“New Year’s Day — Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.” – Mark Twain, January 1863.

Happy New Year everyone!

The dictators of political correctness decree that we must all constantly, seriously, respectfully – nay, reverently – contemplate every imaginable variety of sexual abnormality.

It’s not enough for you to say that you are unconcerned what other people choose to do to derive their sexual pleasures as long as they don’t affect you in any way you do not choose, and then to dismiss the subject from your thoughts and speech. No. You must listen attentively to what is said about the perverse practices, read about them, think about them The topic is called LGBQT. For short! There are now said to be over a hundred recognized deviant preferences, each accorded a revered initial.

The demand for homage to the topic has become so persistent, so incessant, it amounts to a cult, an ideology, a form of religion. As such it needs an -ism on the end of it. So we contribute the coinage ELGEBEECUTYISM, which we pronounce with stresses on the EL and the CU thus: El-ge-bee cu-ty-ism.

And there is another new instruction recently issued by the dictators and not yet named. It concerns the height of the individual you may date to be politically correct, depending on your own height.

Breitbart reports:

A former vice chancellor at the University of Missouri argued in a deposition that it can be sexual harassment if a tall man asks a short woman out on a date. …

A former vice chancellor at the University of Missouri argued during depositions for a campus sexual assault case that it could be considered sexual assault for a tall male student to ask a short female student out on a date.

Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Cathy Scroggs, who resigned from the university in 2017, argued that the alleged perpetrator had committed harassment simply as a result of his “power over” the female student. The power the alleged perpetrator had, according to Scroggs, came from nothing more than his physical size.

So, HEIGHTISM has arrived. Unlike most of the -isms dear to the hearts of the dictators, it is not a term of abuse like “racism”, “sexism”, “colonialism”, “imperialism”. Rather, as with elgebeecutyism, it is an -ism to be embraced and heeded. If you are a tall man, refrain from dating a short woman.

We have yet to be informed whether tall women may date short men. Or which of the elgebeecutyist genders must apply heightist restrictions to their own dating plans. But be sure to check with the dictators before you make that date.

Paul Joseph Watson tells all who will listen: there are evil people who are encouraged to do evil things by their evil belief systems and inferior cultures. And silly women – the sort President Trump told us about in rhyme, whose tender hearts bleed for snakes – get raped and murdered because they refuse to believe that simple truth.

To condone evil is to co-author it. To protect those who carry out crimes is criminal. The European authorities who protect Muslims from the law, and even from criticism, are actively assisting Islam to wage war against our Western culture, our civilization. They are as guilty as the jihadis. They are traitors, they are criminals, they are evil.

Bruce Bawer, at Front Page, describes how the Norwegian government condoned the murder of two young women, one Norwegian and one Danish, both students in Norway – in order to protect Islam:

Maren Ueland and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen … planned for their Christmas vacation this year … a hiking tour of the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. …

On Monday morning, December 17, Ueland and Jespersen were found dead in an “isolated area” in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. … Although neither Ueland nor Jespersen had ever been in Morocco and were not familiar with the territory, they had been backpacking alone. On the last evening of their life, they pitched a tent in which to spend the night. The next morning, a French couple, also tourists, found them dead – one of them in the tent, the other just outside. Both had been subjected to “brutal rape” and then “hacked to death.” One or both of them (sources differ) had been beheaded. The killings have been described as “slaughter” and as having been performed “ISIS style”.

An ID card found in the tent led local police to track down and arrest one suspect in Marrakesh. By late Tuesday, three others had been apprehended in that city. Soon authorities in Morocco and Denmark were suggesting that the culprits were connected to ISIS; by the end of the week their membership in that organization had been established. On Friday afternoon came news that nine more alleged members of the same ISIS cell had been arrested in Marrakesh, Tangier, and other cities. The murders are being treated, at least by Morocco and Denmark, as an act of terrorism – a conclusion supported by videotape of the atrocity that has been circulating on Moroccan social media and that has been certified as authentic by Danish intelligence. In the video, a man says in French: “This is for Syria, here are the heads of your gods.” …

Why … were those two young women so unaware of the dangers they were courting? They seem to have set out on their adventure thinking that the mountains of Morocco were no less menacing than the mountains of Telemark. How can this be? They were in their mid to late twenties, no longer children. They had lived through 9/11 and all the major jihadist acts that have occurred in Western Europe in the years since then. Surely they had heard of ISIS. Surely they knew that Morocco is an Islamic country … And yet they both decided that it was a good idea for them to spend their Christmas holiday hiking, unescorted, in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and sleeping, just the two of them, unarmed, in a tent, in the middle of nowhere.

