Tag: history

The Imperial USA Retreats

Although the way it was done was a humiliating shambles, the retreat of the USA from its occupation of Afghanistan is not a bad thing; the US military should also be withdrawn from Iraq, Africa, Europe, and most of its military bases around the world. But the question is, does this retreat spell the end of the empire?

Wise men in Washington have claimed for years that defeat in Afghanistan is what pushed the Soviet Union to collapse. Now that the US has done much worse, the world is about to see whether their theories hold water.
The last US military flight out of the Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) took off on Monday, a minute before the clocks struck midnight in Kabul. The 20-year war had come to an end, and the Taliban lit up the night skies with celebratory gunfire.

To hear President Joe Biden tell it, “the largest airlift in US history” was an “unparalleled” success, executed by the US military, diplomats, veterans and volunteers “with unmatched courage, professionalism, and resolve.”

In the minds of just about everyone else who could watch the events unfold over the past two weeks, it was a mad scramble to evacuate over 100,000 Afghans eager to emigrate, with fewer than 6,000 Americans making the flights – and several hundred being left behind for diplomats to try and save.

In fact, while 82nd Airborne Division commander General Christopher Donahue and US ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson were the last two people to step on the last plane, no American civilians were on board the last five flights out of Kabul. This was the startling admission by General Kenneth McKenzie of CENTCOM to Pentagon reporters on Monday evening.

“We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out,” McKenzie said.

Compare that to the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan, which ended in February 1989. The USSR took nine months to draw down over 100,000 troops. The last man across the Bridge of Friendship into present-day Uzbekistan was General Boris V. Gromov, who turned to a TV crew and said, “There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me.”

The government of Dr. Najibullah, whom the Soviets intervened to support against the US-backed Islamists a decade earlier, fought on for three more years – collapsing only after the USSR itself imploded and stopped sending aid. By contrast, the US-backed government in Kabul vanished into thin air before the US withdrawal was even complete.

Russia Today, 31 August 2021

What this comparison tells us is that the neoclown world order, aka “the open society”, aka Globohomo, is even less ideologically appealing to the people it oppresses around the world than Soviet-style communism. The riots and protests against the vaccine regimes around the world, from Australia to France, testify to the same thing.

This is precisely what the Learned Elders of Wye feared back in 2006 when they began to make their initial plans to leave the sinking ship of the USA, but if the shambolic retreat of their servants from Afghanistan is a true harbinger, it suggests their planned retreat from the USA will be even more disastrous.

UPDATE: George Soros on China:

2010: China has ‘better-functioning government’ than the USA.

2021: Xi Jinping is “the most dangerous enemy of open societies in the world.”

I wonder what could possibly have changed Mr. Soros’s opinion in the interim?

DISCUSS ON SG

The Next Domino

The failure in The Graveyard of Empires doesn’t necessarily mean the Imperial USA is going to collapse. However, once it becomes clear that the failure is merely one in a series, the conclusion becomes a little more obvious:

No single event no matter how photogenic it is, is not going to be a sign of the grand demise of the “Sole Hyperpower”. It really took from the beginning of WWI till the end of WWII for the British to truly fall apart as a geopolitical force. The Soviet Union fell much quicker, but it is very widely believed that Perestroika (or the The Reykjavik Summit) was the real first white flag that devolved into the breakup of the union years later. The Roman Empire was a vastly slower burn than either of these two modern behemoths.

This means we should not be debating if Afghanistan is the first “domino” to fall, but instead we should really take a look at what the rest of the dominos falling would look like. At this point we can surely put together a rough picture of what the next tiles to fall would look like, i.e. what other major failures/events would really be signs of the Monopolar World meeting its demise? The following are a few humble offerings as to what these dominos could be…

Abandoning the Maidan Regime in the Ukraine

The unexpected surrender and soon to be total fall of Kabul has certainly resonated in another city that starts with the letter K. If Washington is finding it necessary to abandon a twenty-year Nation-Building project that they have invested vast sums of money and manpower into, that means that back-burner Kiev could be cut loose in the near future, putting the fate of the region in the hands of the Russians.

Image: We all know who secures Ukrainian “independence”.

