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The return of the trilogy

Just a little clearing the plate as we gear up for some new releases, beginning with the much-anticipated Appendix N: A Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons from Jeffro Johnson. The three Eternal Warriors novels are now available again on Amazon. If you are a New Release subscriber, be sure to check your email. These were my first solo novels, and it tends to show, particularly in the first book. They don’t need to be read in order.

Mariel thought she was the guardian angel of an ordinary child — until the night an army of fallen angels takes an unholy interest in her charge. Overcome by an angel prince of awesome power, Mariel can only watch as a terrible evil descends upon the home of the boy she is guarding, then vanishes with him. 307 pages. $4.99. Available on Kindle Unlimited.
On a fallen planet, evil may be defeated, but it is never vanquished. When the evil archangel Kaym seeks vengeance, he does not aim at those who belong to his divine Enemy, but at the vulnerable souls around them. Two troubled boys are easy prey for Kaym, and as the high school prom approaches, they are willing to serve as his chosen instruments of death. 337 pages. $4.99.
Book Three: The Wrath of Angels
There is war among the Fallen. As the dread daughter of Moloch cuts a broad swath through the demon princes of Europe, the long-conquered Faery kingdom of Albion threatens to rise against its dark master. Treachery and intrigue are the order of the day as evil battles evil, and jackals lurk amidst the shadows to devour the defeated. 346 pages. $4.99.

From the past reviews.

  • As others have noted, the dialogue is the worst part of the book. Considering that this was Mr. Beale’s first novel, we immediately discover that he is not a most naturally gifted writer. While it always feels evident that he has made great efforts to craft the dialogue carefully, there are moments where it titters on being banal and cringe-worthy.
  • The story was alright, but the Christian message was not subtle, and ended up being a complete turnoff. American Protestant Evangelical Christians of a certain variety will enjoy this, though. I didn’t, and can’t recommend it at all.
  • The book has a couple of strengths that make it unique in Christian fiction. First, the author is honest about the power of evil. He does not whitewash, downplay or ignore the temptations of evil and it’s potentially consuming power. Beale represents evil as the willful choice and temptation that it is, and in doing so incorporates it’s tragic consequences effectively into the story, without diminishing the power of God’s grace and redemption.

The World in Shadow

  • Not only an amazing sequel to the first story, but dives right into the logical consequences in ‘real life’ of the universe the author described in the opening book. This second book, I must say, was even more enjoyable and immediately identifiable than the first. I literally could not put the book down once I got into the story line a few dozen pages into the book.
  • I have been most impressed by Mr. Beale as an author. His development from his first novel to his second is phenomenal. What strikes me most is his dead-on ability to catch the dialogue and culture of his characters. There are few writers who come close to his ability at this. More than that, he is writing not only page-turning stuff, but page-turning stuff with a brain.
  • This book was better than the first, without a single doubt. It brought the spiritual war to Earth, where it indeed is being fought daily.

The Wrath of Angels

  • This is the third, and in my opinion, the best, story of the War in Heaven trilogy, though this book departs considerably from the other two. While the first two are very noticeably ‘young adult’ in their writing style, this one approaches a regular novel, albeit it is rather unusual in terms of its content. All are written in the vein of C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, taking the perspective of a ‘fallen world’ very literally.
  • This, the third book in the Eternal Warriors Series, shows a significant jump both in Mr. Beale’s story-writing abilities and the complexity of the Eternal Warriors setting. One experiences the world of this third book as significantly more expansive, alive, and realistic than the world in the first book. Likewise, the internal worlds of these characters also loom larger. 
  • Excellent finale to this excellent trilogy. I felt a little sad when I finished as I wished the characters were around for a fourth book. I especially enjoyed the spiritual dimension – both the good and evil. Fast paced and fun read. The monsters were enticingly freakish.

Who needs Jesus?

It’s a joke, obviously, but one does wonder what the women-can-do-no-wrong pedestal preachers think is likely going to be the consequence of their extremely extra-Biblical teachings.

According to reports coming out of Hope Community Church, first-time visitor Brittany Wilson remains unsure about why she needed “this Jesus guy” in her life after the pastor spent the entire Sunday sermon reiterating how awesome, amazing, unique, and special she is.

“The message was super-encouraging. It was all about how I need to let the goodness within me shine and ‘just do me,’ without worrying about all the haters,” Wilson said after the service.

