Resolve

As I write this, we are not even a week into what is considered inside the Perimeter to be the cruelest month. Dear kitteh TR, often the first one up to the top as a kitten, ascended to the New House on New Year’s Day in 2009, and his brother Gordon on January 30 three years later. Today, January 6, is Gato’s Day, when we miss and remember a good cat—strong, brave, and levelheaded—on the second anniversary of losing our beloved orange stepchild.

That’s the way of things when committing to love someone not likely to outlive you. It takes an essential sort of courage to do so regardless, and dealings with what comes next comprise life lessons purposely bestowed as subjects of contemplation. We would not have them any other way, which is good, considering they will never be any other way.

This year, January 6 is also the anniversary of losing something, if only temporarily, that was supposed to far outlast us: namely the bestowment of just powers, derived from the consent of the governed, via the treasured institution of free and fair elections. Worse, we didn’t lose this through any progression of natural process. It was taken from us quite unnaturally by traitors and criminals who think they know better how things should be than did America’s Founders.

Over the course of the past year it’s become painfully obvious the current administration and legislative branches are populated on the political Left by individuals elevated through obvious and undeniable interstate fraud. That none of those usurpers have been shot or hanged to date speaks well of the level of civility remaining on the right side of the bell-shaped curve of distribution defining the spectrum of American politics.

Today, hand-wringing commentators more devoted to narrative than integrity will decry the protest at the Capitol of January 6, 2021 as testimony otherwise. Those who have examined the footage and evidence know the unfortunate events of that day were planned and orchestrated by instigators for the exact effect achieved: a coup unopposed by the only strategy which would have prevented the embarrassing debacle of the Biden administration.

Despite conducting the national election in ways that were unconstitutional and illegal at the federal and state levels, corrupt state executives and legislatures allowed their respective electors to present the bounty of Democrat fraud to the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, then presiding over the Senate. His inadequacy was the last ditch that could have decided the election in the House of Representatives, where a preponderance of Republican-majority state delegations reside. For reasons that are equally incomprehensible as his decision to forgo courage, he has since been allowed to appear in public wearing trousers rather than the Swamp Skirt (Pence-ill skirt?) he earned one year ago today.

Mike Pence thinks he’s going to be the Republican candidate for President one day. The Hindenburg was once considered the future of air travel, as well.

Anyway….

The Democrats’ political machine, simply dying to rule, is also killing to rule. Besides Ashli Babbitt, who was shot to death without reasonable justification by Capitol Police officer Lester Holt, Rosanne Boyland died after being beaten during a brutal assault on protesters in a tunnel on the lower west side of the Capitol building. Since those losses, patriots who vented their outrage at a stolen election have been hunted with facial recognition and cell phone network identifiers, interrogated, imprisoned without trial, and harassed by federal authorities, while entrapping instigators such as Ray Epps walk free.

I ditched Facebook before the current regime took power in Washington, recognizing the site would only become target designators in a brave new world dominated for a time by the unelected and unaccountable power-mad in D.C. Prior, I was acquainted with the head of the South Carolina Tea Party, Pressley Stutts, who was invited onto the Capitol steps by its police officers, and whose selfies posted there earned him harassment by the TSA (“We know where you were on January 6^th”) that he feared would last a lifetime.

COVID treatment protocols killed Pressley when he was hospitalized with the virus later that same year, but that is another story.

We have endured the Biden administration for twelve months now. A showcase of exemplary inadequacy, as a result of their wrongheaded policies the country’s economy has suffered, sixty percent of respondents now see Joe Biden as a weak president, and nearly every appearance by the man generates more speculation on what his neurological future holds. Spoiler: it holds as little promise as do those determined to ignore The Way Things Are.

Attempting to wish away consequence is a dead-end road traveled by childish minds and the distinguishing characteristic of the political Left. The delusion promising that sin brings profit is eventually set right for liars, thieves, plagiarists, and the perverse and corrupt. Joe Biden is demonstrably all of those things. His son Hunter is further testament to the deficient character of the man who produced him, and his historical legacy will only be that of a doddering figurehead elevated via fraud by a controlling cabal of opportunists, traitors, reprobates, and idiots. Their temporary advantage can and should have only one result:  the desiccated political viability of the Democratic Party smoldering in the ruins of the midterm elections of 2022 and the presidential contest conducted under reforms to be put in place between now and 2024.

