Tag: history

A Pipeline to the Stars

In which a member of our community has built a system to unlock a whole host of old Hebrew and Latin texts:

This started as an offhand question.

I was chatting with Claude about some obscure Hebrew books related to my interest in the history of astronomy and cosmology. One of them contained a firsthand account of encounters with Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.

I started by asking what Claude knew about the book from reviews, catalogs, and other online references. The information was sparse. Then I thought: why not go to the source?

Knowing that Vox Day had used AI extensively for translation work, I asked Claude what it could do with a scanned PDF.

The answer seemed almost too good to be true.

So I tested it.

“Here’s a 250-page PDF. Translate it.”

That didn’t happen.

Claude explained that the PDF would need to be broken into smaller batches. I would have to upload each section separately, start a new chat for each batch, run a translation prompt, and then manually stitch everything together afterward. It even suggested shell commands to help.

That also didn’t happen.

Instead, over the next five days, I used Claude Web and Claude Code to build the functional scaffolding that eventually became my translation pipeline. As an experiment, I kept it completely code-free at first. I wanted to see how far I could get simply by describing what I wanted.

The answer turned out to be: surprisingly far.

Read the rest about how the translation pipeline was constructed and find the link to the growing compendium of ancient and medieval texts at AI Central.

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Natives and Americans

A fellow American Indian points out that regardless of what the historical grudges exist – and the American track record is a lot worse than the Manifest Destiny apologists taught back in the day – the Clown World program is not and has never been in our interest.

Natives need to bear firmly in mind that if the demographics of this nation wildly vary from the traditional white majority, it won’t be some great development for us.

It will be the opposite. We share a history with the whites, good and bad, but it’s behind us now. The whites like and admire us, and as little as some of us want to admit it, they have helped us enormously.

The newcomers don’t give a damn about us. We have no history with Pakistanis or Afghans or whoever. They are coming to conquer, that’s it.

If we don’t stand with the whites, we will fall together. It’s that simple.

I don’t know that I would go so far as “helped us enormously” but reservations and casinos is a much better deal than many conquered peoples ended up with, although I do think that any state or federal agency who tries to play eminent domain games with Indian land should be treated in exactly the same way a soldier who independently wages war on a foreign power is.

But the point stands. And it really would behoove Americans to be honest about what was done to the American Indian, in order to learn from it and avoid meeting a similar fate. Because it’s all in the legalisms…

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What if it Wasn’t Libel

What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light:

Epstein case revelations: U.S. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert stunned Newsmax after reviewing the unredacted Epstein documents:

“It’s far darker than anyone could have imagined: emails about torture, constant references to ‘consumption,’ a place literally called the ‘Cannibal Restaurant,’ and code words like ‘jerky’ and ‘human meat’ being tossed around as if it were nothing.”

Yes. She directly asked whether we are dealing with cannibalism. With literal human consumption.

This is no longer some fringe theory. A sitting member of Congress is openly saying what no one else dares to say: these monsters not only abused and trafficked children — they may have eaten them as well.

I suspect we are soon going to learn why a certain “libel” not only wasn’t ever a libel, but explains why those to whom it historically applied are persona non grata in dozens of countries to this day. And I suspect it’s going to go deeper, darker, and wider than anyone, including me, really wants to imagine, in the same way that I correctly anticipated what would be found around the ziggurats of Central America.

It’s important to keep in mind there are both spiritual and material elements to this. But anyone who has ever condemned groups like the Inquisitions, the Romans, and the Conquistadors should be considered suspect, because groups like that have been the historical instruments of rooting out and eliminating the ancient evils preying upon Man.

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Common Sense Calculus

I’m not going to lie. I think I would have grasped calculus a lot more easily, and perhaps even remembered it better, if it had been taught to me by starting with the actual meaning of the symbols instead of with all the jargon and symbols unconnected to the underlying concepts, as it used to be taught to 15-year-old American boys instead of not being taught to university graduates.

The preliminary terror, which chokes off most fifth-­form boys from even attempting to learn how to calculate, can be abolished once for all by simply stating what is the meaning—in common-sense terms—of the two principal symbols that are used in calculating.

These dreadful symbols are:

(1) d which merely means “ a little bit of.” Thus dx means a little bit of x; or du means a little bit of u. Ordinary mathematicians think it more polite to say “ an element of,” instead of “ a little bit of.” Just as you please. But you will find that these little bits (or elements) may be considered to be indefinitely small.

(2) f which is merely a long S, and may be called (if you like) “ the sum of.” Thus fdx means the sum of all the little bits of x or fdt means the sum of all the little bits of t. Ordinary mathematicians call this symbol “the integral of.”

