Tag: history

Che Cavalo!

In further confirmation that Italy remains Italian.

  • Paolo Maldini and Leonardo have resigned from their FIGC positions following disagreements regarding the selection of Italy’s new head coach
  • The duo’s tenure lasted just 16 days, having been officially appointed on July 11

I’m not going to lie. I was genuinely excited about the possibility of Maldini and Guardiola joining forces to return gli Azzurri to international prominence.

Efforts to name the next head coach encountered difficulties when Carlo Ancelotti and Pep Guardiola, both leading candidates, declined the opportunity. Andrea Pirlo emerged as a subsequent option; however, his candidacy was swiftly dismissed due to his role as a global brand ambassador for Russian betting company Fonbet. This connection posed both moral concerns and legal complications, since advertising gambling is outlawed in Italy. Reports indicate that Giovanni Malagò intervened to veto Pirlo’s appointment, despite opposition from Maldini and Leonardo. The ongoing disagreements on coach selection reportedly intensified strain within the leadership group.

(makes Italianate hand gestures)

Meanwhile, in France…

Zinedine Zidane Announced As France Men’s National Team Manager

This juxtaposition suffices to explain a disturbing amount of European history.

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Those Who Gnaw

From the recently translated and published GERONA by Benito Pérez Galdós.

Political passion, my friends! I know no baser or more contemptible sentiment than this, which drives men to hate their own countrymen with greater fury than the foreign invader. I was appalled to witness the outrages committed against some and the savage invasion of the houses of others. And we may be thankful they escaped with their lives from the hands of that idle, shrieking mob! In a word, the whole affair was among the most degrading things I have seen in my life, and if the Junta Central was worth little, the men who in Seville and afterward in Cádiz gnawed, like restless and parasitic reptiles, at its foundations, do not occupy, for all their bustling and all the various postures they assumed, any visible place in history.

Their smallness makes them vanish in the long perspectives of the past, and their echoless names awaken neither admiration nor rancour. They belong to that common herd which, common as it is, has shaped the destinies of the country from the first revolution to the present day: people without an ideal, who would be lost in the crowd like raindrops in the ocean, if the deplorable political neutrality of those Spaniards who are honest, decent, informed, and patriotic, and who are the majority, did not allow them to act in public life, treating the country as an object of exclusive property given them for their amusement.

The end of empire is always marked by national enervation. We tend to blame television, or video games, or social media, but the truth is that this torpor that permits those Galdós describes as restless and parasitic reptiles to gnaw at the societal foundations as they rule over the placid NPCs has always been a phenomenon of late-stage empire.

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The End of the Boomer Cons

Not being a particularly social individual, I never really got conventions. I went to Minicon once because I had just published Rebel Moon and joined SFWA, and had been invited there. I loved CGDC before it was taken over by the marketing departments and you could still sit down and talk game design and development details for hours with Julian LeFay, John Romero, and Sid Meiers, but in general, I’ve never understood the appeal of consumer-related conventions. It appears the younger generations tend to agree:

For nearly its entire 39-year run, LibertyCon has sold out the same day registration opens. This year, it didn’t. Four days after badges went live, the convention posted an update fans aren’t used to seeing: “In a strange twist of events, there are still a few badges left for LibertyCon 39.”

That single sentence is a meaningful data point for a convention built the way LibertyCon is built. It’s capped by charter, historically at 750 attendees and more recently around 1,000, deliberately kept small so fans can actually sit down with guests rather than get lost in a crowd. It’s held every June in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and it leans heavily on Baen Books as its backbone, with the “Baen Roadshow” as a recurring programming staple and a guest list built around Baen’s own stable: David Weber, Larry Correia, David Drake, Timothy Zahn, and others who’ve anchored the convention’s identity for decades. A convention with a hard attendance cap, a loyal fanbase, and one of the most reliable backfill mechanisms in the genre (publisher name recognition) not selling out immediately isn’t a small shift. It’s a convention that has weathered a lot, including the death of its own founder, Timothy “Uncle Timmy” Bolgeo, and a last-minute venue change years ago, still selling out every single time until now.

