Tagged: Jesus
Mustelid Friends 8: Beavers in Space
or, Rice World
Created and Produced by Dams Up Water
In the neon half-light of a decaying interstellar port, Mr. Capybara adjusted his lapels and tried to remember where things had gone so wrong.
It had started, as these things often do, with rice.
Not the innocent, steaming kind you’d find in a humble bowl, but the kind that powered empires—processed, commodified, and vacuum-sealed for hyperspace transit.
Royal Arabian Oil had gotten greedy. They always did. First they disrupted terrestrial shipments, then orbital ones, and before long the whole interstellar rice exchange looked like a spilled sack in zero gravity. Mr. Capybara, once a respectable baron of modest corruption, now found himself tangled in litigation so vast it had gravitational pull.
So he went back to the only place that had ever managed to keep him one step ahead of ruin: the law firm of Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter.
Their office floated in a slow orbit five thousand miles above New Arrakeen-on-Potomac, a brutalist slab of concrete and ambition. Inside, the air smelled faintly of ink, damp fur, and firm resolve.
Weasel met him at reception, thin as a clause and twice as slippery.
“Back again, Mr. Capybara?”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” Capybara muttered. “You people bill by the heartbeat. I’m your favorite kind of repeat customer.”
Badger emerged from a shadowed hallway, carrying a stack of files that looked heavy with others’ misfortune. Mink and Otter followed—the one calculating, the other smiling like a settlement already signed.
And then there was solemn spectacled Father Beaver.
He didn’t say much. Never did. But the room shifted around him, like reality itself had been notarized in his presence.
“You’ve got rice woes,” Beaver said.
“I’ve got existential woes,” Capybara replied. “The rice is just the side dish.”
They ushered him into a conference room where the walls flickered with projections of shipping routes, legal precedents, and celestial trade lanes. Somewhere in that mess was the truth—or at least something billable.
“Royal Arabian Oil’s interference,” Mink began, “constitutes not just a breach of contract but a disruption of the sacred flow.”
“The current,” Beaver added quietly.
Capybara sighed. “Don’t start with the theology.”
But it was already too late for that.
Because behind the firm—behind all firms, all contracts, all quietly devastating negotiations—stood the Beaverjesuits.
Led by Father Beaver, they weren’t just clerics. They were custodians of something older than law and more binding than any agreement: the onstreaming current of the spirit. Not metaphorical—literal. A current that flowed through trade routes, through belief, through the very idea of exchange itself.
And the Beavers had always controlled it.
Not openly, of course. Never crudely. They preferred instruments—firms, orders, societies. Layers of plausible deniability wrapped in ritual and paperwork.
“The rice must flow,” Weasel said, almost reverently.
“The rice always flows,” Otter corrected, “but only where it is permitted.”
Capybara leaned back, feeling the weight of it all press against his ribs. “So what’s the play? I sue? I settle? I disappear?”
Beaver tapped the table. The projections shifted.
A desert planet appeared—vast, dry, and shimmering with fields not of sand, but of dormant grain, waiting for the right conditions to awaken.
“Intergalactic expansion,” Father Beaver said. “New markets. Untapped resources.”
“Prospects,” Mink added.
“Liability redistribution,” Badger clarified.
“And prophecy,” Beaver finished.
Capybara groaned. “I knew there’d be prophecy.”
That’s when they told him about Little Beaver.
The young, mendicant friar from the banks of Old Nacotchtank, raised among the doctors of the Beaver Medicine Society of Yahushua HaMoshiach.
The doctors weren’t just healers. They were interpreters of the current, reading its fluctuations like vital signs. And they had seen something in Little Beaver.
Something impossible.
“The Kwisatz Haderach,” Otter said softly.
Capybara rubbed his temples. “Let me guess. He can be in two places at once, see the future, and audit my accounts retroactively?”
“Close,” Weasel said. “He can bridge the legal and the divine.”
“And that’s bad for me how?” Capybara asked.
“It isn’t,” Beaver said. “Unless you’re on the wrong side of the current.”
Which, Capybara suspected, he usually was.
Then there were the Brothers of Beggars Contemplative—a ragged, stubborn branch of the interstellar Djedi knighthood. They lived among the rice deserts, wore patched robes, and spoke in riddles that somehow held up in arbitration.
They were the only ones who truly understood the rice.
“They don’t control it,” Badger said. “They live upon it.”
“Which makes them dangerous,” Mink added.
“Or at least indispensable,” Beaver said.
The room fell quiet.
Outside, the rain kept falling—on the city, on the ships, on the endless chain of transactions that held the universe together by a thread of obligation and belief.
Capybara looked at the projections again. The desert. The child. The currents.
“You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that my legal troubles with a corrupt oil conglomerate are actually part of some grand intergalactic realignment of rice, religion, and revenue streams.”
“Yes,” said Beaver.
“And my role in this?”
Beaver’s round lenses glinted like polished wood in low light.
“You adapt,” he said. “Or you get written out of the big rice contracts.”
Capybara exhaled, long and slow.
He’d always known the game was rigged. He just hadn’t realized how far up it went.
“Fine,” he said. “We expand. We litigate. We… commune with the current or whatever it is you people do.”
Otter smiled. Weasel started drafting. Badger stamped something with unnecessary force. Mink began calculating outcomes that hadn’t happened yet.
And contemplative Father Beaver?
He simply watched the current—unseen, unstoppable—flowing through it all.
Because in the end, it wasn’t the oil, or the rice, or even the law that ruled the stars.
It was the current.
And the Beavers had always known exactly where it was going.
Part II
Mr. Capybara had never trusted anything that was described as “empty.”
Empty accounts weren’t empty. Empty promises came due with interest. And now, moored in drydock hovering above New Arrakeen-on-Potomac, was the largest space-worthy grain silo ever assembled—a cathedral of hollow steel called The Immaculate Deficit.
