Auld Lang Syne

A 'silent majority'?

Steve Sailer ponders whether there really is a 'silent but sensible majority which believes in HBD, and a long discussion follows.

At Inductivist, Ron Guhname gives a negative answer:

'The GSS convinces me that the answer is definitely no.

Beginning in 1977, survey particpants were asked: "On the average, blacks have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are because most blacks have less in-born ability to learn?"

See the results at the link.

It's often claimed on many ethnopatriot blogs that many people are savvy on these issues but will not, because of political correctness, give honest answers on surveys and polls because they know that such perceptions are socially stigmatized.

Meanwhile, I've wondered if most people, or the average person out there, would be familiar with the acronym 'HBD', or could puzzle its meaning out, if asked.

Of course everybody knows the word ''diversity'', since we are beaten about the head with that word every time we turn around, not to mention being assailed by the actual fact of enforced diversity. But I suspect that most people, who are not readers of politically incorrect blogs, would not know what HBD or even the full name "human biodiversity", meant.

What does it mean, really? There's a discussion of the term here in which several people take great pains to disassociate 'HBD' from such taboo concepts as 'White nationalism' or 'racism', although some of them seem to conflate 'nationalism' with 'supremacism.' But just as I surmised, the term HBD seems to serve the purpose of putting a scientific (and therefore 'objective) face on discussions of matters racial. I suppose this has its uses.

The term 'NAM', which I still do not like, is seemingly another way to put a neutral face on the description of minorities, classifying them according to what they are not -- Asian. The implication there is that Asians are in a category above the others, being seen as the high-IQ minorities, or the desirable immigrants. This, to me, places excessive value on IQ, which seems to be held in highest regard by the serious HBDers.

To return to the original question of whether there is a silent majority of people with realist views on race and ethnicity, I tend to think Guhname is more correct. Or it may be that, as HailToYou says in a comment that poll respondents back in 1977 gave more honest answers, not being as brainwashed as today's respondents.

Still, I believe there were more people who had commonsensical views then, based on popular wisdom and direct experience, and they had not yet learned that they had to toe the PC line and self-censor. As the older generations pass on, there are fewer and fewer people who express the old, pre-PC attitudes. I suppose this is the measure of the cultural Marxists' success.

Incidentally, the phrase 'silent majority' is most associated with Richard Nixon, though he did not coin it. According to this source, his phrase 'silent majority' referred to:

''Middle-class whites
Those who felt alienated by the counterculture
Conservative whites''

Is there still a significant silent majority?
Thoughts?

Finding the balance

Everything is a racial issue. That's what I've learned from the media over the last couple of decades. The media help ensure that this is so when they give a megaphone to every race huckster or grievance-monger, as long of course as they are not White or Christian.

The brouhaha now is over the Michael Vick story, which I blogged about back at the time that the story broke. Then we had the presidential seal of approval given to Vick's ''second chance'' and now it seems Tucker Carlson in an outburst on MSNBC said that Vick should be executed for his abuse of animals.

Then someone of a Turkish-sounding name, Cenk Uygur, on MSNBC, suggests that Sarah Palin ought also to be executed for hunting and killing wild animals. Next, apparently, on that same 'news' channel (I have not seen this stuff, only read about it) some Ivy-league black spokeswoman says the Vick case is all about slavery and civil rights.

Does any of this make sense to you all? Me neither.

The Free Republic discussions, linked here and here, discuss whether Carlson's comments were over-the-top. Most think so, but I am a little troubled by the number of people who seem to be diminishing the seriousness of Vick's torture of the dogs. Maybe most ''conservatives'' are really libertarians these days, and are no longer Christian in any real sense, but surely it should not be reduced to the argument that ''animals are property. Plain and simple. We have a right to do as we please with them because we own them.'' Well, in a legalistic, libertarian sense I suppose that would be the argument, but I've argued before that one of the things that characterizes European-descended people is our unique relationship with animals. All we have to do is to look at how other cultures regard animals, and notice that White people tend to bond more with animals, even if those animals are working animals. Perhaps White people, especially in our decadent postmodern culture, go overboard and treat animals as children or dote excessively on them. We see this a lot in a society where many people are childless. But the fact is, Whites seem to be the race which has the greatest empathy with and affinity for animals. I would say that while some Whites are wantonly cruel to animals, that behavior is not as frequent with Whites as it is in certain other ''communities". So for 'conservatives' to make the argument that animals are nothing more than property is a step backwards for us.

From a Christian perspective, we are not the 'owners' of animals as we are of inanimate objects; they were given into our care by God, and we were told to be the stewards of God's creation. The Old Testament certainly enjoins us to treat animals humanely. One passage says "The righteous person regards the life of his beast." Proverbs 12:10. Still the Bible allows for animals to be used for meat, fur, and other purposes, while discouraging needless cruelty to animals. The Bible does not treat animals as inert property to be disposed of however we wish.

So is the MSNBC 'pundit' correct to liken hunting wild animals to Vick's torturing and killing his dogs? I can't imagine that anyone would believe that a quick kill by a hunter is the same as torturing and mutilating animals for sheer malice. Maybe you could make the case that killing an animal with the intention of eating it is killing out of necessity, and not just for sport, and is therefore less objectionable. But there are times when it is necessary to kill animals for other reasons (because they are predators killing livestock, or because their populations have overgrown and become destructive, for example) . Of course some urban person could hardly be expected to understand that kind of thing, and I believe the media consists mostly of liberal urban types who can afford to sit on high and judge rural people for being heartless killers of animals. Then they turn around and make excuses for Vick's behavior.

The most predictable part of this whole media furor is the playing of the race card by this professional race apologist. She seems to imply that blacks having had troubled histories with dogs (dogs were sicced on them by evil White men, of course), and blacks having been 'likened to animals' apparently leads them to a vendetta against dogs. Or something. I guess anything can be made to make sense if your sole purpose is to defend and excuse blacks for any bad behavior or crime.

This is just observation on my part, anecdotal, if you will, but I've perceived that fewer blacks have dogs that are not obviously intended for fighting or protection against gang rivals, or a kind of surrogate masculinity -- hence the popularity of pit bulls, and earlier, Doberman Pinschers, dogs that were known for their fierceness or menacing behavior. There are some blacks who have dogs for companionship but it seems less common than with Whites. When I blogged about this in the past, one of my semi-regular readers (YIH, are you still around?) differed with me, and said that lower-class Whites were just as likely to be into dogfighting and acquiring the aggressive breeds of dogs.

I still believe that Whites, at their best, have a kind of bond with animals that I don't observe with other races. Some people who idealize American Indians as being at one with Mother Earth and All Creation, etc., think that they have a similar fondness for animals. I've observed that they are much less sentimental towards animals then Whites, and I have a friend who works among Indians who was dismayed to see some of her Indian clients abusing a 'runt' puppy. She rescued the pup and took it to a shelter; the clients saw it only as a nuisance.

It's also well-known that before the conquest by Whites, many Indian tribes ate dogs, just as in Asia where dogs are a common menu item.

And yes, I know, who are we to judge other cultures? It's all relative, isn't it? Oprah told me so.

In any case, as to the remarks by Tucker Carlson, he was being a little over-the-top recommending execution for animal cruelty, but there is data out there that shows that most people who commit violence against human beings started out by abusing animals.

I don't blindly accept everything that the 'psychiatric community' tells us, but it makes sense. I steer well clear of anybody who is wantonly cruel to animals. Do I recommend the death penalty for animal abuse? No, but neither do we shrug it off by saying ''animals are property and it's none of our business what people do with theirs.'' There is a happy medium between a callous response to animal cruelty in the name of some kind of purist libertarian principles and being a PETA fanatic.

As for making the Vick story a racial issue, that to me is just more evidence of my own perception that blacks do not feel the same empathy for animals that many White people do. To them all that seems to matter is sticking by their racial kin and defending them no matter what they do.

In a sense we might learn something from them on that score, since we seem to turn on each other all too quickly these days, but on the other hand, if we suspend all our ethics in the name of defending the bad apples amongst us, we will not be true to who we are. Our strengths include our empathy and our adherence to principles - but among our principles ought to be some kind of kin-loyalty. It ought to be higher on our list.

Blind leaders of the blind

At American Thinker, Deborah C. Tyler takes on a subject that few on the right pay attention to: the psychology belief system.

Beginning in 1950, the APA began issuing public policy statements and resolutions. Although presumably a scientific organization, the list of those proclamations reads like a libretto of politically correct shibboleths: the benefits of abortion, the need for sex education in public schools, the need for affirmative action, the evils of cultural insensitivity, the virtues of everything LGBT, the blessings of needle exchange programs for mainlining addicts, the psychological nourishment of diversity, the insensitivity of English-only initiatives, the repressiveness of white majorities -- and on and on and on and on.

Two trends can be seen in APA public positions: 1) the misuse of science, and 2) the devaluation of people who hold different moral and spiritual views -- in effect, making infidels of those who disagree. The APA's resolutions are scattered throughout its vast website, but partial lists can be found here and here.

