Castalia Deluxe

A reader emails concerning his interest in the new Castalia Deluxe line we are currently in the process of creating:

I am interested in the Castalia House leather bound books you have been proposing. My commitment is firm.

After growing up with reading being a prominent pastime, I had become post-literate myself. I had stopped reading for fun or leisure for over a decade.

Why? Because, increasingly, nearly everything that was readily accessible or recommended to me was subverted, converged, perverted, plain wrong, incompetent, amounted to nothing more than propaganda, was revisionist garbage, etc., etc. I had not finished a book in years that did not leave me feeling distorted, disgusted, or contributed to my mounting nihilism in some way. The same has been true for movies, TV, and pop culture generally which I have also abandoned. The odds were too good it would be utter *@!$.

Castalia House has been a welcome relief to my literary drought. Since I discovered you and Castalia House, aside from my professional and academic duties, I have read more in the last few months than I have in years. It’s not just the books Castalia publishes, but also Castalia’s blog, your blog, and the other resources you have exposed me to that has allowed me to reliably track down things worth reading. Things that leave me with a sense of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

A Throne of Bones was excellent. (Looking forward to A Sea of Skulls). David Eddings’s The Belgariad series was an effortless, enjoyable read. A History of France by John Julius Norwich wasn’t revisionist garbage. I am about to crack the first volume in my 1910 edition of Charles Oman’s The History of England.

Thank you for Castalia House and all you do. Keep up the good work.

P.S. Sometimes the presence of gatekeepers make people aware there’s a gate. Despite my growing disdain for Jordan Peterson, I took notice of his interview with Milo. I wondered what had changed because, for lack of a better phrase, one was authorized and the other wasn’t. When I watched the interview, Peterson reminded me you existed with his “Say hi to Vox for me” line. I quickly realized what had changed is Jordanetics was published. Jordanetics clearly articulated why I had developed such disdain for Peterson. This led me to Castalia House, Vox Popoli, and the Darkstream.

So, thanks, Jordan.

For those who aren’t aware, over the last week I’ve been working on expanding the concept of the requested deluxe leatherbound Castalia Junior Classics to an entire line of high-quality Castalia Deluxe books in the vein of Easton Press and Franklin Mint. The interest in this has been unexpectedly high, even among the presumably post-literate video crowd, and the project is looking extremely viable due to the way in which it builds directly on what we’re already doing at Castalia House.

The current plan is to offer a 50/month subscription to Castalia Deluxe, which will provide six books per year to the subscriber, delivered every other month. These subscriber books will NOT be limited editions, but they may have some features that the regular Deluxe books do not, such as gilded page edges and bookmark ribbons. The Castalia Junior Classics will NOT be part of the subscription, but both the regular hardcover and Deluxe editions will be available for sale.

We will offer a discount on non-subscription Deluxe books to subscribers, probably on the order of 5 or 10 dollars per book. We MAY also offer free shipping if we can ship a purchased book with a regular subscription shipment.

The first two books we will send to subscribers will be The Missionaries and Summa Elvetica & Other Stories. And in answer to some more of the frequently asked questions I’ve been getting:

Where do I sign up for the Deluxe subscription?
You don’t yet. We still have to decide how we want to set this up exactly, most likely through the Arkhaven store, and confirm that all the numbers add up correctly. But if you are seriously interested – by which I mean an 85 percent chance you believe you will sign up for a subscription if and when it becomes available – email me now with CASTALIA DELUXE in the subject.

How do I get the Castalia Junior Classics?
Through the crowdfunding campaign that is expected to begin in 2-3 weeks. The Junior Classics are NOT a part of this subscription program. The only connection is that we stumbled upon the idea of a new product line as part of figuring out how to offer a Deluxe edition of them.

Are you only going to be offering Castalia House books in Castalia Deluxe?
No. We’re just starting the Deluxe line with books we already publish because that is one less issue to sort out at the start. We’re trying to keep the degree of difficulty to a reasonable minimum. In addition to some of the usual classics, we want to publish great reference works of history, science, and philosophy. For example, I’d particularly like to bring back the first edition of The Cambridge Medieval History.

