As the West is being destroyed by its own elected leaders, its smartest and most creative, its most successful and prettiest, and the great majority of the population follows as though after the Piper of Hamlin, the salient question is how to save what remains and the people who carry what remains. Very few of the latter are in the political or managerial leadership caste, and you could count on one hand the ones whose exceptional talents or beauty set a large number of hearts aflutter.

An even greater problem is that the destroyers and looters have been in sole purview of culture and education for so long that hardly any under-50 Whites remain who have retained their own mind and its link to their uniquely magnificent Western heritage. That link has been replaced either by a permanent hairshirt for the real and imagined transgressions of the West against the (broadly speaking) East and South, or by a moronic multiculti rainbow pastiche expressed, among others, in the pumping loins of white rappers and pop divas that are but inferior copies of stuff black people do better.

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How modern concerns can produce a faceless past. More about the Polanski case. Why they can “do what they want”. An analogy that is none. Is equality served if, regardless of their differences, all get the same?
 
1. A presumably overlooked news item tells that in Bradford (VA, USA) a memorial for WW2’s leaders has been built. That FDR, Churchill is part of the exposition is normal. Equally appropriate would be Chiang Kai-shek or even de Gaulle. Others that did not head major countries could also be nominated.

 

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Collectivism and its record: consistently downward. The politics of the economic downturn: Is cause and effect filed in the right order? An incredible suit. Is the one that resists encroachments a troublemaker? What the recent spy case tells – about us.

 

1. In a side comment, “The Economist” (to this writer the world’s best weekly) mentioned that, regardless of its ups and downs, Americans prefer Capitalism to Socialism. This is apparently so because, even if they lack personal experience, the Yanks seem to be aware that Socialism has a consistent record. Its arrow points south.

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Even after the introduction of the telescope it took centuries for Western astronomers to work out the true scale of the universe. The English astronomer and architect Thomas Wright (1711-1786) suggested around 1750 that the Milky Way was a disk-like system of stars and that there were other star systems similar to it, only very far away from us. Soon after, Immanuel Kant in 1755 hypothesized that the Solar System is part of a huge, lens-shaped collection of stars and that similar such “island universes” exist elsewhere, too. Kant’s thoughts about the universe, however, were philosophical and had little observational content.

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The phrase “The Challenge of the Spaceship” is the title of an early 1950s popular science article by the late Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), best known as the scenarist for Stanley Kubrick’s enigmatic space travel film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Clarke, a radio-electronics engineer who switched to writing science fiction stories in the late 1940s and became a dean of the genre, used the title again when he anthologized that article with a dozen others for book publication in 1955. (There were republications with additional material in subsequent years.) With other science fiction writers – like John W. Campbell, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov – Clarke helped immensely to inspire the actual space program in the West, chiefly of course in the United States. The boredom of the Space Shuttle in service and the pointlessness of its destination the International Space Station have consigned to oblivion the memory of the actual space program, the climax of which came with the moon landings of the three years 1969 to 1972. NASA, fully complicit in the public’s indifference to its bailiwick, still sends robotic probes to the planets and moons, with diverting results, but has long since lost the courage necessary for manned exploration of the solar system.

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Umbrellas for the fish. Share the wealth, or prevent its creation. Regulation and unfreedom. The supposed racism of laws that apply to all. Utopias and giving predictable failure a second chance. The hope of getting a hot meal from the EU. Self-induced bad governance and responsibility.

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Pro-Palestinian activists are launching a new round of anti-Israel lawsuits in European courts. The lawsuits, which exploit the legal principle of universal jurisdiction, are being used to harass current and former Israeli political and military leaders, with the twin aims of tying Israel’s hands against Palestinian terror and delegitimizing the Jewish state.

