Attention Castalia Subscribers

A message from our sponsor:

During our long months of social distancing we started to realize the value of other humans. After weeks of eating expired dippin’ dots and watching 90’s romcoms alone while talking to a gecko on the wall, being around other humans started to seem like a good idea. Especially once we realized that the gecko had been dead for at least a month, presumably from a bad batch of bat soup.

His name was Bobby. We buried him in a tiny mask.

This was the turning of the tide. It is time to reach out again, as we now realize in our heart that all humans are special, even those that support us at the lowest tier possible. And so, we embrace every patron because we know your real value, and not because we may feel vaguely guilty over completely blowing off last month for perfectly valid medical reasons concerning social and temporal distancing.

So, to all of our patrons, this month we will give you more than you ever asked for. With the gracious permission of the author, for July and August we are giving every patron the download codes for both the ebook and audiobook productions of both The Lawdog Files and The Lawdog Files: African Adventures.

The coupon will expire September 15, 2020, so you still have several weeks left to become a Castalia patron and avail yourself of what Squeaks the pygmy mongoose himself would swear was the most excellent opportunity since that magic day that Ali Cheap-Cheap dropped a burlap bag of “beef” on his personal residence.

Machiavelli and the Holocaust laws

From The History of Florence by Niccolo Machiavelli:

Nor is it possible for a public to enact a law more pernicious than one relating to matters which have long transpired.

Machiavelli was discussing here the fate of the ammoniti, or the descendants of the Ghibellines who were banned by law from holding any office of government in Florence after the victory of the Guelphic party in 1356. He states that this law “laid the foundation of many evils” and noted “none felt so particularly injured with it as the Ricci; for they knew themselves to have occasioned it, they saw it involved the ruin of the republic, and their enemies, the Albizzi, contrary to their intention, became great in consequence.”

History always repeats itself. The direct attacks on the First Amendment rights of Americans by U.S. citizens who are not, and never will be, Americans, are not only going to fail, they are going to ruin the republic and make great their enemies.

There is a reason the Prometheans don’t want you to study history and why the Shapiros and Pragers relentlessly lie about it and retroactively attempt to revise it. There is nothing new under the sun. If you know history and you recognize which patterns apply to current events, you will have a very good idea what is going to happen.

Twitter bans mask skeptics

It’s always interesting to see what SJW narrratives are not only being pushed, but are being actively enforced, by the Tech Cartel:

Conservative pundit Bill Mitchell has been kicked off Twitter, saying his opposition to face masks first earned him a suspension, which became permanent after he unwittingly violated the rules by tweeting from a second account. Mitchell announced his ban in a post on Parler on Friday, laying his Twitter handle to rest after accumulating more than 600,000 followers. Earning regular retweets from President Donald Trump, the account was a source of controversy, at times backing ‘QAnon’ conspiracy theories and voicing skepticism toward Covid-19, among other things.

Frankly, since I don’t pay much attention to the ever-shifting Corona-chan narratives, I was still vaguely under the impression that the Narrative was still insisting that masks were unnecessary for the general public.

In late February and early March as the COVID-19 outbreak began accelerating in the US, hospitals and health facilities experienced severe shortages of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers. In response, experts like Fauci and the US Surgeon General Jerome Adams advised Americans against wearing masks. 

I imagine Twitter is going to be hell on margarine matters too.

Score one for the concerned consumers

And it’s a very big one. Patreon’s core strategy from the start has been to try carving out an exception to the arbitrations it imposes upon all of its users in order to avoid paying the required arbitration fees. This strategy has uniformly failed, as evidenced by decisions by the arbitration company, the arbitrators, and even the Superior Court judge.

Now Patreon’s attempt to avoid permitting the arbitrators to decide if its practices are deceptive and in violation of California law or not has been comprehensively shot down by the highest relevant authority. This means that its legal strategy has been a complete and comprehensive failure, as any informed observer could have told them it would be back in December when they implemented it.

Unappreciated and unawarded

And it wasn’t just unawarded. Midnight’s War somehow didn’t even qualify as one of the 36 runners-up despite being one of the top 10 ranked in Popularity and earning a higher rating than two out of the three Silver winners.

This tells me that Arkhaven needs to seriously rethink our plan to use Webtoons as a platform. While some of the winning stories were pretty good, precisely none of the art in any of the winners or runners-up was even close to that of Midnight’s War. It’s now clear that it’s just not the sort of thing that they are ever going to promote to their readership.

