After decades of slow-motion suicide, the Church of England decides that killing itself faster is the cure:
The Church of England is just ‘one generation away from extinction’, the former Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday. Lord Carey laid the blame at the feet of Church leaders who he said should be ‘ashamed’ of their failure to bring youngsters into their services.
His stark message was echoed by the Archbishop of York, who told the General Synod that compared to the need to attract new worshippers, ‘everything else is like re-arranging furniture when the house is on fire’.
The Most Reverend John Sentamu told the Synod – where leaders will debate how to persuade traditionalists to accept women bishops – that they spent too long ‘arguing over words and phrases, while the people of England are left floundering amid meaninglessness, anxiety and despair’….
Church of England Sunday congregations are running at half the numbers of the 1960s, and over the past two decades Roman Catholic churchgoing has seen a similar decline. Christian numbers are rising fast in some parts of the world, notably in Africa. Worldwide, the Anglican churches have between 70 and 80 million followers – many of whom look to the Church of England for a lead.
Embrace the world and die. Abandon Biblical doctrine and die. Permit women in leadership and die. The Church can, and will, survive any amount of persecution. The Gates of Hell themselves cannot prevail, much less bloodthirsty atheist dictators.
But the one thing no church can survive is cutting itself off from its own source of life and nourishment. There are always a plethora of excellent, logical, and convincing reasons why the Church should embrace sin, abandon doctrine, and walk upon the broad and easy path to the approval of the world. And the churches swayed by that reasoning always end up dying. The pursuit of approval always ends in apostasy and societal apathy.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy. And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked. The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.
Those of you who have read RGD will recall that in the chapter entitled “No One Knows Anything”, I pointed out that the various numbers reported by the BLS and the BEA cannot possibly be legitimate. GDP, CPI, U3, all of them are fiction. The margins of error are greater than the difference between reported growth and reported contraction, thereby rendering Keynesian theory unworkable in practice. And they are extraordinarily expensive fictions, because material policies with effects in the trillions are being made and justified on the basis of those known and confirmed fictions.
This is just one more proof of the superiority of the Austrian logical approach to Keynesian pseudo-pragmatism. I once likened the attempts to manage the economy as trying to steer a car with a sledgehammer: it’s not very precise and you’re probably first going to wreck the steering wheel and then the car. But trying to manage the economy on the basis of numbers you know are manufactured is like trying to steer a car with a sledgehammer while wearing the wrong prescription sunglasses.
The Great Depression 2.0 is not coming. We are now in the fifth year of it, regardless of what the BLS and the BEA are telling you.
Tom Kratman’s Come and Take Them is an exciting continuation of his Carreraverse series, and lays some interesting foundations for future series developments. While it is possible to enjoy CATT on it’s own merits, I recommend that readers read the rest of the series first, as I will explain further into the review.
Prose: 7/10 Competently done, describes the action clearly concisely and with verisimilitude. There are no particular passages that stand out as literary masterpieces. I believe that this is a deliberate stylistic choice as the main concern of the novel is to tell the story, and especially with this series, convey the ideas therein. Since this novel is as much a polemic as a story, and the author personally hates too clever by half literary pretension, the prose is deliberately stripped down. Of particular value is the description of combat, and it’s vagaries. Our society has fewer and fewer people familiar with just how dangerous modern combat can be, and far too many x box warriors who think a SEAL team can kill anything. In it’s own way, the stripped down, economical use of language portrays the difficulties combat more effectively by focusing on the essentials.
Plot: 6/10 Above average, especially for military technothriller/ military scifi. Things go wrong, the Good Guys are not infallible, and the Bad Guys aren’t totally incompetent. Mistakes are made on both sides, for understandable reasons. The Balboans fail to anticipate an obvious antagonists’ attempt to seize power, starting the war they wished to avoid. While things go generally the way they want, serious errors are made that could have disastrous repercussions. The Taurans, despite being arrogant, vain, and encumbered by a sclerotic bureaucracy, are brave, tough and competent. and are able to inflict serious damage on their adversaries. The twists and somewhat telegraphed, and there are no major surprises, but it doesn’t bog down anywhere, and enjoyable throughout.