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Cinema means movement, hence the nickname, “motion pictures.” Right from its beginning in Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion films of horses – and of male and female nudes – the “movie camera” has demonstrated understandable fondness for things robustly animate, the more impressive the hyper-kinesis the better. Visiting aliens might be excused for thinking that the main subjects of film are the galloping horse, the steam locomotive, the automobile, and the flying machine. A remarkable Georges Méliès (1861-1936) production based loosely on Jules Verne, Le voyage à travers l’impossible (1904), deploys all of these modes of transportation in a mélange of mechanical and transcontinental fantasies in the auteur’s inimitable style. [Clip] In the aftermath of “The Great War” (1914-1918), filmmakers began to see the possibility of theatrical spectacle in aeronautics. For Wings (1927), director William Wellman (1896-1975) put together an air force in San Antonio, Texas, that must have rivaled the United States Army Air Corps of the time; he installed cameras in a variety of “platform” aircraft and shot “dog fights” (below) of astonishing realism. [Clip]

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Chavez’ solutions nurture his problems. An unwelcome candidate in Germany. The unmentionable Near Eastern solution is gaining acceptance. Who is willing to evict whom? Returning to conditions your family had escaped. Choosing between a community of blood or one of common purpose. Is “leftist peace activist” an oxymoron?

 

1.When Chavez nationalizes an industry, he is engaging in a political and not an economic action as he puts enterprises under political control. In his case, “politics” mean “Chavez”. Louis 16th said that “I am the state” and in the Venezuelan reality that imitates the Sun King, the public realm has become identical with the Bolivarian “Leader’s” eccentric whims. When such nationalizations occur, the accompanying commentary tends to note that Venezuela’s problems made the Chavists to take control of new enterprises. This cause and effect relationship can be turned around. Wanting to comprehend reality the conditional “can” might even need to be translated into an imperative “must”.

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In Belgium, today, police searched the residence of the Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels and the crypt of the Archbishop’s cathedral in Mechelen. They were looking for evidence of cover-ups in the ongoing investigation into widespread pedophilia practices within the Belgian church in the decades during which Cardinal Godfried Danneels was Archbishop. Danneels retired in January of this year.

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“Decoy Jew” is a new phrase in the Netherlands. Jews are no longer safe in major Dutch cities such as Amsterdam. Since 1999, Jewish organizations in the Netherlands have been complaining that Jews who walk the Dutch streets wearing skullcaps risk verbal and physical attacks by young Muslims. Being insulted, spat at or attacked are some of the risks associated with being recognizable as a Jew in contemporary Western Europe.

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Brussels, Belgium -- For the past 200 years, much of the fate of Europe has been determined near this lovely city. That is equally true at the moment as the leaders of Europe meet in what slowly is becoming the capital city of Europe to make decisions that well may determine whether the euro and even the European Union will continue to exist.
 
As every schoolchild knows, Napoleon was finally defeated two centuries ago at the battle of Waterloo - close enough to Brussels to be considered a suburb. The great battles of World War I were fought largely within a drive of an hour or so from Brussels, to the west.

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In several essays at the Gates of Vienna blog and elsewhere I have dealt with the subject of genetic intelligence measured in IQ, inspired by Michael H. Hart’s groundbreaking and very politically incorrect biohistory book Understanding Human History. Many people consider this topic to be “racist” and therefore taboo, but I will write about anything that I deem to be practically and scientifically relevant. On the other hand, there are quite a few things that IQ does not fully explain. We will look at a few of them here, related to geography, population density and level of urbanization. The single most important thing that IQ does not explain is why the scientific Revolution took place among Europeans, not among northeast Asians who have at least as high average IQ as whites. I will leave that issue for a separate essay.

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Eric Voegelin’s critique of modernity claims that liberalism, the creed of the Enlightenment, is “Gnostic.” Voegelin (1901-1985) drew the term “Gnosticism” from a strain of Late Antique religiosity. The term “Gnostic” refers to that array of sects and cults the adherents of which thought of themselves as forming a saintly elect among the perishing masses on account of their possessing, as their souls, sparks of divinity that had become trapped in the world of matter. The ancient Gnostics (as the previous installments in this series will have shown) abhorred the world of matter and claimed to sojourn in it only as exiles from a realm of pure light, which was the “real” world despite appearances. Voegelin labeled Gnosticism an anticosmic rebellion against reality, emphasizing the tendency of Gnostics to construct what – borrowing from novelists Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer – he called a second reality built on principles contrary to those governing what morally and intellectually adjusted people understand to be the actual or first reality. Gnosticism for Voegelin constitutes a social pathology for the reason that the upholders of the second reality, once having invested their emotion in it, make it a fetish and regard criticism of it as lèse majesté. Organized Gnosticism tends to become a censorious war, a jihad or crusade, to protect the second reality from examination and, more aggressively, to coerce assent to the second reality’s existence.

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