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Slow Your Roll

So, this morning I discovered that Amazon actually has a limit on how many ebooks you can publish in a week. I learned that this morning when my attempt to publish a frankly astonishing science fiction novel for young men entitled The Phantom of the Underground Tank by Juza Unno ran into the ten book per week barrier. So there won’t be any new ebooks published on Amazon until Monday, when we will launch something big, in both textual and historical terms.

The subject of the yet-to-be-published Unno book will be fascinating to conspiracy theorists, for reasons that the book description should make clear. Note that this book was published in Japan 86 years ago and has never before been translated into English.

In 1940, a Japanese electrical engineer who wrote science fiction imagined the year 1950: an American cargo ship fighting through an Antarctic blizzard, a secret military installation buried beneath the ice, and a fleet of underground tanks that could bore through solid rock. He called it The Phantom of the Underground Tank. When the cargo ship Ark runs aground on an uncharted Antarctic shore, young Okishima and his American friend Pete discover something impossible beneath the ice: a vast subterranean fortress stocked with machines unlike anything in any nation’s arsenal. Captured by a rogue commander with plans that could reshape the balance of power across the Pacific, the two boys must escape a prison buried a thousand meters underground, survive the frozen wasteland above, and find a way to warn the outside world before the phantom fleet launches.

A secret military installation buried beneath the ice of Antarctica… now, where have I heard that before?

I would also highly recommend Unno’s The Midnight Mayor, which I’ve been reading and very much reminds me of two of China Mieville’s better works, Un Lun Dun and The City and the City. I’m also intent on tracking down a copy of Mushitaro Oguri’s Perfect Crime 完全犯罪, as it’s not in the main public domain archive, and I’d like to translate his entire ouvre as he may actually one day rival Haruki Murakami for my favorite Japanese author. So, if you’re in Japan and find yourself in Jimbocho, please see if you can find anything by him; I’d very much like to get my hands on a first edition Kokushikan Satsujinjiken 黒死館殺人事件 and have it bound in leather.

Anyhow, here is the weekly summary of translations Castalia House published last week. If you want a daily notification, subscribe to the Castalia Library substack.

That may well be the highest-quality, most diverse list of books ever published in English in less than one week. Next week will introduce our first German release as well as major works by Eiji Yoshikawa. While I have requested an increase to the weekly limit, until Amazon approves one, we’ll stick to a Monday through Friday release schedule.

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The Uncomfortable Conclusion

Genuinely curious: does vox day suggest any alternative explanation for the phenomena that Darwin’s theory explains ?

Intelligent Genetic Manipulation. We have no idea by whom. But I suspect all the recent alien disclosure stuff is because it is fairly obvious that the genetic record is going to prove that the human species, at the very least, was constructed. With a few more advancements in genetic science, we may even be able to figure out more or less when it happened.

The uncomfortable thing for everyone, creationist and evolutionist alike, is that the range of genetic variance is also likely to show that humanity is more than one species, constructed at different times. Because neither natural selection nor genetic drift can be responsible for it.

That sounds absolutely crazy, I know. But that’s what the evidence is currently suggesting. And the bigger problem is that natural selection hasn’t been performing its real function, keeping the genome from degrading, since around 1800. This is probably the real reason for the observed decline in human fertility, not microplastics or climate change.

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Do Try to Keep Up, Dennis

Dennis McCarthy has absolutely no idea how absolutely hopeless the case has gotten for evolution by natural selection. Believing in evolution is now much more far-fetched and implausible than believing the Earth is flat or that it is held up by a turtle supporting four elephants.

[This was one of my more popular efforts, and I think it provides a nice intro to the evidence supporting evolution:]

I believe this is one of my more important posts—not only because it explains evolution in simple, intuitive terms, making clear why it must be true, but because it directly refutes the core claims of Vox Day’s best-selling book Probability Zero: The Mathematical Possibility of Evolution by Natural Selection. Day’s adherents are now aggressively pushing its claims across the internet, declaring evolution falsified. As far as I am aware, this post is the only thorough and effective rebuttal to its mathematical analyses currently available….

Here is the problem: What Vox Day calculated—(1/20,000)20,000,000 —are the odds that a particular group or a pre-specified list of 20 million mutations (or 20 million mutations in a row) would all become fixed. In other words, his calculation would only be accurate if the human race experienced only 20 million mutations in total over the last 9 million years—and every one of them then became fixed. And, yes, hitting a lottery (with odds 1/20,000) 20 million times in a row would indeed essentially be probability zero.

