When the Duke of Bari suddenly dies, the neighboring nation of Algarve, long seething over its defeat a generation ago in the Six Years’ War, sees its chance to bring Bari into the fold…an action which the other countries surrounding Algarve cannot, by treaty, tolerate. As nation after nation declares war, a chain of treaties are invoked, ultimately bringing almost all the Powers of Derlavai into a war of unprecedented destructiveness.
For modern magic is deadlier than in years past. Trained flocks of dragons rain explosive fire down on defenseless cities. Massed infantry race from place to place along a network of ley-lines. Rival powers harness sea leviathans to help sabotage one another’s ships. The lights are going out all across Derlavai, and will not come back on in this lifetime.
Against this tapestry Harry Turtledove tells the story of an enormous cast of characters: soldiers and generals, washerwomen and scholars, peasants and diplomats. For all the world, highborn and low, is being plunged by world war…into the darkness. — Book promo @ goodreads.com
The first 100 or so pages you get a complete people and location overload. I guess I should have seen that coming, considering the detailed map and the five and a half pages long list of characters… Then there are all the political relations between countries, which are changing all the time as well. Wars are ending and starting all over the place. So I expected it would be hard to keep track. For some people it may even be a reason to stop right there… — Edited Customer review
Starlink speed test on Tuesday using https://www.highspeedinternet.com/tools/speed-test/starlink:
@8:37 Download 160.55Mbps, Upload 3.19Mbps, Latency 32ms
@12.23 Download 107.01Mbps, Upload 8.21Mbps, Latency 32ms
@16:20 Download 93.78Mbps, Upload 6.14Mbps, Latency 33ms
Then I also did the speed test using the Starlink app.
@8:40 Download 68.00Mbps, Upload 11.80Mbps, Latency 38ms
@12.27 Download 78.00Mbps, Upload 22.00Mbps, Latency 45ms
@16:23 Download 97.00Mbps, Upload 21.00Mbps, Latency 40ms
I wounder if the Democrats will take a page from the Ukraine and Romania presidents playbook and simply say that Biden-Harris will remain in office. The quote is from a good posting by an author that I may start to follow.
One can hardly believe it anymore. The West has dropped all pretense of their sacred cow of ‘democracy’, used for generations as an instrument of moral superiority with which to browbeat the rest of the world.
Romanian candidate Calin Georgescu larruped his opponent in the first round of presidential elections, only for the entire result to be ‘nullified’ by a Romanian court, absurdly citing “Russian interference on TikTok”—with no real evidence.
On top of that, current Romanian president Klaus Iohannis—taking a page out of Zelensky’s playbook—has declared he will illegally stay past his term’s constitutional deadline to absolutely no outrage, calls to action, or even criticism from his Western partners…
The West is eating itself like a snake with its own tail in its mouth. The latest raft of desperate last-ditch policies are exactly that: they are merely accelerating the blowback. Western elites are scrambling to buy time to keep the entire order, which includes the EU, from crumbling. Like a wounded man slowly bleeding out pounding down glass after glass of water, Europe and NATO reflexively gobble up new nations at a record pace, as if the sheer gluttonous girth of their sickened empire can offset the flyblown decay within.
But the entire system walks a thin line because the people have slowly figured it out, and the globalist technocrats’ political duplicity is already revving at max thresholds; they simply cannot afford to steal every future election without the system collapsing beneath the weight of its runaway tyranny. It is already buckling, and a handful of rouged up globalist finger puppets are fain to put up a smiling facade of normalcy before cameras, while the foundations groan beneath them. — Cynical Overtakes Sacred, As The West Bares Its True Face by Simplicius The Thinker