Category: Uncategorized

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.

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You Never Stand Alone

When you stand with God.

And the picture of the only juror willing to call evil what it is and hold the evildoer responsible looks pretty much like what you’d expect a man described as “arrogant” and “unwilling to listen” by a group of wicked women is going to look like. As a general rule, if all the women are for it, it’s a terrible idea and you shouldn’t listen to one single word they say, because all of them are nonsensical rhetoric intended to put emotional pressure on you.

The mob is famously stupid. And female-led mobs are downright retarded, with zero sense of self- or societal preservation. Anyhow, it’s good to see social media is taking a strong position contra the mainstream media’s push.

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Politicians are Useless

The most that even the best politicians can do is nothing.

🚨 BOOM! All the hospices are gone. Not a single hospice remains. No more luxury vehicles and no more of your dollars funding their fraudulent scheme. They were all frauds. In this one location alone we saved America $30 million+.

Cerno asks a perfectly reasonable question:

Why didn’t Rand Paul or Thomas Massie ever think to do this, in their many decades of combined time in office?

Indeed. The observable truth is that the level of fraud in a society is directly related to the level of immigration; paying even a modicum of attention to the activities of immigrants and how they’re sustaining themselves economically is reliably going to reveal absolute mountains of fraud, most of which is not only government-funded, but government employee-abetted.

We now have decades of data demonstrating that politicians are at best useless. Most of them are considerably worse than that. So why would you ever put your trust in politicians, politics, or democracy?

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A Book a Day

Keeps the freaks, creeps, and Zero Historians at bay. Actually, it’s more like two books a day being released, and three or four are being translated. Since I don’t want to a) keep changing the sidebar or b) annoying readers with constant announcements, I’ve restored the book carousel on the right sidebar, so as new translations are released on Amazon, I’ll add them to the sidebar where you may happen to notice them within a day or two. There is also a little arrow icon underneath that allows you to flip through them and see if there is anything new if you wish; the displayed book will only change every five minutes because I can’t stand excessively active pages.

Now, here’s the question. Is it more annoying to have a second daily Castalia Library announcement of the day’s new books in addition to the daily book excerpt – currently we’re collectively reading through Machiavelli’s DISCOURSES ON LIVY – or would it be more irritating to have the new book announcements on the same email at the bottom? I’m just curious to see what people’s general preferences are.

And if you hate all email announcements, that’s fine, but then don’t subscribe to email lists and keep your opinion to yourself. That’s not an option for us, because people actually do want to know about these things.

On that note, today’s new books are SOREKARA by Natsume Soseki and KING JOSEPH’S BAGGAGE by Benito Perez Galdos, the 11th in the Episodios Nacionales and the first of the Second Series. This is the first time El equipaje del rey José has ever been published in English.

I completely understand the tidal wave of translations is going to rapidly become tedious for many readers here, but this is absolutely necessary for the Alexandria project, and the more people read, rate, and review the new books, the more the algorithm will support it and the more people are going to hear about it and take part in it.

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The Campbell Letters

Fandom Pulse presents a fascinating look into the history of science fiction with an intriguing article on The John W. Campbell Letters:

Campbell is generally credited with building the Golden Age of Science Fiction almost single-handedly. Isaac Asimov, in his autobiography, credited Campbell as the dominant force in the field for the first decade of his editorship. Before he became an editor, Campbell wrote his own fiction, first under his own name and later under the pen name Don A. Stuart, including “Who Goes There?”, the 1938 novella that became the basis for John Carpenter’s The Thing. Once he took over Astounding, he largely stopped writing and turned his attention to the writers who would define the field for the next thirty years. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt, and Hal Clement all passed through his door, and in many cases through his editorial red pen, on their way to becoming the names science fiction still measures itself against.

One letter shows exactly what that editorial pressure looked like at full force. In March 1959, Campbell wrote to Robert Heinlein’s agent, Lurton Blassingame, rejecting an early draft called “Starship Soldier,” the manuscript that would later become Starship Troopers. Campbell’s objection was not political squeamishness about the book’s militarism. It was a craft argument, rooted in a rule he considered a founding principle of the kind of science fiction he had spent two decades building: “Don’t tell the reader about the background; let him gather it from what happens.” Heinlein’s draft violated that rule directly, laying out its politics in what Campbell called direct, multi-page “preachments” rather than letting the reader arrive at the ideas through the story itself. Campbell went further, arguing that fiction persuades precisely because it never announces its conclusions, comparing the technique to parables, and noting that a skilled author could make a reader feel genuine sympathy for a committed Nazi if the story stayed inside that character’s head without editorializing. He then spent several more paragraphs disputing Heinlein’s actual thesis, that any two living organisms sharing a universe are doomed to physical combat, arguing instead that higher forms of competition had already replaced war as the most efficient way species out-compete one another. It is a strange letter to read today, an editor best remembered by his critics for a right-leaning editorial stance arguing at length that humanity was outgrowing warfare, on craft grounds, while rejecting the novel that became one of science fiction’s most famous defenses of the military.