Now any fool can see that if x is considered as made up of a lot of little bits, each of which is called dx, if you add them all up together you get the sum of all the dxs, which is the same thing as the whole of x. The word “integral” simply means “the whole.” If you think of the duration of time for one hour, you may (if you like) think of it as cut up into 3,600 little bits called seconds. The whole of the 3,600 little bits added up together make one hour.

When you see an expression that begins with this terrifying symbol, you will henceforth know that it is put there merely to give you instructions that you are now to perform the operation (if you can) of totalling up all the little bits that are indicated by the symbols that follow.

That’s all.

If anyone is interested in Castalia re-releasing this early 20th century introduction to Calculus, let me know. Although I have to say, I think we’d lose the parentheticals, which are unnecessary and don’t help at all.

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The Finding in the Folio

Dennis McCarthy offers further proof that Ben Jonson, and a number of his colleagues, knew very well that Thomas North was the original author of most of the Shakespeare plays.

As we shall see in this article, Jonson’s celebrated ode contains a shocking secret—a dead giveaway to the true origin of the canon. In other words, the answer to the most significant literary question in history—who was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays?—has been sitting prominently in the front of the First Folio for the last 400 years. Jonson was not being remotely subtle…

As I frequently point out with no hyperbole: the second greatest plagiarist in history has not borrowed half as much, perhaps not one-tenth as much, from another writer as Shakespeare has from North.

Shakespeare never had a “witty friend” help him write plays? Not only did North aid him in the chore; scholars involved in authorship studies point to at least half a dozen plays—1 Henry VI, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen, Macbeth, Henry VIII, for instance—that were collaborations. All of Digges’s counter-claims are false.

In brief, Jonson, who knew the North-Shakespeare story and had scoffed at Shakespeare before, saw the poem he would write for the First Folio as an opportunity to memorialize his view of Shakespeare. Of course, he knew he couldn’t explicitly attack Shakespeare—as it would never be allowed in the front of a collection meant for fans of the Stratford dramatist. Shakespeare was the only one then known to London playgoers—and his name and reputation helped ensure the First Folio would be a successful publishing venture.

But even Jonson’s title clues you in: “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us.” It doesn’t refer to what Shakespeare wrote or created—but what he hath left us. And as Digges and Dryden both knew, the poem does not really commend Shakespeare; rather it stands as a sobering rebuttal to the idolatry that the volume would arouse. And in the middle of this ode, the poet identifies the playwright who was the true, original author of Shakespeare’s plays. Jonson’s “tribute” to Shakespeare was his last act of vengeance, a carefully framed reprise of his previous denunciations of the crow cum swan. And it is one of the last pieces in the puzzle that exposes North as the true genius behind the Shakespeare canon.

It’s interesting to see how long ago writers were having to skirt the mainstream narrative in order to avoid getting canceled.

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Comprehensive Failure

No wonder Iran sees no reason to rush into a peace deal. The US military failed in every aspect of the recent war:

CNN found that Iran has now unblocked 50 out of the 69 tunnel entrances struck by the US and Israel at 18 underground missile facilities. Iran has repaired other parts of the bases as well, including roads that the US and Israel bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them. Satellite images show almost all these craters have now been filled, and at two sites, even repaved.

Now the cat’s out of the bag, and the world is exposed to the embarrassing reality that the months of US strikes did virtually nothing to Iran’s military capability, with Trump forced to cover up and save-face by claiming that he “spared” the Iranian military proper because that was somehow favorable to his post-war vision—sure.

The truth is that all the new revelations have unsealed the true aim of US strategy: it was never to totally destroy Iran’s military capability—the US itself never possessed the ability to do so. The aim was to create a brief window of degradation that would allow the Israel-fronted “plan” of overthrowing the Iranian regime to work. The hope was to temporarily slow down and hamper Iran’s military just long enough for the various psyops and false flags to stir up unrest in the country and lead to a Venezuela-style overthrow—but Iran had prepared well, and was not fazed by either prong of the failed operation.

So let’s look at the way the US lost the most recent round of its war with Iran:

  1. Regime change failed
  2. Nuclear prevention failed
  3. Defense of Arab bases failed
  4. Defense of Israel failed
  5. Destruction of military capabilities failed
  6. Strait of Hormuz blocked

About the only thing the US did successfully was to not lose any warships. Which, one notes, could have much more easily been accomplished by not sending them to the Persian Gulf in the first place. And not only did the USA fail in its objectives, but it ended the conflict worse off than when it began.

That is, by every historical measure, a defeat. It’s not an existential one, nor is it necessarily the last word on the international conflict. But the history books will record this as being a defeat of the USA by Iran.

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The Great Fiction of 1989

It’s not hard to understand why the Chinese have absolutely no trust of Clown World or its pet media once one learns the truth of Tiananmen Square. And it does tend to call other Western media reports of China into question.