Characters 8/10 Perhaps the author’s strongest suit as a writer is the ability to create believable, fallible characters. Every major character is complex, with understandable motivations, emotions, and actions that flow logically from those motivations. Each character also has strengths as well as flaws. For instance, Raul Parilla the President of Balboa, is personally brave, honest, and loyal, yet can be indecisive and overly cautious. Admiral Wallenstein is sexually perverse, vain, and yet determined, capable and politically savvy. No one side has a lock on virtue, or on vice, and the conflict is heightened by the wholly believable goals and motivations of the characters.
Ideas 7/10 Perhaps the least ideological book the author has published, the Ideas developed earlier in the series are worked out here in a more straight forward action oriented manner. For instance the heavily ideological Amazon Legion was nearly all polemic, and the action covered there in brief is treated with more detail in this book. This however is still a Kratman book, and ideas are always behind the scenes somewhere. Readers of VP do not need to be told that our elites are perverse, vain, totalitarian, and humorless, but others might yet have faith in them. Come and Take Them demolishes that Faith rather effectively. The individual soldiers of Taurus are portrayed in an almost wholly favorable light, brave, resourceful, and tough. The leadership of Taurus, The Federated States, the Old Earth Peace Fleet, and Balboas neighbors have none of the virtues associated with maintaining civilization. This I think is the key to understanding the whole series, and why I believe that this book and the associated series are must reads for anyone interested in preserving civilization.
I rated the novel as 28/40, very good, but not a Great Book. Why do I believe this series is a must read for all civilized people? Simple, Tom Kratman is not primarily a novelist, he is a pro civilizational polemicist whose chosen medium is novels. After all Heinlein and Rand did more for libertarianism than any economics text by Rothbard, despite Rothbard’s superior intellectual rigor. Stories are the best way to reach the average person, and are far more enjoyable than political tracts to read, so Tom tells stories.
Tom predicted US losses in the Middle East years ago, because we refused to recognize the nature of our enemy and act accordingly. In A Desert Called Peace and Carnifex, Tom show what an actual winning strategy would look like, and shows further why our present elite are unable to execute such a strategy for purely ideological reasons. In addition, the decadence, sexual perversion, disloyalty, and arrogance of our bankster-political elite are on display throughout the series. Tom shows some familiarity with taboo topics such as HBD and the SMP which is refreshing.
I don’t know if Tom is familiar with the Anon Conservative, but these books are a textbook of how to perform an amygdala hijack of leftist rabbits. Read negative Amazon reviews of Amazon Legion or Watch on the Rhine. Leftists literally can’t comprehend the book, engage with the ideas, or even begin to refute them. For instance through the whole series, some opposition soldiers are portrayed as brave, loyal and deserving of respect, even if their leaders aren’t. The Iraqi and Jihadis analogues are treated with more respect than the liberal progressive in the analogous US and EU, and they deserve it.
This of course terrifies rabbits because they themselves are neither brave or loyal, and if the wolves they depend upon to protect them, feed them, keep them warm and make thier stuff ever have enough, they are going to die, and they know it. Note that competence while desired, is not necessarily required to be worthy of in group loyalty. For instance, the legion takes care of the totally disabled and their families, at considerable expense, because they are members of the legion. The purely transactional relationships of the elite are shown to be ultimately hollow and worthless, as are our current rabbits promises and relationships. If you value civilization and want to preserve it, you can do yourself a favor and read the Carrera Series, or anything else by Tom Kratman.
All this has plunged the White House into the deepest hole of the Obama presidency to date, but the biggest shock isn’t about the cruddy rollout, the kludgy law or the disingenuous sales job by which it was passed. The biggest shock and the most damning revelation came in the President’s hasty and awkward press conference when President Obama responded to a reporter’s question about his knowledge of the website’s problems:
“OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Ha[d] I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.”
This was eyepopping. Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut. Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing.
“And much as I love Walter Russell Mead, I note that he voted for this guy, and blandly assumed that an Ivy League pedigree was some sort of assurance of competence. Not so much. And it’s not as if the signs weren’t there, for those able to see them.”
