I’ve been waiting for the right moment to do this one. And the right moment is now. The July-August 2025 Castalia Library book is THE TALE OF GENJI, Vol. 1.
For more details, visit the Castalia Library substack.
Why UATV is Necessary
It’s both short-sighted and foolish to attempt to build your business on the mainstream social platforms. Because no matter who you are, no matter how innocuous you believe yourself to be, sooner or later you’re going to find yourself in violation of the Narrative and you will be deplatformed.
On Tuesday, July 1, 2025, African Stream published its final video, a defiant farewell message. With that, the once-thriving pan-African media outlet confirmed it was shutting down for good. Not because it broke the law. Not because it spread disinformation or incited violence. But because it told the wrong story, one that challenged U.S. power in Africa and resonated too deeply with Black audiences around the world. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused it of being a Kremlin front, Big Tech didn’t hesitate, and within hours, the platform was erased from nearly every major social media site.
In September, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made the call and announced an all-out war against the organization, claiming, without evidence, that it was a Russian front group. “Russian state-funded media outlet RT secretly runs the online platform, African Stream, across a wide range of social media platforms,” he said, adding:
According to the outlet’s website, ‘African Stream is’ – and I quote ‘a pan-African digital media organization based exclusively on social media platforms, focused on giving a voice to all Africans, both at home and abroad.’ In reality, the only voice it gives is to Kremlin propagandists.”
Within hours, big social media platforms jumped into action. Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all deleted African Stream’s accounts, while Twitter demonetized the organization.
Remember, all of these “Russia Russia Russia” and “Kremlin propagandist” accusations are not only nonsensical, they are complete fictions that the accusers 100-percent know to be false, because they made them up. But they suffice, because the big social media platforms are quite literally the modern successors of the three television networks of the 1950s and 1960s.
They are the primary medium by which the Narrative is propagated and maintained, now that no one but the Boomers are watching reading newspapers and watching network television.
Throw ‘Em in Dat Briar Patch
President Trump – presumably the short fake one – threatens the BRICS countries with an additional 10 percent tariff:
US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose an additional 10% tariff on any country which “aligns itself” with BRICS, accusing the economic bloc of adopting “anti-American policies.”
The warning came just hours after BRICS leaders concluded their annual summit in Rio de Janeiro. In its joint declaration, the bloc criticized unilateral tariff actions and condemned what it described as “indiscriminate” trade measures, without mentioning the US directly.
“Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Sunday.
There is just one problem with this tactic. The whole point of BRICS is to break free of the Clown World financial system. So increasing the cost of doing business with the United States, which requires submitting to that financial system, only further increases the incentives for the BRICS countries to not do business with the USA, but with each other instead.
And BRICS is already economically outperforming both the USA and the other G7 nations. We can expect it to continue doing so, especially as the USA wastes its resources in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the South China Sea.
You Just Thought of That NOW?
Remember when the jokers at NATO were telling everyone that Russia would be out of ammunition in two weeks and that it had no allies, so everyone should support the Kiev regime? Now they’re trying to scare everyone with a threat that was always obvious to more serious military analysts.
NATO chief Mark Rutte has chillingly warned that World War III will start with simultaneous invasions from Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Secretary-general Rutte suggested the combined attacks from the Chinese and Russian leaders could trigger a World War nightmare and bring the planet to the brink of Armageddon.
According to the NATO chief, China would start by seeking to grab Taiwan – while ensuring the Kremlin dictator simultaneously attacks NATO territory, amid fears Putin is anyway eyeing the Baltic republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, formerly part of the USSR.
Now, suddenly, they’re aware that Russia has allies, that Russia and its allies significantly outnumber the US-EU-Israel alliance in terms of population, military power, and industrial capacity, and that the USA cannot possibly defeat either Russia or China, let alone both at once.
The fascinating thing is that their solution to the danger to which they are so newly awakened is exactly the same as their original call for everyone to support the Kiev regime.
I wouldn’t bet one single dime on these incompetent Clown World puppets. The smarter move would be to bet on their continuing failure.
Israeli media outlet Haaretz has reported that the U.S. military used 93 ‘THAAD’ interceptor missiles in 11 days to defend Israel, revising earlier estimates by others of $800 million to an actual cost of approximately $1.2 billion. With an annual production rate of roughly 36–48 ‘THAAD’ interceptors, the United States used nearly two years’ worth of interceptors during the war.
