Barrel Strength

About a year or more ago I made a number of $50 bets that Obama would be a one term President.

The rising tide of revulsion towards the man and his performance is so manifest, and the economic policies the United States is pursuing are so catastrophic, that everyone else is starting to say the same thing.

Let us review the events which are driving Americans to a frenzy of rage:

• appealing the Arizona immigration  law whose effect is merely to enjoin the state officials to enforce existing federal law;
• bowing (more than a civil nod, but a deep from-the-waist bow) to Mulsim leadership, such as the King of Saudi Arabia, while being rude to traditional allies (removing Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office and actually returning the bst to the British embassy);
• a policy of ruinous inflation;
• ignoring the Muslim aspect of terrorist attacks on US bases;
• hindering the  Armed Forces  by forbidding terms like “Islamic jihad” in their planning;
• continuing the policies whereby white Americans are prevented or dissuaded from competing for student placements or jobs, saying truths about other races, or competing for contracts from government (affirmative action);
• supporting the Ground Zero victory mosque;
• a divisive and possibly unnecessary health care reform.

You will be able to add your own issues to this list, and I invite you to do so.

The farrago of politically correct attitudes that let Obama rise to the top of the Democratic party, and which sustain the basis of his support, are beyond my capacity either to amend or to tolerate. But a mighty judgment is coming, and the political elites willl be eating shit pie for their deluded arrogance soon enough. That many Americans believe Obama to be a Muslim reflects merely the correct perception that we do not have a President who is on our side.

In case you need confirmation of what the problem is, I highly recommend Thomas Sowell’s excellent “Intellectuals and Society”. A regime of intellectuals has been put in power. A group of people without wisdom, practical experience, or courage has been selected to govern. The consequences are that government will be returned to adult supervision as soon as possible.

It started with Roger Scruton, naturally. A review of his book, “The Uses of Pessimism”, by Ed West in the Telegraph got me going, Oban responded, and Rebel Yell got into it.

Here is a quote from Scruton’s book:

“As Scruton notes: “Since the 1960s western countries have adopted policies in the matter of immigration that no person schooled in the elementary truths of pessimism would have endorsed. Anybody who has studied the fate of empires, and the difficulties of establishing territorial jurisdiction over communities that differ in religion, language and marital customs, knows that the task is all but impossible, and threatens constantly to break down in fragmentation, tribalism or civil war.”

Ed West continued in his Telegraph review:

Like Communism, mass immigration was based on a denial of human nature, and an inability to distinguish between what might work in individual human relationships and in society as a whole. Just because people of different groups are capable of getting on perfectly well as individuals, becoming friends and falling in love, it does not mean that a multicultural society (and one as diverse as ours will be multicultural as well as multiracial, whatever the Government does) can become a racism-free paradise; anymore than the willingness of people to give money to perfect strangers means Communism can work.

There were other comparisons with Communism: thought crimes were created, and eventually passed into law; dissidents were made public enemies (it was Scruton who published Ray Honeyford’s article about multiculturalism in Bradford, for which the headmaster was victimised and vilified); history was rewritten to educate the next generation in the new realities of their multicultural history; and children were indoctrinated “to embed a culture of equality in our schools and communities“. Even the language was changed, so that holders of non-revolutionary opinions could not express their opinions without becoming outcasts.

Contrary to what was said after Communism fell, we did not reach the end of history, merely a new chapter in the endless story of human stupidity.

This set me going on a rant of agreement and Oban responded:

This sent Rebel Yell into orbit:

To which Oban replied:

-Oban

Roger Scruton’s speech to Vlaams Belang  has touched upon the essential beliefs of the ruling sectors of the liberal intelligentsia, whose ideas still govern us even if conservatives are in power.

(If you doubt their ideas still rule, then why are there still human rights commissions and mass immigration of people unqualified to become Canadians and who will forever be a source of dissension, social dysfunction and underachievement?. Why the policing of thought to prevent accurate discussion of immigration and race?)

It is worth reading the whole speech that Scruton gave. I have extracted key points for the sake of brevity.

“For a long time now the European political class has been in denial about the problems posed by the large-scale immigration of people who do not enter into our European way of life. It has turned angrily on those who have warned against the disruption that might follow, or who have affirmed the right of indigenous communities to refuse admission to people who cannot or will not assimilate. And one of the weapons that the élite has used, in order to ensure that it is never troubled by the truths that it denies, is to accuse those who wish to discuss the problem of ‘racism and xenophobia’. People of my generation have been brought up in fear of this charge, just as the people of Salem were brought up in the fear of being denounced as witches….

