By Ida Auken, Member of the Danish Parliament, from the World Economic Forum (“Davos”) – an annual meeting of billionaires and other members of Big Virtue:

Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city – or should I say, “our city”. I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.

It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.

First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?

Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends. I enjoy the exercise and the ride. It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey. Funny how some things never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants. It makes perfect sense and reminds us of how our culture emerged out of a close relationship with nature.

“Environmental problems seem far away”

In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

Once in awhile, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy – the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.

This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well being. In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over. I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.

The death of shopping

Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.

When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don’t really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.

For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time.

“They live different kinds of lives outside of the city”

My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.

Tommy Robinson’s acceptance speech when he is awarded the Free Speech prize at the Danish Parliament:

https://youtu.be/GMFWbJ9yuiw 

It’s long, but it’s a must-watch.

There are NO benefits to Europe (or America, or Canada, or anywhere) from mass Muslim immigration.

Mass Muslim immigration brings terrorism, death, destruction, decay, injustice and despair.

“Diversity is our strength” is a  fatuous slogan.

Paul Joseph Watson dares to say so:

 

Gentlefolk in the 18th. century thought that to try to live happily was a reasonable aim, to judge by the statement of the great authors of the US Declaration of Independence. To them it appeared “self-evident” that every person had a “right” (“endowed by their Creator”, or, in other words, a natural right) to his life and his choice how to live it, which surely meant that he would live it as nearly to his heart’s desire as he could.

Horny handed sons of toil, even if as free under the law, were not expected, either by themselves or their betters, to achieve the same forms of happiness. Enough for them if they could earn their daily bread. For that they lived and strove. Their life was the striving. It occupied their hours, their days, their years, their bodies and their thoughts. Success was survival. Survival was for most of them the only reasonable attainable happiness. If some strove for more – excess, property, leisure – and attained it, then happiness abounded. (Happiness, that is to say, as contentment. Other forms of gratification – thrills, excitement, delights of the senses, scoring triumphs – are not our subject. They are experienced episodically and enjoyed to the degree the individual is capable of.)

The welfare state relieved the workers of the need to strive for survival. Now all could be philosophers. The joy of exploring the limitless sphere of the mind was open to all. Universal happiness would reign.

But doesn’t.

The reasons why people commit suicide are many and various, but what they all have in common is that they find life unbearable. So suicide rates might be taken as a gauge of happiness and the lack of it in a population.

The figures for those rates from the last few years (according to Wikipedia – and perhaps not entirely trustworthy) provide some surprises. (Worth noticing in passing – far more males kill themselves than do females everywhere.)

Highest suicide rate in the world: Greenland. Average 82.8 per 100,000 per annum. It is a welfare state.

Google reveals:

As part of Denmark, Greenlanders have access to one of the most extensive social welfare systems in Europe, including universal, nationalized medical care and free state education, including college.

(President Trump has asked Denmark if it would sell Greenland to the USA. Rhetorical question: Would life in Greenland be better, more bearable, happier if it became the 51st. state of the USA, which provides much less welfare? USA suicide average per 100,000 per annum, 14.5.)

Big drop to the next highest. Guyana 30.2, Lithuania 28.27, South Korea 26.6

The average for most European countries is between 12.57 (Germany) and 17 (Belgium).

Britain? Only 7.23!

China? 9.8

Iran 4.8   The state does most of the killing there.

Venezuela 3.2  Nature does it there, because the people are starving and have no medicines. Venezuela is – way beyond a welfare state – a socialist state.

Syria 0.1  Constant civil war rages there.

Pakistan 1.1   People are happy in Pakistan?

Haiti  – a truly miserable place of hunger and disease. Average suicide?  0.0

But back to the pursuit of happiness in the civilized West.

What went wrong? Is it possible that the strivers enjoyed the striving and its meager rewards?

Or did philosophizing bring the newly leisured to ask, “What is it all for anyway?“. And find no answer?

There are thousands of counselors – even millions, we would guess – telling unhappy people how to be happy. There are hundreds of thousands of books giving readers rules for living –  from obedience to which, happiness might be expected.

And there is religion. Religion is supposed to “give meaning to life”.

Does it answer the question “what is it all for anyway?”

Let’s look at an individual case of unhappiness. In America.

At the American Conservative, we found this letter, reproduced by Rod Dreher, to whom it was sent as if to an agony aunt:

Mr. Dreher,

The things you have been writing lately about alienated young men and mass shootings prompt me to reach out to you. I am not a young man anymore, but I am dealing with things that I did not imagine I would be when I was young and newly married. Back then, everything made sense. I feel like I need to tell my story.

My background is that I am a successful businessman (a kind of consultant) living in a well-to-do suburb of a Southern city. My wife and I married relatively early, and had two kids. The boys are in good colleges in other states. They are getting ready to head back to school next week. It has been a real pleasure having them here this summer. Our house becomes a tomb when they are not around.

Four years ago, my wife told me that she didn’t want to be married to me anymore. After almost 30 years, she had had enough. I did not see that coming. We almost never fought. We used to go to dinner together, take family vacations, do things together, etc etc. She just said that she thought she had hitched herself to a man too young, and now that the boys were older and out of the house, she was reconsidering her life. I asked her if there was another man. She said no, and eventually I believed her. I asked her if she wanted a divorce. She said probably so, but she wanted to wait until the boys got out of school. She is a reasonable person with a finance background, and knows that a divorce would cost us a lot at a time when we are supporting two kids in college.