 From the first linked page of their policy manual: See their resolution on 'racism and racial discrimination':

''THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the American Psychological Association denounces racism in all its forms for its negative psychological, social, educational, and economic effects on human development throughout the life span;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that APA further the objectives of the 2001 United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance through efforts focused on elimination of all forms of racism and racial/ethnic discrimination at all levels of the science and practice of psychology in the United States;

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that APA will: (1) pursue diverse racial representation at all levels of APA governance; (2) call upon all psychologists to eliminate processes and procedures that perpetuate racial injustice in research, practice, training and education; (3) call upon all psychologists to speak out against racism and take proactive steps to prevent the occurrence of intolerant or racist acts; and (4) promote psychological research on the alleviation of racial/ethnic injustice.''

I've alluded in earlier blog posts to the role played by all-pervasive belief systems like psychology and all social 'sciences', falsely so-called, in the demise of the West and the rise of anti-White policies, but I don't seem to make much headway with alerting people to just how destructive this mindset is to our people and our future.

You can find any number of ethnopatriot blogs and individuals who are busy lambasting Christianity as the fount of every woe of our people, but scarcely a word is said in criticism of psychology and its 'spiritual' branch, the loosely-termed New Age philosophy. The latter is really a hodgepodge of postmodern psychology mixed with a sort of do-it-yourself, patchwork, multicultural religion.

These belief systems are hand-in-glove with the prevailing political and cultural regime which includes what we call 'political correctness' and the 'tolerance' industry. If there is the remotest resemblance between this belief system and Christianity, or what passes as Christianity in 2010, it is not that Christianity has influenced the former; it is that the 'humanistic' belief system has crept into Christianity and captured its leaders.

If you read the list of policies and resolutions by the APA or other such secular bodies, you will see that it all dovetails with the official dogma of our governments, our media, and the educational complex in the West. This is the dominant belief system of most people in the West, not just secular people or atheists or New Agey people, but of many compromised and ignorant Christians who do not know their own faith.

This is the belief system that rules our lives, really.

It's reinforced everywhere we turn. Pick up a dead-tree newspaper and read a random selection of articles on any number of issues. You will find that the mindset of the APA and other related bodies is reflected exactly in the articles written by just about any journalist or editorial writer. It is the reigning ideology of our time.

We talk about cultural Marxism, but it began with our so-called 'social sciences', with anthropology and sociology and psychology, and cross-pollinated with political leftism to produce the many-headed hydra that dominates our thought and discourse today.

Does anybody remember the days when Scientologists used to have people leafleting out in the streets, trying to reel in new 'customers'? Their sales pitch used to start with the question, ''would you like to take a free personality test?" And just about everybody, at least every young (under 30) individual would eagerly agree. We have been shaped into being a narcissistic, individualistic people, who are fascinated with ourselves, I mean, with our selves. Ridiculous belief systems proliferate by appealing to our obsession with ourselves, our minds and personalities. Pop(ular) psychology is popular because it appeals to this lowest common denominator: the desire to navel-gaze and admire ourselves in mirrors and ponder how very unique we are.

Samuel N. Behrman said

"A quite wonderful discovery -- psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex."

Christianity, by contrast, tells us we are all sinners in need of a redeemer. That, naturally, rubs the post-modern individual the wrong way. He'd rather be told how scintillating and fascinating he and his creative mind are. He'd rather be told that 'the proper study of mankind is man', and specifically, self.

Psychology may tell us that we are all potentially 'mentally ill' but the social sciences hold out the possibility of human perfectibility because our 'ills' (which are often just bad habits or bad character) are curable by what? In the olden days, years of expensive therapy, many hours on an analyst's couch, or now, lots of medications and 'positive self-talk' and 'boosting self-esteem' and reading the right guru's books.

Look how popular Oprah and Dr. Phil and Deepak Chopra and Dr. Oz are by peddling various forms of this self-religion, posing as 'science.'

Naturally, we have freedom of religion in this country, so people are quite welcome to believe in Xenu and the Galactic Confederacy, or nothing at all if they so choose. But this reigning belief system, despite its preaching 'non-judgmentalism' is not the least bit tolerant of Other Gods, as witness the policy statements by the APA and its pronouncements of anathema on 'racists, homophobes, and xenophobes.'

It's this belief system that saturates our society, and it goes unchallenged because it is part of the air we breathe, and because it wears the benign mask of 'science' and assumes a mantle of infallibility. Everybody, just about, believes in it to some extent, because we absorb it by osmosis. It's on every TV talk show or 'women's' programming in particular. Women are big proselytizers for the psychology cult's tenets, whether they realize it or not. Women are very fond of the touchy-feely-emotional trappings of this belief system. It is a very feminine mindset and cult.

For whatever reason, I've had a longstanding suspicion of the psychology cult, even to the extent of avoiding any psychology classes in college, which made me quite the oddity. One counselor looked at me as though she thought I was a primitive because I said I had chosen to take no psychology classes, though I took other science courses toward my degree. It was clear that saying I avoided psych classes was tantamount, in her eyes, to saying I could not read and write. Everybody took Psych classes in college; everyone, though they were not required for all majors. But everybody loved to analyze themselves.

Here's the crux of the problem I have with psychology. Does not science in general demand some kind of objective perspective, an ability to look at something from outside, in a dispassionate way? We can't do that with ourselves. Our efforts to understand the human mind, especially our own minds, are flawed because the human mind can't objectively understand itself or be honest about itself, much less measure and quantify itself.

As a much greater source says of the human heart, ''who can know it?''

The belief system that we call the psychological science is one which contradicts in the most basic ways the beliefs and attitudes of our forebears. It destroys the very idea of right and wrong, good and evil, making everything relative and subjective. It contradicts the belief that we are responsible human beings, who make choices, and who must be held accountable for our actions. It diminishes our freedom in that it tends to cause us to see ourselves and others as helpless pawns, products of circumstance or neurochemicals or anything but free choice. Homosexuals are born with a genetic predisposition, say the seers of psychology. People are criminals because of circumstances like poverty,  or 'racism.'

Nobody can be held accountable except, of course, for people who are heretics when it comes to the established belief system, namely those labeled as 'racists, xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists', and other holdouts such as Christians who believe in the faith of their fathers.

Psychology, like political correctness, is so dominant in our ways of thinking that most of us would not dream of contradicting it in any way.

Behrman's quote about psychoanalysis making simple people seem complex is reflective of the tendency of the psychological dogma to make everything seem complex; things are never what they seem. Contra Ockham's Razor, the most convoluted explanation is the best one for anything, it seems. And this mindset has made people lose moral clarity, to see everything as relative, as a complicated grey area, where there are just 'differing narratives', not truth or falsehood.

Rather than increasing man's wisdom about himself or others or the problems of life in general, it has made everybody lukewarm or noncommital about many things which should be clear-cut.

In response, many people just shut down, and distract themselves with the trivial things, entertainment, sports, shopping, anything but actual thought and discussion.

Hence, here we are fiddling while Rome burns around us. Others, while able to see that our situation is dire, cast about to find someone to blame, and they fix the blame on the older generations (Why didn't they stop this long ago?) or a political party -- and with many people, it's Christianity alone which is blamed for the delusion which our people suffer from.

Let's face it: how many real Christians are out there? How many people take their Christianity seriously and live their lives according to its precepts? Few, sad to say. And Christianity, contrary to what the theocracy-phobics say, exerts pitifully little infliuence on our secular liberal government or on our popular culture, which is decidedly carnal and materialistic.

But the ruling ideology of our day is firmly rooted in this reigning philosophy which combines psychology with its false 'science' of the human mind and the syncretistic, multicultural, all-tolerant 'spirituality' peddled by Oprah, Eckhart Tolle, and other celebrities who wield a great deal of influence over women and the young.

Most of the women and young people I know imbibe these things from the popular culture. Everybody talks in pop-psych jargon and psychobabble, about empowerment and self-esteem and 'sharing'. If you watched that video of Lorena Bobbitt that I linked to, you saw her tell the interviewer that she now has good self-esteem and is now helping other women not to be 'victims' -- this, from the ultimate castrating female.

She is just one individual example, an indicator of what happens when our high priests are Abraham Maslow and Oprah Winfrey and Carl Rogers.

And it's easy to see how such a deluded people, following such authorities, might passively acquiesce to displacement, dispossession, and worse.

A sign of weakening?

Am I mistaken in thinking that our people are weakening when it comes to Hispanics?

Over at AmRen, which in many ways is not all that atypical of (moderately) pro-White/ethnonationalist sites, I am seeing a lot of posts which compare Hispanics favorably to blacks, and which praise Hispanics in some way, even if faintly.

On this thread, which had to do with changing demographics and the encouragement of outmarriage for Whites, there were comments like this:

''There is no such thing as a “hispanic”. There are white people, black people and amerind (mestizos) all of whom speak spanish. They have extremely different genetic backgrounds, do not mix, for the most part, yet speak the same language.

