Month: August 2025

Express Yourself

After some discussion, analysis, and research, we believe we’ve come up with a plan to address the panoply of rising costs of producing the world’s most beautiful books in a painless manner.

If you’re a Castalia subscriber, please read it, take part in the poll, and let us know what you think in the comments there. Please note that nothing has been decided yet, we’re just trying to come up with a plan that will work for everyone and maintain future viability without imposing unnecessary expenses on anyone.

DISCUSS ON SG

Sea Power vs Land Power

Sea power tends to be more aggressive and expansive, but land power tends to last longer:

For over a century, two dead advisors have shaped the way great powers view the world.

On one side, we have Alfred Thayer Mahan—the American naval officer who believed sea power determined global supremacy. According to Mahan, controlling the oceans means controlling trade. If you control trade, you control wealth. If you control wealth… well, you get the picture.

On the other side is Halford Mackinder, the British geographer who argued the exact opposite. Forget the seas, he said. Whoever controls the “World Island”—Eurasia—controls the world. Railways, rivers, pipelines, and land empires are what count. Not frigates and aircraft carriers.

Mahan and Mackinder are no longer with us, but their ideas continue to influence the world today.

And we’re watching it unfold.

The United States and the United Kingdom—Mahan’s spiritual children—have long benefited from an ocean-based order. Ruling the waves built their prosperity and power. The British Empire’s reach was maritime. The U.S. Navy now patrols every major sea lane. The dollar reigns supreme because oil, commodities, and trade settle in greenbacks. That world—the Mahan world—is why Americans live like kings while land powers like Russia and China have spent decades playing catch-up.

But Mahan’s world has limits. Especially when you try to keep your rivals bottled up in theirs.

That’s precisely what the U.S. has tried to do with China.

If you look at ancient history, the rivalries between Athens and Sparta, and between Carthage and Rome, all ended the same way; with the land power eventually defeating the sea power. This is because sea power is intrinsically offensive, which means that it doesn’t have much in the way of defense in depth once its advantages are counteracted in one way or another.

It’s already apparent that either China or Russia can defeat the USA in a war. Which means that the US is an empire in decline, and the only real question is how fast it will collapse and how far.

DISCUSS ON SG

Epic Beats Google

I’m not even remotely surprised that Epic won its case against Google over the Play Store. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that the game developers are smarter than the Big Tech guys and all their Silicon Valley lawyers:

A federal appeals court has upheld a jury verdict condemning Google’s Android app store as an illegal monopoly, clearing the way for a federal judge to enforce a potentially disruptive shakeup that’s designed to give consumers more choices.

The unanimous ruling issued Thursday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals delivers a double-barreled legal blow for Google, which has been waylaid in three separate antitrust trials that resulted in different pillars of its internet empire being declared as domineering scofflaws monopolies since late 2023.

The unsuccessful appeal represents a major victory for video game maker Epic Games, which launched a legal crusade targeting Google’s Play Store for Android apps and Apple’s iPhone app store nearly five years ago in an attempt to bypass exclusive payment processing systems that charged 15% to 30% commissions on in-app transactions.

This is good news. It should make it a lot easier to get apps on the platforms that people prefer to utilize on their phones.

DISCUSS ON SG

Don’t Stop

If you don’t use it, you will lose it. A doctor shares a conversation with her 88-year-old patient.

An 88-year-old who I’d been seeing for falls, weakness, and a hip fracture told me I looked strong. Asked if I lifted weights.

I proudly confirmed his assumption as I’d been lifting for the past 9 years. He smiled and said he used to lift too. Shared his old PRs.

He used to bench press 215 lbs, squat 350 lbs, and deadlift 475 lbs at his prime. He trained several times a week & used lifting as a way to stay both physically & mentally fit. But at some point along the way, life happened, so his training sessions decreased. Then, before he knew it, he stopped lifting altogether in his 50s.

Then he got older. He now uses a walker to get around now. He has difficulty getting up from a chair and he’s fallen in his home, one fall leading to a hip fracture.