She has a job she loves. I work from a home office. I was so glad when my company gave me the chance to do this. I miss the friendships in the office, but when you talk on your blog about wokeness in the workplace, I always find myself nodding along. A few years back, my company started getting engaged with “diversity and inclusivity” in the workplace. I noticed that every time they would run us all through one of those seminars, we would all come out of it more suspicious of each other. It was crazy. It was as if our bosses were trying to poison the office environment. I got to the point where as a white male, I saw my co-workers as potentially the people who would try to get me fired if I said one wrong thing by mistake. They might have seen me that way too. It was crazy. The more management pushed “diversity and inclusivity”, the more anxious things felt in the office. When the company was restructuring and offered people in my division the chance to work at home, I jumped at it, just to get out of that tense environment.

It was a blessing at first, but nowadays I wonder if that was the right thing to do. The idea of working from home seems great, until you realize that you don’t see people at all. I have a nice home office where I put in my 9 to 5, which is really more like 8 to 7, but everybody does that. If I’m being truthful, I stay in my office longer than I have to on most days, because there is nothing for me outside of it. My wife used to be my best friend. Now we just share a house and a bed. She has friends from her office, and goes out with them a lot. When all this started, I honestly thought she was seeing some guy. I’m not going into the details, but I’m truly convinced that she’s not. She’s just hanging out with other middle-aged women who are sick of their husbands too.

I used to think only men behaved like that. Mother and Daddy have both passed away, but they had a good marriage. Some of their friends got divorced when I was a kid, and it was always the man leaving his wife for a younger woman. They were very judgmental of them, but in a way I still think was right. They were Southern people (I think you know what I mean, Mr. Dreher), and that meant that they thought it was dishonorable for a man to do his wife like that. I internalized that honor code, and have always lived by it, and my Catholic faith. If my wife demands a divorce, I will give it to her, but I won’t marry again. How could I go through an annulment? I can’t say truthfully that this was not really a marriage. I meant it when I said my vows, and I believe my wife did too. I am not going to make bastards of my sons because my wife abandoned me and I want to be married again. Besides, there would be no marrying again for me anyway. I look at myself in the mirror — mid to late 50s, half-bald, pot belly, etc etc. What woman would want me even if I was free to marry her?

I was an only child, so I have no close family to speak of. We are Catholics. My faith is just about the only thing that keeps me going through all this, but it’s thin. My wife refuses to see a marriage counselor. I made the first steps to getting an appointment to talk to our priest, but I gave up because that was hopeless. I feel bad for our priest. He’s managing a big suburban parish all on his own. It would have taken forever to get an appointment, and there was no way he was going to be able to give us the time it would take to save our marriage, especially given that my wife doesn’t want to save it. Besides, there is nothing I’ve ever heard our priest say that tells me he is a man who could help us. He talks like one of those life coaches our company used to bring in for team building exercises, a guy who gets all his ideas from Hallmark cards.

She still goes to mass with me, but just out of habit. When I stand there listening to Fr give his cheerful but empty homilies, I think about what’s keeping me from going home and blowing my brains out. I’m not going to do this because I’m scared of pain and I’m scared of going to Hell. Also, I don’t want to hurt the boys, and make them feel like they did something to cause it or give them something to be ashamed of. However, I think a lot about how little I have to live for anymore. I am not even sure that the boys think of me much, except as “Good Old Dad”…

Nobody can see it. I stand there in church, wearing my coat and tie, and people probably think I have it all together. We drive nice cars, we live in a nice house in a good neighborhood, etc, etc. I am grateful to have a good job that has allowed me to provide for my family. By all the world’s standards, I’m doing well. I have “white privilege”. 

What a joke. When I first started working in my home office, I would dress up in a coat, no tie, and dress pants to go to “work.” It felt right to hang on to that habit. Since my marriage fell apart, I notice that some days I don’t even get out of my pajamas. I sit there at my nice desk doing all my work on my laptop, and go right back to bed at the end of the day without even taking a shower. I know this is pathetic, and if the boys were still at home, I would know to keep up appearances. This is my life.

When the boys graduate and don’t have to depend on us, I guess that will mean Decision Time. I will probably move out, though to all rights we ought to sell the house. I remember the day we bought it, and talking with my wife about that big dining room, and how we looked forward to the kids coming home with their wives and children for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Oh, we sure had big plans for that dining room. We bought a house with a fireplace because we dreamed about sitting around it with the grandchildren. All that is over now, and not because I wanted it to be. I feel so powerless. Maybe I would stay here if either one of the boys moved back, but given the fields they have chosen, I don’t look for that to happen, and even if it did, we would just be keeping up appearances for their sake. Southern people are real good at that, as you know.

What prompted me to write to you is your writings about the loneliness crisis. I am not some white trash 22 y.o. living in a trailer somewhere, playing video games, and living off his Mama, but I am completely isolated in my life. My “video game” is Excel spreadsheets. The friends I had back in the happier days were all “couples friends” through my wife. When she said she didn’t want to be married to me, we stopped having people over, and stopped accepting invitations to other people’s houses. After a few years, those invitations stopped coming. I tried to keep up these friendships with the husbands, but it was awkward. I told a couple of the guys I was closest to about the mess in my marriage, and they seemed sympathetic, but there wasn’t a lot they could do. They all had kids, and their couples friends. Two or three times I went to their dinner parties by myself, but you talk about awkward! I was embarrassed by it all, and just quit going. I miss those guys, and I even miss their wives. We used to be happy all together.

