Too bad. It had such “nice” ideals.
Europe – Time to Say Goodbye
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Too bad. It had such “nice” ideals.
Next post: American Digest Condensed Books: What Happened by Her Highness HRC
Previous post: Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy
Address for Donations, Complaints, Brickbats, and — oh yes — Donations
In Memory Of W.B. Yeats
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Your Say
My Thinking Hat
My Back Pages
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The People Yes
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The Vault
My Back Pages
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Comments on this entry are closed.
There is going to be terrible bloodshed.
There is already terrible bloodshed. No one cares to notice. The historians will write with astonishment how an army of savages invaded and overthrew an entire continent without tanks, planes, cavalry or guns…and were welcomed by the barren host to nest and destroy them. Willingly. This video made me weep.. And that is about all I can do. I fear that in America there may be a wall built…but with lots of holes.
Not Mongols, this time, but Africans and Middle Easterners?
Socialism is a bullshit outfit, isn’t it?
Pat Condell: “Europe is killing itself“
Madame,
Even worse, will there be historians? Will there be a language for them to employ, beyond grunts and shrieks? For how long will there be art of any kind before it’s outlawed to appease the offended?
If history (or art) is produced, who will experience it? Will there be enough people beyond the final few who can produce it, to act as auditors? This isn’t a continent being destroyed, it’s a civilization.
Alas.
This breaks my heart. I am so fortunate to have experienced Europe while it was still civilized.
I wish my children and grandchildren could see and experience the places I’ve been. The art, the architecture, the wonderful differences of cultures that will soon be gone.
The lights are going out in Europe.
We may experience the same thing, in our Godless and ‘diverse’ America. I pray not, but our chances are poor.
I thought about that very question as I was writing my comment. The historians won’t be coming from the smoldering ruins. It will come from the onlookers who shake their heads in dismay.
If Europeans (in Europe and America) recovered the will to do it, all this could be reversed in a few years. However, Europeans are soft, weak and bemused by their tech. I suspect we will all go quietly.
Speak for yourself. I don’t go cheap.
When the SHTF, it will be as when India was partitioned and Hindu and Muslim took murderous revenge for 100’s of years of hate, insults and injuries.
This time the deadly mix will also include Agnostic, Atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Jew, … Wiccan.
It will happen during either a brutally cold or brutally hot time of year, when tempers are shortest.
.
We all know that Pedophilia is the next depravity to be “normalized”, right?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/14/revised-uk-child-sexual-consent-guidelines-provoke-backlash.
As the Z-man points out.
Whenever the “Never Trump” clown car pulls up, everyone who spills out is wearing a yarmulke.
It will be the young men who carry the ball, if it is carried, not us old guys. I live in Flyover Country and most of the young European guys I see are broken in some way. I don’t use the term “American” because it now has no meaning.
Thank you for this, Gerard. I made it 1:50 in. By then the point was so well made there were tears in my eyes.
Once there was a beautiful exciting world, then we stopped giving lobotomys to the insane and instead turned them loose on the world in the name of fairness,
So sad. ‘Camp of the Saints’ in slow motion.
The last Reconquista took 770 years. I wonder how long this will take.
I agree with you Vanderleun, I won’t go cheap either but I prefer to go on my own terms and not upon the terms of these wildly psychotic and diseased muslim negros.
There really is only one way to handle problems like these and white people all over the world know exactly what is required but it seems that Mr. Hitler left a bad taste in people’s mouths, so much so that nations have lost their desire to protect themselves for fear of being labeled as Nazi, racist or bigoted.
(It makes me wonder, how did Joe Stalin, a murderous Communist who far exceeded the murders and brutality of his Nazi protagonist, not wind up with a reputation as bad as Adolph’s but it seems as if he did not because so many people seem to desire Communism and they seldom refer to actions by Marxists with the disgust they feel for Nazis. When the labels of Nazi, racist or bigot are tossed out, no one ever says Marxist….Strange)
Anyway, call it what you want but this problem will destroy the world and killing these people and removing every vestige of their existence is the only solution to it.
I see this video, and many more each day all portraying individuals behaving in an altogether uncivilized manner. All the individuals in all the videos have one thing in common. It has caused me to developed a sort of tourettes symptom, involuntarily repeating the same single word with each video.
rhymes with a synonym for larger
JW (had it with this shit) M
Shame on you Bill Jones. Antisemitism is the oldest, tawdriest, cheapest trick in the book.
Ideas Have Consequences: Stephen Hicks wrote a deep analysis with that title.
Every leader has proven the truth in those three words, as has every parent and teacher.
The Islamic religion/ideology is most attractive to those who’ve been coached in its corruption from childhood.
1. You carry out god’s will by plundering the wealth, women, and children of non-Muslims. Aggression in this manner is praiseworthy. Dying in this effort one becomes a martyr earning a place in Paradise. What’s not to like?
2. In Paradise, the martyr is gifted with perpetual sensual pleasures. What’s not to like?
3. The non-jihadist, non-martyr, lives under the threat of perpetual torture even after death. The corpse feels the pain forever. What’s not to fear? Therefore to acquiesce to martyrdom makes sense?
Do we wonder that the brain-washed Muslim child becomes the murderous adult?
We will never destroy the ideology of Islam. We will never quarantine it, in this age of easy communication. With constant immense effort and luck we will weaken it as we do to dangerous viruses in preparing vaccines. If humane education of Muslim children does not take place (in some parts of the Islamic world it is promoted! Why not publicly ally ourselves with them?).
There is little hope for our survival, unless we at least match the passion and persistence and competence of our enemies. And beware of the occasional monstrous mutant which must be detected and eradicated early on.
The Islamist teachers in mosque, madrassa, and home have taught their children hell well.
What better ideas have we to overcome the three points above?
The whole Islam system is supported by one belief. Erode, vitiate, destroy that one belief and the whole shitbang of murderous madness collapses.
That is, demonstrate that Mohammed was at best a murderous charlatan or a simple psychopath, and not the Perfect Man or Example to be emulated, and all significance attributed to the Koran and its derivative “sacred” texts disappears as Mohammed is seen to be a Pied Piper of Senseless Doom
Categorize, for example, his behavior according to DSM standards, contrast his early behavior in Mecca with that in Medina — in Medina as clever self-serving power plays and immense criminality.
The latter requiring the tone of the developing Koran to change from the relatively benign to the immutable malign.
Truth will out. It outed Tojo, Hitler, Stalin, Mao.
The truth will need to be known by men and women with chests who act on those truths — particularly in caged Islamic countries of the M.E., Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Who knows, maybe YouTube will serve as an opening wedge to life outside the cage.
This devolution of Islam is already underway by civilian scholars from the West and Middle East who continue historical and linguistic studies of the origins of Islam and its borrowings/distortions from other cultures in composition of the Koran.
Essential to success of this positive destruction will be success in the acceptance by ex-Muslims of a humane system for making life meaningful, worthwhile, significant. Perhaps, apostates from Islam will show the way by demonstrating the decent values of Christianity, Buddhism, or other spiritual approaches.
My people went to war in 1914. After 1916, they decided to destroy themselves: meat-grinding battles, revolutionary politics, socialist economics, fascism, communism, nazism, mass murder, genoicde, war, war, war, and more war; bureacracy; show trials; my fingers grow tired. Europe hasn’t had a good idea in century. And none can answer: why?
Asking, pleading, demanding the insanity stop has had no effect. Setting a good example paints a target. Even defeating nazism, fascism, and communism had no effect. Western civilization is adamant on its suicide.
The lamps went out in 1914, never to be re-lit.
The only open debate is: what will come next?