Category: Uncategorized

NEW RELEASE: Young Man’s War by Rod Walker

When the Dark Gates open and unleash the monstrous Darksiders on an unsuspecting Earth, only the toughest and most determined people will survive. Roland and Maggie Kane are more fortunate than most, because their father, Daniel, is a Chicago cop who has taught them how to shoot and prepared them for almost every eventuality. But, as the Kane family soon learns, there is just no way to prepare for an alien invasion.


However, Roland also discovers that although the Darksiders’ blood may be green, the invaders will die as readily as any man after being ventilated with enough high-speed projectiles.


Rod Walker is the New New Heinlein, and The Thousand Worlds marks the return of science fiction to its classical form and historical heights. Written in the style and tradition of Robert Heinlein’s 12 classic juvenile novels published by Scribner, YOUNG MAN’S WAR is an exciting tale of survival, courage, independence, and the indomitable spirit of Man.

If you enjoyed MUTINY IN SPACE and ALIEN GAME, you will definitely like YOUNG MAN’S WAR. In my opinion, it is easily the best of the three books. It is not necessary to read them in any particular order,  as The Thousand Worlds setting links all the stories together, but only in the sense that all of them take place in the same science fiction universe. This is the kind of science fiction that SJWs destroyed beginning in the mid-80s. This is the kind of science fiction that people have been lamenting their inability to find for decades. And this is the kind of science fiction that Castalia House was created to publish.

But don’t take my word for it. From the reviews:

  • Reading ‘Young Man’s War’ put me in mind of Larry Correia’s ‘Monster Hunters’ books, especially the first one. And I mean that in the very best of ways.
  • Young Man’s War grabs your interest from the start and moves right along without meandering or relying on cliches. I enjoyed the pace and the ending was surprisingly uplifting.
  • Rod Walker has clearly given some thought about how a civilized society would break down and then rebuild after the government evaporates. He captures the feel of Heinlein’s juvenile novels in the voice of the narrator and his focus on succeeding in his missions being worthy goals.
  • This is a coming-of-age story where a teenager becomes a man in about the roughest situation you can think of. The blurb said Young Man’s War is an exciting tale of survival, courage, independence, and the indomitable spirit of Man.” The book delivers.
  • If you like stories where the humans are overrun by strange, terrifying, evil aliens and the survivors immediately decide to *kick their slimy alien butts off our planet*, with tons of gunplay and excitement and a plot that keeps you up till 2am promising yourself “just one more page!”, then GET THIS BOOK NOW.
The good news is that people are noticing that Castalia House is doing unexpectedly well, presumably because it fulfills a long-ignored demand. The challenge, of course, is now that we are no longer being ignored, every relative failure on our part will be cited as conclusive evidence that there is no demand for social justice-free fiction, that the market actually prefers social justice lectures to old-fashioned heroic stories, and so forth. But this is no surprise, as the reward for every level of success is an even bigger challenge.

UPDATE: Congratulations, Rod Walker! YOUNG MAN’S WAR is officially a category bestseller.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #872 Paid in Kindle Store
#1 in Children’s eBooks > Science Fiction, Fantasy & Scary Stories > Science Fiction > Aliens
#4 in Children’s eBooks > Action & Adventure > Survival Stories

YouTube restricts “extremist” content

And by extremist, they don’t mean what you might think they mean:

YouTube has been working on ways to manage offensive and extremist content that do and do not violate its policies, and some steps it has taken include AI-assisted video detection and removal as well as input from more experts. Today, in a blog post, the company provided more detail about its ongoing efforts.

First, its machine learning video detection has been hard at work and during the past month over 75 percent of videos taken down because of violent, extremist content were done so without the help of humans. This system has helped YouTube remove twice as many of these sorts of videos. The company has also started working with a number of non-governmental organizations including the Anti-Defamation League, the No Hate Speech Movement and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “These organizations bring expert knowledge of complex issues like hate speech, radicalization, and terrorism that will help us better identify content that is being used to radicalize and recruit extremists,” said YouTube in the blog post.