Most of the “miscegenation” they are talking about is nothing but english speaking whites marrying spanish speaking whites. And having kids who are white. No different than a french person marrying a white person from britain or spain.''

Well, the old bit of sophistry about Hispanic not being a race has been around for a while. Technically speaking, no, Hispanic is not a race, but a linguistic designation, though in a way the word Hispanic does denote various non-White peoples who speak Spanish, given the undeniable fact that the great majority of Hispanic immigrants are nonwhite.
No doubt some skeptic would challenge me on that, and say 'prove it', but going by the evidence of our senses, it is apparent that the vast majority are nonwhite for the most part, with little to no European blood.

In some localities, like Florida, there may be many White Cubans, but in most other places which have large Spanish-speaking populations, the majority of them are either Amerindian or mulatto (as with the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in New York).  So when we associate the 'Hispanic' label with non-European origin, we are on pretty solid ground.

Some people insist that many Hispanics are White (European-descended), like this commentator:

''I work around an awful lot of latinos, and upwards of a quarter of them, especially the south americans, are basically white descended from numerous waves of european immigration to that region. (Spanish, Italian, English, German, etc) Lighter skinned mestizos are also mostly white in their genetic makeup.

Many others like mexicans and puerto ricans have a lot of white in them too, so the white race can survive some mixing with them, as long as the core western values predominate.''

This man does not say where he lives and works, but it must be an unusual place with lots of European-blooded Hispanics. But this comment is so out of touch with reality I have to wonder if the writer is attempting to put over a bit of propaganda, attempting to misrepresent reality.

And the second paragraph leads to one of my recurring themes: culture vs. race. I've said repeatedly, ad nausaeam probably, that race and culture go together, and that culture merely reflects genetics. We can't say that culture exists in a vacuum, and that it is a disembodied thing which can basically be 'put on' by anyone, like one of those one-size-fits-all garments.

However, I don't think any ethnonationalist would agree that 'core Western values' can be carried on no matter what the demographics or racial makeup of a country may be. I would hope that no real ethnopatriot or ethnonationalist would be so cavalier as to think that our people can survive even if we absorb Hispanic or other genes. No, we would not be 'we' then; we would be somebody else, probably a Spanglish-speaking exotic-looking people whose 'culture' and environment would resemble Latin America more than Europe or Old America.

But this comment takes the cake:

''Point I am making is that the white latinas may be a salvation for the white race, along with importing some russian/ukranian [sic] type girls to help the white population survive. Things have changed in the last 20ish years, once it was more single females, but now with miscenation [sic] there are more single white guys, and thankfully, most single guys dont have any desire for the black girls as the white girls do for the black guys.''

This kind of thinking is becoming not at all uncommon at AmRen and some other such sites.
First of all, I think the amount of outmarriage is greatly overestimated by men who write these kinds of comments. The statistics show that it is just not as common as some claim it to be. It may be that the people who say these things live in areas where the rate is especially high (liberal big cities, Seattle for example) or other areas, perhaps with a high proportion of White underclass types who tend to adopt underclass ways and to mate outside their race.

Or it may be that the people who claim all the attractive White girls are mating with outsiders are people who magnify the examples they see out there in the world until they believe it is widespread or epidemic. Or it may be that these guys are not succeeding with the opposite sex for various reasons, and want to rationalize their lack of success by blaming it on women supposedly preferring nonwhites.

Some men have an attraction to the exotic-looking women, like Latinas and Asians, and this is a longstanding thing, since long before multiculturalism and political correctness. Some men, understandably, are attracted to exotic Eastern European women. But to say that American or other Western men have to look for 'salvation for the white race' by mating with 'white latina' women is reaching a bit.

If we are going to discuss 'White Latina women', I can think of two well-known examples.
Exhibit A and Exhibit B if you can watch a 3-minute video of her.



I acknowledge they are extreme examples, but I suspect they reflect a widespread cultural attitude or style,


Sure, there are White Latina women; both of those women were immigrants who married White Anglo men. One of the women was well-educated and quite intelligent. Still, despite their outward appearance, I would say that cultural differences between the women and their hapless husbands contributed considerably to their, ahem, marital problems. As a result one of the men is now dead, and the other one, shall we say, scarred.

The second  woman has now snagged yet another Anglo White male; I thought only stupid women married psychopaths. But some men find that Latina allure irresistible, knife or no knife.

Sure, bad things happen in non-mixed marriages, but cultural differences of some magnitude do exist even among people of European descent, especially as you mix Southern European or Eastern European with Western European. There are just differences in outlook, temperament, character, values, manners, emotional styles. The idea that 'love conquers all' is just romantic-age twaddle. It sounds nice and makes for a good happy-ever-after movie, but in reality, love does not conquer all, much less does lust conquer anything.

Culture does matter, because it is intertwined with genetics.

I've worked with people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe and there is a greater distance between us and them than between us and Western Europeans, although even with them, misunderstandings and crossed signals occur.

Also, the idea that Hispanics are 'Western' is absurd, yet it is still a popular claim made these days; they are 'Christian' so therefore they are Western, or they speak a European language so they are part of our heritage. This is erroneous, and we cannot gamble the future of our country and our people on that kind of faulty belief.

So, where do we stand? Are people softening towards Latinos and about to join them? Or am I being alarmist?

Sooner than expected...

In this NYT article, published on Christmas Day of all days, we read that the 'end-of-life counseling' that was to be included in the government-run healthcare plan in 2012 will take effect in January 2011. Merry Christmas, America.

In this new policy (which is nothing to do with death panels, honest!) Medicare will pay for 'voluntary advance care planning' with the annual visit to physicians.

Read the details at the NYT article, allowing for the inevitable bias, of course.

This blogger thinks that there is no reason to be concerned about this, though he takes exception to the backdoor way in which it was done.

Conflating euthanasia with Living Wills is silly, but Obama has decided to bring the issue through the back door through regulation - a dangerous precedent that the president apparently feels will be necessary with other Obamacare issues that never made it past the finish line in Congress[...]
It would probably be better if the government was totally out of the loop on making these decisions but most people who take advantage of such counseling will be seeing their family doctor - someone they trust to advise them with their interests at heart. I doubt whether a family physician will be pushing old people to end their own lives rather than receive critical care according to their wishes.''

The commenters are a little less sanguine about the intentions behind this measure, as am I of course.

Many people on Medicare no longer have trusted family docs with whom they have a personal relationship. Given the assembly-line type of care that is dispensed, and given that the recent Medicare cuts have caused many doctors to drop their Medicare patients, they may well be getting their 'end-of-life' counseling from a relative stranger, who is too hurried to take a real interest in the patient or in his or her needs and concerns.

I don't like to discuss personal and family issues here, but I have a relative with Alzheimer's and there is considerable pressure to choose a 'Do Not Resuscitate' order so that should there be a need for emergency care, none will be extended. And as the commenters on the AT blog indicate, in some cases even food and water and IVs are considered 'extraordinary measures.' I can see many Terry Schiavo-type scenarios playing out.

I am dismayed every time I read comments on Free Republic or even here on this blog saying that it would be good riddance to the old folks. This is a decidedly un-Christian, not to say inhumane attitude, and it would not have been expressed in polite society only a decade or two ago. Have we fallen this far in so short a time? If so, it is in large part attributable to the influence of the left and of the everybody-for-himself wing of conservatism in which human life has no value in and of itself, only economic concerns. Surely that is the left's worst stereotype of the right, but it seems to be based in reality, sadly.

One more thing: this anti-elderly policy is very much of a piece with this regime's anti-White policies -- after all, the old are demographically the most White of all age groups. Once they are gone, which it is apparent, is the desired end, the demographic shift away from the historic White majority will be very much speeded up. That's something to think about for those who pay attention to these things.

Meanwhile, compare and contrast this story in which the financially-strapped government (no money for those costly oldsters) is out soliciting for children to be put on Medicaid. Do I need to tell you the demographics of that age group? It is crystal-clear where the priorities lie.

The regime considers this a 'moral obligation' while care for the old is dismissed as too expensive.

Do I begrudge children necessary care? That would be hard-hearted, but it seems to me that society's first priority should be its own citizens. Those who have contributed to this society through years of labor should not be cast adrift as the Eskimos of lore disposed of their unwanted old.

Hannan on the King James Bible

Well, why not resume my regular blog posts with a topic that is certain to be elicit sharply differing responses: Daniel Hannan -- who is himself controversial even on the right, expresses his opinion that the King James Bible is the greatest translation of all time.

I agree with him.
First, though, every time I make a reference to Hannan, someone will chime in that he is not on our side,  not to be trusted, etc. I know his flaws and I may not agree with everything he says but he is right about many things. And he expresses himself with a clarity that is refreshing, especially by contrast with our forked-tongued American politicians and talking heads.

As for his high view of the King James Bible, that is, today,  a controversial subject among Christians, and even non-Christians seem to feel strongly about it. There was a time when the King James Bible was THE version of the Bible for English-speaking people, although there have been others held in high regard, such as the Geneva Bible, which was the preferred translation for the Puritan fathers in this country. Actually the two versions seem very close, being both of them based in large part on the translation by Tyndale.