Today’s Democratic Party is living in a Matrix-like construct engineered entirely by their own aversion to wisdom. And as in the most recent installment of that cinematic franchise, they are also dedicated to the deliberate dismantling of what came before.

No person of normal sensibilities embraces their own destruction. Doing so has been an indicator of mental illness since our species has been sufficiently self-aware to detect those thus afflicted. Degrading the moral and ideological fabric of one’s society roots in self-hatred spawned by the dark patron spirit currently dominating Hollywood. In the same venomous vein driven by colluding inner voices, producers, directors, and politicos seem determined to tear down the institutions that edified and inspired their adherents in favor of agendas that cannot stand against rational criticism.

I have a degree in psychology, and none of the theories I studied for years explains such a state of dedicated and demented human evil as this: their patron spirit wants them (and us) dead.

Individuals locating on the left half of the bell-shaped curve have a common pathology. As the political Left sees government as the summit of authority promising the license to impose their will, the immoral Left (seldom apolitical) holds the apex of the human experience to be indulgence in abyssal depths of depravity without criticism or apparent consequence. Both are manifestations of captivity in the deadly sin of lust.

Politicians currently exploiting the engineered optics of January 6, 2021 have been frustrated in their agenda of overreach over the past year. They rushed into their wish list of tyranny, forgetting that governance in the United States is bounded by Constitutional limits. Those powers not specifically granted belong instead to the States, per the Tenth Amendment’s stipulation.

In the case of the immoral Left, The Way Things Are stymie every plan to escape consequence, consigning transgressors to the judgment of natural law. In both cases indefensible actions, once institutionalized, will inevitably result in systemic collapse rather than being accepted as “the new normal.”

And it doesn’t matter whether that system is the Democratic Party, fiscal irresponsibility, or the terminus of the gastrointestinal tract. Matters there don’t end well when pursued past their limits.

Government manifesting servant leadership rather than oppression roots in the self-governance of a responsible electorate elevating like minds to the righteous authority free and fair elections allow. Since the current cabal found themselves empowered by other means, it was to be expected that the following months would see things go from bad to worse. Natural law is by design a teacher whose harsh lessons impart to those at a distance lasting comprehension of why certain behaviors should be avoided.

It’s the time of year to set goals and pursue aspirations, as we look forward while holding close the lessons of the past. The challenges ahead of we patriots and folk of valid faith require more than resolutions, though. They require resolve to embrace strength rather than weakness. Being strong, we can legitimately demand and cultivate strength in others. Holding ourselves accountable, we can apply the same standards of accountability elsewhere. Believing, we are empowered to propagate awareness of the state of actuality lending an appreciation for the levels and planes of governance beyond the apparent. Having grasped eternal constructs in The Way Things Are, we may proceed to meet the challenges of a new year without fear of tomorrow.

We are meant to live as free folk, not livestock, and in courage, not trepidation. Those who think otherwise might need to be convinced in 2022, but it has never been and never will be otherwise.

Choose to love, -DA

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In production news, the Editress is midway through Boone’s seventh and concluding title, Two Years with Master Quan. Current progress is hinting at a late spring/early summer release, God willing. Boone, Thibaut, Quan and others you’ve not yet met will be worth the wait, I promise.

Christmas 2020

Those who have remained there had a storm back home. I don’t know if you’ve ever endured a blizzard on the High Plains, but there nothing quite like it. As inhospitable environments go, it offers disorientation, wind-whipped crystals that sting one’s skin when they hit, howling wind, and temperatures that will kill you dead if you’re caught unprepared.

Blizzards are a very real thing. It’s better to stay somewhere safe, warm and sheltered with someone who loves you, if one is blessed. Blizzards bring their baby booms in late summer, and the resultant children will hear the story for the rest of their parents’ lives.

I just saw a Facebook meme: “On January 1st, hindsight really will be 2020.” My comment: “And good riddance.”

2020 was a storm. Not a sudden onslaught like the wall cloud that brings a South Dakota thunderstorm or the rolling waves of horizontal snow comprising its blizzards, nor the steady building rainfall that precedes the torrent of a hurricane. This year was a steady deluge of another sort of precipitate.

It didn’t start with a virus. It started somewhere deeper in the makeup of people than their physiology. It’s unique to us, as creatures formed in the image of a living God and fixed in the eye of His mind before we ever were.