“Every society depends on an experience of membership: a sense of who ‘we’ are, why we belong together, and what we share. This experience is pre-political: it precedes all political institutions, and provides our reason for accepting them. It unites left and right, blue-collar and white-collar, man and woman, parent and child. To threaten this ‘first-person plural’ is to open the way to atomisation, as people cease to recognize any general duty to their neighbours, and set out to pillage the accumulated resources while they can. Without membership we risk a new ‘tragedy of the commons’, as our inherited social assets are seized for present use….

“Members of our liberal élite may be immune to xenophobia, but there is an equal fault which they exhibit in abundance, which is the repudiation of, and aversion to, home. Each country exhibits this vice in its own domestic version….

“This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites….

“I call the attitude oikophobia– the aversion to home – by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested….

“The domination of our national Parliaments and the EU machinery by oikophobes is partly responsible for the acceptance of subsidised immigration, and for the attacks on customs and institutions associated with traditional and native forms of life. The oikophobe repudiates national loyalties and defines his goals and ideals againstthe nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed from on high by the EU or the UN, and defining his political vision in terms of cosmopolitan values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community. The oikophobe is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of oikophobia that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe. For we are seeing a massive expansion of the legislative burden on the people of Europe, and a relentless assault on the only loyalties that would enable them voluntarily to bear it….

“It is in the light of these double standards that the charge of ‘racism and xenophobia’ should be assessed. It is a charge almost invariably levelled at members of the indigenous communities of Europe, and in particular against those at the bottom of the social scale, for whom mass immigration is a cost that they have not been schooled (and through no fault of their own) to bear. It is levelled too at political parties that attempt to represent those people, and who promise them some relief from a problem that no other party seems willing to address. Those who level the charge are almost invariably in the grip of oikophobia….

“It is vital that the European states achieve an effective integration of their immigrant communities; but if the liberal élite will not discuss the matter, and continue to put all blame for the growing anxiety on the xenophobia of the indigenous population while ignoring the oikophobia which is an equal contributory cause, then the likely long-term effect will be a popular explosion, and one from which no-one will benefit, least of all the immigrant communities.”

Notice how this story is played, even by the conservative Daily Telegraph.

British Prime Minister David Cameron tells an obvious truth in public and the story is about how offended the Pakistanis are, not the susbstance which is “British Prime Minister calls Pakistan a source of terrorism”. Who gives a flying fuck for what the Muslim nations think? Do you?

Budddhism.

South Korea has deployed sentry robots capable of detecting and killing intruders along the heavily-fortified border with North Korea, officials said on Tuesday.

Islam.

The People’s Daily, a newspaper produced by China’s ruling communist party, has either been hilariously pranked or has out-reported every news outlet in Afghanistan to secure the scoop of the century. The outlet today reports that the Taliban in Afghanistan is “training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops.” After 16 years of war and nine years of battling the U.S., the Islamist insurgents have decided to arm monkeys with “AK-47 rifles and Bren light machine guns in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

The Chinese author, who apparently believes that PETA is more influential than the 31 percent of Americans who oppose the Afghan war, tries to explain what’s happening. “Analysts believe that apart from using ‘monkey killers’ to attack the American troops, the Taliban also sought to arouse Western animal protectionists to pressure their governments to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.”

The White House  tosses NASA administrator Charles Bolden under the bus and flees from his presidentially-assigned  “outreach to Muslim nations” mission so fast, they’re red-shifting:

American diplomats concerned they’re being replaced by NASA employees, breathe easy: The Space agency and its administrator, Charles Bolden, are not responsible for reaching out to the Muslim world after all.

[...]

… White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday, “That was not his task, and that’s not the task of NASA.”

Having taken only one week to achieve, this reversal may be the fastest Obama initiative yet.

The paralyzing influence of the Leftist mind set is discussed in today’s article in the National Post by Shelby Steele. 

One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today, we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today, the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past–racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.

This philosophy is not for me, not for us at Barrelstrength, but you can smell the prevailing wind, can’t you? And what a fine ally this miasma of leftism has in militant know-nothing Islam! As AIDS is to HIV, so is the spreading blight of Islam to the immuno-depressant effect of political correctness. We are the best (civilization and culture) and they can go fuck off.  Say it repeatedly. You will feel better and you will be right.

What other interpretation can you give to the following item?
 

“Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.

“In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran. To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.”

Whatever you may think of the Saudi royal family, they at least can tell who the wackos are in their neighbourhood, and it is not Israel, which they know already possess nukes sufficient to turn Mecca and Medina into glass. The heirs of Mohammed, the guardians of the Hejaz, and of the sacred places of Islam, are making themselves as agreeable as possible to the needs of the Israeli Air Force on its way to bomb Iran.