Will A THRONE OF BONES/AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND be available as part of the Deluxe subscription?
Yes, they will probably be included in the first year. We need to re-layout AWAKE, otherwise it would replace SUMMA as the second subscription book. And beginning with a monstrosity like ATOB would not be minimizing the degree of difficulty.

Will large books like ATOB cost more for subscribers?
No. Some books will cost us more, some will cost us less. This may affect the retail price, but will not affect the subscriptions.

Is the paper for the Deluxe editions going to be acid-free?
Yes, the paper is acid-free and meets ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 standards for archival quality paper.

Will you be publishing THERE WILL BE WAR in Deluxe editions?
Absolutely. They’re very near the top of the list.

I’m an author. Will you publish a Deluxe edition of my book?
That depends. Is your name “Nick Cole” or “William Gibson” or “Arturo Perez-Reverte”?

Will the Deluxe editions ship outside the USA?
Yes, although it is POSSIBLE that an international surcharge to cover shipping will be required for the subscription shipments.

UPDATE: the initial response has been enthusiastic.

Count me in for $50 a month! I find your literary curation absolutely invaluable. This year alone you’ve been the driving force behind me digging into Richard Adams, Hesse, Wodehouse, Umberto Eco, William Gibson, Owen Stanley, Quigley, Norwich, Van Creveld and more. It’s been an incredibly rewarding and transformative process.

A shadow over Minneapolis

The latest conspiracy news out of /pol/ points at the military-industrial complex in… Minnesota, of all places:

Last week at work I traced a massive subcontractors mysterious source to someone who is currently running for President.

The company produces nothing, I found it because we gained access to an area of this company that no one has been given access to before by a new employee not fully in the know. What we found were 165 items each individually valued at over $1,000,000 missing, all ordered in quarter 1 of 2019.

Our audit further lead us to investigate quietly and trace back over $10 Billion of undelivered, but paid for, Navy equipment and materials, and it all goes through the same subcontractor.

The subcontractor is fully owned by a shell company which shares a physical location with it but with two different street address, which are actually on two different street because it is a corner facility, very smart. During this process of tracking the missing items we went to the subcontractors facility to find it……..completely empty. The two companies have a single office with some desks in it and over 400,000 square feet of empty warehouse in the middle of nowhere West Georgia.

Further tracking the shell company we found that it is owned by another shell company, which in turn is owned by a company which owns 5 luxury car dealerships, a big four professional American Sports Franchise, a VERY liberal movie studio, all of which have been noted as being unprofitable, and this single Navy Contractor.

The family that owns this company has a current Senator and a Current Presidential Candidate in it.

Translation: Amy Klobuchar, the Pohlad family, the Minnesota Twins, and River Road Entertainment, which produced 12 Years a Slave and Brokeback Mountain, among others.

I have to admit, it’s a little bit bizarre to read about this, especially in light of the way I could still probably drive River Road, which connects the North campus to the South campus of the private school I attended, while wearing a blindfold.

But it certainly stinks of Deep State satanry. Do what they tell you to do, say what they want you to say, and even if all the world will not be yours, you’ll be very well compensated for your obedience. And it also explains why, despite spending more money on the military than most of the countries in the world combined, the US military keeps falling further behind the Russian military in terms of deployable technologies.

Signs of the Storm

We can see that the Democrats and the media are in full panic mode with the desperation of their toothless attacks on the God-Emperor. What we don’t know is why. It may be due to the way in which the Obama administration is being shown to have colluded with various foreign governments while it engaged in illegal spying on the Trump campaign.

As Democrats ramp up their impeachment efforts against President Trump, Fox News contributor Dan Bongino said the party is starting to panic at the possibility of being linked to illegal spying, as the Department of Justice inspector general prepares to release his report on the matter.

“It’s never going to stop. I mean, the republic is dying a slow death,” he said Monday on “Fox & Friends.” “We’re on life support here… They’re panicking because the IG report’s about to come out, which is about to expose a massive government spying operation against Donald Trump.

“Here’s the key takeaway — in collusion with foreign governments,” Bongino continued. “That’s why they’re panicking. And they’re panicking because… what the Obama administration did is 1,000 times worse than what they’re alleging Donald Trump did.”

