Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake – Wallace Stevens

I focus on the fundamentals a lot in my writing.

Partly because most of what I write is for wide audiences. Like this. Anyone could read this without much effort on their part.

For the stranger, juicier, more advanced stuff, you have to work your way up from here. Each product of mine you buy gives you the opportunity to buy the next one up.

But the main reason is the fundamentals is where the magic is.

Unless you’ve intensely trained under wise supervision, there are plenty of “basic” and “obvious” ideas that would revolutionise your life.

If I tell you to go for a walk to clear your head, stimulate your creativity and expose you to the beautiful outdoors, you might scoff.

“I already know that!”

Great – so it’s easy to convince you to do it.

Literally go for a walk. If you do that often, do it more. Or metaphorically go for a walk. Relax, flow and see things from a new angle.

That might just change everything.

Go on – go now.

You can come back to reading this later.

And when you do, you can follow it up with some more focus on the fundamentals here:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

Amazon Originals sure are something, huh?

There’s Reacher – a generally well-told pair of stories, cast appropriately and written with respect to the source material. Mostly faithful, with a few careful changes.

Then there’s Rings of Power, written by Tolkien-hating morons.

So when they released Fallout – based of a game series I was obsessed with for a while – I didn’t know what to expect.

But what do you know! It’s fun, it’s faithful to the source material and it nails the vibe. There are plenty of references to the games but they all work.

It’s as absurd, grotesque, miserable, funny and exciting as the games.

The plot is weirdly good for a video game adaptation and the characters are generally excellent.

But I’m not here to sing its praises.

I’m only here to comment on something less important than its fun and faithfulness:

Its place in the culture war.

I can imagine all manner of social justice pantytwisters thinking it’s their victory:

Suck it raceophobes! Finally a TV show with a black guy and a strong woman in the lead! You must be writhing in agony about this!

No, dingus, this is our victory.

Yeah, it has a female protagonist. She’s strong, too.

Gasp!

Except she’s not a girlboss. She has her strengths and her weaknesses – and they’re often the same thing. Lucy’s compassion is both throughout the series.

Men routinely outsmart, out-endure and overpower her.

And they save her just as much as she saves them.

You know. Teamwork.

Also, the diversity makes sense. Things that seem biologically impossible are explained later.

That’s all we’ve been asking for:

Good content that respects the audience.

This isn’t the first show to do this. It’s yet another example of something the wokies think we’d hate but we generally love – add it to the list with Alien, Stargate, Terminator, Arcane, Tomb Raider, Perfect Dark and hundreds of others.

Fallout has a lot of interesting things to say about society – and I mean interesting, not racism is bad (obviously) and everything except Hollywood ethics is stupid and evil (obviously not).

As I said, the culture war aspect is the least interesting thing about the show. But that correlates with quality. If you respect the audience, you won’t demonise them and you’ll try to make a good show.

This stuff isn’t rocket surgery.

The views and dollars will go where they’re wanted. And a lot of us want shows like Fallout.

You know what else respects its audience?

It’s a little something like this:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

Long-time readers of mine might remember how I picked the name Antipater.

I borrowed the name from Alexander the Great’s trusted general. While Alex was off conquering the mightiest empire of his time, General Antipater stayed behind in Macedonia and kept things running.

You can probably see the metaphor. You’re Alexander the Great. I have your back.

But no metaphor is perfect.

The fly in the soup is this:

Alexander the Great famously died in his 30s. It could have been an illness or an accidental poisoning.

Or it could have been an assassination. Given how controversial he was, that’s a likely guess.

And one candidate high up on the suspect list is… well, you can probably guess.

I’ve heard historians say Alexander was considering replacing Antipater – and that Antipater was afraid of the rapid changes and foreign influence the conquests wrought.

These two generals might have planned to take each other out – only Antipater was faster and luckier.

It’s just a theory.

Even if they had plans against each other, that doesn’t mean that’s what happened. Alexander suffered many wounds in a time before antibiotics. Falling sick wasn’t impossible.

Still, let’s say it’s true.

Doesn’t that undermine my metaphor a tad?

It might imply that I, too, will one day betray you.

And it’s true.

Antipater’s loyalty was to Macedonia before its king. My loyalty is to Christ and country.

If advancing you works against either of those ideals, then it won’t work out. I’m a Christian nationalist first, businessman second.

