The Next Library Serial

Yesterday marked the end of the successful 116-part serialization of Sir Charles Oman’s STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, which ended with an intriguing take on the iconoclastic brilliance of the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley by Sir Oman.

He knew what was expected of him: “I am the Duke of Wellington, and must do as the Duke of Wellington doth”, was one of his touches of sardonic humour. But it was also one more indication of the fact that he regarded an inflexible adherence to his own peculiar code of duty as the highest obligation.

But above all, to thine own self be true,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

In the aftermath of the completion of the STUDIES, we want to know which Library or History book you would like to see serialized next on the Castalia Library substack. Please feel free to share your opinion on the matter by voting for one of the four selections in the next 24 hours. The serialization will be announced and begin tomorrow. And if you haven’t subscribed yet to the substack, you really should consider doing so, since it is free.

Library and History subscribers debate the next serialization.

DISCUSS ON SG

RIP Willie Mays

Willie Mays was a genus of one. He was a bolt of lightning, a game-changing force of athleticism and beauty on the diamond that snapped you to attention. There is no second strike of his kind of lightning. The likes of Willie Mays were seen never before and will never be seen again. Mays passed away at age 93 Tuesday, just two days before he and his fellow Negro Leaguers are to be honored at a game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field. Opened Aug. 18, 1910, Rickwood is the oldest ballpark in America. It is the Mother Church of baseball. It is the cradle of the career of the greatest all-around player who ever lived. And now it is where we say goodbye.

Willie Mays haunted my teen years. Not because I watched baseball, but because my younger brother loved a song called “Say Hey Willie” that was sung by some little kid. No sooner did we get into our Oldsmobile station wagon – the white one with the fake wood panels – than he would start calling “Willie, Willie!” And so we’d have to listen to it three or four times every time we got in the car to go anywhere.

Total nightmare. But I did read up on Willie Mays as a result of wondering why there was this song about a baseball player, so it wasn’t a total loss. Requiescat in pace Willie.

DISCUSS ON SG

Why Putin Waits

Simplicius explains why the Russians are in no hurry to finish off the Ukrainian resistance:

Everyone understands the dry points of Putin’s demands, which he has articulated over the course of months, about deNazification, keeping to current battlefield gains and ‘realities’, etc. But the single most important point which has flown completely under the radar, and which I believe is actually the very heart of Putin’s proposal, is hinted at in the earlier video where he says that mere ‘ceasefires’ are inadequate, and that he is seeking a permanent solution of some kind.

He didn’t specify there, but he has before—multiple times. What Putin alludes to is that in order to end the Ukrainian war for good, Russia will take no less than a re-working of the entire European security framework. This is why he harps on Zelensky’s illegitimacy, it’s because Putin wants to build up to the fact that there must be a far larger, overriding framework of guarantors which is immutable and inviolable, rather than flimsy and ephemeral like Zelensky.

What Putin is seeking is revolutionary: he wants to re-establish a whole new, modern Westphalian Peace. He wants the Ukrainian war to be the linchpin of a new global security system that plays into all the recent BRICS declarations of ‘reworking the UN’ and every other major global institution. Putin wants to reshape how the entire international system functions vis-a-vis their security relationships; in essence, it would be the first new concrete paradigm of the post-Cold War and ‘Iron Curtain’ era.

So for all those people who are asking: what is the ultimate price Putin is willing to pay to give up Russia’s maximalist aims in Ukraine—would he do it for the basic terms of demilitarization, no joining NATO, and all that? Not likely: because there is no way to guarantee Ukraine’s adherence to any such agreements. The only way to end the war would be a reworking of the entire system in such a way as to give Russia credible confidence in the new system holding indefinitely. It would take, as I said, a new Westphalian framework that institutionalizes new, much broader realities of what countries can and cannot do in overreaching via provocative actions against one another. If you really listen to Putin’s speeches and statements on this issue, this is the secret he’s intimating—though not very loudly or aggressively, for now. The reason for that is likely because he knows it’s too ambitious of an opening ‘ask’, and he would prefer to first lure the parties in via basic conditions before escalating it to the logical conclusion when it comes to the issue of: how do we realistically guarantee such conditions between parties?

This is why Putin is likely in no great rush to end the war: in order to effect such an ambitious world-reshaping plan, he knows the current political class has to first be waited out.

As I’ve been pointing out from the beginning, Putin knows he’s not at war with Ukraine. He’s not even at war with the USA or the West. He’s at war with Clown World, and there are safer, easier ways to defeat his enemies than to wade through literal continents of armies to do so. He understands, as does Xi, that time is on his side.

