Tag: history

It’s Not Just Books

The destruction of knowledge at the behest of the Zero Historians isn’t limited to printed matter.

More than two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews.com is no longer available after MTV appears to have fully pulled down the site and its related content. Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similiar fate.

In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.

The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Monday” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.

This is why Castalia Library is expanding its efforts from just publishing leatherbound classics to leveraging its subscriber base to preserve knowledge in general. Among our efforts, which will include opening up Infogalactic editing to all Library and UATV subscribers and making it easier for them, is releasing free Library ebooks for all Library, Libraria, and History subscribers. We’ll also provide an inexpensive bundle of those titles for which we have permission available for sale as ebooks.

We’ll go with a standard cover for all of them, although we’ll update the logo once we’ve got the Castalia Library-specific one instead of the modified History variant. An example can be seen below. An announcement with a link will be made on the Castalia Library substack within the next week; if you haven’t subscribed there yet, we very much encourage you to do so.

We’re also going to start doing books that are transcriptions of worthwhile video works from various UATV and other video creators. If this is something of serious interest to you – and by serious, I mean cleaning up least five 1,500-word transcriptions per week – please email me with TRANSCRIBE in the subject line. We can provide an AI-transcribed text as a starting point, but it takes about twice as long to go over the whole video and edit it for print as the length of the video. So figure 20 minutes of work for a 10-minute video.

This is going to be particularly important in light of the meltdown we hear is coming in the book industry. The financial takeover of Simon & Schuster by KKR, a private equity firm, combined with the incipient failure of Barnes & Noble, means that the distribution system is going to be further converged and cease to function normally, which will have a tremendous negative effect on all of the mainstream publishing houses going forward.

UPDATE: MTV News isn’t the only site destroying its own archives in the last year:

Tech news website CNET has deleted thousands of old articles over the past few months in a bid to improve its performance in Google Search results, Gizmodo has learned. Archived copies of CNET’s author pages show the company deleted small batches of articles prior to the second half of July, but then the pace increased. Thousands of articles disappeared in recent weeks

UPDATE: Wikileaks is also being wiped.

Julian Assange has been instructed to direct WikiLeaks to destroy any remaining classified documents and information in their possession and provide an affidavit once completed, as part of his plea agreement.

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Mailvox: The War on Knowledge

An email from a reader illustrates how even the profession of the Librarian has been inverted in order to destroy the knowledge they are charged with preserving.

My wife and I are volunteers for the Friends of the Library at the branch library in the college town where we first met, where every year we help out at the book sales. A month ago we received a peculiar donation. It turns out the new director of the library at our alma mater made the decision to liquidate the library’s special collections. Among those liquidations was a special collection library that had been initiated in the nineteenth century by a member of college founder’s immediate family.

In my years at college, I treasured this special library – it was housed in an elegant top-level room in the college’s oldest building, and required special access to visit. Nearly all the books were old, and all of them were on special subjects of great interest to me – literature, poetry, theology, the sciences. Many titles had bookplates with the names of the alumni who donated them over the years.

After some investigation I discovered that this new head of the college library pulled all of the books out of that special library, and put them in an enormous rented bin in the main lobby, with a sign suggesting that students could use them for art projects and scrapbooking, you know, to cut and paste their contents to express themselves and be “creative.” The majority of books sat there for weeks, and then she called our group to donate them to our book sale.

The last day of the book sale is bag day, where a brown grocery bag of books is only a dollar. What the library doesn’t sell at the end of sale is brought to a pulper. I pulled all of these books and placed them in private storage—if I hadn’t, they would have literally been shredded a week ago.

The process is ongoing. I’m told that the librarian is closing all of the special collections in all departments of the college, so I don’t want to share any names just yet, but before this is over, I hope I’ll have saved at least a thousand out-of-print books.

This is not new. Well over a decade ago, another university library in my state was destroyed. This library, in a literal ivory tower built exclusively for holding and preserving hundreds of thousands of books, was at one time among the top ten libraries in the nation. A new library director had not only decided to gut the
interior of the building and destroy all of the original architectural detail and period decor, but he also pulled out and destroyed a great majority of the books to make room for “computer stations.” They did not sell the books, they did not offer to donate them, and the director specifically instructed staff to discard the books in locked university dumpsters so that they couldn’t be taken by anyone.

