Tag: history

Commentary Question

One of the common forms of medieval analysis was the commentary. Hence Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten of Titus Livy, which is just one of many examples of the form.

If I was to write a commentary of that kind, almost certainly with my new best friend, what author and what work would be of the most interest? Darwin, Dawkins, and anyone modern is out, unless you can make a very convincing case for consideration.

Throw your ideas out there. I’m not saying I will, I’m just saying that some of the experiments I’ve been doing with The Legend are making new possibilities of many kinds apparent to us.

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The Man Who Loved His City

A lovely little essay on Niccolo Machiavelli and his love for his native city of Florence:

The tradition of political realism has a reputation for being pessimistic—that is, for seeing and expecting the worst from the world, its individuals, and its states. Yet, despite all his realism, Niccolò Machiavelli was a romantic about his city. He famously said in a letter to his friend, diplomat Francesco Vettori, “I love my city more than my own soul.”

In 1512, the Medici retook Florence from Piero Soderini, and removed Machiavelli from his diplomatic position. The following year, they accused him of conspiring against them and tortured him for three weeks. After this, Machiavelli retired to his family home in Sant’Andrea, and never ceased to lament his “great and continued malignity of fortune” of not being able to contribute to his city’s administration.

Exiled from praxis, Machiavelli theorised about politics. He wrote two historical works—Discourses on Livy and Florentine Histories—to speak to the ways in which he thought that the Italy of his day should aspire to the glory of ancient Rome and the ways in which it failed to do so. He never rejected his being a modern man, and he did not believe that Renaissance Italy could imitate ancient Rome in all respects. However, he pushed his fellow citizens to take inspiration from it and to consider carefully that they share something with their past: it’s not “as if heaven, sun, elements, and men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity.”

In what you may rightly suspect to be closely related news, Castalia Library has announced the April-May-June book for the History subscription.

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Immigration and Empire are Degenerate

This is not news. Consider the following three paragraphs quoted from a book published more than a century ago, in 1911.

The unification of the inhabited world which forms the meaning and the greatness of the Roman Empire, is a process presenting two different sides to the observer. Kelts, Iberians, Rhaetians, Moors, Ulyrians, Thracians were to some extent civilised by the culture of Greece and Rome, and achieved by its help a great advance in economic and civic organisation as well as in education; Syrians, Egyptians, the inhabitants of Asia Minor only modified to a certain extent their manners and views in order to meet the requirements of the Empire. But if the intermixture of tribes and their permeation by Graeco-Roman culture was in one sense a great progress, it was at the same time, but from another point of view, a decline; it was accompanied by a lowering of the level of the culture which exerted the civilising influence. While conquering barbarism and native peculiarities, Graeco-Roman culture assumed various traits from its vanquished opponents, and became gross and vulgar in its turn. In the words of a biographer of Alexander Severus: good and bad were promiscuously thrust into the Empire, noble and base, and numbers of barbarians (Hist. Aug. Alex. Sev. 64).

The unification and transformation of tribes standing on low grades of civilisation leads to consequences characterised by one common feature, the simplification of aims — degeneration. This process is concealed for a while by the political and economic advantages following on the establishment of the Empire. The creation of a central authority, upholding peace and intercourse, the conjunction oft he different parts of the world into one economic system enlivened by free trade, the spread of citizenship and civil culture in wider and wider circles of population — all these benefits produced for a time a rise of prosperity which counterbalanced the excess of barbarous, imperfectly assimilated elements.

But a series of political misfortunes set in rather rapidly in the third century: invasions of barbarians, conflicts between rival candidates to the throne, competition between armies and provinces put an end to order and prosperity and threatened the very existence of the Empire. In these calamities the barbarisation of Roman culture became more and more manifest, a backward movement began in all directions, a backward movement, however, which was by no means a mere falling back into previous conditions, but gave rise to new and interesting departures.