And being from the great land of Australia, I’m bound by some of the best consumer protection laws on the planet. So if I can’t help you, I’ll let you know so you can take your time, attention and money elsewhere.

If you’re lot along for the ride, you’ll exit the vehicle.

The first step on your ride?

That’s on the other end of this link:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

“Christianity is just wish fulfilment for illiterate shepherds!”

Weird how most of the Bible tells you to ignore your base desires.

“Uh… okay, Christianity was created by tyrants to oppress people!”

They should have left out all those passages about defying earthly authority and giving yourself over to God. It’d be a lot shorter too.

“Then… Christianity was made by people experiencing vivid hallucinations or something. How else do you explain all the miracles?”

In two millennia since Jesus walked among us, there have been… what, millions of crazy people? More? Some of them have attracted a few followers. None of them built anything that lasts.

There’s nothing that says you have to believe in Christ.

But – even if you think it’s all superstition – you have to admit that none of those objections apply to Christianity.

It’s a higher calibre of faith than that.

(It doesn’t hurt that it’s True.)

You know what else is excellent among its peers?

I’m so glad you’re curious about that.

Here are some details for your consideration:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

There’s been a lot of talk in the video game space recently.

If you’ve been following the industry, you know all that’s going on. The terrible games, ugliness, poor quality and absurd politics show how gaming is following the movie industry off a cliff.

And how indie devs and non-Western studios are giving gamers what they want.

I have nothing to add about woke consultants or anything like that. You don’t need me to tell how you stupid, evil and parasitic they are.

Instead, I just have to laugh at the folks who defend them.

Social media is full of people acting smug and intolerable because other people like beautiful characters. These enlightened critics have no need for any of their characters to be attractive. They do, of course, need them to be diverse in every way except an accurate depiction of a Western population, but beauty? Nah, they’re too evolved for that.

They say it like appreciating beauty is some sort of defect.

Well, you know who – apart from straight dudes – prefer to look at gorgeous women over ugly ones?

Gay guys.

Straight women.

And babies.

Yeah, even babies. They’ll look at attractive strangers much longer and more often than ugly ones. Of course they do – an appreciation of beauty is hardwired into us.

Beauty is a virtue. Not the only one, not even the most important one, but it’s better than ugliness.

That’s why the woke hate it. It’s not just because of how hideous they themselves are. It’s because they hate all virtues. This is one of the differences between the woke and progressives – progressives can believe in good things. The woke can’t.

And given how good this gorgeous little link is, you just know they hate it too:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

I can grab a marker and make a bunch of squiggles on a crisp piece of paper.

Good for me!

But that’s just the start of the story. What happens next could be anything.

Because there are certain squiggles that would break your heart.

Some squiggles would make you weep with joy.

And some would make you want to punch me in the face.

Squiggles do more than that. With them, you can communicate across incredible distances. You can even communicate across time. Sure, the conversations might be one-way and not all that dynamic, but you can learn from kings, philosophers and poets from all ages.

You don’t even need to have a language in common.

My point here – assuming I have one – is that the world is magical. It’s so magical. If no one knew how to read and write, what I just described would be era-defining sorcery.

Even through a secular lens, the world thrums with poetry and wizardry.

Add some theology to the mix and it grows even more beautiful.

It can get even wilder though.

Our minds are mostly invisible to us. The stuff we’re conscious of in our own experiences, combined with what we’ve learned from neuroscience, is a tiny fraction of the full picture.

Just like the world, our minds can be far more incredible than we sometimes appreciate.

That’s why I love working with coaching clients. Helping them do things and transform in ways they never knew they could? That fires me up like an Italian’s pizza oven.

Whether you want to work with me or not, it doesn’t change what you should do next.

There’s a hierarchy to my products – a pipeline, leading from the simple to the powerful.

Your next step is at this link:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

The right wing is smarter than the left right now, but don’t get all smug.

It’s easy to see. Hang out in both spaces and you’ll find plenty of dumbarsery across the political spectrum. Plenty of clever people, shallow arguments, tired memes and genuine attempts to fix the system.

But the typical right-wing discourse is much smarter, more informed, more practical and even more respectful. It’s not even close.

Most conservatives will jump to a favourable conclusion here. They’ll say that of course that’s the case – they aren’t confused about basic facts of economics and biology like those traitor commies are.

