1. “Freedom of speech is the foundation of any free society.” Really? Who says? We are looking at two things here: What is legal, and what society permits. If a man in 1950s America tried to read pornography in the classrooms of the day, teachers, parents, and the community would have chased him down and beat him within an inch—and sometimes beyond that inch—of his life. And no court in the state would have convicted anyone. The man’s “free speech” might have been “legal” as in “protected by the US Constitution—but society would not permit it.

2. And just what does “protected by the US Constitution” mean? It means that five old men get to decide what rights you have, how you have them, and when you have them—the actual writing in that document be damned. If the US Supreme Court says that pornography is free speech, “drag queen story hour” is free speech, and teaching anal sex to six-year-olds is free speech, then they are free speech. So please tell me again that “free speech is the foundation of and free society”. And if you object to such “free speech”, you will be hounded, arrested, jailed, your property seized, and your family impoverished. There’s your free speech in action.

3. But a man might bleat, “But Austin, the Founders believed in free speech!” No, they did not. Would they have allowed “drag queen story hour”? And the first thing President Adams did after assuming office was to imprison those Americans who spoke freely about the policies of the US Government. See the “Alien and Sedition Acts” (1798). Lincoln agreed and put pro-Confederate Northerners in jail. Wilson agreed and passed the “Sedition Act” of 1918.

4. If some sexual degenerate demands that you bake a wedding cake for sodomites, and you refuse, guess what would happen? There’s your free speech in action. Pornography is free speech. Baking a cake is not.

5. If a man went up to John Wesley Hardin in the 1860s and called him a low-down rebel liar, Hardin would have killed him on the spot. That man might have had free speech, but he did not have the ability to avoid the consequences of that free speech. And no court in Texas would have even bothered to arrest Hardin.

6. Let it be said again and again and again: the only rights you have are those protected by a rifle. Your rifle.

7. Much is made of the fact that Biden’s “Satanic speech”—and it was Satanic— was done in the presence of US Marines. Much is made of how the US Army has become woke, sodomized and feminized. Much is made of the videos put out by members of the US military showing them dancing vulgarly and bumping and grinding. The inference here is that the military is now entirely corrupted and beholden to the demands and perversions of the Deep State. Translation: Conservatives can no longer depend upon the US Military to be on their side in the coming civil war. Is that true? We simply do not know. We will know when that war begins, not before. It is not at all unreasonable for a civil war to occur in the military as well: on ships, on bases, and within units deployed overseas. Not one organ of the State will be immune to chaos and violence—no matter the propaganda saying otherwise. In the coming “spicy times” the US Government will be at war with itself.

8. Snowden should be an American hero. Naturally, the Deep State calls him a traitor, which means he is not.

9. The most consequential leader today is Vladimir Putin. Your feelings about him matter not at all.

10. Feral blacks run amok in blue cities because they are allowed to. No law, no policeman, and no prosecutor will touch them. If anyone tried to actually enforce the law, he would be the one tossed in jail. The negro is actually a “Super American”. He is above the law, his legal rights supersede those of any other race, and any blacks killed by the police become national heroes. Only White folks must obey the law. For now.

11. Much is made of those vandalized electrical substations. Lots and lots of folks have expended untold hours of cyber ink pontificating about them. Here are the facts: 1) Who did them? We don’t know. 2) Why were they done? We don’t know. 3) Why were those locations chosen? We don’t know. 4) Are they harbingers of more attacks? We don’t know. 5) What will be the immediate results of the attack? We don’t know. 6) What will be the far-reaching results of the attacks? We don’t know. But rest assured because the FBI is on the case. And I give my word that no 3-letter agency was behind any of those attacks. Scout’s Honor.

The always essential and admirable craftsman Scott Wadsworth takes us on a pilgrimage in stone.

Berlin’s giant AquaDom hotel aquarium containing 1,500 fish explodes

“And now at the end of a long day time for a relaxing martini at the hotel bar. . . .”

All of which is a fine reason to both bemoan a broken world and broken mankind and still take joy in watching Sheryl Crow and Jason Isbell hit the groove and rock Bob Dylan’s Everything Is Broken

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“Your old men shall dream dreams,
and your young men shall see visions.

Hubble detects ghostly glow surrounding our solar system 

Imagine walking into a room at night, turning out all the lights, and closing the shades. Yet an eerie glow comes from the walls, ceiling, and floor. The faint light is barely enough to see your hands before your face, but it persists. Sounds like a scene out of “Ghost Hunters?” No, for astronomers this is the real deal. But looking for something that’s close to nothing is not easy.

One possible explanation is that a shell of dust envelops our solar system all the way out to Pluto, and is reflecting sunlight. Seeing airborne dust caught in sunbeams is no surprise when cleaning the house. But this must have a more exotic origin. Because the glow is so smoothy distributed, the likely source is innumerable comets — free-flying dusty snowballs of ice. They fall in toward the Sun from all different directions, spewing out an exhaust of dust as the ices sublimate due to heat from the Sun. If real, this would be a newly discovered architectural element of the solar system. It remained invisible until very imaginative and curious astronomers, and the power of Hubble came along.