For videos that contain “controversial religious or supremacist content” but don’t violate any of YouTube’s policies, they’ll now be placed in a “limited state.” YouTube said, “The videos will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won’t be recommended, won’t be monetized, and won’t have key features including comments, suggested videos, and likes.” It says that the limited state will start being applied to desktop versions in the coming weeks and will hit mobile versions shortly thereafter.

YouTube said that these changes are just the beginning and it will be sharing more about its work in the months ahead. “Altogether, we have taken significant steps over the last month in our fight against online terrorism. But this is not the end. We know there is always more work to be done,” it said.

They actually mean people like Dr. Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. And, one has to presume, the 36 individuals on the ADL’s hit list.

A professor in Canada who refuses to use gender-neutral pronouns and criticizes social justice issues was banned from using his Google and YouTube accounts Tuesday, regaining access hours later with no detailed explanation provided.

Professor Jordan B. Peterson of the University of Toronto disputed Google and YouTube’s decision to lock him out of his accounts, according to correspondence obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Please tell me what principle I have violated,” said Peterson in his email to Google upon discovering that he was locked out of his account. “I have not violated any terms that I am aware of and have not misused my account.”

The psychology professor has over 350,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, which he uses as a platform to post his lectures, interviews, and Q&As.

“We understand you’ve recently been unable to access your Google account, and we appreciate you contacting us,” said Google in a response. “After review, your account is not eligible to be reinstated due to a violation of our Terms of Service.”

But Google did not provide any details regarding which rule the professor violated.

The changes are just beginning….

Vid.Me is SJW-converged

It is now evident that Vid.Me is not a possible replacement for YouTube. They are not a serious service, and actually appear to be even more converged than either YouTube or Twitter.

We’re writing to let you know that we’ve reviewed your application for verification, but unfortunately we won’t be able to verify you at this time.

We’re still a small team, so we can’t give you detailed feedback on why your application wasn’t approved, but here are some common reasons:

    Haven’t met the minimum follower threshold of 50

    No cover photo, profile avatar, or videos uploaded

    Limited interaction with the Vidme community

    Not adhering to the Vidme rules

Also, sometimes we make mistakes. We’re imperfect carbon-based lifeforms.

For the record:


Voxday
7 videos
1,006 views
99 video points
270 followers
Joined Jul 24, 2017

Here are some of the people they verified at the same time they denied me verification, which is required for access to the settings that allow for creating subscriptions:

Midgeman
4 videos
9 views
8 video points
2 followers
Joined Jul 21, 2017

SayMo
180 views
8 video points
11 followers
Joined Jun 23, 2017

Casanova
0 views
0 video points
9 followers
Joined Aug 01, 2017

I also discovered that their settings don’t permit giving external supporters from Patreon or wherever access to the premium content, so it wasn’t going to be an option anyhow unless and until they got their act together with regards to that feature. So, thanks very much to all of you who followed and helped me determine that Vid.Me is not a viable option for anyone on the Right.

Needless to say, I will not be making further use of their service. It’s not a problem, though, as I already have several alternatives; this simply happened to be the first one that was recommended to me.

Update: I’m not the only one.

QNTKKA‏ @Qntkka
They would not verify me because of my content. They are MORE SJW than YouTube.

The death of pop culture

They rejected Christendom, they rejected America, and they rejected reality. Now the cultural parasites have literally nothing left:

Modern pop culture is running on fumes, and its about to strand its passengers in the desert.

But the final straw for me, and it appears for many others, was the reveal of Ready Player One directed by an over the hill Steven Spielberg.

I think the best sum up of the reaction might have been this one. The pop culture atmosphere the original book was released in is much different than it is now. It’s amazing how fast the climate has changed.

What the criticism boils down to is that nerd culture is really, really embarrassing, and that this generation is starting to realize why. It’s the realization that we are little more than grown manchildren refusing to be adults. Our grandparents are gone, and no one is willing to step up to bat for them which leaves the Millennials and Gen X to make up for it. This is really about the growing self-awareness that “nerd blackface” (as a friend of mine puts is) has finally hit the wall.

