Category: Uncategorized

100k martyrs annually

Don’t think the world has progressed past Christian persecution:

A top Vatican official has said around 100,000 Christians are killed
every year for reasons linked to their faith and pointed to the Middle
East, Africa and Asia as the biggest problem areas.

Monsignor
Silvano Maria Tomasi was quoted by Vatican radio on Tuesday as saying
that the figures were “shocking” and “incredible”.

Tomasi said
Christians were also forced to leave their homes and see their churches
destroyed in some parts of the world, and were often subjected to rapes,
kidnappings and discrimination. The Vatican official made particular reference to the kidnapping of two Orthodox bishops near Aleppo in Syria last month.

Unless new Charles Martels arise, secular and pagan persecution will eventually come to infest what was once Christendom just as it plagues much of the rest of the world.  The world always hates and fears what it cannot control. 

Christendom and the West were established by Christians willing to fight for their faith.  While there is room to discuss the theological correctness of their efforts, those who will give up their faith rather than die for it or fight for it have no place in the discussion.

A moment of silence

Of all the various sights of Rome, (and we did the full tourist program there with another homeschooling family), my favorite was this haunting image of the triumph of Christianity on the ceiling of the Sala di Constantino.  There are better paintings, and justly more famous ones, in the four Stanze di Raffaello, but there are none more powerful or poignant.

It would be hard to exaggerate the effect of the stark sepia simplicity of the image of the cross standing over the shattered pagan statue in comparison with the riot of colors and activity in the other paintings in the room, including The Vision of the Cross, The Battle of Milvian Bridge, The Donation of Constantine, and The Baptism of Constantine, an effect that is only heightened by the hordes of people shuffling through the Palace like vertical sardines. 

To look up from the press of that murmuring mass humanity and be viscerally reminded of the victory of the Cross, temporal as well as eternal, was both moving and inspiring.  Most of the messages encoded in the paintings are lost on modern Man, but this one is unmistakable.

A frightening economy

Zerohedge compiles 40 frightening facts about the U.S. economy.  The five worst, in my estimation:

#6 Back in 1970, the total amount of debt in the United States (government debt + business debt + consumer debt, etc.) was less than 2 trillion dollars.  Today it is over 56 trillion dollars…

#7 According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001.  That number dropped to 21.6 percent in 2011.

#17 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs.  Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#22 According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.

#40 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

So much for the “science” of global warming

Once more, it is seen that it is the skeptics who were correct and the “scientists” who had their arrogant, pointy heads up their asses:

The increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century just reflects the end of the Little Ice Age. The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, the much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water. That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.

Those ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, are primarily why global temperatures rose from 1915 until 1945, when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years. The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined from 1945 until the late 1970s, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.

The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm from the late 1970s until the late 1990s, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period. But that warming ended 15 years ago, and global temperatures have stopped increasing since then, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period. As The Economist magazine reported in March, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.

At first the current stall out of global warming was due to the ocean cycles turning back to cold. But something much more ominous has developed over this period. Sunspots run in 11 year short term cycles, with longer cyclical trends of 90 and even 200 years. The number of sunspots declined substantially in the last 11 year cycle, after flattening out over the previous 20 years. But in the current cycle, sunspot activity has collapsed…. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.”

That report quoted Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory saying, “Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.” In other words, another Little Ice Age.

Who would have ever imagined that it was the giant flaming ball of nuclear fire in the sky, the one that provides the Earth with the vast majority of its heat, that is the controlling factor concerning global temperatures?  What an outlandish notion!

Keep in mind that the scientists who tell you evolution by natural selection is a fact are, in some cases, the very same people who told you global warming was a fact.  In both cases, what they are relying on is far from science.

Blessings of the Diversity Gospel

This morning’s headlines from the UK:

Tensions on streets after slaughter of British soldier: War memorials defaced and mosque firebombed as EDL march on Westminster

  •     Bomber Command Memorial and Animals In War Memorial vandalised
  •     Police are unsure if attack was by Muslims or by far-right troublemakers
  •     1,000 EDL chant, sing and march from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street
  •     Police keep them apart from Unite Against Fascism counter-protest
  •     Mosque fire-bombed in wake of Lee Rigby’s execution in Woolwich

This is all just gentle prelude, of course, but things do appear to be heating up as we slowly inch our way towards summer. When UKIP starts echoing the EDL, that should indicate a significant corner being turned.  As it stands, things are much more violent in Chicago but talking to various Brits gives one the sense of a powderkeg sitting in the midst of some flying sparks.