If this is “white privilege”, screw it. I stopped by the shoe repair shop a couple of weeks ago, and there were some black guys my age sitting around talking and laughing with each other. I envied them. I probably make 10 or 15 times more than them, but they are probably rich in ways that I used to be before I went “bankrupt”. I would trade all this so-called “white privilege” for a happy marriage, a strong family, and good friends. Mother and Daddy didn’t have a lot of money, but at least they had that. They also had a small-town church where they felt at home. How can anybody feel at home in a big parish like mine? I was taught to be charitable, especially to the clergy, and I do feel bad for our priest, who is carrying a heavy load. But this ain’t church. I’ve gotten to the point where I sit there during mass and I wonder how many of those men in the pews are just like me: barely holding it together, wondering what the hell we’re living for, ignored by our wives, and starving for friendship. God feels so far away. I have never doubted His existence, but these days, He feels like the Pope — a nice man who lives far away and who doesn’t see us.

I know I sound like I’m feeling sorry for myself. I guess I am. But damn it, I didn’t think things were going to work out like this. I did everything I was supposed to do, and it all fell to pieces anyway. I’m racking my brains trying to figure out how I can fix this, but my wife doesn’t want it to be fixed. She just wants out. I recognize that I am privileged economically and socially, but I’m here to tell you that if you were a working man who drove by my house, and saw me out front mowing our big lawn, you would think I had it made. In fact, you would be looking at a dead man, at a man who secretly hopes he falls over from a heart attack so he doesn’t have to keep carrying this weight of loneliness. At this point, my only purpose in life is to do what I have to do so my sons can have a good life or think they have a good life, until they get to my age and it falls to shit, and they end up doing just what their Good Old Dad is doing.

The thought just occurred to me as I’m writing this that the only real reason we will have to keep our household together after our sons graduate is if one of them can’t find a job, and has to live with us. That’s a sorry state to be in, knowing that the only thing that would keep you and your wife together is an unemployed grown-up child.

I appreciate the opportunity to get this off of my chest. I like reading your blog because even though it’s depressing sometimes, I feel like you talk about the real world, which is more than I get from my priest. I would just ask your readers to keep in mind that when they see people at church, in the store, and at other places, that those people might be suffering in ways that are not obvious. You think folks have it made, but they don’t. You see me getting out of my [luxury car brand] at church, with my wife, and we’re all dressed up and smiling, but from my very jaded perspective, we’re dead people who have no future. At least my wife has the girls from the office.

I’ve thought about asking my manager if I can come back to the office, but I know that’s not a solution. I’m the Great White Male, the source of all evil in the world. Given my run of luck, it would be about right for somebody to falsely accuse me of something, and end up taking away the last I have left from what started out as an American dream. I’d end up jobless and poor, and then the gun to the head might not seem so scary after all.

Sorry. Thanks for listening.

One thing we find particularly interesting about this “confession” is how little the man’s faith does for him. Fear of hell keeps him from suicide. That’s about all.

If he were not a believing Catholic, he might have developed some curiosity about the world he lives in. It has not occurred to him to go exploring in the infinite realm of the mind.

He was happier when his children lived with him. If he had grandchildren living near by he might be happy again. For a while, anyway. Until they grew up. But young men are not quick to marry now and raise a family.

Readers, your comments are needed.

… 80 years ago today.

On August 23, 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were in alliance. Nazism and Communism, twin religions, united with each other.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at The Daily Signal:

Eighty years ago, on Aug. 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of nonaggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

The world was shocked—and terrified—by the agreement. Western democracies of the 1930s had counted on the huge resources of Communist Russia, and its hostility to the Nazis, to serve as a brake on Adolf Hitler’s Western ambitions.

Great Britain and the other Western European democracies had assumed that the Nazis would never invade them as long as a hostile Soviet Union threatened the German rear.

The incompatibility between communism and Nazism was considered by all to be existential—and permanent. That mutual hatred explained why dictators Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin both despised and feared each other.

Yet all at once, such illusions vanished with signing of the pact. Just seven days later, on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. World War II had begun.

After quickly absorbing most of Eastern Europe by either coercion or alliance, Hitler was convinced that he now had a safe rear. So he turned west in spring 1940 to overrun Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and the Netherlands.

Hitler accomplished all that relatively easily, failing only to conquer Great Britain with an exhaustive bombing campaigning.

During all these Nazi conquests, a compliant Stalin shipped huge supplies of food and fuel for the German war effort against the West. Stalin cynically had hoped that Germany and the Western democracies would wear themselves out in a wasting war—similar to the four horrific years in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.

Communism then easily would spread to the Atlantic amid the ruins of European capitalism. Unlike Czarist Russia in 1914, this time around the Soviets wanted to stay out of a German war. Instead, Stalin rearmed during the nonaggression pact with Hitler.

Stalin, of course, had no idea he had created a Nazi monster that would quickly devour all of Continental Europe—and turn to its rear to eye a now-isolated Soviet Union.

Much less did Stalin realize that the battle-hardened German war machine would soon overrun his country in a surprise attack beginning on June 22, 1941, a little less than two years after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The nonaggression pact in a way had also ensured that a European war would soon turn into a global massacre that left roughly 65 million dead.

At the time of deal, imperial Japan was fighting the Soviet Union on the Manchurian-Mongolian border. The Japanese were de facto allies of Nazi Germany. They had assumed that Stalin’s fear of an aggressive Germany meant the Soviet Union would have to worry about a two-front war against both Germany and Japan.

But now, the surprise agreement stunned the Japanese, who saw it as a German betrayal. It left them alone against the superior forces of Russia’s eastern armies.