Does this not tell you something very deep about the real constitution of the world? Does this not say that the Sunnis fear and loathe the Shi’ites more than they do the Jews, and by a long mile?

(Apologies to the over-sensitive for referring to the Israelis as the Jews, but we have to consider the issue from an Islamic and not from a liberal point of view).

Just when you thought US foreign policy could not be more detached from reality:

The Obama administration is looking for ways to build up “moderate elements” within the Lebanese Hezbollah guerrilla movement and to diminish the influence of hard-liners, a top White House official said on Tuesday.

[...]

He did not spell out how Washington hoped to promote “moderate elements” given that the organization is branded a “foreign terrorist organization” by the United States.

“We don’t deal with them,” he acknowledged.

How about trying first to encourage moderates within the Obama administration?

In the past week the British papers I have perused have reported:

• A town councillor gets a visit from two policemen for putting a sign in his window in red and blue letters, on a white background, saying: “Get the lot out”. The police suggested that a red, white and blue sign had “racist” connotations. “They said the Union Jack-coloured lettering on a white background could be considered ‘racist’.”
  He was told there had been a single complaint and he was ordered to remove it or change it otherwise he would end up in court.”

“And the furious pensioner , chairman of his local history society and a former Samaritan , slammed police for wasting their time.

“He said : ‘Three years ago vandals put a brick through my window and when I called the police all they offered me was a crime reference number.

No police visit was required for a physical crime, but the possibility of thought crime deserved their special attention.

• A black Christian evangelical counsellor was fired from his job, without recourse, for failing to provide sexual advice to a gay couple on how to improve their love-life, on the grounds that his christian faith required such conduct it. Regardless of his interpretation of Christianity, he failed in his lawsuit because religious belief was not a suitable ground of refusal. The same appeal court judge (Lord Laws)  who ruled this way had also ruled in a previous case that a man fired for excessive adherence to global warming doctrines was entitled to a religious defence.

“Lord Justice Laws condemned any attempt to protect believers who take a stand on matters of conscience under the law as “irrational” and “capricious”.

“In comments likely to set the church on a collision course with the courts, he claimed that doing so could set Britain on the road to a “theocracy”, or religious rule.

“While acknowledging the profound influence of Judeo-Christian traditions over many centuries, he insisted that no religious belief itself could be protected under the law “however long its tradition, however rich its culture”.

“The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified,” he said.

“It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary.”

He added: “If they did … our constitution would be on the road to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.”

But Darren Sherborne, a partner at the law form Rickerbys, said that Lord Justice Laws’s judgment “wrong” open to challenge at the Supreme Court because it placed sexual practices over religious beliefs.

“For him to say a subjective idea isn’t capable of protection completely undermines the 2006 Equality Act which was intended to protect people from discrimination on the grounds of their beliefs,” he said.

“The law has developed to the point where even a belief in the environment is held to be protected.

“There is scope for a challenge to the Supreme Court and I would expect it to be.

“If he doesn’t (challenge it), in my opinion this is one more straw in the camel’s back which is heading for the encouragement … of more extreme religious beliefs.

• A Christian street preacher was arrested and locked in a cell for telling a passer-by that homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God.

“Dale McAlpine was charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” after a homosexual police community support officer (PCSO) overheard him reciting a number of “sins” referred to in the Bible, including blasphemy, drunkenness and same sex relationships.

“The 42-year-old Baptist, who has preached Christianity in Workington, Cumbria for years, said he did not mention homosexuality while delivering a sermon from the top of a stepladder, but admitted telling a passing shopper that he believed it went against the word of God.”

• Atheists seek to ban Christian prayer before town council meetings on the grounds that it offends the human rights of non-believers.
• A Muslim defaces a war memorial with a slogan saying “Islam shall prevail over all” , among others, but his prosecution fails to prosecute this as a “religious” or “racially motivated” act.

“A file was sent to lawyers at the Counter Terrorism Division of the CPS in London to see if there was a racially or religiously motivated connotation.

“However when Shah appeared before magistrates this week, prosecutor Andrew Bodger said: ‘It was decided there was not enough evidence to prove this, and they decided it was politically motivated.’

“Defending, Mumtaz Chaudry said Shah did not hold extremist views. ‘This is nothing to do with his religious beliefs, his family’s beliefs or his cultural beliefs,’ he said. ‘He is just an ordinary guy. ”

“Khadim Thathall, a former president of a mosque in the town, said: ‘This young man has clearly been radicalised by groups which are looking to cause trouble and it’s a pity that the court hasn’t been able to deal with him more strictly.’

