Year: 2023

On the Book Front

Things are proceeding well with the bindery, the mailing lists, and the US fullfillment center. There is still plenty of infrastructural work to do, but we’re gradually excising the parts of the process that don’t work well enough and replacing them with things that do.

ITEM: Autarch, among many other things an Arktoons creator, has launched its new Kickstarter campaign for ASCENDANT: PLATINUM EDITION. A revised second edition of the RPG featuring traditional superheroes who are attractive, straight, and even occasionally right-of-center, if you can imagine such a thing.

ITEM: Today is the last day to subscribe to CASTALIA LIBRARY and receive THE ARTS OF WAR as part of your subscription. Please note that a catchup payment will be required as this is the second month of the two-part subscription. The next book in the subscription series, #21, will be announced tomorrow to the subscribers, via the appropriate mailing list to the non-subscribers, and on the Darkstream. We’ve created the new mailing list to ensure externally-verifiable perfect compliance with the GDPR and eliminate the risk of malicious unfounded abuse complaints, as the mailing service provider can now see and confirm that every single individual on the list proactively signed up for it via their own server.

ITEM: Chuck Dixon is flying on Midnight’s War: Night Streets. And the art is spectacular. New heights, my friends, is what Arkhaven is reaching.

ITEM: Speaking of The Legend, the first in the CHUCK DIXON’S CONAN series, THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL, is now available in paperback from Castalia House. An excerpt is below. The second in the series, CARAVAN OF THE DAMNED, is already complete and will be published later this year.

I’ll have more to say about the bindery on tonight’s Darkstream.

Continue reading “On the Book Front”

No Truth, No Taste

The (((CBS producers))) thought the Charlie Brown Christmas was too slow, too religious, and didn’t like the music. The truth turned out to be the precise opposite, of course.

“Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” an exasperated Charlie Brown exclaims. “Sure, Charlie Brown,” Linus reassures him, “I can tell you what Christmas is all about.” And then Linus famously recites Luke 2.8-14, part of the biblical Christmas story.

It’s just seven verses. Read by the innocent voice of real child (rather than an adult voice actor), it’s the highlight of the show for many people.

And yet those seven verses almost got the whole thing canceled.

When Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, was first approached about doing a Charlie Brown Christmas special, he included the Scripture reading in his pitch. One of his producers was instantly hesitant, but Schultz insisted.

“If we can talk about what I feel is the true meaning of Christmas, based on my Midwest background,” the producer later recalled Schultz saying, “it would really be worth doing.” Notice how Schultz had to speak of the Christian faith euphemistically as coming from his “Midwest background.” The producer explained that Schultz was adamant that the Scripture be included, “If we hadn’t gone that way, we wouldn’t have done the show.”

And yet, when the CBS producers saw the first cut of the show, they were really worried. “We thought we had ruined Charlie Brown,” one producer said. Along with thinking it was too slow and not liking the music (they didn’t like the music!), they thought it was too religious.

These are the inversionists who subsequently decided that America wanted every single television show to be set in New York City and Los Angeles, and killed off the most popular shows on TV. Don’t ever mistake what is reported to be “popular” and “successful” as actually being what people want.

Now they’re going to try to convince everyone that no one ever liked Dilbert, one of the three greatest cartoons ever drawn.

UPDATE: Scott Adams reports on the efforts to erase him.

My publisher for non-Dilbert books has canceled my upcoming book and the entire backlist. Still no disagreement about my point of view. My book agent canceled me too.

Build your own platforms and keep the wicked out of them. If you don’t, they won’t hesitate to eject you, your faith, your nation, and everything that is good, beautiful, true, or functional.

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Restoring the Mandate of Heaven

Some observers believe the Chinese have already declared war on the United States – or to be more precise, the imperial rulers of Clown World – on the basis of their recent proposal for peace in Ukraine and a recently published essay concerning the Chinese position on US imperialism.

All these vectors are evolving as ramifications of the bombing of the Nord Streams, the only military attack – cum industrial terrorism – ever perpetrated against the EU, leave the Collective West paralyzed, dazed and confused.

Perfectly in tandem with Putin’s address, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs chose the geopolitical/existential moment to finally take the gloves off, with a flourish: enter the US Hegemony and its Perils essay cum report, which became an instant massive hit across Chinese media, examined with relish all across East Asia.

