Weekend Neo-Reactions - 20 May 2023

We Love You, Moms!•What is a Woman?•Spenglerposting•Holy War•Stacking Silver•Voting Won’t Solve Anything•Metamediations•The Culture Cult•This Week in Clown World•You Must Follow The Science•Pulped!

Richard Hescox. I’m feeling lazy this week, I just discovered Hescox, and I love his stuff. So it’s all Hescox. You can have whatever art you want, as long as it’s Hescox! You get what you get and you don’t ask questions.

Welcome to this week’s roundup of the best of Substack – everything that’s unfit for print, on account of being too insightful, subversive, blasphemous, or just plain rude for polite society.

I’ve been experimenting with the format each week, trying to find what works best for these digests. Last week I grouped the entries by the approximate affiliation of the writers. This week, I decided to go with a thematic approach, sorting the entries topically rather than according to whatever arbitrary social circle I decided they belong to. Let me know in the comments if you prefer this, or preferred the old ways.

Last week’s top essay, in my opinion, was Alex Leong’s fantastically poetic A Silver Circle, which was the direct inspiration for me to try and do something analogous to Social Matter’s (may it RIP in peace) dearly missed This Week In Reaction. One thing I didn’t mention, although it was implicit in the title, was that Alex also suggested bringing back TWIR’s Silver Circle award for the week’s best writing ... and that he was planning on handing out a couple himself. He hasn’t done it yet, and I hope he does soon, because I want to see what he comes up with.

In the meantime, I’ve decided that these roundups should include similar marks of distinction. This week, therefore, I am handing out the very first Iron Ring Award for the week’s best essay, an honour that carries with it ... absolutely nothing, lol, what, do you think I’m made of money or something? I mean, I could be. If you wanted me to be. And you can make that happen, simply by supporting this blog! It’s easy, just click here:

You know you want to.

More seriously, my hope is that by recognizing the best writing of the week, more people will read, and subscribe to, the winning author.

Why iron, and not something shiny like gold? Well gold is expensive, for one thing, and I’m a skinflint. But also for the simple reason that, as money men have found throughout history, money is not power, power is power. Iron rules gold.

In case it shouldn’t be obvious, if I’d handed out an Iron Ring Award last week, it would have gone to Alex Leong. So as it costs me nothing, I’ll just say that he got one. A belated congratulations!

Last week I had a couple complaints (well, just the one) that it could be a bit disappointing to click through to an article and find out it was partially behind a paywall. I hear you, I hate that too. So, this week I’ve tried indicate the paywalled pieces with a ($). No promises that I identified them all.

I’ve grouped this week’s entries together under the headings of We Love You, Moms!; What is a Woman?; Spenglerposting; Holy War; Stacking Silver; Voting Won’t Solve Anything; Metamediations; The Culture Cult; This Week in Clown World; You Must Follow The Science; Lessons of History; Muh Russia; and finally, as a fictional palette-cleanser for all the preceding deep and serious thinking and outrage-bait, Pulped.

Without further ado, let’s get cozy with a fresh carafe of coffee and a fine cigar (or a carafe of wine and a pack of Marlboros for you Europeans), and get this party started.

Yes, that is Elric. If you know, you know.

We Love You, Moms!

Last Sunday was Mother’s Day, and as with any contrived calendrical celebration it elicited a number of themed posts.

Daniel D thinks America Is Anti-Motherhood. He's right, you know.

Yuri Bezmenov at How to Subvert Subversion has some brief remarks about How To Celebrate Mother's Day. Hope you all called your moms last Sunday.

Bridgette atmotheRuckerhas a few words to say about The Honor and Pleasure of Being a Mother. What is all this nonsense about the “self”-sacrifice of motherhood, she wonders?

More on motherhood from Emily Morgan at Ghost in the Machine: On Motherhood: What They Don't Want You to Know, in which she discusses why mothers are one of the greatest threats to the cold, inhuman machine we've come to know as "modern society". The powerful organic bond between mother and child is polar opposite of the commoditized market relationship between corporate employer and wageserf. To the extent one type of relationship expands through the social order, the other must suffer. So what's really important?

The week of Mother’s Day is a great time to start asking an important question: why do we have so few mothers? On that theme Bennett's Phylactery has announced the Natal Conference 2023. Demographic collapse is the - the - single most pressing threat to humanity in the near future. They're getting people together to figure out what to do about it. It seems some big names will be there - Charles Haywood among them.