The US reportedly contacted key leaders among the protesting students and made them an offer—don’t wind down, go harder on the protesting and we’ll give you US passports, CIA-run safe passage out of China, a new home in the richest country in the world, and enrolment in top US universities—Harvard, Princeton, Columbia. Now that was an offer hard to refuse.

In late May, student leader Chai Ling gave her infamously puzzling interview/ talk, where she seemed to predict a Tiananman Square massacre in which she would die. She said she was speaking her last words, as there would be “a massacre which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square” – but she also included the information that she “would not be there” as her new plan was to move to the United States to study there! Years later, she wrote that her remarkable prediction of a coming violent crackdown which would lead to a Tiananmen Square massacre was something she had heard from Li Lu, not her own forecast.

Another person in the leading student group, Kong Qingdong, later recalled how he how he had come across undergraduates using a mimeograph machine to makes copies of personal documents, to give to the US Embassy in return for passports. Two of the top leaders, Chai Ling and Feng Congde, were getting them, he was told by fellow undergraduates.

Kong refused to join the rush to take US passports, saying that the protest was all about making China a better place.
Kong angrily declined to join them. He felt the protests were about standing up for China and enabling socialist modernization for the people—not grabbing passports handed out by a hostile foreign power.

Something else was troubling Kong, which he found hard to articulate. He later said: “I wasn’t fond of the way the forceful way the government spoke. But what they were actually saying was: ‘This is a complex situation. There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord.’ This was the truth.”

Think about that line of agreement between the students and the government: There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord. In other words, some protesters as well as the government knew what was really happening under the surface. But if things were calming down, what changed? How did violence break out? Kong’s answer to that question was cryptic. “When we were little, we watched movies like Guerrillas Sweep The Plain,” he said.

That answer would have meant nothing to a western audience—but it was clear to many Chinese. This was a reference to a classic 1955 Chinese movie in which there are tensions between two groups. They have disagreements but don’t fight. Suddenly, a hidden third body, the Eighth Army, opens fire at both sides and then quickly hides, triggering bloodshed.

And that is what happened. Soldiers and students were sharing food. But on June 3, mysterious thugs, some of whom were said to be from ethnic minorities, triggered a fight in Mu Xi Di, in the west of the city, attacking army buses with petrol bombs and setting them alight, burning the occupants to death. The perpetrators were never found.

Soldiers who managed to escape the burning buses were beaten to death. Other military men arrived and chaotic fighting broke out, with scores of deaths.

This was five kilometers away from Tiananmen Square.

At the Square, in the early hours of June 4, soldiers arrived and called on students to leave. Student leader Feng Congde worked to gauge protesters’ opinions, and concluded that the majority wanted to vacate the space. “So I announced the decision to leave,” he said. Students left peacefully.

Violence did break out, not in the square, but in the streets around it.

One witness, Larry Wortzel, watched protesters attack a military vehicle and noted how well it was organized—someone had definitely trained them. “This was clearly a tactic rehearsed and even practiced among the demonstrators, since it was used in the same way in separate places around the city,” he wrote.

“All verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully,” said the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews.

Now this is where it gets strange. The next day, a very different story appeared from a few foreign embassies saying that 10,000 people had been killed. This tale said the students in the square had not left. They had stayed and been massacred with machine guns, their bodies pushed into piles with bulldozers, and then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers. This gruesome horror story, supported by no evidence at all, is now viewed by eastern and western historians as entirely fictional.

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The Problem is Vaccination

Dr. Robert Malone clearly doesn’t know his history of epidemiology.

President Trump just signed a new executive order to align the pediatric vaccine schedule with best practices from other developed countries.

At first glance, President Trump’s new Executive Order appears to be about childhood vaccines. It is not. It is about who governs public health in America. The Order represents an attempt to shift authority away from an insulated public health bureaucracy and back toward elected officials who are accountable to voters…

The administration is effectively saying that vaccine policy should not be dictated by a self-perpetuating network of advisory committees, professional associations, and pharmaceutical stakeholders operating behind closed doors. Instead, it argues that elected officials, accountable to voters, have the authority to establish policy objectives and direct agencies accordingly.

Whether courts ultimately agree remains to be seen. The legal challenges will continue. But the constitutional argument is clear: agencies exist to execute policy, not create it independently.

For decades, vaccine policy has been largely insulated from democratic accountability. ACIP recommendations automatically trigger insurance coverage requirements, Medicaid obligations, participation in the Vaccines for Children program, school mandate discussions, and physician practice standards. A relatively small group of experts has wielded extraordinary influence over national health policy.

The problem is not vaccination itself. The problem is regulatory capture.

Vaccines are among the most important public health tools ever developed. Smallpox eradication alone stands as one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Polio, measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and other diseases caused enormous suffering before effective vaccines became available.

Malone here is committing the same fallacy as Daniel Dennett, Immanuel Kant, David Ricardo, and a whole host of others who fail to understand that X is not, and can never be, Not-X.

