Tag: history

The Ultimate Troll

“It truly has been a second home to me.”
–Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, on Soldier Field, after the Packers beat Chicago 28-19

You really have to keep in mind the context here. Because, with yesterday’s victory, the Green Bay Packers finally surpassed the Chicago Bears for the most NFL wins by a franchise. Both teams entered the game with 786 wins; the Packers now have 787. The New York Giants are in third place at 713. This is the first time the Bears haven’t led the NFL in all-time wins since 1921, when they were known as the Decatur Staleys.

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An Evil Impossibility

A Gospel minister points out that “equality” is a rhetorical Enlightenment device that is still being successfully utilized against Christian civilization, to devastating effect:

Equality is an anti-Christian force. It was the rhetoric of the secularists for well over a century because it was useful to batter against the anti-egalitarian strictly hierarchical Christian faith. And it worked. It worked so well many Christians now preach as if equality was their idea.

But now that secularism reigns supreme in our culture egalitarianism is being redefined to suppress any competing philosophies, especially hierarchical religious philosophies. The goal was always the supremacy of the godless morality of the anti-Christ philosophy over Christendom and beyond.

Free speech, free expression, and anti-racism are similar dyscivilizational rhetorical nukes. But once one finally sees through them and recognizes their intrinsic falsity, it’s hard to believe that one could ever have been persuaded to believe in any such shamelessly cynical folly.

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Crucifixion Denial

Elon Musk: Denying a violent event, such as Sandy Hook, the Holocaust, and the September 11th attacks.

Ian Miles Chang: Twitter now has a new policy against Holocaust denial, 9/11 denial, or Sandy Hook denial. Thanks for adding this, @elonmusk

The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ of Nazareth was indubitably a violent historical event. Should not its denial be similarly banned? Does this not mean Twitter has adopted an official Crucifixion Denial policy?

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Bolsonero Crosses the Rubicon

Brazil shows Americans what actual resistance to electoral fraud looks like:

The people of Brazil have risen up against alleged voter fraud in the nation’s recent presidential election, with millions flooding the streets in protest.

During Tuesday’s national Republican Day, an estimated 3 million citizens took to the streets across the country and demanded the election be annulled.

Incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro and his party have responded by moving to annul the election.

Bolsonaro’s conservative Partido Liberal (PL) party presented its report and announced it will apply for the election’s annulment since the results could not be validated.

Since the massive fraud during the runoff election on October 30th in Brazil, millions of Brazilians have been protesting on the streets every day.

The election was “won” by Bolsonaro’s far-left socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Whether this Brazilian revolt against fake democracy is successful or not, it demonstrates why the Second Amendment has become irrelevant. Weapons are of no use to a people who are unwilling to use them. Since Americans wouldn’t use their God-given gun rights to a) defend their borders against foreign immigration or b) to prevent at least two successive fraudulent governments from ruling over them when they had those rights, history indicates they are probably going to eventually lose them.

I understand the natural reaction to protest “we didn’t know” or “people weren’t ready” or “there is nothing we could have done”. But the cold reality of history is that a people have a limited window of opportunity in which successful self-defense is possible. Once the Pilgrims have established themselves, the Visigoths have crossed the Rhine, or the Lombards have crossed the Alps, it’s already too late to turn back time.

That’s why, at this point, the collapse of the United States is probably the optimal outcome for the American posterity.

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She’s Going To Blow

Fred Reed observes the current state of the United States and concludes that the polity is in the process of collapsing:

As the sentient have presumably noticed, the United States is in crisis, the country’s problems are profound, intrinsic, without solution, and worsening. When a population reaches the point of despair, even desperation, when it sees a darkening future for itself and its children, people yearn for a strong man who will forcibly put things right. Yet it is unlikely that helicopters of Marines from Quantico will descend on the White House and announce the dictatorship of some general. Military officers are too well paid and comfortable to worry about the country. It is hard to imagine an American Mussolini. Trump is a caricature and no one else comes to mind. Yet “unrest” –less euphemistically, “chaos” on the order of Mr. Floyd’s massive riots, is possible. We have seen it. We can see it again.