Aside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to the casual observer. But how dark is dark?

To find out, astronomers decided to sort through 200,000 images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky, in an ambitious project called SKYSURF. This would be any leftover light after subtracting the glow from planets, stars, galaxies, and from dust in the plane of our solar system (called zodiacal light).

When researchers completed this inventory, they found an exceedingly tiny excess of light, equivalent to the steady glow of 10 fireflies spread across the entire sky. That’s like turning out all the lights in a shuttered room and still finding an eerie glow coming from the walls, ceiling, and floor.

The researchers say that one possible explanation for this residual glow is that our inner solar system contains a tenuous sphere of dust from comets that are falling into the solar system from all directions, and that the glow is sunlight reflecting off this dust. If real, this dust shell could be a new addition to the known architecture of the solar system.

This idea is bolstered by the fact that in 2021 another team of astronomers used data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to also measure the sky background. New Horizons flew by Pluto in 2015, and a small Kuiper belt object in 2018, and is now heading into interstellar space. The New Horizons measurements were done at a distance of 4 billion to 5 billion miles from the Sun. This is well outside the realm of the planets and asteroids where there is no contamination from interplanetary dust.

New Horizons detected something a bit fainter that is apparently from a more distant source than Hubble detected. The source of the background light seen by New Horizons also remains unexplained. There are numerous theories ranging from the decay of dark matter to a huge unseen population of remote galaxies.

“If our analysis is correct there’s another dust component between us and the distance where New Horizons made measurements. That means this is some kind of extra light coming from inside our solar system,” said Tim Carleton, of Arizona State University (ASU).

“Because our measurement of residual light is higher than New Horizons we think it is a local phenomenon that is not from far outside the solar system. It may be a new element to the contents of the solar system that has been hypothesized but not quantitatively measured until now,” said Carleton.

Music for the season. Veni, Redemptor Gentium.…

Music for the season.  Veni, Redemptor Gentium.  Is this the oldest Christmas carol?  Door to door we go.  Okay, maybe it is a hymn.  Volume up.

Come, thou Redeemer of the earth,
and manifest thy virgin-birth:
let every age adoring fall;
such birth befits the God of all.

Begotten of no human will,
But of the Spirit, Thou art still
The Word of God in flesh arrayed,
The promised fruit to men displayed.

The virgin womb that burden gained
With virgin honor all unstained;
The banners there of virtue glow;
God in His temple dwells below.

Forth from His chamber goeth He,
That royal home of purity,
A giant in two-fold substance one,
Rejoicing now His course to run.

From God the Father He proceeds,
To God the Father back He speeds;
His course He runs to death and hell,
Returning on God’s throne to dwell.

O equal to the Father, Thou!
Gird on Thy fleshly mantle now;
The weakness of our mortal state
With deathless might invigorate.

Thy cradle here shall glitter bright
And darkness breathe a newer light,
Where endless faith shall shine serene,
And twilight never intervene.

“Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when He does” — C.S. Lewis

I confess I am coming close to the sin of Envy when I think of Americans who have even a little bit of land.

Then again. . . .

Meanwhile, out in God’s water feature. . . .

Magical moments with the giant grey whales of Baja California in Mexico..

Sound on.. 😊

🎥 IG: nats.m.f pic.twitter.com/7FetLGmsWR

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) December 12, 2022

 Wrath Of Gnon on Twitter: “We’ve never known a more humane method of treating mild mental illness and retardation than the medieval one. Before lobotomy, before drugs.

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies– but not before they have been hanged. — Heinrich Heine

Carthage Must Be Destroyed! The Atlanticist Axis is desperate to remove Russian leadership and influence on the rest of the world, because Russia keeps blocking their imperial plans, whether in Syria, Ukraine, Asia, Latin America, or Africa. The purpose of such an overt false flag attack as a nuclear detonation, real or fake, would be to generate sufficient international horror and emotion to remove Russia from the UN Security Council, or expel her from the UN entirely. They will require a 9-11 level event to achieve that. Rest assured that when the bomb is finally detonated, the paperwork to expel Russia will be presented to the UN General Assembly before the ashes have hit the ground.

Ellen Harding Baker’s “Solar System” Quilt (1876 — ca. 1883) Two years after a naked-eye comet pierced the blanket of night in the spring of 1874, Ellen Harding Baker (1847–1886) began a near decade-long project to bring the stars farther down to Earth: an appliqué quilt depicting the solar system, complete with a green-tailed comet, its slingshot course plotted around the Sun. On this dreamy textile, measuring seven by eight feet, moons orbit their various planets in running stitch, asteroids clump in circular fields, and embroidered stars of wool and silk blaze out in concentric rings of yellow, blue, and red.

https://twitter.com/OTerrifying/status/1596311698071093248

Vladimir’s Putin’s History of Vengeance Against the West A fourth scenario is that the war continues indefinitely. This is, alas, the most likely scenario because it fits Putin’s personality. It also appears to be what most Russians expect. Whether it continues at the present level or becomes a frozen conflict, as has happened in Georgia and between Armenia and Azerbaijan, isn’t clear. But after all the savage bloodletting in Ukraine, and the bitter enmity it has created there and in Russia, it’s hard to see the fighting fading away entirely.