The infernal Dan Brown

I have never read what passes for a Dan Brown novel, and it seems that this is probably for the best.  But I should note that the vast success of writers who write for idiots doesn’t bother me any more than the success of sixteen year-old pop stars who perform for teen girls does.  Given MPAI, it stands to reason that the writer whose primary goal is to sell as many books as possible should always cater to the lowest nominally literate consumer.

However, it is a bit much to be expected to also accept the intellectual pretensions of a man who is manifestly writing for the ignorati.  For not only is Brown’s “research” obviously incorrect, the fact that he confuses the ascents of the Purgatorio with the circles of the Inferno tends to suggest that it is entirely nonexistent.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn he’d never even read the entire Inferno, let alone the rest of La Comedia.

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, having written what
for lack of a mightier term we must call a novel, a novel that proved that John
the Apostle was a girl, Mary Magdalene a helpless goddess, and a hypotenuse an
African water buffalo—having revealed for millions the lavish colors of the
frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris (there are no frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris),
the grim austerity of Spanish Cathedrals (Spanish Cathedrals are notorious for
baroque exuberance), and the deep mystery of the Golden Ratio (every schoolboy
knew about the Golden Ratio)—having shown the world that he could write a novel
about art, theology, and Christian history while knowing nothing about art,
theology, and Christian history, except what he could glean from the covers of
matchbooks and obiter dicta from Cher—having shown how much
you can do if you do not bother to open an ordinary encyclopedia, this Dan
Brown, I say, this man of our time and of no time, has now written a novel about
the greatest poet who ever lived, Dante.

Only it doesn’t have
a damned thing to do with Dante, just as The
Da Vinci Code didn’t have anything to do with Leonardo.  Dante is just
a quick needle used to inject the “story” into the reader’s head.  This
time, Mr. Brown has opened a lot of encyclopedias, deluging the reader with 400
pages of material that belongs in Michelin guides to Florence, Venice, and
Istanbul, none of it to the point.  Even at that, he gets details wrong as
soon as he veers away from something you might find in a guide book, especially
when he engages in an exceedingly rare moment of telling us something about
Dante’s poem.  He says it was called a Comedy
because it was written in the vernacular, “for the masses.”  No, a comedy,
according to the medieval definition, was a poem in which a character moves
from misery to happiness, regardless of what language it is written in, and
there were no “masses” to read it, since books were still costly to produce and
scarce.

He says that Dante’s
Purgatory has nine circles of ascent; no, there are seven, one for each of the
deadly sins.  He says that Purgatory is the only way to get from the
Inferno to Paradise.  No, it isn’t; nobody but Dante visits Inferno and
leaves the place, and plenty of people do not have to ascend the
mountain.  Essentially, Dante’s poem is about the resurrection of a human
soul, by the grace of God, to turn from the lie of evil to the truth and beauty
of goodness.  Brown doesn’t get any of that, because he doesn’t care about
any of that.

What’s this book
about?  It’s 462 pages of bad prose.  Portentous sentence
fragments.  Italics, for somber
emphasis.  J—–, there are childish profanities!  Even childish
punctuation?!  Anticlimaxes, a good dollop of Most Favored Bigotry, for
sales; one dimensional characters, most of them pallid even in their one
dimension, and a message with all the sophistication of Sesame Street. 

I understand that Eco isn’t for everyone, let alone Calvino and Borges.  But it would be nice if someone in Brown’s position would be responsible enough, if not to actually bother reading Dante, to at least hire someone to read it for him and ensure that he isn’t actively misinforming the sort of people whose only exposure to the culture Brown is mining are his books.

Diversity in Sweden: Sixth Night

Apparently the real Swedes are getting tired of the violent antics of the paper ones:

Rioting spread to several Swedish towns on Friday night as police
stepped up arrests during a sixth night of unrest and far-right
vigilantes chased non-whites in southern Stockholm. In Linköping,
central southern Sweden, police responded to 120 incidents as cars,
caravans and two schools were set alight. At one point a blazing truck
was rolled into a building, which caught fire.

