“Dick is one of the ten best American writers of the twentieth century, which is saying a lot. Dick was a kind of Kafka steeped in LSD and rage.”—Roberto Bolaño
What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K. Dick’s ground-breaking novel, and the first book in his defining trilogy. When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy, or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world.
VALIS is essential reading for any true Philip K. Dick fan, a novel that Roberto Bolaño called “more disturbing than any novel by [Carson] McCullers.” By the end, like Dick himself, you will be left wondering what is real, what is fiction, and just what the price is for divine inspiration.
Featuring virtual reality, parallel worlds, and interstellar travel, The Divine Invasion is the second novel in the VALIS trilogy by Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award–winning author of The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the basis for the film Blade Runner.
God is not dead, he has merely been exiled to an extraterrestrial planet. It is on this planet that Yah—as this possible God is known—meets Herb Asher and convinces him to help Yah return to Earth, which is itself under the control of the demonic Belial. To do this, Asher must shepherd a woman pregnant with Yah past the tight security of Earth.
Part science fiction adventure, part religious inquiry, The Divine Invasion questions just how much anyone really knows—or really can know—about the nature of reality and God.
As the middle novel of Dick’s VALIS trilogy, The Divine Invasion plays a pivotal role in answering the questions raised by the first novel, expanding that world while exploring just how much anyone can really know—even God himself.
From Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award–winning author of The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the basis for the film Blade Runner—comes The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the conclusion of the VALIS trilogy, bringing the author’s search for the identity and nature of God to a close.
The novel follows Bishop Timothy Archer as he travels to Israel, ostensibly to examine ancient scrolls bearing the words of Christ. But more importantly, this leads him to examine the decisions he made during his life and how they may have contributed to the suicides of his mistress and son.
This introspective book is one of Dick’s most philosophical and literary, delving into the mysteries of religion and of faith itself. As one of Dick’s final works, it also provides unique insight into the mind of a genius, whose work was still in the process of maturing at the time of his death.
The final book in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer brings the author’s search for the identity and nature of God to a close. The novel follows Bishop Timothy Archer as he travels to Israel, ostensibly to examine ancient scrolls bearing the words of Christ. But, more importantly, this leads him to examine the decisions he made during his life and how they may have contributed to the suicide of his mistress and son.
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Elite Escapism
In every society there is a gap between the truth the ruling class asserts and the truth the people experience. This used to be a feature of Western criticism of the Soviet economic system during the Cold War. Communist rulers would make claims about their system and critics would compare that to reality. Today, the obvious gap is in the West where the ruling class exists in another world. Over the last year this has been on display when they speak about the war in Ukraine.
Yesterday, the regime sent Joe Biden to visit Kiev, thinking this was going to be a public relations coup on the anniversary of the war. This is the New York Times lead story in which they make him sound like Lenin crossing into Russia. The Washington Post has a very similar story. They even use the same photo. Obviously, much of the content was supplied by narrative men in the regime. The point of these stories is to maintain the sense that victory is at hand!
Putin to Russia’s enemies: Incoming!
A good way to determine whether you are still alive is by asking whether you can still feel wonder and amazement at watching the changes sweeping the world. Most such changes are gradual and hard to detect as part of your day-to-day experience, and so it is useful when someone important stands in front of you for an hour, as Putin did today before Russia’s Federal Assembly, and explains exactly what has happened and exactly what is gong to happen. It is also quite entertaining: Putin is someone who is naturally irrepressible and refuses to hold back. His Russian also has a tremendous dynamic range: one moment he sounds like a streetwise kid from the tough streets of Leningrad, and another moment he sounds like a lawyer and a consummate technocrat, literary scholar or even a theology student. Well, he is all of these things. Like him or hate him (few people manage to feel neutral about him) but he is difficult to ignore. Especially since, as is usual, his annual address to the Federal Assembly was not lacking in linguists call performantives — statements that do not express opinion or impart information but actually transform reality in specific ways. And these it is important to know about, especially if you reside in one of the countries whose leaders have (very stupidly) decided to be Russia’s enemies, since, ultimately, it is your ass that’s on the line. You may stand in awe of the awesome leader whose name is Vladimir Putin (there is nothing to stop you) but, more to the point, I feel it is my humanitarian duty to warn you what’s likely to happen before someone shouts “Incoming!” That way, you might formulate a better plan than just covering yourself with a white sheet and slowly crawling toward the cemetery (so as to not cause a stampede in which someone might get trampled). And so…
In reality, Washington coordinated the trip with Moscow so that nothing bad could happen during Biden’s trip. Serious people in the Pentagon, who still have contacts in Russia, made sure the Russians knew Biden was making the trip long before Biden got on the plane to Poland. Those serious people know Russia does not want a direct war with the West. Two days before Biden made the trip, social media was buzzing about it, as word was leaked by both sides.