The fact that a senior Twitter executive has been exposed as British military intelligence isn’t going to make it harder for the American public to believe that these various agents of the Deep State committed treason. Gordon McMillan, Twitter’s Head of Editorial for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, is a reserve captain in the 77th Brigade, the British Army’s psyops unit.

The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as “information warfare”.

Carter says the 77th Brigade is giving the British military “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level”; to shape perceptions of conflict. Some soldiers who have served with the unit say they have been engaged in operations intended to change the behaviour of target audiences…. The 77th Brigade’s headquarters is located west of London. It brought together a number of existing military units such as the Media Operations Group and the 15 Psychological Operations Group.

The British army’s website describes the 77th Brigade as “an agent of change” which aims to “challenge the difficulties of modern warfare using non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of the opposing forces and adversaries”.

We learn more and more about the corruption of the USA every day. This is why President Trump’s popularity is steadily growing.

They tried, they failed

SJWs tried to stir up a swarm in Sandpoint, Idaho to stop the Big Bear’s show. They failed completely:

Alt-right comedian Owen Benjamin comes to the Panida
· SEPTEMBER 26, 2019

By Zach Hagadone

Owen Benjamin is coming to the Panida Theater for a “Date Night Comedy Show” on Monday, Sept. 30. The 39-year-old New York native is also a classically trained pianist, but he’s bringing with him much more baggage than a microphone and sheet music.

Once an up-and-coming stand-up, in recent years he has been shunned by the entertainment industry, barred from venues around the country and established himself as a darling of the alt-right.

Asked if she was familiar with the mass of controversy trailing behind Benjamin, Panida Executive Director Patricia Walker said “just a little bit.”

“I didn’t come across whatever the hugely controversial stuff was,” she added, noting that Benjamin rented the theater — he was not booked by the Panida. “We don’t censor; we’re here for the entire community, but we don’t allow hate speech and he was all in favor of that. People can vote with their money.”

Pariah status didn’t come immediately to Benjamin, who landed a supporting role in The House Bunny in 2008. The same year, he and Christina Ricci — with whom he starred in the rom-com All’s Faire in Love — announced they were getting married, though the engagement ended after a few months. Benjamin appeared on Comedy Central Presents in 2010, acted in three seasons of the TBS comedy Sullivan & Son from 2012-2014, appeared on Inside Amy Schumer in 2014 and was a frequent guest on The Jay Leno Show and Fallon, among others. He has toured with Vince Vaughn and also had a part in the Adam Sandler flick Jack and Jill.

Yet, Benjamin’s mainstream success effectively came to an end in October 2017, when he called NPR host Jesse Thorn a “child abuser” for giving his 3-year-old the choice to identify as male or female.

Crushing and carrying on. One SJW after another. We don’t want their authorization. We don’t need it.

Red meat is good for you

What were the chances the “food pyramid” and the scientists who told you to eat sugar and white bread all day to lose weight were going to be correct about the dangers of red meat?

New research that claims red and processed meat is probably not harmful to our health has caused controversy among experts who maintain people should cut down.

The World Health Organization has classified red and processed meats as cancer-causing. Public health bodies worldwide urge people to limit their intake of red and processed meat to reduce their cancer risk. The NHS advises that people who eat 90g of meat a day – equivalent to three thin slices of roast meat – should cut down to 70g.

Aside from public health, calls are multiplying for people to cut back on meat consumption because of the climate emergency and the greenhouse gas emissions that come from animal farming.

But the 14-member international team led by Bradley Johnston an associate professor of community health at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, concluded that those who like meat should not stop on health grounds. “Based on the research, we cannot say with any certainty that eating red or processed meat causes cancer, diabetes or heart disease,” he said.

If you have any doubts about the legitimacy of the study, keep in mind that the critics are whining about the way the study was “wrong to exclude environmental concerns about damage to the planet.”

What does that have to do with personal health?

Babymetal goes Indian

This is actually my favorite so far of their new songs off Metal Galaxy. Kano is no Yui, but she appears to work with Su and Moa better than the other two girls they’ve tried. And this new Indian theme, in combination with their shows with The Hu, makes me suspect that Koba-metal is actually attempting to conquer the world.