(Good for you, Khadim Thathall!  You are cleaer on the concept than the Director of Public Prosecutions.)

 

• The strange thing is, David Cameron has resolutely refused to take up any of  these issuea in the British general election. Thinking minds ask: why not?

Ontario is to introduce more explicit sexual education at younger ages, says the Globe and Mail.

Pre-pubescent children have enough difficulty suppressing their natural disgust at the way wholly biological way in which they were generated, let alone getting them to consider homosexual sex, that I imagine many children will be sent to the principal’s office for making “insensitive” remarks. Given the Ontario Liberal government, I assume it is intended to advance some gay-friendly agenda, namely that gay is normal, whatever that means, and young kids had better get used to it, regardless of their parents’ feelings.

Let us ignore the substance of the issue for a moment, which is the wisdom and efficacy of this form of education, and ponder how the government justifies the decision. Responding to the accusation that the curriculum is being modified to appease a lesbian Minister of the government, the article says:

The curriculum hadn’t been reviewed since 1998, and the changes reflect Ontario’s diverse societyand have nothing to do with Ms. Wynne, who is now Transportation Minister, said Michelle Despault, a spokeswoman for Education Minister Lorna Dombrowsky.

“As a government, we have a commitment to provide a curriculum that is both equitable and inclusive,” she said.

Notice how “diverse”, “equitable” and “inclusive” are summoned to replace “good”, “suitable”, “appropriate”, and “sensible”. And as I decode the message, it becomes apparent that the diversity, equity and inclusiveness under discussion refer to the presence of same-sex parents sending their children to school. I do not think it refers to Islamic families: their tendency to marry first cousins,  remove their daughter’s clitorises, or drown them for looking at boys.   Just wait, however, for that to be justified as diverse, equitable, and inclusive.

Let us look at the facts:

1. Europe is being destroyed from within by elites who seek to replace its actual populations with a rabble of barbarian immigrants, with all the effects of crime, no-go zones, and imposition of the values of those barbarians on Europe.

2. The same process is happening in the United States, by uncontrolled illegal immigration of mestizo-Spanish central Americans.

3. The United States has been taken over by an affirmative-action President who neither understands the culture of the place nor its capitalist underpinnings, and who does not much like its white citizens.

4. A variety of laws and speech-control commissions have been empowered to suppress discussion of race, religion, and intelligence distribution on any terms other than the virtues of mulitculuralism, massive barbarian unqualified immigration, tolerance of Islam and the assumption of white guilt for all social evils.

Yes, this is one of those days when I think that western civilization is in a process of rapid and uncontrollable decay. I do not see anywhere, except on a few conservative blogs, any realization of how bad it is and how rapidly it is getting worse.

I do not see any political leadership, or serious political movements, anywhere in the West, daring to take on the assumptions that are driving us over a cliff, namely:

1. The equality of all cultures

2. the equality of all races (in terms of intelligence and achievement)

nor do I see any challenge being mounted to

3. The apparent desire to diminish, demean and or replace the white race with something else wherever it is currently dominant, if that is the appropriate word, or hanging on, if you prefer

or defence of

4.The superiority of of our constitutional order.

Do you?

I am bored stiff with Canadian politics and I suspect you are too. Indeed I am bored with US politics. The global warming scare is fizzling out. The outcomes on several fronts are predictable and they work,  in general, towards conservative aims and outcomes. The only uncertain issue, in the grand strategic sense, is whether we will be forcibly Islamized in 25 years, or not.

Glorious Leader Harper moves the jello which makes up this country to the right, and any change he can make below the level of public discussion he makes, and any change requiring public discussion he does not make. Thus immigration and refugee policy can get fixed by administrative action, but the Human Rights Commissions march onward until they meet their deserved fate: ignominy and dismantlement. But not now.

Obama continues to screw up at his own pace, stiffing his allies and appeasing our enemies.  He will be punished at the mid-terms in spectacular fashion, and the issue is whether he will be considered worse than Jimmy Carter, or slightly better. I already have several bets out that he is a one-term President and I see no sign that my money is at risk.

Free-speech issues, which are really substitutes for the Islamic issue, are now being engaged, and they will play out over years. Sensible people  are not always winning them, but we are engaging a larger segment of society in the necessary discussions of race, class, religion, intelligence distribution, and why they cannot be discussed in frank terms.   The free-speech issues are important because they mark the boundaries that leftists want to put on freedom of discussion in the West, which is to say: they want to end it entirely for everyone, possibly including themselves. And, just as they did in the days of Communism, there is always a large contingent of leftists who hate liberal constitutional democracy and their own culture more than they fear the outside threat.