The reason isn’t a mystery. Baen’s bench of marquee authors is aging, and there isn’t a wave of comparably famous younger names coming up behind them the way there was a decade ago. A convention that leans on its guest list to move tickets needs that list to keep refreshing, and when the same handful of names carry the show every year, the show ages right along with them. Older fans who built LibertyCon’s sellout streak for decades aren’t attending at the same rate they used to either, whether due to health, cost, or simply aging out of convention travel altogether. That’s not a knock on LibertyCon’s organizers, who by every account still run one of the best-managed conventions in the genre. It’s a structural problem no amount of good management fixes on its own.

It’s not a surprise that Baen has struggled post-Jim Baen. Most of the publishing industry is struggling; Castalia would be too if we had relied upon selling traditional hardcovers and paperbacks like everyone has done for decades.

But it’s still sad to see traditions dying, even if you understand the terrible choices that the johnny-come-latelies made thirty years ago that are finally coming home to roost. It’s not the political gatekeeping that has done them in, but it certainly assured their demise given the fact that the winds were against them. For some reason, the more difficult the environmental challenge, the more unreasonable people running these legacy organizations tend to become.

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Conflict Incapable

The US military officially maintains a doctrine that states it is able to fight two major wars in different theaters simultaneously. The combination of 5GW and the Iran War has demonstrated that it is no longer even able to fight one major war, outside of a defensive war on US territory.

The expenditure has been historic by every measure. U.S. warships fired roughly 400 Tomahawks in the first 71 hours of Operation Epic Fury alone, principally to smash Iran’s air defenses and command nodes. By the end of the first month, the total passed 850, which made this, by a wide margin, the largest Tomahawk campaign ever conducted, more than Operation Desert Fox’s 325 and Desert Storm’s 288 combined. Firing continued to the April 8 ceasefire, and CSIS’s munitions review, citing updated Wall Street Journal reporting, put the figure at more than 1,000 Tomahawks expended. The same review tracked parallel drawdowns across the rest of the precision magazine, including heavy use of Patriot and THAAD interceptors against Iranian barrages and large expenditures of air-launched JASSM cruise missiles. Since the ceasefire collapsed this month, strikes have resumed, and no updated official count exists; the only precise statement available as of July 17 is that the true number now exceeds 1,000 by an undisclosed and growing margin.

Two details give the raw number its weight. First, the scale relative to the force: CSIS calculated that 850 missiles represented roughly half of all the Tomahawks loaded on launchers in the entire Middle East theater, and those launchers cannot be reloaded at sea; a destroyer that empties its cells must sail to a properly equipped port. Second, the alarm inside the building: officials told the Washington Post that regional Tomahawk stocks were running dangerously low, with one warning the Pentagon was approaching “Winchester,” the military’s slang for out of ammunition, even as the administration publicly insisted that critical stockpiles had not been dangerously depleted.

What a China or Russia War Would Actually Take

This is the question the months of expenditure snapshots have circled without answering, and it is where the picture turns dark. The reference point is the Pentagon-adjacent wargaming on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and its headline finding predates this war: CSIS’s landmark industrial-base study concluded from a series of wargames that the United States would likely run out of some munitions, specifically long-range precision-guided weapons, in less than one week of a Taiwan Strait conflict, a finding a member of Congress repeated almost verbatim in a formal warning to the Pentagon.

The simulations put numbers on it. Across two dozen iterations, a three-week war with China consumed on average about 4,000 air-launched JASSMs, 450 Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles, 400 Harpoons, and roughly 400 land-attack Tomahawks, plus large numbers of the Navy’s SM-6.

The wrinkle in those figures is the most misunderstood part of this entire subject. The Iran war has already consumed more than twice as many Tomahawks as the Taiwan simulations averaged, and that is not because a China war would be smaller. It is because the weapons mix inverts. Against Iran’s degraded defenses, the ship-launched Tomahawk was the tool of choice. Against China’s dense air defenses and blue-water fleet, the burden shifts to stealthy air-launched standoff weapons and anti-ship missiles, the JASSMs and LRASMs, which are precisely the munitions the wargames show emptying first, and which the Iran war has also drained; the same CSIS review tracked heavy JASSM expenditure alongside the Tomahawks.

