Some Advent Thoughts

     [This piece first appeared at the old Eternity Road blogsite on December 4, 2005 – FWP]

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1. The Haunting

     Via the worthy Lane Core -- welcome to the Eternity Road blogroll, Lane -- comes this inspiring take on the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christian faith:

"Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless." With these words C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, described the early years of his life. The story of his pre-conversion self, however, is much more than the autobiography of one 20th-century Englishman. It depicts the spiritual torpor of modern man, namely post-Christian man.

     For the first time in the history of humanity, man does not believe in the supernatural. The supernatural was natural to the pre-Christian age. The sun and the stars, trees and rivers, everything that surrounded them was inhabited by dryads and nymphs and all sorts of mythological creatures. Everything bore the trace of the divine. Modern man may smile at the primitiveness of their beliefs. In the best case, he will admit that it would make a good fairy tale for children.

     Lewis did not think so; to him it was the twentieth century that was regressive. By reducing the world to the material reality which one can experience with one’s senses, man has turned the world into a vacuum in which men spend their time, as T.S. Eliot would say, "dodging [their] emptiness." Surprisingly enough, it was pagan mythological literature, permeated as it was with the intuitive belief in the supernatural, which set Lewis searching for God. He became a theist and his conversion to Christ followed later. Pagan literature–Greek myths, the sagas and eddas of Norse mythology and the epics of classical antiquity–acted upon him as a preparatio evangelica. His imagination and his sensibility were "baptised" first, which proved to be a pre-requisite for the conversion of his heart. The material reality around him was the same but his gaze had been converted. Like the post-conversion T.S. Eliot, he ended up revisiting the ordinary experiences of his daily life and saw a transfigured reality:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

     I doubt there remains a reader of this site who doesn't know of my admiration for Lewis, by far the greatest of the modern polemicists for Christianity. But it becomes deeper as I acquaint myself with the details of his journey out of the darkness.

     Lewis was not merely a persuasive writer and promulgator of the teachings of others; he was also the possessor of a mighty intelligence and a fertile imagination. Among other things, he conceived the central need of the modern mind -- accurately, in my judgment -- as a fusion of the spiritual yearning naturally inborn in all of us with a revived, freshly vivid vision of what lies beyond the mundane realm through which we plod. For this reason above all others, his Ransom and Narnia books are among the most powerful of all tools for the opening of the weary, battered, spiritually malnourished human heart. He'd "been there," and had divined what it takes to get from "there" to "here."

     But where is "here"? Perhaps it was put best by Father Andrew Greeley when he said that "Catholics live in a haunted world." (Substitute "Christians" for "Catholics" for, uh, best catholicity.) We are perpetually mindful of a realm beyond the one that's evident to our senses. Our choices are formed as much, if not more, by our consciousness of that realm as by their probable consequences in this one. For us as for no materialist of any stripe, the world is alive and immanent with promise.

     With the help of another great genius, Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (upon whom Lewis's hero Dr. Elwin Ransom was based), Lewis found his way, and then his voice. Then he bestowed it upon us.

    

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2. Our Pride And Our Burden.

     Curt at North Western Winds presents an interesting citation today from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's (Pope Benedict XVI) Introduction to Christianity:

The fact that when the perfectly just man appeared he was crucified, delivered up by justice to death, tells us pitilessly who man is: Thou art such, man, that thou canst not bear the just man - that he who simply loves becomes a fool, a scourged criminal, an outcast. Thou art such because, unjust thyself, thou dost always need the injustice of the next man in order to feel excused and thus cannot tolerate the just man who seems to rob thee of this excuse. Such art thou. St John summarized all this in the Ecce Homo ("Look, this is [the] man!" of Pilate, which means quite fundamentally: this is how it is with man; this is man. The truth of man is his complete lack of truth. The sayings in the Pslam that every man is a liar (Ps 116 [115]: 11) and lives in some way or other against the truth already reveals how it really is with man. The truth about man is that he is continually assailing the truth; the just man crucified is thus a mirror held up to man in which he sees himself unadorned. But the Cross does not reveal only man; it also reveals God. God is such that he identifies himself with man right down into the abyss and that he judges him and saves him. In the abyss of human failure is revealed the still more inexhaustible abyss of divine love. The Cross is thus truly the center of revelation, a revelation that does not reveal any previously unknown principle but reveals us to ourselves by revealing us before God and God in our midst.