In Orebro, 120km west of Stockholm, police were stoned after cars and a
school were torched. In Uppsalla, north of Stockholm, there was minor
violence.

At this point, it should be obvious that my prediction of Anders Breivik being a harbinger of things to come was, at the very least, considerably less outlandish than many believed it to be at the time.  Nor are we seeing any sort of backlash in the form of more political support for the multicultural parties across Europe.

And if the police are stupid enough to play quisling and take the side of the immigrants, as they apparently are doing in Stockholm, then they’ll have to go too:

The number of police officers on the streets is simply staggering. The police appear to have focused all their resources on stopping the Swedes, Fredrik Becklin, spokesman for the nationalist youth organization Nordisk Ungdom (Nordic Youth), said Friday night. “It makes me sick to see the police clamp down on us Swedes with full force and without warning, using nightsticks and tear gas, while they don’t do a damn thing about the immigrants. We are only trying to help maintain order, while the immigrants set cars and buildings on fire,” said a young man who wished to remain anonymous.

Kenya deports unwanted barbarians

So how can it possibly be claimed the West cannot simply do the same?

Woolwich suspect Michael Adebolajo came to the attention of MI5 after he appeared in court in Kenya on suspicion of planning to fight for a terrorist group. The Mail on Sunday has learned he was arrested with five others in November 2010. All were said to have been heading for neighbouring Somalia, where they had been recruited by Al-Shabaab, the Islamist insurgent organisation.

Adebolajo, who was filmed after the Woolwich slaughter with blood on his hands, was deported without being charged.

If people are too uncivilized to live in a third world country, what are the odds they can successfully live in a first world one?  In older, wiser times, when Western civilization was being built rather than torn down, such men would have been killed on sight.

Toleration isn’t progress.  Diversity isn’t a sign of societal health.  As anyone familiar with the history of past civilizations knows, they are symptoms of enervation integral to the decline and fall of nations.  UKIP, Movimento 5 Stelle, Golden Dawn, the Schweizerisch Volkspartei, AfD, Sweden Democrats, True Finns, and Jobbik are rising, and the ruling multiculti parties will have to either surrender or cast aside their democratic pretensions and attempt to rule by naked force.

The same thing will happen in America. At this point, the only question is what name the American nationalist party will be known by.

A tale of two statements

American Heritage Girls and an Order of the Arrow Chief respond to the recent action by the Boy Scouts of America to relax its membership standards:

“It was with great disappointment that American Heritage Girls, Inc. Board of Trustees received the news of the change to the Boy Scouts of America’s membership standards. It was our sincerest hope the voice of the majority of those associated with the BSA would be heard and that the BSA would continue the amazing 103-year legacy of its founder to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices. Unfortunately, the organization chose to step away from that commitment.
 
As a result of leaving its time-honored traditions, the BSA has left American Heritage Girls with no choice but to dissolve our Memorandum of Mutual Support. We do so with a heavy heart. We have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with BSA through the years. However, the American Heritage Girls Board of Trustees has decided that we cannot in good conscience continue in a formal relationship with the BSA.
 
As an independent, faith-based leadership and character development organization, we want everyone associated with the American Heritage Girls to know that our board members unanimously affirm the AHG Statement of Faith and its Scriptural foundation, and we are committed to continue providing a safe environment for every girl involved.”

The American Heritage Girls have sent a clear message that they will not pretend that the decision of the Boy Scouts of America to remove the requirement to be “morally straight” from its members is not a serious one.  Whereas, on the other hand, this member of The Order of the Arrow, is scurrilously attempting to encourage scouts who took that oath to ignore it.

Dear Arrowmen of Coosa Lodge,

I know many of you are concerned about what has just happened with the change to the Boys Scouts of America’s membership policy. On May 23, 2013, the National Committee held a vote on whether or not homosexual youth scouts would be allowed into the Boy Scout program. Out of the 1,400 delegates over sixty percent voted to approve the new resolution which states,

“Youth membership in the Boy Scouts of America is open to all youth who meet the specific membership requirements to join the Cub Scout, Boy Scout, Varsity Scout, Sea Scout, and Venturing programs. Membership in any program of the Boy Scouts of America requires the youth member to (a) subscribe to and abide by the values expressed in the Scout Oath and Scout Law, (b) subscribe to and abide by the precepts of the Declaration of Religious Principle (duty to God), and (c) demonstrate behavior that exemplifies the highest level of good conduct and respect for others and is consistent at all times with the values expressed in the Scout Oath and Scout Law. No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.”

