TRAFALGAR

TRAFALGAR is the first volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain

October 1805. Off the coast of Cádiz, the combined fleets of Spain and France sail out to meet the British under Nelson. By nightfall, the Spanish navy will have ceased to exist as a fighting force, and an empire that has ruled the seas for three centuries will have lost them forever.

Gabriel Araceli is fourteen years old. An orphan from the slums of Cádiz, he has been taken into the household of Don Alonso Gutiérrez de Cisniega, a retired naval officer who cannot bear to miss the coming battle. When Don Alonso slips away from his furious wife to join the fleet, Gabriel goes with him, and eventually finds himself aboard the Santísima Trinidad, the largest warship in the world, on the morning of the most catastrophic day in Spanish naval history.

What follows is one of the great battle sequences in European literature: the four-decker as living giant, the sand spread on the planks for the blood, the smoke that swallows the line, the slow agony of a ship that will not surrender and cannot be saved. Pérez Galdós, writing seventy years after the event with the aid of the testimony from the survivors of the battle, gives us a view of Trafalgar from the losing side, not as a British triumph but as a Spanish tragedy, narrated by an old man who was a boy in the rigging and has carried the day with him for the rest of his life.

Trafalgar is the first of forty-six novels in the Episodios Nacionales, Pérez Galdós’s vast fictional history of nineteenth-century Spain, a literary project on the scale of Balzac’s Comédie humaine, and one of the supreme achievements of European realism. Published in 1873, it has remained continuously in print in Spanish for over 150 years. Trafalgar is for readers of Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester, and Bernard Cornwell who are interested in seeing war in the age of sail from the other side of the line, and for readers of Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Hugo to encounter one of Spain’s greatest novelists for the first time.

Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers.

About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written; only 8 of the 46 volumes have been translated into English. Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won.

About the translation: This is the second English translation of Trafalgar. The first one was in 1884, by Clara Bell, and it is both outdated and a significant departure from Pérez Galdós’s literary style. For an excerpt, please visit Castalia Library. One reader notes: “These translated books have been absolutely amazing, some of the best work that has come out of Castalia House.”

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Israel Washes its Hands

The War of the Epstein Alliance can be safely regarded as lost now, as the Israelis are already trying to wash their hands of responsibility for the USA attacking Iran and defending Israel despite the war being observably against the interests of the American people.

US President Donald Trump made the decision to attack Iran after his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago in late December 2025, but the foundations for that decision had been laid long beforehand, and much of them had nothing to do with Israel or Netanyahu. Conversations with a long list of diplomatic and security officials, Israelis, Americans and diplomats from the region, reveal a clear picture: The man in the White House had a top-tier strategic goal, to topple or decisively weaken the regime in Iran.

Moreover, reports published, among others, in The New York Times and The Washington Post, claiming that Netanyahu had “dragged” Trump and the US into war, partly by arguing that the regime could be brought down, are plainly wrong. The conversations I held indicate that at least some senior Trump administration officials, and Trump himself, were the ones who assessed that the regime could be toppled, while the Israeli team presented a far more cautious assessment on this issue.

A note: Such reporting by the two newspapers mentioned above was not surprising. Both took an anti-war line, consistent with their unfavorable coverage of the Trump administration and Netanyahu’s policies. In this case, according to a US official, they were fed by sources in certain departments at the State Department and the War Department who dislike what they see as the overly close ties between Jerusalem and Washington, certainly when it comes to Middle East policy…

 The fall of the regime in Iran would greatly ease the disarming of Hezbollah and the dismantling of its status in Lebanon, leave Hamas and Islamic Jihad without financial backing, and most likely bring down the Houthi regime in Yemen as well. But even before the war, and especially now, it is clear that this is an overly ambitious goal, certainly in the short term. The current focus, on the one hand, is preventing an agreement that would allow the regime to recover militarily, certainly on the nuclear and missile issues. Without an agreement, Israel supports further intensification of sanctions and economic warfare against Iran until it is completely paralyzed, alongside readiness for the resumption of the war in the near term, this time with a focus on strategic targets such as power stations.