This public relations stunt was conducted against the backdrop of a policy that has failed at every turn and now promises to end in disaster. No one in the ruling class bubble wants to think about that, so they tell each other stories like this one from one of the Kagan cult members. Another cult member chimed in with this post in the same publication, now operated by the cult. This post in a conspiracy site gave the kooks out in the fever swamps something to discuss.
There is a theme coming from the cult members, which is aimed at maintaining the fiction that animates Ukraine policy. That theme is inevitability. The subtext to these stories is like the quote from the Terminator movie. The neocons are out there. They cannot be reasoned with. They do not feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until Russia has been destroyed. You hear that Europe? Washington will never stop until victory is achieved!
Of course, the reason for this is reality is starting to creep in at the edges, especially among the Europeans. The stockpiles of old Soviet weapons are all gone, blown up on the battlefields of Ukraine. The extra Western weapons have also been used up to the point where many NATO countries no longer have a functioning army. The German army is back to using slingers and berserkers. America is no longer able to provide Ukraine with enough ammunition for the war.
What is going on here is that the people inside the bubble created a glorious story for themselves regarding Russia. The story said that if they could bait the Russians into war, they just had to sit back and wait for Russia to collapse. This version of reality created by the cult was a reboot of the Bolshevik Revolution. This time, war would crack the Russian regime and the heroes would ride into Moscow to finally exact their revenge on their ancient enemy.
That has not happened. In fact, it is the American Empire that is now cracking under the strain of this war of attrition. Western economies are struggling. There is growing unrest in the public about the political class. Meanwhile, the Russians have organized themselves for the long haul. The story Western elites told each other about this war are falling a part, but rather than face reality they fill their minds with more versions of the big lie from the biggest of big liars.
This form of elite escapism is not unique to Ukraine policy. This is the defining feature of our ruling class. When asked about how all of these magical electric cars will be charged, people like Pete Buttigieg just reply with some hand waving or maybe say they will supply more sockets. He has no idea and he has no reason to care, because his world is the world of fantasy. The people running energy policy are just as divorced from reality as the people running foreign policy.
It is not confined to the elites. This is how the managerial class maintains its sense of identity and cohesion. The answer to the primary question of life, who are we?, is supplied by the many narratives that define the managerial class. Whether it is pronouns, support for deviant sexual practices, saying “keev” all of a sudden or any number of affectations, the point is to signal membership in the club. For these people, the answer to the big question is one of the approved narratives.
This is why the neocons have managed to dominate foreign policy. They are expert at creating complex narrative structures that provide simple moral choices for the audience, moral choices that favor their preferred outcomes. In a society that lives by words, rather than deeds, being good with words counts for a lot. Robert Kagan tells one side stories about monsters and heroes, while his wife tells the other side similar stories, always with the same monsters and heroes.
In the fullness of time, Francis Fukuyama’s seminal essay, The End of History, will be seen as the point at which Western elites became untethered from reality. For them, history was always a nightmare from which they could not awake. All of a sudden, the nightmare was over because history was over. What was ahead was whatever their imaginations could conjure. They could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as they had a mind.