“But then the pastor said I needed Jesus, out of the blue. Like, what? It made no sense. I’m not sure what He has to offer that I don’t, based on how wonderful the pastor said I am.”

Women are not only every bit as fallen as men, but they have been the primary weapon utilized by the architects of the decline of the Christian church. I won’t attend any church with a female pastor, nor will I attend any church that habitually excoriates men while elevating women. Whatever it is that they are teaching, it isn’t from the Bible and it isn’t compatible with Christianity.

The test is go

And thanks to all of you who helped make it possible. Now let’s hope that it works.

We are proud to be able to tell you that your fantastic efforts have helped us smash the target we set in 2013 of £470,000. In fact, between 1 June 2013 and 7 December 2016, a total of £521,563 has been received by KCL for the Crohn’s MAP test.

We want to thank everyone for their amazing efforts, including those of you who have tirelessly continued collecting regular sums to contribute. The total includes a fantastic sum of £47,000 which was received from supporters in the USA this August.

Finally, let us pay a special tribute to Helen Higgs who dedicated her life to raising funds for the cause. In particular, for two fundraising balls, the most recent of which raised in the region of £10,000. Tragically, Helen has passed away, but she will always be remembered for everything she contributed to raising the funds to provide the MAP test.

The severed branch dies

A professor of religion and culture only requires five years to observe the obvious in the Washington Post:

Mainline Protestant churches are in trouble: A 2015 report by the Pew Research Center found that these congregations, once a mainstay of American religion, are now shrinking by about 1 million members annually. Fewer members not only means fewer souls saved, a frightening thought for some clergy members, but also less income for churches, further ensuring their decline.

Faced with this troubling development, clergy members have made various efforts to revive church attendance. It was almost 20 years ago that John Shelby Spong, a U.S. bishop in the Episcopalian Church, published his book “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” It was presented as an antidote to the crisis of decline in mainline churches. Spong, a theological liberal, said congregations would grow if they abandoned their literal interpretation of the Bible and transformed along with changing times.

Spong’s general thesis is popular with many mainline Protestants, including those in the United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian (U.S.A.) and Episcopal churches. Spong’s work has won favor with academics, too. Praising Spong’s work specifically, Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School said in a review of Spong’s book that it “should be required reading for everyone concerned with facing head-on the intellectual and spiritual challenges of late-twentieth-century religious life.” Harvard Divinity professor and liberal theologian Harvey Cox said “Bishop Spong’s work is a significant accomplishment,” and indeed, Cox himself has long been at the task of shifting Christianity to meet the needs of the modern world. Thus, liberal theology has been taught for decades in mainline seminaries and preached from many mainline pulpits. Its enduring appeal to embattled clergy members is that it gives intellectual respectability to religious ideas that, on the surface, might appear far-fetched to modern audiences.

But the liberal turn in mainline churches doesn’t appear to have solved their problem of decline.

Over the last five years, my colleagues and I conducted a study of 22 mainline congregations in the province of Ontario. We compared those in the sample that were growing mainline congregations to those that were declining. After statistically analyzing the survey responses of over 2,200 congregants and the clergy members who serve them, we came to a counterintuitive discovery: Conservative Protestant theology, with its more literal view of the Bible, is a significant predictor of church growth while liberal theology leads to decline. The results were published this month in the peer-reviewed journal, Review of Religious Research.

We also found that for all measures, growing church clergy members were most conservative theologically, followed by their congregants, who were themselves followed by the congregants of the declining churches and then the declining church clergy members. In other words, growing church clergy members are the most theologically conservative, while declining church clergy members are the least.

A nominally Christian church that does not believe in God or Jesus Christ has no reason to exist. By severing themselves from God’s Word, the Bible, and freeing themselves from its strictures, they inevitably decline and die.

It is a reliable predictive model. Welcome women into the pulpit in defiance of Scripture and your church will almost instantly go into decline. Once Jesus Christ is evicted from the building, the genuine Christians soon follow.

The “knucklehead” defense

This is the legal defense to which Vibrant America resorts to when the “he wuz a good boy, he wuz gwan to callege” and the “dindu nuffin” defenses fail. It’s not good to see the police preemptively adopting it; aren’t they supposed to be on the side of the prosecution and leave the exculpatory explanations to the defense?

