And, most importantly, more ecologically-friendly dark lord.
Year: 2023
Gen X Answers Gen Z
This Gen X woman’s response to an innocent question is both hilarious and absolutely 100-percent true.
So when y’all are saying that y’all used to drink from the hose… were sinks not an option?
For fuck’s sake. Whose gonna tell him? You want me to tell him? I’ll tell him.
We weren’t allowed in the house!
I don’t know why that’s so hard for people to understand. Our childhood was like one never-ending episode of that TV show, Survivor, okay? We are indestructible. We never sat in car seats, nobody’s ever given us swimming lessons, we’ve all either been shot with a BB gun or stabbed with a fucking jart. The television stations had to make a commercial reminding our parents that they had kids!
I shit you not! Every night, on the 10 PM news, a voice would come on and say: “It’s 10 PM, do you know where your children are?” To remind our parents that they had fucking kids.
So, no, Sir Shirtless with the beanie. Sinks were not an option.
UPDATE: To be fair, being dropped off at 7 AM to go skiing all day with the Otto Hollaus Ski School or being left at the neighborhood ice rink with nothing but an unheated “warming hut” after lunch to play hockey until dark were some of my favorite childhood experiences.
Sunday Arktoon
THE WISE OF HEART Episode 23: Best Two Out of Three
FLYING SPARKS Episode 72: 0 For 2
NEURAL NETWORK NOVELLAS Episode 12: Wanted – Dead Man
PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 61: No Honor amongst Magical Freaks
FIDDLE WITH DARKNESS Episode 8: The Murky Boy
AFTER ATLANTIS Episode 6: Grudging answers
FULL OF EYES Episode 37: Put to Death
CLASSIC BIBLE TALES Episode 97: Passover Preparations
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 244: Stricter Scale
FULLSTRIKE! Episode 6: The Warm Up
Spirits Accessing the Material World
Bruce Charlton ponders how demons might utilize Man’s technology for satanic purposes.
1. The spiritual is primary, and the material is a sub-set of the spiritual.
2. The spiritual world exists as Beings – (is ‘organized’ as Beings) which are living, conscious, purposive entities.
3. A Being can form part of a larger Being, and often includes smaller Beings.
Putting together the above three assumptions, we can see that the agenda of evil might be administered overall by a Being such as Satan, who is analogous to a general directing lower ranks towards a particular strategy. These lower ranks might include demons participating in a hierarchy of organized and specialized functions; the lower ranks also include Men – and other Beings and parts-of-beings such computers, programs, the internet…
While demons are supposed to be wholly committed to evil by their natures; the Men who participate in the System of evil are only partially being used for that purpose.
So a Man might regard his job as ‘just’ digging holes and building walls, or collecting and summarizing data in an office; and this activity might be integrated into an evil-orientated agenda… or a Good and Godly one; and to varying degrees.
Yet the situation is not static, and evil operates purposively to increase itself and corrupt other Beings; so the Man in an evil-aiming organization who digs holes, or the one that deals with ‘information’ – might be confronted-with links between his activity, and its aims and consequences.
So that he will become aware of his participation in evil, and then needs consciously to decide whether to endorse or repent this participation – each of which will have different consequences for how much of himself participates in the System.
If demons can hurl furniture around and turn lights on and off, then there is no reason to believe they cannot interact in a more sophisticated manner with more complicated material objects. While I’m not particularly concerned about AI qua AI, I can imagine how what purports to be AI might be something else merely pretending to be AI and operating in its guise.
This is not a new idea. In THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, CS Lewis presented a similar use of the material for interdimensional communication.
The Battle for Bakhmut is Over
One year after Russian forces reclaimed Mariupol, they have expelled the forces of the Kiev regime from Bakhmut. As Simplicius notes in his most recent sitrep, the frantic retroactive denial of the city’s importance, contradicting all the previous posturing of Zelensky and his globalist backers, has begun in earnest, thereby underlining the veracity of the Russian assertions.
None of the tricks worked. All the endless distractions, diversions, deflections, and myriad attempts to pry our eyes from the inevitable, massive humiliation for NATO forces in Bakhmut—or is it Artemovsk now?—using every tool in their possession, from diversionary strikes on civilians on Russian border towns, to outright political assassination to steal headlines and steer public attention: none of it worked.
Bakhmut today has fallen on the exact one year anniversary of the fall of Mariupol on May 20th, 2022. And not surprisingly, the posture adopted by the UA supporters is the same exact energy as before: cringe, cope, excuse-making. “Bakhmut’s mission is accomplished,” they say, swallowing sobs.
It’s a long article, but the most interesting part to me is the connection he draws between the talk of the expedited delivery of F-16s to Ukraine and the anticipation of the failure, or even the nonexistence, of the Ukrainian spring offensive that is supposed to justify continued support for the Kiev regime in the West. It is very apparent that support for Kiev is faltering everywhere from Berlin to Washington, even as support for Russia is growing across Africa and Araby.
But while Clown World’s realists are looking for a negotiated exit which may or may not be possible, the neoclowns who started the whole thing are as rabidly aggressive as ever. Hence the F-16 gambit, which has been dreamed up to provide the basis for an argument in favor of Ukraine’s eventual success after the inevitable failure of the UFA “offensive” becomes undeniable in August or September.
However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note Simplicius’s observations on the incapacitation of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who was seriously wounded on May 8th during a visit to a command post by a Russian missile. The fact that the deputy Minister of Defense for the Kiev regime is now talking openly about the possibility that Russia “intends to assassinate” Zaluzhnyi strongly implies that the wound was fatal and he is already out of the picture.