I know I’m supposed to use this to promote other people’s writing, but speaking of the calamitous civilization-threatening fertility crash, I had a few words to say about the Depopulocalypse this week – both its consequences, and its causes. If we’re going to figure out a solution to the Great Mother of All Mother Shortages, the first step is understanding why it happened in the first place.

What is a Woman?

Now that we’ve paid our due respects to our beautiful and long-suffering mothers, let’s move on to the important questions – like, what the hell is a woman, anyhow? And what does it mean that we’re even asking that?

For that matter, why are kids identifying as birds and cakes? What is behind this explosion in boutique identitarian dysphoria? Did you known that palm line surgery is now a thing? You know, in order to add a wealth line to ensure an auspicious augury at your next palmistry reading? “Have you ever noticed that those quickest to claim their originality are also the most likely to hold the most average views?” Duncan Reyburn of the perfectly apocalytpic Eucatastrophologist¹ thinks that it has something to do with The psychopolitics of mimicry. As he puts it, "identities gather like flies around the recently murdered corpse of essential personhood."

Reyburn argues that it all starts with the modern myth of atomized self as something wholly separate from everything else:

All of this is a mythical construction. The myth of modernity is the myth of the atomised individual. I use the word myth here to mean that the whole thing is a coverup for a deeper and much more sinister set of happenings. The modern myth is brilliantly symbolised in H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, especially in how he sets up a radical gap between the isolated self and a sort of awe around the Elder Gods. He suggests a reality in which the individual is absolutely and radically alone; and thus, in Cartesian fashion, incapable of communion with the other. The other shows up as something horrific. Otherness is so overwhelming that it can drive the individual to madness.

He then connects this to the inversion introduced by Sartre, that existence precedes essence, which can only be understood as a sort of discarnate delusion since it requires one to hold that, for instance, the nature of one’s body is less important than the existence one’s body. The older belief, that essence precedes existence, implies that what is possible is conditioned by what is actual. Sartre’s inversion, Reyburn suggests, leads directly to subjective preference usurping objective reality; implies that standards of any sort are a kind of totalitarian imposition; priveleges desire over understanding; converts the subject into a project; and ultimately enables self-exploitation to replace systemic exploitation.

Reyburn then moves to to examine the nature of desire, which he characterizes as a fundamentally social phenomenon: we want the things that other people want. Ultimately, he says, all desire is ruled by metaphysical desire, the desire ‘to be’. And what happens when you get what you desire? Be careful what you wish for....

It’s really impossible to do justice to Reyburn’s essay here. It’s packed with insight, a joy to read, and rewards a close reading. Indeed I read it twice. As soon as I started reading it, I knew I was going to award it this week’s inaugural Iron Ring Award. If you read nothing else in this week’s digest, make it The psychopolitics of mimicry. And don’t forget to subscribe.

Lorenzo Warby at Not On Your Team But Always Fair has the 17th chapter in his ongoing Worshipping the Future series: A better future versus the transformative future. He makes the point that feminism broke with previous emancipation movements by valourizing the fairer sex, seeking to gather more dignity than the outgroup, as opposed to seeking inclusion with the in-group on an equal footing. They seek to be more human than human … or to make their counterparts less. This was inevitable, because after all, the sexes are far from equal. And here's the 18th chapter: A Common Humanity or Bust. He argues that "The transcult is feminism’s bastard child, borne of the older ideology’s pretence that a distinct ideology was needed for women to gain civil rights." TERFs mad.

The Reactionary Feminist Mary Harrington gave a speech at the National Conservatism conference in Britain, the text of which you can read here in Disunited Posthuman Kingdom. She argues that the body politic cannot embrace a politics of the body based purely on individual choice. Indeed we already don't. Our current crop of cyborg theocrats believe 'my body, my choice' when it's a matter of dismembering babies or dismantling genitalia, not so much when it comes to mandated gene therapies.

Spenglerposting

Ever wondered what Oswald Spengler was on about, but lack the superhuman patience to actually read his ponderous tomes? Jeff Russell has you covered. He’s writing an extended investigation of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West at his Webstead. Here's part 1: Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West, Bit 1: Morphology. Part 2: Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West, Bit 2: Culture as Organism. And the latest instalment: Understanding Spengler's Decline of the West, Bit 3: The Soul Image. Anyone who's ever tried to read Spengler knows that his books are not easy reading. Jeff has done the heavy lifting and is distilling it down for his understanding and yours.