“Kids make stupid mistakes, I shouldn’t call them kids, they are legally adults, but they are young adults and the make stupid decisions. That certainly will be part of whether or not we seek a hate crime, determine whether or not this is sincere or stupid ranting and raving.”
– Kevin Duffin, Detective Commander, Chicago Police

And this is why identity politics are the new normal in America. There is no returning from this, because demographics is destiny. #BLMKidnapping

A case for segregation

One of the most painful realizations for the Baby Boomer generation is the failure of the Civil Rights Movement, and the increasing evidence that those evil, very bad, horrible segregationists were right all along.

Chicago investigators are questioning four African-Americans after a Facebook Live video shows a group of people torturing a white mentally disabled man while someone yelled “F*** Trump!” and “F*** white people!”

Chicago police were made aware of the video Tuesday afternoon. A young African American woman streamed the video live on Facebook showing at least four people holding the young white man hostage.

“The video is reprehensible,” said police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. “It’s sickening. You know it makes you wonder what would make individuals treat somebody like that,” Police Supt. Eddie Johnson added.

Throughout the video, the victim is repeatedly kicked and hit, his scalp is cut, all while he is tied up with his mouth taped shut. At one point, the victim is held at knife point and told to curse President-elect Donald Trump. The group also forces the victim to drink water from a toilet. The suspects can be heard saying they want the video to go viral.

The greatest evils very often take place in response to much lesser ones. If 250 years does not suffice to make a single nation out of two very different peoples, then it should be manifestly apparent that no amount of time is ever going to be enough. The fact that so many people have so much trouble simply admitting the obvious and undeniable is not a testimony to the rational ability of Man, no matter what his race, creed, or color.

As Big Gay Steve has observed, the amount of money that has been spent unsuccessfully trying to turn a mostly unwilling nation of Black Americans into ersatz White Americans would have permitted humanity to have established colonies on Mars. Forget all the victims of all the crimes over the years, and ignore bloodshed of the inevitable wars in the years to come, perhaps the greatest sin of the Civil Rights debacle of the last 50 years is the opportunity cost.

Segregation isn’t bad and it isn’t evil. Just ask any American Indian if they’d prefer to give up their reservations and lose the rest of their land to the people of other nations.

There is, of course, a silver lining for Facebook, as it could serve as an advertisement for the ease of use of its new user interface. Even those with 70 IQs can figure out how to use Facebook Live!

A new hypothesis

Scientists discover a physical manifestation of autism:

A team of scientists has discovered that a particular region of the brain is affected in those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). They believe that finding the brain region which causes social deficits in those with the condition could point towards new types of therapies. The team included scientists based at ETH Zürich, Trinity College Dublin, Oxford University and Royal Holloway.

They ran MRI brain scans on people with ASD, and on healthy volunteers, in an attempt to track down the brain region linked to some of the behaviours seen in those with ASD and find differences between the two groups.

Dr Joshua Henk Balsters, the team leader, is based at ETH Zürich but performed much of the research at Trinity while working as a postdoctoral research fellow. He described how ASD can disturb normal personal exchanges. “The ability to understand how other people make decisions and what happens to them as a result is key to successful social interaction,” he said. “A big part of social interaction is to try and understand another person’s point of view. You need to understand another person’s perspective and that is very difficult if you have ASD.”

The researchers identified changes in a region called the gyrus of the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that responds when someone else experiences something surprising. They published their findings in the current edition of the journal Brain.

My new hypothesis is that scientists will eventually discover that people with these changes in the gyrus of the anterior cingulate cortex also happen to possess a statistically significant predilection towards atheism. Remember, there have been two university studies based on my original 2007 hypothesis that there is a correlation between ASD and atheism, and both studies achieved results that tended to support the hypothesis.

Sam Harris had it backwards. Atheists and theists don’t think differently due to their beliefs, but atheists have different beliefs due to their abnormal brain structure. It’s neither superior reason nor a dedication to logic that tends to produce an atheist, but rather, a lack of ability to grasp the perspective of others. There are other causal factors, of course; this does not explain the “mad at Dad” atheist or the “I will brook no limitations on my sexual behavior” atheist, but it does explain the spergey, socially clumsy sort that bring up their active disbelief at every opportunity.

All you need to know

One of the better mainstream media articles you’ll see on the Alt-Right was published by the Irish Times. Interesting to see that they got the Alt-Right/Alt-Lite distinction right, which virtually never happens in the US media, which keeps trying to anoint everyone from MILO to the corpse of Adolf Hitler himself the leader of the Alt-Right.