For being a partisan of the KJV, I have at least once been accused of 'bibliolatry', of worshipping a book rather than the Living God, which I think is a rather over-the-top accusation. To prefer that translation and to believe it inspired is not 'worship'. Tellingly, my liberal friend has used that same term as some of the conservative Christians who are negative toward the King James version.

So there are those who ridicule pro-KJV Christians, and then there are those who assert that 'the only way to get the real thing is to learn Koine Greek and Hebrew; the translations are flawed.' The fact is most people do not know Koine Greek and are not likely to learn it. Are we then left without a true version of the Bible, being deficient in ancient languages? Apparently so, according to these people. Apparently only the learned and the intellectually superior, then, can really read the Bible, since translations are not reliable.
Oddly the people who claim that all the existing translations are inadequate or flawed are often the people who claim that the latest 'modern' version is the best yet. The problem with that is that there are umpteen versions now, and new translations coming out every other day, it seems. That trend looks like going on indefinitely. It must be a profitable business for a number of people, this constant re-translating of the Bible and selling all the many new copies. And now of course there are Bibles aimed at every demographic. There are those hip new Bibles written in slangy modern American English, with some kind of trendy-looking covers to appeal to the young: Bibles covered in denim, or in Gothic-looking black, with fashionable typography. Then there are the Bibles especially for women, for blacks, for mothers, for dads.

It's all about packaging. But I've read through many of these upstart translations, and I find them to be lacking. The translations may have shed the archaic, old-timey style of the King James, but they are written in colorless, dull prose. The phrasings are often clumsy and awkward. They are flatfooted and unmemorable. Whatever you may say of the King James, it is written in a way that stays in the mind. Perhaps it's gone out of style to memorize Scripture, but it is infinitely easier to remember whole passages from the KJV than to learn and retain the same passages in the insipid prose of one of the newfangled translations.

Style, of course, is not all that matters -- though it does help to remember and retain the Scriptures, and it does add to the pleasure of reading.  What matters is that with the more modern translations, somehow key meanings are changed, and it is just coincidental, I am sure, that certain passages having to do with homosexuality, for instance, are translated differently. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 6:9, the references to homosexuals are changed in certain versions to 'homosexual offenders' or 'prostitutes', in other words, homosexuality in and of itself is suddenly not condemned.

The newer versions, written by committees of 'scholars' with appropriately PC views, often subtly, or not-so-subtly, alter the passages which are not acceptable to 21st century sensibilities. Politics, consciously or not, affects the changes that are made.

And in the quest for a 'perfect translation', have these 'improvers' in fact undermined for all time the idea that Scripture is inspired and not subject to a consensus, and not to be re-written every time fashions change, to suit the times?

If we admit that 'errors were made' in the KJV then errors have been made in all other translations, too, and will be made in every proposed new version. I suppose this does not really matter in that most professing Christians these days do not believe that Scripture can be inspired or inerrant, or that God can preserve it.

Hannan's piece is about the superior style of the King James Version, its greatness as literature. There was a time when in English literature classes, the KJV was studied as literature. I remember one of my college English lit professors including the Book of Job as one of the greatest pieces of literature in our language. But that is not PC today; I expect the Book of Job is replaced in the curriculum by something by one of the black female writers.

Regardless of whether we like or prefer the King James Bible, or even know it, we have all heard phrases and words from it; it is part of our linguistic heritage just as is Shakespeare. Of course to a Christian it is more than just another well-written book, and much more than a museum piece.

I didn't even read the comments at Hannan's blog; I looked at the first few and it appears that there are the usual detractors and scoffers along with a few pedants. I'd rather not read it; it would only leave me feeling more discouraged about the state of our post-Christian and post-Western world. And right now I need something more encouraging.

Hannan finishes his piece with this rather odd paragraph:

The English and their kindred peoples are, in my experience, rather less spiritual than Arabs, and it would not occur to them to make an equivalent claim. None the less, the Authorised Version stands as perhaps the greatest translation of all time. The day will eventually come when our power dwindles, and all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre. But as long as English is spoken, and our canon preserved, ours will never be just another country.''

The Arabs more 'spiritual' than we are? I am not so sure about that. And if the English-speaking countries are consigned to the dustheap of history, to use the cliché, then the KJV will not outlive us because those who will inherit the earth will discard it, along with all of our heritage. There will surely be a dark age if the West and especially the Anglosphere falls.

Christmas 2010

To all my readers and friends, a blessed Christmas to you and your families. 

My best wishes to you all.

Under the Holly Bough

Ye who have scorned each other,
Or injured friend or brother,
In this fast-fading year;
Ye who, by word or deed,
Have made a kind heart bleed,
Come gather here!
Let sinned against and sinning
Forget their strife's beginning,
And join in friendship now.
Be links no longer broken,
Be sweet forgiveness spoken
Under the Holly-Bough.

Ye who have loved each other,
Sister and friend and brother,
In this fast-fading year:
Under the Holly-bough

Mother and sire and child,
Young man and maiden mild,
Come gather here;
And let your heart grow fonder,
As memory shall ponder
Each past unbroken vow;
Old loves and younger wooing
Are sweet in the renewing
Under the Holly-Bough.

Ye who have nourished sadness,
Estranged from hope and gladness
In this fast-fading year;
Ye with o'erburdened mind,
Made aliens from your kind,
Come gather here.
Let not the useless sorrow
Pursue you night and morrow,
If e'er you hoped, hope now.
Take heart,-- uncloud your faces,
And join in our embraces
Under the Holly-Bough.

- Charles Mackay

Christmastime is Here

Christmas in the movies

I hope my readers don't mind if I take a brief break from posting about the usual subjects until after Christmas. It seems only appropriate to have a Christmas cessation of hostilities, though our adversaries don't take a break from their relentless warfare.

My fondness for old movies is something that I blog about occasionally here, and I've mentioned Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and the movies based on that story as favorites. Among all the versions of the familiar Dickens story, I like the old black-and-white versions, such as the one with Alistair Sim and the one with Reginald Owen, but my real favorite is the 1970 musical version,  Scrooge with Albert Finney as the title character.

I love the way the film seems to capture the feel of the time and place, and I enjoy the songs. Many people these days dislike movie musicals, and the musical seems to be a dead genre, but I think this one works well, and the tunes are memorable. It seems it isn't Christmas until I see this movie.

Everybody has seen the Frank Capra Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life. For a while, in the 1980s, that movie was so frequently shown on so many channels that I think many of us became weary of it but despite its overexposure, it endures as a favorite for many of us. By today's cynical standards, Capra tugs at the heart-strings a little too obviously but nonetheless, it works, and I am usually misty-eyed by the time the final scene plays out. Capra's movies are by today's lights probably too sentimental and 'corny' but that only tells us how jaded we've become. Many conservatives are suspicious of populism, which was usually at the heart of Capra's messages, but there is the populist streak in me which is cheering for the 'little guy', the everyman, like George Bailey.

Likewise, the Capra movie 'Meet John Doe', which I've written about here before, shows how the underdog everyman, 'John Doe' (Gary Cooper) can prevail against the seemingly invincible 'elites' who are attempting to use and manipulate him from behind the scenes.

I mention this as a Christmas movie, although it is not that specifically, because of the memorable climactic scene on a snowy Christmas Eve, with Gary Cooper planning to jump to his death from a tall building.

There are other movies which are not necessarily about Christmas but which have Christmas scenes, movies which I always think of at Christmastime. Meet John Doe is one of them; another is  'The Man Who Came to Dinner', a comedy with Monte Woolley as the title character. It's not exactly a movie with a Capraesque sentimental quality, but it has its moments.

Another movie with a Christmas background is a rather obscure one called Remember the Night, with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck.

It's a movie which I only discovered about five or six years ago, and it's become a favorite of mine. In the movie, MacMurray is a young assistant district attorney in New York, who prosecutes a young woman (Stanwyck) who is accused of shoplifting a diamond bracelet.

In a rather complicated set of events, MacMurray, feeling sorry for the young woman as Christmas finds her in jail, has her bailed out, and ends up offering her a ride to her family's home, which is not far from his hometown in Indiana. Implausible, but it's a nice, heartwarming story, as both rather hard-bitten characters soften as they interact in the idyllic setting of MacMurray's hometown and family hearth.

There's one scene, with the family singing 'When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day' around the piano, by the fire; it's classic Americana, in a Norman Rockwell kind of way.

Another rather quirky movie I often think of at Christmas is The World of Henry Orient, a movie from 1964. Again, not a well-known movie, and I don't actually like many movies from that era, because it was on the cusp of all the change that was about to overtake society. But it is a film about two very naïve young girls with an innocent crush on a celebrity, an avant-garde pianist, a very inept pianist actually, played by Peter Sellers. 

Such a movie couldn't be made today; first, there are few 13 or 14-year-old girls with such naivete and innocence, and their behavior in following their unlikely idol would be called 'stalking' today. But in the context, it was perfectly innocent.