We’ve already seen the first step: the rise in global prosperity that accompanied the neo-liberal world order. We are now well into the second step: degeneration. The third step is collapse. The historical process is inexorable and cannot be stopped except by removing all of the sources of the dyscivilizational degeneracy.

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We Thought Wikipedia was Bad

Someone asked Deepseek about the founders of Psykosonik.

It’s almost impressive how it is completely incorrect in every way, except for the bit about Minneapolis.

  • Formed in: 1991 (Minneapolis, MN, USA)
  • Members:
    • Paul Sebastien
    • Theodore Beale
    • Daniel Lensmeier
    • Michael Larson
  • Label: Wax Trax!

We were on TVT, but they were our publisher, not our record label. Paul and I were the two founders of the band; we wrote three songs together, after which Dan, who was a DJ at our favorite club, The Perimeter, and Mike, the best friend of Paul’s younger brother, were asked to join the band so that we could play live shows. Paul and Dan were the main composers, I wrote most of the lyrics, and Mike contributed a lot of the sounds that Paul and Dan built the songs around, such as that rich wuah-wuah that begins Silicon Jesus.

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The Invention of William Shakespeare

The conception that most of us have of the playwright from Stratford-on-Avon is almost entirely a modern construction:

One of the book vendors proudly presents you with the first-ever collection of Shakespeare’s works, put together the previous year by the renowned printer, William Jaggard, for the publisher, Thomas Pavier. But as you excitedly look through the pages, you become even more confused. Only three of the nine plays in the collection seem authentic. One of the plays is A Yorkshire Tragedy, which you had already pruchases, and another, Sir John Oldcastle, is also unfamiliar and not part of any modern Shakespeare collection. Still another, The Whole Contention Between the Two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York, is a combination of two heavily revised renditions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI. Two other plays—Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor—are much simpler and briefer adaptations of the authentic versions of these plays. Another play, Pericles, is conventionally considered an inauthentic, slap-dash treatment of a longer, genuine form that has been lost. The only three that seem normal are The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

After you complete your visit of all book vendors in London, and are assured that these are all the plays ever printed that were ascribed to William Shakespeare, you now own only 22 plays—of which a dozen of them are either apocryphal, or they are brief, strange, less literary adaptations of more familiar plays. That’s 12 of 22 that are seemingly wrong. You ask sellers about Othello, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra—but none of these have been printed. And many Londoners have never even heard of these plays.

Giving up in frustration, you at least take some comfort in the thought that at least you get to see an authentic Hamlet. You rush across London Bridge with your assortment of plays under your arm to the Globe Theater, squeeze amongst the groundlings standing before the stage—and wait for that most famous of speeches in English theater history. And the actor playing Hamlet walks out onto stage, holding a book in his hand, and says:

To be or not to be. Aye, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, Aye, marry, there it goes…

What?!? You know this quote is all wrong, even bizarre — a sort of brief, informal rendition of the opening to the real “To be or not to be” soliloquoy…

Who wrote this shorter, funnier, more action-packed Hamlet? Since the changes applied to this version are so inferior and differently styled from other Shakespeare plays, most scholars assume it was the result of a conspiracy. One or two of his greedy fellow actors supposedly created a briefer version of the play that they then sold to grasping printers and publishers eager to produce a work with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.

The truth is much simpler: William Shakespeare wrote it, which is why his name is on the title page. After all, we know Shakespeare did adapt an older version of Hamlet—and this first quarto of 1603 is the adaptation that Shakespeare’s company then performed. Of course, he wrote it. The original Hamlet, the one that Thomas Nashe referenced in 1589 as having been written by an “English Seneca,” is actually the authentic masterpiece that everyone is familiar with today. (And again, in an upcoming paper, Schlueter and I will show that Nashe was indeed referring to Thomas North as English Seneca—and that Jonson and Lodge also identified North as the original author of other Shakespearean plays too.)