The pointing of the finger at Israel as the party that pushed the US into the strike is therefore only partially correct. In practice, this was a purely American decision, based on an understanding that the regime poses a threat to America and the entire West, and certainly to US interests in the Middle East. Israel assisted with precise intelligence, on the nuclear and missile programs, on Iranian attacks against American targets, and on what happened during and after the protests. The clear convergence of interests with the US is what brought about the joint war, even if its end remains unclear.

I find this version of events less interesting for its attempt at revising history and more useful for indicating that at least some of the parties responsible for the war are attempting to avoid being held culpable for it, which is a very reliable indicator that the war failed to accomplish their goals and is expected to be considered something that is worthy of blame rather than praise.

This, in turn, indicates that everyone involved in prosecuting it is going to be highly motivated to bring it to an end sooner rather than later. The last oil tankers have already delivered their loads. The economic bite of the failed war is only beginning to be felt, and the blame game hasn’t even truly begun yet. The political fallout from it will not be insignificant, as the massive turnover in UK politics very likely demonstrates.

UPDATE: Local National Guard HIMARS artillery unit deployed to ME for a year is home now – they literally fired off everything they could find, painted so many fire mission marks on their launchers that they’re no longer camouflage, and have now sent 90% of their people home. The 10% that remain are working on getting the broken-down launchers out of the desert and onto ships back to the US. This gives me confidence that the war is over by default, and we are out of ammunition.

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Iran Can Outlast the USA

Once more, the Douhetians are proven wrong about the strategic capabilities of airpower:

A confidential CIA analysis delivered to administration policymakers this week concludes that Iran can survive the U.S. naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship, four people familiar with the document said, a finding that appears to raise new questions about President Donald Trump’s optimism on ending the war.

The analysis by the U.S. intelligence community, whose secret assessments on Iran have often been more sober than the administration’s public statements, also found that Tehran retains significant ballistic missile capabilities despite weeks of intense U.S. and Israeli bombardment, three of the people familiar with it said.

Iran retains about 75 percent of its prewar inventories of mobile launchers and about 70 percent of its prewar stockpiles of missiles, a U.S. official said. The official said there is evidence that the regime has been able to recover and reopen almost all of its underground storage facilities, repair some damaged missiles and even assemble some new missiles that were nearly complete when the war began.

Airpower never accomplishes one-tenth of what its advocates say it will, because airpower never does even one-tenth the damage that the after-action assessors think it did. Desert Storm was the salient ultimate proof of this, as Col. Douglas Macgregor admitted that an Iraqi tank battalion that was bombed for 30 days in the desert was discovered after the war to have survived with 85 percent of its vehicles still operational.

The average US tank battalion couldn’t survive with 85 percent viability after thirty days of operation on the basis of its maintenance issues alone.

In case you haven’t noticed, despite their relative lack of air forces, both Hezbollah and the Ukrainian armed forces are still in the fight after years of war.

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A Review of KILLING COMMENDATORE

Fandom Pulse has an excellent, in-depth review of Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami, a book I like very much, albeit a review with which I don’t entirely agree even when it’s about the book:

I want to praise one specific thing about the translation as a whole, because it has been under-discussed and it is magnificent. The Commendatore’s voice.

The Commendatore in the Japanese speaks in a way that is instantly recognizable and deeply strange. He uses atashi for “I” — a first-person pronoun associated with women and with a certain old-fashioned formality. He addresses the narrator as shokun, “gentlemen,” in the plural. He says de wa aranai instead of the standard de wa nai for negation — an archaic, almost ceremonial form. He is funny. He is imperious. He is two feet tall and he sounds like a retired general who has been shrunk in the wash and is not entirely displeased about it.

This voice is, in principle, untranslatable. There is no English pronoun that does what atashi does. There is no English form of address that does what shokun does. There is no English negation that does what de wa aranai does. And yet Gabriel and Goossen — and I assume Bloom deserves credit here too — found an English for the Commendatore that works. The Commendatore in English is formal without being stiff, archaic without being ridiculous, funny without trying to be funny. He calls the narrator “my friends.” He speaks in complete, slightly ornate sentences. He has dignity. He is the best thing in the translation and I would read seven hundred pages of him alone.