In other words, the remaining Tomahawks could, on paper, cover the modeled land-attack draw of a Taiwan fight. What they cannot do is compensate for the rest of a magazine that empties in days. CSIS’s most recent assessment, published this spring with the Iran war’s costs in view, is blunt on this point: wargames suggest hundreds of LRASMs and thousands of JASSM-ERs could be expended in just the first week of a Taiwan conflict, expenditures that would climb dramatically in later weeks, and open-source assessments indicate the Pentagon has nowhere near the inventories a protracted war with China would require.

The geography compounds it. Taiwan is an island; unlike Ukraine, it cannot be resupplied across a land border once fighting starts, so the munitions that matter are largely the ones already in theater on day one, and CSIS notes that the naval forces and missiles diverted to the Middle East for this war are exactly the ones that would otherwise sit in the Western Pacific.

What we’ve witnessed has been the most significant revolution in military affairs since WWII, the decline of the battleship, and the end of the UK as a major military power. The USA is still a major power, but it now has little more ability to project its power against a real opponent than China or Russia.

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The Lies of Judeo Peterson

Jordan Peterson has set aside the apple cider and the meth long enough to delve into Judeo-Christian mythology.

With regard to “Judeo Christian”:

The 10 Commandments are Jewish.

The great stories of the Old Testament are Jewish.

The Jews developed the idea of subsidiarity as the alternative to tyranny and slavery.

The Jews established the cultural preconditions for the rise of universal literacy.

The fate of Israel at the hands of the Islamists is the fate of the West.

This rising tide of anti-semitism sickens me. Those of you engaging in it for your oh-so-moral reasons—you’re despicable.

And remember, you proud “Christians” objecting in all your purity to the term:

Christ Himself was a Jew.

First, the 10 Commandments are not, and have never been, Jewish. They are divine. Even if we credit them to Moses, Moses was not of the tribe of Judah. Moses was a Levite.

Second, a few of the great stories of the Old Testament are Jewish, but most of them are not. In fact, the first two Jewish stories from the Bible involve a) slavery, and b) incest. Judah was the one who convinced his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery rather than killing him and was later seduced by his daughter-in-law and had not one, but two sons by her.

Third, Jews were the biggest slave owners in American history and the primary owners of the New World slave trade. They have never had any moral problem with slavery, and some of them still believe that their satanic god is going to provide each of them with more than two thousand slaves apiece when they rule the world.

Fourth, Gutenberg wasn’t a Jew. Also, what universal literacy? Literacy rates have been falling in the West for decades.

Fifth, Israel is currently a significant problem for the West. The West’s fate is not tied to Israel’s in any way, shape, or form.

Sixth, anyone who believes that anti-satanism is anti-semitism is a satanist. Repent.

And finally, Jordan Peterson has absolutely no standing to say anything whatsoever about Christianity. He is, quite literally, on the other side and a servant of evil, both material and spiritual. He is an occultist and a blasphemer, and his own books indicate that he is at least demonically-oppressed, if not actually possessed.

Jesus Christ of Nazareth was a Nazarene and possibly of the tribe of Judah, although the Bible never identifies to which tribe Mary belonged. We know that Joseph was of the tribe of Judah, but Jesus was not his son. The Romans have a better documented claim to him. Regardless, Jesus Christ does not appear to have ever been a member of the satanic Babylonian religious group that hated him and demanded his death; at that time the Pharisees were mostly, though not exclusively, Levites. It is blasphemy to claim that Jesus Christ was a Jew; he was the Son of God, not a son of the Father of Lies.

Now at that feast the governor was wont to release unto the people a prisoner, whom they would. And they had then a notable prisoner, called Barabbas. Therefore when they were gathered together, Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ? For he knew that for envy they had delivered him.