What is more, Hamlet is not the only such example. Although this is not widely known, the plays Henry V, Richard III, Henry VI, part 2 and Henry VI, part 3 also exist in two very different versions: in the genuine, familiar literary form — and as a rewritten, briefer, less erudite, faster-paced staged adaptation. In each case, conventional scholars had always assumed that Shakespeare had written the longer masterpiece, yet it is only their lesser, rewritten theatrical renderings that had ever reached print during Shakespeare’s lifetime — and by 1620 each of these lesser adaptations had been attributed to the Stratford dramatist via the title page. Again, these rewritten versions are so inferior to the originals that orthodox scholars have had a difficult time accounting for Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. So, up until now, conventional scholars had blamed all these lesser works on a system of conspiracies, occurring over decades. Supposedly, various groups of unknown anonymous actors working within the Stratford dramatist’s theater companies rewrote these plays and then secretly sold them to corrupt printers with Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. In reality, of course, there were no conspiracies: These are actually the plays that Shakespeare really wrote—or at least adapted, directed, and produced.

As usual, the analyses of academic historians are fundamentally limited by their insistence on the relevance of their ontological ceilings. Consensus incredulity is an extraordinarily stupid and highly fallible metric, and yet, it’s actually codified into the academic and scientific worlds as “peer review”.

The problem is that most people are fundamentally unable to even imagine what a world without copyright, without mass market publishing, and without publishing gatekeepers would even look like. The ability to self-publish on Amazon and effectively imitate an author’s style using AI is just beginning to give us the faintest glimmerings of what a free-for-all writing, crediting, and publishing must have been in the early 1600s.

I find Mr. Mccarthy’s work on the real Shakespeare and the various elements that have gone into the mythical modern construction to be some of the most fascinating archeo-history that I’ve ever seen in my life. The fact that it is all document-driven rather than theory-driven makes it vastly more interesting as well as far more convincing than other efforts of this type.

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The Empire Never Ended

An altar is discovered in a massive abandoned city-state in Guatemala. And you’ll never guess what they were sacrificing there…

An altar from the Teotihuacan culture, at the pre-Hispanic heart of what became Mexico, was discovered in Tikal National Park in Guatemala, the center of Mayan culture, demonstrating the interaction between the two societies, Guatemala’s Culture and Sports Ministry announced this week.

The enormous city-state of Tikal, whose towering temples still stand in the jungle, battled for centuries with the Kaanul dynasty for dominance of the Maya world.

Far to the north in Mexico, just outside present day Mexico City, Teotihuacan — “the city of the gods” or “the place where men become gods” — is best known for its twin Temples of the Sun and Moon. It was actually a large city that housed over 100,000 inhabitants and covered around 8 square miles.

The still mysterious city was one of the largest in the world at its peak between 100 B.C. and A.D. 750. But it was abandoned before the rise of the Aztecs in the 14th century.

Lorena Paiz, the archaeologist who led the discovery, said that the Teotihuacan altar was believed to have been used for sacrifices, “especially of children.”

“The remains of three children not older than 4 years were found on three sides of the altar,” Paiz told The Associated Press.

“The Teotihuacan were traders who traveled all over the country (Guatemala),” Paiz said.

A collapsed empire. An abandoned city. Child sacrifice. And traders who traveled all over.

You don’t say.

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The True Author of Shakespeare’s Plays

Yes, we should have known. Ben Jonson was openly telling everyone who wrote all along, right at the front of the First Folio, that it was Lord Thomas North, the translator, among many other works, of Plutarch’s Lives.

In 1623, Ben Johnson wrote one of the most famous odes one poet ever crafted for another—To the Memory of My Beloved the author Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us. The poem was prominently placed at the beginning of the first official collection of Shakespeare’s plays known as the First Folio. Yet some eight years later, the poet Leonard Digges wrote a scathing rebuttal to Jonson’s ode, denouncing it as an attack against Shakespeare. He was so furious that he wanted Jonson’s supposedly abusive poem removed for the publication of the Second Folio (1632)—and replaced with Digges’s own defense of the Stratford playwright, answering Jonson’s insults “point by point.” In 1693, the renowned Shakespeare enthusiast John Dryden responded similarly to Digges, labeling Jonson’s poem as “an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.” And Brian Vickers has noted that Dryden’s “judgment has been echoed many times.”