Campbell, of course, has been posthumously cancelled by the deranged freaks of post-science fiction, as what was once the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer in science fiction was renamed because a foreign woman who doesn’t even write anything that can reasonably be recognized as science fiction objected to his politics of 60 years prior.

In 2019, the Campbell Award was renamed the Astounding Award after Jeannette Ng, that year’s winner, called Campbell a “fascist” during the Hugo Awards ceremony; soon afterward, Analog Editor Trevor Quachri announced that award sponsor Dell Magazines would change the prize’s name. Ng’s condemnatory acceptance speech went on to win the 2020 Best Related Work Hugo.

This is why you always sink the damn ships, both metaphorically and literally. And it’s why you always keep the creeps, freaks, and women out, because they don’t join organizations in order to participate in them or because they share the organizational vision, they join organizations in order to fundamentally change them according to their preferences. It’s not as if they hide it either; the imperative need for change is literally the first thing they say every single time they’re allowed in the door, and they repeat it mindlessly like a mantra regardless of how much change has already taken place.

Romantasy, diversity, and social justice didn’t kill science fiction. The Boomer generation of science fiction writers did by refusing to maintain the professional standards established by Campbell’s generation. Remember that when the freaks, creeps, and women come at your organization and demand that you relax your standards in the name of fairness, or kindness, or equality, or equity, or whatever other absurdity they think might serve as leverage.

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It’s Just Different

You can see why the SEC really didn’t want that 9th intra-conference game.

Other than LSU clubbing the hollowed-out husk of a Clemson powerhouse and Auburn stumbling past a mediocre Baylor team, this is who the SEC beat in Week 1: Arkansas-Pine Bluff, UTEP, Tennessee State, Texas State, Missouri State, East Carolina, Furman, Kent State, Youngstown State, North Alabama, Austin Peay, Louisiana-Monroe and Florida Atlantic. Average margin of victory against those 13 opponents: 46.7 points.

East Carolina. I remember East Carolina. I ran track against them once. I always enjoyed their name. Anyhow, it’s been fascinating to see how the other conferences can suddenly keep pace with the SEC now that everyone is openly paying their players.

Big Ten looks less dominant than SEC out of the gate

I wonder why…

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The Textual Wave Begins

Today, Castalia House is extremely pleased to announce the publication of two new books, both original translations. EAGLE AND DOVE is an amazing novel by Zénaïde Fleuriot, about a provincial brother and sister who move to Paris just in time to experience the upheaval of the Franco-Prussian War. This translation from the original French, by Summer Charrette, marks the first time the book has ever been available in English. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.

THE GATE is Natsume Soseki’s personal favorite of his sixteen novels. It is a quintessentially Japanese story about a married couple possessed of a dark secret that imperils not only their relationship, but the husband’s ability to even function in the world. Translated by Kenji Weaver, it is only the third-ever English translation, and the Red Team reviewers rated it more highly than its predecessors on both literal accuracy and readability. It, too, is available on Amazon.

Starting today, Castalia House plans to publish at least one new book on Amazon every day. We already have 27 books translated that are being prepared for release, with at least two more being translated from French, German, Italian, and Japanese every day. All of these books will be available for subscribers on Castalia Unlimited when the Alexandria project is ready for release later this year, and one will be sent out to the subscribers every week, as EAGLE AND DOVE was last night. However, the translations will not be available on Kindle Unlimited anymore, as this would preclude us from making them available on our own system. And, yes, over time these books will gradually be available in hardcover editions, and some of them will be available in leatherbound editions.

I trust you will understand that I was not exaggerating when I said that Alexandria is a major project of historical significance. And I am optimistic that what we are doing in developing Byron AI will prove to be of similar significance.

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There is No Free Press

We always knew the media was fake, gay, and retarded. But we didn’t know that it was 100-percent government-funded.

USAID financed some SIX-THOUSAND, TWO-HUNDRED (6,200) “Journalists” Acros 707 different “media” outlets, and 279 Media Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s).

Stop and think about that for just a moment. How many “Journalists” are there at ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC-MS NOW, CNBC, FOX NEWS CHANNEL, and all the local affiliates of those networks? Certainly nowhere near 6200.

Here in the NYC Metro Area, which is the media capital of the USA, and likely the world, there are maybe a dozen on-air Journalists per network. With the named networks above, a dozen journalists per network makes a total of eighty-four (84).