This blistering enumeration of all the Hegemon’s lethal follies, for decades, constitutes a point of no return for trademark Chinese diplomacy, so far characterized by passivity, ambivalence, actual restraint and extreme politeness. So such turnaround is yet another proud “achievement” of the outright Sinophobia and mendacious hostility exhibited by American neocons and neoliberal-cons.

Scholar Quan Le notes that this document may be regarded as the traditional form – but now filled with contemporary wording – the Chinese Sovereigns used in their millenary past before going to war. It is in fact an axio-epistemo-political proclamation justifying a serious war, which in the Chinese universe means a war ordained by a Higher Power capable of restoring Justice & Harmony in a troubled Universe.

After the proclamation the warriors are equipped to strike mercilessly at the entity judged to be troubling the Harmony of the Universe: in our case, the psycho Straussian neo-cons and neoliberal-cons commanded as rabid dogs by the real American elites.

Of course in the Chinese universe there’s no place for “God” – much less a Christian version; “God” for the Chinese means the Beauty-Goodness-Truth trinity, Timeless Heavenly Universal Principles. The closest concept for a non-Chinese to understand is Dao: the Way. So the Way to the Beauty-Goodness-Truth trinity represents symbolically Beauty-Goodness-Truth.

So what Beijing did – and the Collective West is completely clueless about it – was to issue an axio-epistemo-political proclamation explaining the legitimacy of their quest to restore Timeless Heavenly Universal Principles. They will be fulfilling the Mandate of Heaven – nothing less. The West won’t know what it hit them until it’s too late.

It was predictable that sooner or later the heirs of Chinese civilization would have had enough – and formally identify, mirroring Putin’s analysis, the upstart Hegemon as the premier source of chaos, inequality and war across the planet. Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder, in a nutshell.

To put it bluntly, in streetwise language, the hell with this Americana crap of hegemony being justified by “manifest destiny”.

So here we are. You want Hybrid War? We will return the favor.

This is distinct from the Unrestricted Warfare policy declared and successfully pursued by the Chinese military in 1999. The focus of that policy was to enable China to prevent US hegemony in Southeast Asia and gradually allow China to become a dominant regional power capable of defeating any enemy that dared to enter its zone of influence. It was essentially a defensive doctrine.

The new policy is a warning: mend your ways or else.

While a just cause wins its champion wide support, an unjust one condemns its pursuer to be an outcast. The hegemonic, domineering, and bullying practices of using strength to intimidate the weak, taking from others by force and subterfuge, and playing zero-sum games are exerting grave harm. The historical trends of peace, development, cooperation, and mutual benefit are unstoppable. The United States has been overriding truth with its power and trampling justice to serve self-interest. These unilateral, egoistic and regressive hegemonic practices have drawn growing, intense criticism and opposition from the international community.

Countries need to respect each other and treat each other as equals. Big countries should behave in a manner befitting their status and take the lead in pursuing a new model of state-to-state relations featuring dialogue and partnership, not confrontation or alliance. China opposes all forms of hegemonism and power politics, and rejects interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The United States must conduct serious soul-searching. It must critically examine what it has done, let go of its arrogance and prejudice, and quit its hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices.

DISCUSS ON SG

Darker than the Dark Lord

Scott Adams actually accomplished something I never achieved in two separate national syndications: he was cancelled by Universal Press Syndicate.

Dilbert has been cancelled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books because I gave some advice everyone agreed with. (My syndication partner canceled me.) Dilbert (and more) will only be available on the subscription site.

— Scott Adams

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Sunday Arktoons

A MIND PROGRAMMED Episode 12: Deformed By An Evil Star

THE WISE OF HEART Episode 11: The Defense Argument

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 198: Adorable and Horrible

INVASION ’55 Episode 33: Eruption

BEN GARRISON CLASSICS Episode 84: Crooked House of Clinton

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 49: The Thieves of Thief Mountain

FULL OF EYES Episode 25: Anguish to Joy

CLASSIC BIBLE TALES Episode 85: Hosanna!

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 209: Sneakers

Leather Book Mailing List

This mailing list is a new one intended for non-subscribers who are nevertheless interested in leatherbound books. It’s obviously fine if active Library subscribers wish to follow this monthly newsletter as well, but now that we’re beginning to expand beyond our community, Castalia House needs a way of communicating with people who: a) don’t read this blog or don’t even know it exists, b) are interested in knowing what is going on with the Library and the Bindery but c) don’t have any interest in our regular print editions or ebooks and d) aren’t already subscribed to the Library.