Did you ever wonder why He bothers? Why this place, why people such as us? Why a world so intricately crafted life could hardly be sustained otherwise? Why do storms come?

In the beginning, God chose not to be alone. Better to commune, He must have decided, than to remain a singularity of consciousness. He conceived love, which necessitated an object and ideally evoked reciprocation. It couldn’t be innate, but needed to be a choice, as His was a choice. In that moment of pre-time, He became the Craftsman, and all which we know followed.

The Editress and I have been students of history since before we met, and that was a long enough time ago. The history she and I learned by and large isn’t taught these days but in home school, and for good reason: the primary lesson of history is a stark exposition of our innate human nature. While times change, people do not, and the cycles of human experience confirm the same store of wisdom even as history’s tides ripple against the vessel carrying us forward in the present day.

The lesson of history is that people generally do not learn from history, just as the lesson of Scripture is that we are inescapably bound to a sin nature in our physical form. These aren’t separate lessons. They are one and the same.

The opportunism that manifested in 2020 sprang into the open hearts of men in response to the whispering of God’s enemy, who loves nothing more than to convince his victims of their cleverness. One line of inspiration from a patron spirit (one who, by the way, out of hate wants every one of us dead) might inspire, for example, a strategy to concurrently evolve a potentially fatal malady and its vaccine as a means to pursue wealth.

Fearmongering, the polar opposite of faithful living enabled by the onset of a coronavirus, then merged with social engineering to provide a means of imposing their will for those with deep-seated control issues. Fear confers the short-term gratification of accumulated power comprising the opiate of tyrants, and the only fix for its junkie is furthering the compliance of subjects.

Deep-seated control issues virtually define the political Left. Vice of all sorts is literally the driving force of mentalities repulsed by responsible living in the Real World. No less governed by intractable natural laws in their rebellion, they are the idiot children of comfortable living, and the weak folk who produce bad times out of good years. And they had a president who rubbed their noses in their own ineffectiveness by outperforming them at every turn.

Something simply had to be done, no matter how irrational or immoral, and those stabilizing concepts hardly registered on souls so lost as to consider reality something to be engineered rather than accommodated. “Action Now! The ends will justify our means!”

That’s what gave us 2020. What a crap pile of a year. Way to go, kids.

Somewhat more than half us see what’s going on. Somewhat less than that realize the full extent of the present day, and those of us who know what’s coming next are an earthly population of precisely zero.

In all the camps contending for dominance, we break down into two essential categories. Some of us hang onto hope while others do not.

Hopelessness makes the political Left vulnerable to promises of secular salvation, of the freedom to indulge in base desires, and in the illusion of there being no accountability to the laws of Nature and the judgment of their Author. Natural law decrees unguarded vulnerability will often not end well.

Hope didn’t happen by accident. The Craftsman, present throughout the whole of His creation and unbounded by the line of time, knows our nature far better than we can perceive ourselves in this life. His love in creating those who could choose to love Him in return necessitated accommodation in the relationship, to balance the sum of who He is and what we are.

This eternal God from the beginning knew forgiveness would be part of what He was doing, were it to happen at all. Love made that choice, and in that aspect of Divine nature is all the hope we need to navigate the present day.

God is good, all the time. It pleases Him to inspire our hope, to buttress it with courage, and to witness works of faithfulness that defy the whispers of the enemy, and then his voice, and even his raging bellow. Faith will be here after the storm is past, just as the Craftsman—the same yesterday, today and tomorrow forever—has ever been and ever shall be.

The hope available to you was brought about by the choice of a simple, wonderful girl long ago, who said in faith “Let it be done to me according to Thy will.” Jesus appeared, and His witnesses carried the Good News into the world. He knew we needed something to hang onto when the storms would come. So stay inside, dear child of God, and warm yourself here.

Choose to love, and Merry Christmas. -DA

Fear

Here, it is not yet a week since an addled young man shot up his former high school in Parkland, Florida. And people everywhere are afraid.

We have all felt fear, so there’s seldom a need to define dread. It’s burn graduates through degrees of apprehension to stark terror in every life, because we are fragile and fleeting creatures bounded in an uncertain existence by a beginning and an end, with our anticipated span between at best an assumption. Fear is natural once we witness hurt … or worse.