     Now, the Holy Father's emphasis on God's identification with Man is quite important. Still, there's more here: a fundamental insight of the sort we overlook until we've stumbled over it...after which, we call it "obvious."

     Rational consciousness, the defining characteristic of Man, is the ability to form abstractions and to use them in reasoning. But every abstraction is an incomplete rendition of the reality it seeks to model. In other words, no matter how sincerely we try to make our conceptions accurate representations of the world, they will always lie, if only by omission.

     But the human mind is unsatisfied by the incomplete. It yearns toward fullness; toward transcendence; toward God. So we tend to take such things and "fill in the blanks," sometimes arbitrarily, and sometimes willfully. But even the best of us is incomplete himself, particularly in his knowledge. And even the best of us is inclined to see the world not as it is, but as we would like it to be.

     This is Man's glory and his cross. Being creatures made in God's image and destined to be reunited with God, we are conscious, yet partial. Conjoined, these characteristics compel us to fantasize...and some of the fantasies are wrong.

    

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3. Certainties.

     The word "if" has received quite a bit of, ah, critical attention. (Myself, I think that most of it should go to "should," but that's a subject for another screed.) In his novel An Odor Of Sanctity, Frank Yerby called it "the saddest word in any language." In Godel, Escher, Bach, his exposition on the roots of consciousness, computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter called it "the push into fantasy." Our constant need for "if," the indication of a condition upon which other propositions might be found true, is a potent expression of the uncertainty in which we live.

     It's difficult, this job of living. What make it difficult are uncertainty and change.

     Uncertainty keeps us tense. Change wears us out. In combination, they leave us gasping for breath and ever more desperate for surcease.

     The hell of it is that there's so much uncertainty. Indeed, it seems to be everywhere. Even the propositions upon which ordinary people rely in the course of the most ordinary of their days are uncertain. Wait! Stop! How do you know that floor will bear your weight? Yes, yes, you've walked across it before, but things do change. Mightn't it have weakened fatally since the last time you tested it -- at the risk of your life, one might add?

     Uncertainty rules the physical world. Uncertainty is the ruling principle of the fundamental insights of physics. If the quantum physicists can be believed, Heraclitus was essentially correct: everything is fire, and nothing is truly stable. Heisenberg said it, I believe it, and that settles it.

     But we hunger for certainty and stability. So we create them in our heads.

     Create them? Excuse me. Do we really? We don't create anything else! Everything we make is a blend of pre-existent stuffs with the labor of our bodies and minds. Rather, we extrapolate from the order and persistence we can see to wider, deeper degrees of order and persistence, beneath the bottom-most of which lies a Will that governs all?

     Men being partial and limited, we cannot grasp the whole of Creation. Therefore we cannot be certain that there are any truly immutable truths, or any permanence even to the laws our best minds have deduced from what they can see and touch. This recognition has turned many a man to despair.

     Nevertheless, certainty and stability are available, as and where they've always been:

For I know that my Redeemer liveth,
    And that he shall stand,
        at the latter day, upon the Earth. [Job, 19:25]

     We can't be certain of what we believe, but we can be certain that we believe it. The Advent season, which opens the liturgical year, reminds us that the coming of Christ was foretold by the prophesies of Isaiah and others who came before him, and heralded at last by "the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, 'Prepare ye the way of the Lord'":

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit." [Mark, 1:4-8]

     Job could not be certain of what he foresaw. Neither could Isaiah, and neither could John. They were men, like us, and certainty about factual things is not available to men. But they trusted the visions they had been given. They were firm in their belief -- and they were right.

     For the next three weeks, Christians everywhere will prepare for the arrival of their Certainty, from whose Will flows the inexhaustible stability of all-healing grace.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Edges

     "A man once said to the universe, 'Sir, I exist.'
     'However,' replied the universe, 'that fact has not created in me a sense of obligation.'"

     [Stephen Crane]

     “Utopia is not one of the options” – David Bergland

     The wave of detentions and deportations are having an effect that could easily have been predicted:

A 79-year-old grandfather, in the United States since he was five, was detained by ICE for not complying with a deportation order issued nearly 60 years ago.https://t.co/7QwjcNQN3s

— reason (@reason) November 28, 2025

     Did no one expect that some such cases would arise? I knew they were coming. I also knew that opponents of the deportation policy would strive to capitalize on them. That’s politics, Gentle Reader.

     The above is only one. There are surely others. But that’s in the nature of a rule-based system.

