Tag: history

The Stalwarts of Library

Congratulations to the intrepid subscribers to the Castalia Library substack, as today marks the end of our second serialization. After 315 daily installments and 614 pages covering everything from the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed to the Teutonic migrations, we have finally managed to accomplish together something I never quite managed to do on my own despite it being one of my prize possessions, which is read every single page of The Cambridge Medieval History Volume I: The Christian Empire.

So, well done, everyone.

To be honest, I’ve been a little shocked at seeing how many people have been reading along; there are usually 1,000 post-reads recorded, so even if three-quarters of those readers are only glancing at each post, that’s a lot more people reading through one of the more advanced historical summaries ever published.

Tomorrow I’ll put up a poll for what the next daily serialization should be. One option is to simply continue with Volume II: Foundation of the Western Empire, but perhaps we might do with a break from the Cambridge historians for a while. Feel free to make any suggestions on SocialGalactic, but recall that any work we serialize there must be in the public domain.

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A Century of Damning Evidence

If, at this point, you’re still vaccinating yourself or your children, you deserve the predictably suboptimal outcomes you are actively injecting into your life:

•Since at least 1933, the medical community has known that vaccines cause infant deaths. To conceal this, those deaths were renamed “crib death” and then “Sudden Infant Death Syndrome” (SIDS), eventually being attributed to infants not sleeping on their backs.

•This revisionism is not supported by the existing evidence nor the historical changes in the frequency of SIDS. Most recently, SIDS rates have had an unprecedented decrease in tandem with the COVID-19 lockdowns reducing vaccination rates.

•The vaccine most strongly associated with SIDS, DPT, was protected for decades by the government despite knowing a large body of evidence around the world showed it killed infants—particularly when an inevitable hot lot was released. Eventually, so many injury lawsuits were filed that in 1986, the government had to give blanket immunity to the vaccine manufacturers.

•This article will concisely review the vast body of evidence showing vaccines cause SIDS and reveal the mechanism modern research has now repeatedly proven causes vaccines to trigger infant death.

We’re always told that vaccines were a medical marvel that safely ended the dark age of infectious disease. However, when the actual records are examined, they often abjectly failed to prevent those diseases, and worse still, frequently caused outbreaks and severely injured many of the recipients.

This in part resulted from the inherent toxicity of vaccines and in part because manufacturing challenges regularly resulted in hot lots being released. Rather than address this, the vaccine industry chose to create a variety of strategies to conceal those issues, such as enshrining the dogma “all vaccines are safe” and giving blanket legal immunity to all the “safe” vaccines.

It’s perfectly understandable that many parents do not want to believe this. But the truth is not only ruthless, it is inexorable.

The incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome has grown from .55 per 1000 live births in 1953 to 1.28 per 1000 in 1992 in Olmstead County, Minnesota. The peak incidence for SIDS is at age 2 to 4 months, the exact time most vaccines are being given to children. 85 % of cases of SIDS occur in the first 6 months of infancy. The increase in SIDS as a percentage of total infant deaths has risen from 2.5 per 1000 in 1953 to 17.9 per 1000 in 1992. This rise in SIDS deaths has occurred during a period when nearly every childhood disease was declining due to improved sanitation and medical progress except SIDS. These deaths from SIDS did increase during a period when the number of vaccines given to a child was steadily rising to 36 per child.

What a tragic and inexplicable 133 percent rise in the number of parents shaking their babies and putting infants to sleep on their stomachs! Clearly more education is in order! More education and more vaccines!

UPDATE: the report got the rate of increase wrong. It was 0.55 to 1.28, not 0.55 to 12.8. Still an obvious problem, but literally one-tenth as glaring.