When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him. But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus. The governor answered and said unto them, Whether of the twain will ye that I release unto you? They said, Barabbas. Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified.

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

The word “judeo-christian” is a satanic rhetorical lie concocted by a small number of Jewish leaders after WWII in order to better help them integrate and gain influence in what was then Christian America. The Chosen, a great novel by Chaim Potok, describes that era. Prior to WWII, the term indicated a former Jew who had converted to Christianity.

This was my direct response to Peterson’s tweet, in addition to the Stonetoss comic.

You’re a satanic liar, Judeo-Peterson. I called you out about your lies concerning Jewish IQ years ago, and now you’re lying about Jesus Christ himself. Also, Moses was a Levite, you apple cider-addled moron. The Old Testament isn’t “Jewish” at all.

Those who lie about the past always rely upon the amphibolic redefinition. It should be no surprise that it was the specific tactic utilized here.

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TRANSLATION: Zaragoza

Castalia House’s epic quest to translate the entirety of the historic Spanish Episodios Nacionales into the English language continues with the publication of the sixth book, Zaragoza, about the French siege of the Spanish city during the Peninsular War.

The sixth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain — Zaragoza takes Gabriel Araceli into the most terrible siege in modern European history: the second French assault on the Aragonese capital, where sixty thousand civilians and soldiers held the ruins of their city against Napoleon’s marshals through two months of bombardment, starvation, plague, and hand-to-hand fighting in the cellars.

Gabriel arrives in Zaragoza half-starved and in rags, having escaped a French prisoner column in the company of Don Roque. They sleep among beggars in the shattered monastery of Santa Engracia and are taken in by Don José de Montoria, a proud Aragonese labrador of iron convictions and volcanic patriotism, who has given both his sons to the defence. The elder is already dead. The younger, Agustín, is a theology student whom the siege has transformed into a soldier and who is carrying on a desperate love affair with Mariquilla Candiola, the beautiful daughter of the most hated man in the city: el tío Candiola, a miser of Dickensian proportions whose house stands at the very edge of the French advance.

As the French tighten the noose, the novel compresses with the siege itself, from the open streets to the barricaded quarters, from the quarters to single houses defended room by room, from the houses to the tunnels where Spanish and French sappers dig toward each other in the dark. The city burns. The plague spreads. The dead lie unburied in the streets. Women carry ammunition under fire and friars take up muskets. And through it all, Gabriel watches the collision between Agustín’s love and his father’s honour, between the miser’s gold and the patriot’s sacrifice, between the claims of private tenderness and the needs of a city that will not surrender.

The book has already been delivered to the paid subscribers supporting Castalia’s translation efforts. You can read an excerpt from Zaragoza at Castalia Library.

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The Zero Literature Campaign

We know about Clown World’s Zero History campaign. We can see signs of it everywhere from Fructidor to the Khmer Rouge. But it was also accompanied by a Zero Literature campaign. This is not just our imagination at work. You can still see it in action. But the campaign to disappear traditional literature with historical Western values began at least a century before the ALA was cancelling Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A division of the American Library Association has voted to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s book award over concerns with how the early-to-mid 20th century author portrayed blacks and Native Americans.

The Association for Library Service to Children’s board made the unanimous decision Saturday at a meeting in New Orleans. The name has been changed to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

The association says the work of Wilder — best known for her Little House on the Prairie novels — “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values.”

The first award was given to Wilder in 1954

I have no doubt that if Laura Ingalls Wilder had published a century before she did in a language other than English, we would never have heard of her. Both Benito Perez Galdos and Zenaide Fleuriot were much more significant in their native languages than Wilder was in English, and yet somehow, the English publishing world never saw fit to translate them despite producing dozens of editions of far less popular, far less marketable, and far less significant works.

This is why it is absolutely vital to stop blindly supporting those things that the mainstream feeds you, and go out of your way to find those things and support those things that are in line with your values, and not the “core values” of things like the ALSC.