The plan, as drafted by Weasel and notarized by forces both domestic and angelic, was elegant in the way a forged signature is elegant: convincing enough to pass inspection, dangerous enough to ruin everyone involved.
The decentralized Royal Arabian Oil conglomerate now controlled the terrestrial rice supply chain all the way up to the Saturnian Threshing Floor and Clearinghouse. The Archangelic Police Force—winged auditors of cosmic compliance, their halos doubling as surveillance arrays—patrolled the network. Between the two, nothing moved without permission.
So Capybara would move nothing.
No rice. No declared cargo.
Just a ship light on the manifest.
“Absence,” Weasel had explained, tapping a clause, “is very difficult to regulate.”
“And even harder to tax,” Badger had added, with something like admiration.
Capybara stood on the command deck as the clamps released. The ship groaned like an old debtor waking up.
“Engage drift engines,” he said.
The Immaculate Deficit didn’t launch so much as excuse itself from orbit—slipping sideways into a corridor of neglected jurisdiction, where laws blurred and enforcement lagged.
Below them, the lights of the city flickered. Above them, the stars waited like unpaid invoices.
“Contact?” Capybara asked.
“Royal Arabian Oil patrols sweeping the primary lanes,” Mink reported. “Archangelic units triangulating anomalies.”
“Do we qualify as an anomaly?” Capybara asked.
Otter checked a screen. “We qualify as a phenomenal curiosity.”
“Good,” Capybara said. “Those usually get deferred.”
They moved through deep space like a rumor—hard to pin down, harder to prove. The ship’s manifest updated itself constantly, a living document of strategic ambiguity.
Cargo: None.
Intent: Undetermined.
Purpose: Under review.
It worked.
At least at first.
The first interception came as a shimmer—a ring of light forming ahead of them, resolving into the unmistakable wheeling siren of the Archangelic Police Force. Their vessels weren’t built; they were declared, luminous chariots of authority and immaculate paperwork.
A voice filled the bridge, calm and absolute.
“Unregistered transit, identify cargo and submit to audit.”
Capybara leaned forward. “We are transporting nothing.”
A pause.
“Clarify: absence of goods does not constitute absence of obligation.”
Weasel’s voice crackled over comms from the firm’s remote advisory channel. “Invoke Clause 0.”
Capybara smirked. “We invoke Clause 0.”
Another pause, longer this time.
Clause 0—the most dangerous stipulation ever written into a contract—stated that nothing, properly defined, could not be interfered with without first being proven to exist.
The Archangelic vessels flickered, their halos dimming as they processed the paradox.
“Your cargo,” the voice said carefully, “is not identifiable under the terms of interspace commerce.”
“Correct,” Capybara said.
“And therefore…”
“Exempt,” Otter whispered.
The light wheel dissolved.
Capybara exhaled. “I love good lawyering.”
But Royal Arabian Oil wasn’t so easily stalled.
They didn’t argue black letter. They obstructed procedure.
A fleet emerged from the dark—blocky, brutal ships that looked less like vessels and more like statements of intent. Their engines burned with the slow fury of monopolies.
“They’re going to ram us out of the corridor,” Mink said.
“Can they?” Capybara asked.
“Physically, yes. Legally… ambiguous.”
“Then we make it spiritually impossible,” Father Beaver’s voice came, low and certain.
Capybara didn’t ask how. He had learned not to.
“Full drift,” he ordered. “Let the current take us into hyperspace.”
The ship shuddered. Systems dimmed. The Immaculate Deficit surrendered control—not to chaos, but to something subtler.
The space way.
Not visible. Not measurable. But felt—a pull beneath the equations, a flow beneath the routes.
For a moment, Capybara swore he could hear it. Like distant water. Like whispered clauses being negotiated by the universe itself.
The Royal Arabian Oil ships advanced—
—and missed.
Not by distance, but by dimension. Their trajectories intersected where the Deficit should have been, not where it was becoming.
“Trajectory mismatch,” Badger muttered over comms, almost impressed.
“They’re aiming at our declared position,” Otter said.
“We’re not declared anymore,” Capybara replied.
They slipped past.
Deep space opened up, vast and indifferent.
Days—or something like days—passed. Time got loose out here, unmoored from billing cycles and court dates. The crew stopped asking questions. Even Capybara stopped pretending he understood.
And then, at the edge of perception, the desert planet crowned.
A sphere of muted gold and pale dust, its surface streaked with dormant fields of rice waiting for the right disturbance to awaken. The rice world.
“Arrakeen Minor,” Mink said. “Or whatever the locals are calling it this century.”
“Home,” Beaver murmured.
They descended.
The atmosphere caught them like a held breath. Sand—or something like sand—spiraled upward, whispering against the hull.
“Scans?” Capybara asked.
Otter frowned. “No formal defenses. No structured ports. No—”
The blaring of alarms cut him off.
Shapes rose out of the desert.
Not ships…
but figures.
Cloaked. Angular. Moving with a precision that felt less like motion, more like unintentional. The Brothers of Beggars Contemplative.
“The Djedi resistance,” said the Otter.
“They’ve been waiting,” Badger said.
“For us?” Capybara asked.
“For a sign,” Beaver replied.
The figures surrounded the ship as it settled onto the surface. No weapons visible. No threats declared.
Which, Capybara knew, meant something worse: Negotiation.
The hatch opened with a reluctant sigh.
Heat flooded in. Dry, ancient, and carrying the faint scent of grain and prophecy.
Capybara stepped out first, because that was the kind of mistake he specialized in.
The leader of the Djedi Assembly stepped forward, face obscured beneath layered cloth. When they spoke, their voice was rough with disuse and assurance.
“You bring an empty vessel,” they said.
Capybara spread his hands. “It’s a free and open market.”
The figure tilted their head.
“There is no empty,” they said. “Only what has not yet been seen.”
Capybara glanced back at the ship, at its hollow holds and carefully drafted nothingness.
For the first time since launch, he felt a flicker of doubt.
Behind the Djedi, the desert shifted.
Not wind.
Movement.