Then he looked me dead in the eyes and said:

Don’t ever stop. If I hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t be your patient right now.

Ironically, it’s only because he’d been lifting into his 50s that he has survived to the age of 88. His decline began from a higher peak than most.

So whatever it is that you’re doing, from lifting weights to playing soccer, don’t stop unless you absolutely have to stop. You’re going to get older, but you don’t have to become frail and infirm.

DISCUSS ON SG

Shadows Ride mix

I’m not quite as out of control as you might think. I’m just experimenting with some new techniques to accomplish different things, including a few things you’re not supposed to be able to do, with 4.5+. This is a new model I’ve created that gives a different sound than my previous models; I used to remix CHIBA CITY BLUES with less techno, more rock, and it’s pretty promising based on the Shadows Ride mix, although the third verse might need to be tweaked for flow.

Lost in the sprawl of endless night
Where shadows ride their dreams
Hunting the scores to make it right
Nothing here is what it seems.

DISCUSS ON SG

CIA vs FBI

Tucker Carlson talks to Candace Owens about the “weird little gay kid” Nick Fuentes attacking Joe Kent and being a controlled asset used to discredit people on the right

Interesting that the Fake Right has finally caught up with Owen Benjamin, whose gaydar is attuned from his years in Hollywood. I am not privy to any details concerning Nick Fuentes’s personal predilections, but the probabilities certainly tend to favor him being both fake and gay.

Regardless, I find it impossible to keep up on all the grifter and manufactured e-celeb drama, so I simply don’t spend any time thinking about it.

DISCUSS ON SG

I Stand Corrected

I genuinely, but in respect mistakenly, thought THE LONG AND LONESOME SKYWAY was my musical magnum opus. I could not have been more wrong. And you probably thought that the last thing the world needed was an authentic 80’s New Wave cover of the old folksong GOD’S GONNA CUT YOU DOWN, but you, too, could not have been more wrong.

I think I can guarantee anyone who likes 80’s music is going to absolutely love GOD’S GONNA CUT YOU DOWN (Dancing on Your Grave mix).

If you’re interested in the technical details, they’re explained at AI Central, but let’s just say this started with a cassette tape from 1989 that we all thought was lost long ago.

DISCUSS ON SG

Castalia and the Cost of Tariffs

So President Trump has imposed a 39 percent tariff on Switzerland. This has a direct impact on all the Castalia Library books now being produced in Switzerland, beginning with the Byzantine histories and Dracula. Now, the tariff is imposed on the declared value, not the retail price, so it’s not quite as bad as it looks, but it is a bit of a problem going forward since the discounts provided to subscribers for paying in advance don’t account for this additional expense to the 12 or so books now in production.

Now, even if we jacked up the subscription prices by 40 percent, our books would be a much-better value than Easton Press books, which go for $168. However, we know things are tight, and we don’t want to price our books out of the reach of subscribers who can’t afford a price increase right now.

So what we’re contemplating doing is to add a T-version of our base subscriptions to Library and History, similar to the Euro version of History, that will allow those subscribers who can a) afford the additional tariff cost and b) want to support the bindery. Libraria and Cathedra prices have a sufficient cushion to absorb the additional expense; we priced Cathedra with the expectation that there would be a tariff, although we were hoping for something in the 10-15 percent range. That would mean increasing the monthly subscription price from $50 to $75 for Library.

Another option, indeed, one that we’d originally contemplated from the start, is going back to producing all the US books in the USA, while producing the higher-quality books from the Bindery for Europe and the rest of the world. This would complicate our production runs, but since we could still produce all the interior book blocks from the same tariff-neutral location, would be entirely viable from a manufacturing standpoint. The primary downside is that we would have to establish another shipping operation instead of being able to rely solely on the US one.

Speaking of US production, THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON has passed the stamp test and will be getting bound and shipped to the warehouse very soon.

Anyhow, if you’re a Library, History, or Cathedra subscriber, please feel free to share your thoughts on how you think we should address the situation.

DISCUSS ON SG