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Peter Turchin’s Substack

I’m a fan of Peter Turchin and his work in the historical field he has termed “cliodynamics”. He’s quantified and articulated a number of the things that those of us in the pattern recognition business had only dimly recognized, and it’s very exciting to see that he’s now permitting us to see more of his work outside his very good books, such as this recent post on the so-called French Wars of Religion:

I asked ChatGPT to give me a one-sentence explanation of the causes of this bloody and lengthy civil war. Here’s what it said: “The French Wars of Religion were primarily caused by growing tensions between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots) in France, fueled by religious intolerance, political rivalries among noble families, and a weak monarchy unable to maintain order.” This answer perfectly encapsulates the standard story as seen in popular historical books, or online encyclopedias (LLMs, such as ChatGPT, are great at summarizing such common wisdom).

Readers of my books and blog posts would immediately realize that Cliodynamics gives a very different answer. Noble rivalries and religious tensions were what happened on the surface. But the deep structural causes of the FWR were popular immiseration, elite overproduction leading to intraelite conflict, and fiscal collapse of the state. In other words, the usual suspects when we talk about structural-demographic crises.

The Day of the Barricades (Paris, 1588), an ostensibly spontaneous popular uprising, which was in reality organized by counter-elites

What I’d like to do in this post series is delve a bit into these structural causes (for a deeper dive read Chapter 5 of Secular Cycles). I have two reasons to do so. First, the onset of the FWR gives us a nearly perfect example of how structural-demographic trends lead to state collapse and civil wars. Second, it was the fiscal collapse of the state that triggered warfare in c.1560. I wrote about the possibility of such a trigger for the America today in a recent post, where I concluded that we are fairly immune against it. But France in the sixteenth century was, most emphatically, not immune.

The ultimate driver, as usual in agrarian states, was population growth. During the integrative phase of the cycle (1450 to 1560) the population of France doubled: from 10–11 to 20–22 million. The French Kingdom in the sixteenth century was an overwhelmingly agrarian state and agricultural productivity couldn’t keep up with such massive population growth. As a result, food prices exploded. The price of a setier (a measure of volume) of wheat in livres tournois (the standard monetary unit in early-modern France) increased 10-fold between the 1460s and 1560s. Overpopulation created a high demand for food, inflating its price, and it increased the supply of labor, deflating its price. During the sixteenth century real wages lost two-thirds or more of their buying capacity. The daily wage of the Parisian laborer could buy 16 kg of grain in the 1490s, compared to less than 4 kg one century later.

Turchin makes it easy to see how the mainstream historical narrative is every bit as dumbed-down and falsified as the current news reporting. If you’ve got any interest in history or the truth, and if you’re here, you probably do, I highly recommend taking a gander at his substack.

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Space is Green

If Shaquille O’Neal is to be trusted, and to be honest, I trust the Big Aristotle more than I trust science these days, the Blue Origin “space flight” should have been named Greenscreen Origin:

Spade said that they had been discussing why Shaq had not been aboard the space capsule. I would assume the answer is “real estate,” but Shaq explained that the reason was because he doesn’t think it ever went to space.

“Let’s discuss it: was it real?” Shaq began. “Let me go first. I know Jeff loves Laura…”

That’s “Lauren,” Shaq.

“…He wouldn’t want anything to happen to her, so I think there was some green screen involvement there.”

Alright, that’s some good conjecture, but any evidence supporting this, DJ Diesel?

“Number two: their hair was luxurious in space,” he said. “Katy Perry’s hair didn’t move Laura’s…”

Lauren, Shaq.

“…hair didn’t move. Nobody’s hair ever moved. Then I saw when they landed, Jeff had the special key, but it was already open.

“So, I’m going to go Universal Studios green screen on this one.”

I couldn’t agree more. Now do the so-called “Moon landing” by Apollo 11 in 1969. They’re going to need a new term for those of us who no longer believe anything related to the mainstream narrative, whether it relates to events of the modern era or ancient and medieval history. Conspiracy theorist doesn’t even begin to cut it when everything is more or less fake, and at the very least, dumbed-down and rewritten in a form that retards can begin to comprehend.