DISCUSS ON SG

Another Reason to Subscribe

Folio Society is celebrating… something.

We want to hear about your LGBTQ+ recommendations

One of the greatest comforts reading can offer is the feeling of being seen, whether in the form of fiction or true stories.

We’d like to do our part in amplifying voices and connecting more readers with stories that have moved them.

So in celebration of Pride month, we’re asking you which LGBTQ+ books and authors you’d like to see as Folio collectibles. Editor’s Pick:

Conundrum

A memoir of identity and belonging, and the pain, joy and discovery that the journey from man to woman entailed.

From the team at Folio, Happy Pride!

I’d very much like to see Folio do an edition of Space Raptor Butt Invasion by award-winning author Chuck Tingle. If any work embodies the spirit of Pride, it’s that epic and inclusive tale of interspecies love in space. But failing that, Moira Greyland’s The Last Closet would be my recommendation.

It’s not going to get any better going forward, because the lunatics aren’t just running the asylum, they literally own it now. If you want to help us defeat the complete convergence and eventual demolition of the deluxe book industry, there are three things you can do:

  1. Subscribe to a Library, History, or Libraria subscription.
  2. Buy a leather book from Arkhaven or NDM Express.
  3. Subscribe to Castalia Library or the forthcoming Signature Society.

Speaking of NDM Express, the first t-shirt of the month has been announced and it is the very handsome Castalia History LEGO ERGO SCIO shirt.

DISCUSS ON SG

Green Flag Confirmed

Netanyahu and the Israeli government knew all about the planned Hamas attacks, but permitted them to take place without warning the Israeli public or permitting the IDF to stop them:

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warned in mid-September that Hamas was planning to invade the country and capture more than 200 hostages, Israel’s Kan broadcaster reported on Monday.

Three weeks before Hamas fighters attacked Israel on October 7, the IDF’s intelligence directorate compiled a report stating that the Palestinian militants were training for a large-scale invasion of the Jewish state, Kan has claimed, citing anonymous security sources. The document allegedly warned that dozens of Hamas commandos would take part in the raid, which would be aimed at bringing between 200 and 250 hostages back to Gaza.

Several thousand Hamas fighters carried out the actual October 7 assault, killing around 1,200 people and taking roughly 250 hostages back to Gaza.

According to Kan’s sources, Hamas members had been spotted practicing attacks on mock IDF outposts, rehearsing how to capture military and civilian hostages, and training how to handle the captives once they were detained in Gaza. The document reportedly made its way to senior officials in the IDF’s Gaza Division, but was “completely ignored,” Kan stated.

Kan is not the first source to claim that Israel was forewarned about the October 7 attack. Within days of the assault, Egyptian intelligence officials said that they had repeatedly warned the Israeli government that Hamas was planning “something big” in the days leading up to October 7, but that these warnings were ignored in West Jerusalem.

As to why Netanyahu allowed the attacks to take place, we can only speculate. But Occam’s Razor strongly suggests that the Hamas attacks were permitted in order to give the Israeli government an excuse to whip up support for ethnically cleansing Gaza of the resident Palestinians.

Which raises some fascinating historical questions. After all, if the Israeli government was willing to sacrifice thousands of lives in exchange for Gaza, how many lives were the Zionists of the 1930s and 1940s willing to sacrifice in order to be granted a claim to Palestine?

DISCUSS ON SG

Believing Their Own Word-Magic

Morgoth observes that the insane retardery of Clown World has now gone from redefining invaders as refugees and Pakistani rapists as English grooming gangs to a very dangerous redefinition of war as not-war:

It is stated quite clearly by a left-leaning, neoliberal outlet that there should be no brakes whatsoever on action taken against Russia because they’re all talk and no punch. Yet, the entire reason we’re in this mess is precisely because Russia invaded Ukraine in the teeth of Western opposition and condemnation. The reality of what is being proposed here is bombing campaigns inside Russia, including Russian cities, using weapons and aircraft supplied directly by Western powers, including personnel.

However, if we just play fast and loose with the definitions and framing, it will lose its bite; we can spin it a bit so the Western public can consume it more handily. It is hardly novel to highlight the degree to which Western journalists and politicians exist within their own bubble; now, they’re convincing themselves, entombing themselves within a narrative, that they can treat Russia however they like.