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Fake Patriots Proved

I’ve told you from the very beginning that the Patriot Front was obviously fake, definitely Fed, and probably gay. All of which is true, but now we know that it is an offshoot of the SPLC thanks to Razorfist:

Charlottesville was organized by paid informants for SPLC. Every organization directly involved were therefore tainted by SPLC funding.

American Vanguard was one of those groups.

After Charlottesvile, they changed their name.

To Patriot Front.

It was always obvious that it was fake because there were never any of the usual police obstacles, doxxings, media hit pieces, deplatformings, permit issues, or any of the other things that always target genuine resisters.

And yes, a few people who were fooled by the organizers were arrested. Look, I know how this works. because those SPLC-paid informants tried repeatedly get me to come and speak at Unite the Right. I wasn’t interested because I’m neither a public speaker nor a political activist, but I had already smelled a rat in Richard Spencer by that time.

No organic group is going to be allowed to grow in Clown World’s Union of Satanic Affiliations. There are a panoply of controlled opposition groups and gatekeepers, while organic individuals and groups are either a) infiltrated and converged like the Tea Party or b) banished from the platforms that would permit their rise to popularity.

It’s not always going to be this way because Clown World is collapsing. The good news is that the reason these fake groups keep being constructed and offered up as false opposition is because the terrible truth about Clown World is gradually penetrating the mainstream. And I can pretty much guarantee that there is a very good reason the clowns are so desperate to conceal the truth, because it is almost certainly much worse than any of us, including me, are fully capable of imagining.

Remember what Rome did to Carthage and Jerusalem, and what the Conquistadors did to Technochtitlan. That’s what they fear.

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Israel Admits Genocide

But not the recent one in Gaza. The Armenian one of 1915 to 1917, committed by the Turks.

The Israeli government’s decision to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide has become one of the most symbolic and politically sensitive steps in Israel’s relations with Türkiye. On the surface, it may look like Israel feels the need to restore historical justice: A state founded by a people who survived the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust proclaims a moral obligation to recognize the tragedies of other peoples and oppose the denial of crimes against humanity. But in world politics, moral arguments rarely exist in isolation; most often, they gain traction when they coincide with national interests.

 Israel’s move was addressed not so much towards Armenia or even Türkiye, but towards the US, where a struggle for the future balance of power in the Middle East is unfolding. Israel increasingly perceives Türkiye as the next major regional rival after Iran. While in the past, despite political crises and harsh rhetoric, Ankara and West Jerusalem had maintained space for pragmatic interaction, today this model has effectively collapsed. Türkiye pursues an independent role in the region, seeks to expand its influence in the Muslim world, and is striving to become one of the centers of power in the new architecture of the Middle East. This poses a strategic challenge for Israel. For decades, its security relied heavily on its qualitative military superiority, secured in part by US military aid, access to advanced technologies, and a special status within the US alliance system. However, if Türkiye gains expanded access to Western technology, this balance could begin to shift. This is precisely why the issue with the F-35 jets, and more broadly, the strengthening of Türkiye’s military-technical capabilities, is of fundamental importance to Israel. This isn’t just about the fighter jets; it’s a question of whether Israel will maintain its technological advantage in the region or whether Türkiye will gradually approach it in terms of the quality of its weapons, industrial base, and military capabilities. 

This is where the US factor comes in. In the US, the Armenian issue carries certain political weight because of the Armenian diaspora, congressmen, and lobbyists. By recognizing the Armenian Genocide, Israel may attempt to integrate into this sensitive agenda and thereby strengthen those forces in Washington that oppose excessive rapprochement with Türkiye.

In other words, Israel may intend to activate not only pro-Israeli but also pro-Armenian circles in American politics in order to oppose certain defense concessions to Ankara.

Playing the Armenian Genocide card is another sign that Israel is expecting to be engaging in military hostilities with Turkey sooner rather than later. Although I’m not sure it will be necessary, since Turkey already appears to be disengaging from NATO and the West in favor of Russia, China, and Iran, which even without Turkey has proven to be a more formidable alliance than anyone had anticipated.

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