Over at Resavager Barbaric Disciple offers up some thoughts on a (relatively, by Spenglerian standards) short essay by Oswald Spengler in The Viking Spirit vs The Order Spirit in Oswald Spengler’s Prussianism and Socialism. I hadn't realized that Spengler classified the English as a sort of Viking. I've been trolling Swedes to the effect that Americans are the real vikangz for years now. Unrelated to Spengler, this week BD also wonders if we need a Fabius rather than a Caesar in The Fabian Strategy vs The Hostile Anti-White Hatred of the left ($).

Holy War

Alexander Macris has been evaluating the culture war potential of the various American religions at Contemplations on the Tree of Woe. He's been approaching them with the cold and dispassionate eye of the game designer that he is. He already did Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and this week he contemplates protestantism in The Right Religious Tradition, Part III ($), reaching (as one might expect) woeful conclusions.

Hugh Hunter at the Manly Saints Project tells us a prison ghost story about Blessed Vladimir Ghika. He begins: "Join me today to meet a martyr who defied the KGB...."

Stacking Silver

The Good Citizen explains how the American middle class was destroyed through bankster-engineered housing inflation, using the personal lens of his family's history in the California housing market: Senior Citizens On The Arizona Trail, subtitled "Bombing the middle class with housing inflation and the illusion of the American Dream in the 21st Century."

laughlyn (johan eddebo) of shadowrunners is keeping a wary eye on Ominous signs on the financial horizon. He thinks it's mainly resource constraints leading to present and future economic woes, but acknowledges that there are a plethora of other factors. It's shaping up to be the perfect economic storm.

Ignatius of Maidstone thinks that Gold is Better Than Bitcoin. He argues that when looked at from the point of view of intrinsic rarity, auditability, divisibility (or equivalently transactability), anonymity, and portability, gold stacks up quite well to BTC. With the advantage of being real. Crypto bros mad. This is only the first part of his argument; a sequel is forthcoming. Oh never mind, it came: here's part 2, which Ignatius begins with a Byron quote: “O Gold! I still prefer thee unto paper, Which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour.” Using the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires as examples, Ignatius shows that there's a direct connection between the virtue of a people and the soundness of their money … and that currency debasement invariably presages imperial collapse.

Replying to Ignatius of Maidstone's essay on the gold v Bitcoin question, neoliberal feudalism lays out some Misconceptions regarding cryptocurrencies as an alternative to fiat. Tether, he argues, is FTX on steroids, and crypto in general is mainly there to prepare the ground for CBDCs. I guess we'll see. In the meantime it certainly can't hurt to stack some silver, which NF argues is ridiculously undervalued.

Speaking of Central Bank Digital Currencies, Christopher Brunet has published the third issue of his crypto newsletter at Karlstack: Canada Forges Ahead with CBDC While Florida, Texas & North Carolina Ban It. Things seem to be moving quickly on that front. Canada has become quite the laboratory for globohomo. After a number of headline links and some featured stories on CBDCs from The Dossier, Brunet has a good time laughing at the Canadian banking establishment "soliciting feedback" on their digital loonie program while … turning off comments. Because of course. Judging by the reactions he gathers on CBC and Reddit, even liberal Canadians really don't want this. Not that the Canadian government cares.

Voting Won’t Solve Anything

Clown World governments are all bad jokes, which is why so many of us all talking about how to build better ones.

Harrison Koehli has the fifteenth chapter of his translation of Lobaczewski's Logogcracy up at Political Ponerology: Logocracy - Chapter 15: Five Independent Powers. We're all familiar with the division of the government into executive, legislative, and juridicial branches. Lobaczewski believed that social goods - science and education, and infrastructure such as transportation and communication networks - should be similarly independent. Canada used to have a similar idea as regards the latter in the form of the Crown Corporations, and they worked quite well until they were privatized for “efficiency”.

Nelson R. Elliott wants to play a game of Capture the Flag with the captured institutions. Seizing strategic positions is ultimately much more important than tactical popular victories. That’s how the Left got where it is today, despite their policies being consistently unpopular.

N. Dexia of À Rebours thinks that if we want a A Future to Believe In we need to focus more on the human element, and worry less about the technology. Not that we need to be skeptical of technology, so much as that we must remember not to neglect those influences that shape the next generation. The human element, after all, is essential if we want that solar imperium instead of Global Haiti.