Although the resolution has passed, it shall not take effect until January 1, 2014. The reason for this is to give us and our leadership time to adjust and prepare for the upcoming change. Many of you have expressed your opinions and thoughts on this matter, and whether this is right or wrong, do not let this affect the true core values on which the upon which Scouting was founded: to get our youth active in the outdoors, to instill proper skills for the future, and to gain the ideals of leadership and service in today’s youth which will help build a better future for our country and world.

The road ahead will be a long and hard one for our organization. Many scouts have already expressed their desire to leave the program, but I would like to issue a challenge to you all in the hopes that the Boy Scouts of America will come out stronger than it ever has before. In the upcoming months, speak to your fellow brothers about how you can help build our organization. Please do not focus on someones sexual orientation, but on what you yourself can do for Scouting. It is up to us as the leaders of tomorrow; to be the best we can for the packs, troops, crews, and other groups within Scouting. Scouts will be looking for someone to show them what to do. Let us lead the way by showing them Scouting is no different than it was before. Our focus is still to build leadership and skills for our youth and to give service to our local troops, councils, and camps and we intend to keep it that way. I am proud to call myself an Eagle Scout and Vigil Honor recipient, and I am ecstatic to have the opportunity to be a part of this great organization.

As a former Star Scout and member of the Order of the Arrow, my response to the Chief of the Coosa Lodge is that his feeble attempt to minimize the significance of the degradation of standards represented by the board’s action is not worthy of an Arrowman or a Scout, and that I am requesting the removal of my name from the Lodge to which I belonged because I no longer wish to be associated with the Boy Scouts of America or the Order of the Arrow.

The seeds of destruction have already been successfully sown by the homosexual activists.  Both the Boy Scouts and the Order will be rapidly following the way of the Girl Scouts, whose membership fell by 250,000, (about one-tenth), between 2003 and 2008.  The BSA membership is already only half of what it was in 1972; the mass withdrawal of scouts, troops, and councils should see it fall by another half in much less time.

Tolerance is not a virtue.  It is, as I have written in the past, “the sin of Jeroboam“.  One would think that seeing one organization after another, one institution after another, decline rapidly after lowering its standards in the name of modernizing them would give the various leaderships pause, (for evil’s activists are never successful without the useful fools convinced by their false promises and tortuous arguments). And yet, as the BSA action shows, the same short-sighted attempt to appease the internal destroyers is repeated again and again and again.

So let the Boy Scouts dwindle.  They have made their bed, let them lie in it. Let their decline into irrelevance be a lesson to you.  Vigilance and internal discipline is necessary for every organization that wishes to preserve itself against the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Relaxing your standards and abandoning your traditions is always the first step along the easy way that leads to destruction.

PC = Playing Canute

The politically correct multicultural forces are attempting to hold back an angry tide that will ultimately sweep them away:

The murder of soldier Lee Rigby has provoked a backlash of anger across the UK, including the attacking of mosques, racial abuse and comments made on social media. Eleven people have been arrested around Britain for making ‘racist or anti-religious’ comments on Twitter following the brutal killing in Woolwich on Wednesday.

The incident has also prompted a huge increase in anti-Muslim incidents, according to the organisation Faith Matters, which works to reduce extremism.

Before the attack about four to eight cases a day were reported to its helpline. But the group said about 150 incidents had been reported in the last few days, including attacks on mosques.

When speech isn’t permitted, action will take its place.  The already unpopular British government is foolishly playing with fire here by attacking the natural nationalist reaction to immigrant murder.

Consider the irrational position of the government:

Detective Inspector Ed Yaxley of Avon and Somerset Police said: ‘These comments were directed against a section of our community. Comments such as these are completely unacceptable and only cause more harm to our community in Bristol.

But there is no community in Bristol.  There are communities, plural, and they will soon be at war.  The comments don’t cause any harm to a nonexistent community, rather, they reveal a stark reality that the British police are desperately trying to conceal.