In fact, the more we see these fallacious appeals to “smallpox eradication” the more dubious I become that the smallpox vaccine ever actually worked; one wonders if the whole story about Dr. Jenner and the cowpox will hold up if one looks at other changes in technology, and hand-washing practices, and sewage systems that are responsible for the huge decline in deaths from previous causes of mortality.

But we know that vaccines didn’t even put a dent in the reduction of the harm caused by “polio, measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and other diseases” because the order of historical events absolutely precludes that. The massive decline in deaths in the USA, in England and Wales, and everywhere else that historically kept track took place before the first vaccine was even invented. It’s not just a lie, it’s a retarded and obviously false one.

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The More Things Change

It’s fascinating to see Roman-style tactics being utilized against the dyscivilizational forces of the invasion:

Anti-ICE rioters are now FULLY KETTLED between TWO WALLS of concrete and two walls of police here in Newark

A MASS ARREST bus has just rolled up.

And has prepared to take rioters into custody.

There is literally NO ESCAPE for them out here!

This is somewhat reminiscent of the battle of Alesia, although I’m skeptical about the idea that an anti-ICE army is going to show up to allow the rioters to defeat ICE and the police.

I saw an old episode of FBI from just before Covid, and Hollywood was already signaling desperately against ICE and the deportations. This has been going on longer, and is getting more serious, than most of us probably realize.

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Learning From History

Dominic Cummings is attempting to help people better understand the repeated failures of the governing elites, or at least, the elites that appears to be governing. He started this back in 2023.

One of the most fundamental things I’ve learned in 24 years involvement is that almost nobody has any interest in general principles underlying success and failure, nor interest in execution/management, and although political people read a lot of history books it’s hard to see any learning.

This is a core feature of why the world is as it is. It’s why I found a lot of interest in Silicon Valley about ‘why did Leave win the referendum’ and ‘how exactly does No10 and the deep state work’ but in London practically no interest beyond the surface phenomena. This is so extreme I’ve found more interest from people in San Francisco in ‘how exactly does X work’ than I have from the actual minister in London nominally ‘in charge’ of X.

So this is mainly for a) people outside politics interested in how it really works and b) people (almost all young) interested in the general problem of ‘the hard thing about doing really hard things’ (cf. Ben Horowitz’s excellent book on this in the entrepreneur context). I predict I will have ~100X more interest from entrepreneurs and researchers than from people ‘working in politics’. (And 1,000X more interest from some deep state officials than MPs who aren’t even interested in how the media really works even though they’re obsessed with the media.) But I also learned that odd people in politics are interested in these things and the <1% who are interested have an interesting knack of finding each other and working on things. These people are disproportionately young. (This is partly what happened in Vote Leave.)

If you disbelieve me, reflect on one simple fact that I’ve hammered repeatedly: the entire Westminster debate has, with the sort of ruthless focus it cannot muster to achieve anything positive, totally ignored the loathed, despised, lowest status issue in Westminster — how the government actually buys critical goods and services and the capacity of our industrial production. And it has maintained this ruthless focus through the worst pandemic in a century that left over a hundred thousand unnecessarily choking to death then through the biggest war in Europe since 1945. There has literally been more interest in Russel Brand among political-media-academia elites than this central aspect of how our state and society work and why we’re worse at it than we were in the pre-computer age.

We are living through exactly what we read about in periods like summer 1914 — a structural blindness of dominant political-media-academic elites about core features of the system they participate in all day. We read history books about summer 1914 and ask ‘how could the entire Cabinet week after week not probe exactly what our military commitments to Belgium were, what exactly the plans were, and expose that there was no actual plan or institution to cope with the crisis’. We’re in a worse situation than they were.

It’s a disaster and an opportunity. And studying this chronology can help you see how to create opportunities from disasters. In 2015 I thought the structure of the system was a disaster but the referendum was an opportunity and I tried to apply some of the things I’d learned. This proved unexpectedly successful. And, in keeping with the point above about people struggling to learn, the same happened in 2019 even though powerful forces really wanted it not to happen.

What’s needed is a shift in governing institutions roughly as profound as the shift from the ancien regime pre-1789 to what we think of as the modern western state — a shift in the types of people, their training, their tools, institutions, and the fundamental principles and incentives by which they operate. We are still governed by the Cabinet Room almost indistinguishable from what it looked like when it was overwhelmed in summer 1914: a dozen or so people with poor education and training on top of highly centralised dysfunctional institutions largely blind to the incredible system complexity yet responsible for crises that can affect billions. 

His Bismarck project is a fascinating one. I’m giving some serious contemplation into engaging in it, assuming that he’s actually continued with it over the last two years, and it might make for an interesting collective effort in the old Voxiversity sense. Share your thoughts on this if it might be of any interest to you.

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