It's really about adolescence and friendship, as well as family ties, and again, there are Christmas scenes. It's very interesting to see New York City as it was half a century ago.

One more film in which the opening scene is on Christmas Eve is an oddity called Beyond Tomorrow' or alternatively, Beyond Christmas.The plot is hard to sum up, but it involves three wealthy old gents who invite a couple of young strangers into their shared home for Christmas dinner. The plot has the three old gentlemen dying in a plane crash, and coming back as ghosts to help the young couple. The theology is questionable, but still, it's possible to suspend disbelief and enjoy it. The message is uplifting, as was the case with so many of the old movies.

Today, the world has forgotten how to envision happy endings or even personal redemption, as so many of these old movies did. Now these movies may be derided as childish or fatuous but it's good, if only at Christmas, to take off the jaundiced spectacles with which we see this world (and heaven knows, the world in itself is corrupt enough) and try to remember a time when things were not as dark as they are today.

Most of us have some favorite Christmas-themed movie which has many associations of Christmases past, or which causes us to think beyond the limitations of this present darkness, and it's well worth it to put aside 'the world' for these brief moments of Christmas each year.

Charles Dickens on Christmas

A Christmas Dinner

"Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused - in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened - by the recurrence of Christmas. There are people who will tell you that Christmas is not to them what it used to be; that each succeeding Christmas has found some cherished hope, or happy prospect, of the year before, dimmed or passed away; that the present only serves to remind them of reduced circumstances and straitened incomes - of the feasts they once bestowed on hollow friends, and of the cold looks that meet them now, in adversity and misfortune. Never heed such dismal reminiscences. There are few men who have lived long enough in the world, who cannot call up such thoughts any day in the year. Then do not select the merriest of the three hundred and sixty-five for your doleful recollections, but draw your chair nearer the blazing fire - fill the glass and send round the song and if your room be smaller than it was a dozen years ago, or if your glass be filled with reeking punch, instead of sparkling wine, put a good face on the matter, and empty it off-hand, and fill another, and troll off the old ditty you used to sing, and thank God it's no worse. Look on the merry faces of your children (if you have any) as they sit round the fire. One little seat may be empty; one slight form that gladdened the father's heart, and roused the mother's pride to look upon, may not be there. Dwell not upon the past; think not that one short year ago, the fair child now resolving into dust, sat before you, with the bloom of health upon its cheek, and the gaiety of infancy in its joyous eye. Reflect upon your present blessings - of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. Fill your glass again, with a merry face and contented heart. Our life on it, but your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one!

Who can be insensible to the outpourings of good feeling, and the honest interchange of affectionate attachment, which abound at this season of the year? A Christmas family-party! We know nothing in nature more delightful! There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas. Petty jealousies and discords are forgotten; social feelings are awakened, in bosoms to which they have long been strangers; father and son, or brother and sister, who have met and passed with averted gaze, or a look of cold recognition, for months before, proffer and return the cordial embrace, and bury their past animosities in their present happiness. Kindly hearts that have yearned towards each other, but have been withheld by false notions of pride and self-dignity, are again reunited, and all is kindness and benevolence! Would that Christmas lasted the whole year through (as it ought), and that the prejudices and passions which deform our better nature, were never called into action among those to whom they should ever be strangers!''

-Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz

Christmas in the South

At this time of year I usually devote some space to Christmas-related posts, and I offer you this piece, which is apparently no longer on the Web anywhere. It is credited to J.O. Bledsoe of Georgia.

Christmas in the Early South

Many in the tidewater region of the Southern colonies enjoyed enough wealth and leisure to celebrate the ancient holiday of Christmas in grandest fashion. Largely English, French, and German, often aristocratic, and usually unencumbered by the stern moral earnestness that afflicted their Puritan cousins in the North, these first Southerners thoroughly enjoyed Christmas when they could.

For centuries their European ancestors had observed the 14-day-long season of Christmas-tide, which began on Christmas eve and continued through January 6th, the "Twelfth Day" after Christmas called Epiphany. The Christmas spirit sailed across the Atlantic with them and even during the harsh early years, they often managed to celebrate the Yuletide in the New World with traditional English merrymaking: visiting, music, fireworks, cannon shooting, bonfires, feasting, parties, hunts, games, dances and weddings all before an enormous glowing and blazing Yule log. It had been carefully selected and lighting it on Christmas eve signaled the beginning of holiday merriment. "Carefully selected" in this case meant that servants found the largest, most water-soaked log available since tradition held that the merry season of leisure would last as long as the Yule log burned. Another tradition was to save a small portion to kindle next year's Christmas log.

In New England, the Puritan fathers looked with grim disdain on Christmas. To them, this holiday was a notorious occasion for celebrations in Catholic Europe, and they thus strictly forbade its observance. Work continued on this day unless it fell on Sunday. "Anybody," so ran the enactment by the General Court of Massachusetts, "who is found observing by abstinence from labor, feasting, or any other way, any such day as Christmas day, shall pay for every such offence five shillings." Elders also found it necessary to "Forbid all traffic in plum puddings and the like." For some reason the plum pudding was viewed as a symbol of the whole evil affair. The settlers of the middle colonies held somewhat less dreary views and were not so much bothered by feelings of religious guilt. Many of them enjoyed Christmas with the merriment of their "old country" traditions.

The wealth of our Christmas customs, however, came from the Southern colonies. As the years went by and colonists there increased in wealth, so did their celebrations increase in elaborateness. By the last half of the 18th century Christmas time had become the social as well as religious season for Southerners. Many Southern settlers during early colonial days considered Christmas primarily a religious festival; and although the religious meaning of the season was never neglected the observances leading up to "Twelfth Night" or Epiphany, which commemorates the visit of the Three Wise Men to the Christ Child, were often the most popular and written-about times of the season, even outshining Christmas Day toward the end of that period all the traditional English merrymaking customs and revelry were widely and heartily observed.

The Christmas tree was soon borrowed from German Moravian and Lutheran colonists; but from the beginning Southerners gathered evergreens such as holly, smilax, pine, cedar, laurels, magnolia, and mistletoe to "deck the halls." Wreaths were woven and mantelpieces and pictures festooned. Tidewater Christmases were rarely white, but always green. Juniper or incense might have been burned to protect the household from harm. Another aroma of the season came from the kitchen where Christmas cakes and cookies were baked from long-standing "recipes" passed down from mother to daughter. Gifts were exchanged and carols sung; and specially made huge "Christmas candles" illuminated the whole house.

At the center of all the celebrating was "Father Christmas," from earliest times called "The Lord of Christmas." In tidewater Carolina, his flowing hair and beard were made of Spanish moss. In one hand he carried mistletoe, in the other a black wand or staff with a silver crook at its top, and with which he delivered his gifts to all. Southerners did not take readily to what they called "the dapper little Manhattan goblin called Santa Claus." Father Christmas was large and regal, with features bold and expressive, yet gentle. He was, all in all, the emblematic representative of the classic Jupiter, rather than the quick, merry, and elfish figure Santa Claus has come to be.

Christmas tippling was widespread. Servants' employment contracts stipulated a bonus for Christmas drinking. Slaves had leisure time for dancing and singing around holiday-long bonfires. Usually, new clothes and extra food were furnished them during this season. "Christmas gift" was a cry heard on every plantation as servants claimed their yearly tip. The old English "Boxing Day" custom of bringing "Christmas boxes" to the master to collect gifts had been transplanted to the South and it thrived even though gifts here were less often money than was usual in England.

The main event on Christmas day, of course, was Christmas dinner. It was a board as festive as could be managed, set before a roaring fire. On this much-anticipated, once-a-year occasion, Southern cooking reached the heights of early American quality and quantity. Traditions in Christmas fare varied from house to house, but a large colonial plantation Christmas feast that required days or weeks to assemble and prepare might include: eggnog, oysters on the half shell, scalloped oysters, clear soup, roast stuffed goose with sauce, baked country ham with mustard sauce, lamb, roast wild turkey with cornbread stuffing, venison, and several other wild game dishes, including, perhaps a grand "Christmas pie." The recipe for this special treat called for a turkey stuffed with goose and chicken and pigeon and seasonings, with rabbit and quail set around, all inside a heavy crust. There were brown and white breads, Brussels sprouts with chestnuts, turnips and greens, baked sweet potatoes and apples, beans and peas, Mary Randolph's salad, fig and plum puddings, orange tarts, bourbon pecan cake, fresh fruit, walnuts and pecans, cider, Port wine, and syllabub.

Christmas was also celebrated with the Wassail bowl, another English tradition familiar to all of us because of the popular verses in the old carol "Here We Come A Wassailing." Wassail, or wes hal (be whole) in Anglo-Saxon, was a toast or greeting which is associated with celebrations of Christmas and New Years from the earliest days. According to tradition, the head of the household invited his family to gather around the bowl of hot spiced ale with roasted apples floating on it. After drinking to their health and prosperity in the coming year, the bowl was passed around to each member of the family who returned toasts to joy and happiness for all. Gradually, this ale became known as wassail; and the Wassail bowl, usually decorated with garlands of greenery, particularly holly, was a popular custom in America from the beginning. Eggnog was widely substituted for spiced ale in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. There was much drinking of these and other cheering and warming potions at the homes of friends and neighbors over the holidays.