Henry Haller is a gamma

A fellow Hesse fan reaches a conclusion:

I’ve been reading Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse and something occurred to me. I first intended to ask what sociosexual rank you think Harry Haller inhabits, but then I got to this passage and started laughing outside the sauna:

For long during this night’s walk I had reflected upon the significance of my relation to music, and not for the first time recognized this appealing and fatal relation as the destiny of the entire German spirit. In the German spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of music to an extent unknown in any other people. We intellectuals instead of opposing ourselves to this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the formless. 

Instead of playing his part as truly and honestly as he could, the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music, in wonderful creation of sound and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its practical gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals is at home in reality. We are strangers to it and hostile. That is why the part played by intellect even in our own German reality, in our history and politics and public opinion, has been so lamentable a one. Well, I had often pondered all this, not without an intense longing sometimes to turn to and do something real for once, to be seriously and responsibly active instead of occupying myself forever with nothing but aesthetics and intellectual and artistic pursuits. It always ended, however, in resignation, in surrender to destiny. 

The generals and captains of industry were quite right. there was nothing to be made of us intellectuals. We were a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning.

I wish I would have read Steppenwolf years and years ago because I think that passage would have helped me as much back then as it did today. At that passage I realized that it’s a book written by a German for the German people to help us understand ourselves. Occasionally someone asks you if it would be a good idea to move back to his own ancestral homeland. It may be a good idea, but it’s equally good to start by reading one’s own people’s literature because it was written for you yourself as one of those people.

A German girl I met on vacation about four years ago recommended that I read Steppenwolf, I think now because she recognized me as being truly German and as such would benefit from it like other Germans have. I plan now on diving into Goethe, as my grandfather told me a long time ago that “Goethe is the German Shakespeare.”

I’ve always felt that it was a bit ironic that the band that recorded “Born to be Wild” called themselves Steppenwolf since if they had remained true to the novel, the song would have been named “Born to be Mild”.

And “a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning” is a fairly accurate description of the average intellectual today, except, of course, for the bit about talent.

Mailvox: convergence creeps in

A reader emails about convergence creeping in at Project Gutenberg:

For some time now, I’ve been a volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders (DP), which is the main site providing public domain e-books for Project Gutenberg. I had hoped this project would be somewhat immune to convergence as its mission is to preserve any and all works of literature in the public domain.

However, today the CEO of Project Gutenberg, Gregory Newby, published a notice in the forums for Distributed Proofreaders:

We recently updated the website with information about submitting public domain works to Project Gutenberg. There are two notable changes. The more important change, to me, is to firmly write that PG only accepts works in the public domain in the US. Historically, we’ve added a reasonable quantity of copyrighted works (perhaps a few {20631733b5a15c3694dbfcf360b60a1948a54005354f1d1bb00d126531fe1735}). But now, we send copyrighted submissions to http://self.gutenberg.org .. this change isn’t impactful to DP, since DP, also works exclusively with public domain works (with very few exceptions). The rationale for being firm about PD-only is twofold. Mainly, because there are many ways a contemporary author can distribute his or her works on the Internet (in the olden days, PG was one of few eBook outlets that would accept contemporary works for free, unlimited redistribution). Secondarily, because we were never very good at it: we don’t offer many services to authors, including the ability to post improvements, different formats, get stats on their readers, etc.

The other notable change is more impactful for DP, though still rarely an issue. This is to be more explicit about not wanting items that are hate speech or predecessors to hate speech, or items that are pornographic and obscene.

Hate speech or “predecessors to hate speech”? The latter is a new one for me. Fortunately, there was a speedy and overwhelming backlash… this time.

After a large outcry by the volunteers at Distributed Proofreading, the CEO of Project Gutenberg was essentially forced to walk back his decision and remove the language banning “hate speech” from the Gutenberg terms & conditions. He’s now pledged to uphold an open collection policy.

He needs to be forced out anyhow, though. Because he’s shown that he’s more than willing to cuck, given that he already did so without even coming under any external pressure.