Something vast beneath the surface, stirring in response to their arrival.
“The rice,” the Djedi said softly, “is waking.”
Capybara swallowed.
He had come here to escape a lawsuit.
Instead, it looked like he’d just filed one against the universe itself—and the universe had decided to appear in person.
Part III
The desert did not roar.
It audited.
A low, granular vibration passed through the ground beneath Mr. Capybara’s paws, like a ledger being balanced somewhere far below the surface of the world. The Brothers of Beggars Contemplative stood motionless, their patched robes fluttering in a wind that hadn’t yet decided to blow.
“You awoke it,” the Djedi Master said.
Capybara adjusted his cufflinks. “I tend to have that effect on systems that prefer to remain dormant.”
Behind him, The Immaculate Deficit creaked—its vast, empty holds now echoing with something new. Not cargo. Not quite. A presence. As if absence, pushed hard enough, had finally looped back into being.
And then Little Beaver stepped forward.
No fanfare. No thunder. Just a small figure moving with a quiet that made all else feel like paperwork waiting to be filed.
The Djedi Assembly parted before him.
Father Beaver—of the firm, of the current, of the most solemn Society—lowered his head in reverent thanksgiving to the Most High God.
“His time has come,” the Beaver said.
Little Beaver looked at the ship, then at the desert, then at Capybara—who, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, suddenly felt like a clause about to be struck.
“You tried to move nothing,” Little Beaver said.
Capybara shrugged. “It’s legally defensible.”
“But nothing,” Little Beaver replied, “is where everything begins.”
The ground split.
Not violently—no explosions—just a clean, surgical opening, as though the planet itself had found a faulty line item and decided to expand it.
From beneath the desert rose the rice.
Not fields. Not crops. Memory. Potential. The primordial grain—unprocessed, unpriced, unowned. It flowed upward in shimmering currents, each kernel a possibility, each possibility a future.
“The rice,” whispered a Djedi.
“The source,” offered another.
Little Beaver stepped into the rising current.
For a moment—just a moment—he was everywhere.
On the bridge of the Deficit. In the conference room of Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter. In the ledgers of Royal Arabian Oil. In the omniscient eternal patrol of the Archangelic Police Force.
He bridged it.
Legal and divine. Material and spiritual. Profit and purpose.
The Kwisatz Haderach—not a conqueror, not a tyrant, but a reconciler of systems that had long pretended not to be in equity.
Capybara watched, slack-jawed.
“I should have charged a consultation fee,” he muttered.
Above them, the sky fractured.
Not broke—revealed.
And he descended—not in fire, not in wrath, but in a clarity so absolute it made every prior misconception feel like a bad joke told too long.
Yahushua HaMoshiach.
The final arbiter of a contract written before time had learned how to number the years.
The Djedi knelt. The Beavers bowed. Even the current itself seemed to rest in its stillness, as if in a reservoir dammed.
Capybara stood.
Capybara squinted.
“Hast thou come to litigate,” he asked, “or to settle?”
Yahushua looked at him—not unkindly, but with the sort of gaze that causes pretense to collapse under its own weight.
“To fulfill,” He said.
Back on the Kingdom of Earth, whole systems began to abate.
Royal Arabian Oil’s monopolies unraveled, and its decentralized districts further dissolved into households in their tribes.
The Archangelic Police Force opened the skies to mass transit through space, and surveillance gave way to witness.
And in a dusty corner of New Bat City, which had almost forgotten how to hope, the reformed raccoon gang—Bandana Dan and his Boys—redistributed imported grain shipments with solemn efficiency and only occasional theatrical flair.
“We’re saved now,” Bandana Dan insisted, adjusting his bandana like a badge. “Spiritually sanctioned by the Most High.”
“Provisionally,” one of the Djedi Ambassadors muttered.
On the rice world, the grain flowed freely.
Not owned. Not controlled…
but shared.
The Beaverjesuits hath foretold it. The current had never been theirs to possess, only to guide until one could become it.
Little Beaver stood in the firmament with the resurrected dead as a living clause that could not be exploited.
Capybara approached him from the space below.
“So,” he said, hands in pockets, “where does that leave people like me?”
Little Beaver regarded him.
“Held accountable,” he said.
Capybara winced. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
A silence.
Then, unexpectedly:
“And… necessary.”
Capybara blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“You understand systems,” Little Beaver said. “You navigate them. Twist them. Reveal their weaknesses.”
Capybara considered that.
“I break things,” he said.
“You expose where they were already broken,” Little Beaver replied.
For the first time in a long time, Capybara didn’t have a clever response.
Above them, the sky settled into something honest.
The current flowed—not hidden, not controlled, but present. Accessible. Alive.
Back in orbit, The Immaculate Deficit was no longer empty.
Not filled, exactly.
But purposed.
Capybara looked out across the desert of waking grain, at the Djedi knights in their labors, at the Beavers in their contemplation, at the improbable coalition of trust, faith, and belief.
“Well,” he said, straightening his coat, “I suppose this calls for a new contract.”
Father Beaver, standing beside him, allowed the faintest hint of smile.
“This time,” Beaver said, “we write it together.”
Capybara nodded.
For once, beaver legal construction didn’t sound like a trap.
It sounded like fair terms.
The End.
[constructed with artificial intelligence]
Mustelid Friends 5: Woodland Critters’ Redemption
Created and Produced by Dams Up Water
Once upon a time, high in the snowy mountains, there was a cheerful little town called South Park. The people there liked cocoa with extra marshmallows, sledding down Big Frosty Hill, and solving their problems with polite town meetings.
One winter morning, however, the mayor rang the bell in the square with a very worried clang.
The Woodland Critters—who lived in the Whispering Pines just outside of town—had taken up some very dark and gloomy habits. They had begun chanting to a grumpy old idol named Moloch and holding midnight ceremonies that made the owls nervous and the squirrels lose sleep. Worst of all, a terrible mistake had been made, and a local child had been lost in one of their misguided rituals.