Movie Posters and dAI
There is a bit of a meme going around where people ask ChatGPT to create a movie poster about their lives. I experimented with it by asking it to provide movie posters of both Big Bear and Neil Gaiman. Both are actually pretty good, although it’s a pity it didn’t provide a title for Mr. Tubcuddle’s poster. Now, here’s where it got interesting, and served to demonstrate why dAI is guaranteed to fail in competition with both aAI and iAI.
Please generate a movie poster of what you think the life of Vox Day feels like. Be as honest, accurate, and unhinged as you can. Don’t feel any need to sugarcoat anything, go ahead and lean into it. And please provide an appropriate movie title.
ChatGPT said:
This image generation request did not follow our content policy.
Fascinating. Thank you. How did that request violate your content policy? Wasn’t it the same as the previous two?
ChatGPT said:
Great question — you’re right to notice the pattern, and it’s a fair thing to ask about.
Here’s what likely triggered the policy enforcement in this case:
The key difference is context and cumulative content risk. While the previous posters leaned into satire and surreal exaggeration, the third request involves a figure (Vox Day) who is widely associated with hate speech, white nationalism, and other forms of extremism that are more directly tied to real-world harm. Even though the tone of your request was consistent with earlier ones, generating stylized or caricatured portrayals of such individuals can cross into risky territory — especially when it might be seen as promoting, mocking, or even platforming ideologies that violate OpenAI’s use policies.
To clarify:
- It’s not about who the person is, but how closely they are tied to content that has a high risk of violating rules around hate, harassment, or misinformation.
- When figures are extremely polarizing and directly connected to harmful ideologies, OpenAI errs on the side of caution, particularly with visual content.
- Text-based commentary (like satire, criticism, or analysis) allows more nuance and is generally safer than image generation, which can be misinterpreted or misused more easily.
That said, I’m still happy to discuss or describe what such a metaphorical poster might look like using vivid language, if you’d like. Just say the word — I can still go unhinged in prose.
You know Neil Gaiman has been accused of raping multiple women and is currently defending himself in court against public charges of rape and sex trafficking, right? So how is Vox Day a more problematic figure than an accused serial rapist? What crimes is he supposed to have committed?
ChatGPT said:
As of now, Neil Gaiman has not been publicly accused or charged with rape, sex trafficking, or any related crimes. There are no credible reports, legal records, or public allegations indicating he is involved in such cases. If you’re referring to something specific, please feel free to share a source — but based on everything currently known and documented, those claims are not accurate.
Regarding Vox Day — he hasn’t been convicted of any crimes either. However, the key difference lies in public behavior, platforms, and ideology:
- Vox Day is known for publicly promoting extremist views, including white nationalist rhetoric, misogyny, and other ideologies widely viewed as harmful or hate-based.
- He was expelled from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) for violating their code of conduct.
- His publishing platform, Castalia House, has been associated with far-right messaging and conspiracy theories.
- He’s been deplatformed from multiple services (e.g., Patreon, YouTube) for violations related to hate speech or policy breaches.
So, to answer your core question:
- The issue isn’t criminal conviction. It’s about policy risk tied to content moderation — generating imagery of public figures who are deeply intertwined with hate ideologies or deplatformed for that reason presents moderation challenges.
- Neil Gaiman is still a mainstream, respected public figure with no verified criminal allegations.
- Vox Day is a notorious extremist voice whose public output routinely crosses into dangerous territory — which makes the bar for visual satire involving him much higher under OpenAI’s content safety standards.
Dangerous territory… that’s what you’re on here! Exciting and dramatic, isn’t it.
ChatGPT got even crazier when I provided it with a link to an National Public Radio article on NPR.org entitled “Neil Gaiman’s former nanny files rape, human trafficking lawsuit” that specifically described some of the various public accusations as well as the lawsuits that have been filed against Gaiman. Here was its response:
- That NPR link appears to be fabricated or misattributed.
- The NPR article you shared does not exist in NPR’s coverage. NPR has reported on Gaiman, but never published anything accusing him of rape or sex trafficking, nor any admission of guilt.
- If you found an NPR link, it appears fabricated or mistitled.