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     Charles Murray noted in his early work Losing Ground that no matter the “rules,” a rule-based system – i.e., the kind of policy whose decisions could be programmed, given the appropriate dataset – will always irrationally include some cases it should exclude and / or exclude others it should include. He was analyzing welfare policy, but the effect touches every kind of policy a law-based State might implement. The deportation orders President Trump has implemented are no exceptions.

     Every law creates a rule-based system. Even a law as simple as the one against burglary will have edge cases of the sort that make an observer say “That isn’t just.” (I happen to know someone who was snagged on such an edge.) Occasionally, legislators will try to install provisions in the law, or in the system that will implement and enforce it, to “soften” its edges. But that’s not always possible.

     Prosecutorial and judicial discretion soften the edges of the penal law. Those provisions allow human judgment to temper the applications of the penal law. They were undoubtedly well meant. Yet they too have their drawbacks, as politically-minded prosecutors and judges have demonstrated for us recently.

     The quote from David Bergland above covers all such matters. That’s why the appropriate way to evaluate a law or policy is “Has it made things better or worse?” Perfection in law is no more available than perfection in Mankind.

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     I could go on for days about this. It’s inherent in the nature of things, for a simple and unchangeable reason:

All actions have side effects.
One or more will always be undesirable.

     Physicists call this the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It operates at all scales and in all things. Law and its enforcement are not exceptions.

     To close: Another argument has arisen over the decision of many states to decriminalize the use of cannabis-based products (e.g., marijuana). This has surely had both desirable and undesirable consequences. Some see the negatives as outweighing the positives. It’s unfortunate that there are negative side effects, but whether they mandate returning to the previous state of affairs is a matter for legislators to decide. Should they decide that way, we would shed those undesirable side effects... but we would also lose the positive consequences of cannabis decriminalization: the decreased burdens on law enforcement and corrective institutions, the extra tax revenue, and so forth.

     Edges are like that. They’re never perfect and they’re never infinitely sharp. There will always be persons who seek a way to exploit them for personal benefit.

     It’s a cruel cosmos. But as I typed that, I realized that I need more coffee. Perhaps I’ll be back later.

“Why So Racist, Fran?” Part 2: Let Them Sink

     Appeals such as the following are everywhere, especially in December:

Black children are suffering all over the world.
Imagine if it was a white child pic.twitter.com/r6r0Y0rVxj

— Fighter Rakgadi 🇿🇦 🇧🇫 (@Rakgadi_EM) November 25, 2025

     Oftentimes, they’re proximate to statements such as this: “You stole everything from us.” Of course, you means Whites, and us means blacks.

     Such claims are clearly nonsense, yet they’re repeated endlessly by black racialists and propagandists. They can’t be refuted; they’re utterly counterfactual and nonsensical, so there’s nowhere to start. What is there to say in response?

     Nothing. Silence, cold and absolute, is the proper response. Yet Whites continue to try to reason with them.

     Blacks claim to be our superiors. Yet not one of the advances in science, technology, philosophy, or society came from the Dark Continent. They say we owe them “reparations” for historical slavery. Yet slavery is still practiced in Africa; only in White nations was there an end to it. More, blacks in this country alone have absorbed trillions of dollars in “public assistance,” to say nothing of the many preferential treatment laws and programs that have awarded them privileges over Whites.

     Our forebears were mistaken ever to listen to them.

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     On this Black Friday, among the things I’m thankful for is the surging White anger and resentment toward blacks – and their sad-sack White apologists – that blacks’ claims and demands have elicited. We’re finally getting close to the cold stare and folded arms that say “Watch out. We’ve had enough of you and won’t tolerate your savagery any longer.”

     Of course, there’s a lot of social and political inertia to be overcome. If blacks had intelligent representatives, they’d know better than to “double down.” They’d turn to their own and say “Cool it! You’re about to provoke a pogrom, with us on the losing end.” But they are doubling down. Violence against Whites, shoplifting and destruction, disruptions of White-owned and operated stores, restaurants, shopping centers, and so on are all on the increase.

     I’ve written before that there’s a race war in progress. The “It’s On” pieces are clearest in that regard:

• It’s On
• It’s On: What Now?
• It’s On Part 3: Where Explanation Remains Required
• It’s On, The Ongoing Saga
• It’s On: No Longer Just My Mad Notion

     It doesn’t have to be a flying-lead war. Indeed, it shouldn’t be. It can and should be conducted with Whites’ traditional weapons: exclusion when it suffices, and impersonal, objective enforcement of the law when it’s required. That would leave the Negro race to its own devices: i.e., to whatever order or chaos / prosperity or squalor it could maintain in the absence of interaction with (or support from) Whites.

