#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
An announcement from the UATV devs:
Superchat tokens can now be purchased again on UATV.
We’re still working on the chat part right now, to be completed in time for Owen’s stream tonight, but anyone who is registered with the new payment system and wishes to load up can already do so.
Note that tonight’s stream will be earlier than usual; I’ll be on with Big Bear around 5 PM EST.
Larry Johnson cites an estimate that three percent of Russia’s strategic air fleet was either damaged or destroyed in the recent drone attack on five of its airfields and concludes that NATO intelligence officers were involved in the attack:
In my opinion, none of these attacks could have been planned and executed without assistance, if not the direct involvement, of Western intelligence and NATO officers. The drones likely were activated by a remote signal made possible by Western satellites and/or systems like Starlink. Those systems also played a critical role in enabling the drones to navigate to the targeted airfields.
While this is clearly a PR victory for Ukraine, it is a classic example of a Pyrrhic victory–i.e., a tactical win, leading to a strategic defeat. The Trump administration is denying any knowledge of the attack. I take that disavowal with a big grain of salt. People within the CIA and USEUCOM offices, who are providing assistance to Ukraine, likely knew about the plan, and may even have provided intelligence support to get the drones to their targets. Like any covert operation, they may have tried to give Trump plausible deniability, but the Russians know how this game is played.
I expect Russia will launch a massive retaliatory strike after the talks in Istanbul on Monday conclude. The Ukrainian attacks on the bridges, the train and the airfields have done nothing to alter the situation all along the line of contact in Ukraine. News continues to pour in from the front, from both Ukrainian and Russian news outlets, painting a picture of growing desperation, even panic, among Ukrainian forces, as Russians capture more territory and kill more Ukrainian troops.
The thing that is so pointless about these sorts of clever little innovations is that they are the sort of things that tend to appear after the outcome of the war is already determined, but the losing side hasn’t accepted its defeat yet. The flashy nature of the drone attacks reminds me of the German ME 262 and ME 163 jets, which between them shot down 542 Allied aircraft, and the Japanese kamikazes that sunk or damaged 402 ships.
Both were innovations that captured the imagination and succeeded in producing material results, but at a scale that was totally irrelevant to the outcome of the war.
Upon further review, I don’t think it’s even necessary for Russia to respond to this latest provocation by Western forces, as its best revenge and most effective deterrence will be to simply refuse to call off its infantry and armor as they continue to advance rapidly across the future Russian lands.
Today marks the beginning of the serialization of Aristotle’s RHETORIC at the Castalia Library stack. Sign up for a free subscription there to read along and join in the discussion of it there for the next three months. And, better yet, sign up for a Library subscription to receive a copy of the current subscription book, also by Aristotle, namely, his METAPHYSICS.
Aristotle’s Rhetoric is one of the most useful and important analyses of human communication ever written. It is also one of the great philosopher’s least appreciated works, as it is easily mistaken for a mere technical breakdown of the various methods of persuasion, rather than what it truly is, a brilliant conceptual guide to understanding and anticipating human behavior. While a considerable portion of the text is devoted to the mechanics of the syllogism and the enthymeme, as well as the presentation of the inevitable lists which Aristotle characteristically constructs, by far the most important element of this little book is the philosopher’s division of humanity into two fundamental classes: those who are capable of learning through information, and those who are not.
This is such an important distinction that its complete absence from the schools and universities today is remarkable. It calls into question the basis of modern pedagogical systems and explains the mystery that has confounded every intelligent individual who has tried, and failed, to explain the obvious to another person. Indeed, it is comforting to have long-held suspicions about the intrinsic limitations of one’s fellow men confirmed so comprehensively.
The Western media is convinced that a few trucks full of drones have decimated Russia’s fleet of strategic bombers:
Ukraine has launched one of its most audacious attacks of the war using a ‘swarm’ of kamikaze drones unleashed from the backs of trucks to devastate two of Russia’s most major airfields.
Dubbed ‘Operation Spiderweb’, the co-ordinated strikes have left Vladimir Putin humiliated and his prized warplanes in smouldering ruins.
Two remote military airfields, Olenya in the Arctic Murmansk region and Belaya in eastern Siberia, were rocked by massive explosions overnight, with dramatic footage showing fires raging for hours.
The bases, located thousands of miles from Ukraine, are key to Russia’s nuclear strike capability and were considered untouchable.