Japan quickly withdrew from its losing Russian war. In time it signed its own nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, in April 1941—ironically, just months before Hitler’s planned Operation Barbarossa, the massive invasion of Russia.

Japan correctly concluded by the betrayal that Hitler’s Germany could not be trusted and deserved tit-for-tat duplicity. So Japan never joined Hitler’s surprise invasion of Russia. Instead, the Japanese turned their attention to the Pacific and especially the vulnerable British and American bases at Singapore, Burma, the Philippines—and Pearl Harbor.

In sum, the August 1939 nonaggression pact ensured the German attack against Great Britain and Western Europe. It also convinced Hitler that Russia was vulnerable, gullible and appeasing, and could be overrun in weeks following an invasion.

Finally, the deal ended all Japanese ideas of fighting the Soviet Union on the ground from the East in partnership with Nazi Germany invading from the West. Instead, Japan turned toward the vulnerable British and American eastern forces.

In sophisticated times, we sometimes forget that time-honored concepts like the balance of power and military deterrence—not good intentions and international peace organizations—alone keep the peace. When the pact destroyed fragile alliances and encouraged German adventurism, war was certain.

The final ironies? The Soviet double-cross of the Western democracies eventually ended up almost destroying Russia, which bore the brunt of an empowered Germany.

The redirection of Japanese war strategy to target America finally brought the United States into World War II, which ensured the destruction of Japan and Germany.

Add this all up, and in some sense World War II really started on Aug. 23, 1939, 80 years ago this summer.

Two objectives have to be achieved by those Europeans – numbering probably a little more than half the indigenous population of the continent – who still want their civilization to survive.

One is to bring their respective countries out of the phony ‘superstate’ , the European Union (EU).

The other is to save them from Islamization by stopping the advance of the centuries-long and recently escalating Mohammedan jihad.

Increasing numbers of Europeans are engaged in an active struggle to attain those ends. Nationalist parties are gathering strength. Their leaders are trying to get an international movement started to unseat the rulers who have betrayed the peoples, to break up the EU, to stop immigration from the Third World, and to take back the areas that have fallen to the Muslim foe.

On April 25, 2019, some of these leaders gathered in Prague, a few weeks before the European Parliament elections set for May 23-26.

Soeren Kern reports at Gatestone:

The rally was sponsored by the Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom (MENF), a pan-European alliance of nine nationalist parties dedicated to stopping mass migration and recovering national sovereignty from the European Union.

The speakers were:

The president of the Czech Freedom and Direct Democracy Party (SPD), Tomio Okamura [who organized the event], was joined by Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders, French National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen, the [Belgian] President of Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom (MENF), Gerolf Annemans, and British MEP Janice Atkinson, who is also Vice Chair of the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) political group in the European Parliament.

The Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the Anti-Mass Migration League party, sent a video message.

They addressed an audience in Prague’s Wenceslas Square.

We quote parts of Soeren Kern’s extracts from the keynote speeches:

Tomio Okamura, President, Freedom and Direct Democracy party (SPD) and Deputy Speaker of the [Czech] Chamber of Deputies:

Today, Europeans are once again fighting for their survival. It is not just the migration of colonists from Africa and the Arab countries that is changing the face of Western Europe. It is also the growing assault from Brussels on the sovereignty of Europe’s nation states in the name of a multicultural superstate.

For those who downplay this warning, I would like to mention a quote from the former President of the European Union, Herman Von Rompuy: ‘The time of the homogenous nation-state is over. Each European country has to be open for different culture.’ In contemporary Europe, the Brussels aristocracy has no place for nations, and no place for democracy either. The former President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, has been quoted as saying: ‘It is not the EU’s philosophy that the crowd can decide its destiny.’

And for those who are still not sure about Europe’s ambitions, German Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Roth has called for replacing the principle of unanimity in EU decision-making with qualified majority voting.

The mass immigration of millions of Africans and Muslims to Europe is no coincidence — it is a targeted liquidation of traditional European nation states, as well as the targeted destruction of traditional European values — hence the concept of the traditional family is being liquidated, and patriotism becomes a rude word, because these values ​​are the biggest obstacle to the demolition of nation states.

It is up to us to decide whether we give up all that our ancestors have sacrificed their lives for, whether we will savor their memory, or defend their heritage.

I say clearly that the current EU must end! I remind you that at present, European Union directives and regulations outrank the laws of the EU’s member states …

National patriotic parties are on the rise all over Europe, promoting freedom, democracy and the sovereignty of their peoples.

 

Geert Wilders, MP and Chairman, [Dutch] Party for Freedom:

We are gathered here today to stand up for our freedom and our sovereignty. The most precious things we have. Because without a strong nation state, there is no democracy. And without democracy there are no liberties.

Today, we are fighting for our existence. And the biggest threats to our survival and our freedom are the European Union, mass immigration and the Islamic ideology of submission and violence. 

First, let’s talk about the European Union. An undemocratic superstate. It is forcing its commands on the peoples of Europe. It is trying to take away our national sovereignty!

The European Union is attempting to erase our nation states … shaped by their own history, culture, language and identity …

We want to control our own borders again. We do not want mass immigration. And we do not want to be invaded by a tyrannical ideology.

The European Union has been pampering Islam for decades now. But Islam is a medieval cult that denies freedom to others. So why should we grant Islam any liberties? We should not, we should stop Islam. By depriving Islam of the means to destroy our identity, we are not violating freedom; we are preserving our identity and guaranteeing freedom.

A choice has to be made between Islam and freedom. There is no middle way. Nothing is more precious than liberty and freedom.