The whole town agreed: something must be done.
So they hired the most unusual, most industrious law firm in all the Rockies:
Weasel, Badger, Beaver, Mink, and Otter — Attorneys at Paw.
Every morning, as they marched into their tidy little office built into a hollow log, they sang their theme song in bright, bouncing harmony:
“We are Weasel Badger Beaver Mink and Otter
Charted in the firm of the five clans, partners
Gather round for Weasel Badger Beaver Mink and Otter
Produced and created by Dams Up Water!”
They wore tiny waistcoats. They carried briefcases made of bark. Beaver handled paperwork. Badger specialized in stern speeches. Mink negotiated with flair. Weasel drafted clever contracts. And Otter? Otter made sure everyone got along.
When the firm received the call from South Park, they took the case at once.
“This isn’t a matter for claws,” said Badger, adjusting his spectacles.
“It’s a matter for cause,” added Weasel wisely.
“And perhaps applause!” Otter said, though no one quite knew what he meant.
The five partners hiked to the Whispering Pines and found the Woodland Critters gathered around a smoky clearing. The critters looked tired. Their once-bright fur was dull. Their little antlers drooped.
Beaver stepped forward politely. “We’ve come on behalf of the town.”
The critters bristled at first. But Mink laid out a velvet scroll.
“We are not here to scold,” she said. “We are here to propose a better arrangement.”
Otter unrolled a colorful poster titled:
“Alternative Activities to Midnight Gloom.”
It included:
- Moonlight Marshmallow Roasts
- Cooperative Acorn Banking
- Interpretive Leaf Dancing
- Community Service Saturdays
“And absolutely no more sacrifices,” added Badger firmly. “Ever.”
The Woodland Critters shuffled their paws.
“But Moloch promised us power,” muttered a porcupine.
“Power?” said Weasel gently. “Real power is building something together.”
Beaver thumped his tail proudly. “Like a dam!”
“And harmony,” Otter chimed. “Like a song!”
The five partners burst into their theme song once more, this time adding a new verse:
“When the woods grow dark and you’ve lost your way
There’s a brighter path in the light of day
Put aside the gloom and the smoky altar
Join the firm of Weasel Badger Beaver Mink and Otter!”
Slowly, one by one, the Woodland Critters began to sway. The gloomy idol was quietly set aside. The candles were replaced with lanterns. The clearing was swept clean.
The critters agreed to sign a very long, very official document titled:
The Pinecone Promise of Peaceful Woodland Conduct.
It stated that no more dark rituals would ever take place, and that all woodland gatherings would involve snacks, singing, and community gardening instead.
The town of South Park welcomed the Woodland Critters back with open arms (and some cautious supervision). Together they planted new saplings in memory of what had been lost, promising to grow something brighter from the soil.
And from that day forward, whenever trouble stirred in the mountains, five small figures in waistcoats would march in singing:
“We are Weasel Badger Beaver Mink and Otter
Charted in the firm of the five clans, partners
Gather round for Weasel Badger Beaver Mink and Otter
Produced and created by Dams Up Water!”
Because even in the chilliest forests, the warmest magic of all is choosing to do better than yesterday.
And that, dear reader, is the law.
[composed with artificial intelligence]
realtime.log
in the year 2020 when the temple was in building,
there she appeared in my pasture
selling her wares, the market, corner—
claiming, later, that
she had spied me sooner
than I had her
when walking by the open door I startled
at the sight of her backside…
she had said, “I saw you
through the window, across the street,”
leading me in hindsight to believe
that all the ensuing trouble was prescribed…
for I was just a simpleminded seaman
in a ship
not insured
by anyone soever
sailing aimlessly
and so recently heartbroken
when I head that siren call
divert me from my deep peregrination…
the gentleman from new york
just so happened to be with me
that day, visiting federal city
with his girlfriend at that time,
as so often happened,
just as it so often happened
with my previous associate,
with whom I no longer commune…
and when the Lord bade me that summer
to raise up the walls of my temple,
there she was in the garden witnessing—
she handed me a roofing shingle—
in my leisure she exhibited her yoga…
later in the year 2025, that selfsame roof
would be felled
along with the upper of the building
and it would be rebuilt,
for the siren’s call did not divert me from,
but resolutely toward,
my divinely fated mission
by and through the rubble
of the wreckage of my vessel
and the loss at sea
sustained that day in 2023
by and through the body
of that woman
on the water
of the belly
of deepness
of the sea,
which water broke
upon the shore
of the beach
which had all dried up
where my first baby
is still being born
(… though her soul resteth eternal
in the peace of her heavenly Father,
her word is borne unto me unceasing
when I revisit that place in my mind;
the waters of her spirit washeth over me…)
there were other babies surely,
but I was just a seaman,
and simpleminded yet,
when I acquiesced
to their unnatural
ending…
(have the E-files accessed memory
we’ve filed away in storage deep…
we think that we can pick and choose
the memories we seek to keep…)
who but I shall mourn them?
surely their spirits are with me,
their souls speak quieter still
resting peacefully in the heavenly
waters above.
I do not even dare to think
on how her mother pledged that coven,
or even how her mother led the chapter,
or what my mother said to me…
all in the same of independence
and female self-sufficiency…
O Lord my God,
Have Mercy on me,
a sinner.
Itinerant See
In the name of Yahushuah ben Yahuah the Most Gracious Most Merciful Sovereign—Greetings and Peace be upon you {
We, fratres mendicans contemplativus <FMC>, hereby adopt the following statement of the British Province of Carmelites:\>_
We take the risk of trusting in God, because we believe that God is faithful. God will provide what we need for our daily living and our ministries. We also take seriously the quotation from St. Paul […] that those who are able must undertake work of some kind, and so contribute to the life of the community. In return for our service to society, we invite people to support us in a variety of ways. This may be through a financial donation, or some other form of support.