The Maidan has been a major roadblock for Russia. As Brzeziński wrote, “It cannot be stressed enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire” and Washington has done an absolutely fantastic job of turning the region into an “anti-Russia” as Putin recently called it.

If the Maidan project were to be abandoned, it would become another quite massive domino. Washington giving up on Kiev, resulting in that current political entity probably being divided up, mostly going to Moscow, would symbolize either the USA’s inability to stop the rise of the Russians or their begrudging acceptance of it.

I observe that the failures in Syria and Crimea already preceded the retreat from Afghanistan. That being said, I’m still of the opinion that the collapse will take place in the 2030s rather than the 2020s, even though it only took two years for the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan to turn into the fall of the Soviet empire.

DISCUSS ON SG

The ADL Attemps to Revise History

The most poisonous, anti-American organization in the USA is attempting to retroactively whitewash the crimes of the murderous pedophile Leo Frank by blaming them on a) anti-semitism and b) an innocent black man.

Leo Frank was the manager of the National Pencil Company — a sweatshop factory where over a hundred children labored, and where the Sam Nunn federal building stands today. Little Mary Phagan was 12 years old when she started working there in 1912, and Frank admitted he was the last person to see Mary alive.

In fact, the evidence of his guilt was overwhelming and on August 25, 1913, after a month-long trial in the Fulton County Superior Court, Leo Frank was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and on the next day, he was sentenced to hang for the murder of Mary Phagan.

What followed was an unprecedented effort by Leo Frank and his legal team and supporters to pin this horrific crime on everyone but himself. It is an effort that continues to this very day. The Leo Frank case is no “cold case.” It is obvious to anyone who objectively considers the case evidence that Leo Frank was rightly convicted for this heinous crime.

Today, his supporters have targeted a black man named James Conley who worked as a janitor at the factory. Evidence shows that after Frank beat and strangled Mary he was unable to move the body. He called on Conley and ordered him to help him conceal the crime and swore him to secrecy. After initially concealing Frank’s crime Conley ultimately revealed to authorities the true events of that day. The detail he gave was so shocking and so convincing that he became the state’s star witness against Leo Frank. Frank and his legal team’s response was to accuse Conley of the murder, and that has been their story for a century.

But Mary’s killer was not James Conley, and the state of Georgia proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Leo Frank alone murdered Little Mary Phagan.

The Phagan family has no objection to anyone expressing their opinions about the Leo Frank case, but we do insist that organizations and personal campaigns not distort the truth and facts to use this case for their own political purposes. For over 100 years, each passing decade brought with it dubious revelations of “new historical evidence” falsely claiming to exonerate Leo Frank. The Phagan family has stated since 1982 that if there were clear-cut evidence to clear Leo Frank of this heinous crime, we would be the first to ask for an exoneration. However, such historical evidence has never come to light. Rather, there are considerable data, extensive documentation, revealing archival material, and legal, court, and government records that only support and even strengthen the guilty verdict.

This is a useful reminder that whenever Jews shriek about “blood libels”, what they’re actually protesting is their guilty co-ethnics having been held responsible for the crimes they committed against people outside the Jewish community. Here is a sobering thought: if the most influential Jewish organizations in the USA are willing to go to such extremes to try to retroactively bury the century-old crimes of a single murderous pedophile, how far are they going to hide the crimes of similar rapists, murderers, and pedophiles in Hollywood today?

DISCUSS ON SG.

US Abandons Afghan Embassy

The US retreat from Kabul is rapidly proving to be even more ignominious than the famous flight from Saigon:

The US Ambassador to Afghanistan and some of his staff were seen fleeing their Kabul workplace with the stars and stripes flag Sunday, as the Pentagon increased the number of troops deployed in the region by 1,000 to 6,000.

Ambassador Ross Wilson and the flag were both seen arriving at Kabul Airport, as other Americans still in the country were ordered to shelter in place, with shots being fired at the city’s airport.

Embassy staff will be evacuated within the next 72 hours, as the Taliban makes stunning advances into the Afghan capital city, which worst-case scenarios estimated lasting at least 30 days after the US withdrew from it.