Defending our freedom, defending our way of life, requires all of us to be vigilant, courageous and audacious. It requires all of us to raise our voice. To raise our voice against the enemies of freedom. Against the tyranny of Islamization. Against everyone who tries to silence us!

The European Union and many governments facilitate Islam and Islamic immigration. Why are they facilitating a totalitarian ideology? Why are they accommodating an intolerant dogma? It is as if they have surrendered. It is as if they have capitulated. But not on behalf of the people. Not on behalf of you.

Islam and freedom are incompatible.

 

Gerolf Annemans, President, Movement for a Europe of Nations and Freedom (MENF):

We are the resistance. Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, my party president Tom Van Grieken of the Flemish party Vlaams Belang, and all the others, we are proud to have you and Tomio as strong allies in Central Europe of what will become a force for change in Europe. For our homeland and for our freedom, let us join forces and let us stand strong. No matter how strong our opponents could be, we will be stronger because we have the strength of our conviction, and we are the hope that the people of Europe have in us.

 

Janice Atkinson, British MEP and Vice President, Europe of Nations and Freedom:

Vote for the parties that will take you out of the EU. It is the evil empire. Vote for the parties that will tear down the EU state, so that power is returned to the nations of Europe and freedom.

The EU is the dictatorship of the unelected, the failed politicians of their own nations, as they suck the lifeblood of democracy out of our countries. These unelected dictators have imposed mass uncontrolled immigration on our countries. They have failed to secure our external borders.

They have failed to stop migrants arriving by foot, by boats and via people smugglers.

 They have Europe’s blood on their hands.

They have changed our cities and our streets and towns so that they are unrecognizable, and we are foreigners in our own lands. They encourage radical Islam, which has brought into our lives Sharia law, female genital mutilation, child marriage and medieval clothing such as the burka. Enough. No more!

Do not accept that this is Europe’s fate. It is reversible and can be stopped. If you value your freedoms, your way of life, your rule of law, your culture and heritage, the EU has to be stopped.

I hope you follow the British and vote to leave [the EU].

It isn’t easy to leave the EU, as the British have found out. Despite a majority voting for Brexit, the establishment and the EU have colluded to stop us. And that’s the trouble.

We have given control of our lives and our countries and our day to day life and our future to people who do not believe in the nation state, sovereignty and control over our own laws.

We are at a tipping point in Europe.

 

Marine Le Pen, President, [French] National Rally:

The battle for Europe has begun.

The supporters of globalism stand against supporters of the nation state.

European federalists support total deregulation, the complete abolition of borders, the free movement of migrants across the planet and the weakening of nation states for the benefit of oligarchs and bureaucrats. On the other side, there are us patriots from all across Europe.

My country offers a sad example of migratory submersion.

Whole neighborhoods have become non-French areas!

At present the European Union does not have the capacity to send tanks on the streets or to fire on the crowd… But the goal is the same: to reduce our political, legal, and national identity — our capacities of resistance.

During a press conference, Le Pen added:

Immigration must be stopped, and the Islamist ideology must be eradicated…. Islamization and globalism are new totalitarianisms that threaten European countries.

 

In a video broadcast at the Prague event, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said:

I hope we will be working together in a new Europe that defends borders and our children against immigration and Islamic extremism, which must be stopped.

Salvini is trying to unite nationalist parties scattered across the 28-nation European Union to join forces in a new political alliance. On April 8, Salvini was joined in Milan by representatives of Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the Danish People’s Party and the Finns Party, to launch a new alliance called Towards a Common Sense Europe.

Salvini hopes that the new bloc will emerge as the largest in the 751-member parliament after the elections in May.

These leaders and their parties have the right goals. But the European Parliament can effect nothing. It is a powerless talking shop; a window dressed to look as if it had something to do with democracy. True, its members are elected, but they do not legislate. They are powerless.  They go, once chosen by their constituents, to the grand building in Strasbourg where the European Parliament is housed – and they talk. They can say what they like in there. But nothing they say will make the least difference to how the EU’s ‘dictatorship of the unelected‘ , as Janice Atkinson rightly called the government of the EU, rules the continent.

Nothing they say can stop millions of Third World migrants pouring over the continent and before long dominating it.

They will have to stop talking and act. A good start would be to arrest the conceited poseurs who gather in their dark tower in Brussels and decide that the European states must be ended and the Islamic Republic of Europe take their place. Arrest them, bring them to trial as traitors, and sentence them to condign punishment.

Then disband the European Union.

And then if there is still some way to save Europe from Islam, they will need to take it.

But is there a way?

The European Union’s Parliament in Strasbourg: a useless talk tank

“Free” government benefits are the most expensive goods in the world.

The Democratic Socialist Party – formerly the Democratic Party – is trying to win votes by promising free health care for all.

Supposing a national health service were to be introduced into the USA, what would it cost?

Investor’s Business Daily reports and comments:

Democrats have been falling over themselves to endorse Bernie Sanders’s government takeover of health care. Maybe they should have taken a closer look at his “Medicare for all” plan before signing up. The gargantuan price tag is just one of its many terrible flaws.

Last year, 16 Senators, including three presidential hopefuls, co-sponsored Sanders’s “Medicare for all” bill. And earlier this month, more than 70 Democrats signed on to form a “Medicare for all” caucus. Support for the bill is now something of a litmus test for Democratic hopefuls.

Do they have any idea what they’re endorsing?

A new study out Monday from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center finds that the Sanders plan would add $32.6 trillion to federal spending in its first 10 years, with costs steadily rising from there. That closely matches other studies — including one by the liberal Urban Institute — that looked at the Sanders plan.