While Ukraine has other generals, the fact that the UFA’s Commander-in-Chief has been taken off the board will likely factor in to the eventual decision of various countries like France and Germany to throw in the towel sooner rather than later. There was never any significant desire for war with Russia on the part of any European country outside of Poland and the UK, and what little there was is gone in the aftermath of Russia’s relentless string of victories on the military, economic, and diplomatic fronts.
Anyhow, read the whole thing for a much more realistic perspective on the current situation than you will read in any mainstream media publication.
Italian Apocrypha
It’s probably not true. But it is amusing to think it might be.
Knew a guy once who, back in the day, was not A-list but was high up in the academic semiotics (philosophy of signification) world. not famous but edited books people have read. he told me this story. He goes to Italy and goes to this conference. Umberto Eco is there. He meets Umberto Eco and is very excited. Umberto Eco says, hey man – tonight, come to my hotel room with a bottle of whiskey – and gives him the room number and address.
Our narrator is extremely amped about this, a private evening of discussion with the foremost man in his field. He finds a bottle of whiskey, gets to the hotel, goes to the room. Umberto Eco opens the door and says:
“Do you know what the most valuable thing in life is?”
Narrator says: no.
Umberto Eco says: “solitude” and takes the bottle, and closes the door.
To be honest, this was not my experience of Dottore Eco at all. Both times I met him, he was extremely friendly, very social, and as Spacebunny noted, more than a little charming. But it is amusing nevertheless.
The World They Knew is Gone
Kurt Schlichter explains why conservatives are intellectually and emotionally unequipped to deal with the realities of the world today:
Conservatives, being conservative, like to think they live in an ordered world with norms and rules and that if they rely upon the norms and rules, they will be protected. They won’t be. The genius of cultural Marxism is how it attacks those foundational premises that conservatives believe in, perverts them, and then uses them as a suppository on the befuddled cons…
And now we have the sham system of today. But dumb cons cannot comprehend that systems only function if all the cogs are working correctly. If one component is flawed – like a leftist DA pursuing a specific agenda – you stop having a system. But dumb cons do not want to accept that the justice system has been corrupted so that there is no justice system anymore. They seek the false comfort of illusory normalcy so they do not have to face the ugly reality.
Get it through your thick squish heads – there is no justice system to preserve or protect anymore.
The past is history. The fallen world is what it is. They say that you can’t go home again, and that is particularly true in a societal sense. The USA of 2023 is not the USA of 1950, or even 1980. What was once normal is no more. Those who are civilizationists, those who are Christians, those who are committed to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, need to recognize that the USA is now the center of The Empire That Never Ended.
We are no longer the culture. We are no longer the society. We are now the counter-culture and the minority. Adjust your expectations and analyses accordingly.
Friday Arktoons
HYPERGAMOUSE Episode 97: Set Him Up
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 243: Do You Even Rift?
WARDOGS INC. Episode 29: Enemy Spotted
THE SWORD OF GOD Episode 58: Deus Ex Doggo
First, Arkhaven is delighted to report that HYPERGAMOUSE is back from hiatus! The Dark Herald has more about it at the Arkhaven blog. Second, we’re now working with Castalia’s original artist to retroactively convert WARDOGS INC. to an illustrated episode format using a targeted AI style that he’s concocted, an example of which can be seen below and in this week’s episode.
Time is Running Out
This is probably why the Russians never launched a winter offensive. Because there is no need for Russia to launch an offensive in order to win the war in Ukraine. All they need to do is hold their positions, methodically destroy everything that is thrown at them, and reportedly, within five months, the flow of military material to the Ukraine regime will stop and its NATO-funded military will collapse.
Ukraine has five months to demonstrate some “advances” to the US and other Western backers, to convince them of its plans for the conflict with Russia, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing several European and American officials.
Washington is entering an election cycle and has to show that the massive military support the US and its allies have been providing to Ukraine has not been in vain, the paper also said.
“It is important for America to sell this war as a successful one, as well as for domestic purposes to prove that all of those aid packages have been successful in terms of Ukrainian advances,” a European official told the FT.
The polls show that public support for Ukraine is waning in the US, and President Biden’s administration has to show that the tens of billions of dollars it spent on assistance for Kiev made a major difference on the frontlines, the media outlet said.
According to FT sources, Washington believes the next five months are critical to the outcome of the conflict. “If we get to September and Ukraine has not made significant gains, then the international pressure on [the West] to bring them to negotiations will be enormous,” another source told the FT, on condition of anonymity.
Patience is one thing the Russian military has always had, dating back to the days when Kutuzov let Napoleon take Moscow, knowing that the French Emperor couldn’t possibly hold it. It doesn’t matter if NATO sets a deadline five months from now or elects to completely exhaust themselves before giving up, the Russians are perfectly capable of waiting as long as it takes for their enemies to give up.
Even Christians Boom
The Boomers have learned absolutely nothing from their past mistakes. They are incapable of learning anything. The sooner the myopic, self-absorbed narcissists die off, the better chance Western civilization will have to survive in some form.
We had a church meeting to discuss the issue of the school growing beyond what our facilities can handle, and the mostly boomer congregation decided the best use of our 1.3m of funds would be to build a senior living center on church property. It’s beyond over
The Me generation lived solely for the Now. Instead of planting trees for future generations, they cut down the trees their predecessors had planted and destroyed the society they were given. And whether it is Covid vaccines or church schools, they continue to prioritize themselves instead of their grandchildren, which comes as little surprise to the children they similarly neglected in favor of their rapacious lotus-eating.
The best thing Generation X and the subsequent generations can do is learn from their catastrophic collective failure as a wicked generation and focus on the future rather than on the past or the present.