Much of what constitutes democratic politics in the West is the people debating with one another about the precise time their rulers wake from their dream. Surely they will see the folly of making war with Russia. Maybe this event will do it. Surely they will see the lunacy of banning fossil fuels. Maybe now they will see it. So far, nothing has worked, suggesting nothing will work. Elite escapism is now too much a part of what defines the elite, so their can be no awakening from their dream.
Continue reading at The Z Blog...https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29374
Waiting for Armageddon
Or, not?
The seriousness of our predicament cannot be overstated. We’re in the clutches of the insane with no institutional integrity, no political allies, no military allies, no cultural solidarity on which to draw. At best we are vindicated in our points of view by scattered media outlets of limited reach. At the same time, we’re being targeted, victimized and pursued by the very bureaucracies we’ve funded and supported through taxes, however unwillingly.
The only means of survival both figuratively and literally is in noncompliance. Easier said than done, because they’re coming at us from every direction with everything they have, all the weight of the federal government, the banking institutions, the medical establishment, the national and international corporations.
Who are we then, the individuals, to stop them?
Understand that you, the individual, is the target, because you are the strength and the soul of America and to that end, the dangerous, rebellious villains in their designs. They think if they can separate you from all others you can be controlled, dominated. They cannot be allowed to separate us. They have already proven that if they spread fear they can drive millions into cages and willfully accept poison as sustenance. This is what the pandemic proved to them and cannot be undone, unproven. Every level of deceit that works, is a level that must be overcome by refusal to accept it.
Those who pretend this is an America that has ever existed before are lying to themselves. Never has there been so many evils among us. Never has there been so much corruption, so much disregard for laws by those entrusted to enforce them. We are lost, cast upon a sea of troubles. Our only salvation is in each other, taking strength from those who stand solidly and refuse to be dominated and incorporating that strength into our own resistance. You must refuse, no matter what it costs, because the ultimate cost is not only to you, but to your children, if indeed children will be possible in the future. Consider that for the evil that it is. Those alive today might be the last generation to survive the sterilization, the poison injections, the blood clots, the sex trafficking to arrive at adulthood.
The irrational excuses for taking the vaxx are so the victim can enjoy life, take a vacation, go to work, etc. Really? And when the vaxx kills you, clogs your heart with white, fibrous material, stopping the blood in the arteries, what then will be the reason for compliance other than compliance itself? This is the danger of doing as one is told rather than considering what has been told and then investigating the pros and cons of it and coming to a rational decision. If certain death is already on one side of the ledger, the rest need not be so vigorously investigated. The answer is no.
Next up will be the economic crisis where everyone discovers that the money promised to them in their bank accounts is not really theirs, hasn’t been theirs since they opened the bank account, when they gave it to the bank and then was allowed to pull it back out on certain conditions. Soon, those conditions will no longer exist and when the bank decides it’s time for a bail-in rather than a bail-out, they’ll just take it. It will disappear from the account. Now, if that inspires one to act out in a violent way, there’ll be plenty of cops there to ensure that one does not. When you talk about criminals, the worst sort are the kind that have police protection. At what point, then do the cops themselves become the criminals? That’s a question they should be asking themselves right now, as individuals, as Americans, as parents.
The only thing that will stop any of this, throw sand in the gears of the New World Order, is to band together and refuse to comply. Do not accept a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) unless you want that threat of a bail-in every time you get a paycheck. There will come a time when everyone in America has to stop working until they are presented with an acceptable means of compensation. I suggest that CBDC’s are not acceptable, that they should have left the banking system alone, because after they take everything in the checking account one time, the only acceptable means of compensation should be cash, silver or gold. If we fail that test, too, we will be enslaved by a digital currency able to be withheld at any moment, for any reason and whatever work one has done over the past week or month, will be for nothing. How long will you work, if your compensation is constantly threatened? Not one minute, if you understand the issues being presented.