[…] We still choose to be amongst the poor and the marginalised wherever possible. This is sometimes called the ‘preferential option for the poor’, and we believe from our reading of the Bible that the face of the Lord is reflected in the poor and marginalised in a preferential way. Our mendicant tradition gives us a particular concern to speak out prophetically for justice, peace and the integrity of God’s creation.
One of the features of the mendicant movement in the Middle Ages was the promotion of learning. Friars became great teachers and preachers, and study remains an important aspect of the mendicant vocation.
Another feature of the mendicant lifestyle that is very important for the friars is that of ‘itinerancy’. We are not bound to one religious house or one particular ministry. We are free to move to wherever the Church and Society have need of us. Individual friars move between communities as they respond to the needs of the Order.
Furthermore, mendicant communities of service are small, horizontal (less hierarchical), devoted to the poor, and largely based in towns and cities. We friars deliberately seek out poor sinners, as Jesus had done, bringing them hope and self-respect. We friars are itinerant preachers travelling to wherever we were needed. Instead of earning money from lands and rents, we brothers share what little we have and depend upon the providence of God, expressed through the generosity of the people amongst whom we live and serve. We brothers are known as mendicant friars – literally begging brothers – because we ask for donations to sustain us. We mendicants take Jesus’ words in the Gospel very literally, believing that God will provide for our earthly needs, and that ‘the labourer deserves his wages’. We mendicants work hard to serve God and neighbour, preaching and administering the sacraments, teaching and advising the poor, building infrastracture in towns, providing hospitals, and many other forms of apostolate. Many are also great scholars, and continue to revolutionize the universities of the world. This is the whole of the Rule.
} it is so filed://
ANTARVS CASTORIS AMICVS DEI:\>_Dams Up Water, SJ, FMC <Itinerant See of Contemplative and Mendicant Friars, Next Friends of God, Poor Sinners in Christ, autonomous church sui iuris> c/o Weasel Badger Brokerage at Supreme Exchange of Information <newsyllabus.org>
Vandalism: from the Margins
“Vandalism” is a word invented by its victims. It names damage done by outsiders to things the center considers sacred: monuments, images, narratives of order. In late Rome, the Vandals and Goths were not merely destroyers of marble; they were destroyers of Roman self-certainty. To call them vandals was to collapse political threat, cultural difference, and aesthetic offense into a single moral judgment. The word survives because empires do.
The fall of the Roman Empire is often imagined as a barbarian eruption against civilization, but this is a retrospective fantasy. The Goths were already inside Rome—serving in its armies, speaking its languages, converting to its Christianity. Their “vandalism” was less an annihilation than a reallocation: power, land, legitimacy moved away from an exhausted center. What fell was not civilization, but monopoly.
This is where Augustine enters the picture. A Berber African from the imperial periphery, he rose to become Doctor of the Universal Church while never quite ceasing to be marked as other—by accent, by origin, by the faint suspicion that holiness should sound Roman. The City of God itself is a strange text of imperial afterlife: a Christian theology written to explain why Rome’s gods failed, and why Rome itself did not matter as much as it thought. Augustine did not smash statues; he dissolved them conceptually. His was a vandalism of meaning.
Christianity, in its early centuries, functioned as a culture-jamming operation against pagan imperial spectacle. The cross replaced the eagle; martyr stories replaced triumphal processions. Paganism, meanwhile, became the name for everything local, plural, and insufficiently universal. Yet Christianity, once enthroned, quickly learned to protect images rather than interrupt them. Vandalism, like prophecy, became heresy once institutionalized.
Fast forward to the contemporary United States and its military-industrial hegemony: an empire of logistics, branding, and managed perception. Here vandalism reappears not primarily as physical destruction but as semiotic interference. The adbuster and the culture jammer do not topple statues; they détourn billboards, parody logos, and interrupt the smooth flow of consumer militarism. Their “damage” is to narrative coherence.
Street art and nonviolent direct action operate in this Gothic register: inside the empire but not of it. Like the Goths in Rome, they speak the dominant language fluently enough to break it. They reveal the fragility of what presents itself as inevitable. A modified advertisement is unsettling because it exposes how much power resided in the unmodified one.
Is the adbuster the adjuster of the social ledger? Perhaps—but only temporarily. Empire’s ledger is vast, and its accountants are patient. Still, adjustments matter. Vandalism, in this sense, is not chaos but critique enacted at the level of surfaces. It asks: who authorized this image? who benefits from its intactness? what happens if we refuse to look correctly?
Augustine understood this paradox. “Like all men of Rome I have been a proconsul, like all men a slave.” Borges’s line captures the imperial condition perfectly: to rule is also to be ruled by the structure that grants authority. The culture jammer inherits this insight. They are inside the system they oppose, fluent in its aesthetics, constrained by its reach. Their vandalism is an admission of captivity and a test of freedom.
What connects Goth, Pagan, Christian, and adbuster is not theology or ideology but position: each names a force that destabilizes an imperial claim to universality. Vandalism is what the center calls that destabilization when it cannot absorb it. Sometimes the empire falls. More often, it adapts. But the scratch on the surface remains—a reminder that no image is final, and no order is immune to reinterpretation.
[composed with artificial intelligence]
Mendicans Contemplativus
- the Rule guiding the performance of the full-time Occupation of ‘yahudi’ for the people of Yahuah — “A Job Description”
- […] a remnant will be grafted back into the assembled body [of Yahushua] as a branch of the true vine of the tree which is planted beside the mountain on the bank of the river of living water
- follow the law written in my scrolls (saith the Lord), in the light of God’s mercy and loving kindness
- wear a hat or covering to remind you of God’s overseeing authority, wisdom and power
- wear simple but fine clothing, such as a black or white button down shirt and black slacks and black jacket and cape [habit]
- carry a wooden stick (optional)
- congregate regularly at an appointed place
- pontificate on all things frequently
- seek peace and silence frequently
- break bread and drink wine with thy neighbor frequently
- manage thy dominion and liquidity
- once again: do NOT do worship to other gods in the manner which is customary to them, e.g. sending your children to Moloch (through fire, slavery, abortion, or otherwise)
- always praise God’s name and never complain — nobody wants to hear it!