Consider America today. By comparison with Japan, China, Korea, it is a barbarity, a dumpster, an asylum, an abattoir, an astonishment. San Francisco loses conventions because of needles and excrement on the sidewalks. Almost weekly we see multiple shootings in stores, high schools and, now, grade schools. Murders of whites by blacks run at thirty a month, the news being suppressed. In cities across the country crime is out of control, the tax bases moving out, bail abolished so criminals are freed in hours. Stores leave to escape undiscouraged shoplifting and robbery. Seven hundred homicides a year in Chicago, 300 in Baltimore, and at least twice as many shot but survive, similar numbers in a dozen cities. For practical purposes, law does not exist in these ungovernable enclaves. Sexual curiosities, once called perversions, flourish with American embassies hoisting flags in support of transsexualism. Mobs topple historical statues. Many tens of thousands live on sidewalks and a hundred thousand a year die of opioid overdoses. The country drops math requirements and English grammar in schools, AP courses, and SATs as racist. The economy declines, jobs have left for other climes, medical care is beyond most people’s means, government is corrupt and incompetent, and wars are unending. There is actual hatred between racial, political, and regional groups. Ominously, gun sales are up.

How is this going to end well?

This column is a welcome return to the slashing style of the Fred of yore. The two things Fred left out – presumably due to his identity complications – is the demographic transformation of the population due to mass migration and the demographic transformation of the political and financial elite due to the combination of imperialism and ethnipotism.

But never mind the omissions. They don’t detract in the least from either the force of his words or the accuracy of his conclusions.

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1918 Finally Ended

Eugyppius suggests an interesting hypothesis about the disappearance of the remnants of the Spanish Flu and the advent of a new seasonal flu virus based on Corona

The flu is gone. This is not an illusion. It’s not down to the wilful or mistaken misdiagnosis of Corona or anything like that. Most countries have long-standing influenza surveillance programs, entire offices of people whose job it is to find and track the flu. These programs are still running, and influenza tests are still widely administered across the world. Despite all of this searching, nobody can find anything but a few outliers. As a seasonal phenomenon in the northern and southern hemispheres, influenza has disappeared….

A lot of basic matters are poorly understood in the field of virology, and one of them is why waves of infection seem to spontaneously collapse, rather than continuing indefinitely until all susceptible have been taken ill. One reason seems to be that some viruses interfere with other viruses, such that the rise of one compels the decline of another. Plainly, not all pathogens are at odds with each other. Co-infections are common among the overlapping deep-winter viruses. Some viruses, however, definitely seem to exclude others, at least some of the time and in certain places. Influenza and Corona are two of these mutually exclusive viruses. Since it has killed the flu, Corona can operate both in the vacant flu season and in its own natively preferred dark winter months.

Some months ago, I suggested that Corona’s victory over influenza could well represent a permanent change in the order of respiratory viruses – a revolution, perhaps a very rare one. The only conceivable historical precedent would be the Spanish Flu of 1918. While we have historical reports of influenza-like illness going back centuries, we don’t have any sequenced viruses predating the second wave of this great 1918 pandemic. Before 1918, we can’t be sure that seasonal flu-like illnesses were caused by influenza viruses at all. For all we know, coronaviruses were the dominant scourge prior to 1918, and their centuries-long reign was interrupted by the anomalous and highly destructive avian influenza that entered humans in that year. Perhaps the ensuing century of influenza was an unstable equilibrium, an anomaly, and Corona has restored a prior, more ordinary world.

All that’s speculation, but we do know that the ensuing seasonal flus for decades afterwards were descended, directly or indirectly, from that first 1918 strain. What happened in 1918 was certainly a viral revolution, on the order of the upset Corona achieved in 2019. Much of virology, as a field, grew up in the shadow of 1918, as an attempt to understand the pandemic of that year and the obviously related seasonal infections to which it gave birth.