But no one has been able to explain what was so insolent and invidious about the poem—until now. As we shall see in this article, Jonson’s celebrated ode contains a shocking secret—a dead giveaway to the true origin of the canon. In other words, the answer to the most significant literary question in history—who was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays?—has been sitting prominently in the front of the First Folio for the last 400 years. Jonson was not being remotely subtle. And, at the end of this article, you are almost certainly going to be asking yourself the same question I think about daily: HOW ON EARTH DID EVERYONE MISS THIS?

Jonson.. is saying when we turn from tragedy to Shakespeare’s comedies, the great tragedians (and the reader) would be better served to ignore the Stratford dramatist altogether and focus instead on:

the comparison 

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

And the subject of these lines—the English author who rose from the ashes of a “comparison of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth” is not hard to determine.

Jonson chose his words carefully—carefully enough that his reference to North’s Plutarch’s Lives is unmistakable—or as its actual title reads: “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED …” Not surprisingly, the signature feature of North’s translation is that it is not just a collection of biographies; rather its extremely peculiarizing feature is that Plutarch is writing “COMPARISONS” of Greek leaders with Roman ones. Each section of the book contains three chapters—a biography of a Greek, a biography of a Roman, and a chapter examining correspondences between the two.

All of the titles of these third-chapters in the section followed the same format: “The COMPARISON of [Greek] with [Roman]” – with “COMPARISON” in all-caps. For example, “THE COMPARISON OF Alcibiades with Martius Coriolanus.”

Moreover, Jonson, with his specific description of “insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” even appears to be hinting at the parallels between Alcibiades and Coriolanus as they are the lead characters of two parallel tragedies—Timon of Athens and Coriolanus—in the very Folio he is introducing. As shown in the following passages, according to North’s translation, the Greek Alcibiades, one of the main characters of Timon of Athens, was known for his “insolence,” while the Roman Coriolanus was known as “haughty.”

Howbeit in Alcibiades there was nothing, but his insolency and vainglory that men misliked.20

This Timon was a citizen of ATHENS, that lived about the war of PELOPONNESUS, as appeareth by Plato, and Aristophanes comedies: in the which they mocked him, calling him a viper, & malicious man unto mankind, to shun all other men’s companies, but the company of young Alcibiades, a bold and insolent youth, whom he would greatly feast.

This latter passage, referring to Timon’s great feasts and his relationship with Alcibiades, describes the main focus of Timon of Athens and again describes Alcibiades as an insolent Greek. And this is how he is portrayed in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Meanwhile, while the Greek warrior was known for his insolence, his Roman counterpart was a paragon of haughtiness. North’s translation of the story of Coriolanus emphasizes “the austerity of his nature, and his haughty obstinate mind.” More, all editions of the Roman tragedy mention his pride, condescension, and aloofness, with many editors describing Coriolanus as “haughty.” In fact, examples are so numerous that specific citations are pointless. A Google Book search for the phrase, “haughty Coriolanus,” yields more than 150 results. And it’s likely that the vast majority of all editions of the Roman tragedy describe him thusly.

Jonson’s remark in the front of a Folio that contains four tragedies based on Thomas North’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED” including two parallel plays that invite comparisons between the “insolent” Greek Alcibiades and the “haughty” Roman Coriolanus is not a coincidence. Rather, Jonson is not only exposing the author behind the Folio but emphasizing the intricate entanglement among North’s plays and his translations.

I found the evidence for North’s authorship to be entirely convincing even before this. The textual similarities indicated by the plagiarism analysis is simply too strong to deny. Nor do I find it remotely troubling to accept that this means that the sonnets were written by someone else; they never struck me as having been authored by the same individual and I wondered about that even back in high school.

But this evidence from the First Folio would, in itself, be sufficient. And it’s truly amazing that no one else ever clocked it.