But our evolutionary history does not require that an exact group of 20 million mutations become fixed—only that some 20 million out of an enormous pool of candidate mutations become fixed.

Here’s the correct analysis. Using Vox Day’s numbers, in a population of 10,000 humans, we would expect, on average, 50,000 new mutations per year. And over the course of 9 million years, this means we would expect:

50,000 x 9 million = 450 billion new mutations altogether.

So out of 450 billion mutations, how many mutations may we expect to achieve fixation? Well, as Vox Day noted, each mutation has a probability of 1/20,000 in becoming fixed.
450 billion x 1/20,000 = 22.5 million fixed mutations.

And that is a pretty close approximation to the 20 million fixed mutations that have been observed. Change the assumptions¹ and the estimate moves. But under Vox’s own assumptions, the result is the opposite of “probability zero”: it’s basically what you’d predict.

First, Dennis was completely, absolutely, and hopelessly wrong about literally everything he said in that original post, because he doesn’t understand big numbers, genetic drift, or how probability works. That’s not his fault, not very many people do. Including, as it turns out, the population geneticists.

But what is his fault is that he didn’t even notice that I had to release a new edition of Probability Zero because it turned out that the “complete mapping of the human and chimpanzee genomes” completed in 2005, and upon which all of the numbers in the book were based, was not, in fact, the complete mapping of the human genome or the chimpanzee genome, neither of which were published until 2025.

And when Yoo et al published the genuinely complete mappings of all the great apes, that 35 million difference between the two species was considerably expanded. This is from the Introduction to the Second Edition.

In fact, the genetic difference between chimps and humans turned out to be 13.8 percent, with 410 million base pairs separating the two lineages since the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor. This 10x increase in the number of observed differences between the two genomes has had, as you might expect, a tremendous impact on the arguments I presented in the first edition of this book. In fact, it made them approximately ten times more conclusive.

Not only that, but subsequent work on Kimura’s substitution equation rendered McCarthy’s attempt to escape to Neutral Theory and genetic drift not only highly improbable to the point of effective impossibility, but flatly impossible. I was wrong. Genetic drift in humanity didn’t stop relatively recently, as I calculated in The Frozen Gene. In fact, it hasn’t occurred in humans for millions of years, because no genetic drift can take place in any population that has exceeded 10,000 individuals at any point in its existence.

You can read more about that in my paper The Hard Limits of Fixation Through Genetic Drift, which was written a few months ago after discovering a Portuguese mathematician’s analysis of Kimura’s equation and his identification of the way in which that equation has been systematically misunderstood and misapplied by Kimura and others for the last sixty years.

Kimura’s neutral substitution rate, k = μ, is a steady-state identity: it holds only after a population has held one size for the roughly 4Nₑ generations a neutral allele needs to drift from a single copy to fixation. That transit has never been checked against the number of generations that species lineages have actually had. Checking them yields a hard ceiling on population size, X = (Vₖ + 2)·G/16 — reproductive variance and lineage generations alone, with no mutation rate, no coalescent quantity, and no fitted constant. For a large, long-lived vertebrate the effective ceiling falls to about ten thousand individuals. Above it, a neutral allele’s chance of fixing within the generations its lineage will ever have is not merely small but exponentially small, of order exp(−π²Nₑ/G) — for humans at current size, about one in ten to the seventy-eight-millionth. Humans number more than eight billion, the better part of a million times over the line; the African elephant, endangered at four hundred thousand and falling, is still forty times too abundant for drift to complete to fixation. No vertebrate population is simultaneously large enough to persist as a species and small enough to fix a neutral allele by drift. What substitution these abundant populations show is not produced at their current size; it is residual drainage from the smaller populations they descend from. The domain of k = μ is confined to demographic conditions that no non-endangered species is capable of meeting.

Evolution isn’t just dead, it is absolutely, hopelessly, and completely mathematically impossible. It’s absolutely and observably retarded to continue to believe in evolution, as that is tantamount to admitting that you can’t comprehend basic multiplication or grasp the concept of a number larger than ten thousand. It is more reasonable by far to believe that a black pygmy woman wrote the entire Shakespeare canon in Africa than to believe that evolution by natural selection or genetic drift ever produced one single vertebrate species in the entire history of the planet Earth.