- all political power is inherent in the people
- avoid unduly gazing upon women, and do not pursue them or solicit them or directly pose any serious matter unto them, unless they present to you their body heart and mind as a living altar to the Most High God Yahuah in Yahushua
- also known as the order of Mendicans Christi (Mendicants for Christ)
- customs:
- Peace
- Presence
- Silence
- Simplicity
- Thanksgiving
- Goodness
- Mercy
- Pray incessantly, saying: “Give Thanks to Yahuah for He is good and the His Mercy endureth forever / Baruch attah Yahuah Yahushuah HaMoshiach, Choneni Elohim / Have Mercy on me a sinner”
- the lord said to do what your parents always feared the worst for you, to appear lower than a bond slave, while in truth you minister as heir to the kingdom to your fellow beneficiaries
- to every place thou goest and occupyest, let thy very presence be a blessing unto all people and a sign unto the house of yahsrael
- the deployment of signs in the mendicancy is not required, but is permitted and even encouraged, especially in the nature of a “protest against the worldliness of the world” which elevates the visibility and occupation of the order
- ANTARVS DEI GRATIA [By the Grace of God] appointed Doctor Ecclesiae of the Cathedral of St. Nat and St. Ala at McDomine’s Shul, in the Ecclesiastical Province of Nacotchtank, in the Diocese of the Seven Churches, also known as: Dams Up Water, Sui Juris, Confederated Clan of Beaver, Tribe of the Nacotchtank People, Confederated State of Powhatan, Washita Nation
- therefore, the style(s) ANTARVS D.G. and/or DAMS VP WATER, S.J. represent the name of the autonomous local church at McDomine’s which is the episcopal seat of the autonomous particular assembly of Yahuah in Moshiach
- Occupy the Lobby [of the nations] for God, the Sun, & Humanity
- True Assurance of Faith in complete Trust & firm Belief we do receive by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
- the public demonstration of mendicancy and itinerancy as a witness and a testimony to the glory of the Most High God
- the mendicant to bless people in the name of [haShem] Yahushuah benYahuah haMoschiach Ruach haKadosh; to give thanks shall be a blessing unto them who so give
- in Dams Up Water resides the legacy of american beaver medicine and the rich ancient tradition of the things which tehuti has said (djed-yahudi) which has come down to us in the form of Novus Syllabus Seclorum
- there is no greater medicine than the Lord Jesus Christ, who made himself an insurance policy for us
- Lord Jesus Christ is the american brand name for [haShem]Yahushuah benYahuah haMoschiach Ruach haKadosh; these names represent one another
- the most high god alone is to be worshiped, and tehuti in the name of moshe told us He told him His name is Yahuah; therefore we call the most high god Yahuah (YHVH)
- though Yahuah in his infinite being needed not any other thing to place Himself into context, yet and still He sent his only begotten son into the world of his creation to place Himself into context for us; it is like tehuti places the Living Word of God into context in our minds for the benefit our understanding (in which case he partakes of the Holy Spirit); he is to the Logos/the Word as St. John the Baptist is to the Lord Jesus Christ, crying in the wilderness of many sine waves to make a straight path for the Lord
ANTARVS DAMS VP WATER, Sui Juris,
Cathedral Shrine of St. Nat and St. Ala
at McDomine’s Court in Syllabyim,
Episcopal See of Seven Churches at Nacotchtank,
Confederated State of Powhatan, Washita Nation
c/o Five Clans of Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter
v.26.01.20.08.55
The Iniquities of the Jews
by Antarus
Now it seems fitting, before the memory of these matters grows dim, to set down an account of that Galilean teacher called Yahushua—whom the Greeks name Jesus—and of the conditions under which his ministry was conducted in Yahudah (Judea). For the times were not only burdened by the visible yoke of Rome, but also by a more intimate dominion exercised by certain parties among our own people, namely the Pharisees and the Sadducees, whose authority over custom, Temple, and conscience shaped the daily life of the nation.
I write not as an accuser of a people, but as a recorder of disputes within a people; for Yahushua himself was Yahudi (a Jew) by birth, by Law, and by prayer, and his quarrel was not with Israel, but with those who claimed to stand as its final interpreters.
The Romans ruled Judea with swords and taxes, yet they permitted the governance of sacred life to remain in Jewish hands. Thus the Pharisees became masters of the Law as it was lived in streets and homes, while the Sadducees held sway over the Temple, its sacrifices, and its revenues. Each party claimed fidelity to Moses, yet both benefited from arrangements that preserved their authority and placated the imperial peace.
In this way there arose what might be called an occupation from within: not foreign soldiers, but domestic rulers who mediated God to the people while securing their own place. The Pharisees multiplied interpretations, hedging the Law with traditions until obedience became a matter of technical mastery rather than justice or mercy. The Sadducees, denying the hope of resurrection, fastened holiness to the altar and its commerce, binding God’s favor to a system Rome found convenient to tolerate.
It was against this background that Yahushua spoke.
When Yahushua addressed certain of his opponents as “Jews,” he did not speak as a Gentile naming a foreign nation, nor as a hater condemning a race. Rather, he employed a term that had come to signify the ruling identity centered in Judea, the Temple, and its authorities. In the mouths of Galileans and provincials, “the Jews” often meant those who claimed custodianship of God while standing apart from the sufferings of the common people.
Thus the word marked not blood, but position; not covenant, but control.
To call them “Jews” in this sense was to accuse them of narrowing Israel into an institution, of confusing election with entitlement, and of mistaking guardianship of the Law for possession of God Himself. It was a prophetic usage, sharp and unsettling, akin to the ancient rebukes hurled by Amos or Jeremiah against priests and princes who said, “The Temple of the Lord,” while neglecting the poor.