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The Lethal Cancer of Globalization

Clown World is literally killing its host civilization. Again.

If an American, German, French, Canadian, or Dutch citizen examined the state of their nation in the 80s/early 90s, when globalization went into overdrive, and compared it to today, what would they see? The greatest wealth transfer from the middle class to the oligarchy in history, permanent war, a ramped-up police state, weaponized immigration overload, wild inflation, and Rothschild Zionist control of every facet of society. The neocon/neoliberal ravaged Global South fared worse.

“Western” parasite globalization takes locally grown carrots, transports them around the world, and either sells the marked-up carrots back to their place of origin or forces the local carrot-growing region to sell their good carrots globally and buy inferior and more expensive carrots from abroad. This wastes energy and produces unnecessary pollution. It also creates superfluous middlemen, toll collectors, and debt. Flooding a domestic market with foreign products that the domestic market can produce crushes local labor.

Digital platform globalization takes it to the next level, whereby everything sold digitally (which is practically “everything.”) pays a cut to the digital toll collector, extracting wealth from artists, musicians, content creators, entrepreneurs, and other value producers, and transferring the profits to the oligarchy through Amazon, Apple Music, PayPal, etc. Worse, by moving humanity’s data to the digital platform, Big Tech finance not only controls, but in reality owns, all intellectual property from antiquity to the present.

The remarkable thing is how Clown World’s advocates have absolutely nothing to defend it with. Nothing works anymore. Despite being drenched in an absolute torrent of pornography in every form, young women would rather work as virtual prostitutes and young men would rather play games than get together; sexual oversaturation has proven to be a far more effective libido-killer than censorship and chaperons. Despite the supposed benefits of free trade and massive immigration, the economies are collapsing and the once-mighty industrial power Great Britain now has the manufacturing capacity of a small Caribbean island circa 1700. Despite 72 childhood vaccines, young adults are unhealthier than they have ever been.

And yet, all the clowns can do is to bleat “democracy” and “racism” and “good for the economy”. All they have to offer is more of the lies that have already been comprehensively disproven by current events and observable reality.

Any society that wishes to survive into the future, let alone thrive, needs to reject the poison fruits of the so-called Enlightenment and actively disavow Clown World and all its fake pomps.

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There Are Not “Two Wests”

The New York Times unconvincingly attempts to pass off Clown World as the genuine Christendom it subverted:

After the fall of Communism, fledgling democracies chose to again believe that an association with the West — its image freshly burnished and shining — would bring freedom, wealth and stability.
Now that idea of the West has been broken in two. One half belongs to Mr. Trump and other predatory populists. The other is composed of those who still believe in liberal democracy, respect for international agreements and the right of nations to self-determination.

For now, small countries that have thrown their lot in with America find themselves in a geopolitical trap. For Ukraine in particular, Mr. Trump’s words and actions have triggered something close to an existential panic. But the rest of the direct neighbors of Russia need a new plan, too: alliances of democratic values.
The European Union seems to be fundamental to this effort. For those countries that are already members, including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania and Estonia, the question of how to move forward is simpler. The E.U. is also an aspiration for those countries which aren’t yet members, but have candidate status. As in the ’90s, integration will require adaptation and change — first and foremost, perhaps, in military spending, as the bloc embarks on a plan to spend hundreds of billions to rearm the continent. (Here, Poland is already a model.)

But Europe is only part of the answer to Mr. Trump’s foreign policy of betrayal. Countries like Canada and South Korea cannot join the E.U., but will still seek security alliances with those countries that still share their democratic values — Canada is already moving closer, and is in talks to join the bloc’s military expansion.

It is the end of a chapter. But in alliances of security and values, there will be another: Strange as it may sound, for maybe the first time in history there are two Wests.

There are not “two Wests”. The West, aka Christendom, is a) Christian, b) European, and c) based upon the Graeco-Roman legal and philosophical tradition. It is now represented by the Nationalist Right, which is still suppressed and repressed by all of the Clown World institutions.