The bad, the ugly, and the false. That is the makeup of the world these people are actively contriving and constructing. It really is time to build a consortium of knowledge, physical and digital, containing archives of the world’s books and works that are under attack and being taken away.

The Serpent promises knowledge and provides nothing but ignorance. What we have collectively taken on as a responsibility with Castalia Library and Infogalactic may eventually prove to be one of the most important things any of us have ever done. We are the only true Librarians and we stand between Man and the state of Zero History that Clown World seeks to impose on him.

The Zero Historians need to destroy all human knowledge because only in its absence can they present their lies as truth. And indeed, the better we understand their motives and methods, the more it appears this is not the first time they have attempted such a grand endeavor.

Inversion is always the key. Now it should be perfectly clear what a fundamental lie the asserted conflict between Christianity and Science, and between Faith and Knowledge, has always been.

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How the Hapsburgs Took Over England

Or, was Henry VIIIth actually the good guy and was the dissolution of the monasteries motivated by something more than simple royal greed?

The story of Henry VIII is the story of a conflict. The conflict that is occurring is the conflict between Habsburg and Tudor houses. The house of Habsburg is, as they had previously done in many other European countries, attempting to gain political control of England through marriage and through its influence over the Catholic Church.

Which is to say: The Habsburgs are trying to take over England during the reign of Henry VIII.
Henry’s actions – exiting a marriage to a Habsburg connected figure, and exiting the Catholic Church – are direct responses to Habsburg attacks on England’s sovereignty through those same two avenues. The Habsburg attack comes through marriage and the Catholic Church.

However I have never seen that story recounted. Instead, I have only seen bizarre retellings where half the plot is left out, the Habsburg part. Obviously, if you omit the geopolitical motivation for Henry VIII’s actions from the story then his actions seem insane. The situation reminds me a little bit of the experience of accidentally walking into a spiderweb. Have you ever done this? It is totally jarring. You flail your hands and look like an idiot trying to get the bits of spiderweb off of your face. To an outside observer who can’t see the spiderweb you just walked into, you look spastic, manic. But there is a reason you’re acting that way. The conflict with the Habsburgs is that spiderweb for Henry VIII. You need to know it is there to understand his actions.

Is there any evidence of a Habsburg coup attempt? The evidence I have that the Habsburgs are trying to take over England during this period is that the Habsburgs do take over England in this period.

What? Yes. ‘Bloody Mary’ Tudor weds Phillip II Habsburg – the son of the Habsburg Emperor – just 5 years after the death of Henry VIII.

Phillip Habsburg becomes King of England Jure Uxoris – joint sovereign with Queen Mary. England comes under Habsburg control, along with Spain, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Flanders, Bohemia, Germany, Italy, Hungary and… Did I forget any? At this point the Habsburgs are basically kings of the Universe, totally drunk with power. In England they are literally burning their enemies at the stake.

The Habsburg method for expanding their territory was fairly simple:

  1. Find a failing kingdom in need of aid or protection.
  2. Offer to use your influence in the Catholic Church to aid the Kingdom in exchange for an advantageous marriage, protection money, or both.
  3. Betray the Kingdom and use your influence instead to install your newly wed Habsburg as the sole sovereign.

Are you starting to understand why the story of a medieval Republican who miraculously defeats something that looks suspiciously like today’s democratic institutional oligarchy has never been properly told?

The Habsburg Coup in Henry VIII’s England

I’ve literally never, ever, heard this theory before, but at first glance, it sounds extremely persuasive. It also tends to raise an obvious question about the ethnicity of the Hapsburgs, who were both highly consanguineous and physically deformed. They certainly appear to have worked out their own method of “color revolutions” centuries before the neocons, although it may simply be that they were inspirations for the Rothschilds rather than predecessors of some kind.

And, of course, it would be yet another example of a “religious war” actually being about something other than the purported religious conflict, which tends to track with what we’ve learned about everything from the Crusades to the 30 Years War.

To think some people actually believe that history is boring… Definitely read the whole thing!

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Subscribe, Scan, and Stockpile

Google whistleblower Zach Vorhies predicts a Clown World campaign against books:

Soon, you will see a silent undertaking to destroy the last decentralized form of offline knowledge:

Books.