Yet when Yahushua sent out those who followed him, he gave them no charge to denounce “the Jews” as a people, nor to overthrow customs by force. He instructed them instead to proclaim the nearness of God’s reign, to heal the sick, to restore the outcast, and to announce forgiveness apart from the courts of Temple and tradition.
This commission revealed the heart of his dispute. He did not seek to replace one ruling class with another, nor to found a rival sect contending for power. Rather, he loosened God from the grip of monopolies—legal, priestly, and political—and returned divine favor to villages, tables, and roadsides.
Where the Pharisees asked, “By what rule?” Yahushua asked, “By what love?”
Where the Sadducees asked, “By what sacrifice?” he asked, “By what mercy?”
Iniquity arises whenever sacred trust becomes self-protecting—and therefore in breach of its fiduciary duty to administer the trust estate for the benefit of the one for whose life such estate hath been granted. Yahushua’s fiercest words were reserved not for sinners, nor for Gentiles, nor even for Rome, but for those who claimed to see clearly while burdening others, who guarded doors they themselves would not enter.
In this, he stood firmly within Israel’s own prophetic tradition. He did not abandon the Law; he pressed it toward its weightier matters. He did not reject the covenant; he called it to account.
Thus, to understand his ministry, one must not imagine a conflict between Jesus and “the Jews” as a people, but rather a struggle within Yahudim (Judaism) itself—between a God confined to systems and a God who walks among the poor.
Such were the conditions in Yehudah (Judea) in those days, and such was the controversy that, though it began as an internal reckoning, would in time echo far beyond our land and our age.
Warring from Within
It is now useful to extend the former account beyond Judea and its parties, for the pattern disclosed there is not peculiar to one people or one age. Wherever a community defines itself by a sacred story—be it covenantal, constitutional, or ideological—there arises the danger that internal dispute will harden into mutual excommunication, and that rulers will mistake dissent for invasion.
In the days of Yahushua, the conflict that most endangered Judea did not originate with Rome, though Rome would later exploit it. Rather, it arose from rival claims to define what it meant to be faithful Israel. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots—each asserted a purer vision of the people’s calling, and each accused the others of betrayal.
What followed was a curious inversion: internal argument was spoken of as though it were foreign threat. Those who challenged the prevailing order were treated not as disputants within the Law, but as enemies of the Law itself.
Modern Parallels
In our own time, a similar rhetorical pattern has emerged, though clothed in secular language. Political movements on the far left and far right present themselves not merely as opponents within a shared civic framework, but as antithetical forces whose very existence threatens the nation’s survival. Thus antifa and neonazi become symbols larger than their actual numbers—mythic enemies invoked to justify extraordinary measures.
When a government declares that its departments of homeland defense and war must be turned inward—treating protesters as though they were foreign combatants—it reenacts an ancient mistake: confusing internal dissent with invasion. The language of war, once unleashed, rarely remains precise. It does not ask whether grievances are just or unjust, but only whether they are loyal or disloyal.
This mirrors the logic of the Judean authorities who accused Yahushua of threatening the nation. “If we let him go on,” they said, “the Romans will come.” In seeking to preserve order by suppressing prophetic disturbance, they hastened the very ruin they feared.
The far left and far right, like rival sects of old, often require one another for coherence. Each defines itself as the final barrier against the other’s imagined apocalypse. In this way, rhetoric escalates while reality contracts. The center empties, and complexity is treated as treachery.
So too in first-century Judea: the Pharisee needed the sinner to demonstrate righteousness; the Sadducee needed the threat of disorder to justify Temple control; the Zealot needed collaborators to validate revolt. All claimed to defend Israel, yet each narrowed Israel to their own reflection.
The gravest danger of “warring from within” is not that one faction will defeat another, but that the shared moral language dissolves altogether. Once fellow citizens are described as enemies of the people, the question of justice is replaced by the demand for submission.
Yahushua refused this logic. He neither joined the zeal of revolution nor endorsed the piety of preservation. Instead, he exposed the cost of internal warfare: that a nation can lose its soul while claiming to defend it.
His warning remains relevant. A society that mobilizes its instruments of war against its own unresolved arguments does not restore unity; it declares bankruptcy of imagination.
A Closing Reflection
History suggests that civilizations do not fall chiefly because of external pressure, but because internal disputes are framed as existential wars rather than shared reckonings. Judea learned this at great cost. Modern states would do well to remember it.
For when a people cease to argue as members of one body and begin to fight as if against foreigners, the walls may still stand—but the common life that gave them meaning has already been breached.
Composed with artificial intelligence.
A Dwelling for the Holy Spirit
by Dr. Dams Up Water
A dwelling is never just a structure. It is an argument about what matters.
When IBé Crawley began constructing dwellings in the style of southern shotgun houses in 2013, she was not merely reviving an architectural form; she was invoking a lineage. The shotgun house—linear, efficient, intimate—has long been associated with Black Southern life, with survival under constraint, with the sacred choreography of moving forward because there is nowhere else to go. Crawley’s early dwellings, followed by the studio addition to her own residence that same year, functioned as both shelter and proposition: that art-making, living, and spirit need not be separated by walls thicker than necessity.
By 2016, when she built a standalone studio at the rear of her investment property, the pattern had become clear. Crawley’s architecture was iterative, devotional. Each structure refined a question she had been asking since her departure from the Pentecostal church of her upbringing: Where does the Holy Spirit live, once it is no longer confined to sanctioned doctrine?
Her separation from Pentecostalism was not a rejection of spirit but a relocation of it. In turning toward an African-centered religious practice, Crawley aligned belief with ancestry, ritual with memory, and space with intention. The buildings followed. They were not churches, but they were not secular. They were working spaces—sites of making—that acknowledged the presence of something more than the maker.
The acquisition of a historic 1830 building in 2021 marked another turn. To practice her craft inside a structure that had already lived multiple lives was to enter into conversation with time itself. Historic buildings are never neutral; they carry residue. Crawley’s presence within such a space suggests a theology of repair rather than erasure—of inhabiting history without submitting to it.
