You Are not as Strong as You Think You Are

'Tis the off-season for battle, or so it seems. Perhaps I am merely weakened too much to fight, and don't know it. Maybe I'm just being a REMF.

Remember, if you go toe to toe with the evil one, he will beat you every time. You think you're strong; you think you're cunning; you think you're wise; he is stronger, more cunning, and his deceit will match your wisdom and more.

When it all comes crashing down, what will you do?

Eloquence is not my thing tonight, but a warning is. Take care, because when you play heads up with him, he'll switch the cards on you. You can't beat him on your own. All you can do is offer yourself to Our Blessed Lord; cast yourself upon His strength and His grace, and there you will find refuge.


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Video bonus:

Pornography as Violence

Sin is NP-Complete. For those who don't care to read Wikipedia's article, NP is a space of problems in mathematics that are very difficult to solve. For a problem to be NP-Complete, it must be shown to be equivalent to another NP-Complete problem (the Travelling Salesman Problem is an example).

So what I'm saying, really, is that a given sin, or at least a given mortal sin, can in someway be traced back to another mortal sin. Of course, the root sin is Pride, and all others can be linked through this, if we were actually interested in Mathematical Sin Space, which we aren't. I'm merely giving an example of how my mind works... mathematics is a disease that infects everything.

Briefly considered, lest we dwell too long on this darkness: violence is about power and destruction, it is about incinerating the beautiful, beating it beyond recognition. People like to quote John Paul II, who said that the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much, but rather that it shows too little, that it is merely a hollow shell of the love that should be present in the sexual act. This is fine as far as it goes, but something is missing, and that is an understanding of the way evil works. One would think, from the way this is quoted, that satan's one desire is to replace the Beauty and Love God gives us with a counterfeit. I think this is a distortion in its own right. It credits the devil's insidiousness without making clear his maliciousness.

Much like our current government, which has replaced real money with its own counterfeit and then, by distorting it beyond any resemblance to the original, has, through perversion and violence, gained power of life and death over us, so does the evil one seek, not merely the replacement of the good, but its destruction.

The counterfeit is not the goal; it is the initial means to the goal; it is the deception. The goal is power; the goal is the rape of beauty, the bloody murder of innocence. The goal is unspeakable violence. I am not speaking here of snuff, though that is clearly an example of the most perverse depths. No, I am speaking here of the mere desire to see innocence lost, to see the pure defiled. In this, pornography is the bedmate of violence, for both seek the desecration of the sacred. The power to take, the power to destroy, the both are different manifestations of the same oily sickness with which the evil one would poison all, a sickness that reeks with the stench of damnation.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is not My Friend

The demons quarrel. They argue amongst themselves, how best to effect the damnation of a soul. Or at least, so it would seem, for evil never presents a consistent face. We feed on power: the power to destroy, the power of life and death, whether it be held over a foreigner, a child, a Jew, a Christian, a criminal suspect, this is what nourishes us; this is what poisons us. In one sentence you may earn my respect by denouncing the needless deaths of women and children killed by remote control, and in the next you tell me that a woman has power of life and death over her child. You say the government has no business sticking its nose into healthcare, or taxing private citizens (directly or, through inflation, indirectly) to bail out large corporations, but you will accept those same taxes as long as the revenue is paid out to large corporations that make implements of destruction in order that the government that took your money may bomb some weddings and birthday parties on the other side of the world.

Yes, indeed, throw rocks at the nest and see if you are not stung. But never mind, they're brown, they're Muslim, they haven't been born yet, they're a future drain on society and the environment, hence they are not worthy of life.

The enemy of my enemy is very often my enemy. We denounce the crimes of those who hold power over us, then we are given the Gift of power, and the wrongs we mean to right are forgotten for the wrongs we mean to do.

The People Who Wear Jeans

Some of the other people in our building actually refer to us that way.

Standing in the elevator

Cursing those who wake up later

Than you do

Wishing your clothes were as comfortable

Wishing your life was as manageable

As those people who wear jeans

Yeah, they live on the eighth floor

And it's a cave up there

Life's just not fair

You wish you were one of

The people who wear jeans

When Friday finally rolls around

You think at last you can dress down

So do they

And you hate that they wear t-shirts

And you wish that you could play with dirt

Isn't that what they do up there?

Yeah, they live on the eighth floor

And it's a cave up there

Life's just not fair

You wish you were one of

The people who wear jeans

'Cause your job's not as cool as theirs

You'll never get to wrestle bears

You don't really like your coworkers

You just want to drink a few beers

With those people who wear jeans

You Keep Saying That Word... Part II

More linguistic commentary. For Part I, go here.

To beg the question is to assume what you are trying to prove. A rudimentary and somewhat silly example is the following mathematical argument:

Prove:
Pi is not an irrational number

Proof:
Since Pi can be written as p/q with p and q integers, Pi is clearly a rational number. Therefore, Pi is not an irrational number.

Of course, the assumption that Pi can be written as the quotient of integers p and q is the same as assuming that Pi is not an irrational number. This is begging the question. Begging the question =/= raising the question.

Communicate is overused. It sounds corporate. Don't communicate something; tell me something, e-mail me something, or call me. Communicate is best left to its intransitive meaning. That is, two people communicate well with one another when each is capable of telling the other whatever is on his mind (and yes, the masculine pronoun is correct).

Invest your money. Spend time with friends, learn to know them, rejoice with them, weep with them, but for heaven's sake do not invest in them - unless they are a bank.

Calling women "females" makes animals of them. Proper words would be girls, ladies, women, matrons, lasses, dames - depending on the situation in which one finds himself.

Avoid rhetoric; say what you mean; know what you are saying. Remember, businessmen and politicians are professional liars.

This will perhaps be an ongoing series, and yes, I will continue to pick on my friends without calling them out :).