Speaking of the Bindery, it might interest you to know that it already has its first customer and will be binding 650 books in topgrain Italian cowhide for an independent publishing house later this summer. To anticipate the obvious questions, we have not yet determined what the minimum quantity to place an order will be, and we have not yet determined what our standard pricing will be either.

Castalia Library
invites you to join
The Leather Book
Mailing List

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Convergence Literally Kills

I’ve always used the phrase “convergence kills” in a metaphorical sense. And while I knew Intel’s much-ballyhooed $300 million workplace diversity program launched in 2015 was going to prove disastrous, and even addressed it specifically in Corporate Cancer, I had no idea how lethal it would prove to be.

The bright future of well-funded diversity departments and their growing cost to corporate budgets can be anticipated by looking at what some of the most converged corporations in the United States are doing. In 2015, Intel announced a $300 million commitment to diversity, pledging to spend $60 million per year by 2020 in order to establish a $300 million fund to be used by 2020 to improve the diversity of the company’s work force.

This expensive program was supplemented by Intel Capital’s Diversity Initiative, which at $125 million, is “the largest venture capital resource ever created to focus on underrepresented entrepreneurs.”

Although these costs are relatively small, the primary problem with diversity departments is that they represent a one-hundred percent pure waste of corporate resources. They simply do not deliver even the most basic results that one might expect from them.

Corporate Cancer, Vox Day

The results delivered by diversity departments don’t necessarily deliver the results promised by those who encouraged the mass entry of vibrants into the corpocracy.

On Feb. 18, an Arizona man allegedly beat his coworker to death with a baseball bat in the cafeteria of an Intel building. According to the New York Post, 50-year-old Derrick Simmons was arrested after he attacked a coworker with a bat, knife, and hatchet at the Intel Ocotillo Campus cafeteria.

Witnesses told police in the court paperwork that after the night shift employees left, Simmons approached a man at the table and allegedly hit him multiple times with a baseball bat.

Chandler police found one person dead with fatal brutal force trauma injuries and another person injured. The second victim was injured after confronting Simmons.

Strangely enough, an increase in the number of employees being beaten to death by baseball-wielding vibrants was never listed among the benefits of increased diversity by corporate diversity advocates.

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Revisit Your Assumptions

College attendance and university degrees have long been defended on the basis of higher earnings prospects. But what was a great deal in the 1950s and 1960s, and still made some degree of sense in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But for the average college student in the United States, a university degree can no longer be justified on economic grounds.

When it comes to wages, fortunes flipped last year for college and high-school graduates.

In 2022, median annual pay was $52,000 for Americans with a bachelor’s degree, according to data released by the New York Federal Reserve Friday. That’s a 7.4% decline in inflation-adjusted terms — the steepest plunge since 2004, erasing nearly all of the pandemic-era gains. It was sharpest for those earning the most.

Meanwhile, wages accelerated 6% in real terms to $34,320 for those with only a high-school diploma — the biggest gain in more than two decades.

While secondary-degree holders are still paid more, those who didn’t attend college are catching up. Americans with only a high school diploma made 93% of what recent graduates with a bachelor’s degree in the bottom quarter of wages made.

While average degree-holder wages are still higher, the wage comparisons are meaningless when they fail to take into account a) the cost of college debt and debt service as well as b) the opportunity cost of not working for five years.

The cost of college debt service is the real killer. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, only “37% of all borrowers saw their student loan balance shrink” as a result of making their payments in 2022.

So with an average student loan debt of $39,351, plus an estimated average $7,870 in lifetime debt service costs, plus an average $205,920 in lost wages, the college student pursuing a university degree in 2023 is $253,141 in the hole versus the high-school diploma holder from the start of his professional career.

Which means, if he is one of the fortunate 59 percent that manages to finish his degree in six years, it will take him 14 years just to reach economic parity with the less-educated members of his high school graduating class, just in time for their 20th high school reunion. And that is the positive outcome; don’t forget there is a forty-percent chance that all of that time and expense will be wasted by a failure to obtain a degree.

The fact is that college in the United States only made sense as a means of elevating members of the lower and working classes for a few decades. Now, it has become something more akin to what it historically was, which is a means of establishing class norms for the administers of empire. This is not to say that no young American should waste his time and money on university, only that he should sit down with his parents, and if necessary, a trusted friend who understands mathematics and statistics, and seriously consider the question of whether going to college is likely to prove advantageous to him or not.

Because it can no longer be reasonably assumed that, on average, it is.

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