Kulak of Anarchonomicon offers a Short Take: Reading "The Age of Entitlement", The left's Terrifying Vulnerability. He² ported it directly from a Twitter thread, so it's a bit rough around the edges, but it's a solid overview of the remarkable fragility of the post-1964 civil rights diversity regime from a legal, constitutional, and popular support basis. The whole thing is a sand castle that can be washed away when the tide comes in … and its beneficiaries know this better than anyone, which is why they're so ruthless in protecting it.

See how they attaq! There has been a flurry of anti-vitalist salvos from the stuffed shirts of the "conservative" "movement" recently, appearing everywhere from the National Review to the Daily Beast (yes, really, it’s like they’re not even pretending to be on different sides anymore). Second City Bureaucrat has a (long) deep dive exploring what passes for the ideology of these uncloseted establishment respecters in Against the New Reaganism - part 2 of 2.

Charles Eisenstein is probably one of the most interesting contemporary philosophers I've come across, and he's been a substantial influence on my own thought. He’s admittedly a bit of an awkward fit in these pages, and would no doubt feel awkward being included among some of the ... less respectable voices featured here. After all, he comes from a left-wing, hippie environmentalist milieu, and speaks in the soft grammar of the medicine circle, which I expect a lot of you might find a bit twee. He’s also one of the most nuanced thinkers, and beautiful writers, that I’ve ever come across. He's been a bit quiet lately, and it turns out there's a reason for that: A Major Life Change. The life change in question is that he's apparently going to be working very closely with the RFK, Jr campaign. That's not a plot twist I saw coming, and it's quite a good sign. He follows this up with Why we care: A conversation with RFK, Jr. RFK, Jr is an old school environmentalist, i.e. the good kind, and while I'm inclined to roll my eyes at the global warming talk and the MLK hagiography, I give the man a lot of credit for being one of the few voices to speak out during the medical tyranny of the last three years.

Charles seems quite optimistic about RFK, Jr’s chances, and I know others have gotten quite excited about this. I’m ... less sanguine. Maybe I’m just jaded, but to me this looks like the latest repeat of Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Bob Dole ... American electoral politics has a long tradition of anti-establishment protest candidates that garner massive popular support, only to founder on the rocks of establishment duplicity. And after 2020.... Well, we’ll see. At the very least it will be entertaining, and maybe move the Overton Window a bit on the vaxx question.

Niccolo Soldo of Fisted by Foucault gave a close listen to a recent speech from Biden's National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and reports his findings in The New Washington Consensus - An Industrial Policy For a New American Century ($). The regime is adopting some talking points from economic populism, but aside from bringing chip manufacturing back home - or at least 'friendshoring' it, which probably just means relocating manufacturing from China to the Philippines - the policy is light on specifics. Some of it sounds good but personally, I don't trust these people to be either honest or competent.

Metamediations

L.P. Koch reminds us that language runs deeper than ideological camps in How To Read Without Getting Triggered. His point is that words are imprecise pointers to concepts that must be shared for communication to be possible - thus, people using the same word for different concepts, or different words for the same concept, can fail to connect.

River Page admonishes us to Don’t Be a Bigot, It’s “Houseless” Now at Pirate Wires. Just kidding, there’s no admonishment here - this is an entertainingly foul-mouthed rant against the euphemism treadmill. The symbol manipulators of the PMC have this very annoying superstition that changing the word we use for something somehow changes the thing itself. If we carefully say 'houseless' instead of 'schizo vagrant junkie', this will magically cure mental health and drug addiction problems, and no doubt conjure domiciles into being. Just like if we all stop saying 'retard', people with Down Syndrome will suddenly be able to write JavaScript.

Canadians above a certain age will all remember the infamous house hippo PSA from the late 90s, which the CBC put out as a way of cheekily suggesting that people should think for themselves and not just trust whatever is said with the voice of authority. It seems the house hippo came back in 2019, although as Millennial Woes describes in Break It Till You Fake It the message is now the precise opposite.

Chris Bray at Tell Me How It Ends complains that It Sticks to Your Boots. The propagan-dung, that is. He's trying to clean it off so he can get back to writing about what he wants to write about, which isn't the legacy media's tendentious presentation of Daniel Perry. On the same theme: Endless Propaganda, Endless Emptiness is a reminder to never, ever take the headlines at face value … especially when they're misrepresenting a new law in Florida. Finally, he’d like to state for the record that Daniel Penny Wasn't a "Vigilante". He may or may not have been, but the guy’s a damn hero.

