Human beings are not “fundamentally good” or even “generally decent”. To say they are is to mouth Hallmark card sentiments, not express conclusions of observation and thought.

There is a small minority who are naturally fair-minded and humane. If you live long enough, chances are you will come upon a few.

Others, also a minority but much more numerous, commit atrocities.

The rest of us are standard rogues.

Most of us restrain ourselves from doing our worst most of the time. That much we can fairly claim for ourselves in the way of virtue.

Laws are the best bridle, though far from infallible.

Does nothing else hold us in check? Yes –

Fear that they might do unto us what we would like to do unto them. 

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Jillian Becker

January 3, 2019

Pat Condell reminds us, the heirs to the Enlightenment, what so many among us have forgotten: that all liberty depends on freedom of speech, and all progress depends on liberty. That is why, he says, “the 45 words of the First Amendment to the US Constitution are among the most important ever written in the English language”.

Generations are growing up – even in America itself – not knowing this. They are taught to hate and despise free speech by “teachers who think they know best because they don’t know any better”. Watching such deluded people protest against freedom of speech is like watching people digging their own grave.

“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.