I can only assume Mead hasn’t had much contact with Ivy League graduates. For the most part, their uselessness is only surpassed by how impressed they are with their own academic credentials. And the more Affirmative Action the Ivy League graduate, the more hopelessly inept they tend to be. Think about what knobs your class president and valedictorian were. Then recall that with the exception of Brown and Dartmouth, the Ivy League universities are absolutely full of class presidents and valedictorians who are firmly convinced that, as Chiefs, they don’t have to know anything about how all that Indian stuff works.
This first-person account of the death of the brilliant German general illustrates why one should never believe the Official Government-Approved Histories:
A seven-page report [Dr Friedrich Breiderhoff] made to Cologne police on July 22 1960 has now been found in the city’s archive in which he details how he was threatened with pain of death by an S.S. man to lie on Rommel’s death certificate.
Dr Breiderhoff was brought from his post at the reserve military hospital at Ulm where he was the chief physician. He was told to inspect a person in a car outside by two senior army officers. He told police: ‘It was Herr Rommel. His hat and his marshall’s baton were lying to the right of his upper body on the floor.
“Then a man in civilian dress appeared and ordered me to begin resuscitation attempts and told me that I must not tell the staff that he was dead. I made a direct cardiac injection and then attempts at resuscitation with heart massage and breathing exercises, as if the Field Marshall had drowned. I felt completely that Rommel was a dead man already. Then an S.S. man ordered me to remove the vomit from his mouth and I found an empty cyanide capsule in his throat covered with brown and yellow mucus. I was then ordered that I had to put ‘heart attack’ on the death certificate on the express orders of the High Command of the Armed Forces.”
Now, I very much doubt that anyone still believes that Rommel died of natural causes, but the point is that even when the factual information is documented and in the possession of the government authorities, it often fails to make its way out to the public.
About twelve years ago, not long after writing the short story “Medal for a Marine”, I started writing another short story. This one concerned the murder of a man in exile from his home planet. I didn’t get very far on it before setting it aside, in fact, I didn’t even make it to the actual murder. Nevertheless, I had a very clear picture of the murder, the SF setting, and the detective. Heavily influenced by Fifth Frontier War, the story was set in a futuristic world that was a combination of the Traveller universe and the Space Lords universe. I should probably explain that Space Lords was a 1997 attempt to design a science fiction MMO that was a thousand-year extrapolation from the worlds of Rebel Moon Rising. We never really did much more than discuss it with Microsoft in a desultory manner, but for the next 16 years, the design document sat untouched on a hard drive.
In early 2013, I happened to run across the fragment of the short story. Having almost completely forgotten about it, it read as if someone else had written it. I thought it compared rather well to most of the SF I’d read since then, (China Mieville and Neal Stephenson aside), but realized that with four more 850-page TAODAL novels to write, there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to get around to that SF world for at least another six years. So, I contacted one of the guys who had expressed interest in publishing a Selenoth-related story through First Sword and suggested that we collaborate on turning that story fragment into a SF mystery series. Steve agreed, we wrote the novel together, and we are very pleased make the following announcement:
QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted will be published by Marcher Lord Hinterlands on December 2, 2013. It is 326 pages and will retail for $4.99 ebook and $22.99 hardcover. Those who preorder the hardcover by December 1st can do so for a discounted price of $14.99 and in addition to the hardcover will also receive a copy of QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted in either epub or mobi format (please specify) via email the day before release.
The independent planet of Rhysalan provides contractual Sanctuary to 1,462 governments-in-exile. It is the responsibility of the Military Crimes Investigation Division, specifically, the Xenocriminology and Alien Relations department, to keep a firm leash on the hundreds of thousands of xenos residing on-planet. Assassinations, revolutions, civil wars, and attempted planetary genocides are all in a day’s work for Chief Warrant Officer Graven Tower, MCID-XAR.
In addition to a missile-armed aerovar, his trusty Sphinx CPB-18, and MCID’s extremely liberal policies concerning collateral damage and civilian casualties, Chief Tower is assisted by his extreme xenophobia as well as a military-grade augmented machine intelligence that believes it has found God. So when the disintegrated remnants of the heir apparent of an alien royal house are discovered on the streets of Trans Paradis, the question is not so much whether the killers will eventually be found, but if it is the criminals or the crime investigators who will contribute more to the final body count.