Yet Ukraine appears to have struck them with deadly precision, using first-person-view (FPV) drones launched from unmarked vans parked near the airfields.
Both are thousands of miles from Ukraine but were ‘under drone attack’, with dozens of Moscow’s nuclear capable warplanes evidently destroyed.
The Ukrainian media claimed more than 40 Putin aircraft had been hit, including Tu-95, Tu-22M3, and A-50 strategic bombers. The damage to the enemy was alleged to exceed £1.5billion.
If Kiev, Berlin, and London aren’t hit with major missile strikes in the next 24 hours, I think it will be safe to conclude that the damage reports are significantly exaggerated. Which I assume to be the case, in light of the number of Russian planes shot down by “the Ghost of Kiev”, the number of times Russia has run out of ammunition, and the number of times Vladimir Putin has died of cancer.
But it is interesting to observe how Ukraine is now reduced to celebrating acts of subterfuge and terrorism that may or may not even be real as the Russian military continues to advance at an increasing pace.
I’m mostly posting this here for the purposes of future comparison when the numbers are inevitably revised downward. However, it does show that Russia’s attempt at strategic deterrence through doctrine is not working.
UPDATE: It appears eight planes were confirmed damaged or destroyed.
5 Tu-95MS bombers, 2 Tu-22M3 bombers, 1 An-12 military transport aircraft.
Which is two more than Russia has lost in all of 2025, bringing the total to 14. To put this into perspective, in 2022, Russia lost 104 planes.
The poll has closed. A respectable 190 Castalians had their say and the results were remarkably close.
Tomorrow, therefore, we shall begin with the serialization of RHETORIC by Aristotle, utilizing the Library edition which begins with an Introduction by none other than your favorite dark lord. If you want to take part in the group reading and the discussion in the comments, be sure to subscribe to the Castalia Library substack.
Russia makes it clear that it’s moving on to the third phase of territorial acquisition by taking 200 km2, including a lot on the new Sumy front, in the last week.
The Russian army took 18 settlements, almost 200 km², in 7 days. Russian troops are demonstrating the most active advancement in the DPR, Kharkov and Sumy regions. According to the publication’s experts, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are unable to stop the offensive due to an acute shortage of personnel, which cannot be eliminated in the near future. — Bild
As I and many others have predicted, the failure of the Kiev regime to surrender when it is observably defeated means that the Russians now intend to take on the battlefield what they obviously desired from the beginning.
State Duma Defense Committee Chairman Kartapolov issued an even more pronounced statement—that Ukraine would lose Sumy, Zaporozhye, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Nikolayev, and Odessa if it continues to resist.
There is absolutely nothing the USA, NATO, or anyone else can do to stop Russia from taking the entirety of those six additional provinces except try to negotiate a conditional surrender that confirms Russia’s control of all the territory up to the Dnieper and turns over Odessa to the Russians. I expect control of Odessa is a non-negotiable at this point and that we are likely less than one year from Russia being in a position to demand an unconditional surrender by Kiev. Russia now has the full and open support of China; the clumsy attempts of the USA to pivot from Ukraine to Taiwan, the trade war, and the US support for the Gazacaust have only increased China’s appreciation for the importance of its alliance with Russia.
Since 2022, the Chinese have resolutely refused to blame Russia for the war in Ukraine despite US demands to do so, and now, to the contrary, they have very publicly, and correctly, laid “a major responsibility” for the war on the USA.
The United States bears a major responsibility for the outbreak of the war and the continuation of the war. But, of course, the United States has a responsibility to work its efforts and play its part for an early ending of the conflict. We urge the United States to concentrate on the ongoing diplomatic effort and stop this rather boring blaming game. — Deputy UN Representative Geng Shuang
All of this highlights the intrinsic danger of allowing men and women who believe in subversion and word magic to hold power at the national level. They will cling to their belief in their fantasies even when objective reality conclusively disproves them.
Whatever could be causing the increase in Austrian illiteracy and innumeracy?
Almost a third of the population in Austria has poor reading skills, signaling an alarming trend, the EU country’s government statistics office has said. The decline is particularly noticeable among those with jobs that require medium or low qualifications, Statistics Austria said in a statement earlier this week.
In Austria, which has a population of nine million, a total of 29.0% or around 2.6 million people have a low level of literacy, according to data on the agency’s website. The number of those who have problems with reading increased by 11.9% between 2012 and 2023, the figures show.