Daniel D comments on beer companies that fail to learn from the catastrophic errors of the competition in Woke Marketing Strikes Again!

The Domestic Extremist Peachy Keenan advises us to Never Let a Midlife Crisis go to Waste. I'm not sure 81-year-old Martha Stewart's Sports Illustrated cover qualifies as a midlife crisis … unless we're to be cursed with her presence for another 8 decades, that is.

The Culture Cult

Doctor Hammer of Doc Hammer’s Anvil replies to Harrison's piece from last week, Reality-blindness, and Ethics as Practical Reason, in Evolutionary Ethics.

You've heard of the Butlerian Jihad, but have you read the book? Morgoth has, and he's written up his commentary on Brian Herbert's novel in Dune, The Butlerian Jihad: Review and Analysis. There’s a book review in there, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Morgoth uses the novel to explore our current predicament with regards to the computational system eating our world, chewing through everything embodied and human, and leaving nothing but digital ash where our souls used to be.

Mark Bisone of The Cat Was Never Found looks back on his career as An Artist (whatever in Hades that is supposed to mean) as he attends an art show for the first time in a long time in The Exhibition. Judging by the art on display, it looks like children were asked to portray their dreams. What Mark finds there is a tapestry of horror, leavened by a little bit of hope.

I recently discovered Yakubian Ape in my comments section, where he left some incredibly poignant and on-point remarks, so I decided to click though and check out his writing at Lake of Lerna. I'm glad I did. His latest piece dissects the "cultural bear trap" we've found ourselves in by way of spitting on the grave of Mickey the Great and Terrible's theme park abomination in A Culture Defying Gravity: The Wreck of the Galactic Starcruiser (Part I), which by the grace of God didn't even reach its first birthday. As Yakub's caucasoid cave monkey promises, it isn't really about Star Wars. At all.

Kenaz Filan has a few Notes from the end of time for us this week. First up is the second instalment in his Mouth of Madness series, From the Mouth of Madness 2: The Terrycloth Mother. And then Part 3: De Profundis. Next he offers an exploration of the big granddaddy conspiracy theories that ruled before the CIA offed JFK in The Kings Who Rule in Shadow.

Tólma thinks that The way to the beginnings leads to barbarism. Using various bodybuilding systems as an exploratory lens, he shows how biological life and culture - training - are interrelated, in a similar fashion to the way in which the Earth Mother that generates life is to the Sky Father who uplifts it. So what’s the best culture? "A ‘sub-optimal’ training system that allows one to train with vigor will always be superior to the most optimal science-based protocol that drains one’s passion. And one can think about ‘cultures’ similarly." And as to beginnings: "Searching for what was first, in the beginning, we often only find crude forms and an ape-like man tied to sensuous life. But what is first is not always best. We remember Alexander the Great because of his courage at the spear of battle, guiding his men to conquer unknown lands. We do not remember him because he sucked his mother’s breast as a child."

Simplicius The Thinker over at Dark Futura meditates On Culture - From Whence Does It Spring? His answer: geography, which shapes the genes, which shapes the culture. Dugin's division of empires into tellurocracies and thalassocracies is a prime example. There are implications here for the monstrous lie of "multiculturalism" springing from the deeply impractical idealism of a certain infamous halfbreed Austrian count. No two places are ever the same, meaning no two peoples are ever the same, meaning no two cultures are ever the same ... so homogenizing the world into a global beige porridge isn’t likely to work out. But that doesn’t mean they won’t ruin things by trying.

This Week in Clown World

The New Right Poast has been compiling the best of write wing Twitter for a while. They're up to #60. Semper Chaddus. It feels a bit meta including a roundup in a roundup but there is good stuff here, you must submit. I mean subscribe. Here’s #61. Naptime for babynappers. Oh, and here we have #62. Karen stole my bike. Busy boys. I could expand this digest quite a bit by just cribbing from NRP but honestly, you should just go check them out directly.

In How To Become a Class Traitor - The Subversive Seven, Yuri Bezmenov gives an overview of who he considers the most prominent, culturally influential champions of reality, contrasted with their NPC doppelgangers who prop up the failing prestige of the “DIEvy League” (great phrase, that. Yoink.) Next up Yuri continues his series on communicating with medical professionals who prioritize social acceptability over their Hippocratic oaths in How To Do No Harm (Part 3).