This has little to do with liking geeky things. It was never about that. A lot of men like geeky movies, comics, and games, but those things are not their whole world. They have families, responsibilities, friends, and hopes for the future. Their entire world is not crying into their pillow about how much they miss the 1980s and their long gone youth. While this book might have been relevant to the zeitgeist when it came out, a lot has changed since 2011 and mindless wallowing in pop culture references have finally started to lose their luster.

People don’t want to hide in their man-caves and be talked down to anymore, and constantly reassured that their childhood is where they should stay. It was a nice, comfortable place to be.

But childhood is over. Star Wars movies ended in 1983. Chris Claremont doesn’t write X-Men anymore. Kurt Cobain is dead, and so is radio rock. Dr. Who has been treading water creatively since its reboot. These properties have had their stories were told. Now it is time for new franchises and new stories and for the baggage to be left behind. It’s time to stop pining for a childhood that is over.

Which brings us to the bigger point. What comes next?

This is where we realize we are standing in muddy waters.

As Razorfist pointed out above, there’s always a new trend coming along to replace the old one. It’s the way of the beast. But it’s different now. The industry has been working overtime to destroy legacy genres and franchises. They’ve been forcing PC doctrine into every script to make every set of characters interchangeable and every tired plot beat the same. It’s not the same as it once was.

If superhero movies do end, then what replaces them? There is no pleasant answer to this, but there’s only really one .

The answer, is nothing.

What replaces Pop Culture is Alt Culture. What replaces the Superhero is Alt Hero. Winter is coming and the wolves are howling. And it’s coming much sooner than you think.

Book Review: HITLER IN HELL

A review of HITLER IN HELL by the ever-insightful John C. Walker:

Hitler tells the story of his life: from childhood, his days as a struggling artist in Vienna and Munich, the experience of the Great War, his political awakening in the postwar years, rise to power, implementation of his domestic and foreign policies, and the war and final collapse of Nazi Germany. These events, and the people involved in them, are often described from the viewpoint of the present day, with parallels drawn to more recent history and figures.

What makes this book work so well is that van Creveld’s Hitler makes plausible arguments supporting decisions which many historians argue were irrational or destructive: going to war over Poland, allowing the British evacuation from Dunkirk, attacking the Soviet Union while Britain remained undefeated in the West, declaring war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, forbidding an orderly retreat from Stalingrad, failing to commit armour to counter the Normandy landings, and fighting to the bitter end, regardless of the consequences to Germany and the German people. Each decision is justified with arguments which are plausible when viewed from what is known of Hitler’s world view, the information available to him at the time, and the constraints under which he was operating….

This could have been a parody, but in the hands of a distinguished historian like the author, who has been thinking about Hitler for many years (he wrote his 1971 Ph.D. thesis on Hitler’s Balkan strategy in World War II), it provides a serious look at how Hitler’s policies and actions, far from being irrational or a madman’s delusions, may make perfect sense when one starts from the witches’ brew of bad ideas and ignorance which the real Hitler’s actual written and spoken words abundantly demonstrate.

Read the whole thing. It’s always interesting to read Mr. Walker’s reviews, regardless of the subject.

The only way to raise wages

Is to reduce the supply of labor. American workers can only benefit from the elimination of labor visas, increased limits on immigration, and stepped-up deportation, as evidenced by the response of Maine businesses to a “shortage” of H-2B visas:

Businesses in Bar Harbor, Maine are turning to locals to make up for a shortage of foreign guest workers that normally fill summer jobs in the bustling seaside resort town.

Because the H-2B visa program has already reached its annual quota, Bar Harbor’s hotels, restaurants and shops can’t bring in any more foreign workers for the rest of the busy summer tourist season. Like hundreds of similar coastal resort towns, Bar Harbor has for many years depended on the H-2B visas for temporary workers. The program allows non-agricultural companies to bring in foreign labor if they are unable to find suitable employees domestically.

Now they are coming up with creative ways to attract local labor, reports the Bangor Daily News.

The Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce will hold a job fair Saturday in an effort to recruit significant numbers of workers from the region. Just about every kind of business in the town is looking for help, says chamber executive director Martha Searchfield.

