Year: 2023

The History Subscription

We’re going to print with THE LANDMARK THUCYDIDES. The title page created for the Castalia Library edition is below.

The second and third books in the series are already printed, and the fourth book is presently being scanned in preparation for going to print. We’re waiting on the leathers, which should arrive sometime in October, and then we’ll be going into production.

If you haven’t subscribed yet to Castalia History, or to Castalia Library, this is a very good time to do so, as we expect to be hitting on all cylinders by the end of the year. Below is an image of the first custom stamp die created for the bindery; initial tests of the bottom jig have been good, although it appears we’re going to have to add a top jig as well in order to ensure properly distributed pressure across the cover. You can see the screwholes that we’ve added which will allow us to fix the stamps into an exact position; a system that is a considerable improvement on the two-sided tape customarily used to fix the stamps into position that we regarded as too haphazard and prone to operator error.

And finally, as you have probably already seen on SocialGalactic, both The Promethean and The Lawdog Files are now being spotted in the wild.

DISCUSS ON SG

Tilting at Windmills

Karl Denninger considers the possibility that he may have been wasting his time warning his fellow Americans about the coming hard times:

Tell me, how many of you have demanded your Representative and two Senators place the military on the border and treat the influx of illegal crossers as an invasion, shutting down all passage of bills and other Congressional activity until the Executive does exactly that and implements 100% E-Verify, ejecting all illegal aliens already here? Oh yes, the so-called “Conservatives” have, several times, placed 100% E-Verify in a bill but every single time they’ve pulled it rather than insist it pass to get anything else, yet that IS within their power to do. How many of you have demanded all the scams and frauds in the medical system, including that ruled illegal under 15 USC Chapter 1 forty years ago, be met with immediate indictment, prosecution and imprisonment? I have, publicly and repeatedly for over a decade and been raising hell about it for more than two decades. Have you? Or is it only a problem when the invading mass of people show up in your city and start taking whatever they want? Is that not what an invading army does? Do you only complain when you get hurt and need a physician — and get personally screwed with a bill ten or even one hundred times that someone else pays, or when you’re prescribed a drug that is one hundred times as expensive as the same drug, made in the same factory, sold in Europe.

WELL?

I get it, people go along to get along.

But every now and then I have to look at the record, along with the over 15,500 articles I’ve written (not counting replies and discussions) since 2007 and ask: What has come of all the put-in effort, other than a bunch of worn-out keyboards?

After all there’s only 24 hours in a day, and now matter what I do, and how much money I have (or not) I can’t get a single one of the hours I spend doing this — and its a fairly significant investment in time and effort, for which I expect and earn basically nothing in terms of money — back.

I’m going to spend some of them doing something else since, at a certain point, you have to wonder if you really are tilting at windmills.

By Karl’s chosen metric, saving the American nation from itself, he has been a complete failure and all his efforts have been a complete waste of time. And it’s true, he has been and it was. But this failure was inevitable, because there is no saving a nation from itself. The task that he set himself was always impossible from the start.

A better metric, I think, is to ask whether one’s efforts have been beneficial to others. And on that basis, it is absolutely inarguable that Karl’s efforts have been a near-unprecedented success. He has almost certainly saved more individuals from unnecessarily experiencing poor health, degraded immune systems, and sudden death than one thousand doctors over the entire course of their medical careers. That is more than success, that is time well-spent and a life well-lived.

I’m not saying this to try to persuade Mr. Denninger to devote more time to his Market Ticker, or to make him feel any better about how he has spent his time and efforts, or to curry any favor with him. I’m simply an observer pointing out the observable facts, and the observable fact is that by any historical measure, if there was still a real Catholic Church with a genuine servant of Jesus Christ at its head, Karl Denninger would be beatified as a literal living saint for his selfless services to humanity.

Lest any readers here fear for my own feelings about the complete failure of my own 27,333 blog posts and even more significant time investment to save the American nation or Western civilization, please take comfort in the reminder that I am a quintessential Sigma male, I have always believed most people are self-serving idiots who are totally incapable of recognizing the inevitable consequences of their collective actions, and I have never expected anyone to understand, let alone agree, much less take any action on the basis of, my efforts. I observe because I am an observer and I write because I am a writer. That may not be enough for others with more ambitious objectives, but it is enough for me.

Perhaps we are all just tilting at windmills. But so what? Dragons or windmills, some of us are just born to tilt.

DISCUSS ON SG

Should We Cancel Chuck Dixon

I am reliably informed that he is associated with some deeply unsavory characters. Also – you’ll never guess – antisemitic! These are very serious charges.

Dane, a YouTuber who runs the channel ActualFandom, recently appeared to defame Chuck Dixon as an anti-Semite as the Rippaverse is about to release Dixon’s upcoming Alphacore book.

On X, the YouTuber wrote, “If you’re someone who values the wellbeing of comics communities I implore you to read. Rippaverse Comics will soon publish a comic by a former industry pro, creator of Bane & Time Drake – Chuck Dixon. It gets disturbing from there.”

In the tweet, Dane takes issue with Chuck Dixon’s creation of the comic series Alt Hero Q for Vox Day’s Arkhaven Comics. In an image he shared as part of his tweet he writes, “He’s also worked with a publisher called Arkhaven, on a comic called ALT-HERO:Q. As in QANON. The first arc is titled ‘WHERE WE GO ONE’, which refers to the Q conspiracist mantra of ‘WHERE WE GO ONE, WE GO ALL’, often shortened on social media as ‘WWG1WGA’.