According to Statistics Austria, the number of those with low day-to-day math skills also grew by 6.7% between 2012 and 2023, amounting to 22.6% of the population.
Well, that’s nothing that importing more low-IQ foreigners can’t fix, right? Just a little public education is all they need, and they’ll be just as product as any native Austrian, right?
Now that the Castalia Library substack subscribers have completed The Christian Empire in just under one year, it’s time to decide what the next serial will be. I’ve provided a list of five possibilities, and I’ll leave it to the Library community to decide which of the five will be serialized next.
Of course, if you want to be able to take advantage of it most easily, you should consider subscribing to the substack. It’s free, and you’ll be kept up to date on all Library-related matters as well as have the chance to read through the selected book with the rest of us.
The traditional publishers are actively manipulating the reviews of their books on Amazon and GoodReads alike:
Every “A-list” author from the major sci fi imprints seems to start out with 100+ “pre-release” reviews (almost all 4 or 5 stars) on Goodreads. Now, this could just be successful ARC promotion. That’s entirely possible.
Another explanation is that they have teams of people willing to pad reviews ahead of release. Idk, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Especially since most of these A-listers see their Goodreads averages plummet once actual readers get their hands on the books. I’m not talking about a gradual decline. I’m talking about books that have a 4.3+ rating pre-release ending up in the 3.5 – 3.6 range within a few months.
If you go back through the Goodreads Choice Awards nominees, the trend jumps out of the data. A huge percentage of these books are extremely poorly rated by readers. Not at the time of release, mind you, but within a few months.
All of which is to say, nobody pulls more shenanigans and manipulates the book-buying public more than trad pub.
No, it’s not possible. While there is an organic element of pre-release review-stoking, the repetitive and reliable nature of the pattern indicates that this is a level of manipulation by favored players that Amazon is willing to tolerate. Amazon is not only confirmed to play favorites, but it habitually indulges in a level of charades and shenanigans much more comprehensive than anyone suspects, and has done so from the very beginning.
Ever wonder why Hugh Howey was never able to follow up on his incredible “success”? Or why his “super-popular” books were so mediocre? He was just a variant on the traditional publisher’s manufactured bestseller.
If it gets big fast, it is fake. Every single fucking time.
If I had more bandwidth, one of the things I would do is design a truly impartial and objective review site that aggressively resisted review-fluffing and review-sinking alike.
Also, and more importantly, a foolish and futile one:
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a chilling warning on the China threat during a defense summit in Singapore. He said on Saturday that the threat from China was potentially imminent as he pushed allies in the Indo-Pacific to spend more on their own defense.
Hegseth, speaking for the first time at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Asia’s forum for defense leaders, militaries and diplomats, underlined that the Indo-Pacific region was a priority for the Trump administration.
‘There’s no reason to sugar coat it. The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent’ Hegseth said, in some of his strongest comments on the Communist nation since he took office in January. He added that any attempt by China to conquer Taiwan ‘would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world,’ and echoed Trump’s comment that China will not invade Taiwan on the president’s watch.
Hegseth is sufficiently educated in military affairs to know better than to spout nonsense like this. The US not only will not win a war with China in the Indo-Pacific, it cannot even put up a serious military challenge to China.
The entire world has been watching as Russia, with only limited assistance from Belarus, Iran, and North Korea, has almost singlehandedly defeated the entire might of the USA and its NATO allies. The result would not be any different even if the USA had attempted to utilize its own forces directly; the Kiev regime has already lost twice as many men as exist in the US armed forces without ever even forcing the Russians to utilize most of its frontline troops, its best hardware, or the greater part of its missile stocks.
The Russians, knowing the possibility of direct NATO intervention, have been keeping very powerful reserves in order to utilize them if necessary. This is why most of the Russian casualties have been from the provincial militaries and the mercenary companies. The Russian air force has lost all of 6 aircraft in 2025; the US Navy lost half that many from a single carrier in a single deployment in the Red Sea.
So I very much doubt that the Chinese are very impressed by the performance of the US military or are afraid to risk a confrontation with it over Taiwan. I also doubt there will be an actual invasion as such; it is far more likely that reunification will be quietly negotiated behind the scenes, then announced one day along with a series of arrests of pro-independence advocates.
It’s a shame that the foreign rulers of the USA have inverted the historical American philosophy coined by Teddy Roosevelt, and instead elect for speaking loudly while carrying a small and fragile stick.