“All types of businesses — retail, restaurants, the tour boats, all the trips, everything. All types of workers are needed,” she told the Daily News.

The shortage is so acute that companies are sweetening incentives for local workers. Searchfield says some businesses are offering flexible schedules that might appeal to older workers who might be interested in working only a day or two each week. And other companies have gone so far as to offer higher wages to entice locals.

That’s not a problem, that’s an indication of a solution. As long as tens of millions of Americans remain unemployed, there is absolutely zero net benefit to the economy or to American workers from immigration. All immigration accomplishes is to increase income inequality to the advantage of very large US corporations and the financial class that caters to them.

Whenever half-educated midwits talk about the economy and “business profits”, one thing you will note that they NEVER mention is that about one-third of all corporate profits go to the financial industry, which is up from three percent in the 1950s.

In other words, all that this failure to protect American jobs in the name of “free trade” has accomplished is to redistribute income from the working and middle classes to the .01 percent. Of course, there is nothing “laissez faire” about it, it is the direct result of government action. And as we’ve seen, even straight-up communism is better for a nation than this unconscientious corporatism.

AA comments: It’s people taking advantage of high-standards, high-trust society in which to produce and sell their goods, while importing low-standards/low-trust/low-quality laborers to provide their goods.


In other words, it is short-term societal arbitrage, which is the equivalent of strip-mining a society.

Russia expels US diplomats

This is a warning to the Trump administration: do not permit NATO to extend an invitation to Georgia:

Speaking late on Sunday, the Russian president said that the time for retaliation has come: “we’ve been waiting for quite a long time that maybe something would change for the better, we had hopes that the situation would change. But it looks like, it’s not going to change in the near future… I decided that it is time for us to show that we will not leave anything unanswered.”

Putin added that “the personnel of the US diplomatic missions in Russia will be cut by 755 people and will now equal the number of the Russian diplomatic personnel in the United States, 455 people on each side” Putin said, adding that “because over a thousand employees, diplomats and technical personnel have been working and are still working in Russia, and 755 of them will have to cease their work in the Russian Federation. It’s considerable.”

Putin also told the Russian audience that “the American side has made a move which, it is important to note, hasn’t been provoked by anything, to worsen Russian-US relations. [It includes] unlawful restrictions, attempts to influence other states of the world, including our allies, who are interested in developing and keeping relations with Russia.”

Best. Timeline. Ever.

I suddenly have an image of the God-Emperor and his new Voice raising kitsune while rocking out to Akatsuki in the Oval Office. Glorious doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Mailvox: the New Puritans

BA muses on the observably religious character of the SJWs:

Is it atheism per se or is it a mindset that may or may not include atheism? Or perhaps the old time heretics didn’t quite have the nerve to go full bore atheist.  Specifically, I’m wondering if  the West’s, and in particular America’s, current political/cultural rift goes back to the Reformation and even earlier. Runciman discusses some on his Medieval Manichee.

 Adherents to the older Christian faiths accept and embrace the obligation of doing the right thing in both private and public life.  Live, stumble, sin, repent, pray, try through good works to be a better person because the final judgement is rendered at the end of life, so one had best be on the qui vive at all times.  One must also constantly examine  if what one is doing is right, and accept that all too often it will not be.

By contrast, for a certain kind of 16th and 17th century Protestant, grace, like perfect pitch, is a lucky attribute. One is born of the Elect or not, and nothing can change that.  For those with a guaranteed first class reservation to Heaven so long as they profess the faith, there is a whole lot of leeway in day to day life.  Better yet, there is a whole lot of self examination that one can dispense with.That sword of uncertainty simply does not hang over head.

 Which gets us to the modern secular True Believer.  If all is fore ordained and one’s place is secure (or non-existent, in the case of atheists), criticism (or destruction), the easier path, rather than creation, the harder, becomes the standard. Marching and emoting and punching Nazis is more fun than, say working the soup kitchen or helping building habitats for the poor or teaching the illiterate to read.*  Making errors (much less making up for errors) scarcely enters into the equation.