If the elites don’t do this, then these books will be turned into training AI about the true history of the last 2000 years.

I highly recommend a) subscribing to one of Castalia’s series, b) scanning any unique book to which you have access, and c) stockpiling both books and electronic texts. The latter should be in the simplest possible forms, either PDF or TXT format.

We are the monestaries for the 21st Century and beyond. The Zero Historians are coming to destroy all human knowledge and neither the atheists nor the agnostics are going to stop them. So it again falls to us.

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Judgment, Not Blessing

The Christian Zionists who are on AIPAC’s payroll are even worse theologians than Calvinists and comedians. This is what a complete rhetorical blowout looks like.

The fact that the Jewish organizations in the USA are actually suing to remove the Ten Commandments from public schools should be sufficient to convince even the most rabid Christian Zionist that modern Jewry has an inverted connection to the historical Hebrew people, religion, and culture. It won’t be, but it should be.

God’s promises of blessings to Man have always been contingent on Man’s subsequent behavior. And one need only look at the current state of Israel, or, for that matter, the current state of the USA, to know that it is not God they serve, and that it is God’s judgment, not God’s blessings, that should be anticipated.

It is not as though God’s word had failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are his descendants are they all Abraham’s children. On the contrary, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” In other words, it is not the children by physical descent who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring.

–Romans 9:6-8

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The Harsh Lessons of History

One of the great benefits of reading history is that it provides the reader with an informed perspective to interpret current events. As I was scheduling future posts for the daily Castalia Library serialization of the 1911 edition of The Cambridge Medieval History, I came across this very timely section on the economic challenge faced by the Roman emperors in the early Third Century.

Serious economic difficulties have moral causes, and there was no radical cure short of a complete change in the temper of society. Yet much might have been done by a permanent reduction of taxation and a reform of its incidence and of the methods of collection. Instead of this, the machinery of government (and its expense) was greatly increased. The army had to be held in check by courts of Oriental splendour and a vast establishment of corrupt officials. We can see the growth of officialism even in the language, if we compare the Latin words in Athanasius with those in the New Testament. So heavier taxes had to be levied from a smaller and poorer population. Taxation under the Empire had never been light ; in the third century it grew heavy, under Diocletian it was crushing, and in the later years of Constantine the burden was further increased by the enormous expenditure which built up the new capital like the city in a fairy tale. We are within sight of the time when the whole policy of the government was dictated by dire financial need. We have already reached a state of things like that we see in Russia.

That passage anticipated the October Revolution by six years. Given that there are absolutely no indications that the American people are in any moral condition to force “a complete change in the temper of society” or even to stop the massive invasion of the last 59 years, it’s possible that we will see the political collapse I predicted would take place in 2033 as soon as 2030.

Simplicius notes that the Clown World elite that rules the USA appears to finally be aware that their predatory, self-serving governance has weakened the empire to the point they are in danger of being swept away completely.

I’ve written previously on the panic currently effervescing through the global elites, made viscerally apparent at conclaves like the Davos forum earlier this year. But in America particularly, a deep worry is now consciously gnawing the ruling class—they can see it, feel it: that the American Empire is on its last legs, close to collapse.

This month has seen a bevy of new thinkpieces from top American deepstate figures or old-guard publications urging the changing of course, lest the country be swept away by the remorseless tide of history… This is the theme which recurs again and again throughout the new zeitgeist taking over political discourse in the stricken Beltway—panicking neocons are exhorting each other: we’re in a fight for our lives, if we don’t accept the new realities, we’ll drown!

Ruling Class Finally Awakens to the Reality of America’s Decline, 22 June 2024

The clowns won’t be able to do anything to reverse the decline, or even slow it, of course. Subversion, rhetoric, corruption, and doubling-down are all they know how to do, but none of those tactics work when you’re the one in charge and you’re responsible for maintaining the social order. The more they subvert, the more they corrupt, and the more they double down, the weaker their position becomes.