Niland certainly isn’t a lone voice. Establishment figures such as Boris Johnson have angrily demanded the West give Ukraine everything it needs to stay in the fight; the block was always that Russia is a nuclear power and allied with China. The evolving narrative is that Putin just talks a lot, and he won’t retaliate whatever we do. It is the logic of the drunk driver convincing himself he’s good for another four pints because he had a hearty dinner — it’s convenient bullshit rather than a reflection of reality.

I’m by no means a Putin fanboy; the camp I’m sitting in is the “anti-dying slowly in a cloud of nuclear fallout camp”. Putin is no stranger to weaving bullshit narratives himself. After all, he never even “invaded” Ukraine; he conducted a “special military operation”. The more we in the West convince ourselves, or are told by our betters, that Russia can be attacked with impunity, the more it will be. The more Russia is attacked, the greater the chance of retaliation because the Russian people will demand it.

Yet, astonishingly, Western establishment politicians and journalists are unable to see and understand basic logic in the same way they managed to convince themselves or compartmentalise foreign rape gangs or that a piece of paper doesn’t make a Somalian Irish.

Once you start believing lies in the face of the observable truth, you have no control over when to stop because you no longer have the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, or reality from your own wishful thinking.

DISCUSS ON SG

Gearing Up for War

China is rapidly producing and deploying nuclear weapons:

According to the SIPRI report published on Sunday, the US and Russia are by far the largest nuclear powers, possessing nearly 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons. However, China is “expanding its nuclear arsenal faster than any other country,” according to Hans M. Kristensen, associate senior fellow with SIPRI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program. SIPRI’s findings indicate that Beijing’s nuclear arsenal grew from 410 to 500 warheads between January 2023 and January 2024.

The report concludes that “China could potentially have at least as many intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as either Russia or the USA by the turn of the decade, although its stockpile of nuclear warheads is still expected to remain much smaller than the stockpiles of either of those two countries.”

China has much greater industrial capacity than either the US or Russia, so its stockpile of ICBMs and nuclear warheads will eventually surpass both. Also, the state of the US military’s nuclear weapons is unknown, but it is unlikely to be any better than the state of its conventional weapons.

This doesn’t mean China is intending to nuke anyone, but it’s clear that they have no intention of again being subject to the sort of treatment they received from Britain, France, the USA, and Japan during their “Century of Humiliation”. Especially since they know perfectly well that the West’s foreign rulers possess absolutely no sense of justice or fair play.

I hear a lot of people say, “Americans have eavesdropped on the German Chancellor Merkel. They have stolen data from around the world, as we learnt from Edward Snowden. Why worry about Huawei when the Americans do exactly the same?” What do you say to this?

Well, [chuckles]. A former head of the Central Intelligence Agency told me it’s a matter of whether we steal everybody’s data or the Chinese steal everybody’s data. And don’t you prefer having the Americans steal your data?

Actually, no. China doesn’t have hundreds of military bases all over the planet. China didn’t financially rape Russia in the 1990s. China isn’t driving the entire West into economic ruin or forcing its puppet regime in Kiev to keep sending Ukrainians into the abbatoir of the Donbass. Fucking Clown World… Every day is always Day Zero and they are always the purest of hearts with the best intentions who never did nothing bad to nobody.

DISCUSS ON SG

We Got the Look

This is why it’s pointless to “update” one’s look. I don’t know if it’s still true that significantly changing the appearance of one’s site costs a significant amount of the daily traffic, but I figure it’s best not to take any chances.

Frankly, I like our Arkhaven logo better than any of these, even though it was clearly inspired by the 1976-2005 version. Speaking of DC, rumors are buzzing again about it shutting down the editorial staff and being turned into a licensing house. From Fandom Pulse:

We’ve known DC Comics has been in trouble for some time. The company has failed to move the needle with any of its initiatives in recent years, with their “Rebirth” reboot of their lines collapsing faster than any in history, which led to a “Dawn of DC” secondary soft reboot that couldn’t even generate any top books for the Big two publisher. Now, retailers and insider sources are saying troubles are even worse for the company with a failed summer event in Mark Waid’s Absolute Power leading to talk of selling off the comic IPs entirely.

Of course Absolute Power failed. You can’t fix convergence with SJWs anymore than you can cure cancer with more cancer.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Anonymity of the Innovator

One of the early innovators in the knife-training world contemplates some of his business mistakes, and expresses his exasperation with the youngsters in the field who have no idea that they are standing on his shoulders.