An official security alert was issued by the US government after shots were fired at the airport, sparking fears American jets could be shot down as they try to flee the country, which the Taliban have vowed to rename the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

To cite one Internet wag, we have to run away from them over there so that we don’t have to run away from them here.

Then again, the shambolic defeat of the US military in Afghanistan does lend some support for the inexplicable decision to not send troops to defend the southern border against the ongoing invasion of the nation. Perhaps the tranny generals who failed to defend the US capital from roving bands of FBI informants knew that troops would be equally worthless there.

The Imperial USA has not yet been destroyed, but this marks another step toward its eventual collapse. The nations are rising.

Only 1.85 million people in a nation of 36 million bothered to vote in the last Afghan election. The Afghans knew they were being ruled by an illegitimate foreign government.

Just like Americans.

Discuss on SG.

Kabul Has Fallen

The Taliban have already entered the capital city of Afghanistan, months earlier than expected:

This is the moment US diplomats are seen being evacuated from Kabul just hours before Taliban forces stormed the Afghan capital.

In a stark scene mirroring that of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war, a US Air Force helicopter was seen taking off from the US Embassy earlier today.

The Chinook helicopter was seen taking to the skies above the city – just like in 1975 when a US Marine helicopter was seen evacuating embassy staff from Vietnamese capital.

Smoke was also seen rising from near to the US embassy earlier today as security staff work to burn any important documents, including CIA information, or material that could be used ‘in propaganda efforts’. The US flag is soon expected to be lowered, signalling the official closure of the embassy.

It comes as the US steps up its evacuation of Kabul with Taliban fighters quickly moving in ‘from all sides’. Shots were heard on the outskirts of the capital earlier today, much earlier than first anticipated, before fighters poured into the city.

US Intelligence officials had expected Kabul to hold out for three months, while UK ministers were hoping they had until the end of the month.

Leaders of the extremist group have today demanded the Afghan government surrender the city to them in a bid to avoid bloodshed – adding the chilling warning ‘we’ve not declared a ceasefire’.

As many as 10,000 US citizens are being evacuated from the city. Around 3,000 US troops are being sent to aid the mission.

Meanwhile, Special Forces units are joining 600 British troops from the 16 Air Assault Brigade, including 150 Paratroopers, to begin airlifting more than 500 British Government employees out of Kabul.

It is believed that by Saturday night that the number of UK officials still in Afghanistan had been reduced to the ‘low tens’ – including ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow.

The UK Government says it aims to get British ambassador Sir Laurie and his remaining embassy staff out by Sunday night – amid fears the Taliban could seize Kabul airport within days.

Russia meanwhile today confirmed it did not intend to evacuate its embassy staff in Kabul.

This is a disaster and a national humiliation, but it is one that was both inevitable and obvious, predicted by me and by many others, for nearly two decades. And Russia has no need to evacuate its embassy staff, for unlike the USA and the United Kingdom, it is not at war with the Taliban and it has not been defeated by them.

The policy of Pax Americana enforced by our troops stationed around the world is not only a failure, it is leading to the corruption of the American military.

War is the health of the state, true, but unlike the tango, it does not require two. However, it has become clear that the neoconservative utopians in the administration do not see this undeclared and unconstitutional war as a reactive strike in self-defense, but more as a means of reshaping the global order. I expect this attempt to work about as well as Woodrow Wilson’s did in 1918.

It is not only the inevitable failure of this vision that concerns me. A military machine is a delicate creature, designed to do one thing very well—destroy the opposition. It is a well-known fact of military history that fighting troops and garrison troops are two very different things, and attempting to turn the former into the latter significantly impedes their ability to perform their primary mission.

History proves that no utopian vision, however sweeping, will ever bring a permanent peace. Let us then abandon visions of a global Pax Americana, bring our soldiers home, and only send them forth when war is necessary and declared. And when the war is won and the enemy is destroyed, bring the troops home again immediately. They deserve no less.

Bring them home from Germany, from South Korea and Italy. Bring them home from Kosovo, from Afghanistan and Kuwait, from Turkey, Spain, Iceland and Belgium. Bring them home from Panama, Portugal and Japan. Most of all, bring them home from Iraq. Now.

Our matchless soldiers have won the war—they cannot win the peace.