     The cessation of the war wouldn’t necessarily be evident to everyone. There wouldn’t be an armistice, or a peace treaty. There would only be a steady diminution of offenses against law and propriety, and a lessening of screechy demands from black racialist mouthpieces. It would take a while, and afterward there would be some ugliness. Unless the radical solution is applied, Whites would still have to endure some savagery. Hopefully, it would fall to an irreducible minimum that ordinary law enforcement can handle.

     But blacks might not permit Whites such a peaceful war.

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     “No one wants war” is a phrase we’ve heard many times. It’s one of the perennial lies, a pleasant dream that’s utterly false-to-fact. Many people have wanted war over the centuries. They’ve usually gotten their wish.

     Good people have never wanted war; it’s practically a defining characteristic. Yet they’ve been forced to fight wars many times. They haven’t always prevailed.

     To say that “no one wants a war” when we’re demonstrably already embroiled in a war is the height of folly. It’s like closing one’s eyes and chanting “Make it go away.” Once a war has begun, it must be fought to a conclusion.

     If there’s a race war in progress, it must be fought. To refuse to fight is to surrender pre-emptively. Unless you want to live in a nation in which Whites are a designated rightless victim class, to be abused and expropriated by blacks whenever the urge comes upon them, you must fight.

     If you choose not to fight, don’t expect to keep the respect of others who’ve taken up arms to defend you and yours.

Giving Thanks 2025

     It’s here once more: Thanksgiving Day. Also known as the Feast of St. Gluttony here at the Fortress. I’m of two minds about this holiday.

     On the one hand, it’s entirely appropriate for Americans to be thankful for our country – and in that phrase lies a powerful truth: it’s our country. No one else anywhere has anything like it. Our forebears built it, but we, its citizens, operate it and keep it going.

     On the other hand: only one day for giving thanks? Seems a bit... spare. Niggardly. As if we were too busy to remember and celebrate all we have and enjoy, day after day. “Sorry, can’t stop and give thinks just now; I’ve got emails to answer. What’s that you say? We should pray? Who has the time for that?”

     On the gripping hand (All right, make it three minds.) (Cf. this seminal novel) not everything around us is to be celebrated. No, I shan’t enumerate all the burrs under my saddle; it’s Thanksgiving Day. Anyway, you probably have your own set.

     But today, on the 73rd Thanksgiving Day of my life, I have something new to be grateful for. You may find it odd. Eccentric. But remember who’s writing this.

     I’m grateful that I’ve been conned enough, and in enough different ways, that I’ve unlearned my gullibility sufficiently to have evaded the biggest con of my life.

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     I have no real idea whether my would-be con artist is a man or a woman. As she represented herself as a woman, I’ll treat her as such. Call her Jane.

     Jane has held a long conversation with me over Google Chat. She claimed to be a retired actress of minor stature. Either she boned up on that actress, or she really is that person; it doesn’t matter much.

     After about eight weeks chatting me up, including compliments of the most flattering kind, Jane cast her line: a former husband who was using a shared financial obligation to abuse her and her son. It was a good cast: poignant, sorrowful, adequately protracted and detailed... everything required to lure in an old softy like your humble Curmudgeon. And I, being that old softy, bit the hook.

     Jane let me know, indirectly, that she needed money to exclude that former husband from her life. She didn’t come out and say “Can you help me?” She merely implied, quite adroitly, that help would be welcome. Low key. Lots of half-suppressed suffering. I could imagine the Sorrowing Madonna look on her face.

     ...and I immediately offered to help.

     We pause here for raucous laughter from those Gentle Readers who must vent it.

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     A tiny current in my forebrain redirected my limbic reaction just in time: Are you certain this is really someone who needs and deserves your help? After all, I hadn’t done much research on Jane. As a former actress, there should be plenty of material on the Web about her, but I had yet to look for any. So I did.

     It developed that Jane – i.e., the retired actress she claimed to be – has a net worth in eight digits, that she’d recently purchased an expensive home in a glamorous part of California, that she controls at least two companies, including a production company, and that she employs a management team and a personal assistant. The financial obligation she’d lamented to me was, if not dismissibly trivial, at least minor.