How about the print media? How many “Reporters” does the New York Times have? What about the Wall Street Journal? The New York Daily News? The New York Post? What about the largest newspapers in America’s 25 largest cities? Maybe 100 reporters each? If every newspaper above in the 25 largest US cities each has 100 reporters, that’s only about 2900 reporters.

USAID is now exposed as having funded 6,200.

What does that tell you about the “news” you’ve been getting from ALL of them? What does that tell you about the “narratives” they’ve been “reporting?”

So much for the First Amendment and the so-called free press. The media as we know it is nothing more than government propaganda. Which, of course, we knew, but we didn’t know they were quite literally contract employees working on the government dime.

No journalist, reporter, or media figure should get a free pass on this one. They must all be assumed to be corrupt until proven innocent.

UPDATE: The average payout was $43,286.45 per journalist.

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Why Russia Can’t Stop

The special military operation in Ukraine is not about Ukraine. It was never about Ukraine. The Russians have been telling everyone this from the start, but the media refuses to report the truth about the nature and scale of the conflict.

The world has entered an era of major transformation. In that sense, the narrow focus is – will they reach an agreement on Ukraine? No. Every time you think about that, you have to recall how it all started, why it is like this, how wrongly the world is structured, how important it is for Russia to insist on its interests, why the European bureaucracy itself cannot accept that, because otherwise that would mean the end of both it and the political class of many countries. Why can’t this conflict stop? Because it can’t be settled. Someone has to win. Just as with the US and Iran (which, incidentally, is a much more local conflict) – it is impossible to agree, there can be no deal. There can only be some movement in which one of the sides explicitly or implicitly recognizes its defeat. It may not be total defeat, but at least at some stage one side wins and the other side does not recognize it. Such a process will last a long time, but in the end there will still be some de facto consolidation of the results of this conflict. Not a negotiated one, unfortunately, but a factual one. Diplomats may formalize such a conclusion, or they may not. Frankly, that is no longer important.

When we talk about Russia-US negotiations on Ukraine, there are two extremes, and both miss the essence. Yes, we are negotiating, and we constantly demonstrate that Russia and the US have nothing to fight over. We are ready to coexist with the US on the same globe. That is exactly why Putin says: “Of course, Kushner and Witkoff are welcome guests, come. What else should we show you from Moscow’s kitchen?” You see, the US cannot conduct negotiations on Ukraine because it cannot force either Kiev, London, or Brussels to accept Russia’s reasonable demands. And how are they going to pressure Russia? I think the Trump administration more or less understands that it is pointless. So what kind of negotiations on Ukraine can there be?

As I said back in 2022, we’re already in WWIII. It’s not as dramatic as WWII or as violent on the battlefield as WWI, because the grounds being contested are more abstract than material. Right now, the most significant front is the Strait of Hormuz, which has serious ramifications for Venezuela and Canada due to the global importance of oil. But there is no violence on the second front, which is China, Taiwan, and Japan, and the real question is the destiny of the latter.

Taiwan island is already lost to China. Its fate, already obvious, was absolutely sealed with the defeat of the US Navy by Yemen and Iran. A navy that cannot impose its will on third- and fifth-rate coastal powers cannot hope to contest the will of a primary regional power in its own sphere of influence. Everyone understands this, even though the Chinese are too polite and the Americans are too embarrassed to admit it in public.

The real question is when Japan will throw off its occupation by the USA, which will probably require some sort of mutual assistance arrangement with China. The US military does not give up its bases easily, as the Philippines, the Europeans, and the Iraqis have learned, but it will give them up under pressure. And only the Chinese can provide the Japanese with the amount of pressure they will require to free themselves from the financial servitude under which they have labored, at great and increasing cost to their nation, for the last 70 years.

So that’s the big event that I think will make this global transformation undeniable even to those who still think nothing has changed and we are still living in the post-WWII era. An agreement of some sort between China and Japan, followed by a US withdrawal from its bases in the Home Islands and Okinawa.

On a related note, my guess about the recent visits to Moscow by the CIA Director and the senior negotiators is that Russia and the USA are in the process of reaching an agreement concerning what Russia will be permitted to do to defend itself against the UK and German logistical support for Ukrainian attacks without the USA agreeing to accept those states’ subsequent attempts to invoke NATO Article 5. Note that the USA has absolutely no obligation to take part in any so-called “collective self-defense,” only “such action as it deems necessary.”

The Russian embassy in Berlin has stated “From this point forward, facilities in Germany that house long-range (weapons) systems (being used by Ukraine to attack Russia) will be considered legitimate targets. This comes as German Chancellor Merz this week showcased factories in Germany that hope to produce 5,000 attack drones per month for Ukraine, to make long-range-strikes into Russia. As most people would probably guess, the very first time Russia hits a factory inside Germany, the country of Germany will attempt to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, “Collective Self Defense.”

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