Our observances of Christmas represent a rich mosaic of customs based on the winter festivals of many ancient cultures merged with Christian tradition. The lion's share of the credit for preserving and enhancing this universal holiday in America, like so many of the other good things in our unique cultural inheritance, belongs to the traditional Old South.

A veteran supporter of Confederate causes, Col. Bledsoe is Deputy Commandant of the Old Guard of the Gate City Guard of Atlanta.

Down the slippery slope to -- where?

Several of you have mentioned the 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' repeal. I have only a few things to say about it. First, it's been in the works for a long time, and of course what Clinton began, this regime is completing.

We've seen the military come increasingly under the sway of political correctness, what with things like 'diversity' being a primary objective in the military, and women on submarines, to mention only two examples. One of the most shameful and shocking symptoms was when Casey at the memorial for the victims of the Fort Hood massacre said that a bigger tragedy (bigger than the deaths of soldiers) would be if 'diversity' was decreased as a result. That comment should have evoked way more shock and outrage than it did.

The military has been captured by the left, which is bizarre because the leftists strike an anti-military pose. But now it's ''their'' military, you see, and they will remake it in their perverse image, with 'diversity' and tolerance being the goals, not defending the United States of America and its citizens.

The co-ed military was really the thing that made this latest step inevitable. The same arguments that we might make against gays openly serving (sexual tensions, destruction of camaraderie and morale, sexual distractions, 'sensitivity' issues, etc.) were made against the proposal for a co-ed military, and were rejected.

The left always works relentlessly toward their goals by increments. Women in the military first, now gays. What will be the next target? Because trust me, there will be a next frontier; some barrier they want to demolish and some standard and tradition they just have to trash. We already have non-citizens in the military. What next?

We could trace all this back to the whole affirmative action idea, too; if we choose or prefer people based on traits like race, then next comes gender and 'sexual orientation.'
I suppose there will be quotas for recruiting each type, with 'diversity' as always being the top priority.

I would think that in any case, patriotic Americans would not want to serve in this politically correct, ideologically-driven regime. However, do we want our military to be made up of various people who see the military as a place to make some kind of 'social statement' or to carry out some ideological war against tradition? Do we want our military to be made up of people who are joining only to get free education, training, or citizenship? That's something to think about.

Digital diversity. Celebrate it.

Does Web really connect us?

I wonder if 'journalists' write articles like the linked article spontaneously, or whether they are told what to write and how to write it? It's just amazing how so many articles can be 'written' across America containing so little 'diversity', in the sense of original thinking and unique points of view.

There are no such ideas in the controlled media; the SPJ and the ASNE have their little 'diversity mandates' and guidelines and the newspapers and other media, controlled by ideologues who share the same narrow, blinkered world view with their underling 'journalists', crank out identical articles all over the country every day. Amazing how alike they all are, is it not? We live in a world in which, as Star Trek told us decades ago, there is 'infinite diversity in infinite combinations.' Funny, then, how all these articles are the same, with a few different names and places. Same ideas repeated ad infinitum, all with the one basic message.

Mr. Watson has given us a new term, though --- or new to me, at least: 'digital segregation.' Heretofore we've just heard about ordinary segregation, that bad old practice from the bad old days. You know, where people congregate, like birds of a feather, with those like themselves. But now, just as with these newly-discovered forms of 'racism' (you got your regular racism, your institutional racism, unconscious racism, subconscious racism, scientific racism, and no doubt many other varieties as yet unnamed). But the digital age has given birth to a new form of evil, apparently, in which we seek out others of like minds online. How diabolical! But it's what we can expect from racist Whitey, who no doubt lies awake at night devising new forms of evil to deny others their rights.

Mr. Watson in his article uses the well-worn phrase 'experts say...' to lead up to the key lines here, which no doubt will bemoan the lack of 'diversity.'

A Mr. Zuckerman of Harvard speaking at a conference tells us that we have to 'widen the world' via the web -- and I suspect the Big Brother government will be doing the widening for us, and telling us just who we ought to be 'interacting' with so as to acquire the proper 'global outlook.' 

Big Brother, of course, acts in concert with their media arm, which we call 'mainstream' for some reason.

We are told that we have to globalize our thinking in order to succeed in this 'global' economy. This is not self-evident; why or how would interacting with 'diversity' online make my life better, or make the world work better? I think the idea is the Powers That Be want to leave no place where White Americans, or Europeans or Australians can interact with their fellows; oh no, we might be up to no good if we communicate with our brethren.

No amount of 'chatting' with somebody in China or Latin America or the Middle East will make me a 'global citizen', and truth be told, the people in those countries will not give up their own ethnocentrism and preference for their own. I don't imagine their countries are encouraging them to associate with White Americans online for their own good, or for the good of the 'global village' or anything else. No, as usual, it's only we who are the problem.

Just as with the flagrant attempt to overwhelm our countries via immigration, the effort is now turning to the Web where the idea is to perhaps change our thinking and water down our culture by introducing disparate, conflicting elements. They will try to jam our signals and stop our communication with people like ourselves. We are to be isolated within 'diversity'.

John Donne famously wrote that 'no man is an island', but if the people in charge have their way, every one of us will be an island, surrounded by 'diversity' but unable to connect with our own. Eventually, we are supposed to be absorbed, and gentically overwhelmed.

And of course if any of us says this, it's a sign of paranoia. So the 'experts' say.

The ''experts'' and the meddling journalists and government apparatchiks should learn that it is none of their business who any of us choose to associate with, online or in 'real life.' They exert influence far beyond both their knowledge and their position, in telling the rest of us what to do.

H/T AmRen for the link to this article.

Just to let you know

In case you haven't noticed, 'Mild Colonial Boy' has begun posting again, his blog now being titled The New Anti-Jacobin.

The new name is very promising, and I like the quotes in his sidebar, especially this one:

''I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Sounds very much like my own motivations these days.
Anyway it is good to see MCB blogging again.

Musical interlude

A rather untraditional rendering, but beautiful all the same.

Who speaks for us?

After the article I linked to the other day, about the Chinese-American academic talking about immigrants replacing old White males, this kind of thing is becoming old hat.

Actually it's been 'old hat' (or should I say old hate) for some time now; it just seems to be receiving a tad more attention now than a few years ago, which is good, I suppose. Good, that is, if it results in people becoming more alert to what is being done. However, will that happen, or will the opposite happen, with people greeting this kind of rhetoric with a ho-hum? Another day, another diatribe denouncing old White males.

What can I say that hasn't been said many times?
I will say this: it's interesting (not surprising, though) that it takes 12 comments before someone notes the obvious: Mr. Rich's ethnicity. Obviously I know that to note his ethnicity is somewhat, shall we say, discouraged at AmRen; I gather that the idea is to court Jewish support, or perhaps not to alienate the more sensitive, politically correct readers. But it is disturbing to read comment after comment describing Rich as a self-hating White man, or a Disingenuous White Liberal.

I think that if we subtracted certain ethnic groups from those we call 'self-hating White liberals' we would find that there are far fewer actual 'self-haters' than is supposed. Or are there?

This reminds me of a recent post from Vox Day titled 'America A is no more', "America A" being what I have called Old America.

He notes how Tom Friedman of the NY Times laments the decline of this country, yet over the years, Friedman has avidly supported everything that contributed to this decline:

''This is extraordinarily ironic, coming as it does from an elite Jewish liberal. He quite clearly doesn't recognize that it is the very causes he has championed for decades, from diversity, equality, and secularization to free trade, immigration, and globalization, that have so weakened America in the manner that concerns him now. While he is correct in saying that a successful and powerful America committed to its core values could again become a world leader, his definition of those core values almost surely includes those values that have proven so pernicious to American success, power, and world leadership.

The North American landmass isn't going to disappear. There will still be Americans proper - descendants of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who founded the nation on principles derived from the Bible and the Magna Carta - as well as those who call themselves Americans but have no cultural, ethnic, or religious connection to the historical America that is now essentially gone. The results of the great experiment are now sufficiently observable that we can pronounce the failure of the Viral America hypothesis.

It is now clear that one cannot catch Americanism. Just as the Irish, German, Scandinavian, and Italian immigrants never fully grasped the English concepts of liberty and limited government*, thereby transforming what had been a voluntary union of sovereign states into an involuntary empire ruled by a sovereign central government, the subsequent wave of immigration from Mexico and other third-world nations has transformed what had been a rich and powerful empire into an impoverished and corrupt one.
[...]
From the New York Times: "In 1980, the foreign-born population in the United States was about 4.5 million. By 2000, it had reached 11.3 million, bringing the foreign-born population to about 13 percent of the total. In the early 20th century, after the last big wave of immigration to the United States, immigrants had reached 15 percent of the population."