QUANTUM MORTISis the new action-packed Mil-SF mystery series from Vox Day, author of the epic fantasy series The Arts of Dark and Light. Written with Steve Rzasa, author of The Word Reclaimed, QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted is the first novel in the series featuring Graven Tower, MCID.
However, as it happens, there is more. Steve is an unusually fast writer, especially in comparison with me. So, while he was waiting for me to turn the first draft into a final draft, he decided to make use of the time to write a short story concerning another of Graven Tower’s murder investigations. One thing led to another and by the time we were done with QM:AMD, we had also completed a novella that stood up rather nicely on its own. Since releasing A Magic Broken in company with A Throne of Bones worked rather well, Marcher Lord didn’t see any reason to not adopt a similar approach in the science fiction arena.
So, we are pleased to announce that QUANTUM MORTIS Gravity Kills will also be published on December 2, 2013. It is the equivalent of about 50 pages and will retail for $2.99 in ebook-only. As those familiar with Selenoth probably suspect, Gravity Kills will be enrolled in the Kindle Select program and will be periodically available for free download in 2014 as an introduction to the many worlds of Quantum Mortis.
Speaking of Amazon, I am looking for one more volunteer to read and review QM:GK. If you are interested doing so and expect to be able to read one of the ebooks by December 2nd and post a review on Amazon, please send me an email with QM:GK in the subject and specify if you prefer epub or mobi.
UPDATE: Steve has also announced the book on his blog. If you would like to ask him anything about it, I would encourage you to do so there.
84 Boot Hill Hangmen (3-7) 47 Bradford Gamma Rays (3-7)
My season is essentially over, with both Aaron Rodgers and Arian Foster being sidelined by injury. Even so, there is NO excuse for last week’s loss to the Grizzlies, as ANY starting quarterback would have been enough to give me the 10 points I needed for the win. But I simply forgot that Rodgers was out and started him.
So, it’s looking like the four playoff contenders are Greenfield, Fromundah, last season’s champs, and much to everyone’s surprise, the slow-starting Redbeards.
Apparently excess exposure to the Left has caused Anonagain another allergic reaction or something.
Vox has decided he’s going to be a complete asshole and delete my responses to the yappy little anklebiters on his blog, and even those comments that are on topic but don’t express the correct attitude, so I’ve decided to simply respond to the frothing little yappers from my own blog.
Hey Vox, you really can go fuck yourself. I don’t mind getting deleted, and I don’t give a flying fuck what your personal opinion is of me, but I am not going to hang around your blog to be treated unfairly and disrespected by you or anyone else. When you leave their BS OT comments up and delete only mine, you’re being an asshole. But I am going to respond – no balding little Napoleon is going to prevent me from finishing what those fuckers started. It’s not the first time you’ve done this. The fact that you can’t keep your bitter betas from going into a feeding frenzy is not my problem, it’s yours – you attract pathetic losers looking for their testosterone fix from you….
I had to mass-delete her comments a year or two ago when she descended into a shrewish slough of vulgarity, but let it go when she came back and behaved herself. Unfortunately, the emotionally incontinent usually end up losing control sooner or later. Perhaps she and Real American can one day find happiness together on another blog, cursing virulently at each other 24-7.
She can write whatever she wants on her own blog. She simply won’t be participating in the discussions here. The thing is, I don’t care what side of the political spectrum you happen to be on: if you insist on attacking people in a vulgar manner then you’re not going to be doing it here for long. The chief hallmark of the troll is his insistence on going where he is neither invited nor wanted. But secondary characteristics are vulgarity, a predilection for attacking others, and an extreme sensitivity to being disrespected, which usually concerns the comment-deletion.