What part of “mathematically impossible” is so hard to understand?

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Why the Western Model Failed

It’s never going to work. It can’t work, anymore than communism or feminism could, because it is fundamentally at war with human nature. The idea that the English somehow discovered ideal universal rules of behavior that apply to every culture around the world was always absurd on its face.

Indeed, the idea was overtly satanic and rebellious, as it has proven to be little more than an attempt to return to Babel.

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The Usual End

Larry Johnson explains that Clown World has reached the exit stage with its failed 30-year Ukraine project.

The war in Ukraine was not a crisis that erupted in 2022. It was the payoff of a deliberate, decades-long Western project to turn Ukraine into an instrument for weakening Russia — carried out under the cover of “partnership” and “peacekeeping.” And having spent thirty years building that instrument, Washington and NATO will do with Ukraine exactly what they have done with every client before it: discard it the moment it stops paying…

Here is how it gets discarded. Any foreign government that trusts an American security promise should first study what happened to the South Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Libyans, the Cambodians. When a war stops serving Washington’s purposes, the U.S. says adios.

The recriminations over the failed counteroffensive are the opening of exactly that. The West is lining up to blame Kyiv while its pledges of weapons turn out to be lip service. The maritime-drone strikes on Russian ships are pinpricks — militarily trivial, and dangerous mainly because the Western surveillance that guides them invites Russian retaliation against NATO reconnaissance over the Black Sea and stiffens Moscow’s resolve to strangle Ukraine’s ports. If you want an honest barometer of where this war is heading, forget the briefings from British intelligence and the Institute for the Study of War. Watch for the day the London bookmakers start taking bets on when Zelensky falls.

It’s not the USA proper, of course. It’s the Clown World imperialists who have hijacked the US military for its globalist satanic purposes. Fortunately, the nations that remained sovereign and independent now have the upper hand, which is why the Ukraine project failed, why the Gulf project is failing, and why BRICS is supplanting the G7 as the most important economic organization in the world.

While Mr. Johnson is watching for Zelensky’s fall, I’m more interested in seeing a) when Taiwan officially reunifies with the mainland, b) when Japan frees itself from the US military occupation, and c) how the Korean reunification plays out. Unlike the German reunification, which played into Clown World’s hands, these three events likely demonstrate the opposite.

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Juries are Unjust in a Diverse Society

The most brilliant statesman of the 20th century, Lee Kwan Yew, opposed juries due to his own successful experience with them as a defense attorney:

“In his first case he was “was assigned to defend four murderers.”

Fleeing the Japanese, a Dutch woman had entrusted her daughter to a Malay muslim. She came back after the war, reclaimed the daughter. The Chief Justice, then an Englishman, pending hearing of the case, sent the girl who had been converted into Islam to a convent to be looked after, and hell broke loose. The police force mutinied. Malays and Muslims took out their knives and a lot of white men, who had nothing to do with the case, were killed just becaue they were white. These four men were accused of killing a Royal Air Force officer and his wife and child. They were travelling on a bus from RAF Changi down to town.

Lee Kuan Yew, who had been assigned the case, explains that he did what any advocate does: He “worked on the weaknesses of the jury — their biases, their prejudices, their reluctance really to find four Mussulmen guilty of killing in cold blood or in a heat of great passion, religious passion, an RAF officer, his wife and child.” And he employed “the simple tricks of advocacy — contradictions between one witness and another, contradiction between a witness and his previous statement to the police and the preliminary enquiry.”

When the jury acquitted the murderers, Lee Kuan Kew reports, “The judge was thoroughly disgusted. I went home feeling quite sick because I knew I’d discharged my duty as required of me, but I knew I had done wrong.”

He thereupon concluded that no government in which he had a say would employ this foreign, “foolish, completely incongruous system.” Pointing out that the French and other Latin nations do not use trial by jury, Lee Kuan Kew argues that it is too “alien” to the basic social attitudes of many other cultures, including those of Asia.

It’s not just alien to the basic social attitudes of many cultures, but to women as well. The ability to adjudicate dispassionately is rare enough among men from an Anglo culture, it is entirely absent from the solipsistic sex and the more tribal cultures. It simply cannot function as designed in situations profoundly different than those in which, and for which, it was originally developed.

After all, one can only be tried fairly by a jury of one’s peers. And if the jury is diverse, then it is not a jury at all.

