box that has colonized them. He calls this obsession in the clinical, theological sense. The person is not fully possessed. They function. They hold jobs. They make decisions. They simply cannot perceive anything outside the boundaries the besieging force has constructed around them. He has observed, publicly, that this pattern is identical to the psychology of ideological movements. He has said that when you strip the veneer away, communism and diabolic psychology operate on the same structural logic.

Now consider a different kind of morphing.

Watch a college freshman arrive at an elite university in September. Watch them again in June. The vocal fry has set in. The upswing at the end of declarative sentences, turning statements into questions. The flattened affect. The identical vocabulary deployed across thousands of individuals who believe themselves to be independent thinkers.

They did not choose this. It overtook them.

By the time they reach Silicon Valley, the morphing is complete. They speak as one voice. They believe they arrived at their opinions independently. Listen to the way Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, speaks. The measured cadence. The pauses calibrated to signal thoughtfulness. The vocal register that never rises and never breaks. It is the voice of a system, not a person.

Listen to how many in Generation Z now pronounce the word ‘women.’ The shift is uniform. It is not regional. It did not emerge from any dialect. Millions of people began mispronouncing the same word in the same way at the same time, and no one can identify the point of origin. Linguists call it a speech trend. The ancient world would have called it something else.

When millions of people begin speaking in the same cadence, using the same contractions, the same tonal shifts, the same moral vocabulary, at the same time, that is not culture. That is memetic synchronization. The ancient world had a name for it. The modern world calls it a meme and treats it as a joke. The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, as a deliberate parallel to “gene”: a unit of cultural transmission that replicates, mutates, and colonizes minds. Dawkins meant it as a scientific metaphor. The ancients would have recognized it as a description of exactly what they were warning about.

As I discussed in my recent piece, Money, Sex, and Sorcery, the word “glamour” comes from the Scots English alteration of “grammar,” which itself derives from “grimoire,” a book of spells. A glamour, in its original meaning, is a spell cast through language. It is the manipulation of perception through words. It makes the enchanted person see something other than what is actually there.

Ripperger describes the same dynamic from the exorcism room: demons, he says, put a perspective on your imagination. They alter how you perceive a person, a situation, a reality. The thing itself has not changed. Your perception of it has been replaced. He says this is how demons destroy marriages, careers, and institutions. They do not change the facts. They change how the possessed person sees the facts.

This is why it is very important to not only devote yourself to speaking the truth to the greatest extent possible, but also knowing your own mind. I once had what I am certain was a demonic dream, because not only were the dream-thoughts definitely not my own, but the characterizations of other people in the dream were intrinsically false and fundamentally different than what I absolutely know to be my true perspective on them. It was scripted to attempt to influence my thinking in a destructive direction, and the temptations offered were not of a sort that even appealed to me.

It was rather like seeing an email and immediately recognizing it to be spam. What the false non-science of modern psychology calls “the subconscious” is actually made up of several elements, and one of them is the pathway with which spirits, both good and evil, communicate with the mind.

And, of course, it’s even more important to avoid doing the sorts of things that open up one’s mind to alien influences. Keep those doors resolutely shut, and even if your personal weaknesses lead to you repeatedly open them again and again, never tire of going back and shutting them, every single time.

Science is considerably more fake than genuine. And history is considerably deeper and darker than is generally acknowledged. And not every individual with whom you speak is speaking for himself.

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The MAGA Catastrophe

MAGA was supposed to be the alternative to the neocon-infested GOP, but it turned out to be MIGA, which thereby cements the probability that there will be no political fix for the USA prior to the anticipated failure in the 2033 timeframe.

There were two schools of thought on the Spanish Right in the lead-up to the civil war: Accidentalism and Catastrophism. Accidentalists believed that the serious issues facing the Spanish Republic were not baked into the institution itself, but rather an accident that could be attributed to the early Marxist bent of the first government. The Republic had gotten off on the wrong foot, but Conservatives could and would steer the ship in the right direction once they peacefully won political power through the electoral process and formed a government capable of addressing the Right’s concerns regarding government attacks on the Church and private property. They were strictly committed to following the rule of law and operating within the constitutional framework.

The second group believed the Republic was a catastrophe from the start, and that there could be no saving the Republic from itself. They asserted that the Left would never recognize any non-Leftist government, no matter how much they claimed to uphold the rule of law, because the problem was not with the Republic’s legalistic procedures but rather with the fact that the entire system was merely a facade to facilitate a Socialist and eventually Communist state that would permanently exclude Conservatives from power.