Bring Them Home, Worldnetdaily, February 23, 2004

UPDATE: Bagram airbase also fell to the Taliban this morning, surrendered by the Afghan troops who were defending it after the US withdrawal.

Discuss on SG.

A Rapid and Unexpected Collapse

It’s not the collapse of the US puppet regime in Afghanistan that is surprising, it’s the speed of the collapse, especially when compared to the collapse of the Soviet puppet regime there.

The 20 years of America’s and NATO’s war in Afghanistan has ended in ignominious failure – total and absolute. So, of course, did the Soviets’ war, but not quite so abruptly.

After the last Soviet troops crossed over the Friendship Bridge linking Afghanistan and Soviet Uzbekistan, the mujahideen launched a major offensive, confident that they would be able to defeat the government forces in short order. Their offensive collapsed completely. The Afghan army stood its ground and not a single major population center fell into the hands of their opponents. It was not until two years later, when the post-Soviet Russian government of Boris Yeltsin cut off funding to the Afghans that the PDPA regime finally fell.

The contrast with what has happened this past week could not be clearer. Even after the Soviets had left, the troops they had trained and equipped fought hard and successfully. Today, the troops that America and its allies trained and equipped at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars have scattered to the four winds with only the slightest effort at resistance.

But, to be fair, the problem lies not in army exercises or crates of machine guns. The current batch of Afghans have had plenty of both. They outnumber the Taliban and are better supplied. The problem is one of morale: simply put, not many of them are willing to die for their government.

The PDPA had a well-deserved reputation for corruption, incompetence, factional in-fighting, and dogmatic, counterproductive policies that alienated the Afghan people, such as its Marxist assaults on religion and private enterprise. Meanwhile, the PDPA’s opponents, the mujahideen, the Taliban’s precursor, enjoyed substantial support from the United States, including signing for the delivery of sophisticated Stinger missiles.

The fact that the Soviet-backed government put up a better fight than its contemporary counterpart can, therefore, only have one explanation: Afghans respect their current rulers even less than they respected the socialist PDPA. And that is really saying something.

The neoclowns who run US foreign policy – and increasingly domestic policy as well – operate through corruption because they are wicked and because their primary weapons are a) deception, b) access to a near-infinite supply of manufactured money and c) human weakness. And while corruption is indubitably an effective means of degrading and destroying organizations, institutions, and traditions, it is an incredibly weak foundation for building anything from buildings to nations.

This is why the servants of Satan are always defeated in the end. They can’t hold onto their gains, even when everything is under their control, because they cannot build anything that lasts.

Two years after the Soviet empire retreated from Afghanistan, the empire itself fell. If the amazingly fast collapse of the US puppet regime is a harbinger for a similar series of events, the imminent fall of Kabul would appear to suggest that the collapse of the US empire will be even more rapid, and even less expected, than the fall of its Soviet predecessor.

And while it seems to have escaped mainstream observers, I tend to doubt it is an accident that the Taliban’s massively successful offensive comes just two weeks after the Chinese foreign minister recognized the legitimacy of the Taliban’s government in Afghanistan.

Discuss on SG.

Christianity is not “the tradition of the elders”

Judeochristianity is, and has always been, an ahistorical deception targeting naive American Christians. Unlike Europeans, most 20th-Century Americans knew nothing about Jews or their history, which is why the post-1945 propaganda campaign to convince American Christians that they shared a common faith heritage with Jews rather than a completely antithetical one was mostly successful.

However, Judaism is not, and has never been, the religion of the Old Testament as followed – however haphazardly – by the Biblical 12 Tribes of Israel. In fact, rabbis such as Stephen Wise, the founder of the NAACP and president of the American Jewish Congress when it declared war on Germany in 1933, customarily referred to the Old Testament religion as “Hebrewism” in order to distinguish it from “the tradition of the elders” which began to take shape in 538 BC. This tradition continued to evolve into and beyond Jesus Christ’s day, and is specifically referred to in the New Testament, as the followers of Jesus Christ rejected it from the literal beginning of Christianity.

“Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders…?”