How  wonderful a faith is that?  No real effort involved, and if there are inconsistencies or temptations to act like a jerk, well, not really a problem because, you see – One is one of the Elect.   Too bad about the rest of you sinners.  Perhaps you should move down south with the rest of your heathen kind. Or just die.  And by the way, where’s my check?

Not surprisingly, for those few Elect who do create, the results are, shall we say, not sublime. And their jokes are terrible.

The roots for this mindset go deep and, no surprise, go deepest in states like Massachusetts. That it screws up the individual in small and society at large in any number of ways is obvious, but if one is a true believer, inconvenient facts are there to be ignored. They have to be. If acknowledged, they are shattering. I’ve seen it happen, as no doubt you have as well. Not pretty.  So rather than face up to failure, one must blame failure onto others.

Case in point – an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago gave a whole litany of LBJ’s 1960’s Great Society acts and then observed that every single one of the problems they were meant to address had all gotten worse.  Mea Culpa?  Of course not.  The writer blamed Nixon’s 1970’s law and order policies. Can’t have been anything else.  It was a question of Elect and Non-Elect.  The writer’s solution was to get Republicans to join with Democrats and double down the policies of old.

There is only one answer to the ongoing question so often asked by the Right of the Left: are they evil or are they stupid?

The answer, of course, is “yes”. As I mentioned yesterday, all of the Left’s ideologies, from Marxism to Gramscian cultural marxism to feminism to atheism to multiculturalism to neo-liberal globalism are nothing more than the various skinsuits worn by the Neo-Babelists as suits them at the time. These diverse and incoherent ideologies are nothing more than rationalizations encouraging the adherent to condemn and attack Christendom on whatever grounds happens to appeal most to him.

And Neo-Babelism is more than a superset of useful ideologies, it is a religion, indeed, one could go so far as to say that it is the first religion.

No substitute for effort

Peter King relates an interesting story that explains Bruce Springsteen’s unusual work ethic:

“Have you read the Springsteen book?” Garrett said the other day in a lengthy conversation before practice. (“Born To Run,” an autobiography, 2016, Simon & Schuster.) “He’s 20 years old, everybody at the Jersey Shore loves him, but he’s unknown nationally, and a good friend and adviser tells him, ‘If you really want to be great, you’ve got to get off the Jersey Shore.’ And so they pile everything in a couple vehicles and head west to this sort of open mike night in San Francisco.

As Springsteen wrote, the band was part of a four-band showcase; one band would get the chance to move on and perhaps get a recording contract. The Jersey guys went third and thought they killed it. The fourth band, though not as energetic, was very good. Via “Born To Run:”

“They got the gig. We lost out. After the word came down, all the other guys were complaining we’d gotten ripped off. The guy running the joint didn’t know what he was doing, blah, blah, blah.”


That night, Springsteen reflected, sleeping on a couch in his transplanted parents’ home in the Bay Area. “My confidence was mildly shaken, and I had to make room for a rather unpleasant thought. We were not going to be the big dogs we were back in our little hometown. We were going to be one of the many very competent, very creative musical groups fighting over a very small bone. Reality check. I was good, very good, but maybe not quite as good or exceptional as I’d gotten used to people telling me, or as I thought … I was fast, but like the old gunslingers knew, there’s always somebody faster, and if you can do it better than me, you earn my respect and admiration, and you inspire me to work harder. I was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me—my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness—night after night, to push myself harder, to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive untended in the world I lived in.”

That’s how we approach publishing at Castalia. Yes, we may be smart. Yes, we’ve got some advantages, and, of course, some disadvantages as well. But the one thing we absolutely know is that no one in the publishing industry is going to outwork us.

I was particularly satisfied this weekend, although I was turning in even later than I normally do – I’m usually irritated with myself when that first glow of sunrise is beginning to appear and I realize that I’ve stayed up too late again – because I managed to complete the edits on two books that night, both of which will be published this month.

I very much appreciate the near-fanatic levels of support we receive from you guys. It is an integral part of Castalia’s success. And you can rest assured that we will never take it for granted or coast on our past accomplishments.