To put this in perspective, “Medicare for all” would nearly double the size of the already bloated federal government.

Doubling corporate and individual income taxes wouldn’t cover the costs.

Even this [estimate of $32.6 trillion over 10 years] is wildly optimistic. To get to this number, author Charles Blahous had to make several completely unrealistic assumptions about savings under Sanders’ hugely disruptive plan.

The first is a massive cut in payments to providers. Sanders wants to apply Medicare’s below-market rates across the board, which would amount to a roughly 40% cut in payments to doctors and hospitals. Blahous figures this will save hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Democrats are also apparently unaware that “Medicare for all” would be a more expensive than anything that exists anywhere else in the world … 

Sanders’ plan would eliminate all out-of-pocket expenses for medical, dental and vision care. The only exception would be a small copay for brand-name drugs. …

There is no industrialized country in the world that does this.

Even in the Scandinavian countries that Bernie Sanders directs us to admire (rather than Stalinist Russia which is actually his ideal), “people pay as much as 30% of their nations’ health costs out-of-pocket”. 

And – perhaps surprisingly to American communists –

In Communist China, almost a third of health spending is out-of-pocket.

In Bernie’s USA, the illusion of all medical treatment being “free” would need to be maintained. But how? After all, doctors cannot work for nothing. Hospitals have running costs.

Because Sanders would eliminate prices entirely from health care, the only way to control health spending would be to slap stiff price controls on doctors, hospitals and drugs, or ration care.

Rationing is inevitable in any government-run health service. Administrators have to decide how to allocate resources. When you are in control of your own medical decisions, you decide what treatment, what drugs you are able or prepared to pay for. When the state decides for you, it will not consult your preferences. It will make kill-or-cure, life-or-death decisions for you. The “death panels” that Sarah Palin warned against will determine how long you live; and, for as long as you live, in what state of health.   

Here’s what health care in the U.S. would look like as a result:

There would be chronic shortages of doctors nationwide. Hospital overcrowding would be epidemic. Waits for everything from hip replacements to cataract surgery to cancer treatments would be extensive. Drug innovation would come to a virtual standstill. And there would be endless fights over the size of the government’s health budget, along with massive amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.

How do we know this? Because this is precisely what’s happened in countries that have already gone down the “Medicare for all” road.

In Canada, the average wait time for a hip replacement is nearly two years in some provinces. Patients with cataracts can end up waiting a year for surgery. The UK has fewer doctors, nurses and hospital beds per capita than any other industrialized nation, and is in a state of almost constant crisis.

“Almost constant crisis”? There is no break, no pause, no relief for the briefest of moments from the crisis that is the National Health Service of Great Britain.

Here at home, the Veterans Health Administration — once touted by the left as a model of socialized medicine — has seen deadly delays and massive corruption, even as its budget ballooned in size.

Almost 10% of Medicare spending today is for what the government euphemistically calls “improper payments”, but anyone else would label it waste. Extend this across the entire health care system and Sanders’s “Medicare for all” would result in some $400 billion a year in “improper payments”.

But the biggest problem with “Medicare for all” — and any plan to socialize medicine — is its underlying assumption. Namely, that a handful of government central planners can manage trillions of dollars’ worth of resources better than hundreds of millions of people making trillions of decisions every day in the free market. They can’t.

We already know central planning never works, since it has miserably failed where it’s been tried. It didn’t work in the Soviet Union. It doesn’t work in North Korea or Cuba, and it’s causing untold misery in Venezuela.

A socialist government – which is what the government would be that saves or executes its subjects by controlling their health care – is always, necessarily, inescapably, one big Death Panel.

 

Commenting on what is said in this video, John Hinderaker writes ironically, shockingly, and accurately at PowerLine:

[The] entertaining video of Tucker Carlson and Cornel West … offers a good explanation of why socialism always fails, from the perspective of the vast majority. … Tucker asked West: If democratic socialism works, why doesn’t Venezuela have toilet paper?

Of course West’s answers are lame –“real” socialism has never been tried, blah, blah, blah. You could infer from this that West is an idiot and, if he were arguing in good faith, that would be a fair assessment.

But I think the truth is worse. I think the leaders of the socialist movement are perfectly well aware that the inevitable result of socialism is tyranny and mass poverty. But for them, this isn’t a bug, it is a feature. In fact, it is the whole point. Socialism is now, and always has been, a pretext under which power-mad psychopaths seize power and terrorize their fellow humans.

Viewed with cold realism, socialism works very well for those who bring it about. It worked for Lenin and Stalin. It almost worked for Trotsky, but socialism is like Game of Thrones – it is a risky business. It didn’t work for the Old Bolsheviks for the same reason: they lost out to the more vicious and more power-crazed socialist, Stalin. It worked for Yezhov, Yagoda and Beria, although they, too, lost out after years of demented revels. It worked for Khruschev, Brezhnev and Andropov.

Socialism worked for Mao. It worked for Fidel Castro. It worked for Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceaușescu, until the very end. It worked for Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, again with sad ends that didn’t inflict anywhere near enough pain to negate the years of glory and power that went before. It worked for Hugo Chavez, who like Castro, parlayed socialism into a multi-billion dollar fortune, and it has worked so far for Nicolas Maduro. All of these psychopaths, and many others, got exactly what they wanted out of socialism. From their point of view, it is a successful ideology.