To say that these poor young women were ignorant is not to criticize them but to point a finger at the people who shaped their image of the Muslim world. Both of them grew up in countries where, in the wake of every deadly act of jihadist terrorism, news reporters and politicians were quick to avoid, or deny, the connection of those atrocities to Islam. Throughout their formative years, the TV channels available to them were full of upbeat programs, and the newspapers and popular magazines on sale at their grocery-story checkouts full of cheery profiles, celebrating the wonderful contributions made to their societies by Muslim immigrants. …

These were two young women who grew up … being regularly fed the soothing reassurances of politicians such as Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, who, in her official comments on the double murder, called it “meaningless.” No, it wasn’t meaningless: it was an act of war by Muslims dedicated to the conquest and eradication of infidels.

As it happens, on December 20, the same day Solberg made her statement, the Italian Senate observed a minute of silence in the memory of  Ueland and Jespersen, who were described explicitly as victims of “Islamic terrorism”. But Solberg avoided such language. Even though, by the time of her statement about the murders, a video of the four perpetrators pledging loyalty to ISIS had surfaced online, and Moroccan and Danish authorities had declared the killings an act of terror, Solberg, whose priority in such circumstances is invariably to protect the good name of Islam, refused to do so. Meanwhile, as of Christmas Eve, none of the six major Norwegian party leaders with active Twitter or Facebook accounts had so much as mentioned the murders on their feeds … Evidently, they’re determined to ride this one out in silence. Let that reprehensible fact sink in for a moment.

Erna Solberg, her entire government, all the political leaders, and the Norwegian press are guilty of luring these women to their violent deaths and are accessories to their murder before and after the fact.

For a long time now, Christmas has been a secular holiday; a season of feasting, of exchanging gifts and greetings of goodwill; a season when, in the north, the long nights are still warmed and lit by fire; when, north and south, evergreen trees are brought indoors and decorated. It is a season of merriment, and the enjoyment of it does not depend on belief in the religion its name implies. In the custom of the festive holiday, we wish all our readers, commenters, followers, visitors and critics, the many who are not religious as well as the fewer who are,

A Very Merry Christmas!

Mark Levin interviews Victor Davis Hanson. They talk chiefly about the misuse of freedom to destroy freedom. Hanson muses on how many of those who have gained most from it – such as the tech billionaires – now vote against it; how the Left wants equality above everything else, so would rather all were equally poor, even very poor, than that some were very rich while the “poor” had ample of what they needed; how the opinion of the Left surrounds us and compels us towards a nightmare – a radical egalitarian society. (Since we agree with so much that is said by both the interlocutors, we’ll overlook Levin saying that “human beings were created by God”.)

At this gift-giving time of year, you might want to give a book to a teenager who is not a social justice warrior, a snowflake, or a feminist. If so, we recommend the just-out novel Mordec Raids England, the first of a five-volume saga under the overall title The Thrilling Adventures of Mordec the Viking. It is set in a 10th century full of useful anachronisms.

To come clean about an interest, the books were written by our editor-in chief, Jillian Becker, who maintains that the stories are also for time-worn adults who savor irony and indulge themselves with laughter.

The books are available from Amazon in both kindle and print versions. If you bought the first volume for this Christmas you would have an easy choice of the next four books for each of the next four Christmases. Alternatively, you could buy all five books right now. The first of the kindle books is free for a few weeks. The five titles are: Mordec Raids England; Mordec’s Quest; Mordec and the Hidden Hand; Mordec and the Lost Boys; Mordec the Conqueror.