Chris Waldburger has an update on all those deaths from Suddenly in Bodies keep piling up around the world as current excess death rates easily surpass covid. As he says, the jab obviously isn't an immediate death sentence, but there sure seems to be something going on.

el gato malo has some Farewell Questions for Rochelle Walensky at bad cattitude. you may remember her from such hits as ‘our experimental gene therapy shot makes you a dead end for the virus’ and ‘masks work’ (i paraphrase). next the bad cat asks if we've exited humanity's habitable zone in the goldilocks zone of shame. as with the temperature of porridge and the insolation of a planet, there is a correct amount of shame … and there's such a thing as too little of it. the infelicitous feline follows up with an analysis of a surprisingly well-designed study of expertologist tweets about monkeypox revealing the sheer depth of inaccurate exaggeration pushed by the clout-chasing credentialed class in the monkey-business of "online experts".

eugyppius has More on the Green climate cabal that is currently at war with German industry and society at the plague chronicle. It's truly remarkable how greens continue to LARP as though they're anything other than a cheering squad for regulatory capture by rentier capitalists whose shitty products no one would buy absent government pressure. Then this, on the same paper el gato malo looked at: Study: Healthcare experts and academics on Twitter wildly overstated the risk of Monkeypox to children, drowned out more reasonable and less sensational assessments. Just assuming the opposite of what credentialed experts say isn't a bad heuristic these days.

You Must Follow The Science

William M Briggs at Science Is Not The Answer explains What Magic Tells Us About Propaganda & The End Of The Coronadoom Panic. Magic tricks, that is. It's all a game of three-card Monty with a dollar store psychic. Next he argues that The Beginnings Of The Expertocracy (a.k.a. Managerial Society) Starts With Napoleon. What an irony that the last classical man should be the death knell of traditional society. Why Do Experts Lie About Something They Call Carbon “Pollution”? Because it benefits the Expert Class, of course. The latest from Experts: The Coronadoom Vax Only Worked If You Got It At Lunch. We've come a long way from 95% effective! stops the spread! perfect protection! boosts your sex drive! or whatever the original claims were. Finally, he has some fun with those who dare argue with him in Briggs You Fool! A Reader Attempts To Rebut Arguments Against Morality, Eternity.

A reader recently turned me on to Josh Mitteldorf , who writes Unauthorized Science, and I am thoroughly enjoying his nuanced exploration of the wyrd frontiers. He thinks that It's about time! we started thinking seriously about retrocausality. The idea that time must only flow in one direction, past causes producing future effects, is something we have Einstein to thank for. It's only been a century or so since quantum mechanics called this into question. As Mitteldorf points out, destiny has always been a core element of our mythos … and for all that evolutionary biologists are allergic to teleology, life is highly purposive. This was an excellent and fascinating essay, and a clear runner up for the Iron Ring award. He follows this up with A Brief History of Science, in which he asks how science will change once it comes to terms with the observer effect, psi phenomena, retrocausality, and so on.

Continuing their data-driven exploration of the socio-psycho-emotional toxicity unleashed by social media saturation via portable black mirrors, Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch at After Babel report that Kids Who Get Smartphones Earlier Become Adults With Worse Mental Health based on a new global study from Sapien Labs that has found consistent links between depression and early-onset social media addiction. Shocking no one, the effect is stronger for girls.

Lessons of History

Having wrapped up his assault on the virtue of the blockchain, Ignatius of Maidstone starts in on an even more controversial topic (for normies, that is) in The U.S. Was Wrong to Enter World War II (Part 1). The men who fought in WWII were heroes … on all sides, in my opinion. The men who dragged America into the war? Not so much.

Over at the Grey Goose Chronicles the Stone Age Herbalist shares Two Tales from Laos: Iron Age Battlefields & Demons In The Night. He begins "The story I want to tell is something of a rambling tale, one that connects the Taiping Rebellion with Freddy Kruger, an anti-communist jungle war with an ancient archaeological mystery." Desire to know more intensifies. The breadth and sheer weirdness of the SAH's subject matter is a rare and wonderful thing - in the spirit of a modern-day Herodotus. Oh yes and he seems to have found the real-life precursor to James Bond’s antagonist Jaws.

Katy Barnett at What Katy Did tells a tale from her family archives in A 200+ year old scandal… about convicts, concubines and captains. Are there any Australians who aren't descended from disreputable chancers?