Sure.

But plenty of folks believe the right thing for bad reasoning. Heck, if your culture instils good values then this should be the default. You want folks to be courteous, plan for the future and work hard, even if they only do that because their fairy tales told them to.

Not everyone has the time to tease out morals and good lessons. And just look at academia – not all those with time and intellect will get the right answer.

My point is that even if the right-wing is objectively better than the left, always and in every case (questionable – there’s more to politics than a single spectrum) that doesn’t explain why smart people have gravitated to it recently.

There are a few factors at play.

One is that being right wing is countercultural. It cracks me up when the woke think they’re revolutionary. They only have all of entertainment, education, HR departments, bureaucrats and the legal system on their side. But opposing them is The Patriarchy – a mythical collection of vapour that does nothing, oppresses nothing and resists nothing.

Anyone willing and able to get every patriot fired, blacklisted and shunned is neither good nor oppressed.

The typical nationalist – and even centrist – can’t talk about politics at the office. They definitely couldn’t wear a red baseball cap. But left-endorsed symbols of genocide are A-OK.

That sort of environment weeds out most of the intellectually weak and lazy. It takes effort to go against the power.

But this won’t last forever. Everything runs in cycles. There’ll come a time when it’s mainstream to be a nationalist, just like how it’s mainstream to espouse woke talking points now.

When that happens, the mentally lazy will swing over with them.

Many of them will try to censor their political enemies.

Many of them will vomit up political opinions that manage to contradict themselves within a sentence.

All the I Support the Current Thingers will come knocking at conservatives’ doors once the rolls of history make right wing stances The Current Thing.

And folks who are conservatives now will defend these drooling idiots because they’re on the same team.

I’m not looking forward to that.

Maybe it’ll be good for society, but it’ll strangle the creative spark of the movement.

Anyway, I’m not sure it matters unless you tie yourself up with labels.

Go where Truth is treasured, topics get debated and nuance is explored. Then you’ll be immune to the swings of culture.

Anyway, none of that impacts your life. That’s all big picture and in the future.

Instead, here’s something real and for your present growth:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

The prophecies in the Book of Daniel sure are something else. The burden is on sceptics to show how a bunch of illiterate shepherds – which is how they see the old authors – predicted, with timing and detail, the Persian Empire, Alexander’s conquests, the breakup of his empire and the rise of mighty Rome.

Divine revelation really is the simplest explanation.

And there’s another way Daniel feels ahead of its time.

This isn’t a prophecy, but it covers something that feels so modern.

Consider chapter 13:

Susanna is a beautiful, married woman. Two men of standing, power and reputation lust after her. They corner her in private and threaten her: either she can sleep with them or they’ll tell everyone they caught her sleeping with a strange man.

So it’s either adultery or a false accusation of it – an accusation that’ll carry the death penalty.

Remind you of anything recent? This is #MeToo only worse. It’s bad enough for a man to hold a woman’s career hostage to slake his lusts. Here, they’re holding her life hostage.

Susanna refuses. She’s a good, strong, moral woman who would rather die than betray her husband and God like this.

And she would have died, too, if Daniel hadn’t come, done a Colombo impersonation and caught the two men in their lies.

The idea of a strong, powerful woman isn’t new. And it’s not so offensive to the minds of traditionalists, nationalists and conservatives as certain blue-haired lunatics like to pretend. The Book of Daniel shows how beloved, wise and faithful Susanna is.

Her family loves her.

The community adores her.

She isn’t just a pretty face. She is, in a Biblical sense, a high quality woman.

I bring this up because Christianity is under attack. And one of the many, many weapons used against it is the lie that you have to choose.

The Bible, so they say, is outdated. It promotes antiquated notions around race and family. You can support it, you can support women, but you can’t do both.

It’s absurd. I picked Susanna because I recently went through that chapter. The Bible values women even in the Old Testament. The New Testament goes even harder.

Examine the Rosary and you’ll see the most common prayer focuses on the Virgin Mary. If you came across that prayer without knowing what it referred to, you’d say Christianity worships Mary, with God and Jesus being afterthoughts.

It’s related to the lie they say about conservatives and marriage: how a conservative man expects his wife to be a tradwife.