The alt-right is one part political movement, two parts subculture. This can make it difficult for outsiders to understand. To assist you in comprehending the chatter on Twitter hashtags such as #AltRight and #Frogtwitter, here’s a simple glossary.

Alt-lite: The more mainstream form of the alternative right, embodied by figures such as Vice founder Gavin McInnes or Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos.

Alt-right: A young, energetic upstart faction of the Trump coalition heavily active on Twitter and underground forums. Characterised by nationalism, scepticism toward globalism and an irreverent sense of humour.

Blue hair: An aggressive, unpleasant feminist with brightly coloured hair, usually depicted as being overweight.

Cat lady: An older, less aggressive version of a blue hair. Cat ladies prefer MSNBC and Cosmopolitan, whereas a blue hair spends her life on social blogging platform Tumblr.

Cathedral: The ad-hoc post-second World War liberal-socialist alliance dominating western culture. Coined by pseudonymous neoreactionary blogger Mencius Moldbug, this includes everything from academia to media to government.

Chad: An alpha normie (see below). The alt-right seeks to appeal to Chads, a project known as Chad Nationalism.

Cuckservative: A portmanteau of “cuckold” and “conservative”, which was originally meant to imply that mainstream conservatives protected the welfare of foreign groups over Americans. Often shortened to “cuck” to describe any weak or feminine man. Conservative commentators Erick Erickson and Rick Wilson are exemplars.

About all that is missing is the 16 Points and the Alt-White.

This guy won a peace prize?

The neocons really appear to be desperate to start a war with Russia before Obama leaves office.

PRESIDENT Obama has deployed US special forces troops along Lithuania’s border with “aggressive” Russia.

Tensions between Washington and the Kremlin have reached Cold War levels amid reports Vladimir Putin is deploying nuke-ready missiles in the Russian province of Kaliningrad – which borders Poland, Belarus and Lithuania.

US military chief General Raymond T Thomas told the New York Times that America has a “persistent” presence in the Baltic states bordering Russia. He added that many former Eastern Bloc countries are “scared to death” of Russia and the vulnerable states are “desperate” for America’s leadership.

The US and its Nato allies will send battalions of up to 1,200 to each of the three Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – and Poland by spring this year, reports the New York Times.

Lithuania’s foreign minister Linas Linkevicius confirmed Russia’s military activity in Kaliningrad is terrifying the region. He said: “Iskander missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads have been deployed. There are S-400 missiles and modernised jets.”

Still doubt that a Hillary Clinton victory would have meant war? However, I don’t think Putin is having any of it, as his restrained response to the expulsion of the 35 Russian diplomats tends to demonstrate. He knows Trump isn’t going to embroil the USA in a war just to please the neocons.

This is astonishingly dumb on so many levels. How, exactly, are special forces troops supposed to defend against nuclear warheads?

Thinking the Forbidden Thoughts

From the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance:

Jason Rennie, editor at Superversive Press, has just announced the publication of Forbidden Thoughts, an anthology of short fiction stories and non-fiction articles. The book features an introduction by the great Milo Yiannopoulos and stories and articles by an impressive roster of heavy hitters in the right-minded sci fi world. Featured authors include John C. Wright, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Nick Cole, Larry Correia, Brad Torgersen, Brian Niemeier, Sarah Hoyt, and Vox Day.

Nick Cole gives a hint of what to expect:


A bunch of us malcontents got together and wrote some stories that are fairly reactionary to the PC agenda driven oatmeal currently drowning the SciFi market like a psychotic butler holding a wicked child under the water in the scum laden fountain of the creepy haunted mansion of the deranged old aunt with some weird ideas about “right” and “wrong.”


We had A LOT of fun.


Yes.  I took a few shots at some luminaries. Writers have been doing that forever.  It’s okay.  They can take it.  They’re in the “in crowd.”


My contribution is from the QUANTUM MORTIS universe. It’s a short story called “Amazon Gambit”, and while it doesn’t involve MCID or Graven Tower, I expect fans of the late Joel Rosenberg will recognize it for the tribute that it is meant to be.

Given the lineup, it should be interesting to discover whose stories are the favorites. The idea, as I understood it, was to come up with an idea that would be ruled out-of-bounds by the SF-SJWs and mainstream gatekeepers. I am quietly confident that mine will be considered one of the more appalling contributions to the collection.