Only in the case of Islam, the threat is now inside the house, because of senseless immigration policies.

The Muslim issue is the new Communism. The same issues ae being asked. What is communism?Are there  really such people as communists? What do they intend towards us? Have they infiltrated our governments?

Islam is resuming  a thousand three hundred year long battle with everyone else, after a pause when their political arrangements (the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary pirates) were crushed.

The same sorts of naivety, enthusiasm, folly, intimidation, appeasement, infiltration and refusal to discuss the matter are occurring in relation to Islam as occurred in relation Communism.

The collapse of Christianity is leaving a vast spiritual vacuum in the West, and the Muslims are merely filling it.

Thus it was with great pleasure I turned this past Easter weekend from secular concerns to Jesus’ really bad day upon the cross, and to a brilliant, deeply learned, and well thought out book by the San Francisco philosopher and historian of religion, Jacob Needleman, whose What is God? counts among the 30 most important books I have read.

I thought it would be one of those duty-books that I occasionally read because, like broccoli, they are good for me, though dry and distasteful. Nothing of the sort. It caught me from the opening pages of childhood recollection, and continued straight through to the end, opening larger and deeper vistas. (His description of his boundless loathing, as a young Jewish man, for Saint Augustine aroused in me nothing but sympathy, and outright laughter, as he burns every page of The City of God one evening in outrage).

Needleman’s book leads through a painless and engaged  discussion of western philosophy and religious thinking to spiritual pratices and thence to an exposition of the thought of George Gurdjieff and his followers.

I have bought two copies of “What is God?” to lend to my children and friends, and I have just ordered a dozen books on Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, John Sinclair (Lord Pentland), Jeanne de Salzman and the other disciples.

Jacob Needleman’s “What is God?” is a tonic for your soul. You have one, you know, and it needs exercise and refreshment. It is a good guide to begin thinking about the question because, as he says, the answer to “who is God?” is entirely bound up with the question “who are you?”. And I am  more concerned with those two questions than I am with any other at this time.

_______________________

An engaging on-line resource of writing by Gurdjieff’s disciples can be found at http://books.google.ca/books?id=oyZ14dBwIZMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=gurdjieff&source=bl&ots=D0EsZqpKq6&sig=NqoXKG0W5l_DWFI-vw4gCghG7HE&hl=en&ei=ZlG_S42JFMH78Aai0az8CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=17&ved=0CDUQ6AEwEA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Robert Fowler’s address to the Liberal Party suggests that something has profoundly changed for the better in Canadian politics. The Conservatives are in charge of foreign policy, and we aren’t playing even-handedly between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East. To Robert Fowler, this is a disaster. To the rest of us, it is another example of how Canada is shifting fundamentally for the better, away from moral equivalence between good and evil.

Fowler said both major parties have been enticed by the allure of political gains within the Jewish community. He said it is a strategy that leads to an unproductive support for Israel and undermines Canada’s reputation as a trusted mediator in the Middle East.

 ”The scramble to lock up the Jewish vote in Canada meant selling out our widely admired and long-established reputation for fairness and justice,” Fowler said.

 ”As the globe has become smaller and meaner, Canadian governments have turned inward and adopted me-first stances across the international agenda,” he said.

 ”Canada’s reputation and proud international traditions have been diminished as a result.”

“A proud international tradition” of standing impartial as between Israel and Muslim aggression. That reminds me of George Jonas’ comment about how the cops now stand impartial between mobs trying to shut down conservatives and the conservative speakers, like they would stand impartial between a robbery in progress and the victim.

“The only group exhibiting Canadian-style restraint was the police. They cast a calm eye on the pandemonium, took a balanced view and chose no sides between people trying to exercise their rights and bullies trying to prevent them. Resisting any temptation to enforce the law, Ottawa’s finest exemplified Canada’s definition of moral leadership by observing neutrality between lawful and lawless.”

The news this past week has been replete with evidence of every form of spiritual rot in academe: Coulter at the University of Ottawa, and the 16 profs at the University of Saskabush who protested the scholarships for the children of those servicemen killed in the course of duty. But the rot in the Liberal party goes unnoticed, because it has been with us for so long. Robert Fowler is one of those Liberal top civil servants whose services we are now living without, and may it continue.

An apparent falling-out with Iggy after falling in with the Islamists. And as with all such dhimmis, the result is predictable.