I have suggested in the past the idea of an Autonomous County, one where the fundamental rights of the individual are secured, where laws and dictates from the WHO and the UN are ignored and repudiated. To that end, I’ve written up a justification for and explanation of an Autonomous County for those who have requested more information. It’s one tactic that can help individuals band together on a smaller scale, test out the resistance and consolidate influence over the state. At worst, it allows those red counties in blue states the structure by which to entertain the Greater Idaho method of resistance to irrational and largely insane dictates of the high population centers (the true evil of democracy).
We’re on our own, so we better start figuring out how to work together against the massive forces arrayed against us. We have the tools in the fact that they have to commit crimes and act unconstitutionally in order to pursue their agenda, we just need to mark out our territory, find ways to hold them accountable and pursue charges of treason whenever and however we can. There are a lot of good ideas out there, but we need to pick one and start using it. Unless, we’re just going to wait for the nuclear war to do the work for us, but that mentality has gotten us here.
Continue reading at Substack...https://tldavis.substack.com/p/waiting-for-armageddon
Jl 2:12-18
Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.
For gracious and merciful is he,
slow to anger, rich in kindness,
and relenting in punishment.
Perhaps he will again relent
and leave behind him a blessing,
Offerings and libations
for the LORD, your God.
Blow the trumpet in Zion!
proclaim a fast,
call an assembly;
Gather the people,
notify the congregation;
Assemble the elders,
gather the children
and the infants at the breast;
Let the bridegroom quit his room
and the bride her chamber.
Between the porch and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep,
And say, “Spare, O LORD, your people,
and make not your heritage a reproach,
with the nations ruling over them!
Why should they say among the peoples,
‘Where is their God?’”
[ C O N T I N U E S.... ]
Acts 6:8-15
8 And Stephen, full of grace and power, was performing great wonders and signs among the people. 9 But some men from what was called the Synagogue of the Freedmen, including both Cyrenians and Alexandrians, and some from Cilicia and Asia, rose up and argued with Stephen. 10 But they were unable to cope with his wisdom and the Spirit by whom he was speaking. 11 Then they secretly induced men to say, “We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.” 12 And they stirred up the people, the elders, and the scribes, and they came up to him and dragged him away, and brought him before the Council. 13 They put forward false witnesses who said, “This man does not stop speaking against this holy place and the Law; 14 for we have heard him say that this Nazarene, Jesus, will destroy this place and change the customs which Moses handed down to us.” 15 And all who were sitting in the Council stared at him, and they saw his face, which was like the face of an angel.
[ ... C O N T I N U E D ]
Many people associate the season of Lent with Catholicism, but that no longer holds true. Many other churches and people are choosing to observe the forty days (not including Sundays) before Easter. Lent is a time of penance, of choosing to look closely at our lives and invite the Holy Spirit in to help us clean house.
Often we will choose to give up something, a sacrifice we offer to the Lord, but also something we use as a way to remind us to be more holy, more dependent on God. We fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and we abstain from meat on Fridays as well, although many Catholics do not understand that we still have an obligation to fast on Fridays or substitute another penitential practice year round. We are called to give alms during Lent.
These practices are meant to help us prepare to meet Jesus on Easter Sunday, having walked these six weeks with him toward Calvary, fasting as he fasted in the desert, carrying our cross as he carried his, doing the will of the Father as Jesus taught us so well.
Like Mary, we hope to find ourselves at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, still with our Savior, looking with a more hopeful and receptive heart toward the Resurrection.
If you are not a member of a church, or your particular church does not have any Ash Wednesday service, you are welcome to participate at any Catholic Church. You do not have to be Catholic to attend the service or receive the ashes. I’m sure that is true of other denominations as well.
Continue reading at The Conservative Treehouse...https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/02/22/remember-you-are-dust-and-to-dust-you-shall-return-3/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=remember-you-are-dust-and-to-dust-you-shall-return-3
40 Days in the Desert
I will be posting one blog a day during Lent this year. Except I will be taking Saturdays off, instead of Sundays. Continue reading tomorrow for the second installment. I will probably start to dive into the first book, VALIS.
Cycle of Philip K. Dick
