A reader with the high and exalted yet incognito name of Alia writes and asks:
“Why is “colored” so awfully wrong while “of color” is totally right? From the perspective of a foreigner, it is illogical and simply mad.”
From the perspective of a native, likewise. It does not look mad, it is mad.
This madness is deliberate.
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Voice of Reason posts the next installment of the Last Crusade oration: Last Crusade 25 Deadly Junk Science.
The Last Crusade takes up arms against a fallen world.
The Debate is Over (Continued): The Enemy calls on settled authority to quell debate. But this so-called settled authority never settles on sound science, only junk science, and with fatal results
WARNING! Spoilers below the link.
In her Newberry-Award winning children’s book WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE MOON, Grace Lin reports the old Chinese fairy tale concerning the Leaf of Happiness.
Once, long ago, a family grew famous for their happiness: uncles, cousins and grandchildren never quarreled, nor was their ever an angry word among them. A bellowing and roaring magistrate, learning this, craved the secret of their happiness for himself. He dispatched soldiers with a small box to the family, commanding the secret of happiness be placed within and carried back to him, or else the soldiers would destroy the home. The grandfather of the happy family happily wrote the secret of happiness on a single leaf of paper which he placed in the box, but, by mischance, the box fell from the hands of the soldiers as they hurried back to the magistrate. The box broke open, the wind snatched the leaf of paper away. Before it vanished, the soldiers saw an odd thing: the paper was written with but a single word on both sides, inscribed over and over again. But what the word was, the soldiers could not see, and the secret of happiness was lost.
When I heard of this tale, I scoffed, doubting that even a storyteller as charming and skilled as Grace Lin, or the wise and ancient mothers inspiring her, could propose a lost word that a cynical and wry graybeard like myself would find satisfying.
After a tale such as this, what one-word answer could possibly be offered as a fitting culmination to the tale, and sum up the secret of happiness?
I am happy to report my scoffing was untoward: let all honest men learn from my error, and creep to conclusions rather than leap, testing each step on the way.
Before the end of the book, the word is revealed.
Do not click this link if you mean to read the book, for my next word is the secret to happiness.
A reader with the self-consciously illogical name of Glorious USSA writes:
“So you’re saying that I am a being whose choices are so important that the infinite God of the infinite universe takes a keen interest in each one, and my free will is strong enough to frustrate His will.”
Folly. It is not a question of strength. God is love. Love is voluntary.
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Loyal to the Destroyers is now posted.
This is a unpublished tale from my Unconquered Earth Cycle, and takes place in the same background universe as Farthest Man from Earth, Not Born a Man, and Twilight of the Gods.
It had previously appeared on this website in a slightly different form.
Chapter One of Six.
These events date from 2950 A.D.
The entry for this century from the Historical Institute Analects reads, in part, as follows:
It was due to the influence of nonhuman computer intelligence that the first expedition to the Destroyer World was launched, when that world was still some seven light-years away, detected only as an occlusion of the nebula NGC 6543 in Draco. The Anne Shamlin expedition discovered the true nature of the enemy.
Voice of Reason posts the next installment of the Last Crusade oration: Last Crusade 24 The Debate is Over.
The Last Crusade takes up arms against a fallen world. The Enemy silences opposition by leveling false accusations. First is the accusation that any opposing argument is defying settled authority, hence is rude, unscientific, out-of-touch, hence need not be answered.
A reader with the sunny, angelic, yet septentrionic name of Uriel7 makes a comment worth repeating in full. I present it here as a miniature guest essay:
There are seven answers to “the problem of pain” or “how to be happy”.
SanFrancisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone announced Friday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is barred from receiving Holy Communion due to her pro-abortion stance — marking an escalation in a decades-long tension between the Roman Catholic Church and liberal Democratic politicians on abortion.
Cordileone has written to the California Democrat, informing her that she should not present herself for Holy Communion at Mass, and that priests will not distribute communion to her if she does present herself.
My comment:
This is long overdue, and very welcome news. If Nancy Pelosi dies outside the church, she goes to hell. This is a core belief of the Roman Catholics, and one of the things that makes us so unpopular with the world.
Whether we Catholics are right or are wrong about this harsh and uncompromising belief, if Nancy pelosi is one of us truly, then she also believes it, and at her advanced age should and would be overwhelmed with terror for fear of facing the wrath of an offended Almighty God.