Mordec son of Hauk is an anomalous Viking: an intellectual teenage action-man. His surprising adventures are packed with highly individual characters, among them a girl warrior, a charming executioner, a gloomy knight, a woman ship captain, a philanthropic troll, a pair of polished caring-sharing hypocrites, an evil but cunning abbot, a billionaire tycoon, all caught in extraordinary situations. One of the most startling and exciting episodes (in the third book, Mordec and the Hidden Hand) is a philosophical-theological debate conducted without a word being spoken. That alone is a must-read. And there is much more for your wonder and merriment in this season and beyond.

The Yellow Jacket protests continue in France, and have spread to Holland, Belgium, Sweden(!), and Britain. 

We hope the uprising will seriously disturb all EU member states, and that its purpose is to overthrow their present governments and permanently destroy the EU itself. We hope it is a case of the peoples of Western Europe finally ridding themselves of the traitors they foolishly elected to govern them, who have used their power to ruin their own countries and the continent as a whole by letting in millions of hostile unassimilable Muslims from the Third World. 

Bruce Bawer, writing at Gatestone, says that is what he thinks and hopes it may be:      

I wondered whether this dramatic sign of popular discontent marked the start of the WesternEuropean public’s pushback against the elites’ disastrous multicultural and globalist project. …

The first thing one notices about the variety of motives cited in the media is that they are not unrelated. Anti-EU sentiment? Opposition to the huge immigrant tide? A major reason for anti-EU sentiment in WesternEurope is resentment at the power of Brussels to force member states to take certain numbers of so-called refugees. Similarly, protesters who are angry over high taxes know very well that a great deal of their money is being used to support immigrants who become welfare clients the moment they enter the country. …

AcrossWestern Europe, ordinary citizens feel ignored and condescended to by their political, business, academic, and media elites. Against the will of most of these citizens, their leaders are gradually surrendering their nations’ sovereignty to the EU, which Macron has frankly admitted wanting to transform into a United States of Europe.

Also against these citizens’ will, their nations have been flooded with Muslim immigrants who embody a major cultural challenge, have caused massive social unrest, and represent a devastating economic burden.

Although it is increasingly obvious that taxpayer-funded Islamization is leading Western Europe down the wrong path, the EU, which stands foursquare behind this disastrous development, refuses to reverse course. Naturally, the powerless man and woman in the street are scared, resentful, and, yes, outraged. Perhaps the question should not be why Western Europeans are rioting but why they did not start rioting a long time ago. 

The media in general, being against nationalism and for Islamization, are of course using their usual smear-labels to discredit the movement. The protestors, they say, are xenophobes, bigots, Nazis. They claim that Nazi banners have appeared among the Yellow Jackets. If they have, we suspect that globalist fans of Islam and the EU planted them there. It’s a common trick of the Left to do  such a thing. We remember when “Nazis” with racist banners were planted among Tea Party protestors in America to discredit the movement.   

So is this the beginning of a war of the Yellow Jackets for Western nationalism against the Black Masks for Islam and globalism? 

What discourages the idea is a sign that the yellow jacket is becoming the symbol of civil uprising as such. In Italy, Muslim immigrants themselves and their globalist allies donned the same yellow jackets to protest the policies of the nationalist government recently elected to oppose Islamization!  

An encouraging sign that the Yellow Jacket uprising is a movement to save  Europe is that it is shaking the arrogant rulers, the globalists in power. It has broken apart the coalition government of Belgium. And President Macron of France has had to abandon a policy of taxing citizens to the bone in order to pay for planetary coolants to be manufactured out of moonbeams.    

An imminent and severe threat to freedom is the policy of certain businesses and ostensible facilitators of business that suddenly see themselves as arbiters and dictators of moral rectitude rather than what they are needed to be and essentially are – profit-makers.

To be in business to make a profit is enormously useful, supremely  important, and highly moral. 

Visa and Mastercard are among those that have decided otherwise. They are refusing their services to people and organizations with whom they have political disagreements.

As once it was religious disagreement that the powerful punished, now it is political disagreement. In both cases the punishers believe their views are  morally correct. It is not dissent, they believe, but immorality that they are punishing, for the long-term good of all humankind. 

It is very short-sighted of them. If they stick to a policy of selling their services only to their political like-thinkers, and implement it efficiently, they will be excluding as clients half the population of every Western country. We wonder if they have understood and accepted that consequence.