I thought the reports of the flu vanishing were total nonsense, nothing more than a propagandistic attempt to report flu cases as cases of Covid-19. But if it’s true that the seasonal flu as we’ve known it for the past 100 years didn’t even exist before the Spanish Flu, then it’s conceivable that the coronavirus of 2019 has simply replaced it as the seasonal flu virus.

In which case, the flu vaccines are even more worthless than before, and worse, those vaccinated against Covid-19, whose immune systems have been trained to permit variants of the coronavirus to enter and wreak havoc without meeting much resistance, will likely face regular periodic episodes of new flu without enjoying the benefit of the usual reduction in severity.

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The Good Immigrants

On last night’s Darkstream, I was asked if I could think of a single group of immigrants who genuinely made their new residence a better place for the previous residents. And the only group of whom I could think that truly fit the description was the Conquistadors:

These men stepped off their wooden sailing vessels, accompanied by warhorses and armoured war mastiffs, clad in steel breastplates, armed with sword, axe, dirk, arquebus, and cannon, and ventured into an unknown land inhabited by an alien people speaking an incomprehensible tongue, whose nobles sported head-dresses of brilliant quetzal feathers, whose warriors clad themselves in jaguar skins and painted skulls on their faces, whose men and women pierced and tattooed the flesh of their faces, elongated their skulls, and whose smiles showed teeth filed to a point and replaced with jade and turquoise.

As they made their way into the heart of this land they found themselves standing beside racks of skulls at the bases of vast stepped pyramids, watching as waterfalls of blood cascaded down the steps from priests wearing the flayed skins of victims offering up beating hearts torn from the chests of butchered men to the stone idols of savage gods whose fangs and claws glared out across the arid landscape. Surrounding them was a city of unparalleled magnificence, larger in scale than anything these men had ever beheld, of smooth white adobe walls shining in the merciless irradiance of the tropical sun, wide canals carrying the canoes of trade and strange tribute from every corner of the empire, its avenues thronged with richly attired citizens.

To be in the midst of such power and beauty, while to be confronted with such an incomprehensible scale of cruelty and bloodlust, led these men to come to the only possible conclusion: where their homeland was the land of God and His people, this, surely, must be the earthly domain of His adversary. The people around them were in thrall to Satan and his demons, and had constructed about them all the terrors and tortures of Hell.

And so those hard men from a hard people responded as such men must respond, when cut off from home, surrounded and outnumbered, exposed and alone in the heart of an evil the depth of which even their darkest nightmares and ugliest legends had never hinted might exist. They did the only thing they knew how to do.

They fought.

For gold, yes. For riches and for land and for glory. These were adventurers seeking fortune, after all.

But they also fought for souls.

They fought, desperately, to kill all they must, in order to save who they could, and wipe an abomination from the face of God’s Earth.

What people tend to forget is that the Conquistadors didn’t defeat the ruling Mexica tribe and wipe out its Aztec Empire by themselves. In fact, they were merely the iron core around which the native tribes who were savagely oppressed for over 100 years by the Mexica used to free themselves. It’s worth noting that the Mexica – a Nahuatl-speaking tribe – were themselves immigrants to the region.

Nahua peoples were not originally indigenous to central Mexico, but are instead descended from Chichimec peoples who migrated into the region from the north in the early 13th century.

Of course, given that most history is written by servants of the very Empire That Never Ended that was defeated at Tenochtitlan, it should not be surprising that they are now regarded as the villains of the piece.

UPDATE: One cannot truly grasp the extent of Aztec evil, or the extent to which the Conquistadors benefitted humanity, without learning about the philosophy and theology that underpinned Aztec society.

The Nahautl Weltanschauung was not a mindless or unreflective cruelty, but a sophisticated body of ideas and axioms, developed over centuries of debate and discord. In this way, we can approach the Aztec ‘mindset’ on its own terms and attempt to understand the metaphysical logic behind their civilisation.