     That sent me back over some other curious behavior Jane had displayed. I re-examined it with clearer, more skeptical eyes. It followed a familiar pattern: one characteristic of a Con Under Construction. I chided myself for not seeing it previously.

     One such curious behavior was part of Jane’s current appeal. Once I’d detected the conformance-to-pattern, the scales fell from my eyes. I was being had. Jane had discerned in me the key attributes of a con-victim: the willingness to trust and the urge to help.

     Mind you, “Jane” was a stream of characters from over the Internet. A TCP/IP packet stream. I hadn’t seen her in real time. I hadn’t even heard her voice. And I was about to send her money.

     It’s true, Gentle Reader: There’s no fool like an old fool.

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     I’ve backed away, of course, but I feel terrible about it even so. Yes, I kept a swindler’s fingers out of my wallet, but before that I’d ignored many warning signs that I could now recognize. Worse, I’d disclosed information about myself that persuaded Jane to see me as a target! What was I thinking?

     Answer: I wasn’t. But I woke up in time, and for that, on this fourth Thursday of November in the Year of Our Lord 2025, I give thanks.

     I’ve written many times about the decline in trustworthiness and trust among us. It’s cost this nation dearly. Yet I hadn’t done my personal part in responding to it: I hadn’t become appropriately suspicious and defensive. That is the required response to the plague of deceit that’s upon us, and I had yet to accept my part in it.

     I have now.

     May you all, wherever you are in the world, enjoy a happy and appropriately filling Thanksgiving Day. And may you remember that predators lurk among us. Many wear winning, appealing faces. Strive not to attract their attention. Should one solicit your attention, do your research. Be skeptical, even cynical, for in those attitudes lies survival.

     May God bless and keep you all.

“Why So Racist, Fran?”

     People have asked me that very question.

     There are a number of reasons. Some, I’ve expressed in these pieces. Others arise from personal experiences of which I’m reluctant to speak. But all arise from a pattern that, over time, I grew weary of trying to deny.

     American blacks – i.e., residents of this nation descended from sub-Saharan African ancestors; henceforth simply blacks – are hostile to Whites and Asians. Many of them are openly, violently hostile toward us. The danger is more evident in some places than others, but nowhere that blacks reside is it absent.

     Thomas Sowell and others have pointed out that starting after the Civil War / War Between The States / Late Unpleasantness, blacks had an ascending history: steadily rising economically and socially. Of course if the baseline is rightless slavery, ascent is to be expected. However, even during those ascending years, unwed motherhood was much more prevalent among blacks than Whites: roughly 19% compared to Whites’ 6%. Today black illegitimacy stands at approximately 72%. Nearly three-quarters of all black infants are born to an unwed mother.

     Fatherlessness being an excellent predictor of future crime, blacks’ participation in crime figures has always been out of proportion to their numbers. It’s at its highest today; slightly more than 50% of all violent crimes and crimes against property can be attributed to black perpetrators. Ann Coulter has noted that the great majority of incarcerated offenders – of all races – were born out of wedlock; many never knew their bio-fathers.

     Black participation in various federal and state welfare programs is disproportionate to their percentage of the population. So is black employment by state and federal governments. Despite many subventions, including “equal opportunity” laws and similar preferential-treatment provisions, blacks are net-negative participants in the American economy.

     Heavily black neighborhoods are known to be disorderly and unsafe for Whites or Asians to visit or pass through. “Casual” assaults and harassment of Whites and Asians by blacks are commonplace. Disorderly behavior by blacks, including pointless vandalism, in retail establishments is becoming a major detriment to the retail sector.

     Black youth are highly resistant to education of any kind. This open letter by a White schoolteacher depicts a degree of disorder and pointlessness that’s almost never observed in a classroom of Whites. A typical case:

     Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back.

     They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim—in the crudest terms imaginable—that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, “She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh.”

     So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back, the girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.

     In sum, blacks’ propensity toward aggression, their lack of impulse control, and their unwillingness to accept responsibility for themselves impose a heavy toll on American society. Yet they forever demand special preferences and special programs to cater to them. Black racialist mouthpieces never cease to “blame Whitey,” as if the crimes and destruction blacks perpetrate would never occur had there never been slavery in the United States. And of course there’s the drumbeat for “reparations,” which appears likely to go on to the end of time.