I think I’d prefer to go with Omni-Narrational Skeptic. If you’ve got a mainstream narrative to sell, then I am immediately and intrinsically skeptical of it. Look what happened to the very simple term and concept of “Sigma male” and then apply that filter to every single concept or event described since the year 1700.

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Vibrancy > Christianity

It’s no longer possible to pretend that the Episcopalian Church is Christian anymore:

Sean Rowe, the head of the Episcopal Migration Ministries, which leads The Episcopal Church, announced his organization will not resettle white Afrikaners refugees from South Africa.

In a letter published on May 12, Rowe revealed that the United States federal government requested Episcopal Migration Ministries to “resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government classified as refugees.”

However, he then announced the organization would not be doing it. He explained, “In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step.”

Episcopalians are more committed to diversity and the Devil, and worshiping at the altar of their black gods, than they are to the Churchian principles that they formerly espoused. Of course, those Churchian principles were always fake modifications of genuine Christian principles.

So much for all that “Jesus was a refugee” nonsense. Which was always blitheringly stupid and historically ignorant, considering that his family did the Roman equivalent of moving from New Jersey to Alabama because they had fallen afoul of the mayor of Newark.

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The Narrative is Always Wrong

James Delingpole actually reads Machiavelli for the first time and discovers that the generally accepted narrative about the Florentine is almost completely false:

Machiavelli was the victim of a Europe-wide hit job. By the time anyone outside Italy had read The Prince – it wasn’t translated into English til 1640 – Machiavelli’s name had long since become a byword for evil. England’s last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury Cardinal Pole, who resented his anti-clericism and his rudery towards the Pope, set the ball rolling by declaring him an ‘Enemy of the human race’. Machiavelli’s Christian name – Niccolo – was said to have given the devil his nickname, “Old Nick”. Elizabethan dramatists blamed him as the inspiration for all the scheming and murder that took place in Renaissance Italy. They hated him in France, too, where he was blamed for inspiring the behaviour of Catherine de Medici.

But what had Machiavelli actually done to deserve all this? Not a lot, as it happens. But enough Renaissance history and literary criticism. I want to conclude by extrapolating a more general truth about the nature of our understanding of the world. And about how the dark rulers who currently lord it over us – the modern equivalent of the Medicis, the Pope, Charles V and the various Italian city states, I suppose – get away so easily with doing to us what they do.

One of the things we Awake types are often lamenting is the way in which the tiniest, smallest sliver of a fraction of the world’s population – the Cabal; the Predator Class; The Powers That Be; the Satanic Bloodlines; call them what you will – has yet been able to treat us like cattle, or worse than cattle, for generation upon generation. And while obviously, I’m not letting the Cabal off the hook – they really are evil – I do think there’s a degree to which we have invited our own destruction by being so complacent and lazy.

I’m blaming myself as much as anyone. Especially the person I was before I woke up. There I was, blessed with one of the best educations the world supposedly offers, and yet still, mostly, I remained mired in ignorance because I took too easily for granted what I had been told by my imagined superiors – parents, teachers, the government, ‘experts’, whoever.

The Machiavelli thing is just one tiny example of this. Here, briefly, I have with luck demonstrated that everything 99.99 per cent of the people who’ve heard of Machiavelli know about one of the bigger names in history, or political philosophy anyway, is a caricature of a travesty of complete nonsense. It’s at best a crass simplification; at worst – probably for the usual reasons of propaganda and political intrigue – a cynical misrepresentation.

And it happened because, as usual, none of us did our homework. We regurgitated what teacher wanted to hear – Machiavelli bad, m’kay – and the reason teacher wanted to hear it was because he or she hadn’t bothered to do the homework either. Rather than read the actual book, we all went with the received idea of people who hadn’t read the book and took it on trust that the generally accepted narrative was the correct one.

I am aware that some are dubious about my contention about the importance of the Junior Classics, Castalia Library, UATV, and preserving knowledge for the future. But when one considers the fact that every single backer of the Junior Classics, and every subscriber to Castalia Library, are observably better informed with regards to history, philosophy, science, and religion than even the graduates of some of the most elite college educations in the West, that contention suddenly appears much more soundly based on the available evidence.