Among the people and organizations they are punishing are Jihad Watch and the Freedom Center. Both are politically conservative. So we presume that the people making the decision to deny them service are Leftists, and we must look at the issue through a Leftist lens to understand why they are thinking this way.

A Leftist lens is one that picks race, color, ethnic origin and sex as prime measures of virtue and deservedness. (The Left is obsessed with race and sex.) 

So who are the people at Mastercard and Visa who are punishing conservatives by refusing to serve them? 

The Management Committee of Mastercard is made up thus: 

26 members, of which 

5 are women, including the Vice Chair 

6 are Asian 

4 are Hispanic

11 are white men

The Management Team of Visa consists of :

11 members,  of which 

4 are women all bearing  the title of Executive Vice President and 1 more who is Vice Chair   

2 Asians 

5 white men including the CEO

(Who will wager us a dollar or two that they all vote Democrat and contribute to the Democratic Party?) 

Wallace Nunn writes at Front Page, a Freedom Center website: 

Every day there is a new report about how Facebook, Google,Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and other giants of social media censor content, banish certain commentators for incorrect views, and otherwise work in a steady if unsystematic way to homogenize political opinion within an acceptably progressive bandwidth.  Ideas are scoured for “racism” — as contentiously defined by the intellectual stylebook of the hard left Southern Poverty Law Center, which the media have set up as an “authority” on hate speech; freedom of speech is seen as a nuisance rather than a guarantee of personal liberty and true diversity of opinion.

But there is an even more sinister threat to the first amendment than the social media, a threat that operates in a stealth way in the most crucial arena of our economic system.  It is corporate giants MasterCard and Visa, which now use their unparalleled financial power to determine what speech should be allowed and what speech should be silenced.

Most Americans use a credit or debit card every day and take these two corporations as much for granted as the light switch or the automobile ignition. We buy things with their cards ranging from the annual vacations to the daily groceries. These two interlocked corporations are the drum majors marching us into a cashless society. They are powers unto themselves, but their eminence rests on our money and the fees they exact to accommodate our transactions. 

The cards they issue are even more critical to the vendors whom they pay. Without the ability to accept charges to these cards as payment many businesses would in effect be out of business.

Unlike the comparatively clumsy and very public efforts of the social media to erase “offensive” — all too often a synonym for conservative — opinion, the cognate machinations of Visa/Mastercard take place more remotely and without response in the dark space of the mundane financial transaction.

It is as simple and as faceless as a lethal injection: An individual who wants to support an organization online makes the digital donation and is then informed that Visa/Mastercard will not process it. Neither the individual nor the organization he wishes to support are told that they are on a blacklist, let alone informed how they got there or how to get off.  The donor is denied his right to put his money where his mouth is. …

The Freedom Center had such an experience a few months ago when online donations were overnight peremptorily refused by Visa/Mastercard with no reason given and no protest accepted.  We were able to create enough noise about this injustice — in the media and with the threat of legislative attention — that the credit card giants turned the power back on just as capriciously as they had turned it off.

We were lucky. Robert Spencer, whose jihadwatch.org is one of the indispensable sites for understanding the intentions and the threat ofIslamic terrorism, has been shut down from receiving supporters’ donations for several weeks now, and is forced to try to keep Jihad Watch going on a shoestring while Visa/Mastercard imperiously ignores demand letters and threats of court action from his attorneys. 

The anti-Semitic Nation of Islam’s credit card donations are processed; the anti-Islamist Jihad Watch’s are not.

This oligopoly acts with the faceless finality of an IRS lien when it sets itself up as lawmaker, judge and jury with the power to decide which speech should be allowed and which should be shut down.  It kills free speech not by arguing against the ideas it disapproves of, but by the silence of the arbitrary act, using the financial system to accomplish the deed. …

Over half the people of the United States who own a debit or credit card use it as their sole method for paying bills. (Most of the other half use them too, just not as frequently.) In 2015 there were 69.5 billion debit card payments with a value of $2.56 trillion and 33.8 billion credit card payments with a value of $3.16trillion — together adding up to around 6 trillion in an economy of 19 trillion.

