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AGAINST THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
Season 02 Episode 12: The Prime Directive Dilemma
A discussion of when it is right or wrong for a civilized culture to interact and interfere with a primitive one.
From THE PHOENIX EXULTANT, vol. II of my debut trilogy.
In the far future, where men are as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus discovers all memory of his lifework has been hidden from him. For he is the engineer of the sole starship his civilization has ever produced: the mighty, majestic, and immense Phoenix Exultant. She is a ship to conquer the stars.
But such ambition is outlawed in utopia. Phaethon is a pariah, exiled mentally and physically, denuded of possessions, and cast down among outcasts. His life is sought by sinister agents of the Silent Oecumene: an apocalyptic menace none but he dares see. For in a world where mind or memory can be edited at will, what is truth?
Episode 03: Phaethon Zero of Nothing
Here is a topic which is always timely.
We are all weary hearing the claim that opposition to the widespread normalization of sodomy, pederasty, transvestitism, castration, is bigotry akin to fascism; and we are likewise weary of the claim that tolerance toward perversion will usher in the paradise of endless worldwide orgies, like some mad vision of hordes of houri from an Arabic afterlife.
Let me set out the basic conservative argument, so that we need hear no more extraneous comments about utopia or Nazi Germany or how liberating to women divorce and sexual perversion are, or how happy it makes virgins to fornicate.
All of that, true or false, is irrelevant to the basic argument.
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Maundy Thursday is a day of humility, to remember Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. Maundy is the name of the Christian rite of footwashing. The word “Maundy” is originated from the Latin word called “mandatum,” which means “commandment” as in Jesus’ commandment to his disciples to love one another.
It is also the last day of one’s Lenten vows.
I must say it is only my second favorite day of the season. First is Spy Wednesday, which is a reference to the treason of Judas.
The next episode of the AGAINST THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS is posted.
From THE PHOENIX EXULTANT, my debut trilogy.
In the far future, where men are as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus discovers all memory of his lifework has been hidden from him. For he is the engineer of the sole starship his civilization has ever produced: the mighty, majestic, and immense Phoenix Exultant. She is a ship to conquer the stars.
But such ambition is outlawed in utopia. Phaethon is a pariah, exiled mentally and physically, denuded of possessions, and cast down among outcasts. His life is sought by sinister agents of the Silent Oecumene: an apocalyptic menace none but he dares see. For in a world where mind or memory can be edited at will, what is truth?
Episode 02: Scaramouche, Columbine, Pierrot
My compliments to Fourth Age, whose insightful commentary gave the inspiration and the thread of argument I copy, in my own way, below. To hear a more careful disquisition of this argument see here: Why They/Them Can’t Write Superheroes
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Conquered peoples see their calendars altered, their feast days changed, their banners burned, their monuments toppled. This also holds true for those conquered by subversion rather than conquest, and for humble monuments as well as great.
Humble monuments of the popular culture have fallen to dust: Blue Clues celebrates drag queens to toddlers. Dungeons and Dragons was made wheelchair-accessible. And Superman was overtaken by the Anti-Life Equation.
The woke are bold, bald-faced, and bad. Their boldness and baldness we discuss in other columns.
The question here is why their deceptions are so bad, this is, what make their story tales so poor, their propaganda so tin-eared, their advertisements so unconvincing.
A comment by Scott Adams on Twitter, which I pass along without comment:
Next week, Trump could make over $4 billion when his media company goes public, removing all doubt about his billionaire status.
And you can stop asking if he would have been better off putting his inheritance in a savings account in the 70s.
I expect Trump to leave a 15% tip for Leticia James and the Democrats because they made his windfall possible by hunting him and censoring him for years. You can call it a bond, not a tip, if you prefer.
When the Supreme Court tosses out the unconstitutional fine, Trump gets most of his “tip” back.
The Democrats planned to cripple Trump financially so he couldn’t spend as much on the campaign. Trump turned Leticia James into his best fundraiser.
Lots of interesting developments lately on the topic of the 2020 election. The Simulation wants at least one of those fresh allegations to be a Kraken.
Trump’s legal maneuvering is likely to keep him eligible for the election.
You can fantasize about a heroic Democrat such as Newsom swooping in and replacing Biden, but it’s looking less likely every day. If it had always been the plan, it would have happened by now. Looks like Biden has to stay on the job to keep the Biden Crime Family out of jail.
The predictable Democrat Summer Hoax will add some excitement, but it will be forgotten and debunked by November.
Trump’s upcoming victory is looking like it will be, as Trump says, “too big to rig.” And by that I mean Democrats will try to rig it anyway and get caught. That will be fun.
The gears of the machine have become visible. We can all see the FBI is rotten and the DOJ is weaponized. We know the border is open intentionally. We know the cartels are working with our government. We know our elections are DESIGNED to not be auditable and there’s only one reason for it. We can see Biden is not in charge. We know the Ukraine war was always about its energy resources and who gets to own them. We know our rising debt is ruinous. We know our experts are liars. We know our pharma and food industries are poisoning us. We know our government is racist. We know the corporate media is essentially owned by Democrats who are controlled by intelligence entities and they are actively brainwashing the population. We know the 1st and 2nd amendments, and X, are under sustained government attack because they are the public’s last defense against the government.