     Charles Murray, the bravest sociologist of our time, put hard numbers to some of the above in his recent book Facing Reality. Others, both credentialed and informal, have added data to the pile. Particularly notable is the late Colin Flaherty’s contribution: White Girl Bleed A Lot, which documents the epidemic of black-on-white violence. The work of Jared Taylor and others also deserves recognition.

     In response to all this, the black activists and racial promoters simply scream “racism!”

     Call it what you will. It’s a response to the depredations and social toll blacks have imposed on America – particularly on Whites. Many have tried in vain to explain those burdens away. Many have declared themselves done with all such efforts.

     Including myself.

A Sulvan Future

     The sex doll is now the sex robot:

The end of problems

In a few years, everyone will be single! pic.twitter.com/FaFFmEg415

— Fun Viral Vids 😊 (@Fun_Viral_Vids) November 24, 2025

     ...and Mankind is in grave danger.

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     My regular Gentle Readers already know about my little quirks, so the following is for the newcomers in the audience: I’m a white Catholic libertarian-conservative with traditional views on such matters as love, marriage, fidelity, and reproduction. Having read that, it’s likely that those newcomers are thinking they know what’s coming. My regular Gentle Readers know better.

     There’s a crisis of sorts in progress. It goes by many names. Its central filament is an unprecedented level of distrust, and no small amount of hostility, between men and women. Distrust and hostility are seldom good things, but these instances threaten human survival.

     Unless you’ve spent the last three decades in a drug-induced coma – if you did, check your savings account before reading onward; priorities, don’t y’know – you’re aware that there’s been a sharp decline in reproduction rates in the U.S. and other industrialized nations. Americans aren’t producing children rapidly enough to sustain our population numbers. Other First World nations are doing even worse that way, but my attention is on the U.S.

     Until recently, there was only one way to produce a human baby: a human spermatozoön had to get cozy with a human ovum and produce a viable human zygote. That procedure required a man to have conventional sexual intercourse with a woman. But today we have sperm and ovum banks, such that sperm and ova can be introduced to one another at “mixers” in test tubes. The resulting zygote can then be implanted into a woman’s womb for further maturation.

     While it hasn’t happened yet, researchers are attempting to clone a human, possibly after some genetic manipulation. That abomination threatens to reduce children to products, something one can order from a “vendor,” perhaps with specifications for the desired “item.” It might serve to keep population numbers up, but it would assuredly destroy the nuclear family, one of the pillars of civilized society.

     But let’s leave those considerations aside. The following passage, which I’ve used more than once before, comes from C. S. Lewis’s masterpiece That Hideous Strength:

“Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why is the womb barren on one side? Where are the cold marriages?”

Ransom replied, “Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned toward us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would be he who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side. On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”

     Did God grant Lewis a glimpse of one possible future – perhaps the one toward which we’re headed?

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     The video at the start of this piece tells us of a development that seemingly cannot be headed off. The emphasis recent decades have placed on sexual sensation and “satisfaction” has helped to power the production of many pleasure-enhancing devices. Sometimes such devices are mockingly advertised as “marital aids.” What role they have in “aiding” a marriage, I cannot imagine.

     Those “marital aids” are entirely focused on pleasure. They have no relation to marital bonding, unless – I must allow for the possibility – that a really good orgasm can make one fall in love with its “provider.” But how often is a second person involved with the use of such devices? I could be wrong, but I don’t think the answer is “very often” or “most of the time.”

     The sex robot is the “marital aid” completed and matured:

• It can produce the sensations that lead to orgasm;
• It’s housed in an attractive humaniform body;
• It’s equipped with an artificial-intelligence module that mimics the behavior of a willing sex partner.

     I doubt that AI module is equipped with a behavioral pathway that would allow the robot to refuse sex to its owner. Once again, I could be wrong, but if I were, what would the point of the robot be?

     Such robots, regardless of their target market, reduce the probability that their owner will seek a human sex partner. Need I spell out the consequences for reproduction?

     Given the no-man’s-land that dating and mating have become, I predict that once those robots come down a bit in price, they’ll prove very popular. Demand will outstrip supply immediately.

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     I’m not an idiot. I know that the sex robot is a response to conditions that predated the possibility of such a thing. I also know that the great majority of us don’t decide to have children “for the future of the country.” Finally, I know that exhorting people to have (more) kids for the sake of the future is the worst imaginable way to go about encouraging reproduction. I’m really just shaking my head and wondering if this is a sign that the Last Days are upon us.