Therefore, Friedman is wrong as one cannot expect to make America A work when it has been transformed into America A + (M+I2+G+S+J+3). America A no longer exists. This is the B-Ark nation.''

I read the comments on the blog piece when it was first posted, and I found it a depressing discussion, as the consensus seemed to be that Anglo-Saxon colonial stock Americans did not really have that much to do with America. And this from self-described descendants of the later immigrants. Everybody wants to create his own mental 'America' in which his ethnic group has pride of place: it was really the Scots-Irish who made America great, one person says, or the Germans, or the Irish, and on and on, which proves Vox's point to some extent.

There are many instances of people like Friedman, Rich, Wise, and so many other journalists, academics, and politicians, who see themselves as apart from and in opposition to historic White Christian America, and work to weaken it, consciously or not.

And in regards to the comments at Vox Day's blog on that piece, never do I feel so alienated from my 'fellow Americans' as when I am reading that my ancestors really had no significant contribution to this country. I never used to feel estranged from descendants of the later immigrant waves, believing what I was taught as a child, that we are 'loyal Americans all'. Once upon a time that may have been so, because people were taught the true history of this country, and everybody assimilated more or less to the existing culture and traditions -- which were Anglo-Protestant by origin. Whether one likes that fact or not, it is just a fact. But now, whether influenced by liberal rewritings of history along ethnic lines, or whether because many Americans now make up their own subjective personal history of America, there is just too little common ground.

So America A may be gone, never to return. And I agree with Vox that the old America cannot be sustained by other peoples who had no part or lot in the original. But if, IF we are ever to recover our country, or try to rebuild it from the wreckage, we will need some common basis on which to unite and build. As of now, I don't see much of that, except perhaps in the South. And coincidentally (or not), the South was the area which had the greatest degree of homogeneity among White people, having not been as affected by mass immigration.

But as of now, we have people like Rich, who feel estranged from traditional America interpreting events for us, claiming to represent us, claiming to be our voice. If America is ever to be resurrected, we will have to find our own voice, and a united one at that.

...for now

It's good to see the 'DREAM Act' defeated -- for now.

Of course there is squawking from the usual quarters, but that too is music to the ears, just as long as the amnesty-in-disguise was defeated.
For now.

Recently I heard, as many of you probably did too, about a potential GOP version of the 'DREAM Act' which may be in the works. I hope there is still enough determination to see this thing stopped, once and for all, but reading some of the exasperating comments online among the 'mainstream' conservatives does not exactly inspire hope.

There are still people stuck in that mode of saying 'I'm not against immigration, just ILLEGAL immigration' from the people who think that all legal immigration is good, and that immigration is our lifeblood, keeps our country renewed, and similar twaddle.

As of now, we still have a kind of de facto amnesty in place; once they set foot on our soil, chances are they will stay. Even those who commit crimes and are deported are usually back in the blink of an eye. And once they have kids here, they are home and dry. Legal or not, they are still given most of the rights of citizens, and then some, in certain cases.

Sure, a few are deported, if only for show, yet it seems that this is enough to satisfy some Americans. They read the news stories about the deportation of a handful here and there, and think 'good, they're enforcing our laws.' Yet for every one that is sent home or who goes home voluntarily, there are thousands, probably tens of thousands coming into our country.

The battle was won this time, but the war goes on.

From the past

At the BBC website, there is an interesting short video having to do with Cecil Sharp's diaries. I can't embed it here, but you can click on the link to see it.

For those who may not know who Cecil Sharp was, as the video explains, he was a scholar in the early 20th century who collected traditional English folk ballads, and his search for still-extant old ballads took him to the Appalachian Mountains, where he found many, many English ballads still preserved.

I've written about Sharp and his work in the Appalachians previously, and this page has excerpts from his diaries. They make interesting reading.

''My experiences have been very wonderful so far as the people and their music is concerned. The people are just English of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. They speak English, look English, and their manners are old-fashioned English. Heaps of words and expressions they use habitually in ordinary conversation are obsolete, and have been in England a long time.

I find them very easy to get on with, and have no difficulty in making them sing and show their enthusiasm for their songs. I have taken down very nearly one hundred already, and many of these are quite unknown to me and aesthetically of the very highest value. Indeed, it is the greatest discovery I have made since the original one I made in England sixteen years ago.

This last week I spent three whole days, from 10 A.M. to 5.30 P.M., with a family in the mountains consisting of parents and daughter, by name Hensley. All three sang and the father played the fiddle. Maud and I dined with them each day, and the rest of the time sat on the veranda while the three sang and played and talked, mainly about the songs. I must have taken down thirty tunes from them and have not yet exhausted them. one ballad, The Cruel Mother, is by far the finest variant, both words and tune, which, in my opinion, has yet been found.

Of course, I am only at the beginning of things yet. I have been here seventeen days, but it looks as though I shall bring away with me a large amount of extremely valuable stuff, which when published will create a very great deal of interest in certain circles. Although the people are so English, they have their American quality that they are freer than the English peasant. They own their own land, and have done so for three or four generations, so that there is none of the servility which, unhappily, is one of the characteristics of the English peasant. With that praise, I should say that they are just exactly what the English peasant was one hundred or more years ago.''

Yes, Virginia, there were English-descended people in Appalachia. I know it's all the fashion to say that everybody there is/was descended from these fiery, warrior-like, fighting Scots-Irish, but Cecil Sharp found English people there.

In any case, for anybody who cares about our heritage, this is fascinating and rather poignant material. We do have a distinctive heritage, and it is being lost by the hour.

The short video is worth a look and a listen, and the linked website is interesting reading. Hat tip, by the way, to the Frank at the Kinist Forum for the link to the BBC video.

Trading places? Or mirror images?

At Steve Sailer's blog, following a post called The Ennui of the Left, there was one brief comment that caught my attention among a number of interesting comments.

That very prolific commenter, 'Anonymous', said this:

Steve, you're so wrong about post-WWII USSR. It was culturally conservative in a million ways. Its death was a giant victory for leftism - for gay rights, loose sexual morals, drugs, feminism, violent crime, ugly modernist art, etc. across a huge part of the globe.

Pre-WWII USSR was indeed leftist. It's ignorant to confuse them.'

It's pretty obvious to most thinking people on the right that we (the West) did not really  'win the Cold War', as the triumphalist rhetoric on the mainstream right still boasts. The mythology is that when Reagan said 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' that Communism sort of crumbled, or melted like the Wicked Witch doused with water, and before we knew it, the Berlin wall was down and the Eastern bloc countries were 'free.'

I've alluded before on this blog to the curious fact that the old Soviet communists were very prudish and very traditional in many respects on social/sexual matters. They may have been lenient in regard to making abortion widely available, and they may have been very 'feminist' in that they put more women into leadership positions, but in regard to culture they were much more conservative than we in the Western ''free'' countries were, even in the 1950s.  The 1950s, remember, was the decade most American leftists describe as hyper-conservative and repressed.

I've told the story before of a news event that was reported when I was a child, when Soviet leader Khrushchev visited America. He was given a tour of a movie set, where the movie 'Can-Can' was being filmed. He disapproved of what he saw, commenting that ''the face of humanity is more beautiful than its backside.'' That was his broken-clock moment; he was right on that point. Nowadays, our entertainment media and pop culture are more than ever fixated on people's 'backsides' and on titillating entertainment and 'art'. We've gone from relatively tame scenes, like the one Khrushchev witnessed, to Lady Gaga and beyond.

The old Soviet Union disapproved of rock'n roll and jazz, and promoted classical and folk music. At the time, it seemed that our country perversely decided that if the Russians disliked these things and censored them, then they must be good, and that in defiance of our enemies, we would wallow in the things they tut-tutted about. I see the same sort of thing in regard to Islam's prudishness. Many 'conservatives' see our Western cultural and social decadence as an act of defiance against Islam, and a statement of 'freedom.' I think we have gotten a little confused here.

The anonymous commenter at Sailer's blog refers to 'ugly modernist art' which the Soviet Union banned. This piece describes in detail how the arts were censored and how the Soviet State made sure that all art had the correct political message, delivered in the correct style.

Works of art were censored for the following reasons:

 "...* political reasons (criticism of the Soviet Union, CPSU, Soviet regime, particular political bodies and figures);

 * political unreliability (temporary or permanent) of an artist, whose work was the subject of the publication;

 * political unreliability (temporary or permanent) of an author of a publication;

 * mentioning an unreliable person, unworthy fact or event in the text unless it was criticized (possible cuttings of the text or plates);

  * generally prohibited subject (for instance: unofficial Soviet art);

 * propaganda of fascism, violence or terror (horror films belonged to that category);

 * pornography (a magic word - none of the censors could ever give a distinct definition of this term in their special vocabulary; the most frequent reason for art publications to become banned as most of the artists, since the ancient times, had made the studies of the nude models);

 * themes, subjects, facts, events which caused or might have caused undesirable thoughts, associations or illusions not in favour of the Soviet state.
[...]