– Mark 7:5, also Matthew 15:2

The tradition of the elders was completed in its written form around 475 AD and the oldest extant manuscript dates back to 1342 AD. This tradition is the religion of the Pharisees that is today known as “Judaism” and it has less in common with the religion of the Hebrews of the Old Testament than Mormons and Muslims do with the Greek Orthodox Church.

“The return from Babylon and the adoption of the Babylonian Talmud marked the end of Hebrewism and the beginning of Judaism.”

– Stephen Samuel Wise

The Babylonian Talmud comprises the Mishnah and the Babylonian Gemara, the latter representing the culmination of more than 300 years of analysis of the Mishnah in the Talmudic Academies in Babylonia. The foundations of this process of analysis were laid by Abba Arika (175–247), a disciple of Judah ha-Nasi. Tradition ascribes the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud in its present form to two Babylonian sages, Rav Ashi and Ravina II. Rav Ashi was president of the Sura Academy from 375–427. The work begun by Rav Ashi was completed by Ravina, who is traditionally regarded as the final Amoraic expounder. Accordingly, traditionalists argue that Ravina’s death in 475 is the latest possible date for the completion of the redaction of the Talmud. 

– Wikipedia

Regardless of what you may happen to think of either religion, the fact is that anyone who claims Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism is hopelessly incorrect and his level of knowledge of the subject does not even rise to that of Wikipedia.

Jews and Christians differ on every single fundamental principle—even on the meaning of core Scriptural texts. More crucially, Christians rely on the Old Testament for legal delineation; whereas Jews rely solely upon our rabbinic tradition. We never, ever turn to our Bible for legal guidance, only to our rabbinic literature. To suggest that our Sages had anything at all in common with the likes of Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Carter or Pat Robertson is a slap in the face of 2500 years of scholarship.

– The Jewish Press

Yes, I’m real

 Apparently some Miles Mathis skeptics – whose skepticism is well-documented and justified – are similarly dubious about me:

The only MM I’ve read, his Wittgenstein piece, was basically “look at anything odd in W’s life and then say it’s obviously a lie”, coupled with “I don’t understand/like W’s philosophy so I’ll claim it’s gibberish”. You could write a similar hit piece on Vox Day, pointing out all the improbable coincidences, powerful friends/contacts, and conclude: “So this millionaire’s son who poses with a flaming sword, and apparently partied with Prince, just so happens to write a song for Mortal Kombat, oh and his dad went to prison for 10 years, and I’m supposed to believe he started his own software company as well as a band, and his grandfather was “the Marine’s Marine”, oh and he was a nationally-syndicated journalist at age 18, and a national athlete??? – and then he suddenly decides, whoops I’m going to Italy and there he just happens to start his own publishing company, oh and he’s friends with a leading Israeli military historian, and he somehow finds time to make 1 hour Darkstreams every night, AND to set up his own social media, AND to write 1000-page Fantasy novels. Right. Has anyone even SEEN him, in real life? Does he even exist?” – etc.

Interesting. Usually it’s Spacebunny’s existence that is doubted. But I assure you, we’re both real and pretty much as advertised. Sure, I’ve lived all around the world, tried a lot of different things, and had at least a modicum of success at most of them. But what can I say? I bore easily.

Just to set the record straight:

  1. I never wrote a song for Mortal Kombat. Two Psykosonik songs were used for the first two movies and I didn’t have anything to do with writing either one of them. Dan wrote them both after Mike and I left the band. It’s really not hard to tell what I wrote and what I didn’t write, regardless of what the credits say, if you simply pay attention to the lyrics or the lack of them.
  2. My father went to prison for 12 years, if I recall correctly.
  3. I was nationally syndicated three times, the first time by Chronicle Features at the age of 25.
  4. I would not describe the lowest level of NCAA D1 as being a national-class athlete. Conference champion state-class competitor would be more accurate.
  5. I’m not a programmer. Dozens of people work on the products with which I’m involved in one capacity or another. I’m not even the producer or project leader on most of the projects. I’m just a designer and writer; what tends to distinguish me in the former capacity is that my designs always fundamentally work even if they sound far-fetched or are not especially brilliant in conception or application.
So from the development perspective, I am a “collective” of the sort that some people believe Miles Mathis to be. The funny thing is that there are a number of far less credible encounters and events in my life than most of the known ones that people find suspicious or unusual. But I’ve never worked for any government in any capacity, I’ve never sought mainstream approval or prizes, and I’ve never had any interest in telling other people what to do or how to live their lives. 
However, I think it’s unwise and mostly incorrect to dismiss the Mathis Committee’s conclusions about the essential fakery of so much art and science. Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Joyce’s writing and Darwin’s theory are not described as gibberish because no one understands them or likes them, but because they are genuinely gibberish. Even if one is incapable of recognizing those things for oneself, one need only inquire of an individual who claims to understand them to see that they are gibberish, or at the very least fundamentally incorrect.
Also, the fact that one knows what one is doing, or that one intends what one is doing, does not not make that which one is doing art, let alone great art. It’s just the inept execution of a bad idea. And one need only compare the results to the genuine article to see that the vast majority of the supposedly great works of the 20th century fall catastrophically short of the standard set by previous centuries. For all its flaws, The Tale of Genji is a far more worthwhile, far more original, and far more insightful novel than Ulysses, which offers little more than can be found in reading a thesaurus while listening to an Alphaville album.

The destruction of literature

I’ve always been bewildered by the supposed excellence of Ernest Hemingway. Like later supposedly great writers like Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller, and earlier writers such as James Joyce, I’ve always found his work to fall considerably short of the regard in which it is supposedly held. Miles Mathis explains why Hemingway’s overrated work has been pushed so hard, as the usual suspects apparently did to literature what they’ve done to painting, science, and more recently, comics and computer games:

Again, we can’t understand without knowing who is behind Pound.  The picture above tells us, literally, since the man standing behind Pound is our clue.  Yes, we finally have clear evidence in 1924, when Pound secures funding for Ford Madox Ford’s Transatlantic Review—which contained works from Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Hemingway.  We are told the money came from John Quinn.  Who is John Quinn?  According to Wikipedia, 
He worked for British Intelligence services before, during and after World War I.  In this role he acted as case officer for, among others, Aleister Crowley, who was an agent provocateur posing as an Irish nationalist in order to infiltrate anti-British groups of Irish and Germans in the United States.
Wow.  We have, at one swoop, connected Hemingway, Crowley, Stein, Joyce, Ford and Pound to Intelligence, and we have done it without leaving the whitewashed pages of Wikipedia.  We also have to look back to A Moveable Feast in a new way.  Aleister Crowley makes an appearance in A Moveable Feast, to the astonishment of most people.  It is only a cameo, but still.  Why would Hemingway  mention in 1957 passing by Crowley on the street in the early 1920’s?  Of all the things he experienced in that period, of all the things mentioned in “his notebooks saved in old steamer trunks,” why that mention of Crowley?
The role of Intelligence in the rise of Modernism has been missed by most people for the same reason I missed it for so long: we forget how far back the Agencies go.  Most people know the CIA wasn’t created until 1947, and since it came out of the Office of Strategic Service—which was an agency of the Second World War, we then take Intelligence only back to 1938 or so.  But there was Intelligence in the Civil War and the Revolutionary War.  There was Intelligence in Caesar’s armies and in the armies of Alexander.  Like prostitution, it is as old as the race itself.  Cain and Abel were spying on one another, and plotting, and before that the snake—the first agent—was watching Eve from the tree, trying to insert himself in the place given to Adam.  
Although the evidence for the central role of Intelligence has always been there, it of course hasn’t been promoted, and it has retreated into the shadows.  The evidence can even be found in the works of the Moderns themselves, as I showed previously  with Burrough’s Naked Lunch.  The same is easy to show with Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist, in which Joyce talks about the British spies in Dublin Castle.
And in Dubliners (p. 96), Mr. Henchy “knows for a fact” that half the Radical Nationalists in Dublin are “in the pay of the Castle.”  Who would have thought that Joyce himself was among them, or soon would be?  I haven’t (yet) found any evidence Joyce was subverting the Irish causes, but since he was certainly promoting the Modernist causes, he was in the service of one of the main Intelligence programs of his time.  Since this program served the rich families at the expense of art history, we see that Joyce is an anti-hero in a different way that you have thought.  Although he showed real early talent in both poetry and novel writing, he chose instead to sell out his birthright as a real artist for the money and fame of a bought one.  Ulysses is the public record of that sell-out.  