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Remigration Jetzt

Non-German suspects account for nearly half of all violent crime in the German state of Bavaria, with the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party now calling for remigration for all criminal migrant suspects. The Interior Ministry data was released in response to a request from AfD state parliament member Martin Böhm. It revealed that police recorded 20,367 suspects in violent offenses in 2025 and about 47 percent did not have German citizenship. Remarkably, foreigners are responsible for this massive amount of serious crime despite making up only 15.5 percent of Bavaria’s population.

Imagine how much of that serious crime those foreigners account for if the German authorities correctly counted those foreigners who happen to possess paper citizenship as well. Civic nationalism has, somewhat surprisingly, turned out to be one of the more relentlessly evil memes that has ever existed. It not only sounds like a good thing, it sounds like a patriotic thing, when it is actually an insidious deception that acts as a cancer on the nation.

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Reconquesta II

There is always hope we will see proper history in the making. And no actual Spaniards are going to fight for the government of Pedro Sánchez, least of all the Catalans.

King Felipe VI has called a meeting at Zarzuela with the top Military leadership of Spain and Ceuta, in which he has expressly excluded the President of the Government Pedro Sánchez. The meeting was attended by the Chief of the Defense Staff, the Chief of the Operations Command, the Chief of the Joint Operations Command, and the General Commander of Ceuta, in addition to Defense Minister Margarita Robles.

The President of the Government Pedro Sánchez and several Ministers have made their great displeasure known, but let us not forget that article 6 of the Constitution gives the army the function of safeguarding the Territorial Integrity of the State, and the King is the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces according to article 62 of the Constitution, when Pedro Sánchez and Marlaska are the subject of a possible judicial investigation for crimes against the territorial integrity of Spain and treason.

Not only has the National Court ordered the Police not to inform Marlaska or Sánchez, but the King himself has left them out of a surprise meeting with the top Military leadership of Spain.

It would certainly be a major blow against Clown World if King Felipe VI was to follow in the footsteps of the Generalissimo and put the treasonous government to the sword, then follow the example of Ferdinand and Isabella and expel all of the foreigners working against the people of Spain.

Democracy is a political deceit and a false ideal. It is long past time for the end of this particular political cycle. And no doubt both China and Russia stand ready to provide assistance to the first European nation to break free of their satanic oppressors.

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Translating the Palacesprache

Lady C explains the real reason why Harold and Meghan Markle are so upset about the recent issuance from Buckingham Palace:

So, The King has spoken through the Lord Chamberlain. And what he has to say makes chilling hearing for Harry and Meghan. At least to those of us who understand palacespeak.

Not only does he affirm that Harry and Meghan no longer possess royal status, but he confirms that fact, for the first time, by pointing out that their HRH styles are in abeyance. Those last words ‘in abeyance’ are a legal term with legal significance – something which was fudged when the original Sandringham Agreement was announced. At that time, it was merely stated that they would not be using their Royal Highness styles; now, by stating that they are in abeyance, he is asserting that they no longer hâve the right to use them at ail.

Doubling down on their loss of royal status, the Lord Chamberlain emphasises this fact by stating, “(i)n short, their position is akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests.”

In other words, no one needs to bow or curtsy to Harry and Meghan. This is ratified with sutblety and elegance in the recommendation that those who hâve questions about the courtesies to which they think Harry and Meghan might be entitled, should refer to Buckingham Palace, whose guidance, off the record, will be as it was with regards to the Duchess of Windsor. No HRH, no bowing or curtsying. Make it plain that you know she’s (they’re) not royal by treating them the way you would any other non-royal – with good manners, respect, but none of the affirmations that are a part of royal conduct.

Interesting. One had always assumed that King Charles would be weaker than his mother, but at least in this one regard, he has proven to possess a firmer hand. Of course, it’s hardly uncommon for a grandmother to be excessively indulgent.

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THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH

I’m very, very pleased to be finally releasing this translation of an esoteric murder mystery by Oguri Mushitarō. I’ve been working on this one on and off for six months. Even figuring out a proper title for it was difficult. The print edition will be even harder to produce, due to the need to recreate all of the drawings that were not included in the ebook, as they are not necessary due to their detailed descriptions in the text. Of all the translations I’ve done to date, this is still the one that was of the most interest to me from the start.

THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH

Half a century before Umberto Eco sealed monks inside an abbey with a serial killer and a poisoned Aristotle, Oguri Mushitarō locked a detective inside a Gothic castle with a grimoire, a glowing corpse, and a prophecy of six murders written in the hand of a dead man. Serialized in 1934, The Book of the Black Death is the novel Eco might have written had he been born in Tokyo and raised on Charcot, Cagliostro, and the Kabbalistic Exegesis rather than Aquinas and Borges. Its detective, Norizumi Rintarō, is William of Baskerville’s mad Japanese twin, a polymath who deploys heraldry, toxicology, and medieval sorcery with equal fluency, and whose erudition is both the instrument of his investigation and the source of its deepest dangers. Recognized in Japan as one of the four greatest mystery novels ever written in the language, it has never before appeared in English.

In the Celtic Renaissance château known as the Hall of Black Death, a family descended from the Medici through the sorceress-consort Bianca Capello has kept four foreign musicians sealed within its walls for forty years. When the first violinist is found dead with her corpse glowing with an unearthly phosphorescence and the locked room undisturbed, a document surfaces in the hand of the mansion’s long-dead patriarch. It is a prophecy naming six members of the household and the method by which each will be slain.

As Norizumi races to prevent the next murder, he finds himself contending not only with a killer of extraordinary cunning but with the accumulated sorcery and science of four centuries, encrypted in a grimoire that was old when the Inquisition was young. The translation, by Vox Day, is the first-ever English translation of Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken. Now available on Amazon for Kindle and audiobook.

You can probably see why I was so interested in making it available to the English-reading world after reading this description from Athos, which it produced when I first started delving into Japan’s library of untranslated texts for books that would be particularly interesting for me to read. At that time, I had not really thought about Castalia putting out translations into English, I was just in search of something new and different to read.

In Japan, Kokushikan Satsujin Jiken occupies a position for which there is no precise Western equivalent. It is counted as one of the three great “strange books” — the sandai kisho — in the entire history of Japanese detective fiction. The designation is less an honorific than a warning: these are the novels said to “cause mental disturbance upon reading,” works so structurally peculiar and intellectually dense that they have generated their own mythology. The novel is often described as the only true Gothic romance ever written in Japan, and Edogawa Ranpo, the father of Japanese mystery fiction, publicly praised it — writing an introduction to the 1935 first edition that helped establish its reputation as a landmark.

The novel’s defining characteristic is its gengaku shumi — pedantry elevated to an architectural principle. The disciplines deployed across its pages include theology, demonology, pharmacology, astrology, botany, cosmology, religious studies, physics, medicine, heraldry, psychology, criminology, cryptography, and history. Japanese critics describe the effect not as decoration but as structural inversion: the vast pedantic apparatus overwhelms the mystery itself, producing what one reviewer called a “reversal of subject and object” — the erudition becomes the point, and the murders become its occasion. It has been called a “grand temple of detective fiction,” a novel that satisfies not only the mystery reader’s appetite but a voracious intellectual hunger across every field it touches.

That Shinchōsha, a publisher not especially known for detective fiction, issued the first edition in 1935 speaks to how much attention Oguri commanded at the time in the Japanese publishing world. The novel has been continuously republished since the end of the Pacific War, appearing from Kōdansha, Chikuma Shobō, Shakai Shisōsha, Tōkyō Sōgensha, Kawade Shobō, and Kadokawa in editions spanning seven decades, a publishing record that testifies to its enduring hold on Japanese literary culture. It remains famous as the novel most readers abandon after the first chapter, and the one that those who finish it never forget.

There is a very good chance that THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH will one day be a Library book. It certainly deserves a place next to THE NAME OF THE ROSE, FOUCAULT’S PENDULUM, and THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE. It’s the sort of book that you either never finish reading, or that you read repeatedly, again and again, and never entirely put down.

You can read an excerpt on the Library site, which won’t tell you anything that I haven’t told you already, but will let you see the cover as well as today’s other release, a very well-regarded Italian work of psychological fiction by Luigi Capuana.

A word of warning: there WILL be formatting issues, without any shadow of a doubt. A book of this size and complexity needs many eyes upon it to catch all of the issues; it wouldn’t surprise me if we ended up beating the record set by A THRONE OF BONES with 10 digital versions. So you know the drill, keep a list and send it to me if and when you finish the book.

UPDATE: THE BOOK OF THE BLACK DEATH is the #1 bestseller in Japanese language fiction.

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