In our next release and Boone’s fifth novel, A Garden in Russia—currently editing—the wife of Russia’s FSB Director, my character Ana Lyubov, has this to say about the duty and responsibility for comporting oneself:

“Faith is given to overcome fear, girl, for those who live in righteousness. It is history’s lesson at every turn. This is our time to be strong … for your father’s sake.”

And again, to another:

“Let me tell you, Deborah Vosse … though my husband is in prison, and my daughter a captive, I feel no less the hand of God in these difficult days.”

And this from Boone:

“When fear keeps you from your promises, your duty, from accomplishing whatever it is you are tasked to do by your love for others … only then are you a coward.”

To fear is no dishonor. Fear can be motivating, as adrenaline is invigorating. What follows behind sometimes is problematic.

Fear exists as a tool for those whose main ambition is to direct the lives of others. Like  animal predators in nature rather than society, spiritually deficient personalities seek, sense, cultivate, and exploit it because they recognize the manipulative advantage of leveraging terror.

Terrorists use it as a means to an end. That the techniques of terror are more blatantly homicidal than a politician whose strategy is identical in its heartless essence marks only a matter of decrepit degree. The core value of both sociopathic subsets is dominance. In each case goal-oriented behavior exhibits to the exclusion of valued humanity.

In every case, fear depends on its acceptance in the targeted group embracing the emotion. Sometimes this occurs out of fatigue following relentless, propagandistic assault, but more often the cause is a perception of helplessness. Those manipulating the sensation of horror have some transition in mind, and often what presents as a solution is anything but.

Today the architects of fear are targeting the natural right of free people to possess the means of their defense. The framers of our Constitution recognized this before all but a few when delineating the rights its first ten amendments safeguard, because they were about setting down unchanging principles of governance unhindered by tyranny. In doing so, they were setting the boundaries of government free people would not need to fear.

Frank Herbert’s masterpiece Dune has his portrayed Bene Gesserit trainees recite their litany against fear as “the mind killer” and “the little death that brings total obliteration.” Herbert’s characters, so prepared, faced their emotion, let it go, and traced its path afterward to better understand themselves. So should we.

Fear stems from uncertainty, but certitude is a matter of education. It is infuriating that fear is being cultivated in our educational institutions these days. Its introduction is diminishing rather than edifying.

Malleability originates in a condition of essential incapability. Performance anxiety in vital aspects of life, such as assuring one’s personal safety, amplifies perceptions of dependency, whose end result is to make its subject weak rather then strong. Personal, emotional and physical strength should be the goal of worthwhile mentors. To do otherwise brings into question the motives and honor of those responsible for producing the next generation of citizens, and the ideological condition their curriculum is designed to produce.

I repeat: fear, in whatever condition one finds oneself, regardless needs to be embraced to have an influence. The strength to do otherwise is bestowed first in the spirit and then in the mind, where a decision to act must take place. This is why those whose sum displays in their ambition go to such lengths to assure its abundance in prospective subjects. Tyranny is never in the best interest of the oppressed, and tyrants know this better than anyone. It must be made to appear as the best choice, and to do so more noble aspects of the human experience must be put out of mind.

The fear of death, the scariest and most inevitable doorway we face in life, is the tool God’s enemy uses to turn us from His will. That the enemy and his plans are defeated already through the Resurrection of Christ is the treasure of faith and secret strength for those of us who believe, and freely available should it be sought. This realization is God’s goal, just as His enemy’s schemes intend to keep you from it.

So, here in the wake of another tragedy and in the midst of upset and proposed, agenda-based solutions on the political Left, I would encourage you. Find your faith and build your strength in the company of worthwhile teachers in whatever aspect of your personal development seems lacking. They are the ones whose goals are to make you strong, independent, reverent, and capable rather than a quailing thrall. They will teach you how to help yourself rather than carry or steer you into servitude. They will ask nothing but their due in exchange, if wishing anything at all but that you likewise pay forward the lessons accumulated from similarly happy, formative circumstances of their own in days gone by.

They are the ones you will remember on the day you’re able to say, “I’m not afraid, I am free.”

Choose to love, -DA

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In production news, as mentioned, the fifth installment of Boone’s File is editing and anticipating a September release. As always, whether you have read in Jon’s Trilogy, or Sean’s File, or followed Boone’s progress, we depend on your recommendations and your reviews to get out the word.

“If you’ve read something, I hope you said something.” Your few words, describing to prospective readers how my novel made you feel, will never stop helping me … or go unappreciated here.