I’m not the only one who has noticed that the civility of the discourse has improved considerably with just six troll bans: Andrew Marston, Kilo Papa, Phoenician, Golf Pro, Ann Morgan, and Real American. I very much hope five more won’t be necessary, but to be honest, I’m too busy with various projects to waste any time policing the comments of those who can’t control themselves. So, understand that by the time I am deleting your comments, my finger is already on the trigger and I am the world’s most perfect equalitarian when it comes to pulling it.
It’s nothing personal. It doesn’t really matter to me or the thousands of other people who pass by here from time to time if there are seven trolls who happen to be banned or eight. But it is perhaps worth noting that at least two of those trolls have been repeatedly banned from a number of other sites.
But this conclusion really says it all about the troll’s narcissistic mindset:
I’ve had enough of the backbiting little fuckers and being deleted by Vox whenever I try to defend myself against detractors, or being scolded like a child. He can run his blog however he likes, that’s his business – and he can also delete all my comments and shove them up his ass for all I care. If nobody in the universe reads any of these posts here, that’s fine by me. Comments are not welcome, except by invitation. I don’t give a fuck what most people think. – Posted by Taylor at 12:54 AM
No comments:
New comments are not allowed.
The troll doesn’t care, and in fact doesn’t even want to hear what anyone else thinks… but is obsessed with everyone else hearing what it has to say.
Deft in handling a variety of writing styles, from Calvino’s delicacy of language to Mr. Eco’s show-offy erudition, Mr. Weaver was prolific. He translated dozens of books, a dozen by Calvino alone, including “Invisible Cities,” which posits descriptive and philosophical conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and a collection of short stories, “Cosmicomics,” for which Mr. Weaver won a National Book Award for translation in 1969….
Even a partial list of the writers Mr. Weaver translated — which includes Alberto Moravia, Eugenio Montale, Oriana Fallaci, Ugo Moretti, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Italo Svevo — is, as Mr. Botstein wrote, “nothing short of astonishing.”
Mr. Weaver talked about his work in a 2000 interview in The Paris Review. “Some of the hardest things to translate into English from Italian are not great big words, such as you find in Eco, but perfectly simple things, buon giorno for instance,” he said. “How to translate that? We don’t say ‘good day,’ except in Australia. It has to be translated ‘good morning,’ or ‘good evening,’ or ‘good afternoon’ or ‘hello.’
“You have to know not only the time of day the scene is taking place, but also in which part of Italy it’s taking place,” he continued, “because in some places they start saying buona sera — ‘good evening’ — at 1 p.m. The minute they get up from the luncheon table it’s evening for them. So someone could say buona sera, but you can’t translate it as ‘good evening’ because the scene is taking place at 3 p.m. You need to know the language, but, even more, the life of the country.”
What an epic and productive literary career. I think my next fiction read will have to be one of his translations of Eco or Calvino. That being said, having required several days and multiple consultations of dictionaries and native speakers alike to puzzle out a single Italian word coined by Eco, (celodurismo, in this case), I find it very difficult to accept that the simple words are harder.
Then again, I suppose it’s a lot easier when you can actually ask the great man what he was thinking when he coined it.
It appears it is not only right-wing conservatives, libertarian extremists and Bible-thumping god-botherers who are thoroughly sick of the meatless, mindless, scalzified SF/F that is being pushed on them by the genre publishers:
I am on the opposite end of the political spectrum from you. I am a Marxist and an atheist, but I didn’t come here to debate politics or religion. Anyway, last year I started writing seriously and I thought I should get out there on the web and see what the “scene” is about right now, sci/fi and fantasy writers and markets and new fiction, especially short fiction. I constantly read sci/fi and fanstasy, but mostly from my collection of old paperbacks, Vance, Herbert, Howard, etc… I read just as much non-fiction from my local library. So I put my finger on the pulse. The experience was disheartening. New short fiction seems to place innovation over all other qualities possible in a particular piece, which means my desire to read a good story is likely to go unsatisfied. Also, the “scene” is completely preoccupied with identity.
And of course, I happened upon the Scalzi/Vox feud. I checked out both blogs. The verdict: Scalzi – rather dull and typical upper middle class views, Vox – incendiary but rigorous, consistent, and most importantly, often funny. As a Marxist I can’t resist good polemic, even from the other side. I lurk about once a month.