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Science “Discovers” Auras

As I have said many times, the idea that science, in any of its three aspects, can ever be regarded as a truth-metric is both a) erroneous and b) fundamentally flawed due to its intrinsic ceiling based on the state of current technology. Which the new scientific “discovery” of a millennia-old observation illustrates rather nicely.

Mystics and spiritualists have often claimed they can see a glow of mysterious light surrounding living creatures. Now, scientists have discovered that there may be some truth to their claims.

Researchers from the University of Calgary in Canada have found that living things produce a faint ghostly glow. And their new study proves that this light is snuffed out the moment we die.

This isn’t a mystical force or evidence for the human soul, but rather a physical phenomenon called ultraweak photon emission, the team said.

As the cells in living creatures produce energy, the chemical processes involved release a tiny amount of light in the form of photons, the particles that make up light. While the existence of this glow has been controversial, scientists using ultra-sensitive cameras claim to have provided ‘very clear’ evidence for the existence of ‘biophotons’.

This is why Sherlock Holmes was always wrong and the improbable is more reliable than the impossible. Because our concept of what is “impossible” is necessarily time-biased and technologically-limited. Most people have always dismissed the possibility that others can see the emanations of life, but their dismissals were always self-centered and irrelevant for the same reason that my inability to see certain shades of green and orange does not suffice to prove that those colors do not exist.

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What Shakespeare Really Wrote

It’s truly fascinating to see how the Official Shakespeare Story necessarily involves all sorts of conspiracy theories and ignoring nearly all the actual evidence of the documented works, while the so-called “conspiracy theory” that Shakespeare was a lesser author who plagiarized Lord Thomas North is based in rock-solid evidence of every kind, from eyewitness observation to AI literary analysis:

We now know that Shakespeare penned lesser, collaborative works and inferior stage-renditions (i.e., the bad quartos) of the literary masterpieces because that is what all documentation—all relevant title pages printed while he was alive and within a few years of his death—explicitly declared. Moreover, as we shall show now, that is clearly what many of his fellow writers knew to be the case, with Robert Greene and Ben Jonson even deriding Shakespeare’s method of close adaptation as plagiarism. Incredibly, my one goal on this substack is to confirm that all relevant Shakespeare-era documents are accurate; that there were no devious, behind-the-scenes plots; that all the recorded observations and comments about the Stratford dramatist are factual; that large groups of playwrights, printers, and publishers were not concocting, wide-ranging, multi-decade schemes meant to fool future generations of researchers. Incredibly, and despite the significant amount of controversy that this will generate, I am merely urging readers, again and again, and accept what the title pages state and what his friends and rivals wrote about him. All you have to do is just believe your eyes.

The very first reference to Shakespeare in London as an “upstart crow, beautified” with the feathers of other writers evokes Horace’s description of a plagiarist as a crow who has decorated himself with the feathers of more beautiful birds

The first widely accepted literary allusion to Shakespeare appeared in the 1592 satirical pamphlet, Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, allegedly written by the playwright Robert Greene. It described the playwright as an upstart crow beautified with the feathers of other writers. Upstart refers to his sudden success, achieving wealth and power as a young man, and the tale of the crow that had been beautified with the feathers of other birds alluded to Horace’s classical allegory of plagiarism. The Roman poet compared a plagiarist to a crow who has decorated himself with the feathers of more beautiful birds. As New Cambridge editor J. Dover Wilson wrote about this passage, the pamphlet “was accusing Shakespeare of stealing and adapting plays upon Henry VI.” Similarly, Peter Berek agreed that the “‘upstart crow’ passage is accusing Shakespeare of being a plagiarist who takes credit for the work of other writers.”

Importantly, we have no examples of such accusations of plagiarism being hurled at any other prominent writers of the era. Indeed, we don’t even have any comments about Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Beaumont, John Fletcher, etc., that can even be confused as an allegation of plagiarism.