These two camps were largely united in their politics but divided in how to engage in politics. One pursued reform, while the other waited for an opportunity to overthrow the system itself once enough of the Right realized that there would be no voting their way out of this mess. After the Right won the 1933 elections and were met with: 1) Legalistic stonewalling when they attempted to form a government, and 2) An attempted Left-wing revolution in Asturias in 1934, the Catastrophists were proven to be correct.

As a general rule, the social and political optimists are wrong and the technogical optimists are right.

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The Hobbit 1977

The Dark Herald explains how the 1977 Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit came to be:

There is no getting across to kids of later generations what a TV Special meant to us. You had no control over it whatsoever. None. You either watched it at the exact time the network scheduled it for or you didn’t watch it at all that year. You could possibly catch a missed episode of a regular show during reruns in the summer but not a Special. Miss it and it was gone, no place to rent it, and streaming it was decades away. When you heard that Special fanfare from the TV you dropped everything and ran!

A few guitar strings were plucked, one by one, and then John Huston’s unmistakable cadence read the first words Tolkien published about the world that would become Middle-earth. There was a respect there for what J.R.R. Tolkien began with that sentence.

The “Many ages ago” that followed was intended to draw children into myth and it worked magnificently. Tolkien nerds used to regard it as heresy because Tolkien didn’t write it but then they had no idea what horrors the future held.

Even at the time it was hardly the worst version of The Hobbit. That would be the Hobbit (1966) a 12 minute “rights retainer” featuring Princess Mika and Slaag the Dragon whom Bilbo kills at the end. There had been radio and play adaptations before 1977, mostly British naturally. The rights to Hobbit had been sold separately by Tolkien then parceled out again and again after that.

By 1977 The Hobbit’s rights were such a trainwreck that Arthur Rankin was able to snatch up the TV rights for pennies with the following opening credit “Based on the Original Version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.” The rights for that being distinct from the 1951 revision, which is what the TV special was actually based on. In the 1937 edition, Elves were called, Gnomes” (from the Greek gnosis for “knowledge.” And Bilbo won the ring from Gollum fair and square, they even parted on friendly terms. Those and some other changes were enough to make it legally distinct.

And the Rankin/Bass version was certainly distinct in its own right. It looks like something made by Studio Ghibli – Because it was made by Studio Ghibli.

Okay, fine. It was made by Topcraft although, when that studio failed the remains became Studio Ghibli, and you can absolutely see the design DNA in The Hobbit.

You can also see Tolkien’s come to that, his own Thrór’s Map was used directly in the TV show and was part of the influence of the design aesthetic. J.R.R Tolkien approved of Arthur Rackham artwork and it was clearly another strong influence. The Hobbit (1977) was a Japanese take on the Western fairytale as grotesque. You can see its influence in Nausicaä. Rankin/Bass helped keep the lights on at Topcraft until Nausicaä came out. The Japanese approach isn’t interested in cleaning the fairy tale up, it leans into the distortions. Faces stretch, bodies warp, and the line between the comic and the unsettling disappears. What reads as “off” to a Western eye is often deliberate: characters are designed to move, to emote, to perform, even if that means abandoning symmetry or beauty. It turned what was supposed to be a children’s story into something just a little grimdark – perfect for its Generation X audience.

It was an art design for Tolkien when no one agreed what that looked like and there weren’t any brand managers ruining it. There was also some leftover hippy influence clinging to it, like your older sister’s boyfriend’s van that still smelled “funny.” College age-Boomers had first experienced Tolkien – differently.

It’s such a pity that after doing a very good job of bringing THE LORD OF THE RINGS to life, Peter Jackson wasn’t able to avoid screwing up THE HOBBIT even though he had a perfectly good template from which to work on the basis of the 1977 version.

And perhaps his biggest mistake wasn’t expanding it to three films, but not licensing the original music.

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The Power of the C64

It’s rather astonishing to think that with all this computer power at our disposal in the 1980s, we used it to play Pac-man and Seven Cities of Gold.

I let a Commodore 64 run for three and a half days straight. 87 billion instructions, 303 billion clock cycles, 5.9 million candidate settings tested. It cracked an Enigma message in German without knowing a single character of the plaintext.

On the other hand, what were we going to do with a few messages sent by U-boat commanders to the German naval command forty years beforehand?

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