But we are not quitters.
And the odds do not apply to us.
Conquered peoples see their calendars altered, their feast days changed, their banners burned, their monuments toppled. This also holds true for those conquered by subversion rather than conquest, and for humble monuments as well as great.
Humble monuments of the popular culture have fallen to dust: Blue Clues celebrates drag queens to toddlers. Dungeons and Dragons was made wheelchair-accessible. And Superman was overtaken by the Anti-Life Equation.
The woke are bold, bald-faced liars, and bad at their task. Their boldness and badness we discuss in other columns. The question here is why their deceptions are so bald, this is, so undisguised.
Conquered peoples see their calendars altered, their feast days changed, their banners burned, their monuments toppled.
This also holds true for those conquered by subversion rather than conquest, by spiritual warfare rather than physical.
In our current day, it is 2024 C.E. (Common Era), and social media are wont to post homages to International Woman’s Day rather than Lady’s Day, or to Kwanzaa rather than Christmas, or to Pride Month rather than Lent. Vladimir Lenin established the first, and a Marxist activist named Karenga the second. Pride Month, not by coincidence, falls on days sacred to the demon-goddess Ishtar of Babylon, a bisexual hermaphrodite, patroness of the Temple Prostitutes of ancient Near Eastern religion.
Burning the American Flag is Free Speech, hence sacred, but defacing a Pride Flag is Hate Speech, hence blasphemy.
A season of toppling statues and monuments occupied the so-called Summer of Love, when the press enflamed riots, the politicians cheered, and the police stood aside.
Not just high and noble figures were pulled from pillars or torn from courthouses, not just images of Jefferson, Washington, Roosevelt and Columbus, but also the humbler figures of common entertainment, and cartoons for children old and young.
The question is not why it is being done. Conquered peoples continually dispirited and disheartened cannot combine against the effete elite despoiling them. The question is why is it being done so boldly, so baldly, and so badly?
From THE PHOENIX EXULTANT, my debut trilogy.
In the far future, where men are as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus discovers all memory of his lifework has been hidden from him. For he is the engineer of the sole starship his civilization has ever produced: the mighty, majestic, and immense Phoenix Exultant. She is a ship to conquer the stars.
But such ambition is outlawed in utopia. Phaethon is a pariah, exiled mentally and physically, denuded of possessions, and cast down among outcasts. His life is sought by sinister agents of the Silent Oecumene: an apocalyptic menace none but he dares see. For in a world where mind or memory can be edited at will, what is truth?
I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through a belief in the Threeness,
Through confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation.
I arise today
Through the strength of Christ’s birth and His baptism,
Through the strength of His crucifixion and His burial,
Through the strength of His resurrection and His ascension,
Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of doom.
I arise today
Through the strength of the love of cherubim,
In obedience of angels,
In service of archangels,
In the hope of resurrection to meet with reward,
In the prayers of patriarchs,
In preachings of the apostles,
In faiths of confessors,
In innocence of virgins,
In deeds of righteous men.
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Excerpts from THE GOLDEN AGE, my debut novel from 2001.
In the far future, where humans have become as gods, living lives of perfect peace and prosperity, Phaethon of Rhadamanthus House discovers centuries of his memory are lost. Like his namesake, has flown too high, and must be cast down: for he has committed the one act the Golden Age forbids, to have ambitions higher than utopia can contain. Now his quest is to find himself.
Episode 47: Downfall of Phaeton
This is the Final Episode in THE GOLDEN AGE.
The tale of the Phaethon of Rhadamanth continues in THE PHOENIX EXULTANT
The quote of the day for today comes from the eminently quotable Tom Simon:
Then there are the things that are supposed to manifest some kind of ‘artificial intelligence’. Many of these are based on ChatGPT or another large language model. Superstitious folk, such as tech journalists, have a belief that LLMs can actually understand language; very superstitious folk, such as professional linguists, even believe that language can be ‘understood’ merely by knowing how to manipulate words. This is an error, as Searle showed with his ‘Chinese room’ thought-experiment. A chat bot only ‘understands’, for instance, that the symbol rose frequently occurs in the neighbourhood of such other symbols as red, white, bouquet, thorn, or even love; and these are frequently juxtaposed with still other symbols, and by exploiting these apparent coincidences, the bot can squirt out sentences that will appear to a human to make sense.
But it is only an appearance. We are all, I hope, familiar with the cases where superstitious lawyers have relied on bots to generate legal briefs; and the bots, which could easily imitate the form of a brief, knew nothing of its content, and their output was larded with bogus citations of nonexistent cases. For the bot does not know what a law is, or what a case is, or what a brief is actually for. You will, I am afraid, best understand what an LLM is, if you think of it as an enormously well-read parrot. Most of the wisdom of the ages, and all of the stupidity, is to be found in the texts on which the parrot was trained; and some of it is bound to come up in the composite texts which the parrot faithfully regurgitates. But none of it has any meaning to the parrot, and it is to your credit, not the parrot’s, if any of it happens to have meaning to you. At any rate the parrot is not to be trusted.
From his essay Uninteresting Things. Which should be read.