He then goes on to provide summaries of the first couple of issues of the book. From there he states, “For those unfamiliar with the IRL QAnon, it is a belief that a vast conspiracy of Hollywood elite and every politician who isn’t explicitly pro-Trump, is engaged in acts involving children ranging from an updated take on anti-Semitic ‘blood libel’ narratives, to pedophilia and Satanic sacrifice.”

Let me get this straight. Because The Legend wrote a comic about an evil elite that engages in child sex trafficking, he is antisemitic.

Now, isn’t that an open and public admission that a certain group of people are engaged in child sex trafficking and Satanic sacrifice? Especially given the fact that the comic doesn’t mention or imply anything about Satanic sacrifice.

Anyhow, this is just an attempt to get Chuck kicked off Eric July’s projects, which isn’t going to happen. What’s amusing about this is that if Dane is worked up about AH:Q, he’s going to stroke out on the spot if he ever reads The Legend’s Levon Cade novels…

DISCUSS ON SG

“We Will Lose” – Zelensky

In fairness, he’s not lying:

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has pegged his nation’s continued fight against Russia to sustained US military assistance, according to US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “There was a single sentence that summed it all up, and I am quoting him verbatim. Mr. Zelensky said: ‘If we don’t get the aid, we will lose the war,’” the lawmaker told journalists after meeting Zelensky on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Of course, NATO’s Ukrainian puppet is leaving out the small matter of how if Ukraine does get the aid, it will still lose the war.

Since the Spanish Empire ruled the waves, the rule has always been that the side which can manufacture more of the primary war material, be it wooden ships, iron tanks, or AI-controlled drones, will win the war.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Ustasi is Real

Sarah Hoyt describes a successful attempt to infiltrate her communications two years ago:

I have found out recently that when my phone got spoofed, and my email hacked, back in April of 2021, it was part of an effort that involved a lot of people on our side getting that happening to them at the same time. The email was then used to send insulting emails to those people they thought were monetary supporters. At the same time, the emails were rifled for “incriminating” messages, used to bring legal charges against these people, or to discredit them with the community at large.

It did a number on my mind for various reasons. Note I’m not saying who was behind the hacking because I don’t know. But the fact that legal charges were brought in some cases makes you think… well, you know, the Stasi is real even though it goes under other names.

For the record, the attempted hack was curtailed earlier (and there are now measures in place), by pure luck. I happened to be up really late for me, through being too tired to go to bed. (It’s a thing.)

Also for the record, the shenanigans attempted didn’t land, because their ideas of who I am appear to be pure leftist projection. While I have monetary backers — Hi, y’all — for this blog, they’re not political monetary backers, and they don’t send me emails encouraging messages or slants. In other words, there is no journolist on the right, and there is no equivalent of Soros directing our efforts.

Most of what my email contains are actual personal things. Messages from friends and family. Kids and cats pictures. The occasional editor email, though now that I’m not doing comics, not even that. Links to blogs that hope I’ll link them, or links a friend found interesting. Discussions of how a book did with a friend.

So most of the insulting, (highly racist slurs, btw) emails were sent to friends telling me how much their book had made, and one to my comics editor. None of them “landed” because the reaction were immediate texts saying “Sarah, you’ve been hacked.” First, because I don’t use that language, and second because the messages made no sense since these weren’t political backers but friends. (Even the comics editor became that.) And because it was curtailed early, there was no time for fake emails advising violence, or fake posts on facebook to be made.

The other thing I found out at the same time, through incidental comments in a chat, is that the next attempt was to tap into people’s internet to capture the stream. Doing that on ours is bizarre, but yes, we do have proof that was actually done to us just before we left Colorado. The only reply to that is “Dudes, wait and get it when I post it on the blog or publish it.” Because there is nothing, literally, in either my email or my internet signal that couldn’t be made public tomorrow because most of it is. Oh, some of my correspondents would hate to have their emails made public because they are in the political closet, but they’re not political operators. They’re professors or scientists or members of the Armed Forces (not high up.) Knowing they associate with me at all might bring questions, but then again most of them use pseudonyms, and the emails themselves are blameless. “Hey, have you read this?” and “Look at the cute face my cat made” comprise 99% of it, the rest being maybe more personal and less political than that.

However, the fact that so much effort was made made me queasy. Particularly because I know some of the other people to whom this was done, and they’re much bigger. My claim to “bigness” is posting over at instapundit, (which is yuge) but other than that, I’m medium-small and I’m just a science fiction writer with a nasty politics problem.

While it would have been useful for us to hear about this two years ago, it’s still good that Mrs. Hoyt is going public with the surveillance state’s attempt to interfere with her relations with her readers and supporters. It would also be useful to know how many other public figures were targeted and how successful those efforts were in their attempts to sabotage them.

In the meantime, it’s vital to always remain aware of the constant attempt of these bad actors to infiltrate every organization and every group of people that aren’t completely submitted to the Narrative. The lidless eye is always on you, which is a simple fact of human existence that you should accept with equanimity and utilize to inspire you to do more and do better.

None of this is new. Epictetus made it clear nearly 2,000 years ago.

Yet God hath placed by the side of each a man’s own Guardian Spirit, who is charged to watch over him—a Guardian who sleeps not nor is deceived…. So when you have shut the doors and made a darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone, but God is within, and your Guardian Spirit, and what light do they need to behold what you do?

Man’s surveillance state is but a poor, twisted, and fallen version of God’s. And we know which one holds the real power.

DISCUSS ON SG