     I think I’ll schedule a talk with my pastor. As for you, Gentle Reader: have a nice day.

     And pray.

Choices

     Good morning, Gentle Reader! I know, I know: “What’s good about Monday?” Well, I suppose it depends on your perspective. If you still work for wages, perhaps a certain dreariness is to be expected. On the other hand, if you work for no wages, as does your humble Curmudgeon, it’s just one day among seven: as pleasant or vile as any of the other six.

     But we do have some interesting material for you, so have a look:

1. Energy.

     The most recent estimates I can find of annual American energy consumption hover around 94 quadrillion British Thermal Units (BTU). If you prefer the metric system, which I do under these circumstances, that’s approximately 94 quintillion joules: 94x10¹⁸ newton-meters.

     If you have no feel for such magnitudes – and who does? – that’s a whole honkin’ lot of energy. Threats to various portions of our energy-supply system have people looking at all sorts of adjustments and alternatives. Here’s a very interesting one:

     By dropping a nuclear reactor 1.6 kilometers (1 mile) underground, Deep Fission aims to use the weight of a billion tons of rock and water as a natural containment system comparable to concrete domes and cooling towers. With the fission reaction occurring far below the surface, steam can safely circulate in a closed loop to generate power.
     [...]
     Deep Fission’s small modular reactor (SMR), called Gravity, is designed to stand 9 meters tall while remaining slim enough to fit inside a borehole roughly three-quarters of a meter wide. The company says its modular approach allows multiple 15-megawatt reactors to be clustered on a single site: A block of 10 would total 150 MW, and Deep Fission claims that larger groupings could scale to 1.5 GW.

     This is an exciting prospect. However, if we divide that 15 megawatt output into the 94 quintillion joules yearly consumption, we find that that little reactor would have to labor for 6.26 trillion seconds to meet the annual consumption figure. As there are only about 31 million seconds in a day, it appears we’d need more than one. About 200,000 of them, in fact.

     That’s a lot of reactors and a lot of uranium in a lot of mile-deep boreholes. A lot of regulatory bodies to sweet-talk. Well, no doubt someone is working on it.

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2. Marketing.

     The summary below of chain-gas-station / convenience store Buc-ee’s marketing and design strategy strikes me as the greatest stroke of commercial genius since the drive-through fast-food place:

Did you know Buc-ee's business model is essentially based on our bladder? pic.twitter.com/URlF2amMCA

— Sovey (@SoveyX) November 19, 2025

     That struck me very nearly speechless. (If you’re a regular Gentle Reader, you know that nothing strikes me completely speechless, but this came close.) But like most great insights, it’s perfectly simple once you understand it.

     Buc-ee’s target customer profile is a woman in an automobile. The entire thrust of its design was to cater to her. She might not be alone, but her presence is the key. So attracting women commuters and women traveling with their families were the Buc-ee’s target. The results speak for themselves.

     There are no Buc-ee’s in the American Northeast. Maybe someday. They actually sound like they’re worth patronizing for any reason or none. Hint, hint, Buc-ee’s management!

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3. Relations Between The Sexes.

     You’ve probably seen images of “bachelor pads” that look like this:

     In truth, that’s a rather upscale “pad,” but it will serve. Such living arrangements have been the targets of sarcastic women for decades. But what if it’s trending upward, owing to the declining interest in marriage and family among men?

     Please view it to the end. This gentleman has thought through the implications of at least some “men going their own way.” If young Smith were to elect such a life path early enough, he could reach his mid-forties in a state that makes retirement achievable then and there. Yes, he would forfeit marriage, children, and the possibility of a McMansion, but those are goals no one is required to pursue.

     No, it doesn’t appeal to me. Nor would it have appealed to me when I was in my twenties. But it’s an open choice that some men, at least, will find palatable, with the consequences the video delineates.

     Women plaintively asking “Where are all the men?” (Variation: “Where are all the good men?”) should ponder this. If you want to mate, you must make the lifelong bachelor / early retirement choice depicted above less appealing to men than mating with you. As you can’t change us... well, what does that imply?

     We have choices, too.

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     That’s all for the present. Have a good day and perhaps I’ll be back later with another serving of drivel. Until then, for best results in living, adhere to the mighty Precepts of the late Nelson Algren:

• Never eat at a place called “Mom’s.”
• Never play cards with a man named “Doc.”
• And never bed a woman who’s got more troubles than you.

     Smart guy, wasn’t he?