Untold Fortune

“In reality, freedom is aristocratic, not democratic. With sorrow we must recognize the fact that freedom is dear only to those men who think creatively. It is not very necessary to those who do not value thinking. In the so-called democracies, based on the principle of popular sovereignty, a considerable proportion of the people are those who have not yet become conscious of themselves as free beings, bearing within themselves the dignity of freedom. Education to freedom is something still ahead of us, and this will not be achieved in a hurry.” – Nikolai Berdyaev

This is such a clear distillation of why, despite everything, the French must be protected at all costs

I’m sorry but this is one of the funniest post I’ve seen in a while. 😂

Pelagius, Augustine, and John Romanides are all wrong.

Eschatologically speaking China in spite of its tremendous stature is out of the game. The same is true geopolitically speaking. Strange.

From the (correctly constructed) Atlantean Cross it's relatively straightforward to excavate the Atlantean Calendar, with its five seasons. [I, 55 days] March 1 to April 24 [II, 64 days] April 25 to June 27 [III, 91 days] June 28 to September 26 [IIII, 73 days] September 27 to December 8 [IIIII, 82 days] December 9 to February 28 Modernists can add intercalations in accordance with the Gregorian February. Names to come.

Scientific observations reveal that animals can display grief-like behaviors in response to death.

For Eriugena, this is even true for God himself. Even God doesn't comprehend God.

Is this a good time to remind people that no one can actually explain what it means in practice if a couple lacks “just cause” to use NFP, and what they need to do instead to avoid sin?

A tiny blue octopus discovered in the Galápagos, found near Darwin Island

Become ungovernable.

In the United States, buying an egg salad sandwich from a convenience store or gas station at midnight is a gamble with your digestive system. In Japan, a two-dollar 7-Eleven egg salad sandwich is a culinary religious experience that late chef Anthony Bourdain famously called pillows of love. Why does a humble convenience store sandwich in Tokyo taste better than a fifteen-dollar cafe lunch in New York? It comes down to two obsessions: agricultural engineering and thermal logistics. First, Japanese convenience chains do not use pale, industrial powdered eggs. They use farm eggs from hens fed marigold-enriched diets that produce deep sunset-orange yolks, whipped with yolk-only Kewpie mayonnaise and tucked inside crustless Shokupan milk bread that is steamed and kneaded to stay cloud-soft. Second, those sandwiches do not sit on a frigid shelf for four days. Delivery trucks restock Japanese convenience stores three to four times a day using dedicated temperature zones, keeping bread in mildly cooled compartments so refrigerator chill never hardens the wheat starch.

Most of these men never even had sex, and those that did (like Augustine) usually had deep psychological shame about it. This is why Gregory of Nyssa is the goat, man was married before he became a bishop.

All this tweeting about the sun setting an hour earlier starting on Sunday and how sad and depressing and forlorn life’s gonna get is only so much manipulative and mendacious gaslighting. These pearl-clutchers want to make us think that Standard Time is some vestigial cruelty of a bygone era; that the sheer perversity of short winter days and long winter nights must be blamed on negligent, misanthropic senators rather than on the tilt of the earth’s axis at 23.44º. As if we as a civilized society in the Current Year should have long since moved past leaving work after sunset! Yet somehow these weepers and wailers never bring up the obvious corollary: shouldn’t we in the Big ’26 have long since moved past going *to* work *before sunrise*? They don’t bring this up not because it doesn’t occur to them, but because it doesn’t cater to their goals. No, for them, sunlight in the evening matters; sunlight in the morning does not. Why? Because the former gets us focused on leisure, entertainment, golf, halloween candy, and commercial profit; the latter gets us focused on vigor, work, and study by day, followed by quiet rest and deep sleep by night. The former fills their pockets; the latter makes us sane. We should relish our quiet, dark, fall and winter evenings! They’re delicious. They’re a healing balm after the activity not only of the day now over – a day that was energized by bright, early-morning sunshine – but also that of the long, verdant and vibrant summer now past. But these people don’t want us to enjoy winter evenings at home, inside, in warmth and peace, with all the interior contentment and contemplative coziness that are bound up in that great but now rare word: “hearth.” Part of the problem, of course, is that we either can’t or won’t learn how to make our own homes places of beauty, places where we *want* to be. Instead we flood them with overhead lighting and fill them with screens, so that even when we’re at home, we’re not. And I bet there’s a big overlap in the Venn diagram between the permanent-DST-foisters and the people who started this trend of mounting TVs directly above fireplaces – so as to gut even the idea of the memory of what a quiet family hearth might be like. In the U.S., the year used to be evenly split between standard time and daylight saving. That still wasn’t ideal. But then Big Candy and Big Golf got standard time reduced to only a third of the year: November through February. It’s only during those four months that midday is truly at noon and midnight truly at midnight. In the other eight months, we set the clocks an hour fast – we get up an hour earlier – and thus we can pretend that the sun goes down later. So for all you corporate pearl-clutchers out there howling and writhing as this weekend approaches: what’s your motive? Cui bono? (Painting: Adriaen van Ostade, A Talk by the Fireplace, c. 1640)