Perhaps we’ll look for a platform more in tune with Western art or perhaps we’ll build our own platform. But we definitely won’t be putting anything except Hypergamouse, Quantum Mortis, and Go Monster Go! up there, at least for the time being. If you think my reaction is too severe, consider the artwork from the top prize winner below, and then compare it to the art for Midnight’s War.

UPDATE: There is no mystery concerning the missing webcomics. I pulled AH, CDA, and Jeeves down last night; MW will also be taken down as soon as it’s not locked for the contest by Webtoons. I don’t have the time to keep updating 30-panel episodes if the platform is not part of our core strategy. For Arkhaven Patreon subscribers, we’ll return to direct digital downloads.

UPDATE: Midnight’s War and Quantum Mortis have been removed as well. We are going to build our own platform.

You may not see color

But color sees you:

“Give us your house, give black people back their homes, you’re sitting there comfortably…I used to live in this neighborhood and my family was pushed out and you’re sitting up there having a good time with your other white friends. Now we’re bringing it to your front door, so what the fuck do you plan to do about it?” asks the male protester as the mob continues to harass the homeowner.

The video ends with the homeowner apparently turning the lights off in a bid to avoid any further escalation. The seizure of white-owned property has long been a primary goal of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The remarkable thing about white anti-racists is that they won’t give up their racial virtue-signaling even when blacks are murdering little boys playing in the neighborhood:

Darius Sessoms, a black man, walked up to his neighbor’s kids (three white children) who were riding bikes outside their home, placed a gun to a 5 year old white boy’s head and executed him in front of his two sisters for accidentally riding his bike on his lawn.  

A brave and noble blow against structural and intrinsic racism, no doubt. He’s right up there with St. Floyd and the Chicago Cancer-Fighting Crew:

The Ronald McDonald House in Chicago was vandalized during looting early Monday morning while families and their sick children huddled inside, the charity said Tuesday. The Ronald McDonald House in the Streeterville neighborhood of the city’s Near North Side provides support for sick children and their families while the child receives medical treatment at nearby Lurie Children’s Hospital.

The charity said more than 30 families and their sick children were sleeping inside when the looters, who had taken over downtown, ransacking stores and vandalizing properties, started attacking the building.

I’m confident these brave young men and their enthusiasm to become doctors and fight cancer was just tragically misunderstood due to unconscious bias and racism.

The Sino-Jewish war

That’s what the affirmative-action battle in the Ivy League is actually about:

The Department of Justice found Yale discriminates based on race and national origin in its undergraduate admissions process, and that race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year. For the great majority of applicants, Asian Americans and whites have only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials. Yale rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit.

Although the Supreme Court has held that colleges receiving federal funds may consider applicants’ race in certain limited circumstances as one of a number of factors, the Department of Justice found Yale’s use of race is anything but limited. Yale uses race at multiple steps of its admissions process resulting in a multiplied effect of race on an applicant’s likelihood of admission, and Yale racially balances its classes.

The Department of Justice has demanded Yale agree not to use race or national origin in its upcoming 2020-2021 undergraduate admissions cycle, and, if Yale proposes to consider race or national origin in future admissions cycles, it must first submit to the Department of Justice a plan demonstrating its proposal is narrowly tailored as required by law, including by identifying a date for the end of race discrimination.

The anti-white disparity is actually much worse than it appears, because Jews are classified as white by the universities and are the group most favored by the admissions offices. This battle over the educational high ground is also taking place in Hollywood and Big Tech, and the only reason the media isn’t also a battleground is because it is in complete collapse. The war between China and the Jewish diaspora for global primacy may well prove to be the most significant conflict of the 21st century.

We’re living in 1Q84

This suddenly explains so much of the weirdness of the last few years.

The boffins at the Catalina Sky Survey have stumbled upon an amazing and slightly goofy discovery, apparently Earth has had a second moon for the past three years and nobody noticed. This ‘mini-moon’ is actually an asteroid, measuring between 1.9 and 3.5 metres (6.2 and 11.5 feet) in diameter, that was temporarily captured by our planet’s gravity. Named 2020 CD3, we picked up our second moon some time in 2017 but, given how vast the sky is and how dark the moon is, it never caught anyone’s attention, until now.

“Ho ho,” says the keeper of the beat.

Awake Library edition

This is not a mockup, this is a photo of the actual stamped and silver-foiled cowhide from the bindery. The interior cases have been printed for weeks, and I’m told that the bindery expects to ship the third book in the Castalia Library series to both US and international subscribers by the end of the month.

