Tag: history

The Daily Machiavelli

Having finished with their collective read of THE GUNS OF MARS, the subscribers of Castalia Library voted on the next Library work to be excerpted daily. The vote went as follows:

  • 16% Pensées
  • 23% History of Florence
  • 23% History of Freedom of Thought
  • 12% De Bello Gallico
  • 27% Discourses on Livy

And so we have begun the daily excerpting of Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius by Niccolò Machiavelli. Today features the introduction, so it’s not too late to join in and read along:

Although the envious nature of men, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery and introduction of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents, yet, animated by that desire which impels me to do what may prove for the common benefit of all, I have resolved to open a new route, which has not yet been followed by any one, and may prove difficult and troublesome, but may also bring me some reward in the approbation of those who will kindly appreciate my efforts.

And if my poor talents, my little experience of the present and insufficient study of the past, should make the result of my labors defective and of little utility, I shall at least have shown the way to others, who will carry out my views with greater ability, eloquence, and judgment, so that if I do not merit praise, I ought at least not to incur censure.

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TRANSLATION: Cádiz

The eighth volume of the Episodios Nacionales, the great historical novel cycle of Spain, Cádiz carries Gabriel Araceli into the besieged island city where Spain’s first constitution is being born, and where a drawing-room intrigue will end in blood on the sand.

It is 1810, and Cádiz is the last free city in Spain. While French cannon fire arcs across the bay and the newly convened Cortes debates sovereignty, freedom of the press, and the abolition of feudal lordships, Gabriel finds himself entangled in a world of tertulias and domestic politics more dangerous than any battlefield. The condesa Amaranta needs his help to recover her secret daughter, Inés, from the household of the formidable doña María de Rumblar, a Catholic absolutist matriarch who has imprisoned the girl behind the walls of a household so rigidly governed it resembles a convent. To reach Inés, Gabriel must navigate a social minefield: the effusive doña Flora, whose speeches are torrents of self-interruption and genuine warmth; the feckless young Count Don Diego, who is supposed to marry Inés for family advantage; and the absurd Don Pedro del Congosto, commander of a militia so magnificently incompetent that its members are named after parrots and peacocks.

At the centre of everything is Lord Gray, a brilliant, melancholic Englishman who delivers dazzling speeches against his own country, joins the beggars at the Carmen convent for the philosophical experience, and quotes Byron while systematically destroying the people around him. Gabriel believes Lord Gray is pursuing Inés. He is wrong. The truth, when it comes, is worse than anything Gabriel has imagined.

The Episodios Nacionales is a cycle of forty-six historical novels tracing the history of Spain from the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 through the Restoration of the 1870s. Written between 1872 and 1912, the cycle is one of the supreme achievements of European fiction — a work that stands with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine and Trollope’s Palliser and Barchester novels as a panoramic portrait of an entire nation across a century of upheaval. This is the first complete English translation of the eighth volume.

CÁDIZ by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It is the eighth of the first series of the Episodios Nacionales and was translated from the original Spanish by Vox Day. The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.

An Apology

Stephen A. Smith publicly apologized to Kyrie Irving yesterday.

“When it comes to Kyrie Irving, I can’t apologize strongly enough,” Smith said.

The ESPN star admitted he didn’t want to take the vaccine either but did because his job and livelihood could have been threatened. Athletes like Irving, Aaron Rodgers, and Novak Djokovic were ridiculed for refusing.

“I looked at it as being selfish,” Smith said on his show. “And I watched Dr. Fauci on Capitol Hill yesterday. And the person I thought about most was Kyrie Irving.”

Irving refused vaccination at the time and missed 53 games as a member of the Brooklyn Nets under New York City’s vaccine mandate. The Nets banned him for 35 home games before eventually allowing Irving to play on the road. Since Irving missed so many games, the Nets revoked an extension offer valued at over $100 million. Reports suggest that Irving missed out on $300k per game he sat out.

Smith then brought up his own battle with COVID-19 and shared that the virus nearly killed him. The ESPN personality was in the emergency room before New Year’s 2022 with double pneumonia. Smith not only flipped his opinion on Irving but also called him brave for his stance.

“It didn’t make him stubborn or selfish,” Smith said. “It made him brave. “It turns out that no matter what the truth is behind all of this, Kyrie Irving did nobody wrong. We did him wrong. I did him wrong. And for that, I’m sincerely sorry.”

There are a lot of people who are owed apologies. Not me, because I was fortunate in that my immediate family was 100 percent in accord with my absolute rejection of the vaxx and even my friends who got vaxxed were entirely respectful of my

But for all of you who suffered for your refusal to submit to the global psyop, go ahead and take a private mental victory lap. You have been vindicated. You were right all along. You did the right thing. And never again will you feel the same sort of social pressure on you, even when Clown World tries something similar again, because now you know that you not only can stand against it, but you must do so in order to show others that they can too.

And full credit to Stephen A. Smith for being brave enough to do what very, very few public figures are willing to do, and admit in front of everyone that he was wrong.

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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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