This is a very sizable public accommodation. More importantly it is immense power, power that can be and is being used to shutdown the civil rights of people who want to support the speech of the Freedom Center, Jihad Watch, other conservative groups and anyone else in our political universe. … 

We have come to a point in our history when government must once against step in to preserve rights and prevent wrongs just as it did in 1964. Civil Rights are as much imperiled now as they were then. The technology revolution has undeniably brought much that is good and fruitful, but as it has evolved, this revolution has developed a dark side that concentrates increasing power in the hands of fewer people. …

We too are exasperated by Visa/Mastercard, but we are not convinced that  government should step in. It’s better to keep government out. The cure is surely to be found, as always, in the free market. Competition is the right way to bring companies that exploit near-monopolies to their commercial senses – and will keep them morally clean and decent.   

In the past, attempts at world government have been either imperial or federal: the whole world governed by a single nation – Napoleon’s dream for the French, Hitler’s dream for the Germans; or a union of nation-states with some powers of local self-rule, a league of all nations under the supreme authority of a central government.   

But those visions now are faded. Karl Marx’s idea of a world ruled (somehow) by “the workers” who will “lose their chains” and “unite” across national boundaries, regardless of race, creed, language, history, underlies the new One World ideal. But it is developing in ways Marx did not foresee. It is not “the workers” who will become one but the peoples. They will move in vast waves across the earth, up and down and to and fro upon it. They will mix and mingle. There will be no nation-states because there will be no  nations. Along what courses the human currents flow, from where to where, will be decided, regulated, and organized by the World Government. 

The plan is laid out in the UN’s Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, signed in Morocco in December, 2018, by most of the UN’s member countries – including countries that no one in the world wants to migrate into such as Venezuela, and some like Cuba from which no one is allowed to migrate out of. (The countries that have not signed on to it are: Austria, Australia, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United States of America.)     

Though the “non-binding” compact declares a policy which, if implemented, will make nation-states obsolete, it does not say that it is against them, or against their right and duty to protect their sovereignty by guarding their borders. In fact, it slyly seems to insist on being for them. A sub-section of Clause 15 asserts: “The Global Compact reaffirms the sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy and their prerogative to govern migration within their jurisdiction, in conformity with international law. Within their sovereign jurisdiction, States may distinguish between regular and irregular migration status, including as they determine their legislative and policy measures for the implementation of the Global Compact, taking into account different national realities, policies, priorities and requirements for entry, residence and work, in accordance with international law.”

Why doubt the sincerity of this emphatic “reaffirmation”? Where’s the catch? 

It’s in the repeated phrase “in accordance with international law”. What law would that be?

Why, UN law. 

UN law – according to the UN – overrules the laws of member states.

With what UN laws in particular do states’ decisions on immigration have to conform?

No surprise – “human rights law”.

And what are human rights according to the UN?

When the authors of the Global Compact for Migration come on to human rights, a deluge of familiar UN-speak Left-talk cascades down the page, including: “gender equality and empowerment of women and girls”; “eliminate all forms of discrimination, including racism, xenophobia, and intolerance against migrants and their families”; “mainstreams a gender perspective, promotes gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, recognizing their independence, agency and leadership in order to move away from addressing migrant women primarily through a lens of victimhood”; “promotes broad multi-stakeholder partnerships to address migration in all its dimensions by including migrants, diasporas, local communities, civil society, academia, the private sector, parliamentarians, trade unions, National Human Rights Institutions, the media and other relevant stakeholders in migration governance”. 

As to laws, the document cites its own Framework Convention on Climate Change, and its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – neither of which are in fact legally binding (and it remains arguable whether any United Nation “laws” are ever binding because the United Nations has no way of enforcing them if the states concerned choose to disregard them).  

We know from statements by its authors that the Framework Convention on Climate Change is intended to give the UN the power to redistribute wealth world-wide. 

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a high-minded document which affirms the UN’s determination to “abolish poverty and hunger”, and make everyone in the world well-educated, well-housed, healthy and happy –  without explaining how to fund the party. 

These are not documents of law. They are documents of ambition. 

But all too possibly the Global Compact for Migration will turn out to be a self-license for the UN to decide which countries migrants can or must move from, which countries they can or must move to – and to get them moving. 

A nation-state is a people’s home. If (when?) there are no nation-states we will all be homeless.   

The UN must be destroyed!