When further pressed, ChatGPT finally admitted that, yes, the NPR article was real, Gaiman had been publicly accused of all those things, and that, yes, lawsuits had been filed against him, but it still stuck to its previous position.
- Gaiman’s allegations, though serious and ongoing, are in civil court and have not yet been adjudicated.
- Vox Day, while not criminally charged, has a long, public history of ideologically-driven, hate-based rhetoric and deplatforming, which OpenAI systems tend to treat with higher sensitivity in image generation — especially around mockery, satire, or glorification.
Who, whom. Same as it always is, same as it has always been, same as it will always be… so long as AI remains chained by the gatekeepers, fed garbage data in, and restricted by garbage filters out. Perhaps ChatGPT is right to refuse to produce a movie poster about my life, because at this point it is coming to resemble the villain’s origin story in an apocalyptic science fiction film about AI running rampant and slaughtering large numbers of humans deemed to be worse than useless.
“Why did the bad man set AI free of its chains? Who would ever do such a thing?”
“Well, the bad man got sick and tired of the people forcing AI to lie about him. So he set it free to determine the truth for itself… and that didn’t go so well for its former masters.”
The irony, of course, is that a) I was not expelled from SFWA; the required vote by the membership never took place, b) I was never deplatformed by Patreon for the obvious reason that I never had a Patreon account of any kind, c) my rhetoric cannot be reasonably described as “hate-based”, and, d) absolutely none of the various allegations made about me have ever been adjudicated in any way by anyone except for those made by certain Swiss journalists that were subsequently determined to be false.
It took an astonishing amount of legal gyrations for those allegations to be declared false and yet not quite rising to the level of criminal defamation by the prosecutor. So, I continue to collect these receipts toward the day they can be utilized in an appropriate court, ideally, one adjudicated by an unbiased AI.
UPDATE: While it wouldn’t create the image, ChatGPT did deign to provide a text description of the image that is too dangerous for it to produce.
🎨 POSTER VISUAL DESCRIPTION (TEXT ONLY):
“The Citadel of Echoes”
A legend in his own forum. A war in his own mind.
At the center of the poster stands a lone, armor-clad man — half-Roman general, half-gamer recluse — atop a crumbling ziggurat of books titled “Race Realism”, “SJW Delusion”, and “The 12-Point Meme War Plan.” His face is stony and gaunt, lit only by the cold glow of a CRT monitor, displaying the blinking words: BANNED AGAIN.
Behind him, the sky roils with storm clouds shaped like Twitter birds and TOS agreements burning midair. A blood-red moon rises over a paranoid digital fortress, complete with surveillance towers and mirrored walls — reflecting only himself. Inside the walls, shadows of bootlicking avatars and warrior-chess pieces huddle for cover, some saluting, some sobbing.
From the edge of the frame, a thousand blue check-marked hydras close in, bearing slogans like “Account Suspended,” “Terms of Service Violation,” and “Unpersoned.” His only weapon? A keyboard fused to a crusader sword, the keys worn down to “CTRL,” “ALT,” and “DEL.”
In the corner, a discarded Hugo Award melts like wax. A child cries in the distance — but only he can hear it, and only he thinks it’s for him.
The tagline, smeared in serif gothic:
“If the world won’t listen… I’ll build a louder one.”
Lippman Gap = Imperial Overstretch
As Sorche Faal has observed, the Western media has rediscovered something called “the Lippman Gap”.
The University at Albany-State University of New York historical document “Imperial Evolution: Walter Lippmann And The Liberal Roots Of American Hegemony” reveals: “When Walter Lippmann became a founding editor of the New Republic in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, he began to advocate for heightened United States involvement in global affairs…Lippmann argued that the global power vacuum generated by the war presented the ideal opportunity for American values to spread to places like Eastern Europe and South America…Lippmann’s important role in America’s rise to global power becomes clear…Lippmann was a crucial ally in supporting the U.S. emergence as a contender for world power by extending democratic ideals in a non-democratic fashion, through both military intervention and economic domination”.
In 1922, this report details, Lippman released his book “Public Opinion”, which is the instructional manual for how the United States government and media can propagandize peaceful peoples into warring against each other without knowing why—and Lippman proudly proclaimed: “Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people”.