I will confess to being a little disappointed to learn that F. Scott Fitzgerald was also manufactured, as I think quite a bit of his work is genuinely good, although I can’t say that I’m shocked. There was always something a little bit odd about his career, and the idea that he sold out explains his very rapid early success, as well as his apparent self-hatred and decline into alcoholism. And it’s certainly in keeping with the dangerous combination of his grandiose ambitions with his insecurity complex.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t quote this glorious dismissal of Hemingway from the Fitzgerald paper:

These people will steer you toward anything but the truth.  You are allowed to theorize about anything but the truth, that being that Hemingway was a shitty writer who wrote boring books, promoted fascist causes, and whose fame rests on a mountain of lies.  

Why we fear the night

The Tree of Woe contemplates the time when orcs were real, and makes a case for the legends of orcs, goblins, trolls, and other monsters being atavistic human memories of Homo neanderthalensis:

Neanderthals were apex predators. Analysis of isotopes of bone collage has shown that Neanderthal diet was 97{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} meat. They are estimated to have eaten 4.1 lbs of fresh meat per day. Ample evidence exists to show they used stone-tipped wooden spears to hunt. From the bones littering their caves, we know Neanderthals hunted woolly mammoths, giant cave bears, woolly rhinos, bison, wolves, and even cave lions – the most dangerous and lethal animals on earth.

Neanderthals were cannibals. A number of Neanderthal sites reveal bones that have been cut and cracked open to extract the marrow. While this hypothesis was initially rejected a recent find at El Sidron in Spain revealed numerous Neanderthal skeletons with the unmistakable marks of butchery by cannibals wielding hand axes, knives, and scrapers.

Neanderthals had more robust bones and heavier musculature than Homo Sapiens. They weighed 25{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} more. They were so heavily muscled that their skeletons had to develop extra thick bones. “One of the most characteristic features of the Neanderthals is the exaggerated massiveness of their trunk and limb bones. All of the preserved bones suggest a strength seldom attained by modern humans…” (quoting paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus). “A healthy Neanderthal male could lift an average NFL linebacker over his head and throw him through the goalposts.” Neanderthals also evolved extremely thick skulls – “postcranial hyper-robusticity” — that protected them in close-quarter confrontation with prey. They all had kyphosis, with hunched backs, that gave them a distinct profile and gait.

Neanderthal teeth were twice as large as human teeth. According to 2008 anthropologist research, their mouths could open much wider than human mouths, enabling them to take extremely large bites. Judging by the size of the jaw, they had tremendous bite force.

Neanderthals evolved in Ice Age Europe and had specific adaptations to that climate. They had short limbs, large noses, and compact torsos. Most importantly, they were covered with thick fur!

Since no Neanderthal cadaver survives, this point cannot be proven. But Vendramini points out that every primate except Homo Sapiens is covered with fur, and that every cold-adapted mammal during the Ice Ages had thick fur, including mammals that were hairless in Africa, such as the elephant and rhinoceros. There is no reason to believe Neanderthals were hairless except for our desire for them to look like us. The only way Neanderthals could have survived in the Ice Age without fur was if they made thick, protective clothes. Archeologist Mark White points out “Neanderthal clothing would have needed to be more than the ragged loincloth… of popular depiction. Some form of tailoring would have been required…” But Neanderthal sites have yielded “no evidence of needlecraft technology.” They weren’t making clothes — because they had fur.

The Neanderthal that Vendramini describes is thus a terrifying creature: A hunched cannibalistic predator with large, shining eyes and an animalistic snout, covered by thick fur and massive muscles, built for close combat, hunting by night, with a brutish and guttural voice, and a huge mouth with huge teeth and powerful jaws. It didn’t look like Fred Flintstone. It looked like this:

That, my friends, is an orc. Or a bugbear. Or an ogre. Whatever it is, it’s been appearing in our myths and legends for thousands of years. It’s the great enemy.

Given how crazy the world has become in recent years, at this point, it wouldn’t come as a great surprise to learn that there are still Neanderthals living in caves deep under the Alps, running the World Economic Forum from Davos.