Well, I’m worse than a conservative – I’m a Christian nationalist. I see conservatives as a joke, a collection of fools incapable of preserving anything.

And even I’d be okay with my wife working.

I expect her primary focus to be on the home and family. If she didn’t want that, then our marriage wouldn’t last. But I don’t want her confined to the home.

She’d be free to live as she wants. If she wants to work (for the love of it, not for the money) then she can. If not, I hope she’d have great hobbies or a nice community. Maybe she wants to study or teach – if so, she’ll have my full support.

Being a wife and mother can be her main focus without it being her only one.

You might not want that too, which is fine. If you want an equal partnership or if you want to be a stay at home father, go for it. I’m not here to judge.

All I’m here to say is respecting women and old-style values aren’t incompatible.

Given what modern feminism teaches women, I’d say it’s the opposite.

None of that has anything to do with what I offer folks like you.

(Or maybe it does.)

But my contrary, outdated and no-doubt vile opinions aren’t just useful in relationships.

Before you can be a good boyfriend, husband and father, you need to be a good man.

Or maybe becoming those things inspires you to be better.

Either way, you’ll want to check this out:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

Over the course of Seinfeld, George dated a lot of different women.

For a short, stocky bald guy with glasses and more neuroses than dollars, he did okay for himself.

But out of all his relationships, his best was with Noel.

Can’t keep all his mayfly relationships straight?

Noel was the pianist from “The Pez Dispenser”. She’s beautiful, talented and has the upper hand in the relationship.

George hates that, so he breaks up with her. She begs him to stay together, thus giving him the upper hand.

Jerry, let me tell you something – a man without hand is not a man.
I got so much hand I’m coming out of my gloves.

He’s in the position of power. She wants him more than he wants her, which makes her eager to please.

It works, right up until she ends the relationship.

GEORGE: You can’t break up with me. I’ve got hand!

NOEL: And you’re going to need it.

It’s funny – George’s power came from indifference. He didn’t care about the relationship and that gave him power.

But, as his reaction shows, that power made him care. He wanted to be with her only when he didn’t.

Say it like that and it doesn’t make much sense – yet you can track the logic there. Psychology is a strange thing, filled with seeming contradictions.

Indifference gives you an edge, which makes it hard to stay indifferent.

Wanting something makes you needy, which makes you less likely to get it.

Overtraining can dull your edge.

That’s why, if you want to succeed, it takes more than hard work. It definitely takes more than talent.

What you need is an edge that can’t backfire – and is useful in every context.

Like, say, better self-awareness and self-control.

Like, say, what’s waiting at the other end of this link:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay

I love Aragorn.

He’s one of the finest examples of a man in all of fiction. Strong, wise, brave, decisive, born with blessed blood, royal privilege and long life, yet still incredibly humble.

If I could be more like him, even a little, I’d be thrilled.

But no man’s virtue is pure – not even Aragorn’s.

His weakness – his vice – was shame.

Gondor needed a king. If he had sat on the throne at the start of the adventure, things would have gone more smoothly. A strong and benevolent king of Gondor could have helped Rohan in The Two Towers. It could have then been part of a unified bulwark of Men against the armies of Mordor.

But Aragorn refused the throne. He was ashamed of his own bloodline. His ancestor, Isildur, plunged the world into darkness by not being strong enough to resist the One Ring.

Aragorn carries that shame.

I understand. That humility is a big part of his strength. But humility is a vice when the world needed a charismatic, wise and benevolent king.

Or maybe that’s just the Christian in me talking.

King David could have saved the world. He could have fulfilled God’s promises to Abraham. Instead, he succumbed to weakness and temptation, ensuring the ancient Kingdom of Israel would fall from its peak into a broken kingdom in two generations.

Jesus was born from that bloodline. He didn’t resent his flawed ancestor. Instead, He became the king the world needed.

I suppose that’s the difference between the greatest imaginable human and the Son of God.

Besides, shame isn’t always bad. Looking around the world, I see plenty of folks who need a lot more of it.

And that’s why, as much as I adore Aragorn, Jesus makes the better role model.

Personal growth is all about becoming a better version of yourself.

Being better makes you more like Christ.

That’s why I’ll never apologise for sending links like this so often. If you find yourself clicking it, you might soon become more like our Saviour too.

So click away:

https://christianhypnotism.com/ysiay