I said at the beginning of this review that Killing Commendatore is one of the three peaks of Murakami’s career. I want to end by saying what I mean by that, because it is the kind of claim that requires defense.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the peak of Murakami the storyteller — the novel in which his ability to pull a reader into an impossible world and keep them there for six hundred pages reaches its fullest expression. 1Q84 is the peak of Murakami the architect — the novel in which his ability to construct parallel narratives and hold them in tension over a thousand pages is most fully achieved. Killing Commendatore is the peak of Murakami the artist — the novel in which his lifelong preoccupation with what it means to make things, to create something from nothing, to open a door in a wall that has no door, is most directly and most movingly addressed.

It is also the most personal of the three, and the most vulnerable. There is a passage near the end in which the narrator realizes that the painting he has been working on throughout the novel is finished, and that it is good, and that it is the first good thing he has ever made.

While I can’t really testify to the lack of the sense of oku in the second half of the novel, I did notice that the translator’s voice had changed the one and only time I read it. Now I feel as if I’ve got to read it again. I also think that it’s a bit strange to complain about the lack of depth of the female characters when the female characters are, in this particular book, entirely beside the point; a book that dedicates sufficient space to fully-developing the painter’s faithless wife is not going to be a book about painting, and besides, the book is already 700 pages.

But it is an excellent review, particularly in how it says so much about the novel without giving away anything at all. And I really can’t expect to entirely agree with a review by a reviewer whose favorite Murakami novel is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, since mine is A Wild Sheep’s Chase.

Anyhow, I’m going to see if we can get a copy of my translation of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto reviewed at some point in the future.

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The Naval Non-War

If a ship is hit by a missile in the Gulf of Oman, but the Department of War denies it, does it make a sound?

  • Reports are coming in indicating that at least four ships are on fire in the Gulf of Oman, near the Persian Gulf, after Iran fired missiles.The image above, from NASA FIRMS satellite data, shows fire ignition in the Strait of Hormuz off Oman’s Musandam province at 22:21 UTC, in roughly the same area where Iran’s IRGC Navy said three US destroyers were damaged and forced to “flee” toward the Sea of Oman.
  • Reports are beginning to surface saying that during yesterday’s battle with Iran, ten (10) U.S. Sailors were wounded and Five (5) others are “Missing.” How could five Sailors be “Missing” unless they got blown off a Destroyer by the Concussion Wave of missile(s) impacting? Yet we’ve been told by US Officials that none of the missiles fired by Iran hit any of our ships.

The gap between what we’re told and what actually happened would appear to be growing.

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The Pedo Factory

The Devil Mouse is every bit as awful as you imagine and more:

Dozens of workers from multiple cruise ships that docked in San Diego, including one from the Disney Cruise Line, were found to be in possession of or involved with the distribution of child pornography, according to authorities.

Officers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection boarded eight cruise ships between April 23 and April 27 and interviewed 28 workers as part of an ongoing investigation, federal officials said in a statement.

During the interviews, officers confirmed that 27 of the 28 individuals had either received, sent, possessed or transported child pornography, according to the statement.

A Disney Cruise Line ship was among those that were boarded and where employees were detained in connection with the investigation.

If we’re going to treat corporations like humans and permit them human rights, perhaps it’s time to start punishing them like humans too.

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Wipeout UK

The headline is the way in which Labour was destroyed in the local elections in the United Kingdom. But the real news is the continuing demolition of the Conservative Party, which is being rightly rejected by Reform voters in response to its refusal to stop immigration and start repatriating the invaders.

The final results aren’t in yet, as only one-half of the local council elections have reported yet, but with both Labour and the Tories below the LibDems and Reform nearly doubling the Conservative vote, it’s very clear that the direction the two major parties have been dragging the UK since the Tony Blair years has been a very unpopular and antidemocratic one.

UPDATE: The results are even worse for Labour than had been anticipated.

The Red Wall Labour MP summed up the mood. ‘It’s not carnage. It’s f***ing carnage.’ The results are still coming in. But it’s not going to get any better. The pattern is set. In Labour’s former Northern heartlands, the party has not been defeated. Or even routed. It’s simply ceased to exist. The only councils where the party has been able to cling on are where only a third of the seats were up for election.