Clown World is a satanic inversion of the West that it pretends to be. It is a) Satanic, b) multi-ethnic, and c) based upon talmudic legality, nihilistic philosophy, and a consent-based morality. Every single one of its proclaimed virtues and principles are inversions of the historical values of the genuine West, and every single one of its definitions are false and intentionally misleading.

  • Democracy = rules by an unelected controlled elite
  • Money = debt
  • Nation = ideological idea
  • Person = unaccountable state-created paper entity
  • Sin = rejection of the narrative
  • Misinformation = truth
  • Truth = official narrative
  • Math = official narrative
  • Logic = official narrative
  • Science = official narrative
  • Christianity = judeo-christianity
  • America = idea

The reason Clown World will fail and fall, as it has repeatedly over the course of previous human civilizations and recorded human history, is that it is fundamentally at war with both Nature and Nature’s God. So, counter-intuitively, the stronger it becomes and the more its inversions and perversions take root throughout a society, the closer that society is to complete collapse.

Clown World can only survive through parasitism and subversion. Once a society actually tries to live upon the basis of its principles, it soon discovers that it cannot, and that its weakness will not permit it to survive its encounter with any society that rejects Clown World. Which, of course, is why post-Western Europe’s attempts to defeat Russia will comprehensively and conclusively fail, and why a failure of the God-Emperor 2.0 root out Clown World in the USA would inevitably result in ceding global dominance to China.

There are not “Two Wests”, and this is far from the first time in history that The Empire That Never Ended subverted a society or a civilization. As always, Clown World’s narrative is a factually-incorrect inversion of objective reality.

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Infertility is the End of Democracy

A highly astute observation on how the ascent of the so-called nationalist autocracies and the demise of the so-called democracies appears to be inevitable due to the way these democracies heavily bias their policies toward the least-productive members of their societies:

As far as I can tell, the most notable political science results of the 21st century is democracy cannot work well with low fertility rates. All converge on prioritizing retirees over workers and immigrants over citizens escalating social transfers beyond sustainability. I think this means we should try to understand non-democratic regimes better since they will represent the majority of global political power in the future.

It seems to me that the great graying and mass immigration simply are the end of democracies as we understood them. Just as failure to manage an economy and international trade were the end of Soviet Communism as we understood it. Low-fertility autocracies seems to have little trouble with reindustrializing or waging war when needed. These used to be 20th century strengths of high-fertility democracy!

This is simply another way that enfranchising and educating women, and encouraging the 30 percent of young women who historically married and had children to enter the work force, is both logically and observably incompatible with societal survival. It’s a viable path for a limited time, and it may even be considered a highly desirable path by many, but the now-observable fact is that viability comes with a built-in time limit which is remarkably consistent with the recorded lifespans of many historical societies.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the fundamental flaws in the underlying assumptions of failed past ideologies.

  • Communism: the idea that production will take place without a profit incentive.
  • Libertarianism: the idea that consent is a valid or viable basis for morality and legality.
  • Democracy: the idea that the collective will of the people exists in any meaningful sense or is relevant to the ordering and sustainability of society in any way.
  • Representative Democracy: the idea that an elected elite will meaningfully represent the wishes of the people
  • Constitutionalism: the idea that words on a piece of paper, interpreted by a political elite, will preserve the intentions of the society’s founders.
  • Elefthemporism: the idea that you can replace your native people with foreigners and buy the weapons required by your armed forces from your enemies.
  • Neoliberalism: the idea that the various idiosyncracies of the post-WWII order are of immutable significance for future orders.
  • Conservatism: the idea that yesterday’s status quo is the high point of human existence and any departure from it in any direction is dangerous and wrong.

Personally, I think the reason the “democracies” are failing is because they are fake, evil, and literally gay, but it is without question true that a societal lack of fertility and the inevitable evils that result from it will eventually render even the ideal Platonic form of liberal, constitutional representative democracy non-functional.

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