I have never known a left-wing Catholic, when push came to shove, and he absolutely positively had to choose between his love of leftism and his lukewarm loyalty to Christ, to choose Christ over politics.
Judging by past actions the Catholic Church will cave on this issue before any left wing leader will cave. But miracles have happened before, and we can pray for them to happen again.
Like the temporary abolition of the disinformation board, and the permanent failure of CNN streaming services, and the strong possibility that Roe v Wade will soon be overturned, this is good news.
Belle is a 2021 Japanese animated film written and directed by Mamoru Hosoda and produced by Studio Chizu. It came to my attention because the musical soundtrack has a haunting simplicity and beauty unlike anything made in the modern day.
I recommend it, and strongly, but only for those attracted to melancholy and sentimentality. This is a girlish story, so men without daughters may be uninterested.
Best of All Possible Worlds is now posted.
Avoiding events parallel to these in our own timeline may be possible.
Part two of two parts.
Voice of Reason posts the next installment of the Last Crusade oration: Last Crusade 23 The Devil’s Advocate.
The Last Crusade takes up arms against a fallen world.
The Last Crusade takes up arms against a fallen world. Three lies best promoting the Devil’s work on earth include saying that Devil does not exist, nor spirit, hope, or meaning; next that Sin does not exist but Utopia does; and finally that Man does not exist but only man-shaped meat robots.
I have had two strange conversations lately.
Without revealing any personal or embarrassing details about when they took place or with whom, let me say that one was with a theoretical physicist convinced that he could prove God existed by means of empirical observation, using a God-proving machine. He did not describe details of the machine’s operation, so do not ask me.
The other conversation was with a skeptic who held that if God were real, He would make His existence too obvious for doubt; and since He has not, He is not.
Both these positions run afoul of the Catholic teaching that God, as the First Cause and Last End of all things, can, from created things, be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason, even if other details of His divine nature cannot be.
On the one hand, First Causes and Last Ends are not open to empirical senses, even if created things are; on the other, what human reason can know, it can know, not must know. Reason cannot be forced.
The first conversation was neither interesting nor rewarding, since when I asked the physicist how empirical proof can prove a non-empirical reality, or how physics can prove a metaphysical proposition, I was brusquely informed that metaphysics was a null-set, matter without content, and that philosophy was merely abortive and lazy form of physics. I asked politely for his empirical proof that all philosophy was physics, and was belittled for asking, but not answered. Instead the man waved his credentials at me, and boasted many a boastful boast about himself.
I suppose if, like a stage-magician yanking a white hare out of a tophat, he can yank God Almighty out of the mouth of a cyclotronic supercollider or radiotelescopic dish, complete with roaring throne and blazing coronet and living creatures many-winged and filled with blazing eyes, surrounded by fiery rainbows, emerald and amber and jasper, and wheels within wheels and thunders and quakes and voices like the rushing of mighty waters, so that all the skeptics fall groveling on their faces and beg the mountains to fall on them, in such as case as this, our bold scientiferrifick pioneer of empirical theology will have a good and proper right to boast.
How can one not help but wish such a windbaggish crackpot good luck? We all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
The second conversation was more interesting, because at least it gives one pause. Is there something God could do to make Himself too obvious for doubt? I suggest that depends on one’s standard for doubt.
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Best of All Possible Worlds is now posted.
This grim and brief cautionary tale comes from a timeline parallel to ours, one which grows uncomfortably closer.
Part one of two parts.
The truth is that all men are made in God’s image, ergo all men are brothers.
Cain and Abel were also brothers. Brotherhood does not mean your brother is not a barbarian, a thief, a murderer, or a heathen more savage and unsanitary than a yahoo.
Racism and Antiracism lead to two opposite errors here, each equally foolish.
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Voice of Reason posts the next installment of the Last Crusade oration: Last Crusade 22: War with the Phantoms.
The Last Crusade takes up arms against a fallen world.
The Enemy is never at war with whom he seems to be. We live in an age obsessed with glass ceilings, dog whistles, and micro-aggressions, that is to say, with phantoms. The phantoms the Enemy claims to oppose are creatures of his own invention.