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The Importance of Maneuver

And perhaps even more significant, as demonstrated by this excellent piece on military history, is the importance of tactical flexibility:

Few ancient warriors have amassed such an enduring and widely known legacy as the Spartans. From the cinematic reimagining, to the science fiction super soldiers of the Halo series, to the use of the word Spartan itself as a synonym for arduous and ascetic ruggedness – Spartans are, for many, the archetypical warrior. Most with at least a cursory knowledge of ancient history know the Spartans by acclaim to be the best warriors of all the Greeks.

It is true that the Spartans fielded notably competent and powerful armies. This, of course, had less to do with some sort of genetic predisposition for combat, and more to do with the structure of Spartan society. In the classical era, most Greek city-states fielded citizen armies – quite literally the adult male population under arms, with farmers and craftsman mobilizing into a militia. In contrast, Spartan society was decidedly more martial, even in peacetime. Sparta had a large workforce of slaves (helots) who comprised the majority of the population – Herodotus claimed that there were something like seven helots for each Spartan. The presence of such a large, servile labor force enabled Spartan men to participate in rigorous military-social institutions, including regular training in arms and a military academy for young men. So while the average Athenian soldier was likely to be a farmer who grabbed the family shield, spear, and helmet when he was called up, a Spartan was more like a professional soldier who had helots to do the farming for him.

Sparta’s peculiar social structure and martial institutions bore their intended fruit. From roughly 431 to 404 BC, the Spartans fought a protracted conflict with Athens (the Peloponnesian War) which shattered Athenian preeminence in southern Greece and established Sparta as the dominant Greek power. This struggle witnessed many decisive Spartan victories, including the famous Battle of Syracuse, which saw an Athenian army entirely crushed by Sparta and her proxies.

The Battle of Leuctra brought a sudden, unexpected, and spectacular end to the era of Spartan hegemony.

Athens and Sparta are by far the two best known ancient Greek city states – Athens for its philosophers and Sparta for its warriors. Far less famous is Thebes – the third city of Greece. Yet it was this same uncelebrated Thebes that won a decisive victory against the Spartans, despite being heavily outnumbered, crushing the Spartan army and breaking its power….

At Leuctra, the Spartans arrayed in standard formation, with their battle lines formed up at 8 to 12 ranks deep. This was viewed as the correct formation to ensure both adequate depth and width. In short, the considered “best practice” was to maintain a properly balanced formation, with as little drift or dissipation as possible, to prevent the formation from breaking apart altogether. A broken formation was deadly. It is estimated that, in Greek hoplite battles, losing armies lost on average nearly three times as many men as winning armies. This was the price of a shattered phalanx.

At Leuctra, Epaminondas and the Thebans threw all the conventional wisdom out the window.

Instead of a balanced, rectangular formation, the Thebans assembled in a lopsided, weighted formation, with their left wing packed, both with far deeper ranks and their best troops. While the Spartans followed the conventional wisdom and lined up at a consistent depth all across the line, the Thebans assembled a massive package, fifty ranks deep, on the left (facing the Spartan right).

By forming up the vast bulk of their forces in the left wing (in a formation 4 to 5 times deeper than a traditional Hoplite mass), the Thebans had already deviated from one standard practice of the time. They abandoned a second standard operating procedure when they proceeded to advance that left wing far ahead of the remainder of their line. While the 50-deep left-hand mass smashed into the Spartan right, the Theban center and right lagged far behind. As a result, the mass of the overweight Theban left broke through the Spartan right wing and began to roll up the rear before the rest of the Spartan line even engaged in battle. Most of the Spartan army never got to join the battle before their formation was shattered from the rear. The Theban mass rolled into the rear, began concentric attacks on the Spartan army, and sparked a total rout in short order.

Leuctra was a titanic victory with massive geopolitical implications. The loss of an army to an outnumbered and underestimated foe rocked both Sparta’s material strength and its perception as the leading military power in Greece, and set in motion a strategic defeat that permanently relegated it to a second rate power within Greece.