My review/remark caused a lot of guffaws and a few smart ass remarks, among the 20 and 30 year old readers, most of whom were so submerged in modern “dynasty jargon,” up to their fad-beards in mystique, and lost in the web world. They’d never even heard of us older guys from the 1990s and 2000s. I mean, who am I to comment like this on their latest fad-boy genius?

I can identify. While I don’t fault my fellow GamerGaters who still don’t know, and have no reason to know, about my connection to the initial launch of GamerGate, it was a little astonishing to hear die-hard gamers claiming, with a straight face, that I had no connection to gaming or game development at all. But that doesn’t bother me, just as the litany of my various failures by the usual anklebiters doesn’t

That’s not to say that none of my failures bother me. The failure in particular that haunts me the most wasn’t even my fault, perhaps in part because I keep being reminded of it on a regular basis. And virtually no one who wasn’t in a very small and elite circle even remembers anything about it. As a result, no one wants to believe it, or would believe it if it weren’t a matter of historical and public record.

The Latest News From The Gaming World: Sim Fans—Welcome To The Next Level
ARTIST Graphics’ 3GA Chip Feeds The Need For 3D Speed

ARTIST Graphics, a Minneapolis-based hardware manufacturer, has announced a new graphics chip that may transform your work-a-day PC into a high-performance graphics workstation.

Consider the current state of the art: IndyCar Racing. Papyrus’s hot new game creates a very intense environment for simulated racing action. To do so, it pushes current technology to produce 12,000 flat shaded or 2,000 texture-mapped polygons per second. Bur imagine how much richer, how much more intense, a simulation could be if it could process 12 million flat-shaded, or 30,000 texture-mapped polygons per second at a higher screen resolution than standard VGA. While this might sound as far off as Gibsonian cyberspace, ARTIST Graphics and their 36/1 video processing chips may well make such simulations a very real possibility in ‘94.

ARTIST Graphics has been a manufacturer of graphics hardware used primarily for Computer Aided Design since 1982. Their chips and video boards are used widely by CAD professionals for applications that need heavy graphics horsepower. Adapting ARTIST Graphics’ latest high-end graphics technology to the PC games market is largely the result of a conversation that took place in 1992 between Chris Taylor, senior software engineer at Electronic Arts, and Theodore Beale, “trans-dimensional evangelist” at ARTIST Graphics.

“Chris had called to find out about VESA support on some of our cards,” said Beale. “We got to talking games, and I swapped him a graphics board in return for a couple of EA games. After playing with it for a few weeks, he suggested that we add a few features to our next-generation chip that would make it a really killer device for 3D simulators and action games. I went back to our engineers and asked them about adding the features, and Io and behold, the 3GA.”

According to ARTIST, the chip is capable of displaying up to 12 million flat-shadowed, two hundred thousand Gouraud-shaded, or thirty-thousand texture-mapped polygons per second in a game. These numbers approach RISC-based graphic workstation performance. Simulated benchmark tests have yielded 90 million WinMarks on the WinBench 3.11 test at 1280 x 1024 x 8 resolution on a 486/66 PCI bus machine (an average local-bus VGA video card at 640×480 yields 6 million WinMarks). Games could be written to run with the 3GA from within Windows, with the game’s code written to effectively bypass the Windows’ graphics routines. This would allow 3D intensive games to run under Windows without degradation of performance.

The 3GA chip’s 64-bit wide local memory bus supports up to 4 megabytes of VRAM and up to 8 megabytes of DRAM. The memory allows a game to load a huge portion of a game’s graphic data directly onto the card, thereby relieving the computer of a huge burden. Additionally, the 3GA chip has an on-chip VGA architecture which supports standard VGA text and graphics modes, and VESA SVGA modes up to 1024 x 768 resolution at 8 bits per pixel.

“With this kind of technology,” says Fred Savage, director at Origin Systems, “the limitations of the VGA architecture are removed. Anything that allows us to reduce the load on the CPU is going to let us have a much larger scope for our PC-based games.”

ARTIST’ Graphics is currently working on an OEM deal with a major video card manufacturer. For more information, contact ARTIST’ Graphics at (612) 631-7800.

Computer Gaming World, February 2024

One of these days I’ll go into more detail on the panoply of mistakes that were made, by me and others, that opened the door for Nvidea, and also answer some intriguing anomalies, such as why Artist Graphics held the original trademark for the 3D Blaster and how my biggest, most massive mistake until 30 years after the fact.

DISCUSS ON SG