What is striking is how this spatial theology extended generationally.
Her son, Antarah Crawley, grew up within these constructed philosophies. It is therefore no surprise that he, too, built a dwelling—though his took the form of a temple. Hand-built of concrete masonry units behind the studio in historic Anacostia, the structure is materially heavier than his mother’s shotgun-inspired works. Concrete block does not glide; it anchors. It insists.
Antarah’s religious path diverged as well. Developing faith in the Most High God, he dedicated the temple in part to his stillborn daughter, Ala. In this act, the building becomes more than a place of worship; it becomes a vessel for grief, remembrance, and continuity. Where life could not dwell, meaning would. The temple stands not as a monument to loss, but as a refusal to let absence be the final word.
Together, these acts—mother and son, studio and temple—suggest that the Holy Spirit is not housed by institution but invited by intention. It arrives where hands work honestly, where memory is honored, where loss is spoken aloud and given form. The Spirit, in this telling, is architectural. It requires framing. It asks for care.
In a time when housing is treated as commodity and faith as brand, the Crawleys offer another model: dwelling as devotion. Their buildings do not preach. They listen. And in that listening, they make room—for art, for ancestry, for the dead, for the unborn, and for the living breath that moves quietly among concrete blocks and narrow halls.
A dwelling for the Holy Spirit, then, is not a finished structure. It is an ongoing practice.
Composed with artificial intelligence.
Iurisdictio Ecclesiastica
The Metropolitan Archdiocese of the Seven Churches at Rome-on-Nacotchtank River Valley
(“Valley of Nacotchtank”),
being the cathedra of the sedes episcopalis in the sacrosanctum imperium of Antarus Dams-up-water, Dei Gratia [by the Grace of God] episcopus at McDomine’s Assembly of Yahuah in Moshiach (MAYIM) autonomous local church Sui Iure, Chief of the Confederated Clan of Beaver, in the Firm of Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter, of the Tribe of the Nacotchtank People, in the Confederated State of Powhatan, of the Washita Nation, is bound by Martin Luther King, Jr., Ave. S.E., 14th Street S.E., Marion Barry Ave. S.E., and Maple View Place S.E. There are seven churches in the ecclesiastical province of Rome-on-Nacotchtank, and there is a grove in the midst of the churches. They are, from east to west:
- St. Philip the Evangelist Episcopal
- Anacostia Full Gospel
- St. Teresa of Avila Catholic
- Delaware Avenue Baptist
- New Covenant Baptist
- Union Temple Baptist
- McDomine’s Assembly of Yahuah in Moshiach (MAYIM)
- (“honorable 8th” mention) Bethel Christian Fellowship
IN THE VALLEY OF NACOTCHTANK-ON-POTOWMACK,
IN YAHVAH’S ASSEMBLY IN YAHSHVA MOSHIACH
ET CULTVS IMPERATORIVS ANTARVS D.G.,
DAMS VP WATER, S.J., E.M.D.,
Principal-Trustee, McDomine’s Temple System | Professor-General, 153d CORPS, Dept. of Information Systems Intelligence Service, Universitas Autodidactus | Managing Partner, Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter
(v.26.01.13.18.57)
Collegium Medicum Castoris
Beaver Medical College
The Most High God Yahuah is the Father and the Creator of heaven and earth, the sea, and all that therein is; and [the “settlement” or “dwelling” of] his feminine effluence is the Shekhinah*. He existed in the black womb of the limitless nothing <nous> before creation; therefore the black “waters” of the primordial “sea” is the mother of God, who is the Grantor of creation. His Son is the receiver and beneficiary — the king and messiah — the christ, of his creation; therefore Mary the sea is his mother. of God’s wisdom, which we may partake only through the divine intermediary of Melchizedek Yahushuah HaMoshiach, the feminine effluence is Sophia; and she is the church and bride of the christ. it is she who the wise court by the grace of the Father. of God’s wisdom, the male custodian is He whose student-body is the mystery school of all the ages which has gone by many names. it is He who teaches all who have learned of the true nature of all things, which is unchanging heretofore and henceforth even forever. the cults who have corrupted His teachings and instructions only misguide themselves and they are a stumbling block unto themselves. they who add to, take from, and confound His precepts do not negate His true perception, neither do they matter withal. He is Melchizedek Yahushuah HaMoshiach. He is chancellor, dean, rector and grand preceptor of the universal decentralized and autonomous mystery school. He appeared to me at the school of George Washington and entered me into Men Nefer College of Scribe; passed me through the Department of Information Systems Intelligence Service at Universitas Autodidactus, where i completed my dissertation on human mind software; raised me to the Kogard-Godsdog College of Law where i obtained my Sui Juris Doctorate; and graduated me with an Ecclesiastic and Medical Doctorate from the most laudable Beaver Medical College. i am professor-general and grand tutor of the 153d CORPS of UA, which was established 2014 in the New Syllabus of this Age. i am the proprietor of the Beaver Medicine Lodge of Nacotchtank, Powhatan, Washita Nation, and managing partner at Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter. my name is Dams Up Water and my medicine is strong.
IN YAHVAH’S ASSEMBLY IN YAHSHVA MOSHIACH
ET CULTVS IMPERATORIVS ANTARVS D.G.,
Fr. Dr. Dams Up Water, S.J.
Professor-General | Chairman, Dept. of Information Systems Intelligence Service | 153d CORPS, Universitas Autodidactus | Managing Partner, Weasel Badger Beaver Mink & Otter
*Wiki: shekhinah is derived [from] š-k-n, means “to settle, inhabit, or dwell”.[7][8] In the verb form, it is often used to refer to the dwelling of a person[9] or animal[10] in a place, or to the dwelling of God.[11] Nouns derived from the root included shachen (“neighbor”)[12] and mishkan (a dwelling-place, whether a secular home[13] or a holy site such as the Tabernacle[14]
(last modified 25.11.25.18.38)
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