Ben Jonson lampoons Shakespeare as an ignorant country bumpkin
As is conventional, Ben Jonson spoofs Shakespeare in his satire Every Man Out of His Humor (1600), parodying the successful dramatist as the newly wealthy, satin-clad, uneducated, social-climbing rustic Sogliardo. Sogliardo aggressively pursues a higher social rank and purchases his coat of arms with the crest “Not without mustard”. As scholars note, Shakespeare’s social aspirations were well known, and he had recently obtained a coat of arms with the crest “Not without right.” In substituting “mustard” for “right,” Jonson probably took his cue from the “mustard scene” in The Taming of the Shrew, in which the clown, Grumio, attempting to starve Katherina, refuses to serve her beef without mustard.

H. N. Gibson, noting the similarity of the crests and the fact that “Shakespeare did aspire to gentility,” writes that “there can be little doubt that Shakespeare was one of [Jonson’s] victims in Every Man Out of His Humour.” James P. Bednarz agrees that Sogliardo is a caricature of Shakespeare, writing that Jonson was mocking Shakespeare’s “outlandish aspiration to gentility.” Katherine Duncan-Jones may have been succumbing to Stratfordolatry when she contended that “Sogliardo, a country bumpkin of manifest stupidity, could not possibly be construed as a portrait of Shakespeare,” yet she agrees that it is “impossible not to find a Shakespearean reference” in the arms, referring to it as Jonson’s “mockery” of “Shakespeare’s pursuit of gentility.”

It’s also informative to note that when modern scholars are presented with the evidence of Shakespeare’s actual writing, correctly attributed to him, they reject it because they recognize that it can’t possibly be written by the author of the works he plagiarized.

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Will Trump Put America First?

Simplicius reports on the recent panic in the Israeli media about the possibility that President Trump may have finally given up on the idea that what is good for the Jews is good for Americans, and in doing so, cites Jason Hickel’s apt observation of the obvious:

Palestine is the rock on which the West will break itself.

Put yourself in the shoes of people in the global South. For nearly two years they have watched how Western leaders, who love to talk about human rights and the rule of law, are happy to shred all these values in the most spectacular displays of hypocrisy in order to prop up their military proxy-state as it openly conducts genocide and ethnic cleansing against an occupied people, even in the face of *overwhelming* international condemnation.

What do you think people in the South are supposed to conclude from this? What would *you* conclude from this in their position? Decades of Western propaganda have been shattered, this time in full technicolour. Western governments have made it clear that they do not care about human rights and the rule of law when it comes to people of colour, the global majority. They spit on humanity. 500 years on from the beginning of the European colonial project and they have hardly changed in this regard.

If you think people will be willing to tolerate this going forward, you are mistaken. As Southern states begin to develop the capacity to reject Western hegemony, they will not hesitate to do so. In the 21st century, the West will find itself isolated from the world majority, and the world will move on without them.

Keep in mind that by “the West” what Hickel is really talking about is Clown World, which is the subversive anti-Christian elite that has ruled the West, first indirectly, then directly, since at least 1913 and possibly longer. China has already rejected Clown World supremacy. Russia has thrown off its oligarchs, but there are still some questions about Putin’s connections to Chabad, to which Donald Trump is tied through his daughter.

But while Trump is compromised and conflicted, as Simplicius notes, he also isn’t an idiot and he is not naturally inclined to go down the same futile path to destruction as his presidential predecessors.

Israel is in deep trouble, and has backed itself into an intractable corner. Trump likewise senses his entire legacy hangs in the balance of becoming another in a long line of warmongers, drowned—like past administrations before him—in the endless Mideast conflicts stoked by the perennial Israeli puppeteers. Will he have the courage to make the boldest and most decisive move possible?