Cyberfrog: Bloodhoney is out

And the reviews are already up:

Former DC Comics artist Ethan Van Sciver crowd-funded his Cyberfrog: Bloodhoney comic book to the tune of millions of dollars, and while fans paid a hefty price tag for the comic, unfortunately, it fails to deliver.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Cyberfrog: Bloodhoney comes up short in terms of story, as it comes across as pretty boring, dull and confusing — and just when it starts to get good, it ends.

I say not surprisingly because this comic book reminds me of something put out in the early days of Image Comics when the Marvel Comics artists left and formed their own company in the 90s. While all of the Image founders were stellar artists, they weren’t exactly the best writers (i.e. Todd McFarlane on Spawn; Liefeld, really, on anything). I think the same applies here to Ethan Van Sciver.

Cyberfrog: Bloodhoney read as more of an extended prelude with Bendis-style exposition and little action; there is no conflict for the first 16 pages, which is basically an entire comic book these days. The comic read to me as if it was a cliff-noted version of an extended story that we were already supposed to know about.

Psychoanalysis as pedocover

I’ve always believed that Freud and Freudianism were pure and unmitigated nonsense. But, as it happens, both the man and his pseudoscience were actually a good deal worse than I had ever imagined.

Freud, having stumbled upon the widespread reality of child abuse among his mostly Jewish clientele, covered it up with the theory that all little girls desire their fathers’ penis and all little boys dream of screwing their mothers — and named his theory after a Gentile myth….

Denial means projection: to protect the dirty secret of child abuse in Jewish families—including his own—, Freud projected an imaginary repressed infantile perversion on all mankind. Projection, in turn, means inversion: Freud’s close disciple Otto Rank claimed that Jews had a more primitive, and therefore more healthy sexuality than Gentiles (Rank, “The Essence of Judaism,” 1905). Freudians and Freudo-Marxists have systematically denounced Christian civilization as suffering from sexual repression. According to Wilhelm Reich, anti-Semitism is itself a symptom of sexual frustration, and could be cured by sexual liberation (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1934)—an improvement from Leo Pinsker’s theory that Judeophobia was a “hereditary” and “incurable” “disease transmitted for two thousand years.” In order to understand the psychological background of this Reichian messianic mission to cure the Christian West, and in order to see more clearly the projective nature of the psychoanalytical theory of repression, it is helpful to know the personal story of Wilhelm Reich, which reads as a caricature of Freud’s: At ten years old, when he realized that his mother was having an affair with his tutor, the young Wilhelm thought of blackmailing his mother into having sex with him. Eventually, he confided in his father about his mother’s adultery. In 1910, after a period of beatings from his father, his mother committed suicide, for which Reich blamed himself.

One of the most puzzling aspects of Jews’ relationship with their host nations is its ambivalence—patterned on biblical “history”: within Jewish thinking, saving the nations and destroying them are not two sides of the same coin, but one and the same, because what nations are supposed to be cured of is their very identity (their gods, in biblical terms). According to Andrew Heinze, author of Jews and the American Soul, Jews have shaped “American ideas about the mind and soul” with the preoccupation “to purge the evils they associated with Christian civilization.” It really started with Freud. In September 1909, invited to give a series of lectures in New England, Freud jokingly asked his companions, Sandor Ferenczi and Carl Jung: “Don‘t they know we’re bringing them the plague?” An extraordinary statement for a medical doctor pretending to have found a “cure” for neurosis. And a prophetic one: Freudism became a justification for a sexual “liberation” that can be seen in retrospect as a massive sexual abuse of the youth.

Sexual repression is not the problem. And the “sexual liberation” that is sought is nothing less than societal approval for incestuous child rape. Forget the Chinese, forget the Nazis, at this point I would take Quetzalcoatl-worshipping Aztecs over the Freudians and their devil dreams of Babel 2.0. By their fruits, ye shall know them.

And just to make things worse, if you actually trouble to read Keynes’s General Theory, you’ll soon discover that its all-important “animal spirits” are nothing more than Freud applied to economics. What this implies about the foundation of the global macroeconomic perspective of the last eighty years I leave it to the reader to conclude on his own.