However, we’re still very much delayed on the Libraria versions, as the goatskin tannery went from lockdown to August vacation with barely a few weeks in between. I’m told they expect to ship all the goatskins for The Missionaries, Awake, and The Divine Comedy to the bindery during the third week of September, and we will keep you informed on the progress of those books. This is the downside of working with Italian suppliers; the quality is excellent but they work on Italian time.

The cowhide tannery is on vacation too, so the soonest we can reasonably expect to ship the Library version of The Divine Comedy is the end of September. We’re still finalizing the cover design, but, the interiors have already been printed, and we’re sending the first volume of Plutarch to the printer by the end of this weekend.

Please understand that the production disruptions caused by Corona-chan have not come to an end by any means, and that we are not sitting on our hands, but are actively working to keep routing around them. For example, we had originally planned to produce the Plutarchs in a larger size, but 6 x 9 is the largest paper size that the printer can currently obtain in the quality that we require. So, we adjusted our designs and proceeded accordingly. And, obviously, the delay in producing the Library books has pushed back the Junior Classics, but we’re hoping to at least get the ebook and regular hardcovers out before the end of the year.

In other Library news, the two Plutarch volumes are going to be monsters of around 768 pages each. The covers are going to be very cool and reflective of the dual Graeco-Roman nature of the text. We’ve also decided on Books 7 and 8, although we have not yet decided on the order. They will be Summa Elvetica by Vox Day and Politics by Aristotle. If you have a preference as to which you’d like to see released first, please let us know in the comments.

1950s America survives… in Japan

A fascinating phenomenon that William Gibson first noted in his “cool hunter” novels some years ago turns out to not only be real, but a viable business in Japan:

Takashi Tateno keeps an office in a simple studio above his wife’s hairdressing salon on the outskirts of Okayama, a medium-sized city in central Japan. In fashion circles, Okayama is famous for one thing: making the world’s best denim, using looms that date back to the 1950s. But Tateno isn’t a denim head. His brand, called Workers, adapts all sorts of American work wear from the 1900s to the ’60s—railroad jackets, canvas dusters, flannel shirts, double-kneed pants. Moreover, he’s obsessed by the American workers who manufactured these garments in their heyday, and the skills, techniques and tools used to produce such high-quality clothing on an industrial scale.

Before he hatched the idea of his own collection, Tateno spent years making clothes himself and working in a factory. At the same time, he launched a Japanese-language website that was absolutely alone in its single-minded pursuit of knowledge about the plans, patterns and procedures that old American work-wear manufacturers used to make their garments under such labels as Crown, W.M. Finck & Co. and Can’t Bust ’Em. Tateno journeyed to the United States multiple times to sift through archives and contact heirs to now-defunct clothing manufacturers to see if they had information about their ancestors’ businesses, and to buy up examples of the old clothes he loved so he could dissect their construction.

Tateno ushers me into his upstairs space. One room is filled with all kinds of clothing, everything from the work wear he collects to contemporary Italian jackets by Boglioli. There is also machinery, including an ancient riveting machine, plus old sewing-machine accessories that Tateno purchases so the factories he hires to produce his collection can make things to the exact specifications of, say, 1924 or 1942, with the same tools in use back then.

“When I learned to sew and tried to make these garments myself, I began to realize just how intricate the work was, what kind of tremendous skill level was required to turn out such huge quantities of high-quality garments,” Tateno says. “These were produced at a time when American workers were the most knowledgeable and skilled in the world.”

Though the kind of skilled manufacturing he admired in these garments had largely disappeared in the United States—a consequence of apparel production moving abroad and garment workers no longer finding work—he saw older Japanese people around him in Okayama with high-level sewing skills. And so he realized that if he could unearth the manufacturing secrets behind these old garments, he could make them in Okayama—and perhaps make them even better than the originals.

The cult of the artisan is ensconced in contemporary urban American culture. This is the ideal of a person who can handcraft a pair of jeans or a necktie, conscious of the most minute details of fabric, workmanship and authenticity. The era Tateno’s clothing harks back to is not the age of the lone artisan laboring over a single creation, though; it’s the era of packed factories in Pennsylvania, Virginia and California churning out thousands and thousands of high-quality garments at a reasonable price, all because of the workers’ skill. The irony is that this ideal of the American worker, which sounds like something lifted from old-school union advertising copy, can be hard to find in America today.

If I had nine lives, I like to think that one of them would have been involved staying in Japan and getting fluent in the language. As Spacebunny says, 95 percent of the weirdness in the world comes out of Japan. It’s the one place in the world where the present is as fascinating as the past.