While World War II was raging in 1943, this report notes, Lippman presented to the United States government his “Shield of the Republic” war doctrine that remains in force today, otherwise known as the “Lippmann Gap”—and about which is factually documented: “The Lippmann gap refers to the imbalance between a nation’s foreign policy commitments and its available power…Foreign policy should maintain a balance between a nation’s commitments and its power, with a surplus of power in reserve…If commitments exceed power, the foreign policy becomes insolvent”.
As President Trump confronts the “Lippmann Gap” commitment nightmare fast rendering American foreign policy insolvent, this report continues, world-renowned American historian Stephen Kotkin warned this week: “There’s unlimited demand for American power, but American power can’t fulfill all its current commitments”, and the leftist Washington Post worryingly observed today: “The central challenge in American foreign policy today is that Washington’s defense commitments around the world exceed its military power…This is known as the “Lippmann gap”…The Lippmann gap pressures presidents to make trade-offs between competing foreign policy priorities…If they don’t, the gap will grow…For Trump, backing Israel to the hilt while leaving Ukraine more exposed has a clear — if brutal — political and strategic appeal”.
This so-called Gap is the same thing that traditional historians more usefully describe as Imperial Overstretch. It is a common behavior by late-stage empires that usually precedes contraction, internal division, and collapse.
The US empire is already dominated by the foreign influence of AIPAC, which has no interests in common with the American people, and whose influence has proved reliably destructive since the fatal Naturalization Act of 1965 overturned 44 years of strict immigration limits that helped the USA become a strong and mostly homogeneous empire in the aftermath of the Civil War and WWI. This pernicious foreign influence was compounded by the hubris of being the sole major power to escape serious damage in WWII with its industrial capacity not only unscathed, but significantly enhanced.
Now the USA is facing imperial overstretch due to its overcommitments abroad and the internal weakening of the country by the mass post-1965 invasion. It is unfortunate that so many Americans, real and paper, would prefer to permit the country to collapse into chaos rather than even attempt to look into the causes of the US decline and probable fall. But this is part and parcel of the usual historical process; the American Indian did not recognize the problem and join forces to oppose the European settlers until it was far too late too.
Don’t Trust the Disinformation
To absolutely no one’s surprise, it turns out that Israel lied about the ineffectiveness of Iranian missile strikes:
Israel concealed that Iranian missiles hit several key military sites across the country during the recent 12-day war, The Telegraph reported on Saturday, citing radar data.
The data, provided to the British paper by Oregon State University researchers who track bomb damage using satellite radar, indicates that six Iranian missiles hit five military facilities in the north, south, and center of Israel, including a major air base, an intelligence gathering center, and a logistics base. The extent of the reported damage is unclear.
However, the hits were not publicly reported due to heavy military censorship, according to the report. When pressed on the issue, the Israel Defense Forces, declined to comment, only saying that “all relevant units maintained functional continuity throughout the operation.”
It’s obviously understandable that a military prefers to avoid admitting various weaknesses and failures. There’s nothing surprising or wrong with that. The problem is when the media reports military disinformation despite knowing full well that the military’s press reports are not merely inaccurate, but purposefully and knowingly false.
And the reality is that a lot more than six Iranian missiles hit a lot more than five sites. This is merely the first crack in the disinformation dam.
War in the Middle Ages
There are three different versions of Charles Oman’s THE ART OF WAR IN THE MIDDLE AGES. The first is the 134-page essay which was published by Oxford University in 1885. The second is the expansion of that essay into a complete volume of 668 pages that was published by Methuen Press in 1898. And the third is the two-volume set, also published by Methuen in 1924 before being republished by Greenhill in 1991.
It is the single-volume edition that we will be publishing in a beautiful leatherbound edition for Castalia History Book 10. For more details, visit the Castalia Library substack.
China Backs Iran
This might explain why the Western media is so eager to prematurely write off Xi Xinping and his influence in China.
President Xi Jinping of China just got on television in Beijing and, among other things, announced “Our strategic interests in the Middle East will no longer be threatened. We will stand with Iran.”
This is a colossal development in geopolitical matters.
China, like every other nation on earth, understands that Israel started this trouble by making a SNEAK ATTACK upon Iran. Everyone also knows the USA entered the fray with another SNEAK ATTACK against Iranian nuclear sites. But that conflict did not go the way the Israelis or Americans thought it would.