While the vast majority suffer under socialism, such suffering is by no means universal. Any number of commissars, Stasi informants, Cuban snitches, petty apparatchiks with dachas, etc., have parlayed their sadistic tendencies into good livings and what they want most, power over others. If you follow Twitter, or generally pay attention to the American Left, you see an army of would-be commissars who yearn for the day when they can accuse a neighbor of wrongthink and have him sent to an American Gulag. In the meantime, they settle for mob action, “doxxing,” and so on.

Socialism isn’t misguided, it is evil. Socialism isn’t a failure, any more than the Black Death was a failure. Sadly, it has worked all too well for more than a century. 

Those cunning human demons who get power, riches, and sadistic satisfaction out of imposing Socialism, need dumb believers to let them impose it.

Kurt Schlichter, a master of sardonic derision, writes at Townhall:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is less hideously unattractive than the usual Democrat potentate or potentatette and has therefore been anointed the new face of her pathetic party. This dumb woman, who looks like Huma Abedin without the pedohubby and the weird relationship with Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, took advantage of her even dumber New York district in order to get elected to Congress by calling herself a “socialist”.  Yeah, the subject of a thousand Trader Joe’s house brand chardonnay toasts is a proud adherent of the ideology that butchered 100 million people in the last century. …

Ocasio-Cortez is an idiot, like all adolescent socialists, so she qualified to be the Great Pinko Hope for a party in decline. Here’s how bad she is – she apparently went to college, got a degree in economics, and still ended up a socialist. If she went to med school, she would have probably left a chain smoker.

As for life experience, she was a bartender. Now, being a bartender is an important occupation that provides demonstrable social benefits, and everyone should have at least one crappy job on their resume because it builds character, but it shouldn’t be the only thing you’ve ever done if you want to be in Congress. …

It was only a fun job for her anyway. Not a necessary one. Contrary to what she pretended – in typical socialist style – she did not grow up in the Bronx (though she was born there). She is the daughter of a successful architect and grew up in one of the richest counties in America.

The left is always trying to make [Socialism] happen. It’s not going to happen, not least of which because us militant Normals have about 400 million or so guns and we aren’t super excited about giving up our stuff or our freedom to a bunch of Marxist weirdos who think we should work harder so their voter base doesn’t have to. But they keep trying to sell us this polished fecal matter of an ideology. In 2009, they put Obama’s smug mug on the cover of Newsweek and announced “We’re all socialists now”, but it soon became obvious that we aren’t anything like socialists now. And, in fact, Newsweek is barely anything at all now, though under socialism, instead of teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, it would be nationalized and we’d all be working to subsidize it so its hack staff could keep their loser sinecures.

A few years later, they tried again by releasing Bernie Sanders from the Old Commies Home to nearly beat Stumbles McMyTurn. That failed and now it’s this nitwit’s turn to spray perfume inside the outhouse.

Naturally, the Pink Dummy was summoned to make the rounds of MSNBCNN in the wake of her win over some other liberal tool. This avatar of a failed nineteenth century death cult was hailed as the future of the Democrats because as the leftist precincts in New York City go, so goes America. She did the same tap dance about socialism that all these twits do – see, socialism isn’t scary. Why, “socialism” is just another word for things we all do together, except when the socialists are in charge they kill you if you defy them. …

Pampered spawn of history’s most prosperous and freest society, these goofs are really excited about something they can barely articulate, so they sputter and spit out words like “justice” and “equality” and then get on their iPhones to call their disappointed dads because they are short on cash …

It’s amusing that so many of us Normals understand socialism better than the socialists do not only in terms of what Marx said, and what history says, but in terms of firsthand knowledge. A lot of us Normals have seen socialism up close and personal. Guys like me actually went and lived in its ruins. If you spent significant time, as I have, in the former Yugoslavia, or Ukraine, or even helping to guard the West German border from those friendly fraternal socialist dudes to the east, you’ll be stripped of any illusions about that garbage ideology.

Socialism is about taking your stuff and your freedom and killing you if you complain. They try to pass it off as just Liberalism 2.0, but then you usually don’t call something by a name unless you mean it. If they don’t mean “socialism” why do they call themselves “socialists”?

They use the term, counting on the stupidity of people educated in public schools (Yah government!), but they are coy about what they really mean. They always point to Sweden and Denmark and Norway when they talk about “socialism”, as if those were their role models … Yet, how come we always see the most excited champagne socialists trekking off to visit the dictators in Havana and Caracas and not the elected leaders in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Oslo?

Venezuela is the socialist paradise that dare not be spoken of. I guess when people are so equal they all have to break into the zoo to eat the zebras, equality stops sounding so awesome.

But see, Venezuela isn’t true socialism. Nothing is ever true socialism, which is super convenient since any country that has ever dabbled in socialism tends to run short of food, medicine, and toilet paper. But I bet smart people like Gulag Barbie can totally make socialism work this time, and you’ll be prosperous and free and have your own pet unicorn. …

They are always sure to stick the “democratic” in front of the “socialism” when they try to sell it to the suckers, but that’s a grift. Do they contend that if we vote in socialism and find that it sucks – as every single country that has tried it has found – we can vote it out again? Yeah, uh huh. Seems legit.

[But] Socialism is a train that, once you board, never stops except if you derail it – which we would have every moral right to do if this hateful creed were imposed upon us.

You see, socialism is the doctrine [by which] people like you and I get to slave away for the benefit of the people those in charge decide are worthy – especially those in charge. …

Socialism means what’s theirs is theirs and so is what’s yours. Our private property – what we have worked for and accumulated over decades – is no longer ours. It’s theirs, to be done with – to be redistributed – as those in power wish. And if you object, they will send people with guns to make you comply.