The Battle of Leuctra also marked the beginning of the end of classical Greek hoplite warfare, with its focus on uniform, tactically simplified heavy infantry formations. To a modern reader, the strategy adopted by the Thebans at Leuctra, aimed at a decisive action to penetrate and exploit the enemy line, seems fairly obvious. Yet to accomplish this, the Thebans had to break a variety of “rules” for hoplite warfare, massing their forces into what the Spartans surely viewed as an unwieldy, imbalanced, and excessively deep left wing. Innovation rarely looks like innovation to those that have the benefit of hindsight, but the Thebans had, in a word, discovered the power of schwerpunkt. Thebes would itself soon be overwhelmed by another Greek power fielding similarly flexible, but even more powerful phalanx formations: Macedonia.

Epaminondas’ tactics at Leuctra marked one of the earliest documented examples of coordinated and planned battlefield maneuver.

The History of Battle: Maneuver, Part 1, 4 November 2022

Keep the Battle of Leuctra in mind whenever you’re tempted to “stick to the plan” in the face of a situation that has obviously departed from what was anticipated. If the Spartans had simply withdrawn in order to figure out the probable consequences of the anomaly they were witnessing at Leuctra, they might have been able to adapt to it and overcome it, thereby changing Greek history and preventing Sparta’s decline.

Mindless sticking to one’s pre-established position, either physically and conceptually, can be fatal.

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The UFO Disclosure Campaign

Rumors are heating up that the US government is in the process of coming clean on the existence of extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects:

Dr. Garry Nolan, an immunologist at Stanford, who recently stepped into the ufological arena after claiming to have analyzed alleged UFO remains. As we reported not long ago, during an interview with Tucker Carlson Today, Dr. Nolan discussed his thoughts on the Unidentified Aerospace-Underwater Phenomena (UAPs) and whether or not the government possesses technology that originated from another planet. In addition, Dr. Nolan discussed his experiences working with the government and analyzing and studying people who came too close to UFOs.

He stated during the interview that individuals involved in the recovery of UFO debris and subsequent secret government programs would soon come forward to reveal what they know, putting an end to one of the biggest cover-ups in modern history.

When you say that the government has been involved in a cover-up, do you think they’ve been hiding it all this time?” Coulthart asked.

“Oh yes. I know it’s a fact because I’ve spoken to important people who are about to come out and whistleblow on it,” Nolan replied.

“And there has been an active cover-up. Just look at what the Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced. They announced an office to study the phenomenon. Putting money aside, they say they will start the study from 1947.”

“Which is incredible. That’s the date of Roswell,” the interviewer said.

“Yes, 1947. And we want a list of every operation they did to misinform and misinform the public,” Nolan said.

A recent law passed by the U.S. Congress may have influenced this statement by the Stanford professor. It grants a kind of amnesty to officials, military personnel, and government contractors to provide information on UFOs without fear of legal consequences or reprisals.

Whether these rumors are true or not, what will be will be. I don’t really care because it’s always been entirely obvious to me that extraterrestrial life exists due to a) the size of the known universe, b) the panoply of historical anomalies, and c) the interaction between the natural and the supernatural. I’m not going to bother to explain my thinking now because anyone who can’t follow the logic won’t follow the logic and I just don’t care what anyone else happens to think of my conclusions.

And that’s not the interesting aspect of this rumored disclosure of a decades-long – and probably centuries-long – coverup as far as I’m concerned anyway. For me, the more interesting aspect is the way in which it would conclusively disprove, yet again, the retarded, but commonly-held idea that conspiracies involving large numbers of people are impossible due to the inability of people to avoid inadvertent disclosure to the public.

One would have thought that the success of the Manhattan Project, which involved 130,000 people working in 30 different locations over four years without anyone learning about its purpose would suffice to disprove the Impossibility of Conspiratorial Secrecy argument, but since a) it lasted only four years and b) it took place during wartime, most people erroneously discount the obvious falsification. That will not be possible in the aftermath of the disclosure of a successful 75-year UFO coverup.

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