 The criteria for division of art of the past into two categories was quite simple: the work of art should bare or not some peculiar signs of progressiveness, such as themes of labour, struggle for justice, protest against the bourgeois society, pity for suffering, depiction of poor people, social and class struggle. For obvious reasons the mediaeval art, being the art which served the religion, was not worth studying.''

What seems to have happened by the late 1970s when the 'dam burst', as the writer says, was that the censorship seemed to have only whetted the Soviet people's appetite for what was termed 'decadent Western bourgeois' art and ideas. The Russians seem, since the fall of the old regime, to have plunged headlong into that Western decadence.

I remember when the so-called Iron Curtain came down being somewhat mortified by how fast the people seemed to embrace the libertine lifestyle, drugs, promiscuity, and the worst excesses of greed. Obviously they had not really believed in the stringent standards of their regime -- or were they just easily seduced away by rock music, blue jeans, porn, and the lure of easy money?

Just because our enemies hate the decadence they see in our popular culture, that is not justification for our taking pride in it or considering it a good example of 'freedom' as many people do.

But the question has often occurred to me: why was the old left socially and culturally conservative, honoring the best of classic Western art and culture, while the new left, the post-60s left, trashes our artistic and cultural heritage in favor of ugliness and corruption, worshipping the new and hideous rather than the old and aesthetically pleasing?

And now that the old Soviet Union seems to have been degraded culturally and socially, have 'we' won, or have they won? Or have we all lost? It seems that we have embraced some of the worst features of their leftism, and they have absorbed the worst of our ways.

Leftism seems to be able to morph itself into whatever form works best in the target society, like an opportunistic infection.

The Great Depression vs. the Depression of 2010

Recently I had a conversation with someone -- actually it's an ongoing discussion -- about something like this blog piece from April of 2008.


How the Oldtimers Survived the Great Depression and Why We May Not Measure Up

Arguably, things have gotten worse economically since that blog piece was written -- way back before the 2008 election. In fact I hardly know anyone who is not feeling the effects of the economic situation. I suspect all of us know people who are out of work after years of employment, unable to find a job, or people whose income has been drastically reduced, and I think we all notice that the cost of food and other necessities has gone up noticeably.

The blog entry linked above is an interesting one, and I agree with many of the points made.

One of the reasons why we may not fare as well in a depression is the subject of this piece, from a few months ago, painting a rather stark picture of the de-industrialization of our country.

''The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country. But sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.

For people like that, take this article and print it out and hand it to them. Perhaps what they will read below will shock them badly enough to awaken them from their slumber.

The following are 19 facts about the deindustrialization of America that will blow your mind....

#1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001.''

Read the rest. The writer concludes his piece by asking

''If anyone can explain how a deindustrialized America has any kind of viable economic future, please do so below in the comments section.''

I am interested to hear if anyone believes that we can return to what we were in prosperous times, given that we seem to manufacture very little in this country anymore.

Another subject of discussion with my friend is the fact that many of our foods are grown or processed in some other part of the world, such as Asia or South America. Yet most of our foods grown here seem to be destined for other parts of the world, not local consumption. In other words, the fact that we don't seem to grow much of the food we eat or produce many manufactured goods is not a good sign. We are nowhere near as self-sufficient as we once were.

I know there is a movement among some people to grow food in home gardens or at least, failing that option, to buy locally-grown produce where possible. And now Senate Bill 510 may interfere with our right to grow fruits and vegetables.

The blogger at Code Name Insight, in the first linked article, pinpoints many of the features of old America which enabled them to survive the economic hard times. This piece too delineates how people helped one another during the Great Depression by voluntary giving, personal charity, within their own circle and community. This is something that is rather rare today. I live in a town where people do give rather generously to charity, but I know that much of what is done by the churches involves digging wells in Africa and tending to the people there, or in Central America -- meanwhile there are people in need in this area, people who cannot afford to pay their heating bills or to buy gas for their cars, and so on. Much of the food bank's stock goes to 'immigrants', as donations are insufficient to the demands.

There is a crying need for stronger community bonds and more mutual assistance. This is something that is within our control, even though we can't do much about the other issues, like the fact that our country has lost so many jobs to deindustrialization and offshoring.

Lately I have felt the urge to try to wake my neighbors up to the fact that they need to focus on local needs, and stop trying to save the Third World.

I know I am not the only one who thinks about these issues, and who feels helpless to make a difference as far as the larger economic picture. The globalist elites, who are playing a big game with us as pawns, plainly don't care about our wishes, the will of the people, or about our well-being and prosperity.

I hate that this post sounds rather Glenn Beckish, (minus the chalkboard), but what do the rest of you think about all this? How do things look from where you are?

A disturbing story

Yesterday in a comment, reader Philip alerted us to this story about allegations of human organ trafficking in Kosovo. As of yesterday I had read nothing about it, but it seems to be a more widely-reported story today.

In the AP article  mentioned above, (no excerpt) Kosovo Prime Minister Thaci said these reports were 'monstrous'.

This story from Agence France-Presse quotes a Swiss Council of Europe representative, Dick Marty, who in a report names Thaci as being one of the principals in an organ-trafficking ring.

STRASBOURG (AFP) – Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci was one of the key players in the traffic of organs of Serb prisoners after the 1998-99 conflict there, according to allegations in a draft Council of Europe report.

The report, by Swiss Council of Europe deputy Dick Marty, accuses Thaci and other senior commanders of the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) of having set up the traffic.

The draft report was published on the Council of Europe website on Tuesday and will be considered by its legal affairs committee on Thursday.

In Pristina, the government of Thaci dismissed the report as fabrications designed to smear the country's leaders.

Marty wrote of substantial evidence that Serbians -- and some Albanian Kosovars -- had been secretly imprisoned by the KLA in northern Albania "and were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, before ultimately disappearing."

At the end of the above-quoted article is a link to the draft report at the Council of Europe's website.

Here ia a piece from Politico.com which provides more details. If you peruse the comments at the Politico posting, you will see echoed there the longstanding feeling that we (America, or our government, more accurately) were on the wrong side in the Balkan conflict, and that these kinds of activities by the KLA were already in evidence when 'our' government sided against the Serbs there. The idea of setting up a Kosovar state seems to have been a particularly ill-conceived one, and we have Bill Clinton to thank, among others, for that. Bill Clinton was more than just a hedonistic lecher who disgraced this country by his personal escapades; he was the author of (or collaborator in) some real blunders, including this debacle in the Balkans.

Are the stories of missing organs and prisoners executed for their kidneys credible? A commenter there expresses skepticism.

''Patrick says:

My feeling is that many of the rumors of what is going on inside Kosovo are often manufactured, bias and focused on making the Albanian people and Kosovo as a region seem like a very hostile place, especially for Serbs.

Who on earth would want to return with his family to a place where there are reports of illegal abduction ending in death and the removal of organs?

That's right... No one would return alone or let alone with his family to such a region - ever! ''

It's true that for years, there has been a popular urban legend that there are 'organ thieves' who abduct and remove kidneys from hapless tourists. But as we see here, these grisly 'legends' have proven true in some cases, at least in India.

And the KLA has been notorious for some unsavory activities for a long time, as this article from a dozen years ago indicates.

This article from the EU Observer quotes Mr. Marty as having said that 'the West' has not done enough to investigate allegations of war crimes in the region. I hope that 'the West' taking action will not mean that Americans will be drawn into any kind of military action over there, but given the fact that 'we' have sided with the Kosovars it would seem unlikely that our present regime would wish to be involved in this situation.

My greater concern would be that with our policy of welcoming in refugees from that region, we may unwittingly be bringing this kind of thing into our midst. Back in the late 90s the Clinton administration agreed to take 20,000 Kosovar refugees into this country.

''Then, in an April 21 speech at Ellis Island, Vice President Gore announced that the Kosovar Albanians would be resettled as refugees in the U.S.: "We will accept, on the American mainland, up to 20,000 of the hurting and homeless Kosovar refugees those with close family ties in America and those who are vulnerable. ... We will bring them here until they are able to return home safely." But Gore continued to insist that the refugees' stay would be temporary: "We anticipate their return to Kosovo. . . . the ones coming to the United States, will also be prepared to return on short notice."

By the next day, however, administration officials conceded the obvious that many of the Kosovar Albanians would obtain permanent residence in the United States, a benefit available after one year to anyone admitted as a refugee. In the words of a senior administration official, "We are going to try to create conditions in Kosovo for these people to return, but the choice will ultimately be theirs." Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Albanian Issues Caucus, put it more plainly: "And let's face it, after a year or two, they'd have had a taste of political freedom. They won't want to go back. . . The reality is that the vast majority are probably here to stay."

These 'temporary' refugees, as the CIS article indicates, have a way of becoming permanent, and forming permanent enclaves in our country -- essentially mini-versions of the 'old country' and all its problems and pathologies.

So we can't pretend that these conflicts on the other side of the globe are of no concern for us, as they end up on our doorstep sooner rather than later, these days.

Diversity is costly.