Let me backtrack with a little explanation. Some people out there, perhaps not you, may confuse my radical leftism with the stuff going on out there. They would be wrong. As a Marxist, for me it is class, class, class. Class trumps race, gender, everything. Its all about wealth. The fact that “old white men” are holding alot of it is due to historical forces, not from their “whiteness”. In the 60’s and 70’s, the leftist preoccupation with class was replaced with race and gender issues, to the detriment of all concerned. Old news, just spelling it out here for clarity’s sake.
So we get to now, and race and gender obsessed “liberal progressives” are such a harmful force in society that I, an actual socialist revolutionary, can enjoy you tormenting them on your blog, even though your political perspective is rooted in basic assumptions that are opposite my own. Strange days indeed. For liberal progressives, this would indicate I am a sexist racist, but as a white male I am already on their shitlist so whatever. I am a Marxist. I believe I am fighting the good fight. I am not going to get on my knees and lick boot, hoping for “ally” status. Eff that. The whole thing is a bizarre repackaging of original sin.
So when you put The Last Witchking out there for free, I thought why not and downloaded it. When it came up in the queue I dived in and I was floored. The stories were excellent. They entertained me. What else can I say? Opera Vita was incredible. There was a poignancy there I was not expecting. Suffused throughout is a certain ephemeral beauty, stately and linked with mortality. The subtlety belies tropes about limitations of the “male perspective” that are bandied about when the writing community weighs in on gender. I haven’t seen religion done so convincingly and movingly in the genre since Herbert. I went ahead and read Magic Broken and enjoyed it thoroughly and then pulled the trigger on Throne for five bucks and now I am enjoying that.
It is really remarkable that your apparent congenital disorder, the inability to shut up or even tone it down, has disbarred you from the typical path to success as a writer. I guess there is hope. I found your work via your soapbox. Despite my predilections toward the radical, I never let politics get in the way of personal relationships and now I have to add that it can’t dissuade me from enjoying fiction I like. Thanks for the books. I am hooked on Selenoth now, the antidote for my genre malaise. Please make it your goal to churn out volumes of the stuff for readers like me trying to survive this long winter.
That an avowed Marxist would enjoy my fiction is less surprising than it might sound. I am, after all, a radical, merely one with very different assumptions and objectives. And I’ve always gotten along much better with the hard left than with the soft, squishy, bourgeois progressive left; one of my independent studies was done under a hardcore Canadian socialist who regarded McDonalds as the capitalist devil incarnate.
Of course, this may be because the hard left is about the only group that hates the progressive left more than I do. One of the great satisfactions about being on the right-wing is the knowledge that even if we lose and the revolution finally arrives in its fullness, the useful idiots are going to be the first ones lined up against the wall and shot. And who can look at the way Wall Street has been raping the country and not feel the urge to raise a revolutionary flag; if that is capitalism, then I don’t want any part of it and I’m a libertarian!
But besides our obvious ideological and religious differences, I have to take some issue with the writer’s idea that it is my unwillingness to cower before the PC gods of publishing that have prevented me from following the conventional path. While my notoriety would presumably have made it easier for them to decline to publish me – which is theoretical anyhow because I do not have an agent and I have never submitted my work for publication to any of the various genre publishing houses – this actually has the situation backwards.
One reason that I have been so uncompromising and so unwilling to play along with the progressives is because I have known from the start that the substance of my fiction would prevent the mainstream publishers from publishing it. And I also knew I had no interest in writing the sort of tedious political crap they wanted to publish. So, there was no reason to muzzle myself because I knew there was no chance that they would publish books like The Chronicles of King David or Summa Elvetica no matter what I did or did not say. I can’t pose as either a hero or a victim because I never had anything to lose in that regard.
In fact, I consider myself incredibly lucky to not only have such strong support from intelligent readers across religious and ideological lines, but to be writing at a time when the gatekeepers are so impotent. All of us who write should be deeply grateful, whether it is to God or to History and the class struggle, to be alive at such a fascinating time! To be able to write exactly what one wants and be able to make it readily available to those who are potentially interested in it is all that any writer can really ask for. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake.