Muh Russia

Rolo Slavskiy at The Slavland Chronicle has harsh words for the Lying Dog of a Woman Promotes New Kremlin-Approved Cope as Prigozhin Howls Into the Voide . I don't think he likes her very much. Next up,  Strelkov Angry Patriots Club Presser Was Not Covered By Any Russian or Z-Media, but it was covered by Rolo. Apparently it's a new coalition of Russkies trying to shame the Kremlin into taking the war seriously instead of slow-walking to defeat against the decrepit Empire of Lies the liberalniks anachronistically worship. Next he takes a step back and asks But What Does It All Mean, Really? Rolo's answer: Russia isn't so different from the Post-West: it has a rapacious and traitorous elite more concerned with internal than external threats. He's got a point, you know. Next up, he takes a look at the charges of treason being leveled against Wagner PMC's warlord in Deep State Unveils New Plot Against Prigozhin ($). As the headline implies, Rolo thinks it's a stitch-up, which seems like a safe bet given that the leaks are being publicized in Western media outlets. He's done some digging (possibly of his own grave) into the origins of this scheme within the various factions struggling for power in the Kremlin, but you'll need to go behind his paywall to learn more. Rolo has an IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: I Am Offering A 5D Amnesty!!! Can't we all just get along? Next, some interesting information about Wagner's role in Syria, and the MoD's role in shutting down the SAM defences that sheltered Wagner from American serial aerial attack: Maybe Prigozhin Was Telling the Truth About the Russian MoD? Finally, Rolo has an interview with the conservative-patriot Russian journalist Andrei Tsiganov: Russia's Elites Are Suffering From Extreme Cognitive Dissonance.

Simplicius The Thinker gives an analysis of the Anatomy of MIM-104 Patriot Destruction + Primer on Kinzhal Hypersonic Missile. There's been a lot of discussion about hypersonic missiles since the invasion of Ukraine, and Simplicius has put together an excellent explainer for how this technology (probably, it's all classified) works. An interesting wrinkle I hadn't appreciated is that the plasma sheath generated by hypersonic flight makes it impossible to communicate with the vehicle … but also makes it invisible to radar. Talk about a double-edged sword.

Pulped

We end this week’s digest with some neopulp fiction. First up, Frank Kidd has a horror story up at The Pulp Vitalist, Electric Gothic Nightmare, in which the clean energy future collides with the forgotten things of the back-country swamps:

“Oh, well nice to meet you. I’m Jackie,” she said, and reached out a hand.

“Ma says it’s not good to play with your food,” the man said. He left her hand hanging.

The Obelisk is the Substack presence of neopulp magazine The Bizarchives. It seems they're putting out the legendary cosmic horror novel King in Yellow Hardcover Preorder! Also up this week: a comedy story MYLK: A Cystopian Trauma, which promises to be comedy of the distinctly unsettling kind. Next up is a retrospective on one of the greats of practical effects, Ray Harryhausen, the Maestro of Monster Magic. Finally, they continue their series on Macabre Eroticism: The Work of Glenn Danzig, Part III: Danzig.

---

Dear readers, that is all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this compilation as much as I enjoyed assembling it. And if you enjoyed it, you should subscribe to ensure you receive next week’s digest. In the meantime you can read any of the other essays on Postcards From Barsoom, all of which are available for free. What’s that, free? Yep, free. I know, right? It surprises me, too. And you – yes, you! – can help keep it that way by becoming a paid supporter. Paid supporters don’t get any additional content (it’s all free, like I said), but they do get the warm feeling, akin to throwing change to a vagrant which is not so far from an accurate description, that comes with knowing that they have made me very happy, postponed the time when I will have to get a real job, and oh yes, in addition to all of that they receive exclusive access to Deimos Station, our orbital Martian battle-castle where I gather with my confederates to plot world domination, by which I mean mostly talking about philosophy and weight-lifting.

And don’t forget to

In between writing on Substack you can find me on the bird site @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active on the Russian den of iniquity at Telegrams From Barsoom

1. I was introduced to Duncan’s writing by Kruptos , who I’m told may return soon....

2. I misgendered him in an earlier digest ... and no I’m not apologizing, that’s what you get for using the Twitter handle Catgirl Kulak, you sperg. I discovered this while watching his recent, and very good interview with Alex Kaschuta, wherein I also discovered that he is (may Allah forgive me for uttering this name) a fucking Leaf.