Despite resorting to open genocide and ethnic cleansing, Israel still hasn’t been able to defeat Hamas, let alone Hezbollah. Attempts to enshrine Holocaustianity into US law are fanning the flames of genuine hatred, even as the younger generation across the West discovers who were the genuinely responsible parties for the invasion, degeneration, and decline of their societies.

Neocon Mark Levin is sufficiently panicked to say the quiet part out loud.

By the way, neocon is a pejorative for Jew. Unbelievable.

Think about what he’s admitting there. When the substance is intrinsically negative, every label eventually becomes a pejorative, due to the nature of what it is describing.

The truth is that it doesn’t really matter very much whether President Trump decides to do the right thing or if he fails due to a lack of courage. Events are going to take their course, the pendulum has been swinging back for ten years, and it will continue doing so for at least another fifty years, perhaps another century or more.

The Empire That Never Ended will survive, as it always does, hiding in the shadows and in the dark corners of various societies, and in the dark hearts of corrupt men, but its current form, which we know as Clown World, is already collapsing.

Carthago semper delenda est.

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The Return of the Mercenary

Which raises the natural question: if mercenaries are back, is the return of the City-State next?

At my Australian High School, there was a weekly assembly of all students and time was always set aside for us to sing the national anthem. Yet almost no one sung it. Some would mouth it, others hum, while many did nothing at all. At most someone would start to sing it, lasting about 10 seconds before folding back into the hum. The only exception was our principal, who had served in the military. Even he struggled, and not for lack of memory of the lifeless lyrics, but in the battle against the apathy of everyone around him. This is emblematic of the loss of national consciousness that has occurred in Western countries, though I doubt we Westerners are the only ones. The loss of national consciousness makes the current political order and all others that have been seen since the French Revolution untenable. German-speakers of the 13th century cannot fight for anything but God, family, their local lord or money. The national consciousness simply does not exist.

Shortages of military recruits is a common problem to many Western countries. Despite generally offering salaries + benefits equal to or in excess of what would be found in private industry for an average young man there is a deficit of applicants. The flag simply isn’t motivating enough to die for anymore. This calls in to question the viability of even the professionalised state militaries that are supposed to fight the post-Vietnam Cabinet’s War. Indeed, the United States has been afflicted with an enduring shortage of recruits, this is despite replacing much of their front-line soldiers with mercenaries (Private Military Contractors). The significance of the use of mercenaries can be most clearly seen through their share of total combat deaths. As of 2020, total US military service-member (government soldier) fatalities in Iraq numbered at 4586, while total Private Military Contractor fatalities in Iraq numbered at least 3413. So as at least 43% of total American fatalities in Iraq were American Private Military Contractors. 2009 was the point when American Private Military Contractor fatalities year-on-year surpassed those of US government soldiers. Such a ratio of mercenary to state soldier fatalities in an army is more reminiscent of a medieval campaign than what would have been considered a “modern” war for the last 250 years.


Any attempt to fight the long-term trend of neomedievalism by forcible conscription will end as Vietnam ended. Additionally, any attempt to “change the culture” to get more volunteers will have the same effect as my school principal awkwardly singing the national anthem. The pressure or emotion to “answer the call” of the nation-state has been lost due to multiple factors. The key complaint is “what are we fighting for”. It’s an important one. What precisely a Brit, Australian, Frenchman, American, Canadian etc. is has lost much definition since the end of World War 2, particularly in the last 40 years. Intra-country political and ethno-religious differences now trump inter-country hatred. People also do not trust the media as they once did, so the media does not have a monopoly on truth which it once had. Use of the media is a crucial tool in rallying the masses for secular wars, without it the need for coercion multiplies. Coercion, which the outcome of Vietnam in the United States showed cannot be supplied. I don’t think that there is anything that would cause majority of Western male Zoomers to be out on the streets protesting, rioting or otherwise actively resisting the government; with the sole exception of military conscription to a war. Gen Alpha will be much the same.

Somehow, I don’t think neo-medievalism and all of the incumbent serfdom was what most people had in mind when they bought into the lies of Clown World.

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