Unless, in a fifth scenario, Putin opts to break a stalemate, or ward off a seeming defeat, by going nuclear. In the past, few observers would have expected him to do so. But then again few (including this writer) expected him to invade Ukraine, even after he massed nearly 200,000 troops on its border. The reason is that his decision to launch such a war seemed so out of character. But if, as I have argued, it was in fact so squarely in character, then who is to say that going nuclear would not be? Whether Putin does so depends on many factors. Will he actually apply the much-disputed idea in Russian military doctrine of “escalating to de-escalate”? Will he be sufficiently certain that exploding a small tactical weapon won’t trigger an all-out nuclear exchange? Will he break the taboo that has prevented any use of nuclear weapons since 1945? Let us hope not. But if he decides that such a move is the only way to avoid a humiliating defeat, then the once unimaginable will be all too likely.

Members may cavort freely in more, much more, of this Strange Daze report (#1,000 in the series) at The New American Digest

10-year-old Kaylee Rogers, who has autism and ADHD, leads the Killard House School Choir in the singing of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. This beautiful music video was recorded at the Killard House School in Donaghadee in Northern Ireland.

[Full screen but only if you have tissues on hand. HT: Krill]

And. . . . Plucked from yesterday’s Memesapoppin! with a foreword by James Howard Kunstler

Ah, but you ask whatever could the one-heart-beat-away vice-simulacrum be up to?

The Twink Who Ruled Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” Censorship Machine

ESSAY OF THE DAY: The Alarm Bells Go Off – Kunstler

Startling fact of the week: Twitter’s senior ranks of content moderators included over a dozen former FBI and CIA agents and analysts who let child porn run loose all over the app while surgically removing any utterance contradicting the government’s claim that mRNA “vaccines” are “safe and effective” — not to mention the effort this elite crew expended against anyone objecting to the Woke-Left’s race and gender hustles. Wouldn’t you like to know how much they were paid? Probably more than government work.

Here’s another awful reality (better fasten your seatbelts): What also emerged in the tweet record of Yoel Roth, the company’s chief censor (former “Head of Trust and Safety”), begins to look like a gay mafia assault on the collective American psyche. Having gained official federal government sanction and protection, a statistically tiny homosexual demographic left in charge of the country’s main public forum has been out for revenge against their perceived enemy, political conservatives — Americans disinclined to join the cheerleading for drag queen story hours, “minor-attracted persons,” transsexuals in the military, and other LBGTQ cultural pranks.

In the process, that gay mafia running the public dialogue supported every lie that the government, its protector, put out, to keep the Deep State happy and well-fed. Shocking, I’m sure… but there it is. That means the gay mafia also helped promote the most-deadly psy-op in world history: the Covid-19 scare and the mass “vaccination” crusade that will end up killing many millions world-wide, after destroying the economies of the Western Civ nations. The whole package looks like an attempt to turn the world upside down and inside out. Is it any wonder that so many feel the USA has gone crazy?

Of course, these revelations aroused the widespread suspicion that these now-exposed nefarious operators in social media were merely tools for some murky plutocrat elite led by the likes of the WEF, Bill Gates, and George Soros. Could that be the greatest “conspiracy theory” of all? More likely, I hesitate to suggest, all these characters in one way or another are merely tools of history itself, as the world enters the darkest days of a Fourth Turning secular winter. As T.S. Eliot observed: “Humankind cannot bear too much reality.”. . . . .

RTWT AT The Alarm Bells Go Off by Kunstler

And now, without further ado,  50 MEMES SUITABLE FOR FRAMING OR FORWARDING

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I’m presently dealing with some rapid onset and developing minor health issues that require constant care and attention and multiple visits to various overloaded GPs and specialists. We all know what sort of management this entails. As a result, posting here will be either light or formulaic. 

First take. Perfect take. One and done.

Make time for this. Full screen. Full voice.

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[ HT: Austin]

Dave Rubin this morning took a close look at the mainstream media and the release of the Twitter Files revealing the long and sordid Twitter history of censorship, election meddling, Wuhan Flu obfuscation, and pandemic lying and suppression. His overarching observation is, “We are splitting into two internets.” ***

Splitting? Already in my rearview mirror.

*** At the tail of it all “Silly leftist clowns” at the New York Times are mugged by reality.

UPDATE: The Findings on the Removal of Donald Trump from Twitter [continue reading…]