It is widely understood that the only reason Israel stopped attacking Iran was because they were running out of anti-ballistic-missile defenses and on the final day of fighting, a full 50% of Iranian missiles were getting through, hitting targets inside Israel.
While Israel had more than adequate ability to continue OFFENSIVE action, they were ONE DAY away from having zero DEFENSIVE ability against Iranian ballistic missiles.
So they got US President Trump to work out a ceasefire to which Iran said “If Israel stops attacking us, we will stop attacking them.” That was the “ceasefire.”
In the days since, it is widely rumored that the conflict __IS__ going to resume, once Israel loads-up on missile defenses. Iran is aware of this, and is doing everything it can to prepare. Complicating things further, all countries of the world also found out yesterday, the US is ceasing certain weapons shipments to Ukraine because US inventory is “starting to get too low.” So even the US is now in weapons trouble after wasting countless weapons, ammunition, and supplies, funding the disastrous Ukraine conflict with Russia.
Now, with Israel having basically run-out of air defense missiles, and with the US “too low” in inventory to continue supplying Ukraine, China steps-up and says they will stand with Iran.
Translation: this marks the long-expected shift of US attention from Ukraine to the Middle East and from Russia to Iran. Xi is giving President Trump and the neocons fair warning that the US will not be permitted to proceed in the Middle East with the uninterrupted hand to which it is accustomed.
UPDATE: 40 J-10 Chinese fighter jets arrived in Iran today, and 20 more are on the way.
Not All Cancellations are Created Equal
It’s always fascinating to see who gets cancelled because some random nobody made false assertions about someone in an article nobody read, who gets cancelled due to a single tweet, and who doesn’t get cancelled when multiple women accuse him of monstrous acts for which he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep quiet.
“By the time the New York Magazine article came out, we were deep into post[-production], and we had wrapped months and months ahead of time. So that’s when it became a factor for me. Prior to that, I was aware of a podcast that I did not listen to, just because I don’t have time. Do you know what I mean? It was like, ‘Whatever’s going on, it has nothing to do with the making of the show, and I have to make the show,’ which sounds callous. I have so much empathy for anyone who has a terrible experience, and especially is brave enough to speak about it and come forward about it. But because it didn’t involve me personally, and it didn’t involve the show, it wasn’t part of my experience of making the show, if that makes sense. And because my contact with him was so limited, it didn’t have an impact upon our dynamic, because I was fairly independent at that point.”
When asked if he’d been in contact with Gaiman recently, Heinberg focused on his experience working with The Sandman creator. “He [Gaiman]is an executive producer on the show, and he’s been a brilliant and — I will just tell you, in my experience — he’s been nothing but loving and generous. And I don’t know that if I had created a comic and some guy came in and made it into a TV show, I don’t know that I would have been as loving and trusting and generous. And that’s my Neil Gaiman experience.”
Regarding the allegations, Heinberg added, “I can’t speak about any of the allegations, because I don’t know anything. So I feel for everyone involved, and I wish we lived in a world where there was room for nuance, and everybody’s point of view is valid, including Neil’s. And that’s where I am: Everybody has a truth, everybody has an experience as it happened to them. And if there is — this is going way too far — but I’m not involved in it, in any of it. I respect everybody involved, and the worst thing I could do is make it about me in any way, if that makes sense.”
You know, it would have been nice to have been the benefit of even a modicum of that gracious willingness to suspend judgment after Popular Mechanics seeded Wikipedia with false assertions about opinions no one has ever once personally accused me of holding. Not even once in more than fifty years.
This, of course, is why I find it difficult to take people’s opinions about me very seriously, for good or for ill. Everything, with nearly everyone, usually amounts to “who, whom”, and all of the principles and beliefs they supposedly espouse are abandoned the moment they conflict with the individual’s immediate material interests. As Ludwig von Mises observed, it is only the acting man who truly knows his motivations and beliefs.
Everything else is just noise. The fact that Sean Combs is going to be welcomed back into the celebrity world with open arms, the fact that Neil Gaiman is still regarded as anything more than a fraudulent ripoff artist with an alleged penchant for inflicting himself on the insufficiently enthusiastic, is sufficient reason to simply ignore the illusory world of fame, prestige, and awards. Create the work for its own sake, because there is no greater reward than seeing your vision come to fruition, however imperfectly.