In contrast, in freedom and capitalism, the people with guns protect you from having what’s yours taken.

They don’t say it, but we Normals are the engine that they intend to power their socialism. We’re supposed to continue working and building and creating just as hard as we did when we kept the rewards. Note how the recipients of socialism – the elite, the bums, the hipster doofuses with their stupid Che T-shirts – never seem to expect that they might be asked to sacrifice too? We’re supposed to give up our property and labor to benefit them, but what do they contribute? New grievances? …

Marxgirl wants to start off with free college, which means you pay for other people’s college too. Notice how there’s no expectation that her fans contribute toward the benefit they are receiving? And then she’s for free health care, which means you pay for other people’s doctors too. Again, the recipients are not expected to work for their own benefit. Want to guess what she wants to do with the means of production? And with private property? And the rights of people who oppose her schemes?

Oh, and she’s also for banning guns. Gee, I wonder why.

In Europe, people are being prosecuted for saying what they think and for telling the truth.

It is being done by the ruling powers to help Islam overwhelm the West and destroy our civilization.

“Without the right to speak your mind, all other rights are worthless,” Pat Condell says – rightly.

This video was made unavailable by YouTube late on May 2, 2017, one day after it had been posted.

Does YouTube have a policy of censoring content it does not like?

Is YouTube punishing Pat Condell for speaking the truth about Islam?

How strong is Islam’s influence over YouTube?

We wait to learn the answers.

The enthusiasm among the expensively under-educated first-time voters for old-time socialist Bernie Sanders, is probably stoked by his (fingers-crossed-behind-his-back) promises to give them “free” college education. Among other goodies. All absolutely free, dropping from the heavens as it were. And as he calls himself a  “democratic socialist”, and tells them that Denmark, Sweden and Norway are extremely happy democratic socialist countries with perfectly sound economies –  why, what could go wrong if they put him in power and he has that wonderful system do for them what it’s done for those happy Scandinavians?

Margin note: Since politicians seldom if ever fulfill their promises, and never have to pay any price for not doing so, but know that promises always garner votes, we wonder why every ambitious candidate doesn’t offer free everything-he-can-think-of. Free college education for all of course – and free iPhones and free computers. That much goes without saying. But why not also: free houses, free cars (two for a family), free month-long vacations twice yearly … ? And … mmm … what else? Free yachts? No. Perhaps that would be going too far. Might raise a little twinge of doubt. But for the slightly older voter, what do you say to guaranteed paid paternal leave of say a month? Maternal leave of say six months? And who’s for a guaranteed income of [pause to think of a fairly preposterous figure] say $100,000 per annum? You see? That guy has your vote, hasn’t he? What fools we’d be not to vote for him. And if he doesn’t take everybody in, if some pause and wonder how the funding would actually be worked (absent bounty from the lord of the universe), his pitch will have the excellent result of getting the doubters at least to start asking the questions that lead men in desperate times to Real Economics.

But to return to Bernie Sanders and “democratic socialism”. It’s not what he would have them think it is.

Ray DiLorenzo writes at Canada Free Press:

Since democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and, to a lesser degree, Hillary Clinton, point to Sweden, Denmark and Norway as models of democratic socialism, let’s examine where they are today.  …

Denmark has the highest level of private debt in the world.  More than half of Danes use the black market to obtain goods and services.  The number of people below the poverty line has doubled in the past 10 years. Denmark’s schools, according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) lag behind even the UK’s. If you need emergency medical service, you need to make an appointment.  Cancer rates are among the highest in the world and [the Danes’] use of anti-depressants is the 2nd highest on the planet. Denmark has become a quasi police state.  Police are not required to display their ID numbers or give you their names.  Denmark has plenty of racists, pedophiles, crooks, drug addicts, you name it … and, the trains don’t run on time. Denmark, as of late, has tilted to the right.  With welfare abuse, an eroding work ethic and social order, something had to be done.

Sweden had been poor for much of the 19th century until they turned to free-market capitalism around 1870.  They became rich, and, in fact, between 1870 and 1936, they had the highest growth rate in the industrialized world.  By the 1960s, Sweden made a hard left turn, raising taxes, welfare payments and discouraging entrepreneurship. In 1975, Sweden was the 4th wealthiest nation on earth; by 1993, it had dropped to 14th. In Sweden, the effective tax rate, in some circumstances, had reached 100%.  IKEA founder, Ingvar Kamprad, fled Sweden in 1973.  Sweden came up with a scheme to confiscate corporate profits and give them to labor unions.  The idea was to have a market economy without entrepreneurs and capitalists.  Of course, job creation, wages and opportunity plummeted.

Until recently, Norway has resisted change to a market economy.  In 1999, the former social democrat Minister of Business, Bjorn Rosengren, called Norway, “the last Soviet state”.  But Norway now is gradually shifting from a full-boat welfare state to a system that rewards work and investment.

What Bernie Sanders has failed to mention, in his sales effort for democratic socialism, is that almost all European nations, including Scandinavia have seen a dramatic fall of support for socialism and now have adopted policies of free-market capitalism and individual responsibility. Sanders’ and Clinton’s idea of democratic socialism and its illusion of prosperity peaked about twenty years ago.  The affluence, high levels of income equality, long life and good health, all pre-date the welfare state.  Much of what Scandinavia had enjoyed is now at risk due to the welfare state, not because of it.

Generous welfare programs can stifle the work ethic, honesty, innovation and entrepreneurship of even the most ambitious among us. The Democratic Socialists, in essence, have run out of other people’s money, and ideas.