I did not know precisely what blogging here was going to be all about when I created the site as I prepared to retire from the Army after being a mostly loyal slave to that organization for 32 or 33 years (depending on how I count that). That was 2017, I thought I would become a dilettante and a pseudo-polymath (insofar as my mental abilities would allow) and explore things that interested me. I thought I would throw a rock or two into the fray of the cultural war, not understanding at that point it was already well over but nothing too serious. Perhaps I would dabble in some historical analysis, take a swing at some geopolitical matters within the sphere of my experience and play around with some philosophy. All of that is here, in the archives, back in what now must be considered a simpler time.

In 2019, playing the part of the retired gentlemen, toying with some minor entrepreneurial projects, and reading a lot of history, philosophy, and theology it came to me that there simply is no time for play-acting a life of relaxed leisure and reading. Something profound is occurring, the end of a long cycle of history, the sort of stuff that collapses empires and destroys existing civilizations (in practical fact if not in cataclysmic fire and brimstone). All of that is here to, progressively elaborated in my argumentation since the fall of 2019. This is not the black-pill, this is a realist's understanding of trendlines in history. I have no time for those that dismiss these facts as doomer talk no more than I would listen to someone that would say it is perfectly ok that three of the four engines on a jetliner have failed, but we still have the one hanging on by one bolt. It will all be much less cataclysmic than many would assume, a whimper not a bang, but fade the light of what we have come to see as Western Christendom will. I do not say Christianity will fade. I say the civilization built on the ashes of Rome and on the heroic stand of martyrs in the first and second centuries. The true spring of Spengler's season of our Faustian civilization that he misdiagnosed by a couple of centuries, Athens and Jeruselum made in a new people with a new revelation. It was great when it was great and it could not resist the same temptations that plagued man in Genesis 3 and 6.

I am not an academic, not even close no matter how long I sat under academic instruction. But men like me, men that know enough of the world to know that their deeply held intuition, common sense guided by the Spirit speaks truth seem to know things that academics cannot even frame proper questions about. I am not a theologian, again not even close. Yet, the vast swath of liars, fools, compromisers, twisters, and fornicators of the mind that claim that title seem like clowns compared to a man that understands foundational precepts. The time of experts has passed, and all the expert classes have proven their ineptness, they have proven that they have been fully corrupted by the Faustian bargain made beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. The light of true truth burned bright enough for three centuries to cover their error, but the remnants of that wick burn low now.

I speak candidly, there is no time left for winsomeness. Candid does not mean unkind, but winsome has very often meant compromising. In this great transformational period, there will be a great sundering. Things once thought unfathomable will become social norms. Things that were once the bedrock foundations of culture will be forsaken, hated, and reviled. Many of the institutions beloved and fought over even now by a few will fall into the hands of deceivers, fully and irrevocably. With only rare and fleeting exceptions this has always been the case as the transformation built to this point over the last couple hundred years. Our challenge is not the be drug along for too long unequally yoked to reprobates and unregenerate deceivers, even and especially those that claim to be brothers. Our challenge is to remain strong and true, carrying the fire (the light and the truth) for what comes after, for there will be an after, there will be something more permanent to replace the decline and fall. There will be hope and there will be those who seek and cherish the truth.

We should speak truth every day we have breath until we no longer draw breath.

That is purpose. Not the heretical sort that Rick Warren infected a not so resurged Baptist Church within the 1990s but real purpose. Stand on truth and proclaim it, true truth for ultimately all secondary and tertiary truth has a source, and without the foundation of that all else is purposeless and wasted.

I find it both satisfying and ironic that some herticess wrote a book about John Wayne Christianity. I snagged this clip from The Alamo, John Wayne speaks of truth and purpose here, the sort of purpose I was looking for when I began smashing keys on a keyboard and producing typos those few years ago.

Here I stand, I can (and will) do no other. If you are a liar, deceiver, heretic or apostate I will say it, I will say it in love but I will not be winsome about it.