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Darkhaven Nights

Since JDA is too frightened to discuss the incredible expose I’ve got on Gene Roddenberry and the occult tonight, I’ll be streaming a solo DARKHAVEN NIGHT tonight. And among other things, we’ll be discussing a) the origin story of your favorite Dark Lord and b) Larry Correia’s threatened foray into Romantasy, as covered by Fandom Pulse.

Why would he defend a smut genre when it has no place in a trade marketplace like Amazon? Selling well does not equate value, and Romantasy has objectively destroyed the fantasy genre, and pushed male readers out of bookstores, as Correia has noted in his complaint that he’s not #1.

One can tell it’s not about the values of what books have quality or anything, but simply about what sells with Correia, as he posits making his own romantasy series in a passive-aggressive response afterward. While it’s a funny idea, it’s likely one that wouldn’t go well for Correia if he did decide to write these.

#Bestselling Military Sci-Fi, Political Philosophy, and Genetic Sciences author Vox Day commented on whether this tack would work, “Anyone who’s ever read Larry’s books knows that he doesn’t know the first thing about the realities of male-female relations.”

It’s true that romantasy readers would not likely enjoy Larry Correia’s self-insert Gary Stu beta male character “getting the girl” over the slick alpha as he wrote in his Monster Hunter International series. If anything, they probably would be disappointed that the female character didn’t end up with the monsters he hunts.

Don’t get me wrong, I, personally, would very much love to see Larry Correia write a romantasy novel. I think it would be absolutely hilarious. I’m also confident that women would hate, hate, hate it with the passion of ten thousand sexy vampires staked out to burn to a crisp under a hot afternoon sun.

I mean, what woman doesn’t fantasize about a regular, competent nice guy who is too intimidated by female beauty to pursue women directly, but tries to gain their attention by showing how he is pure of heart and good at his job.

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The Architecture of the Lie

And remember, just like Covid vaccine, most of your friends and family are going to fall for this one. It’s going to be a lot more convincing, and a lot more “proven” than any of the Covid nonsense ever was. And the social and economic pressure to submit to it is going to be even harsher.

The Birth of a Unified Cosmic Spirituality

The convergence produces a religion with six defining features:

  1. Universalism — all paths lead to the same cosmic source.
  2. Evolutionary spirituality — humanity is ascending to a higher state.
  3. Extraterrestrial cosmology — the universe is populated with guiding intelligences.
  4. Technological mysticism — miracles are framed as advanced science.
  5. Mandatory unity — religious exclusivity is dangerous.
  6. Allegiance to the Beast — loyalty becomes a spiritual duty.

This is not secularism.
This is hyper‑religion — mystical, cosmic, scientific, and compulsory.

It is the religion of the world.

The Continual: The One Faith That Cannot Be Absorbed

Every religion can be reframed as extraterrestrial.

Except one.

The Continual — the Christ‑only covenant witness — cannot be merged, reinterpreted, or absorbed. It is exclusive, covenantal, and rooted in the identity of the Messiah.

It stands outside the cosmic narrative.
It refuses to bow to the universal myth.
It cannot be rewritten.

Therefore:

  • it becomes the enemy of unity,
  • the threat to human evolution,
  • the obstacle to global harmony.

This is why it must be outlawed.

This is why the saints become the target.

This is why the Beast makes war.

The Continual is the stone the builders reject — again.

The Final Shape of the Global Religion

The convergence produces a system with:

  • One narrative — cosmic origins and cosmic destiny.
  • One interpreter — the False Prophet.
  • One embodiment — the Antichrist.
  • One unifying myth — humanity joining the cosmic family.
  • One forbidden belief — exclusive devotion to Christ.

This is the religion of the world.

This is the Empire That Never Ended, as Philip K. Dick described it. It survived the Romans, the Crusaders, the Conquistadors, and the Inquisitions. And the alien deception is going to be its next variant, perhaps even its final variant, although the history of failed apocalypses tends to testify otherwise.

Regardless, recognize it and reject it. In nomine Jesu.

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