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Do Not Fear the Good

For the last 24 hours, we have polled the subscribers of the Castalia Library substack to determine which work we would serialize in the aftermath of the very successful serialization of Oman’s STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS. The results were as follows, with Medieval History eking out a narrow victory over Meditations, which was a surprise to me, as I expected Discourses would be the favorite after having narrowly finished second last time, although I voted for the Marcus Aurelius work myself.

  • 35% THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY
  • 32% MEDITATIONS
  • 19% DISCOURSES ON LIVY
  • 13% POLITICS

Now, although we have not yet presented the logo for Castalia Library proper, as opposed to the logo for Castalia History, we already have the Latin motto for it: NOLITE TIMERE BONI. This admonition to not be afraid of the Good can be interpreted in several ways, one of which is “don’t be afraid to do it right”. This mindset applies to everything we do at the Library, from taking risks on ancient machines that may or may not work to abandoning a perfectly good space for a better one that provides us with room to grow in the future.

In this context, however, it applies to which version of the Cambridge Medieval History we serialize. Although I was originally thinking of the serialization in the context of the abbreviated edition by Charles Previté-Orton that we published in two volumes, both of which are already sold out, it occurred to us that the lack of material limitations that applied to the leather books does not apply to the digital domain of the substack. So, we’ve decided that instead of the 1952 Previté-Orton edition, we will serialize the first volume of the original 1911 edition edited by J.B. Bury, entitled The Christian Roman Empire and the Foundation of the Teutonic Kingdoms.

At 614 pages, not including the bibliography which we will not serialize, it’s of a similar length to the edition we published, but it goes much deeper into the details of historical events such as the original Nicene Council and Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians than the shorter Previté-Orton edition. Given the chance to provide our readers with the deeper and more substantive material, our philosophy dictates that we do so.

The serialization has already begun. Therefore, please enjoy the preface to volume I as presented by the editors.

The present volume covers a space of about two hundred years beginning with Constantine and stopping a little short of Justinian. At its opening the Roman Empire is standing in its ancient majesty, drawing new strength from the reforms of Diocletian and the statesmanship of Constantine: at its close the Empire has vanished from the West, while the East is slowly recovering from the pressure of the barbarians in the fifth century, and gathering strength for Justinian’s wars of conquest. At its opening heathenism is still a mighty power, society is built up on heathen pride of class, and Rome still seems the centre of the world: at its ending we see Christianity supreme, Constantinople the seat of power, and the old heathen order of society in the West dissolving in the confusion of barbarian devastations. At its opening Caesar’s will is law from the Atlantic to Armenia: at its ending a great system of Teutonic and Arian kingdoms in the West has just been grievously shaken by the conversion of the Franks from heathenism direct to orthodoxy.

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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?

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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.

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Seas of Blood

The bastard led the brave
Over the waves into the sun
200 strong against the Turk
Under sail, shield, sword, and gun

Two lines of battle, face to face
The rowers rowed, the banners blessed
The breath of God sanctified
The brave defenders of the West

And the seas flowed red
Amidst the countless drowning dead
The sailors bled
The seas flowed red
Seas of blood!
Seas of blood!

The signal flashed and war began
Cannons roared and sailors fell
200 strong they held the line
To send the Ottomans to Hell

The wind turned by the grace of God
The galley slaves were freed
They took up arms and joined the fray
With their brothers of the Creed!

And the seas flowed red
Amidst the countless drowning dead
The sailors bled
The seas flowed red
Seas of blood!
Seas of blood!

Two flagships came together
With all the violence of the storm
Two leaders fought, two leaders fell
And the Pasha’s deck was swarmed

The banner of the Holy League
Was raised high from the mast
The Turk knew he was beaten
And fought bravely to the last

And the seas flowed red
Amidst the countless drowning dead
The sailors bled
The seas flowed red
Seas of blood!
Seas of blood!

The battle raged til nightfall
Forty thousand died that day
The Venetians were avenged
And the blood-debt was repaid

The victors praised the Virgin
For the miracle at sea
200 strong remembered
So long as Christendom is free

And the seas flowed red
Amidst the countless drowning dead
The sailors bled
The vanquished fled
Seas of blood!
Seas of blood!

And the seas flowed red
Amidst the countless drowning dead
The sailors bled
The seas flowed red
Seas of blood!
Seas of blood!

You can hear this on the most recent Darkstream, if you’re interested.

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